Sophie's Choice - William Styron [114]
Leslie is—literally and figuratively—totally lingual. Her sex life is wholly centered in her tongue. It is not fortuitous therefore that the inflammatory promise she has been able to extend me through that hyperactive organ of hers finds a correlation in the equally inflammatory but utterly spurious words she loves to speak. While we sit there I recall the name of a ludicrous phenomenon I read about in a Duke Univ. course in abnormal psychology: “coprolalia,” the compulsive use of obscene language, often found in young women. When at last I break our silence and banteringly broach the possibility that she may be a victim of this malady, she seems not so much insulted as hurt, and softly begins to sob again. I seem to have opened some painful wound. But no, she insists, it’s not that. After a while she stops sobbing. Then she says something which only hours before I would have considered a joke but I now accept placidly and with no surprise as the stark, aching truth. “I’m a virgin,” she says in a bleak small voice. After a long silence I reply, “No offense, understand. But I think you’re a very sick virgin.” As I say this I realize the acerbity of the words but somehow don’t regret them. Again a ship’s horn groans at the harbor’s mouth, touching me with such longing and nostalgia and despair that I think that I too might burst into tears. “I like you a lot, Les,” I manage to say, “I just think it was unfair of you to string me along this way. It’s tough on a guy. It’s terrible. You can’t imagine.” After saying this I simply cannot tell whether her words make up a non sequitur or not, when she replies in the most desolate voice I’ve ever heard, “But oh, Stingo, you can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up in a Jewish family.” She fails immediately to elaborate on this.
But finally, when dawn breaks and deep fatigue floods through my bones and muscles—including that doughty love-muscle which at last begins to flag and droop after its tenacious vigil—Leslie re-creates for me the dark odyssey of her psychoanalysis. And of course her family. Her horrible family. Her family which, despite the cool and civilized veneer, according to Leslie, is a waxwork gallery of monsters. The ruthless and ambitious father whose religion is molded plastics and who has spoken a bare twenty words to her since childhood. The creepy younger sister and the stupid older brother. Above all, the ogreish mother who, Barnard enlightenment or no, has dominated Les’s life with bitchery and vengeance ever since the moment when she caught Leslie, then three, diddling herself and forced her to wear hand-splints for months as prophylaxis against self-abuse. All this Leslie pours out to me in a terrible rush as if I too were momentarily only another in that ever-changing phalanx of practitioners which has attended her woes and wretchednesses for over four years. It is full sun-up. Leslie is drinking coffee, I am drinking Budweiser, and Tommy Dorsey is playing on the two-thousand-dollar Magnavox phonograph. Exhausted, I hear Leslie’s cataract of words as if through muffled layers of wool, trying without much success to piece it all together—this scrambled confessional with its hodgepodge of terms like Reichian and Jungian, Adlerian, a Disciple of Karen Horney, sublimation, gestalt, fixations, toilet training, and other things I have been aware of but never heard a human being speak of in such tones, which down South are reserved for Thomas Jefferson, Uncle Remus and the blessed Trinity. I am so tired that I am only barely aware of what