William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (208 page)

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 it 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 am a 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 one whose 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’
Nig
-ro! 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 for the 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!”