“Oh, but I’m going to be very lonesome, Sophie,” I said.
She looked up from the radio and cocked her eye at me in an expression which I suppose might have been regarded as impish, plainly oblivious of my undisguised Sophiemania, and now uttering words which made up the last type of half-assed sentiment I wanted to hear. “You’ll find some beautiful girl, Stingo, very soon—I’m sure of that. Someone very sexy. Someone like that good-looking Leslie Lapidus, only less of the coquette, more complaisante—”
“Oh God, Sophie,” I groaned, “deliver me from the Leslies of the world.”
Then suddenly something about the entire situation—Sophie’s imminent departure, but also the handbag and the near-empty room with its associations of Nathan and the days of the recent past, the music and the high hilarity and all the glorious times we had had together—filled me with such ruinously enervating gloom that I let out another groan, loud enough that I saw a startled light like a flash of beads come to Sophie’s eyes. And quite violently disturbed now, I found myself gripping her firmly by the arms.
“Nathan!” I cried. “Nathan! Nathan! What in God’s name has happened? What has happened, Sophie? Tell me!” I was close to her, nose to nose, and I was aware of one or two flecks of my spittle landing on her cheek. “Here is this incredible guy who’s madly in love with you, the Prince Charming of all time, a man who adores you—I’ve seen it on his face, Sophie, like a form of worship—and all of a sudden you’re out of his life. What in God’s name happened to him, Sophie? He puts you out of his life! You can’t tell me it’s just because of some simple-minded suspicion that you’ve been unfaithful to him, like he said the other night at the Maple Court. It’s got to have some deeper meaning, some deeper cause than that. Or what about me? Me? Me!” I began to smite my chest to emphasize my own involvement in the tragedy. “What about the way he treated me, this guy? I mean, Sophie, Jesus Christ, I don’t have to explain to you, do I, that Nathan came to be like a brother to me, a fucking brother. I never knew anyone like him in all my life, anyone more intelligent, more generous, more funny and fun to be with, more—oh Jesus, simply no one as great. I have loved that guy! I mean, practically single-handed it was Nathan who when he read my first stuff gave me the faith to go on and be a writer. I felt he did it out of love. And then out of nowhere—out of the fucking blue, Sophie—he turns on me like a snarling dog with rabies. Turns on me, tells me my writing is shit, treats me as if I were the most contemptible asshole he had ever known. And then cuts me out of his life as firmly and finally as he cut you.” My voice had risen its usual uncontrolled octaves, becoming an epicene mezzo-soprano. “I can’t stand this, Sophie! What are we going to do?”
The tears pouring down Sophie’s face in watery bright freshets told me that I should not have unloaded myself in this way. I should have had more control. I now saw that I could not have caused her worse pain had she possessed a hot inflamed cicatrix from which I had savagely yanked the stitches in a horrible ball of fresh sutures and outraged flesh. But I could not help myself; indeed, I felt her grief meet mine in some huge gushing confluence and flow onward with it even as I continued to rage. “He can’t take people’s love for him and piss on it like that. It’s unfair! It’s... it’s...” I began to stammer. “It’s, by God, fucking inhuman!”
She turned away from me then, sobbing. There was something a little somnambulistic about the way in which she walked with arms rigid at her side across the room to the edge of the bed. Then abruptly she flopped face down on the apricot bedspread and smothered her face in her hands. She was silent but her shoulders were heaving. I went to the side of the bed and stood above her, looking down. I began to master my voice. “Sophie,” I said, “forgive me for all this. But I just don’t understand anything. I don’t understand anything about Nathan, and maybe I don’t understand anything about you, either. Though I think I’m able to figure out a lot more about you than I ever will about him.” I paused. It was, I knew, like creating another wound to mention that matter which she herself had obviously felt was so hateful to talk about—and hadn’t she with her own lips warned me away from it?—but I was compelled to say what I had to say. I reached down and laid my hand lightly on her bare arm. The skin was very warm and seemed to throb beneath my fingers like the throat of a frightened bird. “Sophie, the other night... the other night at the Maple Court when he... when he cast us out. That awful night. Surely he knew you had a son in that place—just a while ago you told me that you let him know that. Then how could he have been so cruel to you, taunting you like that, asking you how you lived through it all while so many of the others were”—the word nearly choked me, a clot in my throat, but I managed to get it out—“were gassed. How could anybody do that to you? How could anyone love you and be so unbelievably cruel?”
She said nothing for a while, merely lay there with her face buried in her hands. I sat on the edge of the bed beside her and stroked the pleasantly warm, almost febrile surface of her arm, delicately skirting the vaccination scar. From that angle I could plainly see the grim blue-black tattoo, the row of numbers remarkably neat, a little barbwire fence of orderly ciphers in which one “seven” was bisected with the meticulous European slash. I smelled that herbal perfume she so often wore. Could it be possible, Stingo, I asked myself, that she would ever love you? I suddenly wondered if I dared now make a pass at her. No, definitely not. Lying there, she seemed terribly vulnerable, but my outburst had tired me, leaving me somehow shaken and empty of desire. Moving my fingers upward, I touched the loose strands of her butter-bright hair. Finally I sensed that she had stopped weeping. Then I heard her say, “It was never his fault. He always had this demon, this demon which appeared when he was in his tempêtes. It was the demon in control, Stingo.”
I do not know which image at this moment, each appearing almost simultaneously at the rim of my consciousness, gave me the chill that traversed the length of my spinal column: that of black monstrous Caliban or of Morris Fink’s fearful golem. But I felt myself shiver, and in the midst of the spasm said, “What do you mean, Sophie—a demon?”
She made no immediate reply. Instead, after a long silence, she raised her head up and said something in a soft matter-of-fact voice that truly flabbergasted me, it was so totally out of character, so much a part of some other Sophie I had not witnessed until this very day.
“Stingo,” she said, “I can’t leave here so quickly. Too many memories. Do me a big favor. Please. Go over to Church Avenue and buy a bottle of whiskey. I want very much to get drunk.”
I got her the whiskey—a fifth of rye—which helped enable her to tell me about some bad moments during the turbulent year she spent with Nathan, before I came on the scene. All of which might be considered unnecessary to recount were it not for the fact that he would return to possess our lives again.
In Connecticut, somewhere on the beautiful winding arboreal highway that stretches north and south along the riverbank between New Milford and Canaan, there had been an old country inn with slanted oak floors, a sunny white bedroom with samplers on the wall, two damp panting Irish setters downstairs and the smell of applewood burning in the fireplace—and it was there, Sophie told me that night, that Nathan tried to take her life and then end his own in what has come to be known in the vernacular as a suicide pact. This happened in the fall of the year when the leaves were fiercely incandescent, a few months after their first meeting in the Brooklyn College library. Sophie said she would have remembered the terrible episode for many reasons (for example, it was simply the first time he had really even raised his voice at her since they met) but she would never be able to obliterate the chief reason: his raging insistence (again for the first time since they had been together) that she justify to his satisfaction the way in which she survived Auschwitz while “the others” (as he put it) perished.
When Sophie described this browbeating and then told the wretched tale of the ensuing events, I was of course immediately reminded of Nathan’s w
ild behavior on that recent night in the Maple Court when he bade both of us his adamantly final, unfond farewell. I was about to point out to Sophie the similarity and question her about it, but by this time—devouring a huge steaming mound of spaghetti in a little Italian restaurant she and Nathan used to frequent on Coney Island Avenue—she had become so totally absorbed in her chronicle of their life together that I hesitated, faltered helplessly, then lumpishly kept silent. I considered the whiskey. It was baffling about Sophie and her whiskey—baffling and a little overpowering. For one thing, she had the capacity of a Polish hussar; it was astounding to see this poised, lovely and usually painfully correct creature put away the booze; fully a quarter of the fifth of Seagram’s I had bought her had vanished by the time we took a taxi to the restaurant. (She also insisted on transporting the bottle, upon which, it is important to add, I committed no incursions, sticking, as always, to beer.) I attributed this new indulgence to grief over Nathan’s abandonment.
Even so, I was more struck by the manner of Sophie’s drinking than the amount. For the fact is that these powerful eighty-six-proof spirits diluted with only a little water had no apparent disorganizing effect on Sophie’s tongue or thought processes at all. At least this was true when I first witnessed her new-found diversion. Utterly composed, each yellow lock in place, she could slosh it down with the toothy glee of a barmaid out of Hogarth. I wondered if she was not protected by some genetic or cultural adaptation to alcohol which Slavic people seem to share with the Celts. Save for a tender rosiness, there were only two ways in which Seagram’s 7 seemed to alter her expression or her manner. It did turn her into a runaway talker. It made her pour it all out. Not that she had ever held back with me when speaking about Nathan or Poland or the past. But the whiskey transformed her speech into a spillway notable for its precise, unhurried cadences. It was a kind of lubricated diction in which many of the more briery Polish-accented consonants became magically smoothed over. The other thing whiskey did to her was quite fetching. Fetching, that is, in a maddeningly frustrating way: it let loose practically all of her dammed-up reticences about sex. I squirmed with mixed discomfort and delight as she spoke of her past love life with Nathan. The words came out in a charmingly open, unabashed, tickled voice, like that of a child who has discovered pig Latin. “He said I was a wonderful piece of ass,” she announced nostalgically, and shortly after this, told me, “We used to love to fuck in front of mirrors.” God, if she only knew what manner of sugarplums danced in my head when she gave tongue to such delicious conceits.
But for the most part her mood was funereal when she spoke of Nathan, reminiscing with a persistent use of the past tense; it was as if she were speaking of someone long ago dead and buried. And when she related the story of their “suicide pact” on that weekend in the frosty Connecticut countryside, I was saddened and astonished. Even so, I do not think that my astonishment over that mournful little incident could have been exceeded by any form of surprise when, shortly before telling me about that aborted appointment with death, she revealed still another piece of dismal news.
“You know, Stingo,” she said a little hesitantly, “you know that Nathan was always taking drugs. I didn’t know if you could see this or not. Anyway, for some reason I have not been quite honest with you. I have not been able to mention it.”
Drugs, I thought, merciful God. I really found it almost impossible to believe. The up-to-date reader of this narrative has most likely assumed such a fact about Nathan already, but certainly I had not. In 1947 I was as innocent about drugs as I was about sex. (Oh, those lamblike forties and fifties!) Our present-day drug culture had not seen, that year, even the glimmerings of dawn, and my notion of addiction (if I had ever really thought of such a thing) was connected with the idea of “dope fiends”—goggleeyed madmen in strait jackets immured in backwater asylums, slavering molesters of children, zombies stalking the back streets of Chicago, comatose Chinese in their smoky dens, and so on. There was the taint about drugs of the irredeemably depraved, almost as evil as certain images of sexual intercourse—which until I was at least thirteen I visualized as a brutish act committed in secrecy upon dyed blondes by huge drunken unshaven ex-convicts with their shoes on. As for drugs, certainly I knew nothing about the types and subtle gradations of these substances. Save for opium, I do not think that I could name a single drug, and what Sophie disclosed about Nathan produced the immediate effect on me of having heard about something criminal. (That it was criminal was incidental to my moral shock.) I told her I didn’t believe it, but she assured me it was true, and when directly after this my shock merged into curiosity and I asked her what he had used, I heard for the first time the word amphetamine. “He took this stuff called Benzedrine,” she said, “also cocaine. But huge doses. Enough sometimes to make him crazy. It was easy enough for him to get this at Pfizer, at the laboratory where he was doing his work. Although, of course, it was not legal.” So that was it, I thought in wonder, that was behind those seizures of rage, of seething violence, of paranoia. How blind I had been!
Yet she was aware now, she said, that most of the time he had his habit under control. Nathan had always been high-strung, vivacious, talkative, agitated; since throughout the first five months they were together (and they were together constantly) she rarely saw him in the act of taking “the stuff,” she made only the most belated connection between drugs and what she simply thought was his somewhat frenetic but ordinary behavior. And she went on to say that during those months of the previous year his behavior—drug-induced or not—his presence in her life, his entire being, brought her the happiest days she had ever known. She realized how helpless and adrift she had been during that time when she first came to Brooklyn and to Yetta’s rooming house; trying to hold on to her reason, trying to thrust away the past from the rim of her memory, she thought she was in control of herself (after all, had not Dr. Blackstock told her that she was the most efficient secretary-receptionist he had ever known?), but in reality she was on the verge of becoming emotionally unhelmed, no more in command of her destiny than a puppy that has been hurled floundering into a turbulent pool. “Whoever it was that finger-fucked me that day in the subway made me see that,” she said. Even though she had been momentarily restored from that trauma, she knew she was on a downward slide—hurtling fatally and rapidly down—and she could hardly bear to think what might have happened to her had not Nathan (blundering like herself into the library on that momentous day, searching for an out-of-print copy of a book of short stories by Ambrose Bierce; bless Bierce! praise Bierce!) appeared like a redemptive knight from the void and restored her to life.
Life. That is what it was. He had actually given her life. He had (helped by the good offices of his brother Larry) restored her to health, causing her bloodsucking anemia to be corrected at Columbia Presbyterian, where the gifted Dr. Hatfield found a few other nutritional defects that needed straightening out. For one thing, he discovered that even after all these months she had the residual effects of scurvy. So he prescribed huge pills. Soon the ugly little skin hemorrhages, which had plagued her all over, disappeared, but even more remarkable was the change that came over her hair. Her golden hair had always been her most reassuring physical vanity, but having passed through Hades like the rest of her body, it had grown out scruffy, dull and fatigued-looking. Dr. Hatfield’s ministrations changed all that too, and it was not very long—six weeks or so—before Nathan was purring like a hungry tomcat into its luxuriance, stroking it compulsively and insisting that she should start modeling for shampoo ads.
Indeed, supervised by Nathan, the splendid apparatus of American medicine brought Sophie as close to a state of smiling fitness as could be wrought upon a person who had suffered such dreadful damage—and this included her marvelous new teeth. Her choppers, as Nathan referred to them, replaced the temporary false teeth which had been installed by the Red Cross in Sweden, and were the handiwork of still another friend and colleague of Larry’s—one of New Yor
k’s classiest practitioners of prosthodontia. Those teeth were hard to forget. They had to be the dental equivalent of Benvenuto Cellini. They were fabulous teeth, with a kind of icy, mother-of-pearl sparkle; every time she opened her mouth really wide I was reminded of Jean Harlow in smoochy close-ups, and on one or two memorably sunny days when Sophie burst into laughter those teeth lit up an entire room like a flashbulb.
So, brought back to the land of the living, she could only treasure the wonderful time she had with Nathan all through that summer and early fall. His generosity was exhaustless, and although a greed for luxury was not a component of her nature, she liked the good life and she accepted his bounty with pleasure—as much of her pleasure deriving from the delight which pure giving plainly gave to him as from the things themselves which he gave. And he gave her and shared in everything she could possibly have wanted: record albums of beautiful music, tickets to concerts, Polish books and French books and American books, divine meals in restaurants of every ethnic description all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. As with his nose for wine, Nathan had an informed palate (a reaction, he said, to a childhood surfeit of soggy kreplach and gefilte fish) and he took obvious joy in making her acquainted with New York’s incredible and manifold banquet.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 200