Sophie's Choice - William Styron [117]
Thus the Maple Court did not obtain a cabaret license, and all the bright angular chrome-and-gilt decor, including sunburst chandeliers meant to revolve above the giddy dancers like glittering confections in a Ruby Keeler movie, fell into disrepair and gathered a patina of grime and smoke. The raised platform which formed the hub of the oval-shaped bar, and which had been designed to enable sleek long-legged stripteasers to wiggle their behinds down upon a circumambience of lounging gawkers, became filled with dusty signs and bloated fake bottles advertising brands of whiskey and beer. And more sadly somehow, the big Art Deco mural against one wall—a fine period piece done by an expert hand, with the skyline of Manhattan and silhouettes of a jazz band and chorus girls kicking up their heels—never once faced out toward a swirl of jubilant dancers but grew cracked and water-blotched and acquired a long horizontal dingy streak where a generation of neighborhood drunks had propped the backs of their heads. It was just beneath a corner of this mural, in a remote part of the ill-starred dance floor, that Nathan and Sophie and I would sit on those muggy evenings in the Maple Court.
“I’m sorry you didn’t make out with Leslie, kid,” Nathan said to me one night after the debacle on Pierrepont Street. He was clearly both disappointed and a little surprised that his efforts at matchmaking had come to naught. “I thought you two were all locked in, made for each other. At Coney Island that day I thought she was going to eat you up. And now you tell me it all went flooey. What’s the matter? I can’t believe she wouldn’t put out.”
“Oh no, it was all right in the sex department,” I lied. “I mean, at least I got in.” For a variety of vague reasons I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth about our calamitous stand-off, this scratching match between two virgins. It was too disgraceful to dwell upon, both from Leslie’s point of view and my own. I plunged into a feeble fabrication, but I could tell that Nathan knew I had begun to improvise—his shoulders were shaking with laughter—and I finished my account with one or two Freudian furbelows, chief among them being one in which Leslie told me that she had been able to reach a climax only with large, muscular, coal-black Negroes with colossal penises. Smiling, Nathan began to regard me with the look of a man who is having his leg pulled in a chummy way, and when I was finished he put his hand on my shoulder and said in those understanding tones of an older brother, “Sorry about you and Leslie, kid, whatever happened. I thought she’d be a dreamboat. Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t right.”
We forgot about Leslie. I did most of the drinking these evenings, downing my half-dozen glasses of beer or so. Sometimes we went to the bar before dinner, often afterward. In those days it was almost unheard of to order wine in a bar—especially a tacky place like the Maple Court—but Nathan, in the vanguard about so many things, always managed to have served up a bottle of Chablis, which he kept cold in a bucket by the table and which would last him and Sophie the hour and a half we usually spent there. The Chablis never did more than get both of them mildly and pleasantly relaxed, signaled by a fine sheen welling up through his dark face and the tenderest dogwood-blossom flush on hers.
Nathan and Sophie were like an old married couple to me now, we were all inseparable; and I idly wondered if some of the more sophisticated of the Maple Court habitu