Sophie's Choice (8 page)

moment. Then I felt that he thought I had overheard, but it didn't matter. Considering his emotional state, I was surprised at his way with me, which if not exactly gracious seemed at least momentarily civil, as if I had been magnanimously excluded from the territory of his rage. "You the new roomer Fink told me about?" he managed between breaths. I answered in the feeblest, briefest affirmative. "You're from the South," he said. "Morris told me you were from the South. Said your name's Stingo. Yetta needs a Southerner in her house to fit in with all the other funnies." He sent a dark glance backtoward Sophie, then looked at me and said, "Too bad I won't be around for a lively conversation, but I'm getting out of here. It would have been nice to talk with you." And here his tone became faintly ominous, the forced civility tapering off into the baldest sarcasm I had heard in a long time. "We'd have had great fun, shootin' the shit, you and I. We could have talked about sports. I mean Southern sports. Like lynching niggers--or coons, I think you call them down there. Or culture. We could have talked about Southern culture, and maybe could have sat around here at old Yetta's listening to hillbilly records. You know, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and all those other standard bearers of classical Southern culture." He had been scowling as he spoke, but now a smile parted his dark, troubled face and before I knew it he had reached out and clasped my unwilling hand in a firm handshake. "Ah well, that's what could have been. Too bad. Old Nathan's got to hit the road. Maybe in another life, Cracker, we'll get together. So long, Cracker! See you in another life." And then, before my lips could part to utter protest or counter with an outraged sally or insult, Nathan had turned and pounded down the steps to the sidewalk, where his hard leather heels made a demonic clack-clack-clack as the sound receded, then faded out beneath the darkening trees, in the direction of the subway. It is a commonplace that small cataclysms--an automobile accident, a stalled elevator, a violent assault witnessed by others--bring out an unnatural communicativeness among total strangers. After Nathan had disappeared into the night, I approached Sophie without hesitation. I had no idea what I was about to say--doubtless some gauche words of comfort--but it was she who spoke first, behind hands clenched to a tear-stained face. "It is so unfair of him," she sobbed. "Oh, I love him so!" I did the clumsy thing they often do in movies at such a point, when dialogue is a problem. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and silently gave it to her. She took it readily and began to mop at her eyes. "Oh, I love him so much!" she exclaimed. "So much! So much! I'll die without him." "There, there," I said, or something equally awful. Her eyes implored me--I whom she had never before laid eyes on--with the despairing plea of an innocent prisoner protesting her virtue before the bar. I'm no whore, your honor, she seemed to be trying to say. I was flabbergasted both by her candor and her passion. "It is so unfair of him," she said again. "To say that! He is the only manI have ever made love to, except my husband. And my husband's dead!" And she was shaken by more sobs, and more tears poured forth, turning my handkerchief into a wet little monogrammed sponge. Her nose was swollen with grief and the pink tear stains marred her extraordinary beauty, but not so much that the beauty itself (including the mole, felicitously placed near the left eye, like a tiny satellite) failed to melt me on the spot--a distinct feeling of liquefaction emanating not from the heart's region but, amazingly, from that of the stomach, which began to churn as if in revolt from a prolonged fast. I hungered so deeply to put my arms around her, to soothe her, that it became pure discomfort, but a cluster of oddly assorted inhibitions caused me to hold back. Also, I would be a liar if I did not confess that through all this there rapidly expanded in my mind a strictly self-serving scheme, which was that somehow, God granting me the luck and strength, I would take over this flaxen Polish treasure where Nathan, the thankless swine, had left off. Then a tingling sensation in the small of my back made me realize that Nathan was behind us again, standing on the front steps. I wheeled about. He had managed to return in phantasmal silence and now glared at the two of us with a malevolent gleam, leaning forward with one arm outstretched against the frame of the door. "And one last thing," he said to Sophie in a flat hard voice. "One other last thing, whore. The records. The record albums. The Beethoven. The Handel. The Mozart. All of them. I don't want to have to lay eyes on you again. So take the records--take the records out of your room and put them in my room, on the chair by the door. The Brahms you can keep only because Blackstock gave it to you. Keep it, see? The rest of them I want, so make sure you put them where I tell you. If you don't, when I come back here to pack I'll break your arms, both of them." After a pause, he inhaled deeply and whispered, "So help me God, I'll break your fucking arms!" Then this time he was gone for good, moving in loose-limbed strides back to the sidewalk and quickly losing himself in the darkness. Having no more tears to shed for the moment, Sophie slowly composed herself. "Thank you, you were kind," she said to me softly, in the stuffed-head-cold tones of one who has wept copiously and long. She stretched out her hand and pressed into my own the handkerchief, a soggy wad. As she did so I saw for the first time the number tattooedon the suntanned, lightly freckled skin of her forearm--a purple number of at least five digits, too small to read in this light but graven, I could tell, with exactitude and craft. To the melting love in my stomach was added a sudden ache, and with an involuntary motion that was quite inexplicable (for one brought up to mind where he put his hands) I gently grasped her wrist, looking more closely at the tattoo Even at that instant I knew my curiosity might be offensive, but I couldn't help myself. "Where were you?" I said. She spoke a fibrous name in Polish, which I understood, barely, to be "Ooewiê cim." Then she said, "I was there for a long time. Longtemps." She paused. "Vous voyez..." Another pause. "Do you speak French?" she said. "My English is very bad." "Un peu," I replied, grossly exaggerating my facility. "It's a little rusty." Which meant that I had next to none. "Rusty? What is rusty?" "Sale," I tried recklessly. "Dirty French?" she said, with the faintest whisper of a smile. After a moment she asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" Which did not even draw from me a "Nein." "Oh, forget it," I said. "You speak good English." Then after a moment's silence I said, "That Nathan! I've never seen anything like him in my life. I know it's not my business, but--but he must be nuts! How can he talk like that to anyone? If you ask me, you're well rid of him." She shut her eyes tightly and pursed her lips in pain, as if in recollection of all that had just transpired. "Oh, he's right about so much," she whispered. "Not about I wasn't faithful. I don't mean that. I have been faithful to him always. But other things. When he said I didn't dress right. Or when he said I was a sloppy Pole and didn't clean up. Then he called me a dirty Polack, and I knew that I... yes, deserved it. Or when he took me to these nice restaurants and I always keeped..." She questioned me with her gaze. "Kept," I said. Without overdoing it, I will from time to time have to try to duplicate the delicious inaccuracies of Sophie's English. Her command was certainly more than adequate and--for me, anyway--actually enhanced by her small stumbles in the thickets of syntax, especially upon the snags of our grisly irregular verbs. "Kept what?" I asked. "Kept the carte, the menu I mean. I so often would keep the menu, put it in my bag for a souvenir. He said a menu cost money, that I was stealing. He was right about that, you know." "Taking a menu doesn't exactly seem like grand larceny to me, for Christ's sake," I said. "Look, again I know it's none of my business, but--" Clearly determined to resist my attempts to help restore her selfesteem, she interrupted me, saying, "No, I know it was wrong. What he said was true, I done so many things that were wrong. I deserved it, that he leave me. But I was never unfaithful to him. Never! Oh, I'll just die now, without him! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?" For a moment I was afraid that she might soar off on another little mad fugue of grief, but she gave only a single hoarse gulping sob, like some final punctuation mark, then turned away from me. "You've been kind," she said. "Now I must go up to my room." As she went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress. While it was a beautiful body, with all the right prominences, curves, continuities and symmetries, there was something a little strange about it--nothing visibly missing and not so much deficient as reassembled. And that was precisely it, I could see. The odd quality proclaimed itself through the skin. It possessed the sickish plasticity (at the back of her arms it was especially noticeable) of one who has suffered severe emaciation and whose flesh is even now in the last stages of being restored. Also, I felt that underneath that healthy suntan there lingered the sallowness of a body not wholly rescued from a terrible crisis. But none of these at all diminished a kind of wonderfully negligent sexuality having to do at that moment, at least, with the casual but forthright way her pelvis moved and with her truly sumptuous rear end. Despite past famine, her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass's brief lodging--thirty seconds would do--within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms. Old Stingo, I mused as she climbed upward, there must be some perversity in this dorsal fixation. Then as she reached the top of the stairs she turned, looking down, and smiled the saddest smile imaginable. "I hope I haven't annoyed you with my problems," she said. "I am so sorry." And she moved toward her room and said, "Good night." So then, from the only comfortable chair in my room, where I sat reading Aristophanes that night, I was able to see a section of the upstairs hallway through my partly open door. Once around midevening I saw Sophie take to his room the record albums which Nathan had commanded her to return to him. On her way back I could see that again she was crying. How could she go on so? Where did those tears come from? Later she played over and over on the phonograph the final movement of that First Symphony of Brahms which he so big-heartedly had allowed her to keep. It must have been her only album now. All evening that music filtered down through the paper-thin ceiling, the lordly and tragic French horn mingling in my head with the flute's antiphonal, piercing birdcall to fill my spirit with a sadness and nostalgia almost more intense than any I had ever felt before. I thought of the moment of that music's creation. It was music that, among other things, spoke of a Europe of a halcyon time, bathed in the soft umber glow of serene twilights--of children in pigtails and pinafores bobbing along in dogcarts, of excursions in the glades of the Wiener Wald and strong Bavarian beer, of ladies from Grenoble with parasols strolling the glittering rims of glaciers in the high Alps, and balloon voyages, of gaiety, of vertiginous waltzes, of Moselle wine, of Johannes Brahms himself, with beard and black cigar, contemplating his titanic chords beneath the leafless, autumnal beech trees of the Hofgarten. It was a Europe of almost inconceivable sweetness--a Europe that Sophie, drowning in her sorrow above me, could never have known. When I went to bed the music was still playing. And when each of the scratchy shellac records reached its end, allowing me in the interval before the next to hear Sophie's inconsolable weeping, I tossed and turned and wondered again how one mortal human being could be the vessel to contain such grief. It seemed nearly impossible that Nathan could inspire this raw, devastating woe. But clearly he had done so, and this posed for me a problem. For if, as I have said, I felt myself slipping already into that sick and unfortified situation known as love, wasn't it foolish of me to expect to win the affection, much less to share the bed, of one so dislodgeably attached to the memory of her lover? There was something actually indecent about the idea, like laying siege to a recently bereaved widow. To be sure, Nathan was out of the way, but wasn't it vain of me to expect to fill the vacuum? For one thing, I remembered I had so little money. Even if I broke through the barrierof her grief, how could I expect to woo this ex-starveling with her taste for fancy restaurants and expensive phonograph records? Finally the music stopped and she stopped weeping too, while the restless creak of springs told me she had gone to bed. I lay there for a long time awake, listening to the soft night-sounds of Brooklyn--a far-off howling dog, a passing car, a burst of gentle laughter from a woman and a man at the edge of the park. I thought of Virginia, of home. I drifted off to sleep, but slept uneasily, indeed chaotically, once waking in the unfamiliar darkness to find myself very close to some droll phallic penetration--through folds, or a hem, or a damp wrinkle--of my displaced pillow. Then again I fell asleep, only to wake with a start just before dawn, in the dead silence of that hour, with pounding heart and an icy chill staring straight up at my ceiling above which Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer's fierce clarity that she was doomed.

Chapter 3

Stingo! Oh, Stingo!" Late that same morning--a sunny June Sunday--I heard their voices on the other side of the door, rousing me from sleep. Nathan's voice, then Sophie's: "Stingo, wake up. Wake up, Stingo!" The door itself, while not locked, was secured by a night chain, and from where I lay against the pillow I could see Nathan's beaming face as he peered at me through the wide crack in the door. "Rise and shine," said the voice. "Hit the deck, kid. Up and at 'em, boy. We're going to Coney Island!" And behind him I heard Sophie, in clear piping echo of Nathan: "Rise and shine! Up and at 'em!" Her command was followed by a silvery little giggle, and now Nathan began to rattle the door and the chain. "Come on, Cracker, hit the deck! You can't lie there all day snoozin' like some ole hound dog down South." His voice took on the syrupy synthetic tones of deepest Dixieland--an accent, though, to my sleep-drugged but responsive ears, that was the product of remarkably deft mimicry. "Stir them lazy bones, honeychile," he drawled in the munchiest cornpone. "Put on yo' bathin' costume. Wegonna hab old Pompey hitch up the old coach-an'-foah and hab us a little picnic outin' down by the seashoah!" I was--to put it in restrained terms--somewhat less than exhilarated by all this. His snarling insult of the night before, and his general mistreatment of Sophie, had trespassed on my dreams all night in various allusive masks and guises, and now to awake to behold the same midcentury urban face intoning these hokey antebellum lyrics was simply more than I could tolerate. I leaped straight out of the bedclothes and hurled myself at the door. "Get out of here!" I yelled. "Leave me alone!" I tried to slam the door in Nathan's face, but he had one foot firmly entrenched in the crack. "Get out!" I shouted again. "You have your goddamned nerve, doing this. Get your goddamned foot out of that door and leave me the fuck alone!" "Stingo, Stingo," the voice went on in lulling cadences, having reverted to the Brooklyn style. "Stingo, take it easy. No offense meant, kid. Come on, open up. Let's have a coffee together and make up and be pals." "I don't want to be pals with you!" I howled at Nathan. I burst into a fit of coughing. Half strangling on the goo and crud of threescore daily Camels, I was surprised that I was coherent at all. As I hacked away, oddly embarrassed at the croupy noise I was making, I began to suffer further slow surprise--and not a little distress--over the fact that the atrocious Nathan had materialized like some wicked genie at Sophie's side, and seemed once more to be in possession and command. For at least a minute, perhaps longer, I shuddered and heaved in the throes of a pulmonary spasm, having had in the meantime to endure the humiliation of submitting to Nathan in the role of medical savant: "You've got a regular smoker's cough there, Cracker. You also have the haggard, drawn face of a person hooked on nicotine. Look at me for a second, Cracker, look me straight in the eye." I glared at him through leisurely narrowing pupils fogged over with rage and loathing. "Don't call me--" I began, but the words were cut off by another racking cough. "Haggard, that's the word," Nathan went on. "Too bad, for such a nice-looking guy. The haggard look comes from being slowly deprived of oxygen. You should cut out smoking, Cracker. It causes cancer of the lung. Also lousy on the heart." (In 1947, it may be remembered, the truly pernicious effect of cigarette smoking on the health was barelysurmised even by medical men, and word of its potential erosive damage, when uttered at all, was greeted by sophisticates with amused skepticism. It was an old wives' tale of the same category as that in which it was imputed to masturbation such scourges as acne, or warts, or madness. Therefore, although Nathan's remark was doubly infuriating at the time, piling, as I thought, imbecility on plain viciousness, I realize now how weirdly prescient it really was, how typical it was of that erratic, daft, tormented, but keenly honed and magisterial intelligence I was to get to know and find myself too often pitted against. Fifteen years later, while in the toils of a successful battle with my addiction to cigarettes, I would recall Nathan's admonition--for some reason especially that word haggard--like a voice from the grave.) Now, however, his words were an invitation to manslaughter. "Don't call me Cracker!" I cried, recovering my voice. "I'm a Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University. I don't have to take your rotten insults. Now you get your foot out of that door and leave me alone!" I struggled vainly to dislodge his shoe from the crack. "And I don't need any cheap advice about cigarettes," I rasped through the clogged and inflamed flues of my larynx. Then Nathan underwent a remarkable transformation. His manner suddenly became apologetic, civilized, almost contrite. "All right, Stingo, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, I really am. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Forgive me, will you? I won't use that word again. Sophie and I just wanted to extend a little friendly welcome on a beautiful summer day." It was positively breath-taking, this swift change in him, and I might have felt that he was simply indulging in another form of leaden sarcasm had my instincts not told me that he was sincere. In fact, I sensed he was suffering a rather painful overreaction, as people sometimes do when after thoughtlessly teasing a child they realize they have caused real anguish. But I was not to be moved. "Scram," I said flatly and firmly. "I want to be alone." "I'm sorry, old pal, I really am. I was just kidding a little with that Cracker bit. I really didn't mean to offend you." "No, Nathan really didn't mean to offend you," Sophie chimed in. She moved from behind Nathan to a spot where I could see her clearly. And something about her once more tugged away at my heart. Unlike the portrait of misery she had presented the night before, she was now plainly flushed with high spirits and joy at Nathan's miraculous return. It was possible almost to feel the force of her happiness; it flowed fromher body in visible little glints and tremors--in the sparkle of her eyes, and in her animated lips, and in the pink exultant glow that colored her cheeks like rouge. This happiness, together with the look of appeal on that radiant face, was something that even in my disheveled morning state I found altogether seductive--no, irresistible. "Please, Stingo," she pleaded, "Nathan didn't mean to offend you, to hurt your feelings. We just wanted to make friends and take you out on a beautiful summer day. Please. Please come with us!" Nathan relaxed--I felt his foot move away from the crack--and I relaxed, not without a severe pang, however, at the sight of him as he suddenly grabbed Sophie around the waist and commenced to nuzzle her cheek. With the lazy appetite of a calf mooning over a salt lick, he smeared his sizable nose against her face, which caused her to emit a gay burbling laugh, like the fragment of a carol, and when he flicked at her earlobe with the pink tip of his tongue she gave the most faithful imitation of a cat's electric purr I had ever seen or heard. It was a dumfounding tableau. Only brief hours before, he was ready to slice her throat. Sophie pulled the trick. I was helpless in the face of her plea, and mumbled a grudging "Well, okay." Then just as I was at the point of unfastening the chain and letting them in, I changed my mind. "Screw off," I said to Nathan, "you owe me an apology." "I apologized," he replied. His voice was deferential. "I said I wouldn't call you Cracker any more." "Not just that," I retorted. "The bit about lynching and all that crap. About the South. It's an insult. Suppose I told you that somebody with a name like Landau couldn't be anything but a fat, hooknosed, miserly pawnbroker out to cheat trusting Gentiles. It'd make you mad. It works both ways, these slurs. You owe me another apology." I realized I had become a little pompous, but I was adamant. "Okay, I'm sorry for that too," he said expansively, warmly. "I know I was off base there. Let's forget it, okay? I beg your pardon, honestly. But we're serious about taking you on a little outing today. Look, why don't we leave it like this? It's early yet. Why don't you take your time and get dressed and then come upstairs to Sophie's room. We'll all have a beer or coffee or something. Then we'll go to Coney Island. We'll have lunch in a great seafood restaurant I know down there, and then we'll go to the beach. I've got a good friend who makes extra money Sundays working as a lifeguard. He lets us lie on aspecial restricted part of the beach where there aren't any people to kick sand in your face. So come on." Sulking rather obviously, I said, "I'll think about it." "Ah, be a sport, come on!" "All right," I said, "I'll come." To which I added a tepid. "Thanks." While I shaved and slicked myself up, I reflected with puzzlement on this odd turn of events. What devious motive, I wondered, caused such a goodwill gesture? Could it be that Sophie had urged Nathan toward this cordial move, perhaps to get him to make up for his nastiness of the night before? Or was he simply out to obtain something else? I knew the ways of New York well enough by now to at least give passing credence to the idea that Nathan might just be some sort of con man, out to hustle up something as commonplace and as obvious as money. (This prompted me to check the condition of the slightly more than four hundred dollars I had secreted at the back of the medicine chest, in a box meant for Johnson & Johnson gauze bandages. The loot, in tens and twenties, was intact, causing me as usual to whisper a loving little threnody to my spectral patron Artiste, moldering to dust these many years in Georgia.) But that seemed an unlikely suspicion, after Morris Fink's observation about Nathan's singular affluence. Nonetheless, all these possibilities floated about in my head as I prepared with some misgivings to join Sophie and Nathan. I really felt I ought to stay and try to work, try to set some words down on the yawning yellow page, even if they be inane and random jottings. But Sophie and Nathan had quite simply laid siege to my imagination. What I really wondered about was the smoochy détente between the two of them, reestablished short hours after the most harrowing scene of lovers' strife I could imagine this side of a low-grade Italian opera. Then I considered the fact that they both simply might be crazy, or outcast like Paolo and Francesca, caught up in some weird, shared perdition. Morris Fink was informative as usual, if not particularly illuminating, when I ran into him in the hallway just as I was leaving my room. While we were exchanging banalities I became for the first time aware of a church bell chiming, far-off but distinct, in the direction of Flatbush Avenue. At once poignant and reminiscent of Southern Sundays, it also unnerved me a little, since I had the firm impression that synagogues did not come equipped with belfries. Very briefly I closed my eyes as the chimes descended on the stillness, thinking of a homely brick church in a Tidewater town, piety and Sabbath hush, the dewy little Christian lambs with flower-stalk legs trouping to the Presbyterian tabernacle with their Hebrew history books and Judaical catechisms. When I opened my eyes Morris was explaining, "No, that's no synagogue. That's the Dutch Reformed church up at Church Avenue and Flatbush. They only ring it on Sundays. I go by there sometime when they got a service going. Or Sunday School. They sing their fuckin' heads off. 'Jesus Loves Me.' Shit like that. Those Dutch Reformed broads are something. A lot of them look like they need a blood transfusion. .. Or a hot meat injection." He gave a lewd snort. "The cemetery's nice, though. In the summer it's cool in there. Some of these wild Jewish kids go in there at night and get laid." "Well, Brooklyn's got a little bit of everything, hasn't it?" I said. "Yeah. All religions. Jewish, Irish, Italian, Dutch Reformed, boogies, everything. Lots of boogies comin' in now, since the war. Williamsburg. Brownsville. Bedford-Stuyvesant, that's where they're movin' into. Fuckin' apes, I call 'em. Boy, do I hate those boogies. Apes! Aaaa-gh!" He gave a shudder, and baring his teeth, made what I took to be a simian grimace. Just as he did so, the regal, celebrant strains of Handel's Water Music shimmered down the stairs from Sophie's room. And very faintly from above I heard Nathan's laughter. "I guess you got to meet Sophie and Nathan," Morris said. I allowed that I had, in a manner of speaking, met them. "What do you think of that Nathan? Don't he break your balls?" A sudden light glowed in the lusterless eyes, his voice became conspiratorial. "You know what I think he is? A golem, that's what. Some kind of a golem." "Golem?" I said. "What on earth's a golem?" "Well, I can't explain exactly. It's a Jewish... what do you call it?--not exactly religious, but some kind of monster. He's been invented, that's what, like Frankenstein, see, only he's been invented by a rabbi. He's made out of clay or some kind of shit like that, only he looks like a human. Anyway, you can't control him. I mean, sometimes he acts normal, just like a normal human. But deep down he's a runaway fuckin' monster. That's a golem. That's what I mean about Nathan. He acts like a fuckin' golem." With a vague stir of recognition, I asked Morris to elaborate on his theory. "Well, this morning early, see, I guess you were asleep. I see Sophie go into Nathan's room. My room is right across the hall and I can see everything. It's about seven-thirty or eight. I heard them fightin' last night, so I know that Nathan's gone. Now guess what I see next? This is what I see. Sophie's cryin', softly, but still cryin' her head off. When she goes into Nathan's room she leaves the door open and lays down. But guess where she lays down? On the bed? No! On the fuckin' floor! She lays down on the floor in her nightgown, all curled up like a baby. I watch her for a while, maybe ten, fifteen minutes--you know, thinkin' it's crazy for her to be in Nathan's room layin' on the floor like that--and then all of a sudden down below on the street I hear a car drive up and I look out the window and there's Nathan. Did you hear him when he came in? He made a hell of a lot of noise, stampin' and bangin' and mutterin' to himself." "No, I was sound asleep," I replied. "My noise problem there--in the crater, as you call it--seems to be mainly vertical. Directly overhead. The rest of the house I can't hear, thank heaven." "Anyway, Nathan comes upstairs and goes to his room. He goes through the door and there's Sophie all curled up and layin' on the floor. He walks over to her and stands there--she's awake--and this is what he says. He says, 'Get out of here, you
whore!' Sophie doesn't say anything, just lays there cryin', I guess, and Nathan says, 'Get your ass out of here, whore, I'm leavin'.' Still Sophie doesn't say anything and I begin to hear her cry and cry, and then Nathan says, 'I'm goin' to count to three, whore, and if you're not up and out of here and out of my sight I'm goin' to kick your ass into the middle of next year.' And then he counts to three and she doesn't move and then he gets down on his knees and begins to slap the livin' shit out of her." "While she's lying there?" I put in. I had begun to wish that Morris had not felt the need to tell me this story. My stomach stirred with queasy sickishness; though a man of nonviolence, I was nearly overwhelmed by the impulse to rush upstairs, where, accompanied by the Water Music's sprightly bourrée, I would somehow exorcise the golem by battering its brains out with a chair. "You mean he actually hit that girl while she was lying there like that?" "Yeah, he kept slappin' her. Hard, too. Right in the fuckin' chops he kept slappin' her." "Why didn't you do something?" I demanded. He hesitated, cleared his throat, then said, "Well, if you want to know, I'm a physical coward. I'm five foot five and that Nathan--he's a big motherfucker. But I'll tell you one thing. I did think about callin' the police. Sophie was beginnin' to groan, those clouts in the face must have hurt like a bastard. So I decided to come down here and call the police on the phone. I didn't have anything on, I don't wear anything sleepin'. So I went to my closet and put on a bathrobe and slippers--tryin' to move fast, see? Who knows, I thought he might kill her. I guess I was gone about a minute, at first I couldn't find my fuckin' slippers. Then when I got back to the door... Guess what?" "I can't imagine." "This time it's the other way around. Like it's opposite, see? This time Sophie's sittin' up on the floor with her legs crossed, and Nathan's sort of crouched down and he's got his head buried right in her crotch. I don't mean he's eatin' her. He's cryin'! He's got his face right down in there and he's cryin' away like a baby. And all this time Sophie's strokin' that black hair of his and whisperin', 'That's all right, that's all right.' And I hear Nathan say, 'Oh God, how could I do it to you? How could I hurt you?' Things like that. Then, 'I love you, Sophie, I love you.' And she just sayin', 'That's all right,' and makin' little cluckin' noises, and him with his nose in her crotch, cryin' and sayin' over and over again, 'Oh, Sophie, I love you so.' Ach, I almost heaved up my breakfast." "And what then?" "I couldn't take any more of it. When they finished all this crap and got up off the floor, I went out and got a Sunday paper and walked over to the park and read for an hour. I didn't want to have anything more to do with either of them. But see what I mean? I mean..." He paused and his eyes morosely probed me for some interpretation of this evil masque. I had none. Then Morris said decisively, "A golem, if you ask me. A fuckin' golem." I made my way upstairs in a black squall of gusty, shifting emotion. I kept saying to myself that I couldn't get involved with these sick characters. Despite the grip that Sophie had laid upon my imagination, and despite my loneliness, I was certain that it would be foolhardy to seek their friendship. I felt this not only because I was afraid of getting sucked toward the epicenter of such a volatile, destructive relationship, but because I had to confront the hard fact thatI, Stingo, had other fish to fry. I had come to Brooklyn ostensibly "to write my guts out," as dear old Farrell had put it, not to play the hapless supernumerary in some tortured melodrama. I resolved to tell them that I would not go with them to Coney Island, after all; that done, I would politely but decisively nudge them out of my life, making it plain that I was a solitary spirit who was not to be disturbed, ever. I knocked and entered as the last record ceased playing, and the great barge with its jubilant trumpets vanished around a turning on the Thames. Sophie's room smote me instantly with delight. Though I know an eyesore when I see one, I have had very little sense of "taste," of décor; yet I could tell that Sophie had achieved a kind of triumph over the inexhaustible pink. Rather than let the pink bully her, she had fought back, splashing the room with complementary hues of orange and green and red--a bright carnation bookcase here, an apricot bedspread there--and thus had vanquished the omnipresent and puerile stain. I wanted to burst out laughing at the way she had imbued that dumb Navy camouflage paint with such joy and warmth. And there were flowers. Flowers were everywhere--daffodils, tulips, gladioli; they sprouted from small table vases and from sconces on the wall. The place was fragrant with fresh flowers, and although they were abundant, there was no feeling of the sickroom amid all these blooms; they seemed instead simply festive, perfectly consonant with the gay flavor of the rest of the room. Then I suddenly realized that Sophie and Nathan were nowhere in sight. Just as I was puzzling this out, I heard a giggle and saw a Japanese screen in one of the far corners give a little vibration. And from behind the screen, hand in hand, flashing uniform vaudevillian smiles, came Sophie and Nathan dancing a little two-step and wearing some of the most bewitchingly tailored clothes I had ever seen. More nearly costumes really, they were decidedly out of fashion--his being a white chalk-stripe gray flannel double-breasted suit of the kind made modish more than fifteen years before by the Prince of Wales; hers a pleated plum-colored satin skirt of the same period, a white flannel yachting jacket, and a burgundy beret tilted over her brow. Yet there was nothing hand-me-down about these two relics, they were clearly expensive and too well-fitting to be anything but custom-made. I felt desolate in my white Arrow shirt and its rolled-up sleeves and with my nondescript baggy slacks. "Don't worry," Nathan said a few moments later, while he was fetching a quart bottle of beer from the refrigerator and Sophie wassetting out cheese and crackers. "Don't worry about your clothes. Just because we dress up like this is no reason for you to feel uncomfortable. It's just a little fad of ours." I had slumped pleasurably in a chair, utterly shorn of my resolve to terminate our brief acquaintance. What caused this turnabout is almost impossible to explain. I suspect it was a combination of things. The delightful room, the unexpected and farcical costumery, the beer, Nathan's demonstrative warmth and eagerness to make amends, Sophie's calamitous effect on my heart--all these had wiped out my will power. Thus I was once again their pawn. "It's just a little hobby of ours," he went on to explain over, or through, limpid Vivaldi as Sophie bustled about in the kitchenette. "Today we're wearing early thirties. But we've got clothes from the twenties, World War One period, Gay Nineties, even earlier than that. Naturally, we only dress up like this on Sunday or a holiday when we're together." "Don't people stare?" I asked. "And isn't it kind of expensive?" "Sure they stare," he said. "That's part of the fun. Sometimes--like with our Gay Nineties outfit--we cause a hell of a commotion. As for expense, it's not much more expensive than regular clothes. There's this tailor on Fulton Street will make up anything I want so long as I bring him the right patterns." I nodded agreeably. Although perhaps a touch exhibitionistic, it seemed a fairly harmless diversion. Certainly with their splendid good looks, emphasized even more by the contrast between his smoky Levantine features and her pale radiance, Sophie and Nathan would be an eyeful sauntering along together in almost anything. "It was Sophie's idea," Nathan explained further, "and she's right. People look drab on the street. They all look alike, walking around in uniform. Clothes like these have individuality. Style. That's why it's fun when people stare at us." He paused to fill my glass with beer. "Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's secondary." Well, it takes all kinds, as I had been accustomed to hear from childhood. Dress. Beauty. Being human. What talk from a man who only shortly before had been mouthing savage words and, if Morris could be trusted, had been inflicting outrageous pain on this gentle creature now flitting about with plates and ashtrays and cheese, dressed like Ginger Rogers in an old movie. Now he could not have been moreamiable and engaging. And as I relaxed fully, feeling the beer begin to softly effervesce throughout my limbs, I conceded to myself that what he was saying had merit. After the hideous uniformity in dress of the postwar scene, especially in a man-trap like McGraw-Hill, what really was more refreshing to the eye than a little quaintness, a bit of eccentricity? Once again (I speak now from the vantage point of hindsight) Nathan was dealing in small auguries of the world to come. "Look at her," he said, "isn't she something? Did you ever see such a dollbaby? Hey, dollbaby, come over here." "I'm busy, can't you see?" Sophie said as she bustled about. "Fixing the fromage." "Hey!" He gave an earsplitting whistle. "Hey, come over here!" He winked at me. "I can't keep my hands off her." Sophie came over and plopped down in his lap. "Give me a kiss," he said. "One kiss, that's all," she replied, and smacked him lightly at the side of his mouth. "There! One kiss is all you deserve." As she squirmed on his lap he nibbled at her ear and squeezed her waist, causing her adoring face to glow so visibly that I could have sworn he had twisted some kind of knob. "I can't keep my hands off you-u-u," he hummed. Like others, I am embarrassed by unprivate displays of affection--or of hostility, for that matter-especially when I am the solitary onlooker. I took a large swallow of beer and averted my eyes; they of course lit upon the outsized bed with its coverlet of luscious apricot where my new friends had transacted most of these goings-on, and which had been the monstrous engine of so much of my recent discomfort. Maybe my renewed outbreak of coughing betrayed me, or I suspect Sophie sensed my embarrassment; at any rate, she leaped up from Nathan's lap, saying, "Enough! Enough for you, Nathan Landau. No more kisses." "Come on," he complained, "one more." "No more," she said sweetly but firmly. "We're going to have the beer and a little fromage and then we're all going to get on the subway train and go have lunch at Coney Island." "You're a cheater," he said in a kidding voice. "You're a tease. You're worse than any little yenta that ever came out of Brooklyn." He turned and regarded me with mock gravity. "What do you think of that, Stingo? Here I am pushing thirty years old. I fall crazy in love with a Polish shiksa and she keeps her sweet treasure all locked up as tightlyas little Shirley Mirmelstein I tried to make out with for five whole years. What do you think of that?" Again the sly wink. "Bad news," I improvised in a jocular tone. "It's a form of sadism." Although I'm certain I kept my composure, I was really vastly surprised at this revelation: Sophie was not Jewish! I could not really have cared less one way or another, but I was still surprised, and there was something vaguely negative and self-preoccupied in my reaction. Like Gulliver among the Hounyhnhnms, I had rather thought myself a unique figure in this huge Semitic arrondissement and was simply taken aback that Yetta's house should shelter another Gentile. So Sophie was a shiksa. Well, hush my mouth, I thought in mild wonder. Sophie set before us a plate containing squares of toast upon which she had melted little sunbursts of golden Cheddar-like cheese. With the beer, they tasted particularly delicious. I began to warm to the convivial, gently alcoholic mood of our tiny gathering as does a hound dog who slinks out from chill, comfortless shadows into the heat of the midday sun. "When I first met this one here," Nathan said as she sat down on the rug beside his chair and contentedly leaned against his leg, "she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year and a half after the Russians liberated that camp she was in. How much was it you weighed, sweetie?" "Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight kilos." "Yeah, about eighty-five pounds. Can you imagine? She was a wraith." "How much do you weigh now, Sophie?" I asked. "Just fifty." "One hundred and ten pounds," Nathan translated, "which still isn't enough for her frame and height. She should weigh about oneseventeen, but she's getting there--she's getting there. We'll make a nice big milk-fed American girl out of her in no time." Idly, affectionately he fingered the butter-yellow strands of hair that curled out from beneath the rim of her beret. "But, boy, was she a wreck when I first got hold of her. Here, drink some beer, sweetie. It'll help make you fat." "I was a real wreck," Sophie put in, her tone affectingly light-hearted. "I looked like an old witch--I mean, you know, the thing that chases birds away. The scarecrow? I didn't have hardly any hair and my legs ached. I had the scorbut--" "The scurvy," Nathan interjected, "she means she'd had the scurvy, which was cured as soon as the Russians took over--" "Le scorbut--scurvy I mean--I had. I lose my teeth! And typhus. And scarlet fever. And anemia. All of them. I was a real wreck." She uttered the litany of diseases with no self-pity yet with a certain childish earnestness, as if she were reciting the names of some pet animals. "But then I met Nathan and he taked care of me." "Theoretically she was saved as soon as the camp was liberated," he explained. "That is, she wasn't going to die. But then she was in a displaced persons' camp for a long time. And there were thousands of people there, tens of thousands, and they just didn't have the medical facilities to take care of all the damage that the Nazis had done to so many bodies. So then last year, when she arrived over here in America, she still had a quite serious, I mean a really serious, case of anemia. I could tell." "How could you tell?" I asked, with honest interest in his expertise. Nathan explained, briefly, articulately, and with a straightforward modesty that I found winning. Not that he was a physician, he said. He was, rather, a graduate in science from Harvard, with a master's degree in cellular and developmental biology. It had been his achievement in this field of study which had led him to be hired as a researcher at Pfizer, a Brooklyn-based firm and one of the largest pharmaceutical houses in the nation. So much, then, for the background. He claimed no intricate or extensive