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By Root 12341 0

primarily from a single piece of plastic no bigger than the forefinger of a child or an adult’s vermiform appendix, which as a matter of fact it rather resembled. Bernard Lapidus, according to Mr. Field as he fondled his Chivas Regal, had prospered through the Depression years of the thirties manufacturing embossed plastic ashtrays. The ashtrays (Leslie later elaborated) were of the type everyone was familiar with: usually black, circular, and stamped with such inscriptions as STORK CLUB, “21,” EL MOROCCO or, in more plebeian settings, BETTY’S PLACE and JOE’S BAR. Many people stole these ashtrays, so there was a never-ending demand. During those years Mr. Lapidus had produced the ashtrays by the hundreds of thousands, his operation from a smallish factory in Long Island City allowing him to live very comfortably with his family in Crown Heights, then one of the tonier sections of Flatbush. It was the recent war which had brought about this transition from mere prosperity to luxury, to the refurbished brownstone on Pierrepont Street and the Bonnard and the Degas (and a Pissarro landscape I was to see soon, a view of a lost country lane in the nineteenth century wilds outside of Paris so meltingly serene and lovely that it brought a lump to my throat).

Just before Pearl Harbor—Mr. Field went on in his quiet instructive tone—the Federal government opened bidding among fabricators of molded plastic for the manufacture of this dinky object, a bare two inches long, irregular in outline and containing at one end a squiggly bulge which had to fit into a similarly shaped aperture with absolute precision. It cost only a fraction of a penny to make, but since the contract—which Mr. Lapidus won—called for its production by the tens of millions, the midget device gave birth to a Golconda: it was an essential component of the fuse of every seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell fired by the Army and Marine Corps during the entire Second World War. In the palatial bathroom which I later had need to visit, there was a replica of this little piece of polymer resin (for of such, Mr. Field told me, it was made) framed behind glass and hanging on a wall, and I bemusedly gazed at it for long moments, thinking of the unnumbered legions of Japs and Krauts that had been blasted into the sweet by-and-by by grace of its existence, fashioned out of black inchoate gunk in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The replica was in eighteen-carat gold, and its presence struck the only note of bad taste in the house. But this might be excused, that year, with the fresh smell of victory still in the American air. Leslie later referred to it as “the Worm,” asking me in addition if it didn’t remind me of “some fat species of spermatozoa”—an arresting but chillingly contradictory image, considering the Worm’s ultimate function. We talked philosophically at some length about this, but in the end, and in the most inoffensive manner, she maintained a breezy attitude toward the source of the family wealth, observing with a sort of resigned amusement that “the Worm certainly bought some fantastic French Impressionists.”

Leslie finally appeared, flushed and beautiful in a bituminous black jersey dress which clung and rippled over her various undulant roundnesses in the most achingly attractive way. She gave me a moist peck on my cheek, exuding a scent of some innocent toilet water that made her smell as fresh as a daffodil, and for some reason twice as exciting as the cock teasers I had known in the Tidewater, those preposterous virgins drenched in their odalisques’ reeking musk. This was class, I thought, real Jewish class. A girl who felt secure enough to wear Yardley’s really knew what sex was about. Soon afterward we were joined by Leslie’s parents, a sleek, suntanned and engagingly foxy-looking man in his early fifties and a lovely amber-haired woman so youthful in appearance that she might easily have passed for Leslie’s older sister. Because of her looks alone I could scarcely believe it when Leslie later told me that her mother was a graduate of Barnard,