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By Root 12360 0

upon the matter, which was just as well, for the polychrome cloud went on its way eastward, allowing light to flood around us once again; Sophie smiled, as if the sun’s rays had dispersed her moment of gloom, and hurling a final crust at Tadeusz, said that we should be getting back to Yetta’s. Nathan, she declared with a touch of excitement, had bought a fabulous bottle of Burgundy for their evening dinner, she had to shop at the A & P on Church Avenue for a fine steak to go with it; that done, she added, she would curl up all afternoon and continue her monumental wrestle with “The Bear.” “I would like to meet this Mr. Weel-yam Faulkner,” she said as we strolled back toward the house, “and tell him that he make it very difficult for Polish people when he don’t know how to end a sentence. But oh, Stingo, how that man can write! I feel I’m in Mississippi. Stingo, will you take Nathan and me to the South sometime?”

Sophie’s lively presence receded, then disappeared, from mind as I entered my room and once again with heartstopping distress was smitten by one of those sledgehammer thoughts about Leslie Lapidus. I had been foolish enough to think that on this afternoon, as the fleeting hours ticked away before our rendezvous, my customary discipline and detachment would allow me to continue my usual routine, which is to say, write letters to friends down South or scribble in my notebook or simply loll on my bed and read. I was deep into Crime and Punishment, and although my ambitions as a writer had been laid low by the book’s stupefying range and complexity, I had, for several afternoons now, been forging ahead with admiring wonder, much of my amazement having to do simply with Raskolnikov, whose bedeviled and seedy career in St. Petersburg seemed (except for a murder) so closely analogous to mine in Brooklyn. Its effect on me had indeed been so powerful that I had actually speculated—not idly either, but with a moment’s seriousness, which rather scared me—on the physical and spiritual consequences to myself were I, too, to indulge in a little homicide tinged with metaphysics, plunge a knife, say, into the breast of some innocent old woman like Yetta Zimmerman. The burning vision of the book both repelled me and pulled me back, yet each afternoon its attraction had won out irresistibly. It is all the greater tribute, then, to the way in which Leslie Lapidus had taken possession of my intellect, my very will, that this afternoon the book went unread.

Nor did I write letters or indite in my notebook any of those gnomic lines—ranging from the mordant to the apocalyptic and aping in style the worst of both Cyril Connolly and André Gide—by which I strove to maintain a subsidiary career as diarist. (I long ago destroyed a great deal of these leakages from my youthful psyche, saving only a hundred pages or so with nostalgic value, including the stuff on Leslie and a nine-hundred-word treatise—surprisingly witty for a journal so freighted otherwise with angst and deep thoughts—on the relative merits, apparent friction co-efficients, fragrance and so forth of the various lubricants I had used while practicing the Secret Vice, my hands-down winner being Ivory Flakes well-emulsified in water at body temperature.) No, against all dictates of conscience and the Calvinist work ethic, and despite the fact that I was far from tired, I lay flat on my back in bed, immobilized like one near prostration, bemused in the realization that the fever which I had run for these recent days had caused my muscles to twitch, and that one could actually be taken ill, perhaps seriously so, with venereal ecstasy. I was a recumbent six-foot-long erogenous zone. Each time I thought of Leslie, naked and squirming in my arms as she would be in the coming hours, my heart gave that savage lunge which, as I have said, might be perilous in an older man.

While I lay there in my room’s peppermint-candy glow and the afternoon minutes crept by, my sickness joined company with a kind of half-demented disbelief. Remember, my chastity was all but intact. This enhanced my