Sophie's Choice (41 page)

witnessed a female in the nude) when I say that these tidings could not have created the mingled astonishment and sheer brute happiness of Sophie's gentle suggestion. Combined with the touch of her fingers, forthrightly lewd, it caused me to gulp air with incredible rapidity. I think I went into that state known medically as hyperventilation and I thought for a moment that I might black out completely. And even as I looked up she was wriggling out of her Cole of California special, so that I beheld inches away that which I thought I would see only after reaching early middle age: a young female body all creamy bare, with plump breasts that had perky brown nipples, a smooth slightly rounded belly with a frank eyewink of a bellybutton, and (be still, my heart, I remember thinking) a nicely symmetrical triangle of honey-hued pubic hair. My cultural conditioning--ten years of airbrushed Petty girls and a universal blackout of the human form-had caused me to nearly forget that women possessed this last item, and I was still staring at it, wonderstruck, when Sophie turned and began to scamper toward the beach. "Come on, Stingo," she cried, "take off your clothes and let's go in the water!" I got up then and watched her go, transfixed; I mean it when I say that no chaste and famished grail-tormented Christian knight could have gazed with more slack-jawed admiration at the object of his quest than I did at my first glimpse of Sophie's bouncing behind--a delectable upside-down valentine. Then I saw her splash into the murky ocean. I think it must have been pure consternation that prevented my following her into the water. So much had happened so quickly that my senses were spinning and I stood rooted to the sand. The shift in mood--the grisly chronicle of Warsaw, followed in a flash by this wanton playfulness. What in hell did it mean? I was wildly excited but hopelessly confused, with no precedent to guide me in this turn of events. In an excess of furtiveness--despite the total seclusion of the place--I slid out of my trunks and stood there beneath the strange churning gray summer sky, helplessly flaunting my manly state to the seraphim. I gulped at the last beer, woozy with mingled apprehension and joy. I watched Sophie swim. She swam well and with what seemed relaxed pleasure; I hoped she was not too relaxed, and for an instant I worried about her mixing swimming with all that whiskey. The air was sweltering, close, but I felt myself in the clutch of malarial trembling and chills. "Oh, Stingo," she said with a giggle when she returned, "tubandes." "Tu... what?" "You have a hard-on." She had seen it immediately. Not knowing what to do with it, but trying to avoid the extremes of gaucherie, I had arranged it and me on the blanket in a nonchalant posture--or as nonchalant as possible in my fit of ague--with my distended part concealed beneath my forearm; the attempt was unsuccessful, it flopped into view just before she flopped down beside me, and we rolled like dolphins into each other's arms. I have since then utterly despaired of trying to capture the tortured excitement of that embrace. I heard myself making little ponylike whinnies as I kissed her, but kissing was all I could manage; I clutched her around the waist with a maniac's armhold, terrified of stroking her anywhere out of fear that she would disintegrate under my crude fingers. There was a fragile feel to her rib cage. I thought of Nathan's kick but also of past starvation. My shivering and shaking continued; I was conscious now only of the whiskied sweetness of her mouth and my tongue and hers warmly mingled. "Stingo, you're shaking so," she whispered once, drawing back from my canine tongue play. "Just relax!" But I realized I was salivating stupidly--a further humiliation which preyed on my mind as our lips stayed wetly plastered together. I could not figure out why my mouth was leaking so, and this worry itself prevented me even more firmly from exploring breasts, bottom or, God help me, that innermost recess which had figured so thrillingly in my dreams. I was in the grip of a nameless and diabolical paralysis. It was as if ten thousand Presbyterian Sunday School teachers had massed above Long Island in a minatory cloud, their presence resolutely disabling my fingers. The seconds passed like minutes, the minutes like hours, and still I could make no serious move. But then, as if to put a stop to my suffering, or perhaps in an effort simply to get things going, Sophie herself made a move. "You have a nice schlong, Stingo," she said, grasping me delicately but with a subtle, knowing firmness. "Thank you," I heard myself mumble. A wave of disbelief swept over me (She is actually grabbing me there, I thought) but I tried to affect a saving savoir-faire. "Why do you call it schlong? Down South we call it something else." My voice had a bad quaver. "It's what Nathan calls it," she replied. "What do you call it in the South?" "Sometimes we call it a pecker," I whispered. "In parts of the upper South they call it a dong or a tool. Or a peter." "I've heard Nathan call it his dork. Also, his putz." "Do you like mine?" I could barely hear myself. "It's sweet." I no longer recall what--if any one thing precisely--brought this ghastly dialogue to its termination. She was of course supposed to compliment me more floridly--"gigantic," "une merveille," even "big" would do, almost anything but "sweet"--and perhaps it was only my glum silence after this which impelled her to begin to stroke and pump me with a zest that mingled the adroitness of a courtesan and a milkmaid. It was exquisite; I listened to her sigh in rapid breaths, I sighed too, and when she whispered, "Turn over on your back, Stingo darling," there flashed through my mind the scenes of insatiable oral love with Nathan she had so frankly described. But it was too much, too much to bear--all this divine, accomplished friction and (My God, I thought, she called me "darling") the sudden command to join her in paradise: with a bleat of dismay like that of a ram being slaughtered I felt my eyelids slam shut and I let loose the floodgates in a pulsing torrent. Then I died. Certainly in the grief of that moment she was not supposed to giggle, but she did. Minutes later, however, sensing my despair, she said, "Don't let it make you sad, Stingo. That happens sometimes, I know." I lay crumpled like a wet paper bag, my eyes tightly shut, quite unable to contemplate the depths of my failure. Ejaculatio praecox (Psychology 4B at Duke University). A squad of evil imps yammered the phrase derisively in the black pit of my despair. I felt I would never again open my eyes to the world--a mud-imprisoned mollusk, lowliest creature in the sea. I heard her giggle again, peered upward. "Look, Stingo," she was saying in front of my disbelieving gaze, "it's good for the complexion." And I watched while the crazy Polack took a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle and with her other hand--the one which had wrought upon me such mixed mortification and pleasure--gently massaged into the skin of her face my hapless exudate. "Nathan always said that come is filled with these very wonderful vitamins," she said. For some reason my eyes fixed themselves on her tattoo; it seemed profoundly incongruous at this moment. "Don't look so tragique, Stingo. It's not the end of the world, it happens to all men sometimes, especially when they are young. Par example, in Warsaw when Jozef and me first try to make love he done the same thing, exactly the same thing. He was a virgin too." "How did you know I was a virgin?" I said with a wretched sigh. "Oh, I can tell, Stingo. I knew that you had no success with that Leslie girl, you were just making up stories when you said you have gone to bed with her. Poor Stingo--Oh, to be honest, Stingo, I did not really know. I just guessed. But I was right, no?" "Yes," I groaned. "Pure as the driven snow." "Jozef was so much like you in many ways--honest, direct, with this quality that make him like a little boy in a certain fashion. It is hard to describe. Maybe that's why I like you so much, Stingo, because you remind me quite a bit of Jozef. I maybe would have married him if he had not been killed by the Nazis. You know, none of us could ever find out who it was who betrayed him after he killed Irena. It was a total mystery, but somebody must have told. We used to go on picnics like this together. It was very difficult during the war--so little food--but once or twice we went out into the country in the summer and spread a blanket this way..." This was astounding. After the steamy sexuality of only moments before, after this encounter--despite fumbling and failure, the single most cataclysmic and soul-stirring event of its kind that I had ever experienced--she was rattling on in reminiscence like someone plunged into a daydream, seemingly no more touched by our prodigious intimacy than if we had done a two-step together innocently on a dance floor. Was part of this due to some perverse effect of the booze? She had gotten a little glassy-eyed by now and was running off at the mouth like a tobacco auctioneer. Whatever the cause, her sudden insouciance gave me acute distress. Here she was, unconcernedly smearing my frenzied spermatozoa across her cheeks as if she were using Pond's cold cream, talking not about me (whom she had called "darling"!)--talking not about us but about a lover dead and buried years before. Had she forgotten that only minutes ago she had been on the brink of initiating me into the mysteries of the blowjob, a sacrament I had awaited with anxious joy since the age of fourteen? Could women, then, so instantaneously turn off their lust like a light switch? And Jozef! Her preoccupation with her sweetheart was maddening, and I could hardly bear the thought--thrust it into the back of my mind--that this precipitate passion she had for a few hot moments lavished on me was the result of a transfer of identity; that I was merely an instant surrogate Jozef, flesh to occupy space in an ephemeral fantasy. In any case, I also noticed that she was becoming a little incoherent; her voice had an intonation that was both stilted and thick, and her lips moved in an odd artificial way as if they had been numbed by Novocaine. It was more than a little alarming, this mesmerized appearance. I removed the bottle with its few remaining ounces from her hand. "It make me sick, Stingo, so sick to think how things might have been. If Jozef hadn't died. I cared for him very much. So much more than Nathan, really. Jozef never mistreated me like Nathan done. Who knows? Maybe we would have been married, and if we were married, life would have been so different. Just one thing, par example--his half sister, Wanda. I would have removed him from her evil influence and that would have been such a good thing. Where's that bottle, Stingo?" Even as she spoke I was pouring--behind my back and out of sight--what was left of the liquor into the sand. "The bottle. Anyway, that kvetch Wanda, such a kvetch she was!" (I loved kvetch. Nathan, Nathan again!) "It was her who was responsible for Jozef being killed. All right, I'll admit it--il fallait que... I mean it was necessary for someone to retaliate for betraying the Jews, but why every time to make Jozef the killer? Why? That was Wanda's power, this kvetch. Okay, she was an underground leader, but was it fair to make your brother the only killer in our part of the city? Was it fair, I ask you? He vomited every time he kill, Stingo. Vomited! It turn him half crazy." I held my breath as her face faded into an ashy white, and with a desperate clawing motion she groped about for the bottle, mumbling. "Sophie," I said, "Sophie, the whiskey's all gone." Abstracted, stranded in her memory, she seemed not to hear, and also was plainly close to tears. Suddenly and for the first time I was aware of the meaning of the phrase "Slavic melancholy": sorrow had flooded across her face like black shadows sweeping over a snowy field. "Goddamned cunt, Wanda! She was the cause of everything. Everything! Jozef dying and me going to Auschwitz and everything!" She began to sob, and the tears made disfiguring trails down her cheeks. I stirred miserably, not knowing really what to do. And although Eros had fled, I reached up and took her in my arms, bringing her down next to me. Her face lay against my chest. "Oh, goddamn, Stingo, I'm so awful unhappy!" she wailed. "Where's Nathan? Where's Jozef? Where's everybody? Oh, Stingo, I want to die!" "Hush, Sophie," I said softly, stroking her bare shoulder, "everything's going to be all right." (Fat chance!) "Hold me, Stingo," she whispered despairingly, "hold me. I feel so lost. Oh Christ, I feel so lost! What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I'm so alone!" Booze, exhaustion, grief, the limpid soggy heat--it was doubtless all of these which put her to sleep in my arms. Beered-up and depleted, I too fell asleep, tightly hanging on to her body as to a security blanket. I dreamed aimless, convoluted dreams of the sort which all my life have seemed to be a recurrent specialty--dreams within dreams of ludicrous pursuit, of a quest for some unnamable prize taking me to unknown destinations: up steep angular stairways, by rowboat down sluggish canals, through cockeyed bowling alleys and labyrinthine railroad yards (where I saw my adored English professor at Duke, fully clad in his tweeds, standing at the controls of a rapidly moving switch engine), across yawning acres of garishly lit basements, subbasements and tunnels. Also a weird and terrible sewer. My goal as always was an enigma, although it seemed to have something vaguely to do with a lost dog. Then when I awoke, with a start, the first thing I realized was that Sophie had somehow loosened herself from my grasp and was gone. I heard myself utter a cry, which, however, got lodged in the back of my mouth and became a strangled moan. I felt my heart begin a pounding commotion. Struggling back into my trunks, I climbed to the side of the dune where I could look up and down the beach--saw nothing on that gloomy dull expanse of sand, nothing at all. She had vanished from sight. I looked behind the dunes--a sere wasteland of marsh grass. No one. And no one on the nearby beach, except for an indistinct human shape, squat, thickly set, moving in my direction. I ran toward the figure, which gradually defined itself as a large swarthy male bather munching on a hot dog. His black hair was plastered down and parted in the middle; he grinned with amiable fatuity. "Have you seen someone... a blond girl, I mean a real dish, very blond..." I stammered. He gave an affirmative nod, smiling. "Where?" I said in relief. "No hablo inglés" was the reply. It is graven on my memory still, that interchange--perhaps all the more vividly because at the precise instant I heard his answer I caught a glimpse of Sophie over his