Sophie's Choice - William Styron [198]
Climbing to the second floor, she began to wonder what she would wear; the weather had become brisk and she contemplated which item among their elaborate “costumery” might be appropriate for the October woodlands, then suddenly she remembered a lightweight tweed suit Nathan had bought her at Abraham & Straus only two weeks before. Just as she reached the landing she heard Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody on the phonograph, Marian Anderson’s flowering dark exultancy, triumph wrested from eons of despair. Perhaps it was her tiredness or the aftereffects of the funeral, but the music brought a sweet choking sensation to her throat and her eyes blurred with tears. She quickened her step and her heart stirred because she knew the music meant that Nathan was there. But when she opened the door—“I’m home, darling!” she called to him—she was surprised to find no one in the room. She had expected him. He had said he would be there from six o’clock on, but he was gone.
She lay down for what she thought would be a nap, but in her exhaustion slept for a long time, although restlessly. Waking up in the dark, she saw by the alarm clock’s dim green eyes that it was past ten o’clock and she was seized by grave, immediate alarm. Nathan! It was so unlike him not to be there at the appointed hour, or at least to fail to leave a note. She felt a frantic sense of desertion. She leaped up from bed and turned on the light and began aimlessly to pace the room. Her only thought was that he had come home from work, then gone out for something and had met with a terrible accident on the street. Each recollected sound of a police siren, screeching just now through her dreams, betokened certain catastrophe. Part of her mind told her that this panic was foolish, but it was something she could not help or avoid. Her love for Nathan was so totally consuming, yet at the same time was defined by such childlike dependence in a hundred ways, that the terror that surrounded her in his unexplained absence was utterly demoralizing, like being caught in that strangling fear—the fear that she might be abandoned by her parents—which she had often felt as a little girl. And she knew that this, too, was irrational but beyond remedy. Turning the radio on, she sought a news announcer’s empty distraction. She continued to pace the room, visualizing the most ghastly mishaps, and she was on the verge of dissolving into tears when he suddenly and noisily burst through the door. At that instant she felt an immediate blessing like showering light—resurrection from the dead. She remembered thinking: I cannot believe such love.
He smothered her in his arms. “Let’s fuck,” he breathed into her ear. Then he said, “No, let’s wait. I’ve got a surprise for you.” She trembled in his irresistible bear hug, as pliantly feeble with relief as the stalk of a flower. “Dinner—” she began fatuously.
“Don’t talk about dinner,” he said loudly, releasing her. “We’ve got better things to do.” As he moved around her in a happy little jig she looked into his eyes; the flashing eccentric glitter there, together with his overflowing, overpowering voice—near-frenzy, manic—told her at once that he was high on his “stuff.” Yet although she had never seen him quite this extravagantly agitated, she was not alarmed. Amused, vastly relieved, but not alarmed. She had seen him high before. “We’re going to a jam session at Morty Haber’s,” he announced, rubbing his nose like a lovesick moose across her cheek.