Sophie's Choice - William Styron [7]
—It has been calculated that if the number of the vaginas employing Kotex during a single four day period in the U.S.A. were lined up orifice to orifice, there would be a snatch long enough to extend from Boston to White River Junction, Vt...
The next day Farrell, ever amiable and tolerant, would muse wryly on such offerings, chewing at his Yello-Bole, and after observing that “this isn’t quite what I think we had in mind,” would grin understandingly and ask me to please try again. And because I was not yet completely lost, perhaps because the Presbyterian ethic still exercised some vestigial hold on me, I would try again that night—would try with all my passion and might, to no avail. After sweaty hours, I would give up and return to “The Bear” or Notes from the Underground or Billy Budd, or often simply loiter yearningly by the window, gazing down into the enchanted garden. There in the golden spring dusk of Manhattan, in an ambience of culture and unassertive affluence from which I knew I would forever be excluded, a soiree would be commencing at the Winston Hunnicutts’, for that was the swank name with which I had christened them. Alone for an instant, blond Mavis Hunnicutt would appear in the garden, dressed in a blouse and tight flowered slacks; after pausing for a peek up at the opalescent evening sky, she would give an odd and bewitching toss to her lovely hair and then bend down to pluck tulips from the flowerbed. In this adorable stance, she could not know what she did to the loneliest junior editor in New York. My lust was incredible—something prehensile, a groping snout of desire, slithering down the begrimed walls of the wretched old building, uncoiling itself across a fence, moving with haste serpentine and indecent to a point just short of her upturned rump, where in silent metamorphosis it blazingly flowered into the embodiment of myself, priapic, ravenous, yet under hair-trigger control. Gently my arms surrounded Mavis, and I cupped my hands under her full, free-floating, honeydew breasts. “Is that you, Winston?” she whispered. “No, it’s I,” said I, her lover, in response, “let me take you doggie fashion.” To which she invariably replied, “Oh, darling, yes—later.”
In these demented fantasies I was prevented from immediate copulation on the Abercrombie & Fitch hammock only by the sudden arrival in the garden of Thornton Wilder. Or e. e. cummings. Or Katherine Anne Porter. Or John Hersey. Or Malcolm Cowley. Or John P. Marquand. At which point—brought back to my senses with a punctured libido—I would find myself at the window once more, savoring with longing heart the festivities below. For it seemed perfectly logical to me that the Winston Hunnicutts, this vivid and gregarious young couple (whose garden-level living room, incidentally, afforded me a jealous glimpse of Danish-modern shelves jammed with books), had the enormous good fortune to inhabit a world populated by writers and poets and critics and other literary types; and thus on these evenings as the twilight softly fell and the terrace began to fill with chattering, beautifully dressed sophisticates, I discerned in the shadows the faces of all the impossible heroes and heroines I had ever dreamed of since that moment when my hapless spirit had become entrapped by the magic of the printed word. I had yet to meet a single author of a published book—unless one excepts the seedy old ex-Communist I have mentioned, who once accidentally blundered into my office at McGraw-Hill, smelling of garlic and the stale sweat of ancient apprehensions—and so that spring the Hunnicutt parties, which were frequent and of long duration, gave my imagination opportunity for the craziest flights of fancy that ever afflicted the brain of a lovelorn idolater. There was Wallace Stevens! And Robert Lowell! That mustached gentleman looking rather furtively from the door. Could that really be Faulkner? He was rumored to be in New York. The woman with the buxom frame, the hair in a bun, the interminable grin. Surely that was Mary McCarthy. The shortish man with the wry ruddy sardonic face could only be John Cheever. Once in the twilight a woman