Sophie's Choice - William Styron [109]
But finally, when dawn breaks and deep fatigue floods through my bones and muscles—including that doughty love-muscle which at last begins to flag and droop after its tenacious vigil—Leslie re-creates for me the dark odyssey of her psychoanalysis. And of course her family. Her horrible family. Her family which, despite the cool and civilized veneer, according to Leslie, is a waxwork gallery of monsters. The ruthless and ambitious father whose religion is molded plastics and who has spoken a bare twenty words to her since childhood. The creepy younger sister and the stupid older brother. Above all, the ogreish mother who, Barnard enlightenment or no, has dominated Les’s life with bitchery and vengeance ever since the moment when she caught Leslie, then three, diddling herself and forced her to wear hand-splints for months as prophylaxis against self-abuse. All this Leslie pours out to me in a terrible rush as if I too were momentarily only another in that ever-changing phalanx of practitioners which has attended her woes and wretchednesses for over four years. It is full sun-up. Leslie is drinking coffee, I am drinking Budweiser, and Tommy Dorsey is playing on the two-thousand-dollar Magnavox phonograph. Exhausted, I hear Leslie’s cataract of words as if through muffled layers of wool, trying without much success to piece it all together—this scrambled confessional with its hodgepodge of terms like Reichian and Jungian, Adlerian, a Disciple of Karen Horney, sublimation, gestalt, fixations, toilet training, and other things I have been aware of but never heard a human being speak of in such tones, which down South are reserved for Thomas Jefferson, Uncle Remus and the blessed Trinity. I am so tired that I am only barely aware of what she is driving at when she speaks of her current analyst, her fourth, a “Reichian,” one Dr. Pulvermacher, and then alludes to her “plateau.” I make flutters with my eyelids denoting an urgent need for sleep. And she goes on and on, those moist and precious Jewish lips, forever lost to me, driving home the sudden awareness that my poor dear joint for the first time in many hours is as shrunken and as small as that Worm whose replica hangs behind me, there in the papal bathroom. I yawn, ferociously, loud, but Leslie pays this no mind, seemingly intent that I should not go away with ill feelings, that I should somehow try to understand her. But I really don’t know if I want to understand. As Leslie continues I can only reflect despairingly on the obvious irony: that if through those frigid little harpies in Virginia I had been betrayed chiefly by Jesus, I have been just as cruelly swindled at Leslie’s hands by the egregious Doktor Freud. Two smart Jews, believe me.
“Before I reached this plateau of vocalization,” I hear Leslie say, through the surreal delirium of my fatigue, “I could never have said any of those words I’ve said to you. Now I’m completely able to vocalize. I mean those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everyone should be able to say. My analyst—Dr. Pulvermacher—said that the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language.” What I say in reply is mingled with a yawn so cavernous and profound that my voice is like a wild beast