But Sophie halted me, saying, “Hush, Stingo. You mustn’t feel that way. Let’s go get a drink.”
Sitting on a stool at the fake-morocco bar of a hideous mirrored Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street, Sophie told me what had happened during my absence. It was bliss at first, unqualified joy. She had never known Nathan to be in such a serene and sunny mood. Much preoccupied with our coming trip south, and plainly looking forward to the wedding day, he went into a kind of prothalamic fit, taking Sophie through a weekend buying spree (including a special excursion to Manhattan, where they spent two hours at Saks Fifth Avenue) during which she wound up with a huge sapphire engagement ring, a trousseau fit for a Hollywood princess, and a wildly expensive travel wardrobe calculated to knock the eyes out of the natives of such backwater centers as Charleston, Atlanta and New Orleans. He had even thought to drop into Cartier’s, where he had bought me a watch as a best man’s gift. Subsequent evenings they spent boning up on Southern geography and Southern history, both of them tackling various travel guides and he spending long hours with Lee’s Lieutenants as preparation for the tours around the Virginia battlefields I had promised to inflict upon them.
It was all done in Nathan’s careful, intelligent, methodical way, with as much attention to the arcana of the various regions we would be traveling through (the botany of cotton and peanuts, the origins of certain local dialects such as Gullah and Cajun, even the physiology of alligators) as that of a British colonial empire builder of the Victorian era setting forth toward the sources of the Nile. He infected Sophie with his enthusiasm, imparting to her all sorts of useful and useless information about the South, which he accumulated in gobs and bits like lint; loving Nathan, she loved it all, including such worthless lore as the fact that more peaches are grown in Georgia than in any other state and that the highest point in Mississippi is eight hundred feet. He went so far as to go around to the Brooklyn College library and check out two novels by George Washington Cable. He developed an adorable drawl, which filled her with gaiety.
Why had she not been able to detect the warning signals when they began to glimmer? She had watched him carefully all this time, she was certain he had stopped taking his amphetamines. But then the day before, when they had both gone to work—she to Dr. Blackstock’s, he to his “lab”—something must have caused him to slip off the path, just what, she would never know. In any case, she was stupidly off guard and vulnerable when he put out the first signals, as he had before, and she failed to read their portent: the euphoric telephone call from Pfizer, the voice too high-pitched and excited, the announcement of incredible victories in the offing, a grandiose “breakthrough,” a majestic scientific discovery. How could she have been so dumb? Her description of Nathan’s furious eruption and the ensuing damage and debris was for me—in my frazzled state—agreeably laconic, but somehow more searing by its very brevity.
“Morty Haber was giving a party for a friend who was going off for a year to study in France. I worked late to help send out bills at the office and I had told Nathan that I would eat near the office and meet him later at the party. Nathan didn’t come until long after I got there, but I could tell when I first saw him how high he was. I almost fainted when I saw him, knowing that he’d probably been that way all day, even when I got that phone call, and that I had been too stupid to even—well, even be alarmed. At the party he behaved all right. I mean, he wasn’t... unruly or anything but I could tell so well he was on Benzedrine. He talked to some people about his new cure for polio, and my heart sort of died. I said to myself then that maybe Nathan would come down off this high and just go to sleep finally. Sometimes he would do that, you know, without getting violent. Finally Nathan and I went home, it was not too late, about twelve-thirty. It was only when we got home that he began screaming at me, building up into this great rage. Doing what he always done, you know, when he was in the middle of his worst tempête, which is to accuse me of being unfaithful to him. Of, well, screwing somebody else.”
Sophie halted for an instant, and as she raised her left hand to throw back a lock of hair I sensed something slightly unnatural in the gesture, wondered what it was, then realized that she was favoring her right arm, which hung limply at her side. It obviously was causing her pain.
“Who was he after you about this time?” I demanded. “Blackstock? Seymour Katz? Oh Christ, Sophie, if the poor guy wasn’t so wacky, I wouldn’t be able to stand this without wanting to knock his teeth out. Jesus, who does he have you cuckolding him with now?”
She shook her head violently, the bright hair tossing in an uncombed and untidy way above the forlorn, haggard face. “It don’t matter, Stingo,” she said, “just somebody.”
“Well, then what else happened?”
“He screamed and shouted at me. He took more Benzedrine—maybe cocaine too, I don’t know what exactly. Then he went out the door with this enormous slam. He shouted that he was never coming back. I lay there in the dark, I couldn’t sleep for a long time, I was so worried and scared. I thought of calling you but it was terribly late by then. Finally I couldn’t stay awake any more and went to sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but when he come back it was dawn. He come in the room like an explosion. Raving, shouting. He woke up the whole house again. He dragged me out of bed and throwed me on the floor and shouted at me. About me having sex with—well, this man, and how he would kill me and this man and himself. Oh mon Dieu, Stingo, never, never was Nathan in such a state, never! He kicked me hard finally—hard, on the arm here, and then he left. And later I left. And that was all.” Sophie fell silent.
I put my face down slowly and gently on the mahogany surface of the bar with its damp patina of cigarette ash and water rings, wanting desperately to be overtaken by coma or some other form of beneficent unconsciousness. Then I raised my head and looked at Sophie, saying, “Sophie, I don’t want to say this. But Nathan simply must be put away. He’s dangerous. He has to be confined.” I heard gurgle up in my voice a sob, vaguely ludicrous. “Forever.”
With a trembling hand she signaled to the bartender and asked for a double whiskey on ice. I felt I could not dissuade her, even though her speech already had a glutinous, slurred quality. After the drink came she took a hefty gulp and then, turning to me, said, “There is something else I didn’t tell you. About when he come back at dawn.”
“What?” I said.
“He had a gun. A pistol.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit,” I heard myself murmur, a cracked record. “Shit, shit, shit, shit...”
“He said he was going to use it. He pointed it at my head. But he didn’t use it.”
I made a whispered, not entirely blasphemous invocation, “Jesus Christ, have mercy.”
But we could not just sit there bleeding to death with these gaping wounds. After a long silence I decided on a course of action. I would go with Sophie to the Pink Palace and help her pack up. She would leave the house immediately, taking a room for that night, at least, in the St. George Hotel, which was not far away from her office. Meanwhile, throughout all this, I would somehow find the means to get in touch with Larry in Toronto, telling him of the extreme danger of the situation and urging him to come back at all costs. Then, with Sophie safely in her temporary seclusion, I would do my damnedest to find Nathan and somehow deal with him—though this prospect filled my stomach with dread like a huge, sick football. I was so unstrung that even as I sat there I came close to regurgitating my single beer. “Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”
At Mrs. Zimmerman’s I paid that faithful mole Morris Fink fifty cents to help us cope with Sophie’s baggage. She was sobbing and, I could see, rather drunk as she tramped about her room stuffing clothes and cosmetics and jewelry into a large suitcase.
“My beautiful suits from Saks,” she mumbled. “Oh, what should I do with them?”
“Take them with you, for Christ’s sake,” I said impatiently, heaving her many pairs of shoes into another bag. “Forget protocol a
t a time like this. You’ve got to hurry. Nathan might be coming back.”
“And my lovely wedding dress? What shall I do with it?”
“Take it, too! If you can’t wear it, maybe you can hock it.”
“Hock?” she said.
“Pawn.”
I had not meant to be cruel, but my words caused Sophie to drop a silk slip to the floor and then raise her hands to her face, and bawl loudly, and shed helpless, glistening tears. Morris looked on morosely as I held her for a moment and uttered futile soothing sounds. It was dark outside and the roar of a truck horn along a nearby street made me jump, shredding my nerve endings like some evil hacksaw. To the general hubbub was added now the monstrous jangle of the telephone in the hallway, and I think I must have stifled a groan, or perhaps a scream. I became even further unstrung when Morris, having silenced the Gorgon by answering it, bellowed out the news that the call was for me.
It was Nathan. It was Nathan, all right. Plainly, unmistakably, unequivocally it was Nathan. Then why for an instant did my mind play an odd trick on me, so that I thought it was Jack Brown calling up from Rockland County to check on the situation? It was because of the Southern accent, that perfectly modulated mimicry which made me believe that the possessor of such a voice had to be one teethed on fatback and grits. It was as Southern as verbena or foot-washing Baptists or hound dogs or John C. Calhoun, and I think I even smiled when I heard it say, “What’s cookin’, sugah? How’s your hammer hangin’?”
“Nathan!” I exclaimed with contrived heartiness. “How are you? Where are you? God, it’s good to hear from you!”
“We still gonna take that trip down South? You and me an’ ol’ Sophie? Gonna do the Dixie tour?”
I knew that I had to humor him in some way, make small talk while trying at the same time to discover his whereabouts—a subtle matter—so I replied instantly, “You’re damn right we’re going to make that trip, Nathan. Sophie and I were just talking it over. God, those are sensational clothes you bought her! Where are you now, old pal? I’d love to come and see you. I want to tell you about this little side trip I’ve got planned—”
The voice broke in with its ingratiating molasses pokiness and warmth, still an uncanny replica of the speech of my Carolina forebears, lilting, lulling: “I’m sho’ lookin’ forward to that trip with you an’ Miz Sophie. We gonna have the time of our lives, ain’t we, ol’ buddy?”
“It’s going to be the best trip ever—” I began.
“We’ll have a lot of free time, too, won’t we?” he said.
“Sure, we’ll have a lot of free time,” I replied, not knowing quite what he meant. “All the time in the world, to do anything we want. It’s still warm in October down there. Swim. Fish. Sail a boat on Mobile Bay.”
“That’s what I want,” he drawled, “lots of free time. What I mean is, three people, they travel around a lot together, well, even when they are the best of friends, it might be a little sticky bein’ together every single minute. So I’d have free time to go off by myself every now an’ then, wouldn’t I? Just for an hour or two, maybe, down in Birmingham or Baton Rouge or someplace like that.” He paused and I heard a rich melodious chuckle. “An’ that would give you free time too, wouldn’t it? You might even have enough free time to get you a little nooky. A growin’ Southern boy’s got to have his poontang, don’t he?”
I began to laugh a trifle nervously, struck by the fact that in this weird conversation with its desperate undertone, at least on my part, we should already have foundered on the shoals of sex. But I willingly rose to Nathan’s bait, quite unaware of the savage hook he had fashioned for my precipitate capture. “Well, Nathan,” I said, “I do expect that here and there I’ll run into some good, ready stuff. Southern girls,” I added, thinking grimly of Mary Alice Grimball, “are tough to penetrate, if you’ll excuse the phrase, but once they decide to put out, they’re awfully sweet in the sack—”
“No, buddy,” he put in suddenly, “I don’t mean Southern nooky! What I mean is Polack nooky! What I mean is that when ol’ Nathan goes off to see Mr. Jeff Davis’s White House or the ol’ plantation where Scarlett O’Hara whupped all those niggers with her ridin’ crop—why, there’s ol’ Stingo back at the Green Magnolia Motel, and guess what he’s doin’? Just guess! Guess what ol’ Stingo’s up to with his best friend’s wife! Why, Stingo and her are in bed and he has actually mounted that tender willing little Polish piece an’ they jus’ fuckin’ their fool heads off! Hee hee!”
As he said these words I was aware that Sophie had drawn near, hovering at my elbow, murmuring something I could not comprehend—the incomprehensibility being partly due to the blood pounding at a hot gallop in my ears and perhaps also to the fact that, distracted and horrified, I could pay little attention to anything save for the incredible jellylike weakness in my knees and my fingers, which had begun to twitch out of control. “Nathan!” I said in a choked voice. “Good God—”
And then his voice, transmuted back into what I had always conceived as Educated High Brooklyn, became a snarl of such ferocity that even the myriad intervening and humming electronic synapses could not filter out the force of its crazed but human rage. “You unspeakable creep! You wretched swine! God damn you to hell forever for betraying me behind my back, you whom I trusted like the best friend I ever had! And that shit-eating grin of yours day after day cool as a cucumber, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it, when you gave me a piece of your manuscript to read—‘ah gee, Nathan, thank you so much—’ when not fifteen minutes earlier you’d been humping away in bed with the woman I was going to marry, I say was going to, past tense, because I’d burn in hell before I’d marry a two-timing Polack who’d spread her legs for a sneaky Southern shitass betraying me like...”
I removed the receiver from my ear and turned to Sophie, who, with mouth agape, had clearly divined what it was that Nathan had been raging about. “Oh God, Stingo,” I heard her whisper, “I didn’t want you to know that he kept saying it was you that I was...”
I listened again, in impotence and anguish: “I’m coming to get you both.” Then there was a moment’s silence, resonant, baffling. And I heard a metallic click. But I realized the line was not dead.
“Nathan,” I said. “Please! Where are you?”
“Not far away, old pal. In fact, I’m right around the corner. And I’m coming to get you treacherous scum. And then you know what I’m going to do? Do you know what I’m going to do to you two deceitful, unspeakable pigs? Listen—”
There was an explosion in my ear. Too diminished by the distance or by whatever in a phone mercifully deamplifies noise and prevents it from destroying human hearing, the impact of the gunshot stunned rather than hurt me yet nonetheless left a prolonged and desolate buzzing against my eardrum like the swarming of a thousand bees. I will never know whether Nathan fired that shot into the very mouth of the telephone he was holding, or into the air, or against some forlorn, anonymous wall, but it sounded close enough for him to be, as he had said, right around the corner, and I dropped the receiver in panic and, turning, clutched for Sophie’s hand. I had not heard a shot fired since the war, and I’m almost certain that I thought I would never hear another shot again. I pity my blind innocence. Now, after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever there has occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Nathan—the poor lunatic whom I loved, high on drugs and with a smoking barrel in some nameless room or phone booth—and his image has always seemed to foreshadow these wretched unending years of madness, illusion, error, dream and strife. But at that moment I felt only unutterable fear. I looked at Sophie, and she looked at me, and we fled.
15
THE NEXT MORNING the Pennsylvania train that Sophie and I were riding to Washington, D.C., on our way down to Virginia, suffered a power failure and stalled on the trestle opposite the Wheatena factory in Rahway, New Jersey. During this interruption in our trip—
a stop which lasted only fifteen minutes or so—I subsided into a remarkable tranquillity and found myself taking hopeful stock of the future. It still amazes me that I was able to maintain this calm, this almost elegant repose, after our headlong escape from Nathan and the fretful, sleepless night Sophie and I spent in the bowels of Penn Station. My eyes were gritty with fatigue and a part of my mind still dwelt achingly on the catastrophe we had barely avoided. As time had worn on that night it seemed more and more probable to both Sophie and me that Nathan had not been in our vicinity when he made that telephone call; nonetheless his merciless threat had sent us running madly from the Pink Palace with only one large suitcase each to get us down to the farm in Southampton County. We agreed that we would worry about the rest of our belongings later. From that moment on we had both been possessed—and in a sense united—by a single-minded and terrible urge: to flee Nathan and get as far away from him as we could.
Even so, the spell of enervated composure which finally came over me on the train would scarcely have been possible had it not been for the first of two telephone calls I was finally able to complete from the station. This was to Larry, who understood immediately the desperate nature of his brother’s crisis and told me that he would leave Toronto without delay and come down and cope with Nathan in the best way he could. We wished each other luck and said we would keep in touch. So at least I felt I had discharged some final responsibility toward Nathan and had not exactly abandoned him in my scramble to get away; after all, I had been running for my life. The other call was to my father; he of course welcomed with joy my announcement that Sophie and I were on our way south. “You’ve made a splendid decision!” I heard him shout over the distant miles, with obvious emotion. “Leaving that no-good world!”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 219