Sophie's Choice (9 page)

medical knowledge, and had no use for the lay habit of venturing amateur diagnoses of illness; his training had, however, made him more than ordinarily enlightened about the chemical vagaries and ailments of the human body, and so the moment he first laid eyes on Sophie ("this sweetie," he murmured with enormous concern and gentleness, twisting the lock of her hair) he guessed, with dead accuracy as it turned out, that her ravaged appearance was the result of a deficiency anemia. "I took her to a doctor, a friend of my brother's, who teaches at Columbia Presbyterian. He does work in nutrition diseases." A proud note, not at all unattractive in the sense it conveyed of quiet authority, stole into Nathan's voice. "He said I was right on target. A critical deficiency of iron. We put the little sweetie here on massive doses of ferrous sulfate and she began to bloom like a rose." He paused and looked down at her. "A rose. A rose. A beautiful fucking rose." Helightly ran his fingers over his lips and transferred his fingertips to her brow, anointing it with his kiss. "God, you're something," he whispered, "you're the greatest." She gazed up at him. She looked incredibly beautiful but somehow tired and drawn. I thought of the previous night's orgy of sorrow. She lightly stroked the blue-veined surface of his wrist. "Thank you, Monsieur Senior Researcher at Charles Pfizer Company," she said. For some reason, I could not help but think: Jesus Christ, Sophie honey, we've got to find you a dialogue coach. "And thank you for making me to bloom like a rose," she added after a moment. All at once I became aware of the way in which Sophie echoed so much of Nathan's diction. Indeed, he was her dialogue coach, a fact which became more directly evident now as I heard him begin to correct her in detail, like an exceedingly meticulous, very patient instructor at a Berlitz school. "Not 'to bloom,'" he explained, "just 'bloom.' You're so good, it's about time you were perfect. You must begin to learn just when and where to add the preposition 'to' to the infinitive verb, and when to leave it out. And it's tough, you see, because in English there's no hard, fast rule. You have to use your instinct." "Instinct?' she said. "You have to use your ear, so that it finally becomes instinct. Let me give you an example. You could say 'causing me to bloom like a rose' but not 'making me to bloom.' There's no rule about this, understand. It's just one of those odd little tricks of the language which you'll pick up in time." He stroked her earlobe. "With that pretty ear of yours." "Such a language!" she groaned, and in mock pain clutched her brow. "Too many words. I mean just the words for vélocité. I mean 'fast.' 'Rapid.' 'Quick.' All the same thing! A scandal!" " 'Swift,' " I added. "How about 'speedy'?" Nathan said. " 'Hasty,' " I went on. "And 'fleet,' " Nathan said, "though that's a bit fancy." " 'Snappy'!" I said. "Stop it!" Sophie said, laughing. "Too much! Too many words, this English. In French is so simple, you just say 'vite.' " "How about some more beer?" Nathan asked me. "We'll finish off this other quart and then go down to Coney Island and hit the beach." I noticed that Nathan drank next to nothing himself, but was almost embarrassingly generous with the Budweiser, keeping my glass topped off with unceasing attention. As for myself, in that brief time I had begun to achieve a benign, tingling high so surprisingly intense that I became a little uneasy trying to manage my own euphoria. It was an exaltation really, lofty as the summer sun; I felt buoyed up by fraternal arms holding me in a snug, loving, compassionate embrace. Part of what worked on me was, to be sure, only the coarse clutch of alcohol. The rest stemmed from all of those mingled elements comprising what, in that era so heavily burdened by the idiom of psychoanalysis, I had come to recognize as the gestalt: the blissful temper of the sunny June day, the ecstatic pomp of Mr. Handel's riverborne jam session, and this festive little room whose open windows admitted a fragrance of spring blossoms which pierced me with that sense of ineffable promise and certitude I don't recall having felt more than once or twice after the age of twenty-two--or let us say twenty-five--when the ambitious career I had cut out for myself seemed so often to be the consequence of pitiable lunacy. Above all, however, my joy flowed out from some source I had not known since I had come to New York months before, and thought I had abandoned forever--fellowship, familiarity, sweet times among friends. The brittle aloofness with which I had so willfully armored myself I felt crumbling away utterly. How wonderful it was, I thought, to happen upon Sophie and Nathan--these warm and bright and lively new companions--and the urge I had to reach out and hug both of them close to me was (for the moment at least, despite my desperate crush on Sophie) freighted with the mellowest brotherhood, cleanly, practically devoid of carnal accents. Old Stingo, I murmured, grinning foolishly at Sophie but toasting myself with the foaming Bud, you've come back to the land of the living. "Salut, Stingo!" said Sophie, tipping in return the glass of beer which Nathan had pressed on her, and the grave and delectable smile she bestowed on me, bright teeth shining amid a scrubbed happy face still bruised with the shadows of deprivation, touched me so deeply that I made an involuntary, choking sound of contentment. I felt close to total salvation. Yet beneath my grand mood I was able to sense that there was something wrong. The terrible scene between Sophie and Nathan the night before should have been warning enough to me that our chummy little get-together, with its laughter and its ease and its gentle intimacy, was scarcely true of the status quo as it existed between them. But I ama person who is too often weakly misguided by the external masquerade, quick to trust in such notions as that the ghastly blow-up I had witnessed was a lamentable but rare aberration in a lovers' connection whose prevailing tone was really hearts and flowers. I suppose the fact of the matter is that deep down I so hungered for friendship--was so infatuated with Sophie, and attracted with such perverse fascination to this dynamic, vaguely outlandish, wickedly compelling young man who was her inamorato--that I dared not regard their relationship in anything but the rosiest light. Even so, as I say, I could feel something distinctly out of joint. Beneath all the jollity, the tenderness, the solicitude, I sensed a disturbing tension in the room. I don't mean that the tension at that moment directly involved the two lovers. But there was tension, an unnerving strain, and most of it seemed to emanate from Nathan. He had become distracted, restless, and he got up and fiddled with the phonograph records, replaced the Handel with Vivaldi again, in obvious turmoil gulped a glass of water, sat down and drummed his fingers against his pants leg in rhythm to the celebrant horns. Then swiftly he turned to me, peering at me searchingly with his troubled and gloomy eyes, and said, "Just an old briar-hopper, ain't you?" After a pause and with a touch of the bogus drawl he had baited me with before, he added, "You know, you Confederate types interest me. You-all"--and here he bore down on the "all"--"you-all interest me very, very much." I began to do, or undergo, or experience what I believe is known as a slow burn. This Nathan was incredible! How could he be so clumsy, so unfeeling--such a creep? My euphoric haze evaporated like thousands of tiny soap bubbles all at once. This swine! I thought. He had actually trapped me! How otherwise to explain this sly change in mood, unless it was to try to edge me into a corner? It was either clumsiness or craft: there was no other way to fathom such words, after I had so emphatically and so recently made it a condition of our amity--if such it might be called--that he would lay off his heavy business about the South. Once more indignation rose like a regurgitated bone in my gorge, though I made a last attempt to be patient. I turned up the butane under my Tidewater accent and said, "Why, Nathan ole hoss, you Brooklyn folks interest us boys down home, too." This had a distinctly adverse effect on Nathan. He was not only unamused, his eyes flashed warfare; he glowered at me with implacable mistrust, and for an instant I could have sworn I saw in those shining pupils the freak, the redneck, the alien he knew me to be. "Oh, fuck it," I said, starting to rise to my feet. "I'll just be going–" But before I could set down my glass and get up he had clutched me by the wrist. It was not a rough or painful grasp, but he bore down strongly nonetheless, and insistently, and his grip held me fast in the chair. There was something desperately importunate in that grip which chilled me. "It's hardly a joking matter," he said. His voice, though restrained, was, I felt, charged with turbulent emotion. Then his next words, spoken with deliberate, almost comical slowness, were like an incantation. "Bobby... Weed... Bobby Weed! Do you think Bobby Weed is worthy of nothing more than your attempt... at. .. humor?" "It wasn't I who started that cotton-picking accent," I retorted. And I thought: Bobby Weed! Oh shit! Now he's going to get on Bobby Weed. Let me out of here. Then at this moment Sophie, as if sensing the perhaps sinister shift in Nathan's mood, hurried to his side and touched his shoulder with a fluttery, nervously placating hand. "Nathan," she said, "no more about Bobby Weed. Please, Nathan! It will just disturb you when we were having such a lovely time." She cast me a look of distress. "All week he's been talking about Bobby Weed. I can't get him to stop." To Nathan again she begged, "Please, darling, we were having such a lovely time!" But Nathan was not to be deflected. "What about Bobby Weed?" he demanded of me. "Well, what about him, for Christ's sake?" I groaned, and pulled myself upward out of his grasp. I had begun to eye the door and the intervening furniture, and quickly schemed out the best way of immediate exit. "Thanks for the beer," I muttered. "I'll tell you what about Bobby Weed," Nathan persisted. He was not about to allow me off the hook, and dumped more foaming beer into the glass which he pressed into my hand. His expression still seemed calm enough but was betrayed by inner excitement in the form of a waggling, hairy, didactic forefinger which he thrust into my face. "I'll tell you something about Bobby Weed, Stingo my friend. And that is this! You Southern white people have a lot to answer for when it comes to such bestiality. You deny that? Then listen. I say this as onewhose people have suffered the death camps. I say this as a man who is deeply in love with one who survived them." He reached up and surrounded Sophie's wrist with his hand while the forefinger of his other hand still made its vermiform scrawl in the air above my cheekbone. "But mainly I say this as Nathan Landau, common citizen, research biologist, human being, witness to man's inhumanity to man. I say that the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do you agree with me?" I bit the inside of my mouth in an effort to keep my composure. "What happened to Bobby Weed, Nathan," I replied, "was horrible. Unspeakable! But I don't see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They're both awful! Would you mind taking your finger out of my face?" I felt my brow growing moist and feverish. "And I damn well question this big net you're trying to throw out to catch all of what you call you Southern white people. Goddamnit, I'm not going to swallow that line! I'm Southern and I'm proud of it, but I'm not one of those pigs--those troglodytes who did what they did to Bobby Weed! I was born in Tidewater Virginia, and if you'll pardon the expression, I regard myself as a gentleman! Also, if you'll pardon me, this simplistic nonsense of yours, this ignorance coming from somebody so obviously intelligent as yourself truly nauseates me!" I heard my voice climb, quavering, cracked and no longer under control, and I feared another disastrous coughing fit as I watched Nathan calmly rising to his full height, so that in effect we were confronting each other. Despite the now rather threatful forward-thrusting nature of his stance and the fact that he outmanned me in bulk and stature, I had the powerful urge to punch him in the jaw. "Nathan, let me tell you something. You are now dealing in the cheapest kind of New York-liberal, hypocritical horseshit! What gives you the right to pass judgment on millions of people, most of whom would die before they'd harm a Negro!" "Ha!" he replied. "See, it's even in your speech pattern. Nigro! I find that so offensive." "It's the way we say it down there. It's not meant to offend. All right--Knee-grow. Anyway," I went on impatiently, "what gives you the right to pass judgment? I find that so offensive." "As a Jew, I regard myself as an authority on anguish and suffering." He paused and as he gazed at me now I thought I saw forthe first time contempt in his look, and mounting disgust. "As for this 'New York-liberal' evasion, this 'hypocritical horseshit'--I consider that a laughably feeble, insubstantial comeback to an honest accusation. Aren't you able to perceive the simple truth? Aren't you able to discern the truth in its awful outlines? And that is that your refusal to admit responsibility in the death of Bobby Weed is the same as that of those Germans who disavowed the Nazi party even as they watched blandly and unprotestingly as the thugs vandalized the synagogues and perpetrated the Kristallnacht. Can't you see the truth about yourself? About the South? After all, it wasn't the citizens of New York State who destroyed Bobby Weed." Most of what he was saying-especially about my "responsibility"--was lopsided, irrational, smug and horrendously wrong, yet to my nearly total chagrin at that point, I found that I could not answer. I was momentarily demoralized. I made an odd chirping sound in the back of my throat and moved in a sort of weak-kneed graceless lurch toward the window. Feeble, impotent though inwardly raging, I struggled for words that would not come. I swilled at a gulp the larger part of a glass of beer, looking through eyes bleared with frustration down at the sunny pastoral lawns of Flatbush, the rustling sycamores and maples, decorous streets all gently astir with Sunday-morning motion: shirt-sleeved ball-throwers, churning bicycles, sun-dappled strollers on the walks. The scent of new-mown grass was rank, sweet, warmly green to the nostrils, reminding me of countryside prospects and distances--fields and lanes perhaps not too different from
those once meandered upon by the young Bobby Weed, whom Nathan had implanted like a pulsing lesion in my brain. And as I thought of Bobby Weed, I was overtaken by bitter, disabling despair. How could this infernal Nathan summon up the shade of Bobby Weed on such a ravishing day? I listened to Nathan's voice behind me, high now, hectoring, reminiscent of that of a squat, half-hysteric Communist youth organizer with a mouth like a torn pocket I had once heard screaming up at the empty empyrean over Union Square. "The South today has abdicated any right to connection with the human race," Nathan harangued me. "Each white Southerner is accountable for the tragedy of Bobby Weed. No Southerner escapes responsibility!" I shivered violently, my hand jerked, and I watched my beer slosh greasily in its glass. Nineteen forty-seven. One, nine, four, seven. Inthat summer, twenty years almost to the month before the city of Newark burned down, and Negro blood flowed incarnadine in the gutters of Detroit, it was possible--if one was Dixieborn and sensitive and enlightened and aware of one's fearsome and ungodly history--to smart beneath such a tongue-lashing, even when one knew that it partook heavily of renascent abolitionist self-righteousness, ascribing to itself moral superiority so hygienic as to provoke tolerant though mirthless amusement. In less violent form, in subtle digs and supercilious little drawing-room slanders, Southerners who had ventured north were to endure such exploitative assaults upon their indwelling guilt during an era of unalleviated discomfort which ended officially on a morning in August, 1963, when on North Water Street in Edgartown, Massachusetts, the youngish, straw-haired, dimple-kneed wife of the yacht-club commodore, a prominent Brahmin investment banker, was seen brandishing a copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time as she uttered to a friend, in tones of clamp-jawed desolation, these words: "My dear, it's going to happen to all of us!" This understatement could not have seemed quite so omniscient to me back then in 1947. At that time the drowsing black behemoth, although beginning to stir, was still not regarded as much of a Northern problem. Perhaps for this very reason--although I might honestly have bridled at the intolerant Yankee slurs that had sometimes come my way (even good old Farrell had gotten in a few mildly caustic licks)--I did feel at my heart's core a truly burdensome shame over the kinship I was forced to acknowledge with those solidly Anglo-Saxon subhumans who were the torturers of Bobby Weed. These Georgia backwoodsmen--denizens, as it so happened, of that same piney coast near Brunswick where my savior Artiste had toiled and suffered and died--had made sixteen-year-old Bobby Weed one of the last and certainly one of the most memorably wiped-out victims of lynch justice the South was to witness. His reputed crime, very much resembling that of Artiste, had been so classic as to take on the outlines of a grotesque clichée: he had ogled, or molested, or otherwise interfered with (actual offense never made clear, though falling short of rape) the simpleton daughter, named Lula--another clichée! but true: Lula's woebegone and rabbity face had sulked from the pages of six metropolitan newspapers--of a crossroads storekeeper, who had instigated immediate action by an outraged daddy's appeal to the local rabble. I had read of the peasantry's medieval vengeance only a week before, while standing on an uptown Lexington Avenue local, squashedbetween an enormously fat woman with an S. Klein shopping bag and a small Popsicle-licking Puerto Rican in a busboy's jacket whose gardenia-ripe brilliantine floated sweetishly up to my nose as he mooned over my Mirror, sharing with me its devil's photographs. While he was still alive Bobby Weed's cock and balls had been hacked off and thrust into his mouth (this feature not displayed), and when near death, though reportedly aware of all, had by a flaming blowtorch received the brand on his chest of a serpentine "L"--representing what? "Lynch?" "Lula?" "Law and Order?" "Love?" Even as Nathan raved at me, I recalled having semi-staggered out of the train and up into the bright summer light of Eighty-sixth Street, amid the scent of wienerwurst and Orange Julius and scorched metal from the subway gratings, moving blindly past the Rossellini movie I had traveled that far to see. I did not go to the theatre that afternoon. Instead, I found myself at Gracie Square on the promenade by the river, gazing as if in a trance at the municipal hideousness of the river islands, unable to efface the mangled image of Bobby Weed from my mind even as I kept murmuring--endlessly it seemed--lines from Revelation I had memorized as a boy: And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain... Perhaps it had been an overreaction, but--ah, God, even so, I could not weep. Nathan's voice, still badgering me, swam back into hearing. "Look, in the concentration camps the brutes in charge would not have stooped to that bestiality!" Would they? Would they not? It seemed hardly to matter, and I was sick of the argument, sick of the fanaticism I was unable to counter or find shelter from, sick with the vision of Bobby Weed and--despite feeling no complicity whatever in the Georgia abomination--suddenly sick with a past and a place and a heritage I could neither believe in nor fathom. I had the idle urge now--at risk of a broken nose--to heave the rest of my beer in Nathan's face. Restraining myself, I tensed my shoulders and said in tones of frosty contempt, "As a member of a race which has been unjustly persecuted for centuries for having allegedly crucified Christ, you--yes, you, goddamnit!--should be aware of how inexcusable it is to condemn any single people for anything!" And then I found myself so enraged that I blurted out something which to Jews, in that tormented bygone year scant months removed from thecrematoriums, was freighted with enough incendiary offensiveness to make me regret the words as soon as they escaped my lips. But I didn't take them back. "And that goes for any people," I said, "by God, even the Germans!" Nathan flinched, then reddened even more deeply, and I thought that the showdown had finally arrived. Just then, however, Sophie miraculously salvaged. the entire cheerless situation by swooping down in her campus-cutup costume and inserting herself between the two of us. "Stop this talk right now," she demanded. "Stop it! It is too serious for Sunday." There was playfulness in her manner but I could tell she meant business. "Forget Bobby Weed. We must talk about happy things. We must go to Coney Island and swim and eat and have a lovely time!" She whirled on the glowering golem and I was surprised and considerably relieved to see how readily she was able to discard her wounded, submissive role and actually stand up to Nathan in a frisky way, beginning to manipulate him out of sheer charm, beauty and brio. "What do you know about concentration camps, Nathan Landau? Nothing at all. Quit talking about such places. And quit shouting at Stingo. Quit shouting at Stingo about Bobby Weed. Enough! Stingo didn't have anything to do with Bobby Weed. Stingo's sweet. And you're sweet, Nathan Landau, and vraiment, je t'adore." I noticed that summer that under certain circumstances having to do with the mysterious vicissitudes of his mind and mood, Sophie was able to work upon Nathan such tricks of alchemy that he was almost instantaneously transformed--the ranting ogre become Prince Charming. European women often boss their men too, but with a beguiling subtlety unknown to most American females. Now she pecked him lightly on the cheek, and holding his outstretched hands by her fingertips, stared at him appraisingly as the beet-hued, choleric passion he had vented on me began to recede from his face. "Vraiment, je t'adore, chéri," she said softly and then, tugging at his wrists, sang out in the most cheery voice of the day, "To the beach! To the beach! We'll build sand castles." And the tempest was over, the thunderclouds had rolled away, and the sunniest good humor flooded into the color-splashed room, where the curtains made a tap-tapping sound upon a sudden gusty breeze from the park. As we moved toward the door, the three of us, Nathan--looking a bit like a fashionable gambler now in his suit out of an oldVanity Fair--looped his long arm around my shoulder and offered me an apology so straightforward and honorable that I could not help but forgive him his dark insults, his bigoted and wrong-headed slurs and his other transgressions. "Old Stingo, I'm just an ass, an ass!" he roared in my ear, uncomfortably loud. "I don't mean to be a shmuck, it's a bad habit I've got, saying things to people without any regard for their feelings. I know it's not all bad down South. Hey, I'll make you a promise. I promise never to jump on you about the South again! Okay? Sophie, you're the witness!" Squeezing me, tousling my hair with fingers that moved across my scalp as if they were kneading dough and like some overgrown and ludicrously affectionate schnauzer poking his noble scimitar of a nose into the coral recesses of my ear, he fell into what I began to identify as his comic mode. We walked in the gayest of spirits toward the subway station-- Sophie between us now, her arms linked in ours--and he returned to that grits-and-molasses accent he rendered with such fantastic precision; there was no sarcasm this time, no intent to needle me, and his intonation, accurate enough to fool a native of Memphis or Mobile, caused me to nearly choke with laughter. But his gift was not mimicry alone; what emanated from him so drolly was the product of dazzling invention. With the loutish, swollen, barely comprehensible diction I had heard bubble up out of the tonsils of all sorts of down-home rustics, he embarked on an improvisation so crazily funny and so deadly precise and obscene that in my own hilarity I quite forgot that it all involved those people whom he had been flaying only moments before with unpitying and humorless rage. I'm sure Sophie missed many of the nuances of his act, but affected by the general contagion, joined me in filling Flatbush Avenue with noisy runaway laughter. And all of it, I dimly began to realize, was blessedly purgative of the mean and threatful emotions which had churned up like an evil storm in Sophie's room. Along a block and a half of the city's crowded, easygoing Sunday street, he created an entire southern Appalachian scenario, a kind of darkling, concupiscent Dogpatch in which Pappy Yokum was transformed into an incestuous old farmer consecrated to romps with a daughter that Nathan--ever medically aware--had christened Pink Eye. "Ever git yore dick sucked by a harelip?" Nathan cackled, too loud, startling a pair of window-shopping Hadassah matrons, who drifted past us with expressions of agony as Nathan sailed blissfully on, doing a job on Mammy. "You done knocked up mah precious babyagain!" he boohooed in female plaint, his voice a heavenly facsimile--down to the perfect shading of falsetto--of that of some weak-witted and godforsaken wife and victim, blighted by wedlock, history and retrograde genes. As impossible to reproduce as the exact quality of a passage of music, Nathan's rollicking, dirty performance--and its power, which I can only barely suggest--had its origins in some transcendent desperation, although I was only beginning to be aware of that. What I was aware of, as my wild laughter sprang forth, was that it was a species of genius--and this was something I would wait another twenty years to witness, in the incandescent figuration of Lenny Bruce. Because it was well past noon, Nathan and Sophie and I decided to postpone our "gourmet" seafood meal until the evening. To fill the gap we bought beautiful long kosher frankfurters with sauerkraut and Coca-Colas at a little stand and took them with us to the subway. On the train, which was thronged with beach-famished New Yorkers carrying huge bloated inner tubes and squalling infants, we managed to find a seat where we could loll three abreast and munch at our humble but agreeable fare. Sophie fell to eating her hot dog with truly serious absorption while Nathan unwound from his flight and began to get better acquainted with me over the clamor of the train. He was ingratiating now, inquisitive without being nosy, and I responded easily to the questions. What brought me to Brooklyn? What did I do? What did I live on? He seemed tickled and impressed to learn that I was a writer, and as for my means of support, I was about to lapse into my silkiest plantation brogue and say something on the order of "Well, you see, there was this nigger-- Knee-grow--slave I owned, that was sold..." But I thought this might provoke Nathan into thinking I was pulling his leg; he might then embark again upon his monologue, which was becoming a trifle exhausting, so I merely smiled thinly, wrapping myself in an enigma, and replied, "I have a private source of income." "You're a writer?" he said again, earnestly and with obvious enthusiasm. Shaking his head back and forth as if with the minor marvel of it all, he leaned across Sophie's lap and gripped my arm at the elbow. And I did not feel it at all awkward or emotional when his black, brooding eyes pierced into mine and he told me in a shout, "You know, I think we're going to become great friends!" "Oh, we're all going to become great friends!" Sophie echoed him suddenly. A lovely phosphorescence enveloped her face as the trainplunged toward sunlight, out of the claustrophobic tunnel and into the marshy maritime reaches of south Brooklyn. Her cheek was very close to my own, flushed with contentment, and when once again she linked her arms in mine and Nathan's, I felt on cozy enough terms to remove, between my delicate thumb and forefinger, a tiny thread of sauerkraut clinging to the corner of her lip. "Oh, we're going to be the best of friends!" she trilled over the train's rackety noise, and she gave my arm a tight squeeze that was certainly not flirtatious but contained something in it more than--well, casual. Call it the reassuring squeeze of one who, secure in her love for another, wished to admit a new-found companion into the privileges of her trust and affection. This was one hell of a compromise, I thought, pondering the harsh inequity of Nathan's custodianship of such an exquisite prize, but better even this savory little crust than no loaf at all. I returned Sophie's squeeze with the clumsy pressure of unrequited love, and realized as I did so that I was so horny my balls had begun to ache. Earlier, Nathan had mentioned getting me a girl at Coney Island, a "hot dish" he knew named Leslie; it was a consolation to be looked forward to, I supposed in