“Oh, that’s really too much, Nathan,” I blurted, “but God—thanks.” I was moved by this generosity—no, nearly overwhelmed. The fragile records of that period had not evolved into our cheap items of conspicuous consumption. People were simply not so free-handed with their records in those days. They were precious, and there had never been made available to me so much music in my life; the prospect which Nathan offered me filled me with cheer that verged close to the voluptuous. Free choice of any of the pink and nubile female flesh I had ever dreamed of could not have so ravishingly whetted my appetite. “I’ll certainly take good care of them,” I hurried to add.
“I trust you,” he said, “though you do have to be careful. Goddamn shellac is still too easily broken. I predict something inevitable in a couple of years—an unbreakable record.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“Not only that, not only unbreakable but compressed—made so that you can play an entire symphony, say, or a whole Bach cantata on one side of a single record. I’m sure it’s coming,” he said, rising from the chair, adding within the space of a few minutes his prophecy of the long-playing record to that of the Jewish literary renaissance. “The musical millennium is close at hand, Stingo.”
“Jesus, I just want to thank you,” I said, still genuinely affected.
“Forget it, kid,” he replied, and his gaze went upward in the direction of the music. “Don’t thank me, thank Sophie. She taught me to care about music as if she had invented it, as if I hadn’t cared about it before. Just as she taught me about clothes, about so many things...” He paused and his eyes became luminous, distant. “About everything. Life! God, isn’t she unbelievable?” There was in his voice the slightly overwrought reverence sometimes used about supreme works of art, yet when I agreed, murmuring a thin “I’ll say she is,” Nathan could not even have been faintly aware of my forlorn and jealous passion.
As I have said, Nathan had encouraged me to keep Sophie company, so I had no compunction—after he had gone off to work—about walking out in the hallway and calling up to her with an invitation. It was Thursday—one of the days off from her job at Dr. Blackstock’s, and when her voice floated down over the banister, I asked if she would join me for lunch in the park a little after noon. She called out “Okay, Stingo!” cheerily, and then she fled from my mind. Frankly, my thoughts were of crotch and breast and belly and bellybutton and ass, specifically of those belonging to the wild nymph I had met on the beach the previous Sunday, the “hot dish” Nathan had so happily served me up.
Despite my lust, I returned to my writing desk and tried to scratch away for an hour or so, almost but not quite oblivious of the stirrings, the comings and goings of the other occupants of the house—Morris Fink muttering malevolently to himself as he swept the front porch, Yetta Zimmerman clumping down from her quarters on the third floor to give the place her morning once-over, the whalelike Moishe Muskatblit departing in a ponderous rush for his yeshiva, improbably whistling “The Donkey Serenade” in harmonious bell-like notes. After a bit, while I paused in my labors and stood by the window facing the park, I saw one of the two nurses, Astrid Weinstein, returning wearily from her night-shift job at Kings County Hospital. No sooner had she slammed the door behind her in the room opposite mine than the other nurse, Lillian Grossman, scurried out of the house on her way to work at the same hospital. It was difficult to tell which of them was the less comely—the hulking and rawboned Astrid, with her pinkish, weepy look of distress on a slablike face, or Lillian Grossman, skinny as a starved sparrow and with a mean, pinched expression that surely brought little comfort to the sufferers under her care. Their homeliness was heartrending. It was no longer my rotten luck, I reflected, to be lodged under a roof so frustrating, so bereft of erotic promise. After all, I had Leslie! I began to sweat and felt my breath go haywire and something in my chest actually dilate painfully, like a rapidly expanding balloon.
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 least this. Furthermore, it appeared that in all likelihood if I played my cards right, remained the cool exotic Cavalier squire whom Leslie had found so maddeningly aphrodisiacal at our first encounter, if I committed no hapless blunders, this God- or perhaps Jehovah-bestowed gift would become part of a steady, even daily functioning arrangement. I would have wild morning and afternoon romps in the hay and all of this could only enhance the quality of my literary output, despite the prevailing bleak doctrine concerning sexual “sublimation.” All right, so I doubted that the relationship would involve much in the way of high-toned love, for my attraction to Leslie was largely primal in nature, lacking the poetic and idealistic dimension of my buried passion for Sophie. Leslie would allow me for the first time in my life to taste in a calm, exploratory way those varieties of bodily experience which until now had existed in my head like a vast and orgiastic, ince
ssantly thumbed encyclopedia of lust. Through Leslie, I would at last assuage a basic hunger too long ruthlessly thwarted, And as I waited for that fateful Thursday meeting, her remembered image came to represent for me the haunting possibility of a sexual communion which would nullify the farcical manner in which I had transported my mismanaged and ungratified and engorged penis across the frozen sexual moonscape of the 1940s.
I think a brief reflection on this decade might now be in order, to lay the groundwork for and to help explain Leslie’s initial, devastating effect on me. A lot in the way of bilious reminiscence has been written about sex by survivors of the fifties, much of it a legitimate lament. But the forties were really far worse, a particularly ghastly period for Eros, shakily bridging as they did the time between the puritanism of our forefathers and the arrival of public pornography. Sex itself was coming out of the closet, but there was universal distress over how to deal with it. That the era became epitomized by Little Miss Cock Tease—that pert number who jerked off a whole generation of her squirming young coevals, allowing moist liberties but with steel-trap relentlessness withholding the big prize, sobbing in triumph as she stole back to the dorm (O that intact membrane! O those silvery snail tracks on the silken undies!)—is no one’s fault, only that of history, yet is a serious shortcoming of those years. In retrospect one must view the schism as completely awful, and irreconcilably complete. For the first time within reckoning society permitted, indeed encouraged, unhindered propinquity of the flesh but still forbade the flesh’s fulfillment. For the first time automobiles had large, upholstered back seats. This created a tension and a frustration without precedent in the relationship between the sexes. It was a cruel period for the aspiring swordsman, especially if he was young and destitute.
One could and did, of course, get a “professional,” and most of the youths of my generation had had one—usually only once. What was so wonderful about Leslie, among other things, was her explicit promise, her immediate assurance that through her I would be offered redemption from that single pathetic crumpling together which I had experienced and which by haphazard definition could be called sexual congress but which I knew in my secret heart had not been that at all. This had been an ignominious copulation. And the awful fact of the matter is that although what might in a clinical sense be termed full penetration had been achieved, I was utterly denied the terminal ecstasy I had so often rehearsed manually since age fourteen. In brief, I considered myself to be literally a freak: a true demi-vierge. Nor was there any pathology here, anything to do with sinister psychic repression which might have driven me to seek medical care. No, the orgasmic blockage was a simple matter of being swindled both by fright and by that suffocating quality of the Zeitgeist that made sex in midcentury America such a nightmarish Sargasso Sea of guilts and apprehensions. I was a college boy of seventeen at my debut. The comedy, played out with a tired old whore from the tobacco fields in a two-dollar-a-night walk-up fleabag hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, came to naught not only because of her sullen taunts, as I pumped away athwart her aging loins, that I was “slower’n a broke-kneed turtle,” nor only because I was desensitized by the oceans of beer I had drunk to allay my initial anxiety, but additionally, I confess, because during the befuddled preliminaries a combination of delaying tactics and fear of disease had caused me somehow to don two condoms—a fact which I discovered to my dismay when she finally heaved me off her.
Aside from that disaster, on the afternoon when I met Leslie Lapidus my past experience had been typically base and fruitless. Which is to say, typically of the forties. I had done a certain amount of smooching, as it was called then, in the balconies of several movie theatres; another time, stranded in the leafy and secret dark tunnel of the local lovers’ lane, I had with madly pounding pulse and furtive fingers succeeded in obtaining a few seconds’ worth of what was known as “bare tit”; and once, scenting triumph but nearly fainting with exertion, I managed to wrest off a Maidenform bra only to discover a pair of “falsies” and a boyish chest flat as a ping-pong paddle. The sexual memory in which I was drenched during that season in Brooklyn, whenever I forlornly unloosed the floodgates, was of uneasy darkness, sweat, reproving murmurs, bands and sinews of obdurate elastic, lacerating little hooks and snaps, whispered prohibitions, straining erections, stuck zippers and a warm miasmal odor of the secretions from inflamed and obstructed glands.
My purity was an inwardly abiding Golgotha. As an only child, unlike those who have as a matter of course seen their sisters in the nude, I had yet to witness a woman entirely unclothed—and this includes the old floozy in Charlotte who wore a stained and malodorous shift throughout the whole proceeding. I have forgotten the exact fantasies I entertained about my first paramour. I had not idealized “femininity” in the silly fashion of the time and therefore I am sure I did not foresee bedding down some chaste Sweet Briar maiden only after a trip to the altar. Somewhere in the halcyon future, I think I must have reasoned, I would meet a cuddlesome, jolly girl who would simply gather me into her with frenzied whoopees, unhindered by that embargo placed upon their flesh by the nasty little Protestants who had so tortured me in the back seats of a score of cars. But there was one matter of which I had no inkling. I had not yet considered that my dream girl would also lack any inhibition about language; my companions of the past would have been unable to utter the word “breast” without blushing. Indeed, I had been accustomed to wincing when a female said “damn.” You can imagine my emotions, then, when Leslie Lapidus, a scant two hours after our first meeting, stretched out her resplendent legs against the sand like a young lioness, and peering into my face with all the unrestrained, almond-eyed, heathen-whore-of-Babylon wantonness I had ever dreamed of, suggested in unbelievably scabrous terms the adventure that awaited me. It would be impossible to exaggerate my shock, in which fright, disbelief and tingling delight were torrentially mingled. Only the fact that I was too young for a coronary occlusion saved my heart, which stopped beating for critical seconds.
But it was not Leslie’s stunning candor which alone set fire to my senses. The air above that sequestered little triangle of sand which Nathan’s lifeguard friend, Morty Haber, staked out on Sunday afternoons as a private social sanctuary, had been filled with the dirtiest talk I had ever heard in what might be termed mixed company. It was something more serious and complex. It was her sultry glare, which contained both direct challenge and expectancy, a look of naked invitation like a lascivious lariat thrown around my ears. She plainly meant action, and when I recovered my wits I replied, in that laconic, detached, Virginia gentlemanly voice with which I was aware (or was vain enough to conceive) I had taken her captive from the outset, “Well, honeybun, since you put it that way, I do suppose I could give you a right warm snuggle between the sheets.” She could not know how my heart was racing, after its dangerous shutdown. Both my dialect and my diction comprised a glib contrivance but they had succeeded in wildly amusing Leslie, and obviously winning her. My studied and exaggerated speech had kept her alternately giggling and fascinated as we lazed on the sand. Just graduated from college, daughter of a manufacturer of molded plastics, restricted by the vicissitudes of life and the recent war to travel no further from Brooklyn than Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire (where, she laughingly told me, she had gone for ten summers to Camp Nehoc—a widespread patronymic spelled backward), she said I was the first person from the South to whom she had ever spoken a word, or vice versa.
The beginning of that Sunday afternoon remains one of the pleasantest blurs amid a lifetime of blurred recollections. Coney Island. Seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, in golden effervescent air. A popcorn, candy apple and sauerkraut fragrance—and Sophie, tugging on my sleeve, then Nathan’s, insisting that we take all the wild rides, which we did. Steeplechase Park! We risked our necks not once but twice on the Loop-the-Loop and dizzied ourselves on a fearful contraption called The Snapper, whose iron arm flung the three of us out into space in a gondola, where we spun arou
nd in erratic orbits, screaming. The rides sent Sophie into what were clearly transports of something past simple joy. I never saw these diversions draw forth from anyone, even a child, such glee, such rich terror, such uncomplicated visceral bliss. She cried out in ecstasy, with marvelous shrieks, all flowing out of some primitive source of rapture quite beyond normal sensations of sweet peril. She clutched at Nathan, buried her head in the crook of his arm, and laughed and screamed until tears streaked her cheek. As for myself, I was a good sport up to a point but balked at the parachute jump, two hundred feet high, relic of the 1939 World’s Fair, which may have been perfectly safe but filled me with heaving vertigo just to look at it. “Coward, Stingo!” Sophie cried and yanked at my arm, but even her entreaties failed to budge me. Licking an Eskimo Pie, I watched Sophie and Nathan in their old-fashioned clothes grow smaller and smaller as they were hoisted up the guide wires beneath the billowing canopies; they paused at the peak, arrested for a harrowing and breathless moment as in that endless ticktock of time before the condemned fall through the gallows trap, then plummeted earthward with a whooshing of air. Sophie’s cry, borne across the milling hordes on the beach below, could have been heard by ships far out at sea. The jump was for her a final intoxication and she talked about it until she was out of breath, teasing me without mercy for my spinelessness—“Stingo, you don’t know what is fun!”—as we walked along the boardwalk toward the beach amid a pushing and shoving freak show of angular, corpulent, lovely, mottled and undulant human flesh.
Except for Leslie Lapidus and Morty Haber, the half-dozen young people sprawled on the sand around Morty’s lifeguard tower were as new to Nathan and Sophie as they were to me. Morty—aggressively friendly, strapping, hairy, the very figure of a lifeguard—introduced us around to three tanned young men in Lastex swim shorts named Irv and Shelley and Bert and three deliciously rounded, honey-colored girls who became known to me as Sandra, Shirley and—then, ah!—Leslie. Morty was more than amiable, but something indefinably stand-offish, even hostile, about the others (as a Southerner I was given to a great deal of spontaneous handshaking, while they obviously were not and accepted my palm as if it were a haddock) made me distinctly ill-at-ease. As I scanned the group I could not help but feel at the same time a slight but real awkwardness over my bony hide and its hereditary paleness. Sharecropper-white, with pink elbows and chafed knees, I felt wan and desiccated amid these bodies so richly and sleekly dark, so Mediterranean, glistening like dolphins beneath their Coppertone. How I envied the pigmentation that could cause one’s torso to develop this mellow hue of stained walnut.
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