Sophie's Choice - William Styron [80]
Several pairs of horn-rimmed glasses, the general drift of conversation and scattered books (among them The Function of the Orgasm) caused me to deduce that I was among scholastic types, and I was right. They were all recent graduates of, or in some way connected with, Brooklyn College. Leslie, however, had attended Sarah Lawrence. She was also an exception to the general coolness I felt. Sumptuous in a (for that time) daring two-piece white nylon bathing suit which revealed, so far as I was able swiftly to reckon, the first grown-up female navel I had ever beheld in the flesh, she alone among the group acknowledged Morty Haber’s introduction with anything warmer than a glance of puzzled mistrust. She grinned, appraised me up and down with a gaze that was splendidly direct and then with a pattycake motion of her hand bade me to sit down next to her. She was sweating healthily in the hot sun and emitted a musky womanly odor that held me instantaneously captive like a bumblebee. Tongue-tied, I looked at her with famished senses. Truly she was my childhood love, Miriam Bookbinder, come to fruition with all adult hormones in perfect orchestration. Her breasts were made for a banquet. The cleavage between them, a mythical fissure which I had never seen at such close range, gave forth a faint film of dew. I wanted to bury my nose there in that damp Jewish bosom and make strangled sounds of discovery and joy.
Then as Leslie and I began to chat casually (about literature, I recollect, prompted by Nathan’s helpful remark that I was a writer), I was conscious that the principle of the attraction of opposites was very much in effect. Jew and goy in magnetic gravitation. There was no mistaking it—the warmth for me that radiated from her almost immediately, a vibration, one of those swift and tangible feelings of rapport that one experiences so seldom in life. But we also had simple things in common. Like me, Leslie had majored in English; she had written a thesis on Hart Crane and was very knowledgeable about poetry. But her attitude was refreshingly unacademic and relaxed. This enabled us both to have a smooth, trouble-free conversational interchange, even though my attention was drawn over and over again to those astounding breasts, then to the navel, a perfect little goblet from which, in a microsecond’s fantasy, I lapped lemon Kool-Aid or some other such nectar with my tongue. While talking of another Brooklyn laureate, Walt Whitman, I found it easy not to pay perfect attention to what Leslie was saying. At college and elsewhere I had played out this solemn little cultural charade too many times to be unaware that it was a prelude, a preliminary feeling-out of mutual sensibilities in which the substance of what one said was less important than the putative authority with which one’s words were spoken. In reality a ritualized mating dance, it allowed one’s mind to wander, not alone as in the present case to Leslie’s bountiful flesh but to a perception of what was being uttered in the background. Because I only barely understood the words, I could not believe my ears and thought at first I was overhearing some new verbal game, until I realized that this was no joke, there was somber earnestness inhabiting these conversational fragments, almost every one of which began with “My analyst said...”
Halting, truncated, the talk bewildered me and at the same time held me enthralled; in addition, the sexual frankness was so utterly novel that I experienced a phenomenon that I hadn’t felt since I was about eight years old: my ears were burning. Altogether the conversation made up a new experience that impressed me with such force that later that night back at my