Sophie's Choice - William Styron [207]
...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