Sophie's Choice - William Styron [112]
“I’m sorry you didn’t make out with Leslie, kid,” Nathan said to me one night after the debacle on Pierrepont Street. He was clearly both disappointed and a little surprised that his efforts at matchmaking had come to naught. “I thought you two were all locked in, made for each other. At Coney Island that day I thought she was going to eat you up. And now you tell me it all went flooey. What’s the matter? I can’t believe she wouldn’t put out.”
“Oh no, it was all right in the sex department,” I lied. “I mean, at least I got in.” For a variety of vague reasons I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth about our calamitous stand-off, this scratching match between two virgins. It was too disgraceful to dwell upon, both from Leslie’s point of view and my own. I plunged into a feeble fabrication, but I could tell that Nathan knew I had begun to improvise—his shoulders were shaking with laughter—and I finished my account with one or two Freudian furbelows, chief among them being one in which Leslie told me that she had been able to reach a climax only with large, muscular, coal-black Negroes with colossal penises. Smiling, Nathan began to regard me with the look of a man who is having his leg pulled in a chummy way, and when I was finished he put his hand on my shoulder and said in those understanding tones of an older brother, “Sorry about you and Leslie, kid, whatever happened. I thought she’d be a dreamboat. Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t right.”
We forgot about Leslie. I did most of the drinking these evenings, downing my half-dozen glasses of beer or so. Sometimes we went to the bar before dinner, often afterward. In those days it was almost unheard of to order wine in a bar—especially a tacky place like the Maple Court—but Nathan, in the vanguard about so many things, always managed to have served up a bottle of Chablis, which he kept cold in a bucket by the table and which would last him and Sophie the hour and a half we usually spent there. The Chablis never did more than get both of them mildly and pleasantly relaxed, signaled by a fine sheen welling up through his dark face and the tenderest dogwood-blossom flush on hers.
Nathan and Sophie were like an old married couple to me now, we were all inseparable; and I idly wondered if some of the more sophisticated of the Maple Court habitués did not regard us as a ménage à trois. Nathan was marvelous, bewitching, so perfectly “normal” and so delightful to be with that were it not for Sophie’s wretched little references (sometimes made inadvertently during our Prospect Park picnics) to terrible moments during their past year together, I would utterly have erased from memory that cataclysmic scene when I had first glimpsed them battling, along with other hints I had had of another, blacker side of his being. How could I do otherwise, in the presence of this electrifying, commanding character, part magic entertainer, part big brother, confidant and guru, who had so generously reached out to me in my isolation? Nathan was no cheap charmer. There was the depth of a masterful performer in even the slightest of his jokes, practically all of them Jewish, which he was able so inexhaustibly to disgorge. His major stories were masterpieces. Once as a boy sitting in the Tidewater Theatre with my father as we watched a W. C. Fields movie (I believe it was My Little Chickadee) I saw happen what was supposed to happen only as a figure of speech, or in cornball works of fiction: I saw my father caught up in a rapture of such mind-dissolving laughter that he slid completely out of his seat and into the aisle. Laid out, by God, in the aisle! I did nearly the same in the Maple Court bar as Nathan told what I always remember as his Jewish country club joke.
It is like watching not one but two separate performers when Nathan acts out this suburban folk tale. The first performer is Shapiro, who at a banquet is attempting to propose once more his perennially blackballed friend for membership. Nathan’s voice grows incomparably oleaginous, gross with fatuity and edged with just the perfect trace of Yiddish as he limns Shapiro