Sophie's Choice - William Styron [284]
What could be more inviting and freighted with promise than such a setup? Here is the horny young bachelor hard at his writing all day, aware only of the pleasant chink-chink of the tools of his peglegged sculptor friend and the smell of chicken and hush puppies frying in the kitchen, his work impelled to even greater flights of exquisite nuance and power by the knowledge, pleasurably roosting at the mind’s edge, that the evening will bring friendly relaxation, good food, talk murmurous with down-home Southern nostalgia—all this fragrantly buoyed by the presence of two delightful young women, one of whom in the darkness of the coming night he will make whisper, moan and squeal with joy amid tangled sheets in the hotter tangle of love. Indeed, the purely domestic aspects of this fantasy were well realized. I did work a great deal during those days with Jack Brown and his wife and Mary Alice. The four of us swam often in the pool in the woods (the weather remained quite warm), the mealtime get-togethers were festive and good-natured, and the talk was filled with rich reminiscence. But there was suffering too, and it was in the early hours of those mornings when, time after time, I would steal away with Mary Alice that I found myself exposed, literally, to a form of sexual eccentricity I had never dreamed existed and have never experienced since. For Mary Alice was—as I grimly and comparatively anatomized her in my notes (set down in the same frantic unbelieving scrawl which I had used to record my other disastrous liaison several months before)—
—something worse than a Cock Tease, a Whack-off artist. I sit here in the hours just before dawn listening to the crickets and contemplating her dismal artistry for the third morning running, wondering at the calamity that has happened to me. Again I have inspected myself in the bathroom mirror, seen nothing amiss in my physiognomy, indeed I must say modestly that all is well: my strong nose and brown intelligent eyes, good complexion, excellent bone structure (not so fine, thank God, as to appear “aristocratic,” but possessing enough angularities to prevent my looking coarsely plebeian) and rather humorous mouth and chin all merge into a face that could reasonably be called handsome, though it is certainly far from the stereotype handsomeness of a Vitalis ad. So she could not be repelled by my looks. Mary Alice is sensitive, literate, which is to say, widely read in one or two of the same books in which I have an interest, has a decent sense of humor (hardly a barrel of laughs, but then, who could be in the shadow of Jack Brown’s wit), seems relatively advanced and liberated in “worldly” matters for a girl of her background, which is intensely Southern. Rather atavistically, she does seem to mention church-going a little too often. Neither of us has done anything so rash or heedless as to utter protestations of love, but it is evident that she is, at least mildly, aroused sexually. In this regard, however, she is a reverse image of Leslie, since despite her (I think, partly counterfeit) passion in our hottest embrace, she is utterly prudish (like so many Southern girls) in the realm of language. When, for instance, an hour or so into our first “lovemaking” session night before last I was carried away enough to softly remark upon the marvelous ass I thought