Sophie's Choice - William Styron [192]
She turned away from me then, sobbing. There was something a little somnambulistic about the way in which she walked with arms rigid at her side across the room to the edge of the bed. Then abruptly she flopped face down on the apricot bedspread and smothered her face in her hands. She was silent but her shoulders were heaving. I went to the side of the bed and stood above her, looking down. I began to master my voice. “Sophie,” I said, “forgive me for all this. But I just don’t understand anything. I don’t understand anything about Nathan, and maybe I don’t understand anything about you, either. Though I think I’m able to figure out a lot more about you than I ever will about him.” I paused. It was, I knew, like creating another wound to mention that matter which she herself had obviously felt was so hateful to talk about—and hadn’t she with her own lips warned me away from it?—but I was compelled to say what I had to say. I reached down and laid my hand lightly on her bare arm. The skin was very warm and seemed to throb beneath my fingers like the throat of a frightened bird. “Sophie, the other night... the other night at the Maple Court when he... when he cast us out. That awful night. Surely he knew you had a son in that place—just a while ago you told me that you let him know that. Then how could he have been so cruel to you, taunting you like that, asking you how you lived through it all while so many of the others were”—the word nearly choked me, a clot in my throat, but I managed to get it out—“were gassed. How could anybody do that to you? How could anyone love you and be so unbelievably cruel?”
She said nothing for a while, merely lay there with her face buried in her hands. I sat on the edge of the bed beside her and stroked the pleasantly warm, almost febrile surface of her arm, delicately skirting the vaccination scar. From that angle I could plainly see the grim blue-black tattoo, the row of numbers remarkably neat, a little barbwire fence of orderly ciphers in which one “seven” was bisected with the meticulous European slash. I smelled that herbal perfume she so often wore. Could it be possible, Stingo, I asked myself, that she would ever love you? I suddenly wondered if I dared now make a pass at her. No, definitely not. Lying there, she seemed terribly vulnerable, but my outburst had tired me, leaving me somehow shaken and empty of desire. Moving my fingers upward, I touched the loose strands of her butter-bright hair. Finally I sensed that she had stopped weeping. Then I heard her say, “It was never his fault. He always had this demon, this demon which appeared when he was in his tempêtes. It was the demon in control, Stingo.”
I do not know which image at this moment, each appearing almost simultaneously at the rim of my consciousness, gave me the chill that traversed the length of my spinal column: that of black monstrous Caliban or of Morris Fink’s fearful golem. But I felt myself shiver, and in the midst of the spasm said, “What do you mean, Sophie—a demon?”
She made no immediate reply. Instead, after a long silence, she raised her head up and said something in a soft matter-of-fact voice that truly flabbergasted me, it was so totally out of character, so much a part of some other Sophie I had not witnessed until this very day.
“Stingo,” she said, “I can’t leave here so quickly. Too many memories. Do me a big favor. Please. Go over to Church Avenue and buy a bottle of whiskey. I want very much to get drunk.”
I got her the whiskey—a fifth of rye—which helped enable her to tell me about some bad moments during the turbulent year she spent with Nathan, before I came on the scene. All of which might be considered unnecessary to recount were it not for the fact that he would return to possess our lives again.
In Connecticut, somewhere on the beautiful winding arboreal highway that stretches north and south along the riverbank between New Milford and Canaan, there had been an old country inn with slanted oak floors, a sunny white bedroom with samplers on the wall, two damp panting Irish setters downstairs and the smell of applewood burning in the fireplace