Sophie's Choice - William Styron [195]
Indeed, supervised by Nathan, the splendid apparatus of American medicine brought Sophie as close to a state of smiling fitness as could be wrought upon a person who had suffered such dreadful damage—and this included her marvelous new teeth. Her choppers, as Nathan referred to them, replaced the temporary false teeth which had been installed by the Red Cross in Sweden, and were the handiwork of still another friend and colleague of Larry’s—one of New York’s classiest practitioners of prosthodontia. Those teeth were hard to forget. They had to be the dental equivalent of Benvenuto Cellini. They were fabulous teeth, with a kind of icy, mother-of-pearl sparkle; every time she opened her mouth really wide I was reminded of Jean Harlow in smoochy close-ups, and on one or two memorably sunny days when Sophie burst into laughter those teeth lit up an entire room like a flashbulb.
So, brought back to the land of the living, she could only treasure the wonderful time she had with Nathan all through that summer and early fall. His generosity was exhaustless, and although a greed for luxury was not a component of her nature, she liked the good life and she accepted his bounty with pleasure—as much of her pleasure deriving from the delight which pure giving plainly gave to him as from the things themselves which he gave. And he gave her and shared in everything she could possibly have wanted: record albums of beautiful music, tickets to concerts, Polish books and French books and American books, divine meals in restaurants of every ethnic description all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. As with his nose for wine, Nathan had an informed palate (a reaction, he said, to a childhood surfeit of soggy kreplach and gefilte fish) and he took obvious joy in making her acquainted with New York’s incredible and manifold banquet.
Money itself never seemed to be of any object; his job at Pfizer obviously paid well. He bought her fine clothes (including the droll and beguiling matching “costumes” I first saw them dressed in), rings, earrings, bracelets, bangles, beads. Then there were the movies. During the war she had missed them with almost the same longing as she had missed music. In Cracow before the war there had been a period when she had drenched herself in American movies—the bland innocent romances of the thirties, with stars like Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon and Gable and Lombard. She had also adored Disney, especially Mickey Mouse and Snow White. And—oh God!—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat! And so in New York’s paradise of theatres she and Nathan sometimes went on weekend binges—staring themselves red-eyed through five, six, seven films between Friday night and the last show on Sunday. Nearly everything she possessed flowed from Nathan’s munificence, including even (she said with a giggle) her diaphragm. Having her fitted for a diaphragm by one more of Larry’s associates was a final and perhaps artfully symbolic touch in Nathan’s program of restorative medicine; she had never used a diaphragm before and accepted it with a rush of liberating satisfaction, feeling that it was the ultimate token of her leave-taking from the church. But it liberated her in more than one way. “Stingo,” she said, “never did I think two people could fuck so much. Or love it so much either.”
The only thorn in this bower of roses, Sophie told me, was her employment. That is, the fact that she continued to work for Dr. Hyman Blackstock, who, after all, was a chiropractor. To Nathan, brother of a first-rate doctor, a young man who considered himself a dedicated scientist (and for whom the canons of medical ethics were as sacred as if he himself had taken the Hippocratic oath), the idea of her laboring in the employ of a quack was nearly intolerable. He told her point-blank that in his view it was tantamount to whoring and he implored her to quit. To be sure, for a long time he made an extended joke out of it all, concocting all sorts of gags and stories about chiropractors and their shoddy craft that caused her to laugh despite herself; the general facetiousness of his attitude allowed her to decide that his objections were not to be taken too seriously. Even so, when his complaints grew louder and his animadversions more serious and cutting, she steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of leaving her job, as uncomfortable as the whole situation seemed to make Nathan feel. It was one of the few tangents in their relationship where she felt unable to adopt a subservient point of view. And she was firm about the matter. After all, she was not married to Nathan. She had to feel a certain independence. She had to remain employed in that year when employment was devilishly difficult to come by, especially for a young woman who (as she kept pointing out to Nathan) had