Sophie's Choice - William Styron [108]
(Oh, André Gide, comme toi, je crois que je deviendrai pédéraste!)
Later she bawls like a little baby as she sits beside me, trying to explain herself. For some reason her awful sweetness, her helplessness, her crestfallen and remorseful manner all help me to control my wild rage. Whereas at first I wanted to belt the living shit out of her—take that priceless Degas and ram it down around her neck—now I could almost cry with her, crying out of my own chagrin and frustration but also for Leslie too and for her psychoanalysis, which has so helped create her own gross imposture. I learn about all this as the clock ticks onward toward dawn and after I get my several querulous complaints and objections out of the way. “I don’t want to be nasty or unreasonable,” I whisper to her in the shadows, holding her hand, “but you led me to believe something else. You said, and I quote you exactly, ‘I’ll bet you could give a girl a fantastic fucking.’ ” I pause for a long moment, blowing blue smoke through the gloom. Then I say, “Well, I could. And I wanted to.” I halt. “That’s all.” Then after another long pause and a lot of snuffled sobs, she replies, “I know I said that, and if I led you on I’m sorry, Stingo;” Snuffle, snuffle. I give her a Kleenex. “But I didn’t say I wanted you to do it.” More snuffles. “Also I said ‘a girl.’ I didn’t say me.” At this instant the groan I give would stir the souls of the dead. We are both silent for an endlessly long time. At some moment between three and four o’clock I hear a ship‘s whistle, plaintive and mournful and far off, borne through the night from N.Y. harbor. It reminds me of home and fills me with inexpressible sorrow. For some reason that sound and the sorrow it brings makes it all the more difficult to bear Leslie's overheated and blooming presence, like some jungle flower, now so astonishingly unattainable. Thinking fleetingly of gangrene, I cannot believe that my staff still flaunts itself, lancelike. Could John the Baptist have suffered such deprivation? Tantalus? St. Augustine? Little Nell?
Leslie is—literally and figuratively—totally lingual. Her sex life is wholly centered in her tongue. It is not fortuitous therefore that the inflammatory promise she has been able to extend me through that hyperactive organ of hers finds a correlation in the equally inflammatory but utterly spurious words she loves to speak. While we sit there I recall the name of a ludicrous phenomenon I read about in a Duke Univ. course in abnormal psychology: “coprolalia,” the compulsive use of obscene language, often found in young women. When at last I break our silence and banteringly broach the possibility that she may be a victim of this malady, she seems not so much insulted as hurt, and softly begins to sob again. I seem to have opened some painful wound. But no, she insists, it’s not that. After a while she stops sobbing. Then she says something which only hours before I would have considered a joke but I now accept placidly and with no surprise as the stark, aching truth.