Sophie's Choice (16 page)

ashine with sweat--that afternoon remains in memory a gauzy but pleasure-charged extravaganza. There were cans of beer from a boardwalk bar and of course this helped perpetuate my euphoria; even when Sophie and Nathan told me goodby--Sophie looking wan and unhappy and saying she felt a little sick--and abruptly left, I kept afloat on a high cloud of elation. (I recall, however, that their departure caused, for a moment, an uneasy silence in the group on the sand, a silence broken by someone's remark: "Did you see that number on her arm, that tattoo?") After another half-hour the psychoanalytical talk palled on me desperately, and alcohol and randiness emboldened me to ask Leslie if she'd stroll with me someplace where we could chat and be alone. She agreed, since it had clouded up a little anyway, and we ended up at a boardwalk café whereLeslie drank 7-Up and I helped swell the flood of my raging ardor with can after can of Budweiser. But let a few more of my feverish notes continue that afternoon's operetta: Leslie and I are in the bar of a restaurant called Victor's and I am getting a little drunk. I have never felt such sexual electricity in my life. This Jewish dryad has more sensuality in one of her expressive thumbs than all the locked-up virgins I ever knew in Va. & N. C. put together. Also, she is exceedingly bright, reinforcing Henry Miller's observation somewhere that sex is all in the head, i. e., dumb girls, dumb screwing. Our conversation ebbs and flows in majestic waves like the sea--Hart Crane, sex, Thomas Hardy, sex, Flaubert, sex, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, sex, Huckleberry Finn, sex. I have turned on her the pure flame of my intellect. Manifestly if we were not in a public place I would have her right this minute in the sack. Over the table I hold her hand, which is moist, as if with the pure essence of desire. She speaks rather rapidly in what I have learned to detect is a higher-class Brooklyn accent, more like that used in Manhattan. She has charming facial gestures, nicely interrupted by many grins. Adorable! But what really gets me is that within the lazy space of an hour I hear her say at various moments words I have never in my life heard spoken by a female. Nor do they really sound dirty, once I am used to them. These include such words as "prick," "fuck" and "cocksucking." Also, she says during that same time such phrases as "go down on him," "jerking himself off" (something having to do with Thoreau), "gave him a blowjob," "muff-diver," "swallowed his sperm" (Melville) (Melville?). She does most of the talking though I do my part and am able with a kind of studied unconcern to utter "my throbbing cock" once, aware even as I say it, incredibly excited, that it is the first so-called hard-core obscenity I have ever spoken in a woman's presence. When we leave Victor's I am nicely plastered and am reckless enough to let my arm encircle her firm bare waist. In doing so I actually stroke her ass somewhat slightly and the responsive squeeze she gives my hand with her arm, also the glimmer in those dark oriental eyes as she impishly gazes up at me, makes me certain that I have finally, miraculously discovered a woman free of the horrendous conventions and pieties that afflict this hypocritical culture of ours... I am a little mortified to discover that almost none of the above was apparently written with the faintest trace of irony (I actually was capable of "somewhat slightly"!), which may only indicate how truly momentous for me was this encounter with Leslie, or how doltish and complete was my seizure of passion--or simply how my suggestible mind was working at the age of twenty-two. At any rate, when Leslie and I made our way back to the beach the late-afternoon light, still quivering with heat waves, flooded the sand around the lifeguard tower from which the dejected group of analysands had now departed, leaving behind them a half-buried copy of Partisan Review, squeezed-out tubes of nose balm and a litter of Coke bottles. So, lingering there together in the heat of our charm-bound affinity, we spent another hour or so tying up the loose ends of our conversation, both of us very much aware that we had taken this afternoon the first step of what had to be a journey together into wild and uncharted territory. We lay side by side, bellies down. As I gently traced oval patterns against her pulsing neck with my fingertips she reached up to stroke my hand, and I heard her say, "My analyst said that mankind will forever be the enemy of itself until it learns that each human being only needs, enfin, a fantastic fucking." I heard my own voice, haltingly distant but sincere, reply, "Your analyst must be a very wise person." For a long while she was silent, and then she turned to gaze at me full in the face and uttered finally, with unfeigned desire, that languid yet straightforward invitation which made my heart stop and so unbalanced my mind and senses: "I'll bet you could give a girl a fantastic fucking." And it was then that we somehow made a date for the following Thursday night. Thursday morning arrived, as I have said, with its sense of approaching bliss, of almost unendurable promise. Sitting there at my pink writing table, I managed, however, to ignore my sickishness and fever and to master my fantasies long enough to get two or three more hours of serious writing done. A few minutes past noon I was aware of a yawning sensation at the pit of my stomach. I had not heard a sound from Sophie all morning. Doubtless she would have spent most of her time with her nose in a book, assiduously continuing her selfeducation. Her ability at reading English, while still far from perfect, had improved immeasurably in the year since she had met Nathan; in general she no longer resorted to Polish translations and was now deeply engrossed in Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner, which I knew both captured and perplexed her. "Those sentences," she hadsaid, "that go on and on like a crazy snake!" But she was an adept enough reader to marvel at Faulkner's intricacy of narrative and his turbulent power. I had practically memorized that Portable, which in college had catapulted me into all of Faulkner's work, and it had been upon my recommendation--on the subway or somewhere else on that memorable Sunday of our first encounter--that Nathan had bought a copy and given it to Sophie early in the week. At our several get-togethers since then it had given me great pleasure to help interpret Faulkner for Sophie, not only by way of explaining parts of the occult Mississippi vernacular but in showing her some of the right pathways as she penetrated the wonderful groves and canebrakes of his rhetoric. With all the difficulty, she was moved and impressed by the stormy assault that this prose made upon her mind. "He writes like someone, you know, possessed!" she said to me, then added, "It's very plain that he never was psychoanalyzed." Her nose crinkled up in distaste as she made this observation, obviously alluding to the group of sunbathers who had so offended her the previous Sunday. I hadn't completely realized it at the time, but that same Freudian colloquy which had fascinated and, at the most, amused me had been downright odious to Sophie and had caused her to flee with Nathan from the beach. "Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs," she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. "I hate this type of"--and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase--"unearned unhappiness!" Although I saw exactly what she meant, I was surprised at the fervor of her hostility and I wondered--even as I climbed the steps to take her out on our picnic--if it might not be due only to some irreconcilable discord left over from that stern religion which I knew she had abandoned. I had not meant to take Sophie by surprise but the door to the room was partly open, and since I could see that she was clothed--"decent," as girls used to say--I entered without knocking. Dressed in some kind of robe or housecoat, she stood at the far end of the big room combing her hair in front of a mirror. Her back was to me and for a moment I could tell she was unaware of my presence as she stroked the lustrous blond tresses with a sizzling sound, barely audible on the noontime stillness. Supercharged with a prurient residue--overflow, I imagine, of my Leslie daydreams--I had a sudden impulse to creep up behind Sophie and nuzzle her neck while filling my hands with her breasts. But the very thought was unconscionable and I belatedly realized, while Istood there in silence watching, that it was wrong enough of me to have stolen in on her in this way and violated her privacy, so I announced myself with a small cough. She turned from the mirror with a startled gasp and in so doing revealed a face I shall never in my life forget. Dumfounded, I beheld--for a mercifully fleeting instant--an old hag whose entire lower face had crumpled in upon itself, leaving a mouth like a wrinkled gash and an expression of doddering senescence. It was a mask, withered and pitiable. I was literally on the verge of crying out, but she beat me to it, making a gulping noise as she clapped her hands over her mouth and fled to the bathroom. I stood there in pounding embarrassment for long moments listening to the muffled sounds behind the bathroom door, aware now for the first time of the Scarlatti piano sonata that had been playing softly on the phonograph. Then, "Stingo, when are you going to learn to knock on a lady's door?" I heard her call, more teasing in tone than truly cross. And then--only then--did I realize what I had witnessed. I was grateful that she had displayed no real anger, and was swiftly touched at this generosity of spirit, wondering what my own reaction might have been had I been caught without my teeth. And at that instant Sophie emerged from the bathroom, a faint flush still on her cheeks, but composed, even radiant, all the lovely components of her face reunited in a merry apotheosis of American dentistry. "Let's go to the park," she said, "I'm swooning with hunger. I am... the avatar of hunger!" That "avatar," of course, was quintessential Faulkner, and I was so tickled at the way she used the word, and by her restored beauty, that I found myself disgorging loud coarse cackles of laugher. "Braunschweiger on rye, with mustard," I said. "Hot pastrami!" she replied. "Salami and Swiss cheese on pumpernickel," I went on, "with a pickle, half sour." "Stop it, Stingo, you're killing me!" she cried with a golden laugh. "Let's go!" And off we went to the park, via Himelfarb's Deluxe Delicatessen.

Chapter 6

It was through his older brother, Larry Landau, that Nathan had been able to get Sophie such a superb new set of dentures. And although it was Nathan's own keen if nonprofessional diagnosis which so accurately pegged the nature of Sophie's malady very soon after their encounter at the Brooklyn College library, his brother was instrumental in helping to find a cure for that problem too. Larry, whom I was to meet later on in the summer under very strained circumstances, was a urological surgeon with a large and prosperous practice in Forest Hills. A man in his mid-thirties, Nathan's brother possessed a brilliant record in his field, having once been engaged--as a teaching fellow at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia--in some highly original and valuable research in kidney function which had won him excited attention in professional circles at an early age. Nathan mentioned this to me once in intensely admiring tones, obviously cherishing extravagant pride in his brother. Larry had also served in the war with grand distinction. As a senior lieutenant in the Navy medical corps he had performed brave and extraordinary feats of surgical skill while undergoing kamikaze attacks aboard a doomed flattop off thePhilippines; the exploit won him the Navy Cross--a citation not too often achieved by a medical officer (a Jew to boot in an anti-Semitic Navy), and one which in 1947, with its resonant and recent memories of war and glory, was something else for Nathan to gently crow over and be proud about. Sophie told me that she didn't learn Nathan's name until many hours after he rescued her at the library. What she most deeply and indelibly remembered about that first day, and the days which followed, was his truly awesome tenderness. At the beginning--perhaps only because she recalled him bending over her, murmuring, "Let the doctor take care of everything"--she could not tell that those words had been spoken facetiously, and so she thought he was a doctor even later as with a kind of commanding gentleness he held her against his arm, whispering words of comfort and encouragement while they rode back to Yetta's in a taxi. "We've got to get you fixed up," she remembered him saying, in a kind of half-jocular tone which brought to her lips the first trace of a grin since she had collapsed. "You can't run around Brooklyn fainting in libraries and scaring people half to death." There was something so supportive, so friendly and benign, so caring in his voice, and everything about his presence inspired such immediate trust, that when they got back to her room (hot and stifling in the slant of afternoon sunlight, where she again had a brief fainting spell and slumped against him), she had not the slightest trace of discomfiture in feeling him gently unbutton and remove her soiled dress and then with delicate but firm pressure push her slowly down to her bed, where she lay stretched out clad only in a slip. She felt much better, the nausea had vanished. But as she lay there looking up, trying to return the stranger's quizzical sad smile, she could feel the ponderous drowsiness and lassitude persisting to her bone marrow. "Why am I so tired?" she heard herself ask him in a faint voice. "What's wrong with me?" She still had the notion that he was a physician and regarded his silent, vaguely sorrowing gaze upon her as being diagnostic, professional, until suddenly she realized that his eyes had fixed upon the number graven on her arm. Abruptly (and this was odd, for she had long since abandoned any self-consciousness about the marking) she made a move with her hand as if to cover it up, but before she could do so he had gently grasped her wrist and had begun to monitor her pulse as he had done at the library. He said nothing for awhile, and she felt perfectly safe and at ease in his calm grip, drowsing off with his words in her ear, restorative, soothing, with that blessed touch of playfulness: "The doctor thinks you need a big pill to try to bring some color to that beautiful white skin." Again: the doctor! Peacefully then she fell into a dreamless doze, but when, only moments after, she awoke and opened her eyes, the doctor was gone. "Oh, Stingo, I remember so well, it was such a long time since I feel this terrible panic. And it was so strange, you know! I did not even know him. I did not even know his name! I had been with him an hour, I think even less, and now he was gone and I had this panic, this deep panic and fear that he might never come back, that he was gone forever. It was like losing a person very close to you." Some romantic whim of mine prompted me irresistibly to ask if she had fallen that swiftly in love. Could this have been the perfect example, I inquired, of that marvelous myth known as love at first sight? Sophie said, "No, it wasn't exactly like that--not love then, I don't think. But, well, it may have been close to it." She paused. "I just don't know. How silly in a way for such a thing to happen. How could it be possible to know a man for forty-five minutes and feel this emptiness when he is gone? Absolument fou! Don't you think? I was crazy for him to come back." A moveable picnic, our lunchtime repast took place in all of the sunny and shady corners of Prospect Park. I am no longer able to remember how many picnics Sophie and I shared--certainly half a dozen, perhaps more. Nor are most of the spots where we sprawled on the grass very clear to me--the rocky crannies and glens and secluded byways where we took our greasy brown paper bags and half-pint cartons of Sealtest milk and the Oscar Williams anthology of American verse, much thumb-stained and dog-eared, whereby I attempted to continue Sophie's schooling in poetry that plump Mr. Youngstein had inaugurated months before. One place, however, I vividly recall--a grassy peninsula, usually unpeopled at that hour on weekdays, jutting out into the lake where a sextet of large, rather pugnacious-looking swans coasted like gangsters through the reeds, interrupting their swim long enough to waddle up onto the grass and scrounge competitively, with aggressive hissings from their voiceless throats, for the crusts of our poppyseed rolls or other leftovers. One of the swans, a small male considerably less agile and scruffier than the others, had also been injured near the eye--doubtless in encounter with some savageBrooklyn biped--and was left with a walleyed apearance that reminded Sophie of her cousin Tadeusz from Lodz, who had died many years before, at thirteen, of leukemia. I was unable to make the anthropomorphic leap and thus failed to comprehend the resemblance between a swan and any specific human being, but Sophie swore that they were dead look-alikes, began to call him Tadeusz and murmured to him in little glottal clucks and clicks of Polish as she heaved at him the debris from her bag. I rarely ever saw Sophie lose her temper, but the conduct of the other swans, bossy and preemptive, so fatly greedy, infuriated her and she yelled Polish swear words at the big bastards and favored Tadeusz by making sure that he got more than his share of the garbage. Her vehemence startled me. I did not--because I could not at the time--connect this energetic protectorship of the underdog (the underswan?) with anything that had happened in her past, but her campaign for Tadeusz was funny and immensely appealing. Even so, I have another and personal motive for sketching a picture of Sophie among the swans. I realize now, after much racking of my mind, that it was here on this little promontory later in the summer, during one long afternoon session which lasted until the sun began to sink far behind us over Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, that Sophie told me in a voice alternately desperate and hopeful but largely desperate about part of this last convulsive year with Nathan, whom she adored but whom even then (even then as she spoke to me) she had come to see as her savior, yes, but her destroyer as well... When to her fathomless relief he returned to her room that day, half an hour later, he came to her bed and gazed down at her once more with his gentle eyes and said, "I'm going to take you to see my brother. Okay? I've made a few phone calls." She was perplexed. He sat down beside her again. "Why are you going to take me to your brother?" she asked. "My brother's a doctor," he replied, "one of the best doctors going. He can help you." "But you..." she began, then halted. "I thought..." "You thought I was a doctor," he said. "No, I'm a biologist. How do you feel?" "Better," she said, "much better." And this was true, not the least, she realized, because of his comforting presence. He had brought with him a grocery bag, which he now opened, extracting the contents rapidly and deftly and laying them out on the large board near the end of her bed which served as a kitchen table. "Vot a mishegoss," she heard him say. She began to giggle, for he had gone into a very low-key comedy routine, his accent all of a sudden profoundly and luxuriously Yiddish as he catalogued the bottles and cans and cardboard cartons pouring forth from the bag, his face furrowed in a perfect replica of some elderly harassed, purblind, nervously parsimonious Flatbush storekeeper. He reminded her of Danny Kaye (so many times she had seen him, one of her few movie obsessions), with this wonderfully rhythmic and absurd inventory, and she was still shaking with silent laughter when he ceased, turned toward her and held up a can with a white label, bedewed with frosty beads. "Consommé madrilène," he said in his normal voice. "I found a grocery where they keep it on ice. I want you to eat it. Then you'll be able to swim five miles, like Esther Williams." She was aware that her appetite had returned and felt an eager spasm in her empty stomach. When he poured the consommé into one of her cheap plastic bowls she raised herself up on one elbow and ate pleasurably, savoring the soup, cool and gelatinous with a tart aftertaste. Finally she said to him, "Thank you. I feel much better now." She sensed again such intensity in his gaze as he sat beside her, not speaking for a nearly interminable space, that despite her trust in him, she began to feel a little uneasy. Then at last he said, "I will bet anyone a hundred dollars that you have a severe deficiency anemia. Possibly folic acid or B-twelve. But most probably iron. Baby, have you been eating properly recently?" She told him that except for the short period a few weeks before, when she had caused herself to suffer a half-voluntary rejection of food, she had for the past six months eaten more healthily and handsomely than at any time in her life. "I have these problems," she explained. "I cannot eat much fat of animals. But all else is okay." "Then it's bound to be a deficiency of iron," Nathan said. "In what you describe you've been eating you'd have had more than adequate folic acid and B-twelve. All you need is a trace of both. Iron's a great deal trickier, though. You could have fallen behind with iron and never had a chance to catch up." He paused, perhaps aware of the apprehension in her face (for what he had been saying puzzled and troubled her), and gave her a reassuring smile. "It's one of the easiestthings in the world to treat, once you've got it nailed down." "Nail down?" "Once you understand what the trouble is. It's a very simple thing to cure." For some reason she was embarrassed to ask his name, although she was dying to know. As he sat there beside her, she stole a glimpse of his face and decided that he was exceedingly agreeable-looking--unmistakably Jewish, with fine symmetrical lines and planes in the midst of which the strong, prominent nose was an adornment, as were his luminously intelligent eyes that could switch from compassion to humor and back again so rapidly and easily and naturally. Once more his very presence made her feel better; she was suffused by a drowsy fatigue but the nausea and deep malaise were gone. Then suddenly, lying there, she had a lazy, bright inspiration. Earlier in the day, after looking at the radio schedule in the Times, she had been badly disappointed to learn that on account of her English class she would miss a performance of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony on the early-afternoon concert over WQXR. It was a little like her rediscovery of the Sinfonia Concertante, yet with a difference. She remembered the symphony so clearly from her past--again, those concerts in Cracow--but here in Brooklyn, because she had no phonograph and because she always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Pastoral had completely eluded her, forever tantalizingly announcing itself but remaining unheard like some gorgeous but mute bird flitting away as she pursued it through the foliage of a dark forest. Now she realized that due to today's misadventure she could at last hear the music; it seemed far more crucial to her existence at the moment than this medical talk, no matter how encouraging its overtones, and so she said, "Do you mind if I turn on the radio?" She had scarcely spoken the words when he reached across her and switched it on just an instant before the Philadelphia Orchestra, with its murmurous strings, hesitant at first then jubilantly swelling, commenced that inebriate psalm to the flowering globe. She experienced a sensation of beauty so intense that it was as if she were dying. She shut her eyes and kept them firmly closed to the very end of the symphony, at which point she opened them again, embarrassed by the tears streaming down her cheeks but unable to do anything about them, or to say anything sensible or coherent to the Samaritan, who was still gazing down at her with grave and patient concern. Lightly he touched the back of her hand with his fingers. "Are you crying because that music is so beautiful?" he said. "Even on that crummy little radio?" "I don't know why I am crying," she replied after a long pause during which she collected her senses. "Maybe I'm just crying because I made a mistake." "How do you mean, mistake?" he asked. Again she waited for a long time before saying, "Mistake about hearing the music. I thought that the last time I hear that symphony was in Cracow when I was a very young girl. Now just then when I listened I realize that I heard it once after that, in Warsaw. We was forbidden to have radios, but one night I listened to it on this forbidden radio, from London. Now I remember it is the last music I ever hear before going..." And she halted. What on earth was she saying to this stranger? What did it matter to him? She pulled a piece of Kleenex from the drawer of her table and dried her eyes. "That is not a good reply." "You said 'before going...' " he went on. "Before going where? Do you mean the place where they did this?" He glanced pointedly at the tattoo. "I can't talk about that," she said suddenly, regretting the way she blurted the words out, which