William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (88 page)

“You’ve read his play?” I asked.

“No,” said Garfinkel, “but he’s told me about it. It can’t miss, I tell you. It’s a natural. The boy’s a genius.”

“I see.”

“I mean, think of the
advantages
he’s had, being born the son of Justin Flagg.” His eyes grew dreamy and remote. “Flagg. That’s a name with which to conjure—” And he looked up at me significantly. “In certain circles, that is.”

There are these women, whose special beauty is such that it is able to break down the reserve of the most unadventurous of men. Celia was one. She fascinated me, and now, as she stood in the center of the noisy room, I was determined to meet her. I coughed and began to drift away from Garfinkel, who was saying: “Levitt. Are you a member of the Long Island and Levittown, P.A., housing firm Levitts?” There must be something basically unsound about the structure of my name; I said I was, and let it go at that, and moved out toward Celia. But as I worked my way across the room in her direction I found myself in a cross-current of bodies and was soon marooned near the buffet table, where I fell into shallow talk with the
Hudson Review
fellow, who did not exactly wince when I mentioned the college I had gone to but made an owlish adjustment with his eyes as if suddenly he were able to see right through my head. I think it must have been then that I decided to go. Celia was inaccessible to me by now, shunted into one corner of the room where, as around some bright blossom, several young men had gathered murmuring like bees. She was lovely, but she would never be mine and now, besides, the
Hudson
man, who had been talking about middle-brow culture, was as tired of me as I was of him. Yawning almost in unison, we bade each other a relieved good night, and I went to tell Mason I was leaving.

Now, was it some exhibitionistic streak in Mason (part of that whole hysteric craze for sex, that incessant hee-haw and jabber about the carnal side of love which was like a hot breath blowing down the neck when you listened to him, which is fine at fifteen or sixteen, but which in a man you expect to become muted—not less hysteric, just muted) that kept him from locking the bedroom door? He knew that I was aware where he was; indeed, he had said that he would be expecting me. If he had bolted that door when he had his chat with me, you would think he might doublebolt it when settling down to doing what I was luckless enough to surprise him at. But this was Mason, alas, not you or me, and I cannot pretend to know what he was always up to. I do know I got the shock of my life when my knock went unanswered and, opening the door, I saw the two of them in the blazing light, Mason and Carole, naked as pullets and frenziedly abed, locked in that entangled embrace all pink flesh and pounding posteriors and arms which I wish I could say fulfilled the fantasist, the Peeping Tom in me, but which instead, in terms of sex or aesthetics or anything you can name, had the effect of a huge shot of novocaine. It seemed somehow so obviously staged that I stood there and watched for a moment with the fascination of one who is witnessing his first autopsy and then, recovering my wits, uttered an inane “Good night, Mason,” slammed the door like a startled hotel maid and tramped back down the hallway, cheeks blazing, marveling at the terrible potency of conjugal love which could cause a man to take his wife to bed, drunk as she was, in the midst of his own party.

The point being, of course, that Carole was not his wife at all. (Could I be blamed if, short years removed from Virginia, I assumed that when a man said “love of my life” he meant his wife? Probably.) Because as I started to leave the place, Garfinkel was near the door, and with him was my impossible vision of the evening, the fair and glowing Celia.

“Levitt,” said Garfinkel. “You aren’t leaving, are you? I’d like you to meet Mason’s wife. Celia, this is Peter Levitt.”

“Oh, you must be Peter
Leverett!”
she said with a smile, all warmth and animation. “Mason’s told me so much about you and those wonderful years you had together in Virginia. That crazy school you went to! Why, I had no idea you were here!”

“Leverett, then. Sorry, my boy,” said Garfinkel. “Anyway, I want you to know that right here, right in this little doll here, resides a great deal of credit for Mason’s genius.”

Mason’s
wife?
Too many emotions crowded in at once (Carole, “the love of my life,” life: wife, what an idiot!); I looked at Celia and found I could not speak. She was a flute-sound, a bell, a reed; Carole was a moo. And at that very moment Mason and Carole … I have rarely felt such squirmy distress, such disenchantment with anything, or everything.

“Art is dead, Peter,” Mason said to me at one point or another during that week in New York. “Well, if not dead yet, then put it this way—the dear old Muse is slowly dying, and in a couple more decades we’ll watch her as she gasps her last. Science is the new Muse—it’s as plain as the nose on your face. Couple science with a general leveling of taste everywhere, and the demise is inevitable. But there’s no need to weep, you know. You can’t weep over the determinism of history. Facts are facts. By the end of the century art—painting, music, poetry, drama—all of them, they’ll be as dead as the labyrinthodont.”

“What’s that?”

“A prehistoric amphibian, late Permian period.”

“Well then, tell me, Mason, why do you keep on with this play you’re doing?”

“Oh I don’t know,” he said, “ a sort of
diehardism,
I suppose. A sailor with any sort of guts doesn’t abandon ship even when the rails are awash. Besides, there’s always the faint possibility—I mean a really faint one, but a possibility—that history will give a lurch, as history sometimes does, and we’ll have a renaissance instead of a burial. There are a couple of things already that make me think that might happen.”

“Like what?”

“Well, in painting, abstract expressionism. And in music, jazz. There’s a tremendous freedom and vitality in both of them, a fantastic throwing-off of restraint and the dreadful constipating formalism and all the traditional crap that’s been such a hindrance to art. So—well, I’ll admit it’s a dim hope, but if these two ever get really going, we might have that renaissance and of course, as history has shown, all the rest of the arts will start booming, too. Do you see what I mean?”

“Well, I know nothing about painting, Mason,” I said. “But as for music, I think some of that early Dixieland is quite marvelous, and Bessie Smith, but after all—”

“After all, what?”

Since I like to express myself exactly, I grope, lose time and ground, and eventually lose out in most discussions.

“After all,” he put in, “there is always J. S. Bach. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

“More or less, Mason,” I replied. “Though somewhat more elaborately.”

’De gustibus,
Peter,” he said amiably. “I’ll let you keep your corpse if you let me keep my sexy dollbaby, all alive and singing.”

’De gustibus,
Mason,” I said.

“Once a square always a square. But everybody has to have a complement. I think it’s because you’re so square that I love you.” And things like this he would say with such a sweet smile, with such true and honest affection, that there would dissipate as if into the air about him all that, seconds before, I had considered offensive, pretentious, and banal.

We had several weighty discussions that week, about art and related matters. Though college may have rejected him—or he it—he seemed on his own to have read everything, to have absorbed most of it, and he wore his really rather amazing erudition flashily and blatantly, like a man outfitted for a costume ball. If it would please you to know the antique origins of Rosicrucianism; the existence of the Kuria Muria Islands, guano atolls off the coast of Aden; the difference between absolute and apparent magnitudes in the measurement of stars; the origin of female circumcision among the tribes of the Kalahari; of the influence of Ranulf de Glanvill upon law ("You mean you studied law, Peter, and never heard of Glanvill?”); of the high tolerance of sexual perversion, and the modes employed, among the Huron Indians; the difference between fibromyoma and chondroma in the classification of benign tumors; the reasons for German scholarship assigning undue influence of Thomas Kyd upon Shakespeare; the Roman use of the mechanical dildo—Mason could fill you in about all these matters, richly and eloquently, these and a thousand more. Most curiously, too—perhaps though only because, a child of my time, I am a sucker for facts—Mason almost never bored me with his knowledge; he made fanciful play with these useless items, setting them loose in the midst of some joke or story in the way that a magician brings forth from his sleeve rabbits, roses, startling doves. Once more would arise his Yugoslavian experience, which he never tired of telling and which I never minded hearing, if only because new insights, new characters kept intruding—the jovial mayor of the town, an Italian deserter (the victim of epilepsy, and given to murderous rampages through the night), the S.S. commandant who had paid a frightening visit to the villa one day—and from this substructure now arose the most dazzling edifice of fact, history, lore, and legend. “Of course old Plaja was really a full-blooded Dalmatian,” he would tell me. “Which is to say that he had a warrior’s heart. You see, his ancestors had all fought against the Venetians in the Middle Ages when a real scoundrel of a king they had, Ladislas of Naples, sold out to Venice for a hundred thousand ducats, I think it was. A fantastic gory period! Let me tell you …” And off he would go. And somehow, during the telling, I would learn that the chief enemy of the common orchard plum is the curculio, a repulsive small beetle; that the codpiece was proscribed by Pope Sixtus V as a universal threat to chastity; and that the word “falcon” derives from the Latin
falx,
meaning sickle and describing the bird’s curved talons. A striking fact about Mason is that, despising the past as he did, he yet knew so much about it.

Now, in my smudged and tear-stained book of memories there are still mounted two photographs. In the first of these (I am trying to remember at what party it was taken) my own white hand is visible, fishbelly-pale in the glare of the flashbulb. Carole is there, too, looking quite dazed and voluptuous, her lips moistly reflecting the light as she bends down her face to give Mason what I’m now sure must have become, half a second later, a kiss on the back of his well-barbered head. What is it that disturbs me so about this picture—and in a way that has nothing to do with what Mason or Carole were doing at all? It is Mason himself who dominates the picture. In profile, he is talking to an invisible someone; he is unaware of the lips, the wet bud of a tongue hovering at the nape of his neck, and at that moment, poised in that split instant of time before the mouth descends, his face wears an expression of total dejection. It is an odd look, one Mason rarely wore—of heaviness, of weariness, and disgust with life (who could he be talking to? it does not matter)—and I have pondered that picture many times, always touched a bit by this fleeting sorrow of his, which I so seldom saw in life. Was he as unhappy during that time as this picture tells me he was? Right now I cannot say. Certainly there is not a speck of sadness in this other picture of Mason. Here we are on his Village rooftop—there I am again, and there is Mason, and not Carole this time, but Celia. It is noontime of a spring day; this you can tell from the light, and from the blooming flowerboxes and trees on the penthouse roofs of the buildings behind, and by the cool spring dress Celia is wearing. As from all fading snapshots, longing and nostalgia emanate from this one: they are in the amateurish tilt of the picture and its yellowing hue and in the sense of springs gone forever, old shoe styles and hair-dos, rooftops that no longer exist (Mason’s house was torn down not long ago), in that knowledge which is perhaps the camera’s single most poignant gift, of time past and irretrievable. Celia, appearing in retrospect now even more lovely than I remember her in the flesh, has her face and eyes upturned toward Mason, very close to his own, seeming ready to give him a roguish nibble on the cheek with her perfect white teeth. Mason inclines his head down toward her; he is ready to bite her back, but most playfully and joyfully, and his face is suffused with exuberance, with merriment and happiness. As for myself, I am standing somewhat aside, contemplating whoever it was that snapped the picture, and my expression can best be described as glum. And behind us all a flock of pigeons, slatecolored blurs, rove heavenward above the water towers, lending to the whole moment of bygone time a feeling of feathery movement, of space and life… .

I must say that Mason really took over my hours, night and day, during that brief period. I had quit my job preparatory to going to Europe and, having nothing to do, I found it was fun to tag along with Mason; he never ran out of steam, there was always something new to do, somewhere new to go, and he always picked up the check. I protested this (I really did) but he had a smooth way to make me rise above my own secret humiliation. “Look, dollbaby,” he would say, “those French girls you’re going to have soon don’t come cheap. Save your money.” And then he would pause. “May I be frank about something?” he would continue. “I’m a rich boy and I know it, and I like to spend dough on people I love. Good God, let’s don’t let Justin’s ill-gotten loot go to waste. Now give me back that tab!” Then, pulling out his wallet, he would say: “In a crummy democracy you have to go through the damndest
contortions
if you’re rich, pretending you haven’t got a nickel to your name.”

I relented, with a sort of hoarse catch in my voice. It was a cozy situation to find oneself in—for a short term, anyway. More than once I wondered whether—if I had not already planned to go abroad—it might not be possible to remain under Mason’s aegis for the rest of my days, and the thought gave me a shiver. Because if I suspected that there was lust for a kind of ownership in these big gestures of Mason’s, I also realized with some shame that my willingness to be owned was stronger than I ever wanted to admit. But who could blame me? Each night (and there were at least five of them) brought me a different girl. And they were all brainless, beautiful, and willing. What a treat to be in the hands of such a casual, big-hearted procurer! I mean it. I have never had so much consecutive sex, and of such variety, in all my life. And I was indebted to Mason for it. I had become the crown prince among his freeloaders. And I knew I was
in
when he showed me his collection of erotica.