Sophie's Choice - William Styron [211]
...Naked, he padded back to the bed and lightly, carefully lay down beside her. The two capsules still glistened in the ashtray, and she wondered drowsily if he had forgotten them, wondered if he again would flirt and tantalize her with their pink menace. The Nembutal, washing her downward toward sleep, pulled at her legs like the warm undertow of a gentle sea. “Sophielove,” he said, his voice drowsy too, “Sophielove, I regret only two things.” She said, “What, darling?” When he failed to answer, she said again, “What?” “Just this,” he said finally, “that all that hard work at the lab, all the research, that I’ll never see the fruits of it.” Strange, she thought as he spoke, his voice almost for the first time that day had lost its hysteric threat, its mania, its cruelty, had become edged instead with the tenderness, familiar, soothing, which was so naturally a part of him and which all day long she had been certain was past recapture. Had he, too, been rescued at the last instant, was he being borne backward serenely into his salvaging barbiturate harbor? Would he in fact simply forget death and drift off to sleep?
There was a creak on the stairway outside, again the unctuous female voice. “Mr. and Mrs. Landau, excuse me, please. But my husband wants to know if you would care for a drink before dinner. We have everything. But my husband does make a wonderful hot rum punch.” After a moment Nathan said, “Yeah, thanks, a rum punch. Two.” And she thought: It sounds like the other Nathan. But then she heard him murmur softly, “The other thing, the other thing is that you and I never had any children.” She gazed into the glimmering dusk, beneath the coverlet felt her fingernails slice like blades into the flesh of her palm, thought: Why does he have to say that now? I know, as he said sometime today, I was a masochistic cunt and he was only giving me what I wanted. But why can’t he at least spare me that agony? “I meant that last night about getting married,” she heard him say. She made no reply. She half dreamed of Cracow and time long ago and the clipclopclipclop of horses’ hoofs on the timeworn cobblestones; for no reason at all she saw in some theatre’s darkness the bright pastel image of Donald Duck as he bristled about, sailor’s hat askew, spluttering in Polish, then heard her mother’s gentle laughter. She thought: If I could unlock the past even a little, maybe I could tell him. But the past or guilt, or something, stops up my mouth in silence. Why can’t I tell him what I, too, have suffered? And lost...
...Even with his crazy whispered rhyme repeated again and again—“Don’t be a teaser, Irma Griese”—even with his hand remorselessly twisting her hair as if from its roots, even with his other hand at her shoulder clamped down with sickening pain and force, even with the pervasive sense he transmits, lying there, shuddering, of a man far over the brink and prowling his own demented underworld—even with the feverish fright engulfing her she cannot help but feel the old delectable pleasure as she sucks him. And sucks and sucks and sucks. And endlessly loving sucks. Her fingers claw the loamy earth of the wooded hillside upon which he lies underneath her, she feels the dirt impacting itself beneath her fingernails. The ground is damp and chill, she smells woodsmoke, and through her eyelids