IT MUST HAVE BEEN a couple of weeks after settling comfortably into my pink lodgings that I received another communication from my father. It was a fascinating letter in itself, although I could hardly realize then what bearing it would ultimately have upon my relationship with Sophie and Nathan and the scrambled events that took place later on in the summer. Like the last of his letters I quoted—the one about Maria Hunt—this message had to do with a death, and like the earlier one concerning Artiste, it brought me news of what might be considered something in the nature of a legacy, or a share in one. I set down most of it here:
Son, ten days ago my dear friend and political & philosophical antagonist Frank Hobbs dropped dead at his office in the shipyard. It was a swift, I should say almost instantaneous cerebral thrombosis. He was only 60, an age I have begun desperately to perceive as being virtually in life’s springtide. His passing was a great shock to me and I feel the loss deeply. His politics of course were deplorable, situating him I should say about 10 miles to the right of Mussolini, but withal he was what we who originated in the country have always termed a “good ole boy” and I shall miss intensely his hulking, generous albeit bigoted presence as we drove to work. He was in many ways a tragic man, lonely, a widower, and still mourning the death of his only child, Frank Jr., who you may remember drowned while still in his twenties not long ago in a fishing accident down on Albemarle Sound. Frank Sr. left no survivors, and that fact is central to this letter and to the reason I am writing you at some length.
Frank’s lawyer called me up several days ago to inform me, to my enormous astonishment, that I am the chief beneficiary of his estate. Frank had little money saved and no investments, having been like myself only a high class wage-earner within or perhaps I should say astride the precarious back of the monstrous leviathan known as American business. Thus I regret I do not bring you tidings of the imminent receipt of a fat check to lighten your worries as you labor in the literary vineyard. For many years, however, Frank had been the owner and absentee landlord of a small peanut farm over in Southampton County, a place that was in the Hobbs family ever since the Civil War. It is this farm that Frank left to me, stating in his will that while I could do with it what I wished it was his earnest hope that I continue to farm the place as he had done, realizing not only the very modest profit that can be gained from 60 acres of peanuts but enjoying the pleasant and verdant countryside in which the farm is situated, along with a lovely little stream swarming with fish. He must have known how much I appreciated the place, which I visited a number of times over the years.
This extraordinary and touching gesture of Frank’s has, however, I’m afraid, thrown me into something of a quandary. While I should like to do anything within my power to accede to Frank’s desire and not sell the place I don’t know if I am any longer temperamentally suited to farming after these many years (although as a boy in N.C. I was well acquainted with the heft of a shovel and hoe), even as an absentee owner as Frank was. It still requires a great deal of work and attention and while Frank doted on it I have my own labor cut out for me here at the shipyard. In many ways of course it is an attractive proposition. There are two very able and reliable negro tenant farmers on the place, and the equipment is in reasonably good condition. The main dwelling itself is in excellent repair and would make a fine weekend retreat particularly considering its proximity to that wonderful fishing stream. Peanuts are now a coming money crop, especially since the late war opened up so many new uses for the legume. Frank, I remember, sold most of his crop to Planters in Suffolk, where it went to help satiate America’s ravenous need for “Skippy” peanut butter. There are some hogs, too, which of course make the finest hams in all Christendom. Also there are a few acres planted in soybeans and cotton, both still profitable crops, and so as you can see there are totally mercenary aspects of the situation—aside from the aesthetic and recreative—that tempt me into lending my hand to agrarian pursuits after 40-odd years’ absence from the barn and the field. Certainly it would not make me rich, though I suspect I might in some small way augment an income badly depleted by the needs of your poor aunts down in N.C. But I am balked by the aforementioned serious qualms and reservations. And this brings me, Stingo, to your possible or potential role in this so far unresolved dilemma.
What I am proposing is that you come down to the farm and live on it, acting as the proprietor in my absence. I can almost feel your chagrin as you read this, and see that “but I don’t know a damn thing about raising peanuts” look in your eye. I am well aware how this may not seem at all suitable to you, especially since you have chosen to cast your lot as a literary man among the Yankees. But I am asking you to consider the proposition, not because I don’t honor your need for independence as you sojourn in the (to me) barbaric North but out of honest solicitude for the discontent you express in your recent letters, that sense I get that you are not precisely flourishing, spiritually or (of course) financially. But for one thing your duties would be minimal since Hugo and Lewis, the two negroes who have been on the place for years with their families, have the practical matters of the place well in hand so that you would function as a kind of gentleman farmer whose main work, I’m certain, would be the writing of that novel you tell me you have embarked upon. But you would also pay no rent and I’m sure I could manage a small extra stipend for your few responsibilities. Furthermore (and I was saving this for now) I ask you to consider this final inducement, which is the proximity of the farm to the ancient habitat of “ole prophet Nat,” that mysterious negro who so frightened the pants off or (if you will pardon the more accurate expletive) the s—t out of an unhappy slave-holding Virginia so many years ago. No one knows better than I of your fascination with the “ole Prophet” since I cannot forget how even as a high school boy you were busy with your maps and your charts and all the meager information you were able to assemble regarding that extraordinary figure. The Hobbs farm is only a hop, skip and a jump from the ground upon which the Prophet set forth on his terrible mission of bloodshed, and I should think that if you took up residence there you might be richly supplied with all the atmosphere and information you need for that book I’m sure you will eventually write. Please think over carefully this proposition, son. Needless to say I would not nor can I disguise the element of self-interest that prompts the offer. I am very much in need of an overseer for the farm, if I am to keep it at all. But if this is true I cannot disguise, either, the vicarious pleasure I take in thinking that you, growing to be the writer I yearned to be but could not, might have such a splendid chance to live on that land, to feel and see and smell the very earth which gave birth to that dim and prodigious black man...
In a way it was all very tempting, and I could not deny it. With his letter my father had enclosed several Kodachrome snapshots of the farm; surrounded and shaded by lofty beech trees, the sprawling old mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse looked as if it needed—aside from a coat of paint—hardly anything to make it the comfortable abode of one who might slide easily into that great Southern tradition of writer-farmers. The sorghum-sweet serenity of the place (geese paddling through the weedy summer grass, a drowsy porch with a swing, old Hugo or Lewis sending a grin full of calcimine teeth and pink gums across the steering wheel of a muddy tractor) skewered me squarely for an instant on a knifeblade of nostalgia for the rural South. The temptation was both poignant and powerful, and it lasted for as long as it took me to read the letter twice more and to brood over the house and its homely lawn again, all of it seemingly suspended in a milky idyllic mist, which may, however, have been the result of the film’s overexposure. But though the letter tugged at my heart and at the same time possessed, in practical terms, a compelling logic, I realized that I had to turn my father’s invitation down. If the letter had arrived only a few weeks before, at the low ebb of my life after being fired from McGraw-Hill, I might have jumped at the chance. But things were now radically altered and I had happily come to terms with my environment. So I was forced to write back to my father a somewhat regretful No. And as I look back now on that promising time I realize that there were three factors responsible for my surprising newborn contentment. In no particular order of significance, these were: (1) sudden illumination about my novel, its prognosis heretofore opaque and unyielding; (2) my discovery of Sophie and Nathan; and (3) anticipation of guaranteed sexual fulfillment, for the first time in my unfulfilled life.
To begin with, a word about that book I was trying to get started on. In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes—suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery. Even at that early time I knew my first work would be flavored by a certain morbidity—I had the feeling in my bones, it may possibly be called the “tragic sense”—but to be perfectly honest, I had only the vaguest notion of what I was so feverishly setting off to write about. It is true that I possessed in my brain a most valuable component of a work of fiction: a place. The sights, sounds, smells, the lights and shades and watery deeps and shallows of my native Tidewater coast were urgently pressing me to be given physical reality on paper, and I could scarcely contain my passion—it was almost like a rage—to get them down. But of characters and story, a sensible narrative through which I might be able to thread these vivid images of my recent past, I had none. At twenty-two I felt myself to be hardly more than a skinny, six-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-fifty-pound exposed nerve with nothing very much to say. My original strategy was pathetically derivative, lacking logic and design and substituting for both an amorphous hunger to do for a small Southern city what James Joyce had done in his miraculous microcosm. For someone of my age it was not a totally worthless ambition, save for the fact that even on the more modest level of attainment I sought, there seemed no way to invent Dixieland replicas of Stephen Dedalus and the imperishable Blooms.
But then—and oh, how true it is that most writers become sooner or later the exploiters of the tragedies of others—came (or went) Maria Hunt. She had died just at that moment when I most needed that wondrous psychic jolt known as inspiration. And so during the next few days after getting news of her death, as the shock wore off and I was able to adopt what might be called a professional view of her grotesque ending, I was overtaken by a fabulous sense of discovery. Again and again I pored over the newspaper clipping my father had sent, becoming warm with excitement as the awareness grew that Maria and her family might serve as the exemplary figures for the novel’s cast of characters. The rather desperate wreck of a father, a chronic lush and also something of a womanizer; the mother, slightly unbalanced and a grim pietist, known throughout the upper-middle-class, country-club and high Episcopal echelons of the city for her long-suffering tolerance of her husband’s mistress, herself a social-climbing dimwit from the sticks; and the daughter finally, poor dead Maria, doomed and a victim from the outset through all the tangled misunderstandings, petty hatreds and vindictive hurts that are capable of making bourgeois family life the closest thing to hell on earth—my God, I thought, it was perfectly marvelous, a gift from the sky! And I realized to my delight that, however unwittingly, I had already put together the first part of the frame to surround this tragic landscape: my dog-eared train ride, the passage I had cherished and reread with such daft absorption, would now represent the arrival in the town of our heroine’s body, disinterred from the potter’s field in New York and shipped in a baggage car for final burial in the city of her birth. It seemed too good to be true. Oh, what ghoulish opportunism are writers prone to!
Even before I put my father’s letter down for the last time, I breathed a delicious sigh and felt the next scene hatching, so palpable I could almost reach up and fondle it, like a fat golden egg in my brain. I turned to my yellow legal pads, lifted a pencil. The train would be arriving in the riverside station, a dismal quay filled with heat, commotion, dust. Awaiting the train would be the bereaved father, the importunate mistress, a hearse, an unctuous mortician, perhaps someone else... A faithful retainer, a woman. An old Negro? Scratch scratch went the virginal Venus Velvet.
I remember those first weeks at Yetta’s with remarkable clarity. To begin with, there was that magnificent surge of creative energy, the innocent and youthful abandon with which I was able to set down in so short a time the first fifty or sixty pages of the book. I have never written fast or easily and this was no exception, for even then I was compelled to search, however inadequately, for the right word and suffered over the rhythms and subtleties of our gorgeous but unbenevolent, unyielding tongue; nonetheless, I was seized by a strange, dauntless self-confidence and I scribbled away joyously while the characters I had begun to create seemed to acquire life of their own and the muggy atmosphere of the Tidewater summer took on both an eye-dazzling and almost tactile reality, as if unspooling before my eyes on film, in uncanny three-dimensional color. How I now cherish the image of myself in this earlier time, hunched over the schoolmarm’s desk in that radiant pink room, whispering melodiously (as I still do) the invented phrases and sentences, testing them on my lips like some obsessed verse-monger, and all the while remaining supremely content in the knowledge that the fruit of this happy labor, whatever its deficiencies, would be the most awesome and important of man’s imaginative endeavors—The Novel. The blessed Novel. The sacred Novel. The Almighty Novel. Oh, Stingo, how I envy you in those faraway afternoons of First Novelhood (so long before middle age and the drowsy slack tides of inanition, gloomy boredom with fiction, and the pooping-out of ego and ambition) when immortal longings impelled your every hyphen and semicolon and you had the faith of a child in the beauty you felt you were destined to bring forth.
Another thing I remember so well about that earliest period at Yetta’s was the new-found ease and security I felt—this too, I’m sure, the result of my friendship with Sophie and Nathan. I had sensed a glimmering of this in Sophie’s room that Sunday. While I had droned in the hive at McGraw-Hill there had been something sick, self-flagellating in my withdrawal from people into a world of fantasy and loneliness; on my own terms it was unnatural, for I am a companionable person most of the time, impelled genuinely enough toward friendship but equally smitten by the same horror of solitude that causes human beings to get married or join the Rotarians. There in Brooklyn I had come to the point where I sorely needed friends, and I had found them, thus soothing my pent-up anxieties and allowing me to work. Certainly only the most sickly and reclusive person can finish hard labor day after day without contemplating in dread the prospect of a room that is a vessel of silence, rimmed by four empty walls. After setting down my tense, distraught little funeral tableau so permeated by human desolation and bereavement, I felt I had earned the right to a few beers and the fellowship of Sophie and Nathan.
Considerable time had to pass, however—at least several weeks—before I was fated to get involved with my new chums in a fever of the same emotional intensity which threatened to consume us all when I first encountered them. When this storm broke anew it was horrible—far more threatful than the squabbles and black moments I have described—and its explosive return almost totally confounded me. But this was later. Meanwhile, like a floral extension of the pink room I inhabited, a ripe peony sending forth its petals, I blossomed in creative contentment. Another point: I no longer had to worry about the boisterous noise of lovemaking from above. During the year or so that Sophie and Nathan had maintained rooms on the second floor, they had cohabited in a rather casual, flexible way, each keeping separate accommodations but sleeping together in whichever bed at the moment seemed more natural or convenient.
It is perhaps a reflection on the severe morality of that period that despite Yetta’s relatively tolerant attitude toward sex, Sophie and Nathan felt constrained to live technically apart—separated by a mere few yards of linoleum-covered hallway—rather than moving in together into either one of their commodious rooms, where they would no longer have to enact their formal charade of devoted companions lacking any carnal interests. But this was still a time of worshipful wedlock and cold, marmoreal legitimacy, and besides, it was Flatbush, a place as disposed to the extremes of propriety and to neighborly snooping as the most arrested small town in the American heartland. Yetta’s house would have received a bad name had it gotten around that two “unmarrieds” were living together. So the upstairs hallway was for Sophie and Nathan merely a brief umbilicus between what in effect were separate halves of a large two-room apartment. What made it now more restful and silent for me was that my two friends soon transferred both their sleeping arrangements and their deafening amatory rites to the bed in Nathan’s quarters—a room not nearly so cheery as Sophie’s but now, with the coming of summer, somewhat cooler, so Nathan said. Thank God, I thought, no more annotated climaxes to intrude on my work and composure.
During those first weeks I managed fairly successfully to bury my infatuation for Sophie. I so carefully banked the fires of my passion for her that I am certain that neither she nor Nathan was able to detect the molten hunger I suffered every moment I was in her presence. For one thing, at that time I was laughably inexperienced and even in the spirit of sexual sport or competition I would never have made a pass at a woman who had so clearly given her heart to another. For another thing, there was the simple matter of what I construed to be Nathan’s overwhelming seniority. And this was not a trivial question. In one’s twenties a few years’ edge counts for much more than it does later on in life; that is, that Nathan was around thirty and I was twenty-two made him substantially the “elder” in a way that those years could not have made in our forties. Also, it must be pointed out now that Sophie, too, was about Nathan’s age. Given these considerations, along with the disinterested manner I affected, I am almost sure that it never crossed either Sophie’s or Nathan’s mind that I might be a serious contender for her affections. A friend, yes. A lover? It would have made them both laugh. It must have been because of all this that Nathan never seemed reluctant to leave me alone with Sophie, and indeed encouraged our companionship whenever he was away. He had every right to be so trusting, at least during those early weeks, since Sophie and I never did more than casually touch fingertips despite all my craving. I became very much a listener, and I’m certain that my archly chaste detachment allowed me eventually to learn as much about Sophie and her past (or more) as Nathan ever learned.
“I admire your courage, kid,” Nathan said to me early one morning in my room. “I really admire what you’re doing, setting out to write something else about the South.”
“What do you mean?” I said with genuine curiosity. “What’s so courageous about writing about the South?” I was pouring the two of us coffee on one of those mornings during the week after our outing to Coney Island. Defying habit, I had for several days risen just past dawn, propelled to my table by the electric urgency I have described, and had written steadily for two hours or more. I had completed one of those (for me) fantastic sprints—a thousand words or thereabouts—which was to characterize this stage of the book’s creation, I felt a bit winded, and therefore Nathan’s knock at my door as he passed on his way to work was a welcome distraction. He had popped in on me like this for several mornings running and I enjoyed the byplay. He was up very early these days, he had explained, leaving for his laboratory at Pfizer because of some very important bacterial cultures that needed his observation. He had attempted to describe his experiment to me in detail—it had to do with amniotic fluid and the fetus of a rabbit, including weird stuff about enzymes and ion transference—but he had given up on me with an understanding laugh when, having taken me beyond my depth, he saw my look of pain and boredom. The failure of any mental connection had been my fault, not Nathan’s, for he had been precise and articulate. It was just that I possessed small wit or patience for scientific abstractions, and this was something I think I deplored in myself as much as I envied the capacious and catholic range of Nathan’s mind. His ability, for example, to switch from enzymes to Quality Lit., as he did now.
“I don’t think it’s any big deal for me to be writing about the South,” I went on, “it’s the place I know the best. Dem ole cotton fields at home.”
“I don’t mean that,” he replied. “It’s simply that you’re at the end of a tradition. You may think I’m ignorant about the South, the way I jumped you last Sunday so unmercifully and, I might add, so unpardonably about Bobby Weed. But I’m talking about something else now—writing. Southern writing as a force is going to be over within a few years. Another genre is going to have to appear to take its place. That’s why I’m saying you’ve got a lot of guts to be writing in a worn-out tradition.”
I was a little irritated, although my irritation lay less in the logic and truth of what he was saying, if indeed logical or true, than in the fact that such an opinionated literary verdict should issue from a research biologist at a pharmaceutical house. It seemed none of his business. But when I uttered, mildly and with some amusement, the standard demurral of the literary aesthete, he outflanked me neatly again.
“Nathan, you’re a fucking expert in cells,” I said, “what the hell do you know about literary genres and traditions?”
“In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man. I believe that, Stingo old pal—which is maybe why I care about you and your writing.” He paused and held out an expensive-looking silver lighter, with which he ignited the end of the Camel between my lips. “May I be forgiven for abetting your filthy habit, I carry this to light Bunsen burners,” he said playfully, then went on, “As a matter of fact, something I’ve concealed from you. I wanted to be a writer myself until halfway through Harvard I realized I could never be a Dostoevsky, and so turned my piercing mind toward the seething arcana of human protoplasm.”
“So you were really planning to write,” I said.
“Not at first. Jewish mothers are very ambitious for their sons and all during my childhood I was supposed to become a great fiddle player—another Heifetz or Menuhin. But frankly, I lacked the touch, the genius, although it left me with a tremendous thing about music. Then I decided to be a writer, and there were a bunch of us at Harvard, a bunch of very dedicated book-crazy sophomores, and we were deep into the literary life for a while. A cute little kindergarten Bloomsbury in Cambridge. I wrote some poetry and a lot of lousy short stories, like all my pals. Each of us thought we were going to outdo Hemingway. But in the end I had enough good sense to realize that as a fiction writer I was better trying to emulate Louis Pasteur. It turned out that my true gifts were in science. So I switched my major from English over to biology. It was a fortunate choice, I’m damned sure of that. I can see now that all I had going for me was the fact that I was Jewish.”
“Jewish?” I put in. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, only that I’m quite certain that Jewish writing is going to be the important force in American literature in the coming years.”
“Oh, it is, is it?” I said a little defensively. “How do you know? Is that why you said I had courage to write about the South?”
“I didn’t say Jewish writing was going to be the only force, just the important force,” he replied pleasantly and evenly, “and I’m not in the slightest trying to suggest that you might not add something significant to your own tradition. It’s just that historically and ethnically Jews will be coming into their own in a cultural way in this postwar wave. It’s in the cards, that’s all. There’s one novel already that’s set the pace. It’s not a major book, it’s a small book but with beautiful proportions and it’s the work of a young writer of absolutely unquestionable brilliance.”
“What’s the name of it?” I asked. I think my voice had a sulky note when I added, “And who’s the brilliant writer?”
“It’s called Dangling Man,” he replied, “and it’s by Saul Bellow.”
“Well, dog my cats,” I drawled and took a sip of coffee.
“Have you read it?” he asked.
“Certainly,” I said, lying with a bald and open face.
“What did you think of it?”
I stifled a calculated yawn. “I thought it was pretty thin.” Actually, I was very much aware of the novel, but the petty spirit which so often afflicts the unpublished writer allowed me to harbor only a grudge for what I suspected was the book’s well-deserved critical approval. “It’s a very urban book,” I added, “very special, you know, a little too much of the smell of the streets about it.” But I had to concede to myself that Nathan’s words had disturbed me, as I watched him lolling so easily in the chair opposite me. Suppose, I thought, the clever son of a bitch was right and the ancient and noble literary heritage with which I had cast my lot had indeed petered out, rumbled to a feeble halt with me crushed ignominiously beneath the decrepit cartwheels? Nathan had seemed so certain and knowledgeable about other matters that in this case, too, his augury might be correct, and in a sudden weird vision—all the more demeaning because of its blatant competitiveness—I saw myself running a pale tenth in a literary track race, coughing on the dust of a pounding fast-footed horde of Bellows and Schwartzes and Levys and Mandelbaums.
Nathan was smiling at me. It seemed to be a perfectly amiable smile, with not a trace of the sardonic about it, but for an instant I felt intensely about his presence what I had already felt and what I would feel again—a fleeting moment in which the attractive and compelling in him seemed in absolute equipoise with the subtly and indefinably sinister. Then, as if something formlessly damp had stolen through the room, departing instantly, I was freed of the creepy sensation and I smiled back at him. He wore what I believe was called a Palm Beach suit, tan, smartly tailored and perceivably high-priced, and it helped make him appear not even a distant cousin of that wild apparition I had first set eyes on only days before, disheveled, in baggy slacks, raging at Sophie in the hallway. All of a sudden that fracas, his mad accusation—Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor!—seemed as unreal to me as dialogue spoken by the leading stinker in a long-ago, half-forgotten movie. (What had he meant by those balmy words? I wondered if I would ever find out.) As the ambiguous smile lingered on his face, I was aware that this man posed riddles of personality more exasperating and mystifying than any I had ever encountered.
“Well, at least you didn’t tell me that the novel’s dead,” I said at last, just as a phrase of music, celestial and tender, flowed down very softly from the room above and forced a change of subject.
“That’s Sophie who put the music on,” Nathan said. “I try to get her to sleep late in the morning when she doesn’t have to go to work. But she says she can’t. Ever since the war she says she could never learn again to sleep late.”
“What is that playing?” It was naggingly familiar, something from Bach I should have been able to name as from a child’s first music book, but which I had unaccountably forgotten.
“It’s from Cantata 147, the one that in English has the title Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,”
“I envy you that phonograph,” I said, “and those records. But they’re so goddamned expensive. A Beethoven symphony would cost me a good hunk of what I used to call a week’s pay.” It then occurred to me that what had further bolstered the kinship I felt for Sophie and Nathan during these nascent few days of our friendship had been our common passion for music. Nathan alone was keen on jazz, but in general I mean music in the grand tradition, nothing remotely popular and very little composed after Franz Schubert, with Brahms being a notable exception. Like Sophie, like Nathan too, I was at that time of life—long before Rock or the resurgence of Folk—when music was more than simple meat and drink, it was an essential opiate and something resembling the divine breath. (I neglected to mention how much of my free time at McGraw-Hill, or time after work, had been spent in record stores, mooching hours of music in the stifling booths they had in those days.) Music for me at this moment was almost so much in itself a reason for being that had I been deprived too long of this or that wrenching harmony, or some miraculously stitched tapestry of the baroque, I would have unhesitatingly committed dangerous crimes. “Those stacks of records of yours make me drool,” I said.
“You know, kid, you’re welcome to play them anytime.” I was aware that in the past few days he had taken to calling me “kid” at times. This secretly pleased me more than he could know. I think that in my growing fondness for him I, an only child, had begun to see in him a little of the older brother I had never had—a brother, furthermore, whose charm and warmth so outweighed the unpredictable and bizarre in him that I was swift to put his eccentricities quite out of my head. “Look,” he went on, “just consider my pad and Sophie’s pad as a couple of places—”
“Your what?” I said.
“Pad.”
“What’s that?”
“Pad. You know, a room.” It was the first time I had ever heard the word used in the argot. Pad. I liked the sound.
“Anyway, consider yourself welcome up there anytime you want to play the records during the day when Sophie and I have gone to work. Morris Fink has a passkey. I’ve told him to let you in anytime you want.”
“Oh, that’s really too much, Nathan,” I blurted, “but God—thanks.” I was moved by this generosity—no, nearly overwhelmed. The fragile records of that period had not evolved into our cheap items of conspicuous consumption. People were simply not so free-handed with their records in those days. They were precious, and there had never been made available to me so much music in my life; the prospect which Nathan offered me filled me with cheer that verged close to the voluptuous. Free choice of any of the pink and nubile female flesh I had ever dreamed of could not have so ravishingly whetted my appetite. “I’ll certainly take good care of them,” I hurried to add.
“I trust you,” he said, “though you do have to be careful. Goddamn shellac is still too easily broken. I predict something inevitable in a couple of years—an unbreakable record.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“Not only that, not only unbreakable but compressed—made so that you can play an entire symphony, say, or a whole Bach cantata on one side of a single record. I’m sure it’s coming,” he said, rising from the chair, adding within the space of a few minutes his prophecy of the long-playing record to that of the Jewish literary renaissance. “The musical millennium is close at hand, Stingo.”
“Jesus, I just want to thank you,” I said, still genuinely affected.
“Forget it, kid,” he replied, and his gaze went upward in the direction of the music. “Don’t thank me, thank Sophie. She taught me to care about music as if she had invented it, as if I hadn’t cared about it before. Just as she taught me about clothes, about so many things...” He paused and his eyes became luminous, distant. “About everything. Life! God, isn’t she unbelievable?” There was in his voice the slightly overwrought reverence sometimes used about supreme works of art, yet when I agreed, murmuring a thin “I’ll say she is,” Nathan could not even have been faintly aware of my forlorn and jealous passion.
As I have said, Nathan had encouraged me to keep Sophie company, so I had no compunction—after he had gone off to work—about walking out in the hallway and calling up to her with an invitation. It was Thursday—one of the days off from her job at Dr. Blackstock’s, and when her voice floated down over the banister, I asked if she would join me for lunch in the park a little after noon. She called out “Okay, Stingo!” cheerily, and then she fled from my mind. Frankly, my thoughts were of crotch and breast and belly and bellybutton and ass, specifically of those belonging to the wild nymph I had met on the beach the previous Sunday, the “hot dish” Nathan had so happily served me up.
Despite my lust, I returned to my writing desk and tried to scratch away for an hour or so, almost but not quite oblivious of the stirrings, the comings and goings of the other occupants of the house—Morris Fink muttering malevolently to himself as he swept the front porch, Yetta Zimmerman clumping down from her quarters on the third floor to give the place her morning once-over, the whalelike Moishe Muskatblit departing in a ponderous rush for his yeshiva, improbably whistling “The Donkey Serenade” in harmonious bell-like notes. After a bit, while I paused in my labors and stood by the window facing the park, I saw one of the two nurses, Astrid Weinstein, returning wearily from her night-shift job at Kings County Hospital. No sooner had she slammed the door behind her in the room opposite mine than the other nurse, Lillian Grossman, scurried out of the house on her way to work at the same hospital. It was difficult to tell which of them was the less comely—the hulking and rawboned Astrid, with her pinkish, weepy look of distress on a slablike face, or Lillian Grossman, skinny as a starved sparrow and with a mean, pinched expression that surely brought little comfort to the sufferers under her care. Their homeliness was heartrending. It was no longer my rotten luck, I reflected, to be lodged under a roof so frustrating, so bereft of erotic promise. After all, I had Leslie! I began to sweat and felt my breath go haywire and something in my chest actually dilate painfully, like a rapidly expanding balloon.
Thus I came to the notion of sexual fulfillment, which is another of those items I mentioned a while back and which I considered to be so richly a part of the fruition of my new life in Brooklyn. In itself this saga, or episode, or fantasia has little direct bearing on Sophie and Nathan, and so I have hesitated to set it down, thinking it perhaps extraneous stuff best suited to another tale and time. But it is so bound up into the fabric and mood of that summer that to deprive this story of its reality would be like divesting a body of some member—not an essential member, but as important, say, as one of one’s more consequential fingers. Besides, even as I set these reservations down, I sense an urgency, an elusive meaning in this experience and its desperate eroticism by which at least there may be significant things to be said about that sexually bedeviled era.
At any rate, as I stood there that morning, tumescent amid my interrupted labors, I felt that there was being thrust on me a priceless reward for the vigor and zeal with which I had embraced my Art. Like any writer worth his salt, I was about to receive my just bounty, that necessary adjunct to hard work—necessary as food and drink—which revived the fatigued wits and sweetened all life. Of course I mean by this that for the first time after these many months in New York, finally and safely beyond peradventure, I was going to get a piece of ass. This time there was no doubt about it. In a matter of hours, as certainly as springtime begets the greening leaves or the sun sets at eventide, my prick was going to be firmly implanted within a remarkably beautiful, sexually liberated, twenty-two-year-old Jewish Madonna lily named Leslie Lapidus (rhyming, please, with “Ah, feed us”).
At Coney Island that Sunday, Leslie Lapidus had virtually guaranteed me—as I shall shortly demonstrate—possession of her glorious body and we had made a date for the following Thursday night. During the intervening days—looking forward to our second meeting with such unseemly excitement that I felt a little sick and began off and on to run a mild but genuine fever—I had become intoxicated mainly by a single fact: this time I would surely succeed. I had it sewed up. Made! This time there would be no impediments; the crazy bliss of fornication with a hot-skinned, eager-bellied Jewish girl with fathomless eyes and magnificent apricot-and-ocher suntanned legs that all but promised to squeeze the life out of me was no dumb fantasy: it was a fait accompli, practically consummated save for the terrible wait until Thursday. In my brief but hectic sex life I had never experienced anything like certainty of conquest (rarely had any young man of that time) and the sensation was exquisite. One may speak of flirtation, the thrill of the chase, the delights and challenges of hard-won seduction; each had its peculiar rewards. There is much to be said, however, for the delectable and leisurely anticipation which accompanies the knowledge that it is all ready and waiting and, so to speak, in the bag. Thus during those hours when I had not been immersed in my novel I had thought of Leslie and the approaching tryst, envisioned myself sucking on the nipples of those “melon-heavy” Jewish breasts so dear to Thomas Wolfe, and glowed in my fever like a jack-o’-lantern.
Another thing: I had been almost beside myself with a sense of the rightness of this prospect. Every devoted artist, however impecunious, I felt, deserved at least this. Furthermore, it appeared that in all likelihood if I played my cards right, remained the cool exotic Cavalier squire whom Leslie had found so maddeningly aphrodisiacal at our first encounter, if I committed no hapless blunders, this God- or perhaps Jehovah-bestowed gift would become part of a steady, even daily functioning arrangement. I would have wild morning and afternoon romps in the hay and all of this could only enhance the quality of my literary output, despite the prevailing bleak doctrine concerning sexual “sublimation.” All right, so I doubted that the relationship would involve much in the way of high-toned love, for my attraction to Leslie was largely primal in nature, lacking the poetic and idealistic dimension of my buried passion for Sophie. Leslie would allow me for the first time in my life to taste in a calm, exploratory way those varieties of bodily experience which until now had existed in my head like a vast and orgiastic, incessantly thumbed encyclopedia of lust. Through Leslie, I would at last assuage a basic hunger too long ruthlessly thwarted, And as I waited for that fateful Thursday meeting, her remembered image came to represent for me the haunting possibility of a sexual communion which would nullify the farcical manner in which I had transported my mismanaged and ungratified and engorged penis across the frozen sexual moonscape of the 1940s.
I think a brief reflection on this decade might now be in order, to lay the groundwork for and to help explain Leslie’s initial, devastating effect on me. A lot in the way of bilious reminiscence has been written about sex by survivors of the fifties, much of it a legitimate lament. But the forties were really far worse, a particularly ghastly period for Eros, shakily bridging as they did the time between the puritanism of our forefathers and the arrival of public pornography. Sex itself was coming out of the closet, but there was universal distress over how to deal with it. That the era became epitomized by Little Miss Cock Tease—that pert number who jerked off a whole generation of her squirming young coevals, allowing moist liberties but with steel-trap relentlessness withholding the big prize, sobbing in triumph as she stole back to the dorm (O that intact membrane! O those silvery snail tracks on the silken undies!)—is no one’s fault, only that of history, yet is a serious shortcoming of those years. In retrospect one must view the schism as completely awful, and irreconcilably complete. For the first time within reckoning society permitted, indeed encouraged, unhindered propinquity of the flesh but still forbade the flesh’s fulfillment. For the first time automobiles had large, upholstered back seats. This created a tension and a frustration without precedent in the relationship between the sexes. It was a cruel period for the aspiring swordsman, especially if he was young and destitute.
One could and did, of course, get a “professional,” and most of the youths of my generation had had one—usually only once. What was so wonderful about Leslie, among other things, was her explicit promise, her immediate assurance that through her I would be offered redemption from that single pathetic crumpling together which I had experienced and which by haphazard definition could be called sexual congress but which I knew in my secret heart had not been that at all. This had been an ignominious copulation. And the awful fact of the matter is that although what might in a clinical sense be termed full penetration had been achieved, I was utterly denied the terminal ecstasy I had so often rehearsed manually since age fourteen. In brief, I considered myself to be literally a freak: a true demi-vierge. Nor was there any pathology here, anything to do with sinister psychic repression which might have driven me to seek medical care. No, the orgasmic blockage was a simple matter of being swindled both by fright and by that suffocating quality of the Zeitgeist that made sex in midcentury America such a nightmarish Sargasso Sea of guilts and apprehensions. I was a college boy of seventeen at my debut. The comedy, played out with a tired old whore from the tobacco fields in a two-dollar-a-night walk-up fleabag hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, came to naught not only because of her sullen taunts, as I pumped away athwart her aging loins, that I was “slower’n a broke-kneed turtle,” nor only because I was desensitized by the oceans of beer I had drunk to allay my initial anxiety, but additionally, I confess, because during the befuddled preliminaries a combination of delaying tactics and fear of disease had caused me somehow to don two condoms—a fact which I discovered to my dismay when she finally heaved me off her.
Aside from that disaster, on the afternoon when I met Leslie Lapidus my past experience had been typically base and fruitless. Which is to say, typically of the forties. I had done a certain amount of smooching, as it was called then, in the balconies of several movie theatres; another time, stranded in the leafy and secret dark tunnel of the local lovers’ lane, I had with madly pounding pulse and furtive fingers succeeded in obtaining a few seconds’ worth of what was known as “bare tit”; and once, scenting triumph but nearly fainting with exertion, I managed to wrest off a Maidenform bra only to discover a pair of “falsies” and a boyish chest flat as a ping-pong paddle. The sexual memory in which I was drenched during that season in Brooklyn, whenever I forlornly unloosed the floodgates, was of uneasy darkness, sweat, reproving murmurs, bands and sinews of obdurate elastic, lacerating little hooks and snaps, whispered prohibitions, straining erections, stuck zippers and a warm miasmal odor of the secretions from inflamed and obstructed glands.
My purity was an inwardly abiding Golgotha. As an only child, unlike those who have as a matter of course seen their sisters in the nude, I had yet to witness a woman entirely unclothed—and this includes the old floozy in Charlotte who wore a stained and malodorous shift throughout the whole proceeding. I have forgotten the exact fantasies I entertained about my first paramour. I had not idealized “femininity” in the silly fashion of the time and therefore I am sure I did not foresee bedding down some chaste Sweet Briar maiden only after a trip to the altar. Somewhere in the halcyon future, I think I must have reasoned, I would meet a cuddlesome, jolly girl who would simply gather me into her with frenzied whoopees, unhindered by that embargo placed upon their flesh by the nasty little Protestants who had so tortured me in the back seats of a score of cars. But there was one matter of which I had no inkling. I had not yet considered that my dream girl would also lack any inhibition about language; my companions of the past would have been unable to utter the word “breast” without blushing. Indeed, I had been accustomed to wincing when a female said “damn.” You can imagine my emotions, then, when Leslie Lapidus, a scant two hours after our first meeting, stretched out her resplendent legs against the sand like a young lioness, and peering into my face with all the unrestrained, almond-eyed, heathen-whore-of-Babylon wantonness I had ever dreamed of, suggested in unbelievably scabrous terms the adventure that awaited me. It would be impossible to exaggerate my shock, in which fright, disbelief and tingling delight were torrentially mingled. Only the fact that I was too young for a coronary occlusion saved my heart, which stopped beating for critical seconds.
But it was not Leslie’s stunning candor which alone set fire to my senses. The air above that sequestered little triangle of sand which Nathan’s lifeguard friend, Morty Haber, staked out on Sunday afternoons as a private social sanctuary, had been filled with the dirtiest talk I had ever heard in what might be termed mixed company. It was something more serious and complex. It was her sultry glare, which contained both direct challenge and expectancy, a look of naked invitation like a lascivious lariat thrown around my ears. She plainly meant action, and when I recovered my wits I replied, in that laconic, detached, Virginia gentlemanly voice with which I was aware (or was vain enough to conceive) I had taken her captive from the outset, “Well, honeybun, since you put it that way, I do suppose I could give you a right warm snuggle between the sheets.” She could not know how my heart was racing, after its dangerous shutdown. Both my dialect and my diction comprised a glib contrivance but they had succeeded in wildly amusing Leslie, and obviously winning her. My studied and exaggerated speech had kept her alternately giggling and fascinated as we lazed on the sand. Just graduated from college, daughter of a manufacturer of molded plastics, restricted by the vicissitudes of life and the recent war to travel no further from Brooklyn than Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire (where, she laughingly told me, she had gone for ten summers to Camp Nehoc—a widespread patronymic spelled backward), she said I was the first person from the South to whom she had ever spoken a word, or vice versa.
The beginning of that Sunday afternoon remains one of the pleasantest blurs amid a lifetime of blurred recollections. Coney Island. Seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, in golden effervescent air. A popcorn, candy apple and sauerkraut fragrance—and Sophie, tugging on my sleeve, then Nathan’s, insisting that we take all the wild rides, which we did. Steeplechase Park! We risked our necks not once but twice on the Loop-the-Loop and dizzied ourselves on a fearful contraption called The Snapper, whose iron arm flung the three of us out into space in a gondola, where we spun around in erratic orbits, screaming. The rides sent Sophie into what were clearly transports of something past simple joy. I never saw these diversions draw forth from anyone, even a child, such glee, such rich terror, such uncomplicated visceral bliss. She cried out in ecstasy, with marvelous shrieks, all flowing out of some primitive source of rapture quite beyond normal sensations of sweet peril. She clutched at Nathan, buried her head in the crook of his arm, and laughed and screamed until tears streaked her cheek. As for myself, I was a good sport up to a point but balked at the parachute jump, two hundred feet high, relic of the 1939 World’s Fair, which may have been perfectly safe but filled me with heaving vertigo just to look at it. “Coward, Stingo!” Sophie cried and yanked at my arm, but even her entreaties failed to budge me. Licking an Eskimo Pie, I watched Sophie and Nathan in their old-fashioned clothes grow smaller and smaller as they were hoisted up the guide wires beneath the billowing canopies; they paused at the peak, arrested for a harrowing and breathless moment as in that endless ticktock of time before the condemned fall through the gallows trap, then plummeted earthward with a whooshing of air. Sophie’s cry, borne across the milling hordes on the beach below, could have been heard by ships far out at sea. The jump was for her a final intoxication and she talked about it until she was out of breath, teasing me without mercy for my spinelessness—“Stingo, you don’t know what is fun!”—as we walked along the boardwalk toward the beach amid a pushing and shoving freak show of angular, corpulent, lovely, mottled and undulant human flesh.
Except for Leslie Lapidus and Morty Haber, the half-dozen young people sprawled on the sand around Morty’s lifeguard tower were as new to Nathan and Sophie as they were to me. Morty—aggressively friendly, strapping, hairy, the very figure of a lifeguard—introduced us around to three tanned young men in Lastex swim shorts named Irv and Shelley and Bert and three deliciously rounded, honey-colored girls who became known to me as Sandra, Shirley and—then, ah!—Leslie. Morty was more than amiable, but something indefinably stand-offish, even hostile, about the others (as a Southerner I was given to a great deal of spontaneous handshaking, while they obviously were not and accepted my palm as if it were a haddock) made me distinctly ill-at-ease. As I scanned the group I could not help but feel at the same time a slight but real awkwardness over my bony hide and its hereditary paleness. Sharecropper-white, with pink elbows and chafed knees, I felt wan and desiccated amid these bodies so richly and sleekly dark, so Mediterranean, glistening like dolphins beneath their Coppertone. How I envied the pigmentation that could cause one’s torso to develop this mellow hue of stained walnut.
Several pairs of horn-rimmed glasses, the general drift of conversation and scattered books (among them The Function of the Orgasm) caused me to deduce that I was among scholastic types, and I was right. They were all recent graduates of, or in some way connected with, Brooklyn College. Leslie, however, had attended Sarah Lawrence. She was also an exception to the general coolness I felt. Sumptuous in a (for that time) daring two-piece white nylon bathing suit which revealed, so far as I was able swiftly to reckon, the first grown-up female navel I had ever beheld in the flesh, she alone among the group acknowledged Morty Haber’s introduction with anything warmer than a glance of puzzled mistrust. She grinned, appraised me up and down with a gaze that was splendidly direct and then with a pattycake motion of her hand bade me to sit down next to her. She was sweating healthily in the hot sun and emitted a musky womanly odor that held me instantaneously captive like a bumblebee. Tongue-tied, I looked at her with famished senses. Truly she was my childhood love, Miriam Bookbinder, come to fruition with all adult hormones in perfect orchestration. Her breasts were made for a banquet. The cleavage between them, a mythical fissure which I had never seen at such close range, gave forth a faint film of dew. I wanted to bury my nose there in that damp Jewish bosom and make strangled sounds of discovery and joy.
Then as Leslie and I began to chat casually (about literature, I recollect, prompted by Nathan’s helpful remark that I was a writer), I was conscious that the principle of the attraction of opposites was very much in effect. Jew and goy in magnetic gravitation. There was no mistaking it—the warmth for me that radiated from her almost immediately, a vibration, one of those swift and tangible feelings of rapport that one experiences so seldom in life. But we also had simple things in common. Like me, Leslie had majored in English; she had written a thesis on Hart Crane and was very knowledgeable about poetry. But her attitude was refreshingly unacademic and relaxed. This enabled us both to have a smooth, trouble-free conversational interchange, even though my attention was drawn over and over again to those astounding breasts, then to the navel, a perfect little goblet from which, in a microsecond’s fantasy, I lapped lemon Kool-Aid or some other such nectar with my tongue. While talking of another Brooklyn laureate, Walt Whitman, I found it easy not to pay perfect attention to what Leslie was saying. At college and elsewhere I had played out this solemn little cultural charade too many times to be unaware that it was a prelude, a preliminary feeling-out of mutual sensibilities in which the substance of what one said was less important than the putative authority with which one’s words were spoken. In reality a ritualized mating dance, it allowed one’s mind to wander, not alone as in the present case to Leslie’s bountiful flesh but to a perception of what was being uttered in the background. Because I only barely understood the words, I could not believe my ears and thought at first I was overhearing some new verbal game, until I realized that this was no joke, there was somber earnestness inhabiting these conversational fragments, almost every one of which began with “My analyst said...”
Halting, truncated, the talk bewildered me and at the same time held me enthralled; in addition, the sexual frankness was so utterly novel that I experienced a phenomenon that I hadn’t felt since I was about eight years old: my ears were burning. Altogether the conversation made up a new experience that impressed me with such force that later that night back at my room I scribbled verbatim notes from memory—notes which, now faded and yellowing, I have retrieved from the past along with such mementos as my father’s letters. Although I promised myself not to inflict upon the reader too many of the voluminous jottings I made that summer (it is a tiresome and interruptive device, symptomatic of a flagging imagination), I have made an exception in this particular instance, setting my little memorandum down just as I wrote it as unimpeachable testimony of the way some people talked in 1947, that cradle year of psychoanalysis in postwar America:
Girl named Sandra: “My analyst said that my transference problem has passed from the hostile to the affectionate stage. He said that this usually meant that the analysis might go ahead with fewer barriers and repressions.”
Long silence. Blinding sunlight, gulls against a cerulean blue sky. Plume of smoke on the horizon. A glorious day, crying out for a hymn to itself, like Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” What in God’s name is ailing these kids? I never saw such gloom, such despair, such blighted numb solemnity. Finally someone breaks the long silence.
Guy named Irv: “Don’t get too affectionate, Sandra. You might get Dr. Bronfman’s cock inside you.”
No one laughs.
Sandra: “That’s not funny, Irving. In fact what you just said is outrageous. A transference problem is no laughing matter.”
More long silence. I am thunderstruck. I have never in my life heard those four-letter words spoken in a mixed gathering. Also I have never heard of transference. I feel my Presbyterian scrotum shrink. These characters are really liberated. But if so, why so gloomy?
“My analyst says that any transference problem is serious, whether it’s affectionate or hostile. She says it’s proof that you haven’t gotten over an Oedipal dependence” This from the girl named Shirley, not as nifty as Leslie but with great boobs. As T. Wolfe pointed out these Jewish girls have marvelous chest development. Except for Leslie, though, they all give the impression that they’re at a funeral. I notice Sophie off to the side on the sand, listening to the talk. All the simple happiness she had during those crazy rides is gone. She has a sullen sulky look on her beautiful face and says nothing. She is so beautiful, even when her mood is down. From time to time she looks at Nathan—she seems to seek him, to make sure that he is there—and then she glowers while the people talk.
Some random jabber:
“My analyst said that the reason I find it hard to come is that I’m pre-genitally fixated.” (Sandra)
“Nine months of analysis and I discover it’s not my mother I want to fuck, it’s my Aunt Sadie.” (Bert) (Mild laughter)
“Before I went into analysis I was completely frigid, can you imagine? Now all I do is think about fucking. Wilhelm Reich has turned me into a nympho, I mean sex on the brain.”
These last words, spoken by Leslie as she flopped over on her belly, had an effect on my libido which forever after would render insipid the word aphrodisiac. I was beyond simple desire, borne away rather in a near-swoon of lust. Couldn’t she know what she did to me with this concubine’s speech, with those foul, priceless words which assailed like sharp spears the bastion of my own Christian gentility, with its aching repressions and restraints? I was so overcome by excitement that the entire sunny seascape—bathers, white-capped waves, even a droning airplane with its trailing banner THRILLS NIGHTLY AT AQUEDUCT RACETRACK—was suddenly steeped in a pornographic glow, as if seen through a filter of lurid blue. I gazed at Leslie in her new pose—the long tawny legs merging with the firm cushioned bottom, an ample but symmetrical roundness which in turn flowed slightly down then upward into a cuprous, lightly freckled back, sleek as a seal’s. She must have anticipated my hunger to stroke that back (if not the sweaty palm with which I had already mentally massaged her darling behind), for she soon twisted her head around and said to me, “Hey, oil me up, will you? I’m getting parboiled.” From this moment of slippery intimacy—smearing as I did the lotion across her shoulders and down her back to the beginning cleft of her buttocks, a tiny nook suggestively fair of hue, then with fluttering fingers in the air above the rump and on further to the mysterious regions between her thighs, ashine with sweat—that afternoon remains in memory a gauzy but pleasure-charged extravaganza.
There were cans of beer from a boardwalk bar and of course this helped perpetuate my euphoria; even when Sophie and Nathan told me goodby—Sophie looking wan and unhappy and saying she felt a little sick—and abruptly left, I kept afloat on a high cloud of elation. (I recall, however, that their departure caused, for a moment, an uneasy silence in the group on the sand, a silence broken by someone’s remark: “Did you see that number on her arm, that tattoo?") After another half-hour the psychoanalytical talk palled on me desperately, and alcohol and randiness emboldened me to ask Leslie if she’d stroll with me someplace where we could chat and be alone. She agreed, since it had clouded up a little anyway, and we ended up at a boardwalk café where Leslie drank 7-Up and I helped swell the flood of my raging ardor with can after can of Budweiser. But let a few more of my feverish notes continue that afternoon’s operetta:
Leslie and I are in the bar of a restaurant called Victor’s and I am getting a little drunk. I have never felt such sexual electricity in my life. This Jewish dryad has more sensuality in one of her expressive thumbs than all the locked-up virgins I ever knew in Va. & N.C. put together. Also, she is exceedingly bright, reinforcing Henry Miller’s observation somewhere that sex is all in the head, i.e., dumb girls, dumb screwing. Our conversation ebbs and flows in majestic waves like the sea—Hart Crane, sex, Thomas Hardy, sex, Flaubert, sex, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, sex, Huckleberry Finn, sex. I have turned on her the pure flame of my intellect. Manifestly if we were not in a public place I would have her right this minute in the sack. Over the table I hold her hand, which is moist, as if with the pure essence of desire. She speaks rather rapidly in what I have learned to detect is a higher-class Brooklyn accent, more like that used in Manhattan. She has charming facial gestures, nicely interrupted by many grins. Adorable! But what really gets me is that within the lazy space of an hour I hear her say at various moments words I have never in my life heard spoken by a female. Nor do they really sound dirty, once I am used to them. These include such words as “prick,” “fuck” and “cocksucking.” Also, she says during that same time such phrases as “go down on him” “jerking himself off” (something having to do with Thoreau), “gave him a blowjob” “muff-diver,” “swallowed his sperm” (Melville) (Melville?). She does most of the talking though I do my part and am able with a kind of studied unconcern to utter “my throbbing cock” once, aware even as I say it, incredibly excited, that it is the first so-called hard-core obscenity I have ever spoken in a woman’s presence. When we leave Victor’s I am nicely plastered and am reckless enough to let my arm encircle her firm bare waist. In doing so I actually stroke her ass somewhat slightly and the responsive squeeze she gives my hand with her arm, also the glimmer in those dark oriental eyes as she impishly gazes up at me, makes me certain that I have finally, miraculously discovered a woman free of the horrendous conventions and pieties that afflict this hypocritical culture of ours...
I am a little mortified to discover that almost none of the above was apparently written with the faintest trace of irony (I actually was capable of “somewhat slightly ”!), which may only indicate how truly momentous for me was this encounter with Leslie, or how doltish and complete was my seizure of passion—or simply how my suggestible mind was working at the age of twenty-two. At any rate, when Leslie and I made our way back to the beach the late-afternoon light, still quivering with heat waves, flooded the sand around the lifeguard tower from which the dejected group of analysands had now departed, leaving behind them a half-buried copy of Partisan Review, squeezed-out tubes of nose balm and a litter of Coke bottles. So, lingering there together in the heat of our charm-bound affinity, we spent another hour or so tying up the loose ends of our conversation, both of us very much aware that we had taken this afternoon the first step of what had to be a journey together into wild and uncharted territory. We lay side by side, bellies down. As I gently traced oval patterns against her pulsing neck with my fingertips she reached up to stroke my hand, and I heard her say, “My analyst said that mankind will forever be the enemy of itself until it learns that each human being only needs, enfin, a fantastic fucking.” I heard my own voice, haltingly distant but sincere, reply, “Your analyst must be a very wise person.” For a long while she was silent, and then she turned to gaze at me full in the face and uttered finally, with unfeigned desire, that languid yet straightforward invitation which made my heart stop and so unbalanced my mind and senses: “I’ll bet you could give a girl a fantastic fucking.” And it was then that we somehow made a date for the following Thursday night.
Thursday morning arrived, as I have said, with its sense of approaching bliss, of almost unendurable promise. Sitting there at my pink writing table, I managed, however, to ignore my sickishness and fever and to master my fantasies long enough to get two or three more hours of serious writing done. A few minutes past noon I was aware of a yawning sensation at the pit of my stomach. I had not heard a sound from Sophie all morning. Doubtless she would have spent most of her time with her nose in a book, assiduously continuing her self-education. Her ability at reading English, while still far from perfect, had improved immeasurably in the year since she had met Nathan; in general she no longer resorted to Polish translations and was now deeply engrossed in Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, which I knew both captured and perplexed her. “Those sentences,” she had said, “that go on and on like a crazy snake!” But she was an adept enough reader to marvel at Faulkner’s intricacy of narrative and his turbulent power. I had practically memorized that Portable, which in college had catapulted me into all of Faulkner’s work, and it had been upon my recommendation—on the subway or somewhere else on that memorable Sunday of our first encounter—that Nathan had bought a copy and given it to Sophie early in the week. At our several get-togethers since then it had given me great pleasure to help interpret Faulkner for Sophie, not only by way of explaining parts of the occult Mississippi vernacular but in showing her some of the right pathways as she penetrated the wonderful groves and canebrakes of his rhetoric.
With all the difficulty, she was moved and impressed by the stormy assault that this prose made upon her mind. “He writes like someone, you know, possessed!” she said to me, then added, “It’s very plain that he never was psychoanalyzed.” Her nose crinkled up in distaste as she made this observation, obviously alluding to the group of sunbathers who had so offended her the previous Sunday. I hadn’t completely realized it at the time, but that same Freudian colloquy which had fascinated and, at the most, amused me had been downright odious to Sophie and had caused her to flee with Nathan from the beach. “Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs,” she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. “I hate this type of—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—“unearned unhappiness!” Although I saw exactly what she meant, I was surprised at the fervor of her hostility and I wondered—even as I climbed the steps to take her out on our picnic—if it might not be due only to some irreconcilable discord left over from that stern religion which I knew she had abandoned.
I had not meant to take Sophie by surprise but the door to the room was partly open, and since I could see that she was clothed—“decent,” as girls used to say—I entered without knocking. Dressed in some kind of robe or housecoat, she stood at the far end of the big room combing her hair in front of a mirror. Her back was to me and for a moment I could tell she was unaware of my presence as she stroked the lustrous blond tresses with a sizzling sound, barely audible on the noontime stillness. Supercharged with a prurient residue—overflow, I imagine, of my Leslie daydreams—I had a sudden impulse to creep up behind Sophie and nuzzle her neck while filling my hands with her breasts. But the very thought was unconscionable and I belatedly realized, while I stood there in silence watching, that it was wrong enough of me to have stolen in on her in this way and violated her privacy, so I announced myself with a small, cough. She turned from the mirror with a startled gasp and in so doing revealed a face I shall never in my life forget. Dumfounded, I beheld—for a mercifully fleeting instant—an old hag whose entire lower face had crumpled in upon itself, leaving a mouth like a wrinkled gash and an expression of doddering senescence. It was a mask, withered and pitiable.
I was literally on the verge of crying out, but she beat me to it, making a gulping noise as she clapped her hands over her mouth and fled to the bathroom. I stood there in pounding embarrassment for long moments listening to the muffled sounds behind the bathroom door, aware now for the first time of the Scarlatti piano sonata that had been playing softly on the phonograph. Then, “Stingo, when are you going to learn to knock on a lady’s door?” I heard her call, more teasing in tone than truly cross. And then—only then—did I realize what I had witnessed. I was grateful that she had displayed no real anger, and was swiftly touched at this generosity of spirit, wondering what my own reaction might have been had / been caught without my teeth. And at that instant Sophie emerged from the bathroom, a faint flush still on her cheeks, but composed, even radiant, all the lovely components of her face reunited in a merry apotheosis of American dentistry. “Let’s go to the park,” she said, “I’m swooning with hunger. I am... the avatar of hunger!”
That “avatar,” of course, was quintessential Faulkner, and I was so tickled at the way she used the word, and by her restored beauty, that I found myself disgorging loud coarse cackles of laughter.
“Braunschweiger on rye, with mustard,” I said.
“Hot pastrami!” she replied.
“Salami and Swiss cheese on pumpernickel,” I went on, “with a pickle, half sour.”
“Stop it, Stingo, you’re killing me!” she cried with a golden laugh. “Let’s go!” And off we went to the park, via Himelfarb’s Deluxe Delicatessen.