Sophie's Choice - William Styron [111]
I never saw Leslie again. We parted that morning in a spirit of grave though rueful affection and she asked me to call her soon, but I never did. She dwelt often in my erotic fantasies after that, though, and over the years she has occupied my thoughts many times. Despite the torture she inflicted on me, I have wished her only the best of fortune, wherever she went or whatever she ultimately became. I always idly hoped that her time in the orgone box led her to the fulfillment she yearned for, hoisting her to a loftier plateau than mere “vocalization.” But should this have failed, like the other forms of treatment she had submitted to, I have never had much doubt that the ensuing decades, with their extraordinary scientific progress in terms of the care and maintenance of the libido, would have brought Leslie an ample measure of fulfillment. I may be wrong, but why is it that some intuition tells me that Leslie ultimately found her full meed of happiness? I don’t know, but anyway, that is how I now see her: an adjusted, sleek, elegantly graying and still beautiful woman ungrudgingly accommodating herself to middle age, very sophisticated now in her thrifty use of dirty words, warmly married, philoprogenitive and (I’m almost certain) multiorgasmic.
Chapter Eight
THE WEATHER WAS generally fine that summer, but sometimes the evenings got hot and steamy, and when this happened Nathan and Sophie and I often went around the corner on Church Avenue to an air-conditioned “cocktail lounge”—God, what a description!—called the Maple Court. There were relatively few full-fledged bars in that part of Flatbush (a puzzlement to me until Nathan pointed out that serious tippling does not rank high among Jewish pastimes), but this bar of ours did do a moderately brisk business, numbering among its predominately bluecollar clientele Irish doormen, Scandinavian cabdrivers, German building superintendents and WASPs of indeterminate status like myself who had somehow strayed into the faubourg. There was also what appeared to me a small sprinkling of Jews, some looking a little furtive. The Maple Court was large, ill-lit and on the seedy side, with the faint pervasive odor of stagnant water, but the three of us were attracted there on especially sultry summer nights by the refrigerated air and by the fact that we had grown rather to like its down-at-the-heel easygoingness. It was also cheap and beer was still ten cents a glass. I learned that the bar had been built in 1933, to celebrate and capitalize upon the repeal of Prohibition, and its spacious, even somewhat cavernous dimensions were originally meant to encompass a dance floor. Such Corybantic revels as envisioned by the first owners never took place, however, since through some incredible oversight the raunchy entrepreneurs failed to realize that they had located their establishment in a neighborhood substantially as devoted to order and propriety as a community of Hard Shell Baptists or Mennonites. The synagogues said No, also the Dutch Reformed church.
Thus the Maple Court did not obtain a cabaret license, and all the bright angular chrome-and-gilt decor, including sunburst chandeliers meant to revolve above the giddy dancers like glittering confections in a Ruby Keeler movie, fell into disrepair and gathered a patina of grime and smoke. The raised platform which formed the hub of the oval-shaped bar, and which had been designed to enable sleek long-legged stripteasers to wiggle their behinds down upon a circumambience of lounging gawkers, became filled with dusty signs and bloated fake bottles advertising brands of whiskey and beer. And more sadly somehow, the big Art Deco mural against one wall—a fine period piece done by an expert hand, with the skyline of Manhattan and silhouettes of a jazz band and chorus girls kicking up their heels—never once faced out toward a swirl of jubilant dancers but grew cracked and water-blotched and acquired a long horizontal dingy streak where a generation of neighborhood drunks had propped the backs of their heads. It was just beneath a corner of this mural, in a remote part of the ill-starred dance floor, that Nathan and Sophie and I would sit on those muggy evenings in the Maple Court.