William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (205 page)

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 man I 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 up 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 tattooed on 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 “O
ś
wi
ȩ
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 self-esteem, 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 barrier of 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 the 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.

“
S
TINGO!
O
H,
S
TINGO!”
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.
We gonna 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 ante-bellum 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!”