William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (227 page)

“Then let’s
go
to the dark gods,” I said, practically beyond control now as I urgently signaled for the check.

Some pages back I touched upon André Gide and the Gidean diaries I had been trying to emulate. As a student at Duke, I had read the master laboriously in French. I had admired his journals inordinately, and had considered Gide’s probity and relentless self-dissection to be part of one of the truly triumphant feats of the civilized twentieth-century mind. In my own journal, at the beginning of the final part of my chronicle of Leslie Lapidus—a Passion Week, I realized later, which began on that palmy Sunday at Coney Island and ended with my time on the Cross in the small hours of Friday morning back on Pierrepont Street—I brooded at some length on Gide and paraphrased from memory a few of his exemplary thoughts and observations. I won’t dwell on this passage here, except to note my admiration therein not only for the terrible humiliations Gide had been able to absorb, but the brave honesty with which he seemed always determined to record them: the more catastrophic the humiliation or the disappointment, I noted, the more cleansing and luminous became Gide’s account in his
Journals
—a catharsis in which the reader, too, could participate. Although I can no longer remember for certain, it must have been the same sort of catharsis I was trying to attain in this last section on Leslie—following my meditation on Gide—which I include here. But I have to add that there was something a little freaky about these particular pages. At some point not long after their writing I must have torn them out in despair from the ledger-like book in which I kept my journal, stowing them away in a clumsy wad at the back of the ledger, where I ran across them by luck even as I was re-creating the denouement of this goofy masquerade. What still amazes is the handwriting: not the placid, diligently legible schoolboy script I habitually used, but a savage scurrying scrawl indicating the breakneck speed of distraught emotions. The style, however, as now can be seen, continues to possess an unruffled, wryly sardonic, self-anatomizing quality which Gide might have admired had he ever been able to peruse these humiliated pages:

I might be tipped off to what is going on when we get into the taxi after Gage & Tollner’s. Naturally by then I am so beside myself with plain old hog lust that I simply wrap Leslie in my arms even before the cab gets moving. Right off it is a repetition of the moment when we went to look at the Pissarro. That foraging tongue of hers is inside me like some shad thrashing upstream for dear life. Never before have I known that kissing can be so major, so expansive. Obviously, though, the time has come for me to reciprocate, and so I do. As we ride down Fulton Street I “give tongue” back to her and she clearly loves it, responding with little groans and shudders. By this time I am so hot that I do something I have always wanted to do when kissing a girl but never dared to down in Va., because of its rather blatant suggestiveness. What I do is to slowly and rhythmically move my tongue in and out of her mouth in long copulatory movements, ad libitum. This causes Leslie to groan again and she draws her lips away long enough to whisper, “God! Your guess what in my guess what!” I am not deflected by that odd coyness. I am semi-deranged. It is almost impossible to reproduce my condition at this moment. In a sort of controlled frenzy I decide that now is the time to make the first truly direct move. So very delicately I slip my hand up in a way that will allow it to begin to cup the underpart of her luscious left breast, or right one, I forget which. And at that instant, to my almost total disbelief, with a firmness and a resolve that match my own delicate stealth, she moves her arm protectively into a position which clearly means: “Nothing doing.” It is absolutely dumfounding, so completely dumfounding that I think one of us has made a mistake, gotten our signals crossed, that she is joking (a bad joke), something. So, shortly after this, while my tongue is still rammed down her gullet and she continues to make these little moaning sounds, I move toward her other knocker. Wham! The same thing again: the sudden protective movement, the arm flung down like one of those barriers at a railroad crossing. “Do not pass!” It is utterly beyond belief.

(Writing now at 8
P.M
. Friday, I consult my “Merck’s Manual.” From “Merck” I can assume I am suffering from a case of “severe acute glossitis,” an inflamed condition of the tongue’s surface which is of traumatic origin but doubtless aggravated by bacteria, viruses and all sorts of toxicity resulting from five or six hours of salivary exchange unprecedented in the history of my mouth and I daresay anyone’s. “Merck” informs me that this is a transient state, becoming palliated after a number of hours of the tongue’s gentle rest, which is a great relief to know, since it is sheer murder to eat anything or to take more than a few sips of beer. It is nearly nightfall, I am writing at Yetta’s, alone. I cannot even face Sophie or Nathan. In plain truth I am suffering from a desolation and letdown such as I have never known, or thought possible.)

Back to Stingo’s Progress. Naturally, almost to preserve my reason, I have to think of some rationale to explain her bizarre behavior. Obviously, I think, Les simply and with logic does not wish to have anything of an overt nature take place in a taxicab. Perfectly proper indeed. A lady in a taxi, a whore in bed. With this consideration in mind, I content myself with more labyrinthine tongue-work until the taxi arrives at the brownstone on Pierrepont Street. We disembark and enter the dark house. As Leslie unlocks the front door she remarks that, it being Thursday, it is Minnie’s night off, and I construe this to lay emphasis on the privacy we will have. In the soft light of the foyer my membrum, betrousered, is truly rampant. Also a spot of “dogwater” there, pre-coital seepage, as if a puppy had peed in my lap.

(Oh, André Gide, prie pour moi! This telling becomes well-nigh intolerable. How do I make sense of, make credible—much less human—the miseries of the next few hours? Upon whose shoulders rests the blame for this gratuitous torture—mine, Leslie’s, the Zeitgeist’s? Leslie’s analyst’s? Certainly someone has a lot to account for in turning poor Les out upon her cold and bleak plateau. For that is exactly what she calls it—a plateau—this forlorn limbo where she wanders solitary and freezing.)

We get started again at about midnight on a couch underneath the Degas. There is a clock somewhere in the house, striking the hour, and at two o’clock I am no further advanced than I was in the taxi. We have fallen into a pretty desperate but generally silent tug of war by now, and I have been working on every tactic in the book—trying to grope tit, thigh, crotch. No go. Except for that gaping oral cavity of hers and that prodigiously active tongue, she might as well be clad in breastplates, full armor. The martial image is apt in another way because soon after I begin making my more aggressive forays there in the semi-dark, fingering the arch of her thigh or trying to get my paw tucked in between her clamped knees, she yanks that flailing tongue out of my mouth and mutters things like: “Whoa there, Colonel Mosby!” Or: “Back up there, Johnny Reb!” All spoken in an attempt to approximate my Confederate accent, and in a light-hearted, giggly but Nonetheless I Mean Business voice that sweeps over me like icewater. Again, throughout this entire charade I really can hardly believe the actuality of what is happening, simply cannot accept the fact that after her absolutely breath-taking overture, all those unequivocal invitations and blazing come-hithers, she is falling back on this outrageous flimflam. Sometime after two o’clock, driven to the brink of madness, I resort to doing something which even while I am in the process of doing it I know will provoke a drastic reaction from Les—though how drastic I can scarcely predict. Still embroiled in our oceanic wrestle, I’m sure she is going to choke both of us on the gagged scream she gives as she realizes what she has got hold of. (This is after I silently unzip my fly and place her hand on my cock.) She sails off the sofa as if someone has lit a fire beneath her and at that moment the evening and all my wretched fantasies and dreams turn to a pile of straw.

(Oh, André Gide, comme toi, je crois que je deviendrai pédéraste!)

Later she bawls like a little baby as she sits beside me, trying to explain herself. For some reason her awful sweetness, her helplessness, her crestfallen and remorseful manner all help me to control my wild rage. Whereas at first I wanted to belt the living shit out of her—take that priceless Degas and ram it down around her neck—now I could almost cry with her, crying out of my own chagrin and frustration but also for Leslie too and for her psychoanalysis, which has so helped create her own gross imposture. I learn about all this as the clock ticks onward toward dawn and after I get my several querulous complaints and objections out of the way. “I don’t want to be nasty or unreasonable,” I whisper to her in the shadows, holding her hand, “but you led me to believe something else. You said, and I quote you exactly, ‘I’ll bet you could give a girl a fantastic fucking.’ ” I pause for a long moment, blowing blue smoke through the gloom. Then I say, “Well, I could. And I wanted to.” I halt. “That’s all.” Then after another long pause and a lot of snuffled sobs, she replies, “I know I said that, and if I led you on I’m sorry, Stingo;” Snuffle, snuffle. I give her a Kleenex. “But I didn’t say I
wanted
you to do it.” More snuffles. “Also I said ‘a girl.’ I didn’t say
me
.” At this instant the groan I give would stir the souls of the dead. We are both silent for an endlessly long time. At some moment between three and four o’clock I hear a ship‘s whistle, plaintive and mournful and far off, borne through the night from N.Y. harbor. It reminds me of home and fills me with inexpressible sorrow. For some reason that sound and the sorrow it brings makes it all the more difficult to bear Leslie's overheated and blooming presence, like some jungle flower, now so astonishingly unattainable. Thinking fleetingly of gangrene, I cannot believe that my staff still flaunts itself, lancelike. Could John the Baptist have suffered such deprivation? Tantalus? St. Augustine? Little Nell?

Leslie is—literally and figuratively—totally lingual. Her sex life is wholly centered in her tongue. It is not fortuitous therefore that the inflammatory promise she has been able to extend me through that hyperactive organ of hers finds a correlation in the equally inflammatory but utterly spurious words she loves to speak. While we sit there I recall the name of a ludicrous phenomenon I read about in a Duke Univ. course in abnormal psychology: “coprolalia,” the compulsive use of obscene language, often found in young women. When at last I break our silence and banteringly broach the possibility that she
may
be a victim of this malady, she seems not so much insulted as hurt, and softly begins to sob again. I seem to have opened some painful wound. But no, she insists, it’s not that. After a while she stops sobbing. Then she says something which only hours before I would have considered a joke but I now accept placidly and with no surprise as the stark, aching truth. “I’m a virgin,” she says in a bleak small voice. After a long silence I reply, “No offense, understand. But I think you’re a very sick virgin.” As I say this I realize the acerbity of the words but somehow don’t regret them. Again a ship’s horn groans at the harbor’s mouth, touching me with such longing and nostalgia and despair that I think that I too might burst into tears. “I like you a lot, Les,” I manage to say, “I just think it was unfair of you to string me along this way. It’s tough on a guy. It’s terrible. You can’t imagine.” After saying this I simply cannot tell whether her words make up a non sequitur or not, when she replies in the most desolate voice I’ve ever heard, “But oh, Stingo,
you
can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up in a Jewish family.” She fails immediately to elaborate on this.

But finally, when dawn breaks and deep fatigue floods through my bones and muscles—including that doughty love-muscle which at last begins to flag and droop after its tenacious vigil—Leslie re-creates for me the dark odyssey of her psychoanalysis. And of course her family. Her horrible family. Her family which, despite the cool and civilized veneer, according to Leslie, is a waxwork gallery of monsters. The ruthless and ambitious father whose
religion
is molded plastics and who has spoken a bare twenty words to her since childhood. The creepy younger sister and the stupid older brother. Above all, the ogreish mother who, Barnard enlightenment or no, has dominated Les’s life with bitchery and vengeance ever since the moment when she caught Leslie, then three, diddling herself and forced her to wear hand-splints for months as prophylaxis against self-abuse. All this Leslie pours out to me in a terrible rush as if I too were momentarily only another in that ever-changing phalanx of practitioners which has attended her woes and wretchednesses for over four years. It is full sun-up. Leslie is drinking coffee, I am drinking Budweiser, and Tommy Dorsey is playing on the two-thousand-dollar Magnavox phonograph. Exhausted, I hear Leslie’s cataract of words as if through muffled layers of wool, trying without much success to piece it all together—this scrambled confessional with its hodgepodge of terms like Reichian and Jungian, Adlerian, a Disciple of Karen Horney, sublimation, gestalt, fixations, toilet training, and other things I have been aware of but never heard a human being speak of in such tones, which down South are reserved for Thomas Jefferson, Uncle Remus and the blessed Trinity. I am so tired that I am only barely aware of what she is driving at when she speaks of her current analyst, her fourth, a “Reichian,” one Dr. Pulvermacher, and then alludes to her “plateau.” I make flutters with my eyelids denoting an urgent need for sleep. And she goes on and on, those moist and precious Jewish lips, forever lost to me, driving home the sudden awareness that my poor dear joint for the first time in many hours is as shrunken and as small as that Worm whose replica hangs behind me, there in the papal bathroom. I yawn, ferociously, loud, but Leslie pays this no mind, seemingly intent that I should not go away with ill feelings, that I should somehow try to understand her. But I really don’t know if I want to understand. As Leslie continues I can only reflect despairingly on the obvious irony: that if through those frigid little harpies in Virginia I had been betrayed chiefly by Jesus, I have been just as cruelly swindled at Leslie’s hands by the egregious Doktor Freud. Two smart Jews, believe me.

“Before I reached this plateau of vocalization,” I hear Leslie say, through the surreal delirium of my fatigue, “I could never have said any of those words I’ve said to you. Now I’m completely able to vocalize. I mean those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everyone should be able to say. My analyst—Dr. Pulvermacher—said that the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language.” What I say in reply is mingled with a yawn so cavernous and profound that my voice is like a wild beast’s roar. “I see, I see,” I yawn, roaring, “this word vocalize, you mean you can
say
fuck but you still can’t do it!” Her answer is a blur in my brain of imperfectly registered sounds, many minutes in duration, out of what I am able to salvage only the impression that Leslie, now deep into something called orgone therapy, will in the coming days be seated in some sort of box, there to absorb patiently waves of energy from the ether that might allow her passage upward to the next plateau. Close to the brink of sleep, I yawn again and wordlessly wish her well. And then, mirabile ditcu, I drop off into slumberland even as she babbles on about the possibility of someday—someday! I dream a strange confounded dream in which intimations of bliss are transfused with lacerating pain. It could only be a few moments that I drowse. When I wake—blinking at Leslie in the full flight of her soliliquy—I realize I have been sitting ponderously on my hand, which I withdraw from underneath my ass. All five fingers are momentarily deformed and totally without sensation. This helps to explain my ineffably sad dream, where, hotly embracing Leslie once more on the couch, I managed at last to fondle one bare breast, which, however, felt like a soggy ball of dough beneath my hand, itself tightly imprisoned within the rim of a murderous brassiere made of wormwood and wire.