Sophie's Choice (23 page)

after she had recovered. "Do you know what the word for fuck in Polish is? It's pierdol. It just doesn't have the same quality that the English word has. I like fuck much better." "I like fuck much better too." The drift of conversation made me both flustered and a little aroused (from Nathan she had also absorbed an innocent candor I was still unable to get used to), and so I managed to change the subject. I pretended nonchalance even though her presence still stirred me to the very pit of my stomach, inflamed me in a way that was all the more distracting because of the perfume she was wearing--the same herbal scent, distinctly unsubtle and loamy and provocative, which had stung my libidinal longings on that first day when we went to Coney Island. Now that perfume seemed to float up from between her breasts, which to my great surprise were most amply on show, appetizingly framed by her low-cut silk blouse. It was a new blouse, I was sure, and not really her style. During the weeks I had known her she had been aggravatingly conservative and low-keyed in her dress (aside from the flair for costumery she shared with Nathan, which was a different matter) and wore clothes clearly not calculated to focus eyes on her body, especially her upper torso; she was excessively demure even at a time in fashion when the womanly figure, badly depreciated, was rather down and out. I had seen her bosom browsing about beneath silk and cashmere and a nylon swimsuit but never with any definition. I could only theorize that this was some psychic extension of the prudish way she doubtless had to cloak herself in the rigid Catholic community of prewar Cracow, a practice she must have found hard to abandon. Also, to a lesser degree, I think she may not have wanted to expose to the world what had been wreaked upon her body by the privation of the past. Her dentures sometimes came loose. Her neck still had unbecoming little wrinkles, slack flesh pulled at the back of her arms. But by now Nathan's year-long campaign to restore her to health and plumpness had begun to pay off; at least it seemed that Sophie was beginning to think so, for she had liberated her slightly freckled, pretty demiglobes as openly as she could and remain a lady, and I glanced at them with enormous appreciation. All it took for boobs, I thought, was great American nutrition. They caused me slightly to shift my focus of erogenous dreamery away from the few glimpses I had had of her achingly desirable, harmoniously proportioned Elberta peach of a derrière. Now I soon discovered that she had gotten herself rigged out in these sexpot duds because it was to be a very special evening for Nathan. He was going to reveal something wonderful about his work to Sophie and me. It was going to be, said Sophie, quoting Nathan, "a bombshell." "What do you mean?" I said. "His work," she replied, "his research. He told me he would say to us tonight about his discovery. They finally make what Nathan calls the breakthrough." "That's marvelous," I said, genuinely excited. "You mean this stuff he's been so... mysterious about? He's finally got it licked, is that what you mean?" "That's what he said, Stingo!" Her eyes were ashine. "He's going to tell us tonight." "God, that's terrific," I said, feeling a small but vivid interior thrill. I knew virtually nothing about Nathan's work. Although he had told me in large (though generally impenetrable) detail about the technical nature of his research (enzymes, ion transference, permeable membranes, etc., also the fetus of that miserable rabbit), he had never divulged to me--nor had I out of reticence asked--anything concerning the ultimate justification for this complex and, beyond doubt, profoundly challenging biological enterprise. I knew also, from what she had intimated, that he had kept Sophie in the dark about his project. My earliest conjecture--far-fetched even for a scientific ignoramus like myself (even then I was beginning to rue the lilac fin de siècle hours of my college days, with their total immersion in metaphysical poesy and Quality Lit., their yawning disdain of politics and the raw dirty world, their quotidian homage to the Kenyon Review, to the New Criticism and the ectoplasmic Mr. Eliot)--was that he was creating life full-blown from a test tube. Maybe Nathan was founding a new race of Homo sapiens, finer, fairer, fleeter than the bedeviled sufferers of the present day. I even envisioned a tiny embryonic Superman whom Nathan might be concocting at Pfizer, an inch-high square-jawed homunculus complete with cape and "S" emblazoned on his breast, ready to leap to his place in the color pages of Life as another miraculous artifact of our age. But this was a bootless piece of whimsy and I was really in the dark. Sophie's sudden news that soon we would be enlightened was like receiving an electric jolt. I wanted only to hear more. "He telephoned me this morning at work," she explained, "at Dr. Blackstock's, and said he wanted to have lunch with me. He wanted to tell me something. His voice sounded so excited, I just couldn't imagine what it was. He was calling from his laboratory, and it was so unusual, you see, Stingo, because we almost never have lunch together. We are working so far away from each other. Besides, Nathan says we see so much of each other that having lunch together is maybe a little... de trop. Anyway, he called this morning and insisted in this very excited voice, and so we met in this Italian restaurant near Lafayette Square, where we had been together last year when we first met. Oh, Nathan was just wild with excitement! I thought he had a fever. And when we ate lunch he started to tell me what had happened. Listen to this, Stingo. He said that this morning he and his team--this research team--have make the final breakthrough they were hoping for. He said they were right upon the edge of the final discovery. Oh, Nathan could not eat he was so full of joy! And you know, Stingo, while Nathan was telling me these things I remember that it was right at this same table a year ago that he first told me about his work. He said what he was doing was a secret. What it was precisely he could not reveal, even to me. But I remember this--I remember him telling me that if it was successful it would end up being one of the greatest medical advances of all time. Those were his exact words, Stingo. He said that it wasn't his work alone, there were others. But he was very proud of his own contribution. And then he said it again: one of the greatest medical advances of all time! He said it would win the Nobel Prize!" She paused and I saw that her own face was rosy with excitement. "God, Sophie," I said, "that's just wonderful. What do you think it is? Didn't he give you any hint at all?" "No, he said he would have to wait until tonight. He could not tell me the secret at lunch, just that they have make the breakthrough. There is this great secrecy in the companies that make drugs like Pfizer, that is why Nathan is sometimes so mysterious. But I understand." "You'd think a few hours wouldn't make any difference," I said. I felt a frustrating impatience. "Yes, but he said that it does. Anyway, Stingo, we'll know what it is very soon. Isn't it incredible, isn't it formidable?" She squeezed my hand until my fingertips went numb. It's cancer, I thought all during Sophie's little soliloquy. I had really begun to burst with happiness and pride, sharing Sophie's own radiant exuberance. It's a cure for cancer, I kept thinking; that unbelievable son of a bitch, that scientific genius whom I am privileged to call a friend has discovered a cure for cancer. I signaled to the bartender for more beer. A fucking cure for cancer! But just at this instant, it seemed to me, Sophie's mood underwent a subtly disturbing change. The excitement, the high spirits fled her and a note of concern--of apprehension--stole into her voice. It was as if she were affixing a gloomy and unpleasant afterthought to a letter which had been all the more factitiously cheerful because of the necessity of the grim postscript itself. (P. S. I want a divorce.) "We left the restaurant then," she continued, "because he said that before we went back to work he wanted to buy me something, to celebrate. To celebrate his discovery. Something I could wear tonight when we celebrate together. Something chic and sexy. So we go to this very fine shop where we have been before and he buy me this blouse and skirt. And shoes. And some hats, and bags. Do you like it, this blouse?" "It's a knockout," I said, understating my admiration. "It's very... daring, I think. Anyway, Stingo, the point is that while we are in this shop and he has paid for the clothes and we are ready to leave, I see something strange about Nathan. I have seen it before but not too often and it always scares me a little. He said suddenly that he had a headache, back here, at the back of his head. Also, he was suddenly very pale and make sweat--perspiring, you know. You see, I think it was as if all the excitement was too much for him and he was having this reaction that made him a little sick. I told him he should go home, back to Yetta's and lie down, take the afternoon off, but no, he said he must go back to the laboratory, there was still much to do. The headache, he said, was terrible. I wanted him so much to go home and rest but he said he must go back to Pfizer. So he took three aspirin from the lady who own the shop, and he is calm now, no longer excited like he was. He is quiet, mélancholique even. And then very quietly he kissed me goodby and said he would see me tonight, here--here with you, Stingo. He wants the three of us to go down to Lundy's Restaurant for a wonderful seafood dinner to celebrate. To celebrate winning the Nobel Prize of 1947." I had to tell her no. I was absolutely crushed at the idea that because of my father's visit I would be unable to join them for the jamboree celebration; what a wicked disappointment! This augury of fabulous news was so itchingly teasing that I simply could not believe that I would be denied participating in the announcement when it came. "I'm just sorry beyond belief, Sophie," I said, "but I've got to meet my father at Penn Station. But look, before I go, maybe Nathan can at least tell me what the discovery is. Then in a couple of days after my old man's gone we can go out and have another celebration some other night." She appeared not to be listening any too closely, and I heard her continue in a voice that seemed to me both subdued and invaded by hints of foreboding. "I just hope he is okay. Sometimes when he gets excited so much and gets so happy--then he gets these terrible headaches and sweats so much it go through his clothes, like he's been in the rain. Then the happiness is gone. And oh, Stingo, it don't happen every time. But sometimes it make him so very, very strange! It's like he gets so tellement agité, so happy and flying that he is like an airplane going up and up into the stratosphere where the air is so thin that he can't fly no more and the only way is down. I mean all the way down, Stingo! Oh, I hope Nathan's okay." "Listen, he's going to be all right," I assured her, a little uneasily. "Anyone with the story Nathan is going to tell has a right to act a little peculiar." Although I could not share what were obviously her deep misgivings, I had to confess to myself that her words put me a bit on edge. Even so, I thrust them out of my mind. I wanted only for Nathan to arrive with news of his triumph and an explanation for this unbearably tantalizing mystery. The jukebox started to blare. The bar was beginning to fill up with its gray evening habitués--most of them middle-aged and male, porridge-faced even in midsummer, North European Gentiles with flabby paunches and serious thirsts who ran the elevators and unplugged the plumbing of the ten-story Jewish pueblos whose homely beige-brick ranks stretched for block after block in the region behind the park. Aside from Sophie, few females ever ventured into the place. I never saw a single hooker--the conventional neighborhood and the tired and baggy clientele precluded even the idea of any such sport--but there were, this special evening, two smiling nuns who bore down on Sophie and me with some kind of rattling tin-plated chalice and a murmured plea for charity, in the name of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Their English was preposterously broken. They looked Italian and were extremely ugly--one of them in particular, who wore at the corner of her mouth an awesome wen the size, shape and color of one of those University Residence Club cockroaches, out of which hair sprouted like cornsilk. I averted my eyes but scrounged in my pocket and came up with two dimes; Sophie, however, confronted with the jingling cup uttered a "No!" with such vehemence that the nuns drew back with a concerted gasp, then scuttled away, and I turned to her in surprise. "Bad luck, two nuns," she said morosely, then, after a pause, added, "I hate them! Weren't they awful-looking?" "I thought you were brought up a good sweet Catholic girl," I said in a joshing tone. "I was," she replied, "but that was long ago. Anyway, I would hate nuns even if I cared about religion. Silly, stupid virgins! And so horrible-looking!" A tremor passed through her, she shook her head. "Awful! Oh, how I hate that stupid religion!" "You know, it's really strange, Sophie," I put in, "I remember a few weeks ago how you were telling me about your devout childhood, and your belief, and all that. What is it that--" But she shook her head again in a brisk, negative way, and lay her slender fingers on the back of my hand. "Please, Stingo, those nuns make me feel so pourri--rotten. Stinking. Those nuns grubbling..." She hesitated, looking perplexed. "I think you mean groveling," I said. "Yes, groveling in front of a God who must be a monster, Stingo, if He exist. A monster!" She paused. "I don't want to talk about religion. I hate religion. It is for, you know, des analphabètes, imbecile peoples." She cast a glance at her wristwatch and remarked that it was after seven. Anxiety edged her voice. "Oh, I hope Nathan is okay." "Don't worry, he's going to be fine," I said again in my most reassuring voice. "Look, Sophie, Nathan's really been under tremendous pressure with this research project, this breakthrough, whatever it is. That strain is bound to make him behave, well, erratically--you know what I mean? Don't worry about him. I'd have a headache too if I'd been through his kind of wringer-especially when it's resulted in this incredible achievement." I paused. I seemed constantly compelled to add, "Whatever it is." I patted her hand in return. "Now please, just relax. He'll be here in a minute, I'm certain." At this point I made another reference to my father and his arrival in New York (fondly mentioning his general concern for me, and his moral
support, though making no note of the slave Artiste and his part in my destiny, rather doubting that Sophie had sufficient comprehension of American history, at least yet, to be able to grasp the complexities of the debt I owed to that black boy), and I continued in a general way to praise the luck of those young men like myself, relatively few in number, who possessed parents of such tolerance and selflessness and the will to have faith, blind faith, in a son reckless enough to seek to pluck a few leaves from the laurel branch of art. I was getting a little bit high. Fathers of this largeness of vision and amplitude of spirit were scarce, I averred sentimentally, beginning to feel my lips tingling from the beer. "Oh, you're so lucky to still have a father," said Sophie in a faraway voice. "I miss my father so." I felt a little ashamed--no, not ashamed, inadequate would be better--thinking suddenly of the story she had told me, some weeks before, about her father herded together with the other Cracow professors like so many pigs, the Nazi machine guns, the stifling vans, Sachsenhausen, then death by firing squad in the cold snows of Germany. God, I thought, what Americans had been spared in our era, after all. Oh, we had done our brave and needful part as warriors, but how scant our count of fathers and sons compared to the terrible martyrdom of those unnumbered Europeans. Our glut of good fortune was enough to make us choke. "It has been long enough now," she went on, "that I no longer grieve like I did, but yet I miss him. He was such a good man--that is what make it so terrible, Stingo! When you think of all the bad people--Poles, Germans, Russians, French, all nationalities--all these evil people who escaped, people who killed Jews who are still alive right now. In Germany. And places like Argentina. And my father--this good man--who had to die! Isn't that enough to make you not believe in this God. Who can believe in God who turn His back on people like that?" This outburst--this little aria--had come so swiftly that it surprised me; her fingers trembled slightly. Then she calmed down. And once again--as if she had forgotten that she had already once told me, or perhaps because the repetition gave her some forlorn comfort--she sketched the portrait she imagined of her father, in Lublin many years before, saving Jews from a Russian pogrom at peril to his life. "What is the word l'ironie in English?" "Irony?" I said. "Yes, such an irony that a man like that, a man like my father, risk his life for Jews and die, and the Jew-killers live, so many of them, right now." "I'd say that's less an irony, Sophie, than the way of the world," I concluded a little sententiously but with seriousness, feeling the need to relieve my bladder. I got up and made my way to the men's room, weaving slightly, aglow at the edges of my skin with a penumbra of Rheingold, the jolly, astringent beer served at the Maple Court on draft. I richly enjoyed the men's john at the Maple Court, where, cantilevered slightly forward over the urinal, I could brood over the plashing clear stream while Guy Lombardo or Sammy Kaye or Shep Fields or some other glutinously innocuous band rumbled faintly from the jukebox beyond the walls. It was wonderful to be twenty-two and a little drunk, knowing that all went well at the writing desk, shiveringly happy in the clutch of one's own creative ardor and in that "grand certitude" Thomas Wolfe was always hymning--the certitude that the wellsprings of youth would never run dry, and that the wrenching anguish endured in the crucible of art would find its recompense in everlasting fame, and glory, and the love of beautiful women. As I blissfully pissed I eyed the ubiquitous homosexual graffiti (inscribed there, God knows, not by the Maple Court regulars but by the transient trade which managed to scribble up the walls of any place, no matter how unlikely, where males unlimbered their joints) and with delight gazed once again at the smoke-stained but still vivid caricature on the wall: companion-piece to the mural outside, it was a masterpiece of 1930s innocent ribaldry, displaying Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in contortionist Peeping Tom postures, gleefully asquint through the interstices of a garden trellis as they observed little Betty Boop, enchanting and voluptuous of calf and thigh, squatting to take a pee. Suddenly I was stabbed with alarm, sensing an unholy and unnatural presence of flapping vulturous black, until I realized in an instant that the two mendicant nuns had blundered into the wrong facility. They were gone then in a flash, squawking in distressed Italian, and I rather hoped they had gotten a look at my schlong. Was it their entry--duplicating the bad omen Sophie had felt only a short while before--that presaged the evil contretemps of the next fifteen minutes or so? I heard Nathan's voice over Shep Fields' rippling rhythm even as I approached the table. It was a voice not so much loud as incredibly assertive and it cut through the music like a hacksaw. It was filled with trouble, and though I wanted to retreat when I heard it I dared not, feeling something momentous in the air which impelled me on toward the voice and Sophie. And so totally immersed was Nathan in this rancorous message he was imparting to Sophie, so single-minded did he seem at that moment, that I was able to stand waiting by the table long minutes, listening in miserable discomfort while Nathan bullyragged and tore at her, quite oblivious that I was there. "Haven't I told you that the only single thing I absolutely demand from you is fidelity?" he said. "Yes, but--" She could not get the words in. "And didn't I tell you that if you were ever with this guy Katz--ever again, outside of work--that if you ever so much as walked ten feet with this cheap shmatte, I'd break your ass?" "Yes, but--" "And this afternoon he brings you home again in his car! Fink saw you. And not only that, that cheap motherfucker, you take him up to the room. And you're there for an hour with him. Did he lay you a couple of times? Oh, I'll bet you Katz does quite a number with that fast chiropractor's dick of his!" "Nathan, let me explain!" she implored him. Her composure was fast dissolving, and her voice cracked. "Shut your fucking yap! There's nothing to explain! You'd have kept it a secret too, if my good old pal Morris hadn't told me he'd seen the two of you go up there together." "I would not have kept it secret," she wailed. "I would have tell you now! I did not have a chance yet, darling!" "Shut up!" Again the voice was not loud so much as chillingly domineering, scathing, irruptive. I yearned for an exit, but only stood there behind him, hesitant, waiting. My intoxication had bubbled away and I felt the blood pounding against my Adam's apple. She tried to persist in her plea. "Nathan darling, listen! The only reason I took him to the room was because of the phonograph. The changer part has not been working, you know that, and I told him and he said he might be able to fix it. He said he was an expert. And he did fix it, darling, that was all! I'll show you, we'll go back and play it--" "Oh, I'll bet old Seymour's an expert," Nathan put in. "Does he do a quick routine on your spinal column when he's humping you? Does he get your vertebrae all in order with those slippery hands? The cheap fraud--" "Nathan, please!" she entreated him. She was leaning forward toward him now. The blood seemed to have drained from her face, which wore an expression of terminal agony. "Oh, you're some dish, you are," he said softly and slowly, in tones of sarcasm that sounded unbearably heavy, graceless. He obviously had visited their lodgings at Yetta's after returning from the lab; I inferred this not only because of his reference to Morris Fink's outrageous tattle but because of his dress: he was decked out in his fanciest oyster-white linen suit, and heavy oval gold links sparkled on the cuffs of his custom-made shirt. He smelled pleasantly of a light, jaunty cologne. Plainly he had intended to match Sophie's gala get-up that evening and had gone home to transform himself into the fashion plate I now beheld. There, however, he had been confronted with evidence of Sophie's betrayal--or what he construed as such--and now there seemed no doubt that the celebration had not only become aborted, it was headed for unknown depths of disaster. Writhing inwardly as I stood there, I held my breath and listened while Nathan continued. "You're really some Polish dumpling. It was over my dead body that I let you degrade yourself by continuing to work with these charlatans, these horse doctors. Bad enough you accept the money they make stretching the spines of ignorant, gullible old Jews just off the boat from Danzig, with pains that might be rheumatism or might be carcinoma but go undiagnosed because these snake-oil shysters con them into thinking that a simple back massage will return them to glowing health. Bad enough you managed to talk me into continuing this disgraceful collaboration with a couple of medical hoodlums. But it's fucking unbearable to think that behind my back you would let either of these mangy characters get into that twat of yours--" She tried to interrupt. "Nathan!" "Shut up! I've had just about enough of you and your whorish behavior." He was not talking loudly but there was something mincingly savage in his throttled-back rage that seemed more threatening than if his voice had been a roar; it was a bleak, reedy, thin, almost bureaucratic rage and his choice of phrase-- "whorish behavior"--sounded incongruously tight-assed and rabbinical. "I thought somehow you would see the light, that you would abandon your ways after that escapade with Doctor Katz"--the accent on Doctor was a consummate sneer--"I thought I'd warned you off after that smooching business in his car. But no, I guess those pants you wear get a little too urgently hot in the crotch. And so when I caught you in a bit of hanky-panky with Blackstock, I wasn't surprised, given your bizarre predilection for chiropractic penises--I wasn't surprised, as I say, but when I blew the horn on you and put an end to it I thought you'd be chastened enough to abandon this wretched, degrading promiscuity. But no, once again I was wrong. The libidinal sap which courses so frantically in your Polish veins would allow you no ease, and so today once again you choose to fall into the ridiculous embrace--ridiculous, that is, if it weren't really so vile and demeaning--of Doctor Seymour Katz." Sophie had begun to sniffle softly into a handkerchief clutched in white-knuckled fingers. "No, no, darling," I heard her say in whispers, "it just isn't true." Nathan's stilted, didactic enunciation might have been, under different circumstances, vaguely comical--a burlesque of itself--but now was edged with such real threat, rage and obdurate conviction that I could not help but give a small shiver and feel at my back the approach, like the thudding of gallows-bound footsteps, of some awful and unnamed doom. I heard myself groan, clearly audible above the harangue, and it occurred to me that this dreadful assault on Sophie had weirdly identical resonances to those of the fracas in which I had first glimpsed him acting out his implacable enmity, the scenes distinguished one from the other mainly by the tone of voice--fortissimo that evening weeks ago, now singularly level and restrained but no less sinister. Abruptly I was conscious that Nathan was aware of my presence. His words were flatly uttered and edged with the faintest frost of hostility as he said to me, without looking up, "Why don't you sit down next to the première putain of Flatbush Avenue." I sat down but said nothing, my mouth having become parched and speechless. As I seated myself, Nathan rose to his feet. "It seems to me that a little Chablis is in order now for furtherance of our celebration." I gaped up at him while he spoke in his humorless, declamatory way. Suddenly I got the impression that he was exercising a severe control over himself, as if he were trying to prevent his entire big frame from flying apart or crumpling like a marionette on strings. I saw for the first time that shiny streams of sweat were coursing down his face, though our corner was ventilated by almost frigid breezes; also, there was something funny about his eye--exactly what, at the moment, I could not tell. Some jittery and feverish nervous activity, I felt, some abnormally frantic interchange of neurons in their chaotic synapses, was taking place under each square millimeter of his skin. He was so emotionally jazzed up that he almost seemed to be electrified, as if he had strayed into a magnetic field. Yet it was all held back under tremendous composure. "Too bad," he said, again in tones of leaden irony, "too bad, my friends, that our celebration cannot continue in the vein of exalted homage I had intended for this evening. Homage to devoted hours in pursuit of a noble scientific goal which just this day has seen the light of triumph. Homage to days and years of a team's selfless research terminating in victory over one of the greatest scourges to beset a suffering humanity. Too bad," he said again, after a prolonged pause that was almost unendurable in the burden it imposed on the silently spun-out seconds, "too bad our celebration will be of a more mundane stripe. To wit, the necessary and all-too-healthy severance of my relationship with the sweet siren of Cracow--that inimitable, that incomparable, that tragically faithless daughter of joy, Poland's gem and gift to the concupiscent chiropractors of Flatbush--Sophie Zawistowska! But wait, I must get the Chablis so we can drink a toast to that!" Like a terrified child clutching at Daddy in the vortex of a mob, Sophie squeezed down on my fingers. We both watched Nathan stiffly shoulder his way to the bar through shoals of shirt-sleeved drinkers. I turned to look at Sophie then. Her eyes were completely out of kilter, unforgettably so in the face of Nathan's threat. I would ever after define the word "distraught" by the raw fear I saw dwelling there. "Oh, Stingo," she moaned, "I knew this was going to happen. I just knew he would accuse me of being unfaithful. He always does when he come into these strange tempêtes. Oh, Stingo, I just can't bear it when he become like this. I just know this time he's going to leave me." I tried to soothe her. "Don't worry," I said, "he'll get over this thing." I had small faith in those words. "Oh no, Stingo, something terrible will happen, I know it! Always he get this way. First he is so excited, full of joy. Then he comes down, and when he comes down, it is always that I have been unfaithful and then he wants to leave me." She squeezed again, so hard I thought that her fingernails might draw blood. "And what I said to him was true," she added in a frantic hurry. "I mean about Seymour