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 room I scribbled verbatim notes from memory—notes which, now faded and yellowing, I have retrieved from the past along with such mementos as my father’s letters. Although I promised myself not to inflict upon the reader too many of the voluminous jottings I made that summer (it is a tiresome and interruptive device, symptomatic of a flagging imagination), I have made an exception in this particular instance, setting my little memorandum down just as I wrote it as unimpeachable testimony of the way some people talked in 1947, that cradle year of psychoanalysis in postwar America:
Girl named Sandra: “My analyst said that my transference problem has passed from the hostile to the affectionate stage. He said that this usually meant that the analysis might go ahead with fewer barriers and repressions.”
Long silence. Blinding sunlight, gulls against a cerulean blue sky. Plume of smoke on the horizon. A glorious day, crying out for a hymn to itself, like Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” What in God’s name is ailing these kids? I never saw such gloom, such despair, such blighted numb solemnity. Finally someone breaks the long silence.
Guy named Irv: “Don’t get too affectionate, Sandra. You might get Dr. Bronfman’s cock inside you.”
No one laughs.
Sandra: “That’s not funny, Irving. In fact what you just said is outrageous. A transference problem is no laughing matter.”
More long silence. I am thunderstruck. I have never in my life heard those four-letter words spoken in a mixed gathering. Also I have never heard of transference. I feel my Presbyterian scrotum shrink. These characters are really liberated. But if so, why so gloomy?
“My analyst says that any transference problem is serious, whether it’s affectionate or hostile. She says it’s proof that you haven’t gotten over an Oedipal dependence” This from the girl named Shirley, not as nifty as Leslie but with great boobs. As T. Wolfe pointed out these Jewish girls have marvelous chest development. Except for Leslie, though, they all give the impression that they’re at a funeral. I notice Sophie off to the side on the sand, listening to the talk. All the simple happiness she had during those crazy rides is gone. She has a sullen sulky look on her beautiful face and says nothing. She is so beautiful, even when her mood is down. From time to time she looks at Nathan—she seems to seek him, to make sure that he is there—and then she glowers while the people talk.
Some random jabber:
“My analyst said that the reason I find it hard to come is that I’m pre-genitally fixated.” (Sandra)
“Nine months of analysis and I discover it’s not my mother I want to fuck, it’s my Aunt Sadie.” (Bert) (Mild laughter)
“Before I went into analysis I was completely frigid, can you imagine? Now all I do is think about fucking. Wilhelm Reich has turned me into a nympho, I mean sex on the brain.”
These last words, spoken by Leslie as she flopped over on her belly, had an effect on my libido which forever after would render insipid the word aphrodisiac. I was beyond simple desire, borne away rather in a near-swoon of lust. Couldn’t she know what she did to me with this concubine’s speech, with those foul, priceless words which assailed like sharp spears the bastion of my own Christian gentility, with its aching repressions and restraints? I was so overcome by excitement that the entire sunny seascape—bathers, white-capped waves, even a droning airplane with its trailing banner THRILLS NIGHTLY AT AQUEDUCT RACETRACK—was suddenly steeped in a pornographic glow, as if seen through a filter of lurid blue. I gazed at Leslie in her new pose—the long tawny legs merging with the firm cushioned bottom, an ample but symmetrical roundness which in turn flowed slightly down then upward into a cuprous, lightly freckled back, sleek as a seal’s. She must have anticipated my hunger to stroke that back (if not the sweaty palm with which I had already mentally massaged her darling behind), for she soon twisted her head around and said to me, “Hey, oil me up, will you? I’m getting parboiled.” From this moment of slippery intimacy—smearing as I did the lotion across her shoulders and down her back to the beginning cleft of her buttocks, a tiny nook suggestively fair of hue, then with fluttering fingers in the air above the rump and on further to the mysterious regions between her thighs, ashine with sweat—that afternoon remains in memory a gauzy but pleasure-charged extravaganza.
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 from which the dejected group of analysands had now departed, leaving behind them a half-buried copy of Partisan Review, squeezed-out tubes of nose balm and a litter of Coke bottles. So, lingering there together in the heat of our charm-bound affinity, we spent another hour or so tying up the loose ends of our conversation, both of us very much aware that we had taken this afternoon the first step of what had to be a journey together into wild and uncharted territory. We lay side by side, bellies down. As I gently traced oval patterns against her pulsing neck with my fingertips she reached up to stroke my hand, and I heard her say, “My analyst said that mankind will forever be the enemy of itself until it learns that each human being only needs, enfin, a fantastic fucking.” I heard my own voice, haltingly distant but sincere, reply, “Your analyst must be a very wise person.” For a long while she was silent, and then she turned to gaze at me full in the face and uttered finally, with unfeigned desire, that languid yet straightforward invitation which made my heart stop and so unbalanced my mind and senses: “I’ll bet you could give a girl a fantastic fucking.” And it was then that we somehow made a date for the following Thursday night.
Thursday morning arrived, as I have said, with its sense of approaching bliss, of almost unendurable promise. Sitting there at my pink writing table, I managed, however, to ignore my sickishness and fever and to master my fantasies long enough to get two or three more hours of serious writing done. A few minutes past noon I was aware of a yawning sensation at the pit of my stomach. I had not heard a sound from Sophie all morning. Doubtless she would have spent most of her time with her nose in a book, assiduously continuing her self-education. Her ability at reading English, while still far from perfect, had improved immeasurably in the year since she had met Nathan; in general she no longer resorted to Polish translations and was now deeply engrossed in Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, which I knew both captured and perplexed her. “Those sentences,” she had said, “that go on and on like a crazy snake!” But she was an adept enough reader to marvel at Faulkner’s intricacy of narrative and his turbulent power. I had practically memorized that Portable, which in college had catapulted me into all of Faulkner’s work, and it had been upon my recommendation—on the subway or somewhere else on that memorable Sunday of our first encounter—that Nathan had bought a copy and given it to Sophie early in the week. At our several get-togethers since then it had given me great pleasure to help interpret Faulkner for Sophie, not only by way of explaining parts of the occult Mississippi vernacular but in showing her some of the right pathways as she penetrated the wonderful groves and canebrakes of his rhetoric.
With all the difficulty, she was moved and impressed by the stormy assault that this prose made upon her mind. “He writes like someone, you know, possessed!” she said to me, then added, “It’s very plain that he never was psychoanalyzed.” Her nose crinkled up in distaste as she made this observation, obviously alluding to the group of sunbathers who had so offended her the previous Sunday. I hadn’t completely realized it at the time, but that same Freudian colloquy which had fascinated and, at the most, amused me had been downright odious to Sophie and had caused her to flee with Nathan from the beach. “Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs,” she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. “I hate this type of—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—“unearned unhappiness!” Although I saw exactly what she meant, I was surprised at the fervor of her hostility and I wondered—even as I climbed the steps to take her out on our picnic—if it might not be due only to some irreconcilable discord left over from that stern religion which I knew she had abandoned.
I had not meant to take Sophie by surprise but the door to the room was partly open, and since I could see that she was clothed—“decent,” as girls used to say—I entered without knocking. Dressed in some kind of robe or housecoat, she stood at the far end of the big room combing her hair in front of a mirror. Her back was to me and for a moment I could tell she was unaware of my presence as she stroked the lustrous blond tresses with a sizzling sound, barely audible on the noontime stillness. Supercharged with a prurient residue—overflow, I imagine, of my Leslie daydreams—I had a sudden impulse to creep up behind Sophie and nuzzle her neck while filling my hands with her breasts. But the very thought was unconscionable and I belatedly realized, while I stood there in silence watching, that it was wrong enough of me to have stolen in on her in this way and violated her privacy, so I announced myself with a small, cough. She turned from the mirror with a startled gasp and in so doing revealed a face I shall never in my life forget. Dumfounded, I beheld—for a mercifully fleeting instant—an old hag whose entire lower face had crumpled in upon itself, leaving a mouth like a wrinkled gash and an expression of doddering senescence. It was a mask, withered and pitiable.
I was literally on the verge of crying out, but she beat me to it, making a gulping noise as she clapped her hands over her mouth and fled to the bathroom. I
stood there in pounding embarrassment for long moments listening to the muffled sounds behind the bathroom door, aware now for the first time of the Scarlatti piano sonata that had been playing softly on the phonograph. Then, “Stingo, when are you going to learn to knock on a lady’s door?” I heard her call, more teasing in tone than truly cross. And then—only then—did I realize what I had witnessed. I was grateful that she had displayed no real anger, and was swiftly touched at this generosity of spirit, wondering what my own reaction might have been had / been caught without my teeth. And at that instant Sophie emerged from the bathroom, a faint flush still on her cheeks, but composed, even radiant, all the lovely components of her face reunited in a merry apotheosis of American dentistry. “Let’s go to the park,” she said, “I’m swooning with hunger. I am... the avatar of hunger!”
That “avatar,” of course, was quintessential Faulkner, and I was so tickled at the way she used the word, and by her restored beauty, that I found myself disgorging loud coarse cackles of laughter.
“Braunschweiger on rye, with mustard,” I said.
“Hot pastrami!” she replied.