Sophie's Choice - William Styron [7]
As the romance of paper is central to the story of the American dream, so is the name Kimberly-Clark central to the story of paper. Beginning as a humble “one-horse” operation in the sleepy Wisconsin lakeside town of Neenah, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation is now one of the authentic giants of the world paper industry, with factories in 13 states and 8 foreign countries. Serving a host of human needs, many of its products—the most famous of which is undoubtedly Kleenex—have become so familiar that their very names have passed into the language...
A paragraph like this would require hours. Should I say “undoubtedly Kleenex” or “indubitably”? “Host” of human needs or “horde”? “Mass”? “Mess”? During its composition I would pace my cell distractedly, uttering soft meaningless vocables to the air as I struggled with the prose rhythms, and fighting back the desolate urge to masturbate that for some reason always accompanied this task. Finally, overtaken by rage, I would find myself saying “No! No!” in a loud voice to the beaverboard walls, and then hurl myself on the typewriter where, cackling wickedly, I would tap out a swift, sophomoric but blessedly purgative variation.
Kimberly-Clark statistics are staggering to contemplate:
—It is estimated that, during one winter month alone, if all the snot blown into Kleenex tissues in the United States and Canada were spread over the playing surface of the Yale Bowl, it would reach a depth of one-and-a-half feet...
—It has been calculated that if the number of the vaginas employing Kotex during a single four day period in the U.S.A. were lined up orifice to orifice, there would be a snatch long enough to extend from Boston to White River Junction, Vt...
The next day Farrell, ever amiable and tolerant, would muse wryly on such offerings, chewing at his Yello-Bole, and after observing that “this isn’t quite what I think we had in mind,” would grin understandingly and ask me to please try again. And because I was not yet completely lost, perhaps because the Presbyterian ethic still exercised some vestigial hold on me, I would try again that night—would try with all my passion and might, to no avail. After sweaty hours, I would give up and return to “The Bear” or Notes from the Underground or Billy Budd, or often simply loiter yearningly by the window, gazing down into the enchanted garden. There in the golden spring dusk of Manhattan, in an ambience of culture and unassertive affluence from which I knew I would forever be excluded, a soiree would be commencing at the Winston Hunnicutts’, for that was the swank name with which I had christened them. Alone for an instant, blond Mavis Hunnicutt would appear in the garden, dressed in a blouse and tight flowered slacks; after pausing for a peek up at the opalescent evening sky, she would give an odd and bewitching toss to her lovely hair and then bend down to pluck tulips from the flowerbed. In this adorable stance, she could not know what she did to the loneliest junior editor in New York. My lust was incredible—something prehensile, a groping snout of desire, slithering down the begrimed walls of the wretched old building, uncoiling itself across a fence, moving with haste serpentine and indecent to a point just short of her upturned rump, where in silent metamorphosis it blazingly flowered into the embodiment of myself, priapic, ravenous, yet under hair-trigger control. Gently my arms surrounded Mavis, and I cupped my hands under her full, free-floating, honeydew breasts. “Is that you, Winston?” she whispered. “No, it’s I,” said I, her lover, in response, “let me take you doggie fashion.” To which she invariably replied, “Oh, darling, yes—later.”
In these demented