Sophie's Choice - William Styron [75]
But it was not Leslie’s stunning candor which alone set fire to my senses. The air above that sequestered little triangle of sand which Nathan’s lifeguard friend, Morty Haber, staked out on Sunday afternoons as a private social sanctuary, had been filled with the dirtiest talk I had ever heard in what might be termed mixed company. It was something more serious and complex. It was her sultry glare, which contained both direct challenge and expectancy, a look of naked invitation like a lascivious lariat thrown around my ears. She plainly meant action, and when I recovered my wits I replied, in that laconic, detached, Virginia gentlemanly voice with which I was aware (or was vain enough to conceive) I had taken her captive from the outset, “Well, honeybun, since you put it that way, I do suppose I could give you a right warm snuggle between the sheets.” She could not know how my heart was racing, after its dangerous shutdown. Both my dialect and my diction comprised a glib contrivance but they had succeeded in wildly amusing Leslie, and obviously winning her. My studied and exaggerated speech had kept her alternately giggling and fascinated as we lazed on the sand. Just graduated from college, daughter of a manufacturer of molded plastics, restricted by the vicissitudes of life and the recent war to travel no further from Brooklyn than Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire (where, she laughingly told me, she had gone for ten summers to Camp Nehoc—a widespread patronymic spelled backward), she said I was the first person from the South to whom she had ever spoken a word, or vice versa.
The beginning of that Sunday afternoon remains one of the pleasantest blurs amid a lifetime of blurred recollections. Coney Island. Seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, in golden effervescent air. A popcorn, candy apple and sauerkraut fragrance—and Sophie, tugging on my sleeve, then Nathan’s, insisting that we take all the wild rides, which we did. Steeplechase Park! We risked our necks not once but twice on the Loop-the-Loop and dizzied ourselves on a fearful contraption called The Snapper, whose iron arm flung the three of us out into space in a gondola, where we spun around in erratic orbits, screaming. The rides sent Sophie into what were clearly transports of something past simple joy. I never saw these diversions draw forth from anyone, even a child, such glee, such rich terror, such uncomplicated visceral bliss. She cried out in ecstasy, with marvelous shrieks, all flowing out of some primitive source of rapture quite beyond normal sensations of sweet peril. She clutched at Nathan, buried her head in the crook of his arm, and laughed and screamed until tears streaked her cheek. As for myself, I was a good sport up to a point but balked at the parachute jump, two hundred feet high, relic of the 1939 World’s Fair, which may have been perfectly safe but filled me with heaving vertigo just to look at it. “Coward, Stingo!” Sophie cried and yanked at my arm, but even her entreaties failed to budge me. Licking an Eskimo Pie, I watched Sophie and Nathan in their old-fashioned clothes grow smaller and smaller as they were hoisted up the guide wires beneath the billowing canopies; they paused at the peak, arrested for a harrowing and breathless moment as in that endless ticktock of time before the condemned fall through the gallows trap, then plummeted earthward with a whooshing of air. Sophie