Sophie's Choice - William Styron [76]
Thus I came to the notion of sexual fulfillment, which is another of those items I mentioned a while back and which I considered to be so richly a part of the fruition of my new life in Brooklyn. In itself this saga, or episode, or fantasia has little direct bearing on Sophie and Nathan, and so I have hesitated to set it down, thinking it perhaps extraneous stuff best suited to another tale and time. But it is so bound up into the fabric and mood of that summer that to deprive this story of its reality would be like divesting a body of some member—not an essential member, but as important, say, as one of one’s more consequential fingers. Besides, even as I set these reservations down, I sense an urgency, an elusive meaning in this experience and its desperate eroticism by which at least there may be significant things to be said about that sexually bedeviled era.
At any rate, as I stood there that morning, tumescent amid my interrupted labors, I felt that there was being thrust on me a priceless reward for the vigor and zeal with which I had embraced my Art. Like any writer worth his salt, I was about to receive my just bounty, that necessary adjunct to hard work—necessary as food and drink—which revived the fatigued wits and sweetened all life. Of course I mean by this that for the first time after these many months in New York, finally and safely beyond peradventure, I was going to get a piece of ass. This time there was no doubt about it. In a matter of hours, as certainly as springtime begets the greening leaves or the sun sets at eventide, my prick was going to be firmly implanted within a remarkably beautiful, sexually liberated, twenty-two-year-old Jewish Madonna lily named Leslie Lapidus (rhyming, please, with “Ah, feed us”).
At Coney Island that Sunday, Leslie Lapidus had virtually guaranteed me—as I shall shortly demonstrate—possession of her glorious body and we had made a date for the following Thursday night. During the intervening days—looking forward to our second meeting with such unseemly excitement that I felt a little sick and began off and on to run a mild but genuine fever—I had become intoxicated mainly by a single fact: this time I would surely succeed. I had it sewed up. Made! This time there would be no impediments; the crazy bliss of fornication with a hot-skinned, eager-bellied Jewish girl with fathomless eyes and magnificent apricot-and-ocher suntanned legs that all but promised to squeeze the life out of me was no dumb fantasy: it was a fait accompli, practically consummated save for the terrible wait until Thursday. In my brief but hectic sex life I had never experienced anything like certainty of conquest (rarely had any young man of that time) and the sensation was exquisite. One may speak of flirtation, the thrill of the chase, the delights and challenges of hard-won seduction; each had its peculiar rewards. There is much to be said, however, for the delectable and leisurely anticipation which accompanies the knowledge that it is all ready and waiting and, so to speak, in the bag. Thus during those hours when I had not been immersed in my novel I had thought of Leslie and the approaching tryst, envisioned myself sucking on the nipples of those “melon-heavy” Jewish breasts so dear to Thomas Wolfe, and glowed in my fever like a jack-o’-lantern.
Another thing: I had been almost beside myself with a sense of the rightness of this prospect. Every devoted artist, however impecunious, I felt, deserved at