Sophie's Choice - William Styron [73]
At Coney Island that Sunday, Leslie Lapidus had virtually guaranteed me—as I shall shortly demonstrate—possession of her glorious body and we had made a date for the following Thursday night. During the intervening days—looking forward to our second meeting with such unseemly excitement that I felt a little sick and began off and on to run a mild but genuine fever—I had become intoxicated mainly by a single fact: this time I would surely succeed. I had it sewed up. Made! This time there would be no impediments; the crazy bliss of fornication with a hot-skinned, eager-bellied Jewish girl with fathomless eyes and magnificent apricot-and-ocher suntanned legs that all but promised to squeeze the life out of me was no dumb fantasy: it was a fait accompli, practically consummated save for the terrible wait until Thursday. In my brief but hectic sex life I had never experienced anything like certainty of conquest (rarely had any young man of that time) and the sensation was exquisite. One may speak of flirtation, the thrill of the chase, the delights and challenges of hard-won seduction; each had its peculiar rewards. There is much to be said, however, for the delectable and leisurely anticipation which accompanies the knowledge that it is all ready and waiting and, so to speak, in the bag. Thus during those hours when I had not been immersed in my novel I had thought of Leslie and the approaching tryst, envisioned myself sucking on the nipples of those “melon-heavy” Jewish breasts so dear to Thomas Wolfe, and glowed in my fever like a jack-o’-lantern.
Another thing: I had been almost beside myself with a sense of the rightness of this prospect. Every devoted artist, however impecunious, I felt, deserved at least this. Furthermore, it appeared that in all likelihood if I played my cards right, remained the cool exotic Cavalier squire whom Leslie had found so maddeningly aphrodisiacal at our first encounter, if I committed no hapless blunders, this God- or perhaps Jehovah-bestowed gift would become part of a steady, even daily functioning arrangement. I would have wild morning and afternoon romps in the hay and all of this could only enhance the quality of my literary output, despite the prevailing bleak doctrine concerning sexual “sublimation.” All right, so I doubted that the relationship would involve much in the way of high-toned love, for my attraction to Leslie was largely primal in nature, lacking the poetic and idealistic dimension of my buried passion for Sophie. Leslie would allow me for the first time in my life to taste in a calm, exploratory way those varieties of bodily experience which until now had existed in my head like a vast and orgiastic, incessantly thumbed encyclopedia of lust. Through Leslie, I would at last assuage a basic hunger too long ruthlessly thwarted, And as I waited for that fateful Thursday meeting, her remembered image came to represent for me the haunting possibility of a sexual communion which would nullify the farcical manner in which I had transported my mismanaged and ungratified and engorged penis across the frozen sexual moonscape of the 1940s.
I think a brief reflection on this decade might now be in order, to lay the groundwork for and to help explain Leslie’s initial, devastating effect on me. A lot in the way of bilious reminiscence has been written about sex by survivors of the fifties, much of it a legitimate lament. But the forties were really far worse, a particularly ghastly period for Eros, shakily bridging as they did the time between the puritanism of our forefathers and the arrival of public pornography. Sex itself was coming out of the closet, but there was universal distress over how to deal with it. That the era became epitomized by Little Miss Cock Tease—that pert number who jerked off a whole generation of her squirming young coevals, allowing moist liberties but with steel-trap relentlessness withholding the big prize, sobbing in triumph as she stole back to the dorm (O that intact membrane! O those silvery snail tracks on the silken undies!)—is no one