Sophie's Choice - William Styron [193]
When Sophie described this browbeating and then told the wretched tale of the ensuing events, I was of course immediately reminded of Nathan’s wild behavior on that recent night in the Maple Court when he bade both of us his adamantly final, unfond farewell. I was about to point out to Sophie the similarity and question her about it, but by this time—devouring a huge steaming mound of spaghetti in a little Italian restaurant she and Nathan used to frequent on Coney Island Avenue—she had become so totally absorbed in her chronicle of their life together that I hesitated, faltered helplessly, then lumpishly kept silent. I considered the whiskey. It was baffling about Sophie and her whiskey—baffling and a little overpowering. For one thing, she had the capacity of a Polish hussar; it was astounding to see this poised, lovely and usually painfully correct creature put away the booze; fully a quarter of the fifth of Seagram’s I had bought her had vanished by the time we took a taxi to the restaurant. (She also insisted on transporting the bottle, upon which, it is important to add, I committed no incursions, sticking, as always, to beer.) I attributed this new indulgence to grief over Nathan’s abandonment.
Even so, I was more struck by the manner of Sophie’s drinking than the amount. For the fact is that these powerful eighty-six-proof spirits diluted with only a little water had no apparent disorganizing effect on Sophie’s tongue or thought processes at all. At least this was true when I first witnessed her new-found diversion. Utterly composed, each yellow lock in place, she could slosh it down with the toothy glee of a barmaid out of Hogarth. I wondered if she was not protected by some genetic or cultural adaptation to alcohol which Slavic people seem to share with the Celts. Save for a tender rosiness, there were only two ways in which Seagram’s 7 seemed to alter her expression or her manner. It did turn her into a runaway talker. It made her pour it all out. Not that she had ever held back with me when speaking about Nathan or Poland or the past. But the whiskey transformed her speech into a spillway notable for its precise, unhurried cadences. It was a kind of lubricated diction in which many of the more briery Polish-accented consonants became magically smoothed over. The other thing whiskey did to her was quite fetching. Fetching, that is, in a maddeningly frustrating way: it let loose practically all of her dammed-up reticences about sex. I squirmed with mixed discomfort and delight as she spoke of her past love life with Nathan. The words came out in a charmingly open, unabashed, tickled voice, like that of a child who has discovered pig Latin. “He said I was a wonderful piece of ass,” she announced nostalgically, and shortly after this, told me, “We used to love to fuck in front of mirrors.” God, if she only knew what manner of sugarplums danced in my head when she gave tongue to such delicious conceits.
But for the most part her mood was funereal when she spoke of Nathan, reminiscing with a persistent use of the past tense; it was as if she were speaking of someone long ago dead and buried. And when she related the story of their “suicide pact” on that weekend in the frosty Connecticut countryside, I was saddened and astonished. Even so, I do not think that my astonishment over that mournful little incident could have been exceeded by any form of surprise when, shortly before telling me about that aborted appointment with death, she revealed still another piece of dismal news.