Sophie's Choice - William Styron [111]
“Oh yes,” I said with a shiver, “oh yes, it does. It enlarges one’s sense of history.”
It was past ten o’clock and I ordered more brandy. We lingered for another hour, and again, as at Coney Island, Leslie gently but irresistibly seized the conversational helm, steering us into turbid backwaters and eerie lagoons where I, at least, had never ventured with a female. She spoke often of her current analyst, who, she said, had opened up a consciousness of her primal self and, more important, of the sexual energy which had only needed to be tapped and liberated in order to make her the functioning, healthy brute (her word) she now felt herself to be. As she spoke, the benign cognac allowed me to run my fingertips very gently over the edges of her expressive mouth, silver-bright with vermilion lipstick.
“I was such a little creep before I went into analysis,” she said with a sigh, “hyped-up intellectual with no sense at all of my connection with my body, the wisdom my body had to give me. No sense of my pussy, no sense of that marvelous little clit, no sense of anything. Have you read D. H. Lawrence? Lady Chatterley’s Lover?” I had to say no. It was a book which I had longed to read but which, incarcerated like a mad strangler behind the wires of the locked shelves of the university library, had been denied me. “Read it,” she said, her voice husky and intense now, “get it and read it, for the sake of your salvation. A friend of mine smuggled a copy from France, I’ll lend it to you. Lawrence has the answer—oh, he knows so much about fucking. He says that when you fuck you go to the dark gods.” Uttering these words, she squeezed my hand, which was now entwined with hers a scant millimeter from the straining tumefaction in my lap, and her eyes gazed into mine with such a galvanized look of passion and certitude that it took all my self-command to avoid, that very instant, some ludicrous, brutish, public embrace. “Oh, Stingo,” she said again, “I really mean it, to fuck is to go to the dark gods.”
“Then let’s go to the dark gods,” I said, practically beyond control now as I urgently signaled for the check.
Some pages back I touched upon André Gide and the Gidean diaries I had been trying to emulate. As a student at Duke, I had read the master laboriously in French. I had admired his journals inordinately, and had considered Gide’s probity and relentless self-dissection to be part of one of the truly triumphant feats of the civilized twentieth-century mind. In my own journal, at the beginning of the final part of my chronicle of Leslie Lapidus—a Passion Week, I realized later, which began on that palmy Sunday at Coney Island and ended with my time on the Cross in the small hours of Friday morning back on Pierrepont Street—I brooded at some length on Gide and paraphrased from memory a few of his exemplary thoughts and observations. I won’t dwell on this passage here, except to note my admiration therein not only for the terrible humiliations Gide had been able to absorb, but the brave honesty with which he seemed always determined to record them: the more catastrophic the humiliation or the disappointment, I noted, the more cleansing and luminous became Gide’s account in his Journals—a catharsis in which the reader, too, could participate. Although I can no longer remember for certain, it must have been the same sort of catharsis I was trying to attain in this last section on Leslie—following my meditation on Gide—which I include here. But I have to add that there was something a little freaky about these particular pages. At some point not long after their writing I must have torn them out in despair from the ledger-like book in which I kept my journal, stowing them away in a clumsy wad at the back of the ledger, where I ran across them by luck even as I was re-creating the denouement of this goofy masquerade. What still