Sophie's Choice (40 page)

Chapter 12

In small hours of that morning, after her long soliloquy, I had to put Sophie into bed--pour her into bed, as we used to say in those days. I was amazed that after all the booze she had guzzled she could remain so coherent throughout the evening; but by the time the bar closed at four o'clock I saw that she was pretty well smashed. I splurged and we took a taxi the mile or so back to the Pink Palace; on the way she dozed heavily against my shoulder. I maneuvered her up the stairs, pushing at her waist from behind, and her legs wobbled dangerously. She uttered only the smallest of sighs when I eased her down into her bed, fully clothed, and watched her pass instantly away into a pale coma. I was drunk and exhausted myself. I threw a coverlet over Sophie. Then I went downstairs to my own room and after undressing slithered between the sheets, falling into the blank slumber of a cretin. I woke up with the late-morning sunlight ablaze in my face, and the sound in my ears of birds squabbling among the maples and sycamores, and the distant froggy noise of boys' adolescent voices all refracted through an aching skull and the pulsating consciousness of the worst hangover I had experienced in a year or two. Needless to say, beer too can undermine body and soul, if downed in enough quantity. I succumbed to an abrupt and terrible magnification of all sensations: the nap of the sheet beneath my naked back felt like cornfield stubble, the chitter of a sparrow outside seemed the squawk of a pterodactyl, a truck's wheel striking a pothole on the street made a clamor like the slamming of the gates of hell. All my ganglia were quivering. Another thing: I sweltered with lust, helpless in the throes of an alcohol-induced concupiscence known, at least in that day, by the name of "the hangover hots." Normally the prey of an ever-unfulfilled randiness--as the reader by now must be aware--I became, during these mercifully infrequent seizures of morning-after engorgement, a godforsaken organism in absolute thrall to the genital urge, capable of defiling a five-year-old of either sex, ready for coition with almost any vertebrate having a pulse and warm blood. Nor could loutish selfgratification quell this imperious, feverish desire. Desire like this was too overwhelming, sprang from sources too demandingly procreative to be satisfied by some handy makeshift. I do not think it hyperbolic to describe this derangement (for such it really was) as primordial: "I would have fucked mud" was the Marine Corps description for such a mania. But suddenly with a manful zeal that pleased me I bestirred myself and leaped out of bed, thinking of Jones Beach and Sophie in the room above me. I stuck my head out into the hallway and called upstairs. I heard the faint strains of something of Bach. Sophie's response from behind her door, while indistinct, sounded chipper enough, and I retreated and splashed about in my morning purification. It was a Saturday. The night before, in what seemed a rush of (perhaps inebriate) affection toward me, Sophie had promised to spend the entire weekend at the house before moving off to her new place near Fort Greene Park. She also agreed enthusiastically to an outing with me to Jones Beach. I had never been there but I knew it to be an oceanside strand far less congested than Coney Island. Now while I soaped myself beneath the tepid trickle in the pink mildewed upright metal coffin which served as my shower stall, I began to scheme in earnest about Sophie and the immediate future. I was more than ever aware of the tragicomic nature of my passion for Sophie. On the one hand I possessed enough of a sense of humor to be aware of the ludicrousness of the contortions and writhings her very existence inflicted upon me. I had read romantic literature in sufficient bulk to know that my wretched frustrated moonings could in their collective despair almost laughably exemplify the word "lovelorn." Yet it was only half a joke, really. Because the anxiety and pain which this one-way love caused me was as cruel as the discovery that I had acquired some terminal disease. The only cure for this disease was her love in return--and such a genuine love seemed as remote as a cure for cancer. At times (and this moment was one) I was able actually to curse her out loud-- "Bitch, Sophie!"--for I almost would have preferred her scorn and hatred to this proximate love which could be called affection or fondness but never love itself. My mind still echoed with her outpouring of the past night, with its awful vision of Nathan and its brutality and despairing tenderness and perverse eroticism and its stink of death. "God damn you, Sophie!" I said half aloud, slowly enunciating the words while I lathered my crotch. "Nathan's out of your life now, gone for good. That death-force is gone, finished, kaput! So now love me, Sophie. Love me. Love me! Love life!" Drying myself off, I considered in a businesslike way the possible practical objections Sophie might have to me as a suitor, provided of course that I could speak my way through those emotional walls and somehow gain her love. They were rather troublesome, her potential complaints. I was, of course, years younger (and a postpubescent pimple blossoming next to my nose, glimpsed in the mirror just then, underscored the fact), but this was a trifling matter with many historical precedents to make it right, or at least acceptable. Then, too, I was not nearly so solvent financially as Nathan had been. Although she could scarcely be called avaricious, Sophie loved the fat American life; self-denial was not among her most obvious qualities, and I wondered with a soft but audible groan how on earth I'd be able to provide for the two of us. And at that moment, as if in some odd reflexive response to the thought, I reached in and took my Johnson & Johnson bank down out of its hiding place in the medicine chest. And to my absolute horror I saw that every last dollar had vanished from the little box. I was wiped out! Of the tumult of black emotions that sweeps through one after a robbery--chagrin, despair, rage, hatred of the human race--the one that usually comes last is also one of the most poisonous: suspicion. I could not help pointing an inner finger of accusation at Morris Fink, who prowled around the premises and had access to my room, and the sleaziness I felt at my unproved suspicion was somehow compounded by the fact that I had begun to feel a remote liking for the molelike janitor. Fink had done me one or two small favors, which only complicated the mistrust I felt for him now. And of course I could not voice my suspicion even to Sophie, who received the news of the depredation done me with affecting sympathy. "Oh, Stingo, no! Poor Stingo! Why?" She clambered out of bed, where, propped against the pillows, she had been reading a French translation of The Sun Also Rises. "Stingo! Who could have done such a thing to you?" In a flowered silk robe she threw herself impulsively around me. My turmoil was so intense that I could make no response even to the enjoyable pressure of her breasts. "Stingo! Robbed? How awful!" I felt my lips quiver, I was despicably close to real tears. "Gone!" I said. "All gone! Three hundred and some dollars, all I had between myself and the poorhouse! How in God's name will I ever get my book written now? Every penny I had on earth, except-" As an afterthought I grabbed my wallet and opened it. "Except for forty dollars-forty dollars that I was lucky enough to take with me when we went out last night. Oh, Sophie, this is complete disaster!" Half consciously I heard myself imitating Nathan: "Oy, have I got tsuris!" Sophie had that mysterious knack of being able to calm wild passions, even those of Nathan when he was not uncontrollably out of his mind. A strange sorcery which I could never quite pin down, it had to do both with her Europeanness and something that was obscurely, seductively maternal. "Shush!" she would say in a certain tone of sham reproof, and a man would simply wilt and end up grinning. While my desolation at this point precluded any such thing as a grin, Sophie did quite easily manage to cool my frenzy. "Stingo," she said, playing with the shoulders of my shirt, "such a thing is terrible! But you mustn't act like the atomic bomb has fallen on you. Such a big baby, you look like you're going to cry. What's three hundred dollars? Soon when you're a great writer you'll be making three hundred dollars a week! Now it is bad, this loss, mais, chéri, ce n'est pas tragique, there is nothing you can do about it, so you must forget it all for this moment and come on let us go to Jones Beach like we said! Allons-y!" Her words helped considerably and I quickly settled down. As devastating as my loss was, I realized, as she did, that there was almost nothing I could do to change things, so I resolved to relax and at least try to enjoy the rest of the weekend with Sophie. There would be time enough to confront the monstrous future come Monday. I began to look forward to our outing at the beach with the escapist euphoria of a tax dodger seeking to lose his past in Rio de Janeiro. Rather surprised at my own priggish objections, I tried to forbid Sophie from stuffing the half-full bottle of whiskey into her beach bag. But she gaily insisted, saying "hair of the dog," which was something I was sure she had picked up from Nathan. "You're not the only one with a hangover, Stingo," she added. Was it at that moment that I first became seriously concerned about her drinking? I think that previously I had regarded this thirst of Sophie's as a temporary aberration, a retreat into momentary solace which was due more to Nathan's abandonment of her than anything else. Now I was by no means so certain; doubt and worry plucked at me as we swayed together in the car of a rackety subway train. We got off soon. The bus itself left for Jones Beach from a dingy terminal on Nostrand Avenue, a place swarming with unruly Brooklynites jostling for position to get to the sun. On our bus Sophie and I were the last to climb aboard; standing in a sepulchral tunnel, the vehicle was malodorous, nearly pitch-black and utterly silent although packed with a dim and shifting mass of human bodies. The effect of silence was sinister, baffling--surely, I thought while we edged our way toward the rear, such a throng should give up a vagrant mumble, a sigh, some evidence of life--until the moment we found our tattered and rumpsprung seats. Just then the bus lurched forward into sunlight, and I was able to discern our fellow passengers. They were all children, little Jews in their late childhood and early teens, and all of them were deafmutes. Or at least I assumed they were Jews, since one of the kids held a big hand-lettered placard which read: BETH ISRAEL SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF. Two motherly, bosomy women roamed the aisle with cheery smiles, flicking their fingers in sign language as if conducting a voiceless choir. Here and there a child, beaming, would flick back winglike fluttering hands. I felt myself shudder within the bottomless drainpipe of my hangover. I had an awful sensation of doom. My jangled nerves together with the sight of these incapacitated angels and the smell of faulty combustion leaking up from the engine--all merged into a phantasm of aching anxiety. Nor was my panic alleviated by Sophie's voice at my side and the bitter flavor of what she had to say. She had begun to take little nips from the bottle and had become incredibly garrulous. But I was really astounded at the words she spoke about Nathan, the blunt rancor in her voice. I could scarcely believe this new tone, and blamed it on the whiskey. Over the roar of the engine and in a bluish haze of hydrocarbons I listened to her in numb discomfort, praying for the purity of the beach. "Last night," she said, "last night, Stingo, after I told you about what happened in Connecticut, I realized something for the first time. I realized I was glad that Nathan left me like he done. Really and truly glad, I mean. I was so completely dependent on him, you see, and that was not a healthy thing. I couldn't move without him. I couldn't make a simple little décision without thinking of Nathan first. Oh, I know I had this debt to him, he done so much for me--I know that--but it was sick of me to be just this little kitten for him to fondle. To fuck and fondle-" "But you said he was on drugs," I interrupted. I felt an odd need to say something in his defense. "I mean, isn't it true that he was so awful to you only when he was high on these drugs-" "Drugs!" she said sharply, cutting me off. "Yes, he was on drugs, but does that have to be an excuse, for God's sake? Always an excuse? I'm so tired of people that always says that we must pity a man, he is under the influence of drugs and so that excuses his behavior. Fuck that noise, Stingo!" she exclaimed in a perfect Nathanism. "He almost killed me. He beat me! He hurt me! Why should I continue to love a man like that? Do you realize that he done something to me that I didn't tell you about last night? He broke one of my ribs when he kicked me. One of my ribs! He had to take me to a doctor--not Larry, thank God--he had to take me to a doctor and I had x-rays and I had to wear all this tape for six weeks. And we had to invent a story for this doctor--that I slipped up and fell and crack my rib on the pavement. Oh, Stingo, I'm glad I'm rid of such a man! Such a cruel person, so... so malhonnête. I'm happy to leave him," she proclaimed, wiping a tiny smear of moisture from her lip, "I'm really ecstatic, if you wish to know the truth. I don't need Nathan no more. I'm still young, I have a nice job, I'm sexy, I can find another man easy. Ha! Maybe I'll marry Seymour Katz! Wouldn't Nathan be surprised if I married this chiropractor he was falsely accusing me of having a relationship? And his friends! Nathan's friends!" I turned to look at her. There was a glint of fury in her eyes; her voice rose shrilly and I wanted to hush her up, until I realized that there was no one but myself to listen. "I really couldn't stand his friends. Oh, I was very fond of his brother. Larry. I will miss Larry and I liked very much Morty Haber. But all these other friends. These Jews with their psychoanalysis, always picking their little sores, worrying about their little brilliant brains and their analysts and everything. You heard them, Stingo. You know what I mean. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous? 'My analyst this, my analyst that...' It is so disgusting, you would think they had suffered something, these comfortable American Jewish people with their Doctor So-and-So they pay many dollars an hour to examine their miserable little Jewish souls! Aaa-h!" A tremor ran through her body and she turned away. Something about Sophie's fury and bitterness, combined with her drinking--all of these so new to me--aggravated my
jitters until the feeling became almost insupportable. While she babbled on I realized dimly that I had undergone unfortunate bodily changes: I had severe heartburn, I was sweating like a coal stoker, a wayward neurasthenic tumescence had caused my beloved waif of a cock to stiffen bone-rigid against my pants leg. And our conveyance had been rented by the devil. Heaving and rocking its way through the bungalow barrens of Queens and Nassau, clashing gears, exuding fumes, the decrepit bus seemed likely to imprison us forever. As in a trance, I listened to Sophie's voice soar like an aria over the children's speechless, antic mummery. And I wish I had been better prepared emotionally to accept the burden of her message. "Jews!" she exclaimed. "It's really true, in the end they are all exactly alike sous la peau, under the skin, you understand. My father was really right when he said that he had never known a Jew who could give something in a free way, without asking for something in return. A quid pro quo, as he would say. And oh, Nathan--what an example Nathan was of that! Okay, so he helped me a lot, make me well, but so what? Do you think he done that out of love, out of kindness? No, Stingo, he done such a thing only so he could use me, have me, fuck me, beat me, have some object to possess! That's all, some object. Oh, it was so very Jewish of Nathan to do that--he wasn't giving me his love, he was buying me with it, like all Jews. No wonder the Jews were so hated in Europe, thinking they could get anything they wished just by paying a little money, a little Geld. Even love they think they can buy!" She clutched me by the sleeve and the odor of rye whiskey reached me through the gasoline fumes. "Jews! God, how I hate them! Oh, the lies I have told you, Stingo. Everything I told you about Cracow was a lie. All my childhood, all my life I really hated Jews. They deserved it, this hate. I hate them, dirty Jewish cochons!" "Oh, please, Sophie, please," I retorted. I knew she was distraught, knew she couldn't really mean any of this, knew also that with Nathan she found his Jewishness simply an easier target than Nathan himself, for whom obviously she was still daft with love. This nasty discharge vexed me, even though I thought I understood its source. Nonetheless, the power of suggestion is mighty, her savage bile touched in me some atavistic susceptibility, and as the bus rocked its way out onto the asphalt parking lot at Jones Beach, I found myself brooding blackly on my recent robbery. And Morris Fink. Fink! That fucking little hebe, I thought, trying vainly to belch. The little deaf-mutes debarked as we did, clambering down around us, stepping on our toes, hemming us in as they filled the air with their butterfly gesticulations. We could not seem to dislodge them; they formed an eerie, soundless retinue in our march across the beach. The sky that had been so bright in Brooklyn had become overcast; the horizon was leaden, the surf swelled with sluggish oily waves. Only a few bathers dotted the beach; the air was muggy and breathless. I felt almost unbearably anxious and depressed, yet my nerves were quiveringly aflame. My ears echoed with a delirious, inconsolable passage from the St. Matthew Passion which had wept out of Sophie's radio earlier that morning, and for no special reason yet in fitting antiphony I recalled some seventeenth-century lines I had read not long before: "... since Death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die..." I perspired in the humid cocoon of my angst, worrying about my theft and my present near-destitution, worrying about my novel and how I would ever get it finished, worrying whether or not I should press charges against Morris Fink. As if responding to some soundless signal, the deaf-mute children suddenly dispersed and scattered like little shore birds, were gone. Sophie and I trudged along the water's edge beneath a sky as gray as moleskin, the two of us alone. "Nathan had everything that is bad in Jews," Sophie said, "nothing of the little bit that's good." "What's good about Jews at all?" I heard myself say loudly, querulously. "It was that Jew Morris Fink that stole the money from my medicine cabinet. I'm certain! Money-mad, money-greedy Jewish bastard!" Two anti-Semites, on a summer outing. An hour later I calculated that Sophie had sloshed down perhaps one or two ounces less than half a pint of whiskey. She was putting it away like some female riveter at a Polish bar in Gary, Indiana. Yet there was no discernible lapse in coordination or locomotion. Only her tongue had slipped its tether (making her speech not slurred but simply runaway, sometimes breakneck) and as on the previous night, I listened and watched in wonder while the powerful solvent of those grain neutral spirits set loose her inhibitions. Among other things, the loss of Nathan seemed to have an effect on her that was perversely erotic, causing her to brood on bygone amour. "Before I was sent to the camp," she said, "I had a lover in Warsaw. He was younger than me by a few years. He wasn't even twenty. His name was Jozef. I never spoke of him to Nathan, I don't know why." She paused, biting her lip, then said, "Yes, I do. Because I knew that Nathan was so jealous, so crazy jealous that he would hate me and punish me for having a lover even in the past. That's how jealous Nathan could be, so I didn't ever say a word to him about Jozef. Imagine, hating somebody in the past who had been a lover! And was dead." "Dead?" I said. "How did he die?" But she seemed not to hear. She rolled over on our blanket. In her canvas beach bag she had--to my great surprise and greater delight-transported four cans of beer. I was not even annoyed that she had forgotten to give them to me sooner. They were, of course, by now quite warm but I could not have cared less (I, too, badly needed that dog's hair), and she opened the third of these, dripping foam, and handed it to me. She had brought along some nondescript-looking sandwiches too, but these lay uneaten. Deliciously isolated, we lay in a kind of hidden cul-de-sac between two high dunes lightly strewn with coarse grass. From here the sea--listlessly washing against the sand and a curious unsightly gray-green, like engine oil-was plainly visible, but we ourselves could not be seen except by the gulls that wavered overhead on the windless air. The humidity hovered around us in an almost palpable mist, the sun's pale disc hung behind gray clouds that shifted and churned in slow motion. In a certain way it was very melancholy, this seascape, and I should not have wanted for us to stay there long, but the blessed Schlitz had stilled at least momentarily my earlier seizure of dread. Only my horniness remained, aggravated by Sophie next to me in her white Lastex bathing suit and the total seclusion of our sandy nook, the clandestine nature of which made me a little feverish. I was still also so maddeningly and helplessly priapic--my first such fit since the doomed night with Leslie Lapidus--that the image I entertained of self-castration was, for a fleeting moment, not absolutely frivolous. For the sake of modesty I lay determinedly belly-downward in my dumb-looking puke-green Marine Corps-issue swim trunks, playing as usual my patient confessor's role. And again as my antennae went out, they relayed back the information that there was no evasion, nothing equivocal in what she was trying to say. "But there was another reason I would not have told Nathan about Jozef," she went on. "I wouldn't have told him even if he was not going to be jealous." "What do you mean?" I said. "I mean he would not have believed anything about Jozef-anything at all. It had to do with Jews again." "Sophie, I don't understand." "Oh, it's so complicated." "Try to explain." "Also, it had to do with the lies I had already told Nathan about my father," she said. "I was getting in--what is the expression?-over my head." I took a deep breath. "Look, Sophie, you're confusing me. Straighten me out. Please." "Okay. Look, Stingo. Nathan would not believe anything good about Polish people when it come to the Jews. I couldn't convince him that there were decent Polish people who had risked their lives to save Jews. My father-" She broke off for an instant; there was a catch in the back of her throat, then a long hesitation before she said, "My father. Oh, goddamnit, I've already told you--I lied to Nathan about him just like I lied to you. But I finally told you the truth, you see, I just couldn't have told Nathan because... I couldn't have told him because... because I was a coward. I had come to see that my father was so big a monster that I had to hide the truth about him, even though what he was and what he done was not my fault. Was not anything I should feel any blame about." Again she hesitated. "It was so frustrating. I lied about my father and Nathan refused to believe it. After that I knew I would never be able to tell him about Jozef. Who was good and brave. And that would have been the truth. I remember this quotation that Nathan had which always sounded so American. 'You win one and you lose one.' But I couldn't win anything." "What about Jozef?" I persisted, a little impatiently. "We lived in this building in Warsaw that was bombed but fixed up. You could live in it. But only barely. It was a terrible place. You can't imagine how terrible Warsaw was then during the occupation. So little food, often just a little water, and in the winter it was so cold. I worked in a factory that made tar paper. I worked ten, eleven hours a day. The tar paper made my hands bleed. They bled all the time. I didn't work for money, really, but to keep a work card. A work card would keep me from being sent off to Germany to a camp for slave labor. I lived in a tiny little place on the fourth floor of the building and Jozef lived with his half sister downstairs. His half sister was named Wanda, she was a little over my age. They were both involved with the underground, the Home Army it would be called in English. I wish I could describe Jozef good but I can't, don't have the words. I was fond of him so very much. But there was no true romance, really. He was small, muscular, very intense and nervous. He was pretty dark for a Pole. Strange, we didn't make love together very often. Though we slept in the same bed. He said he have to preserve his energies for the fight going on. He wasn't very educated, you know, in a formal way. He was like me--the war destroyed our education chances. But he had read a lot, he was very bright. He wasn't even a Communist, he was an anarchist. He worshipped the memory of Bakunin and was a complete atheist, which was a little strange too, because at that time I was still a very devout Catholic girl and I sometimes wondered how I could fall in love with this young man who don't believe in God. But we made this agreement not ever to talk about religion, and so we didn't. "Jozef was a murder-" She paused, then reconstructed the thought and said, "Killer. He was a killer. That was what he done for the underground. He killed Polish people that was betraying Jews, betraying where Jews were hiding. There were Jews hiding out all over Warsaw, not ghetto Jews, naturellement, but better-class Jews-assimilés, many intellectuals. There were many Polish people who would betray the Jews to the Nazis, sometimes for a price, sometimes for nothing. Jozef was one of those which the underground had to kill those who were betraying. He would strangle them with the wire from a piano. He would try to get to know them in some way and then strangle them. Each time he killed someone he would vomit. He killed over six or seven people. Jozef and Wanda and I had a friend in the next building that we were all very fond of--a beautiful girl named Irena, about thirty-five, so beautiful. She had been a teacher before the war. Strange, she taught American literature and I remember she had this expertise in a poet named Hart Crane. Do you know of him, Stingo? She worked for the underground too; I mean, so we thought--because after a while we learned secretly that she was a double agent and was also betraying many Jews. So Jozef had to kill her. Even though he had liked her so much. He strangled her with the piano wire one night late and all the next day he just stayed in my room looking out of the window into space, not saying a word." Sophie fell silent. I eased my face down against the sand, and thinking of Hart Crane, felt myself shiver to a gull's cry, the rhythmic wash and heave of sullen waves. And you beside me, blessèd now while sirens sing to us, stealthily weave us into day ... "How did he die?" I said again. "After he killed Irena the Nazis found out about him. This was about a week later. The Nazis had these huge Ukrainians who done their killing. They came one afternoon when I was out and cut Jozef's throat. When I arrived Wanda had already found him. He was bleeding to death on the stairs..." Minutes passed before either of us spoke. Every word she said had been, I knew, absolutely true, and I was swept with desolation. It was a feeling deeply involved in a bad conscience, and although a logical part of my mind reasoned that I must not blame myself for cosmic events which had dealt with me in one way and with Jozef in another, I could not help but view my own recent career with repugnance. What had old Stingo been up to while Jozef (and Sophie and Wanda) had been writhing in Warsaw's unspeakable Gehenna? Listening to Glenn Miller, swilling beer, horsing around in bars, whacking off. God, what an iniquitous world! Suddenly, after the nearly interminable silence, with my face still downward in the sand, I felt Sophie's fingers reach up into my trunks and lightly stroke that spectacularly sensitive epidermal zone down deep where thigh and buttock intersect, a scant centimeter from my balls. It was a sensation at once surprising and unabashedly erotic; I heard an involuntary gurgle rise up from the back of my throat. The fingers went away. "Stingo, let's take our clothes off," I thought I heard her say. "What did you say?" I replied dully. "Let's take our things off. Let's be naked." Reader, imagine something for a moment. Imagine that you have lived for an indeterminate but longish time with the well-founded suspicion that you are suffering from some fatal disease. One morning the telephone rings and it is the doctor saying this: "You have nothing to worry about, it was all a false alarm." Or imagine this. There have been inflicted upon you severe financial reverses, bringing you so close to penury and ruin that you have considered a way out in self-destruction. Again it's the blessed telephone, with the message that you have won half a million dollars in the state lottery. I am not exaggerating (it may be recalled that I mentioned once that I had never yet really