Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  I knew that it was best that we should get well rested before continuing our trip down to the farm. Through various conversational stratagems, including more agricultural wisdom leavened by all the good Southern jokes I could extract from memory, I was able to infuse Sophie with enough cheer to make it through the rest of the dinner. We drank, ate crab cakes and managed to forget Auschwitz. By ten o’clock she was again quite befuddled and unsteady of gait—as was I, for that matter, with an unconscionable amount of beer stowed away—and so we took a taxi back to the hotel. She was already drowsing against my shoulder by the time we reached the stained marble steps and tobacco-fragrant lobby of the Hotel Congress, and she clung with weary heaviness to my waist as we rode the elevator up to the room. Onto the sway-back bed she flung herself wordlessly, without removing her clothes, and was instantaneously asleep. I put a blanket over her, and after stripping to my skivvy drawers, lay down beside her and fell asleep myself like one bludgeoned. At least for a time. Then came dreams. The church bell sounding intermittently through my slumber was not entirely unmusical, but it had a clangorous, hollow, Protestant ring, as if fashioned of low-pitched alloys; demonically, in the midst of my turbulent erotic visions, it tolled with the voice of sin. The Reverend Entwistle, drugged with Budweiser and in bed with a woman not his wife, was basically ill-at-ease in this illicit ambience, even while asleep. DARK DOOM! DARK DOOM! pealed the wretched bell.

  Indeed, I’m sure it was both my residual Calvinism and my clerical disguise—also that damnable church bell—which helped cause me to falter so badly when Sophie woke me. This must have been around two in the morning. It should have been that moment in my life when literally, as the saying goes, all my dreams came true, for in the half-light I realized both by feel and evidence of my sleep-blurred eyes that Sophie was naked, that she was tenderly licking the recesses of my ear, and that she was groping for my cock. Was I asleep or awake? If all this were not puzzlingly sweet enough—the simulacrum of a dream—the dream melted instantly away at the sound of her whisper: “Oh... now, Stingo darling, I want to fuck.” Then I felt her tugging off my underpants.

  I began to kiss Sophie like a man dying of thirst and she returned my kisses, groaning, but this is all we did (or all I could do, despite her gently expert, tickling manipulation) for many minutes. It would be misleading to emphasize my malfunction, either its duration or its effect on me, although such was its completeness that I recall resolving to commit suicide if it did not soon correct itself. Yet there it remained in her fingers, a limp worm. She slid down over the surface of my belly and began to suck me. I remember once how, in the abandonment of her confession regarding Nathan, she fondly spoke of him calling her “the world’s most elegant cocksucker.” He may have been right; I will never forget how eagerly and how naturally she moved to demonstrate to me her appetite and her devotion, planting her knees firmly between my legs like the fine craftswoman she was, then bending down and taking into her mouth my no longer quite so shrunken little comrade, bringing it swelling and jumping up by such a joyfully adroit, heedlessly noisy blend of labial and lingual rhythms that I could feel the whole slippery-sweet union of mouth and rigid prick like an electric charge running from my scalp to the tips of my toes. “Oh, Stingo,” she gasped, pausing once for breath, “don’t come yet, darling.” Fat chance. I would lie there and let her suck me until my hair grew thin and gray.

  The varieties of sexual experience are, I suppose, so multifarious that it is an exaggeration to say that Sophie and I did that night everything it is possible to do. But I’ll swear we came close, and one thing forever imprinted on my brain was our mutual inexhaustibility. I was inexhaustible because I was twenty-two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at last the goddess of my unending fantasies. Sophie’s lust was as boundless as my own, I’m sure, but for more complex reasons; it had to do, of course, with her good raw natural animal passion, but it was also both a plunge into carnal oblivion and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see, it was a frantic and orgiastic attempt to beat back death. But at the time I was unable to perceive this, running as I was the temperature of an overheated Sherman tank, being out of my wits with excitement, and filled all night long with dumb wonder at our combined frenzy. For me it was less an initiation than a complete, well-rounded apprenticeship, or more, and Sophie, my loving instructress, never ceased whispering encouragement into my ear. It was as if through a living tableau, in which I myself was a participant, there were being acted out all the answers to the questions with which I had half maddened myself ever since I began secretly reading marriage manuals and sweated over the pages of Havelock Ellis and other sexual savants. Yes, the female nipples did spring up like little pink semi-hard gumdrops beneath the fingers, and Sophie emboldened me to even sweeter joys by asking me to excite them with my tongue. Yes, the clitoris was really there, darling little bud; Sophie placed my fingers on it. And oh, the cunt was indeed wet and warm, wet with a saliva-slick wetness that astounded me with its heat; the stiff prick slid in and out of that incandescent tunnel more effortlessly than I had ever dreamed, and when for the first time I spurted prodigiously somewhere in her dark bottomlessness, I heard Sophie cry out against my cheek, saying that she could feel the gush. The cunt also tasted good, I discovered later, as the church bell—no longer admonitory—dropped four gongs in the night; the cunt was simultaneously pungent and briny and I heard Sophie sigh, guiding me gently by the ears as if they were handles while I licked her there.

  And then there were all those famous positions. Not the twenty-eight outlined in the handbooks, but certainly, in addition to the standard one, three or four or five. At some point Sophie, returning from the bathroom where she kept the liquor, switched on the light, and we fucked in a glow of soft copper; I was delighted to find that the “female superior” posture was every bit as pleasurable as Dr. Ellis had claimed, not so much for its anatomical advantages (though those too were fine, I thought as from below I cupped Sophie’s breasts in my hands or, alternately, squeezed and stroked her bottom) as for the view it afforded me of that wide-boned Slavic face brooding over me, her eyes closed and her expression so beautifully tender and drowned and abandoned in her passion that I had to avert my gaze. “I can’t stop coming,” I heard her murmur, and I knew she meant it. We lay quietly together for a while, side by side, but soon without a word Sophie presented herself in such a way as to fulfill all my past fantasies in utter apotheosis. Taking her from behind while she knelt, thrusting into the cleft between those smooth white globes, I suddenly clenched my eyes shut and, I remember, thought in a weird seizure of cognition of the necessity of redefining “joy,” “fulfillment,” “ecstasy,” even “God.” Several times we stopped long enough for Sophie to drink, and for her to pour whiskey and water down my own gullet. The booze, far from numbing me, heightened the images as well as the sensations of what then bloomed into phantasmagoria... Her voice in my ear, the incomprehensible words in Polish nonetheless understood, urging me on as if in a race, urging me to some ever-receding finish line. Fucking for some reason on the gritty bone-hard floor, the reason unclear, dim, stupid—why, for Christ’s sake?—then abruptly dawning: to view, as on a pornographic screen, our pale white entwined bodies splashing back from the lusterless mirror on the bathroom door. A kind of furious obsessed wordlessness finally—no Polish, no English, no language, only breath. Soixante-neuf (recommended by the doctor), where after smothering for minute after minute in her moist mossy cunt’s undulant swamp, I came at last in Sophie’s mouth, came in a spasm of such delayed, prolonged, exquisite intensity that I verged on a scream, or a prayer, and my vision went blank, and I gratefully perished. Sleep then—a sleep that was beyond mere sleep. Cold-cocked. Etherized. Dead.

  I woke up with my face afloat in a puddle of sunlight, and I reached with an instinctive twitch for Sophie’s arm, hair, breast, something. The Reverend Entwistle was, to put it with exactitude, ready for another fuck. This matutinal grope, the somnolent
reaching out, was a Pavlovian reflex which I would experience often in later years. But Sophie was gone. Gone! Her absence, after the most complete (or perhaps I should say only) propinquity of flesh in my life, was spooky, almost palpable, and I drowsily realized it had partly to do with the smell of her, which remained like a vapor in the air: a musky genital odor, still provocative, still lascivious. In my waking daze I glanced down amid the landscape of tangled bedclothes, unable to believe that after all of its happy, exhausting toil my member still stood valiantly upright, serving as a tentpost to the worn and tacky sheet. Then I was washed by an awful panic, aware from the slant of the mirror that Sophie was not in the bathroom and therefore not in the room at all. Just as I leaped from the bed the headache of a hangover smote my skull like a mallet, and during my struggle with my trousers I was seized by further panic, or I should say, dread: the bell tolled outside and I counted the strokes—it was noon! My yells over the decrepit telephone brought no response. Half clothed, murmuring to myself curses, recriminations, filled with auguries of foul tidings, I burst out of the room and galloped down the fire stairs to the lobby with its single Negro bellboy pushing a mop, its potted rubber plants and rump-sprung armchairs and overflowing spittoons. There the old codger who had first greeted me drowsed behind the desk, mooning over the waiting room’s midday desuetude. At the sight of me he came alert, and proceeded to unfold what was simply the worst news I had ever heard.

  “She came down real early, Reverend,” he said, “so early she had to wake me up.” He looked at the bellboy. “What time you reckon it was, Jackson?"

  “Hit must have been aroun’ six.”

  “Yes, it was about six o’clock. Just dawn. She looked like she was in a real state, Reverend.” His pause seemed a little apologetic. “I mean, well, I think she’d had several beers. Her hair was every whichaway. Anyway, she got on the phone here, long-distance to Brooklyn, New York. I couldn’t help overhearing. She was talkin’ to someone—a man, I guess. She began to cry a lot and told him she was leavin’ here right away. Kept callin’ to him—she was real upset, Reverend. Mason. Jason. Something like that.”

  “Nathan,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice. “Nathan! Oh, Jesus Christ...”

  Sympathy and concern—an emotional amalgam which suddenly appeared to me rather Southern and old-fashioned—welled up in the old clerk’s eyes. “Yes—Nathan. I didn’t know what to do, Reverend,” he explained. “She went on upstairs and then she came down with her bag and Jackson here took her over to Union Station. She looked awfully upset and I thought of you, and wondered... I thought of calling you on the phone but it was so early. And anyway, I didn’t want to butt in. I mean, it wasn’t my business.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” I kept hearing myself mutter, half aware of the questioning look on the face of the old man, who as a member of the Second Baptist Church of Washington was doubtless unprepared for such impiety from a preacher.

  Jackson took me back upstairs in the aged elevator, against whose curlicued cast-iron, unfriendly wall I leaned with my eyes closed in a state of stupefaction, unable to believe any of this or, even more intransigently, to accept it. Surely, I thought, Sophie would be lying in bed when I returned, the golden hair shining in a rectangle of sunshine, the nimble loving hands outstretched, beckoning me to renewed delight...

  Instead, tucked against the mirror above the lavatory in the bathroom, there was a note. Scrawled in pencil, it was testimony indeed to the imperfect command of written English of which Sophie had so recently lamented to me, but also to the influence of German, which she had learned from her father so many years before in Cracow and which until this moment I had not realized had embedded itself with such obstinacy, like cornices and moldings of Gothic stone, in her mind’s architecture.

  My dearest Stingo, your such a beautiful Lover I hate to leave and forgive me for not saying Good-Bye but I must go back to Nathan. Believe me you will find some wunderful Mademoiselle to make you happy on the Farm. I am so fond of you—you must not think bei this I am being cruel. But when I woke I was feeling so terrible and in Despair about Nathan, bei that I mean so filled with Gilt and thoughts of Death it was like Eis Ice flowing in my Blut. So I must be with Nathan again for whatever that mean. I may not see you again but do believe me how much knowing you have meaned to me. Your a great Lover Stingo. I feel so bad, I must go now. Forgive my poor englisch. I love Nathan but now feel this Hate of Life and God. FUCK God and all his Hände Werk. And Life too. And even what remain of Love.

  Sophie

  There was never any way of discovering precisely what took place between Sophie and Nathan when she returned that Saturday to Brooklyn. Because she had told me in such detail of the awful weekend in Connecticut the previous autumn, I may have been the only person knowing them both who had an inkling of what went on in their room where they met for the last time. But even I could only guess; they left no last-minute memos to help provide a key. As with most unspeakable events, there were certain troublesome “ifs” involved, making it all the more painful, in retrospect, to ponder the ways in which the whole thing might have been prevented. (Not that I think it really could have been prevented, in the end.) The most important of these suppositions involved Morris Fink, who, given his limited capabilities, had already performed more intelligently than anyone had a right to expect. No one ever determined just when Nathan came back to the house during the thirty-six hours or so after Sophie and I fled and before Sophie herself returned. It seems strange that Fink—who had for so long and so assiduously kept his eye on the goings and comings in the house—had not noticed that Nathan at some point had made his way back and secluded himself in Sophie’s room. But he later protested that he had not had a glimpse of Nathan, and I never saw any reason to doubt him, any more than I doubted his claim to having failed to see Sophie when she, too, reached the house. Assuming no mishaps or delays in the railroad and subway timetable, her return to the Pink Palace must have been at around noon on the day she left me in Washington.

  The reason I place Fink at such a critical focus in respect to these movements is simply that Larry—who had gotten back from Toronto and hurried to Flatbush to talk to Morris and Yetta Zimmerman—had entrusted the janitor to telephone him if and when he saw Nathan enter the house. I had given Fink the same instructions, and additionally, Larry had encouraged Morris with a fat tip. But doubtless Nathan (in whatever frame of mind and with what motive it is impossible to say) sneaked in when Morris was not looking or asleep, while Sophie’s later arrival simply must have escaped his notice. Also, I suspect that Morris was in bed when Sophie made her call to Nathan. Had Fink got in touch with Larry earlier, the doctor would have been there within minutes; he was the only person on earth who could have dealt with his demented brother, and I am certain that if he had been called, the outcome of this story would have been a different one. Perhaps no less calamitous, but different.

  On that Saturday, Indian summer had descended over the eastern seaboard, bringing shirt-sleeve weather, flies, a renascence of Good Humor men, and to most people that absurdly deceptive feeling that the onset of winter is a wicked illusion. I had that feeling the same afternoon in Washington (although my mind was really not on the weather), just as I imagine that Morris Fink had a touch of this sensation at the Pink Palace. He later said that he first realized, with growing astonishment, that Sophie was in her room when he heard the music floating down from above. This was around two o’clock. He knew nothing about the music she and Nathan had played so constantly, merely identifying it as “classic,” and confessing to me once that although it was too “deep” for him to understand, he found it more palatable than some of the popular crud that came from the radios and record players of the other tenants.

  At any rate, he was surprised—no, really flabbergasted—to find that Sophie had returned; his mind jumped to an instantaneous connection with Nathan, and he alerted himself to the possibility that he might have to make that telephone cal
l to Larry. But he had no evidence that Nathan was on the premises and he hesitated to call Larry when it might be a false alarm. He was by now deathly afraid of Nathan (he had been near enough to me two nights before to see me recoil from Nathan’s telephoned gunshot) and he pined hungrily to be able to appeal to the police—for protection, if nothing else. He had sensed a creepy presence in the house ever since Nathan’s last rampage, and had begun to feel so nervous about the Nathan–Sophie situation in general, so jittery and insecure, that he was on the verge of giving up the half-price room he received in exchange for his janitorial functions and telling Mrs. Zimmerman that he was going to move in with his sister in Far Rockaway. He had no longer any doubt that Nathan was the most sinister form of golem. A menace. But Larry had said that under no circumstances should he or anyone else get in touch with the police. So Morris waited downstairs by the hallway door, feeling the stickiness of the summery heat and listening to the complicated and fathomless music as it showered down.

  Then to his swelling wonder he watched the door upstairs open slowly and saw Sophie emerge partway from her room. There was nothing unusual in her appearance, he later recalled; she looked perhaps, well, a bit fatigued, with shadowy places beneath her eyes, but little in her expression betrayed strain or unhappiness or distress or any other “negative” emotion she might have logically been expected to show after the ordeal of the past few days. To the contrary, while she stood there for a moment with one hand caressing the doorknob, a curious, fleeting glint of mild amusement crossed her face, as if she might give a gentle laugh; her lips parted, her gleaming teeth caught the bright afternoon light, and then he saw her tongue run across her upper lip, interrupting the words she had been poised to say. Morris realized that she had caught sight of him, and his gut made a small lurch. He had had a crush on her for many months; her beauty still continued to pain him, as it had day in and day out, hopelessly, replenishing within him mingled freshets of heartache and horniness. She certainly deserved better than that meshuggener Nathan.