Sophie's Choice - William Styron [82]
There were cans of beer from a boardwalk bar and of course this helped perpetuate my euphoria; even when Sophie and Nathan told me goodby—Sophie looking wan and unhappy and saying she felt a little sick—and abruptly left, I kept afloat on a high cloud of elation. (I recall, however, that their departure caused, for a moment, an uneasy silence in the group on the sand, a silence broken by someone’s remark: “Did you see that number on her arm, that tattoo?") After another half-hour the psychoanalytical talk palled on me desperately, and alcohol and randiness emboldened me to ask Leslie if she’d stroll with me someplace where we could chat and be alone. She agreed, since it had clouded up a little anyway, and we ended up at a boardwalk café where Leslie drank 7-Up and I helped swell the flood of my raging ardor with can after can of Budweiser. But let a few more of my feverish notes continue that afternoon’s operetta:
Leslie and I are in the bar of a restaurant called Victor’s and I am getting a little drunk. I have never felt such sexual electricity in my life. This Jewish dryad has more sensuality in one of her expressive thumbs than all the locked-up virgins I ever knew in Va. & N.C. put together. Also, she is exceedingly bright, reinforcing Henry Miller’s observation somewhere that sex is all in the head, i.e., dumb girls, dumb screwing. Our conversation ebbs and flows in majestic waves like the sea—Hart Crane, sex, Thomas Hardy, sex, Flaubert, sex, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, sex, Huckleberry Finn, sex. I have turned on her the pure flame of my intellect. Manifestly if we were not in a public place I would have her right this minute in the sack. Over the table I hold her hand, which is moist, as if with the pure essence of desire. She speaks rather rapidly in what I have learned to detect is a higher-class Brooklyn accent, more like that used in Manhattan. She has charming facial gestures, nicely interrupted by many grins. Adorable! But what really gets me is that within the lazy space of an hour I hear her say at various moments words I have never in my life heard spoken by a female. Nor do they really sound dirty, once I am used to them. These include such words as “prick,” “fuck” and “cocksucking.” Also, she says during that same time such phrases as “go down on him” “jerking himself off” (something having to do with Thoreau), “gave him a blowjob” “muff-diver,” “swallowed his sperm” (Melville) (Melville?). She does most of the talking though I do my part and am able with a kind of studied unconcern to utter “my throbbing cock” once, aware even as I say it, incredibly excited, that it is the first so-called hard-core obscenity I have ever spoken in a woman’s presence. When we leave Victor’s I am nicely plastered and am reckless enough to let my arm encircle her firm bare waist. In doing so I actually stroke her ass somewhat slightly and the responsive squeeze she gives my hand with her arm, also the glimmer in those dark oriental eyes as she impishly gazes up at me, makes me certain that I have finally, miraculously discovered a woman free of the horrendous conventions and pieties that afflict this hypocritical culture of ours...
I am a little mortified to discover that almost none of the above was apparently written with the faintest trace of irony (I actually was capable of “somewhat slightly ”!), which may only indicate how truly momentous for me was this encounter with Leslie, or how doltish and complete was my seizure of passion—or simply how my suggestible mind was working at the age of twenty-two. At any rate, when Leslie and I made our way back to the beach the late-afternoon light, still quivering with heat waves, flooded the sand around the lifeguard tower