Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  ...Eyes still shut, her head still woolly from sleep, she hears Nathan make a cackling noise. “Up and at ’em!”

  She hears him say, “Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there, won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jew-boy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside!”

  She comes awake. She had anticipated his immediate embrace, wonders if she had put her diaphragm in before going to bed, remembers that she had done so and now lazily rolls over, smiling sleepily, to greet him. She recalls his incredible gluttonous passion when on such a high. Recalls it with voluptuary delight—everything—not alone the beginning hungry tenderness, his fingers on her nipples and their gentle yet insistent search between her legs but all else and one thing specifically, again anticipated with hungry, at last liberated (adieu, Cracow!), uninhibited, self-absorbed bliss: his extravagant ability to make her come—to come not once or twice but over and over again until an almost sinister final losingness of herself has been achieved, a sucking death like descent into caverns during which she cannot tell whether she is lost in herself or in him, a sense of black whirling downward into an inseparability of flesh. (It is almost the only time she thinks in or speaks Polish any longer, whispering loudly against his ear, “We? mnie, we? mnie,” which spills out mysteriously, spontaneously and means “Take me, take me,” although once when Nathan asked her the meaning she was gaily forced to lie, saying, “It means fuck me, fuck me!”) It is, as Nathan sometimes exhaustedly proclaims afterward, the twentieth-century Superfuck—think how bland human fucking was throughout the ages before the discovery of benzedrine sulphate. Now she is wildly aroused. Stirring, stretching like a cat, she reaches out an arm toward him, inviting him to bed. He says nothing. And then, puzzled, she hears him say again, “Come on! Up and at ’em! This Jew-boy’s going to take you for a trip to the country!” She begins, “But, Nathan—” His voice, interrupting, is at once insistent and jazzed-up. “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to hit the road!” She feels quick frustration while just then a memory of bygone decorums (bonjour, Cracow!) gives her a twinge of shame at her urgent and unbuttoned lust. “Come on!” he commands. Naked, she moves out of bed, glances up, sees Nathan gazing into the dappled morning sunlight as he sniffs deeply—from a dollar bill—at what she instantly knows is cocaine...

  ...In the New England twilight, past his band and its poison, she could see the inferno of leaves, one tree awash in vermilion, merging with another crafted of the most violent gold. Outside, the evening woods stood in quietude and the vast patches like maps of color were captured motionless, no leaf astir, in the light of the setting sun. Distantly, cars passed on the highway. She felt drowsy but did not seek sleep. She saw now that there were two capsules between his fingers, pink identical twins. “His and hers is one of the cutest contemporary concepts,” she heard him say. “His and hers all over the bathroom, all over the house, why not his and hers cyanide, his and hers fucking nothing? Why not, Sophielove?”

  There was a knock at the door and Nathan’s hand twitched slightly in response. “Yes?” he said in a flat soft tone. “Mr. and Mrs. Landau,” said the voice, “this is Mrs. Rylander. I hate to disturb you!” The voice was overly ingratiating, sedulously sweet. “In the off-season the kitchen closes at seven o’clock. Just wanted to tell you, I hate to interrupt your nap. You’re the only guests here, so there’s no hurry yet, just wanted to tell you. My husband’s making his specialty tonight, corned beef and cabbage!” Silence. “Thank you very much,” Nathan said, “we’ll be down soon.”

  Footsteps thumped down the ancient carpeted staircase; the timbers squealed like a hurt animal. Talktalktalktalktalk. He had talked himself hoarse. “Consider, Sophie-love,” he was saying now, caressing the two capsules, “consider how intimately life and death are intertwined in Nature, which contains everywhere the seeds of our beatitude and our dissolution. This, for instance, HCN, is spread throughout Mother Nature in smothering abundance in the form of glycosides, which is to say, combined with sugars. Sweet, sweet sugar. In bitter almonds, in peach pits, in certain species of these autumn leaves, in the common pear, the arbutus. Imagine, then, when those perfect white porcelain teeth of yours bite down upon the delectable macaroon the taste you experience is only a molecule’s organic distance removed from that of this...”

  She blanked out his voice, gazing again at the astonishing leaves, a fire-lake. She smelled the cabbage from below, blooming, dank. And remembered another voice, Morty Haber’s, filled with his nervous solicitude: “Don’t look so guilty. There’s nothing you could have done, since he’s been hooked for a long time before you ever laid eyes on him. Can it be controlled? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know, Sophie! I wish to God I knew! Nobody knows much about amphetamines. Up to a point they’re relatively harmless. But they obviously can be dangerous, addictive, especially when mixed up with something else, like cocaine. Nathan likes to snort cocaine on top of the Bennies, and I think that’s goddamned dangerous. Then he can get out of control and go into some, I don’t know, area of psychosis where no one can reach him. I’ve checked out all the data, and yes, it’s dangerous, very dangerous—Oh, fuck it, Sophie, I don’t want to talk about it any more, but if he flips out, make sure you get in touch with me right away, me or Larry...” She gazed past Nathan at the leaves, and sensed that her lips were tingling. The Nembutal? For the first time in minutes she stirred slightly against the mattress. Instantly she felt a sharp ache in her ribs where he had kicked her...

  ...“Fidelity would become you more,” he is saying in the midst of his runaway rant. She hears his voice over the roaring slipstream of wind rushing past the convertible’s windshield. Although it is chilly, Nathan has put the top down. Sitting next to him, she has covered herself with a blanket. She does not fully understand what he has said to her, half shouts to him, “What did you say, darling?” He turns to face her, she catches a glimpse of his eyes, distraught now, the pupils all but vanished, swallowed up in the violent brown ellipses. “I said fidelity would become you more, to use an elegant variation.” She is seized with puzzlement and a vague clammy fear. She looks away, heart pounding. Never in their months together has he displayed real anger toward her. Cold dismay begins to wash over her like rain on naked flesh. What does he mean? She fixes her gaze on the landscape wheeling by, the tended evergreen shrubbery at the margin of the manicured parkway, the forest beyond with its explosive turning leaves, blue sky, bright sun, telephone poles. WELCOME TO CONNECTICUT/DRIVE SAFELY. She is aware that he is driving very fast. They overtake car after car, passing with a whooshing noise and a vibration of air. She hears him say, “Or to not use an elegant variation, you’d better not fuck around, especially where I can see it!” She gasps aloud, she cannot believe he is saying this. As if he had slapped her she feels her head jerk sideways, then she turns. “Darling what do you—” But “Shut up!” he roars, and now again the words flow forth as upon a spillway, undammed, a babbling continuation of the jumbled semicoherence he has assailed her with since they left the Pink Palace well over an hour before. “It would appear that that luscious Polish ass of yours is irresistible to your employer the adorable quack from Forest Hills, which is quite all right, quite all right, mind you, it is a darling piece of equipment if I do say so myself, having not only fattened it up but availed myself of its uncommon pleasures, this I can understand Dr. Flimflam yearning for with all his heart and aching prick...” She hears him give a heh-heh-heh brainless giggle. “But for you to cooperate in his enterprise, to actually lay it down and hump this despicable cheat, then, then to flaunt it all right before my eyes as you did last night, letting him stand there and get one last wet feel, poking that revolting chiropractic tongue down your throat—oh, my little Polish tart, it is more than I can bear.” Unable to speak, she fixes her gaze on the speedometer: 70, 75, 80... It is not so bad, she thinks, thinking in kilometers, then in swift adjustment says to herself: Miles! We are going to go out of control! Thinks: It is beyond madness, this
jealousy, that I am sleeping with Blackstock. Far behind them there is the dim sound of a siren, she is somehow aware of a flashing red light, its reflection like a tiny raspberry winking on and off against the windshield. She opens her mouth, poises her tongue for speech (“Darling!” she is trying to say), cannot utter the word. Talktalktalktalktalk... It is like the sound track of a movie pieced together by a chimpanzee, in part coherent but creating no design, making no final sense; its paranoia causes her to feel weak and ill. “Schoenthal is one hundred percent right, it is pure sentimental rubbish embedded in the Judeo-Christian ethos that makes suicide morally wrong, after the Third Reich suicide should become the legitimate option of any sane human being on earth, isn’t that right, Irma?” (Why was he suddenly calling her Irma?) “But I shouldn’t be surprised at your hankering to spread your legs for any joint that comes your way, to be quite honest and I haven’t said this before, much of you has been a mystery since first we met, I might have suspected you were a fucking goy kurveh, but what else—what else?—ohmyohmy, did some weird self-inflicted Schadenfreude cause me to be attracted to such a perfect replica of Irma Griese? She was some looker, according to the people at the trial in Lunenberg, even the prosecutors tipped their hats to that, oh shit, my beloved mama always said I was fatally attracted to blond shiksas, why can’t you be a decent Jewish boy, Nathan, and marry a nice girl like Shirley Mirmelstein who’s so beautiful and has got a father that’s made a killing in foundation garments with a summer place in Lake Placid yet.” (The siren still trails them, faintly screaming. “Nathan,” she says, “there’s a policeman.”) “The Brahmans revere suicide, many Orientals, like what’s so big about death anyway, rienada fucking nothing, so upon reconsideration not too long ago I said to myself okay, beautiful Irma Griese got the rope for personally killing x-thousands of Jews at Auschwitz but didn’t logic dictate a lot of little Irma Grieses getting away, I mean what about this funny little Polish nafka I’m shacked up with, that is, could she truly be one hundred percent true-blue Polack, she looks Polack in many ways but also echt-Nordic like some Kraut movie star masquerading as the murderous Countess of Cracow, also I might add that absolutely flawless Deutsch I have heard emerge with such precision from your lovely Rhine maiden’s lips. A Polack! Ah me! Das machst du andern weismachen! Why don’t you admit it, Irma! You played footsie with the SS, didn’t you? Isn’t that how you got out of Auschwitz, Irma? Admit it!” (She has stopped up her ears with both hands, sobbing “No! No!” She feels the car decelerate abruptly. The siren’s scream becomes a dragon’s growl, diminuendo. The police car pulls abreast.) “Admit it, you Fascist cunt!”...

  ...As she lay in the dusk watching the leaves dim and fade, she heard the sound of his urine in steady noisy collision with the water in the toilet. She remembered. Amid the fantastic leaves earlier, in the deep woods, standing above her, he had tried to piss into her mouth, had failed; it had been the commencement of his downward slide. She stirred on the bed, smelling the steamy rising fumes of cabbage, her eyes lighting drowsily on the two capsules he had deposited gently in the ashtray. BOAR’S HEAD INN, read the Old English letters around the china rim, AN AMERICAN LANDMARK. She yawned, thinking how strange it was. How strange it was that she should not fear death, if he was truly going to force death upon her, but that she should fear simply death taking him and him alone, leaving her behind. That through some unforeseen fuck-up, as he would put it, the lethal dose would do its work only on him and she would be once again the hapless survivor. I cannot live without him, she heard herself whisper aloud in Polish, aware of the triteness of the thought but also of its absolute truth. His death would be my final agony. From afar a train whistle cried across the valley with its strange name, Housatonic, the long cry a richer and more melodic sound than that of the shrill European horns yet no different in the sudden way that railroad lament wrenched the heart.

  She thought of Poland. Her mother’s hands. She had so seldom thought of her mother, that sweet dim self-effacing soul, and now for a moment she could only think of her mother’s elegant expressive pianist’s hands, strong-fingered, at once supple and gentle, like one of the Chopin nocturnes she played, the ivory skin reminding her of the muted white of lilacs. So remarkably white indeed that Sophie only in retrospect ever connected the lovely blanched bloodlessness with the consumption that was devouring her mother even then, and which finally stilled those hands. Mama, Mama, she thought. So often those hands had stroked her brow when as a little girl she spoke the bedtime prayer that every Polish child knows by heart, embedded in the soul more firmly than any nursery rhyme: Angel of God, my guardian angel, stay always by my side; in the morning, during the day, and in the night, come always to my aid. Amen. On one of her mother’s fingers was a slender golden band in the entwined form of a cobra, the eye of the serpent made of a tiny ruby. Professor Biegański had bought the ring in Aden on his voyage back from Madagascar, where he had gone to reconnoiter the geography of his earliest dream: the relocation of the Polish Jews. His utter vulgarity. Had he shopped long for such a monstrosity? Sophie knew her mother detested the ring but wore it out of her constant deference to Papa. Nathan stopped pissing. She thought of her father and his luxuriant blond hair, beaded with sweat in the bazaars of Arabia...

  ...“They got Daytona Beach for car races,” says the cop, “this here’s the Merritt Parkway, for what we call motorists, now what’s the big hurry?” He is fair-haired, youngish, freckle-faced, not unpleasant-looking. He wears a Texas sheriff’s hat. Nathan says nothing, staring straight ahead, but Sophie senses him muttering rapidly beneath his breath. Still talktalktalktalktalk but sotto voce. “You want to make you and that nice girl into a statistic?” The cop wears a nameplate: S. GREZEMKOWSKI. Sophie says “Przepraszam...” (“If you please...”) Grzemkowski beams, answers, “Czy jesteś Polakiem?” “Yes, I’m Polish,” Sophie returns, encouraged, continuing her native spiel, but the cop interrupts, “I just understand a few words. My people are Polish, up in New Britain. Listen, what’s wrong here?” Sophie says, “This is my husband. He is very upset. His mother’s dying in...” She frantically tries to think of a Connecticut place, is able to blurt, “In Boston. That’s why we were speeding.” Sophie stares at the cop’s face, eyes innocent violets, the slablike plane faintly bucolic, the countenance of a peasant. She thinks: He could be tending cows in some Carpathian valley. “Please,” she cajoles, leaning forward over Nathan, pouting her prettiest, “please, sir, do understand about his mother. We promise to go slow now.” The Grzemkowski presence reverts to stolid business, the voice becomes police-gruff. “I’m givin’ you a warning this time. Now slow down.” Nathan says, “Merci beaucoup, mon chef.” He gazes directly ahead into infinity. His lips work wordlessly, without cease, as if speaking to some helpless auditor lodged within his breast. He has begun to sweat in glycerine streams. The cop is suddenly gone. Sophie hears Nathan whispering to himself as the car moves once more. It is almost noon. They drive north (more sedately) through bowers and overhanging clouds and raging storms of multichrome leaves in aerial frenzy—here belching color like blazing lava, there like exploding stars, all like nothing Sophie has ever seen or imagined—the pent-up muttering which she cannot comprehend becomes vocal, unleashed in a new spasm of paranoia. And in its encompassing fury it terrifies her as completely as if he had set loose in the car a cage full of savage rats. Poland. Anti-Semitism. And what did you do, baby, when they burned the ghettos down? Did you hear the line about what one Polish bishop said to the other Polish bishop? “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a kike!” Harharhar! Nathan, don’t, she thinks, don’t make me suffer so! Don’t make me remember! The tears are rolling down her face when she plucks at his sleeve. “I’ve never told you! I’ve never told you!” she cries. “In 1939 my father risked his life to save Jews! He hided Jews under the floor of his office at the university when the Gestapo came, he was a good man, he died because he saved these... ” On the sticky bolus of her own distress, rising in her go
rge like the lie she has just uttered, she strangles, then hears her voice crack. “Nathan! Nathan! Believe me, darling, believe me!” DANBURY CITY LIMITS. “Baked a kike!” Harharhar! “I mean not hided, darling, hid...” Talktalktalk—She half listens now, thinking: If I could get him to stop and eat somewhere, I could steal away and make a phone call to Morty or Larry, get them to come... And she hears herself say, “Darling, I’m so hungry, could we stop...” Only to hear amid the talktalktalk: “Irma my pet, Irma Liebchen, I couldn’t eat a single Saltine cracker if you paid me a thousand dollars, oh shit Irma I’m flying, oh Christ I’m in the sky, never so high never so high and gotta big itch for youu-u-u, you little goy Fascist nafka, hey feel this...” He reaches over and places her hand on the outside of his trousers, presses her fingers against the stiff bulge of his prick; she feels it throb then contract then throb again. “A blowjob, that’s what I need, one of your five hundred gold zloty Polack blowjobs, hey Irma how many SS pricks did you suck to get out of there, how much master race come swallowed for Freiheit? Listen, all kidding aside Irma I’ve gotta get sucked, oh I’ve never flown this high, Jesus to get those sweet little gobbling lips to work right now, I mean somewhere under the blue sky and the burning maple leaves of autumn, fair autumn, and you’ll suck my seed, suck my seed as thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, that’s John Milton...”

  ...Naked, he padded back to the bed and lightly, carefully lay down beside her. The two capsules still glistened in the ashtray, and she wondered drowsily if he had forgotten them, wondered if he again would flirt and tantalize her with their pink menace. The Nembutal, washing her downward toward sleep, pulled at her legs like the warm undertow of a gentle sea. “Sophielove,” he said, his voice drowsy too, “Sophielove, I regret only two things.” She said, “What, darling?” When he failed to answer, she said again, “What?” “Just this,” he said finally, “that all that hard work at the lab, all the research, that I’ll never see the fruits of it.” Strange, she thought as he spoke, his voice almost for the first time that day had lost its hysteric threat, its mania, its cruelty, had become edged instead with the tenderness, familiar, soothing, which was so naturally a part of him and which all day long she had been certain was past recapture. Had he, too, been rescued at the last instant, was he being borne backward serenely into his salvaging barbiturate harbor? Would he in fact simply forget death and drift off to sleep?