William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (255 page)

He seemed to be much calmer now, the frenzy of the morning, the raging lunacy of the afternoon stilled or at least momentarily calmed by the same Nembutal he had given her—the blessed barbiturate which in their common terror they thought he would never find but, only two hours ago, found. He was calmer but, she knew, still deranged; curious, she thought, how in this present pacified form of his derangement he seemed no longer so frightening and menacing, despite the unequivocal menace of the cyanide capsule six inches from her eyes. The minuscule Pfizer trademark was clearly imprinted on the gelatine; the capsule was tiny. It was, he explained, a special veterinary capsule, meant to contain antibiotics for small cats and puppy dogs, which he had obtained as a receptacle for the dose; and because of office technicalities, the capsules themselves had been more difficult to get hold of yesterday than the ten grains of sodium cyanide—five grains for her and five for himself. It was no joke, she knew; at some other time and place she would have regarded the whole display as one of his morbid tricks: the shiny pink pod at the last minute popping open between his fingers to reveal a wee flower, a garnet, a chocolate kiss. But not after this day and its unending delirium. She knew quite beyond doubt that the little casket held death. Odd, though. She felt nothing but a spreading lassitude now, watching him as he raised the capsule to his lips and inserted it between his teeth, biting down just hard enough to lightly bend the surface but not to break it. Was her lack of terror due to the Nembutal or to some intuition that he was still faking? He had done this before. He withdrew the capsule from his mouth and smiled.
“Rienada fucking nothing.”
She recalled the other moment when he flirted thus, less than two hours before in this very room, although it seemed a week ago, a month. And she wondered now through what miraculous alchemy (the Nembutal?) had he been made to cease his daylong uninterrupted rant. Talktalktalktalktalk... The talk had only a few times stopped since that morning at about nine o’clock when he stormed up the steps at the Pink Palace and awakened her...

...Eyes still shut, her head still woolly from sleep, she hears Nathan make a cackling noise. “Up and at ’em!”

She hears him say, “Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there, won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jew-boy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside!”

She comes awake. She had anticipated his immediate embrace, wonders if she had put her diaphragm in before going to bed, remembers that she had done so and now lazily rolls over, smiling sleepily, to greet him. She recalls his incredible gluttonous passion when on such a high. Recalls it with voluptuary delight—everything—not alone the beginning hungry tenderness, his fingers on her nipples and their gentle yet insistent search between her legs but all else and one thing specifically, again anticipated with hungry, at last liberated
(adieu, Cracow!),
uninhibited, self-absorbed bliss: his extravagant ability to make her
come
—to come not once or twice but over and over again until an almost sinister final losingness of herself has been achieved, a sucking death like descent into caverns during which she cannot tell whether she is lost in herself or in him, a sense of black whirling downward into an inseparability of flesh. (It is almost the only time she thinks in or speaks Polish any longer, whispering loudly against his ear,
“We? mnie, we? mnie,”
which spills out mysteriously, spontaneously and means “Take me, take me,” although once when Nathan asked her the meaning she was gaily forced to lie, saying, “It means
fuck me, fuck me!”)
It is, as Nathan sometimes exhaustedly proclaims afterward, the twentieth-century Superfuck—think how bland human fucking was throughout the ages before the discovery of benzedrine sulphate. Now she is wildly aroused. Stirring, stretching like a cat, she reaches out an arm toward him, inviting him to bed. He says nothing. And then, puzzled, she hears him say again, “Come on! Up and at ’em! This Jew-boy’s going to take you for a trip to the country!” She begins, “But, Nathan—” His voice, interrupting, is at once insistent and jazzed-up. “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to hit the road!” She feels quick frustration while just then a memory of bygone decorums
(bonjour, Cracow!)
gives her a twinge of shame at her urgent and unbuttoned lust. “Come on!” he commands. Naked, she moves out of bed, glances up, sees Nathan gazing into the dappled morning sunlight as he sniffs deeply—from a dollar bill—at what she instantly knows is cocaine...

...In the New England twilight, past his band and its poison, she could see the inferno of leaves, one tree awash in vermilion, merging with another crafted of the most violent gold. Outside, the evening woods stood in quietude and the vast patches like maps of color were captured motionless, no leaf astir, in the light of the setting sun. Distantly, cars passed on the highway. She felt drowsy but did not seek sleep. She saw now that there were two capsules between his fingers, pink identical twins. “His and hers is one of the cutest contemporary concepts,” she heard him say. “His and hers all over the bathroom, all over the house, why not his and hers cyanide, his and hers fucking nothing? Why not, Sophielove?”

There was a knock at the door and Nathan’s hand twitched slightly in response. “Yes?” he said in a flat soft tone. “Mr. and Mrs. Landau,” said the voice, “this is Mrs. Rylander. I
hate
to disturb you!” The voice was overly ingratiating, sedulously sweet. “In the off-season the kitchen closes at seven o’clock. Just wanted to tell you, I hate to interrupt your nap. You’re the only guests here, so there’s no hurry yet, just wanted to tell you. My husband’s making his specialty tonight, corned beef and cabbage!” Silence. “Thank you very much,” Nathan said, “we’ll be down soon.”

Footsteps thumped down the ancient carpeted staircase; the timbers squealed like a hurt animal. Talktalktalktalktalk. He had talked himself hoarse. “Consider, Sophie-love,” he was saying now, caressing the two capsules, “consider how intimately life and death are intertwined in Nature, which contains everywhere the seeds of our beatitude and our dissolution. This, for instance, HCN, is spread throughout Mother Nature in smothering abundance in the form of glycosides, which is to say, combined with sugars. Sweet, sweet sugar. In bitter almonds, in peach pits, in certain species of these autumn leaves, in the common pear, the arbutus. Imagine, then, when those perfect white porcelain teeth of yours bite down upon the delectable macaroon the taste you experience is only a molecule’s organic distance removed from that of this...”

She blanked out his voice, gazing again at the astonishing leaves, a fire-lake. She smelled the cabbage from below, blooming, dank. And remembered another voice, Morty Haber’s, filled with his nervous solicitude: “Don’t look so guilty. There’s nothing you could have done, since he’s been hooked for a long time before you ever laid eyes on him. Can it be controlled? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t
know,
Sophie! I wish to God I knew! Nobody knows much about amphetamines. Up to a point they’re relatively harmless. But they obviously can be dangerous,
addictive,
especially when mixed up with something else, like cocaine. Nathan likes to snort cocaine on
top
of the Bennies, and I think that’s goddamned dangerous. Then he can get out of control and go into some, I don’t know, area of psychosis where no one can reach him. I’ve checked out all the data, and yes, it’s dangerous,
very
dangerous—Oh, fuck it, Sophie, I don’t want to talk about it any more, but if he flips out, make sure you get in touch with me right away, me or Larry...” She gazed past Nathan at the leaves, and sensed that her lips were tingling. The Nembutal? For the first time in minutes she stirred slightly against the mattress. Instantly she felt a sharp ache in her ribs where he had kicked her...

...“Fidelity would become you more,” he is saying in the midst of his runaway rant. She hears his voice over the roaring slipstream of wind rushing past the convertible’s windshield. Although it is chilly, Nathan has put the top down. Sitting next to him, she has covered herself with a blanket. She does not fully understand what he has said to her, half shouts to him, “What did you say, darling?” He turns to face her, she catches a glimpse of his eyes, distraught now, the pupils all but vanished, swallowed up in the violent brown ellipses. “I said
fidelity
would become you more, to use an elegant variation.” She is seized with puzzlement and a vague clammy fear. She looks away, heart pounding. Never in their months together has he displayed real anger toward her. Cold dismay begins to wash over her like rain on naked flesh. What does he mean? She fixes her gaze on the landscape wheeling by, the tended evergreen shrubbery at the margin of the manicured parkway, the forest beyond with its explosive turning leaves, blue sky, bright sun, telephone poles. WELCOME TO CONNECTICUT/DRIVE SAFELY. She is aware that he is driving very fast. They overtake car after car, passing with a whooshing noise and a vibration of air. She hears him say, “Or to
not
use an elegant variation, you’d better not
fuck around,
especially where I can see it!” She gasps aloud, she cannot believe he is saying this. As if he had slapped her she feels her head jerk sideways, then she turns. “Darling what do you—” But “Shut up!” he roars, and now again the words flow forth as upon a spillway, undammed, a babbling continuation of the jumbled semicoherence he has assailed her with since they left the Pink Palace well over an hour before. “It would appear that that luscious Polish ass of yours is irresistible to your employer the adorable quack from Forest Hills, which is quite all right, quite all right, mind you, it is a darling piece of equipment if I do say so myself, having not only fattened it up but availed myself of its uncommon pleasures, this I can understand Dr. Flimflam yearning for with all his heart and aching prick...” She hears him give a
heh-heh-heh
brainless giggle. “But for you to cooperate in his enterprise, to actually lay it down and
hump
this despicable cheat, then,
then
to flaunt it all right before my eyes as you did last night, letting him stand there and get one last wet feel, poking that revolting chiropractic tongue down your throat—oh, my little Polish tart, it is more than I can bear.” Unable to speak, she fixes her gaze on the speedometer: 70, 75, 80... It is not so bad, she thinks, thinking in kilometers, then in swift adjustment says to herself:
Miles!
We are going to go out of control! Thinks: It is beyond madness, this jealousy, that I am sleeping with
Blackstock.
Far behind them there is the dim sound of a siren, she is somehow aware of a flashing red light, its reflection like a tiny raspberry winking on and off against the windshield. She opens her mouth, poises her tongue for speech (“Darling!” she is trying to say), cannot utter the word. Talktalktalktalktalk... It is like the sound track of a movie pieced together by a chimpanzee, in part coherent but creating no design, making no final sense; its paranoia causes her to feel weak and ill. “Schoenthal is one hundred percent right, it is pure sentimental rubbish embedded in the Judeo-Christian ethos that makes suicide morally wrong, after the Third Reich suicide should become the legitimate option of any sane human being on earth, isn’t that right, Irma?” (Why was he suddenly calling her Irma?) “But I shouldn’t be surprised at your hankering to spread your legs for any joint that comes your way, to be quite honest and I haven’t said this before, much of you has been a mystery since first we met, I might have suspected you were a fucking
goy kurveh,
but what else—what else?—ohmyohmy, did some weird self-inflicted
Schadenfreude
cause me to be attracted to such a perfect replica of Irma Griese? She was some looker, according to the people at the trial in Lunenberg, even the prosecutors tipped their hats to that, oh shit, my beloved mama always said I was fatally attracted to blond
shiksas,
why can’t you be a decent Jewish boy, Nathan, and marry a nice girl like Shirley Mirmelstein who’s so beautiful and has got a father that’s made a killing in foundation garments with a summer place in Lake Placid yet.” (The siren still trails them, faintly screaming. “Nathan,” she says, “there’s a policeman.”) “The Brahmans
revere
suicide, many Orientals, like what’s so big about death anyway,
rienada fucking nothing,
so upon reconsideration not too long ago I said to myself okay, beautiful Irma Griese got the rope for personally killing x-thousands of Jews at Auschwitz but didn’t logic dictate a lot of little Irma Grieses getting away, I mean what about this funny little Polish
nafka
I’m shacked up with, that is, could she truly be one hundred percent true-blue Polack, she looks Polack in many ways but also
echt
-Nordic like some Kraut movie star masquerading as the murderous Countess of Cracow, also I might add that absolutely flawless Deutsch I have heard emerge with such precision from your lovely Rhine maiden’s lips. A Polack! Ah me!
Das machst du andern weismachen!
Why don’t you admit it, Irma! You played footsie with the SS, didn’t you? Isn’t that how you got out of Auschwitz, Irma? Admit it!” (She has stopped up her ears with both hands, sobbing “No! No!” She feels the car decelerate abruptly. The siren’s scream becomes a dragon’s growl, diminuendo. The police car pulls abreast.) “
Admit
it, you Fascist cunt!”...

...As she lay in the dusk watching the leaves dim and fade, she heard the sound of his urine in steady noisy collision with the water in the toilet. She remembered. Amid the fantastic leaves earlier, in the deep woods, standing above her, he had tried to piss into her mouth, had failed; it had been the commencement of his downward slide. She stirred on the bed, smelling the steamy rising fumes of cabbage, her eyes lighting drowsily on the two capsules he had deposited gently in the ashtray.
BOAR’S HEAD INN
, read the Old English letters around the china rim,
AN AMERICAN LANDMARK
. She yawned, thinking how strange it was. How strange it was that she should not fear death, if he was truly going to force death upon her, but that she should fear simply death taking him and him alone, leaving her behind. That through some unforeseen fuck-up, as he would put it, the lethal dose would do its work only on him and she would be once again the hapless survivor. I cannot live without him, she heard herself whisper aloud in Polish, aware of the triteness of the thought but also of its absolute truth. His death would be
my
final agony. From afar a train whistle cried across the valley with its strange name, Housatonic, the long cry a richer and more melodic sound than that of the shrill European horns yet no different in the sudden way that railroad lament wrenched the heart.