’s haberdashery thrown to the winds. “That fucking Nembutal!” he roars. “Where did I put it! Oh shit! Oh Jesus, I’ve got to...” But he does not finish his words, instead straightens up and whirls around, hurling himself into the front seat, where he sprawls out beneath the steering wheel and frantically fiddles with the latch of the glove compartment. Found! “Water!” he gasps. “Water!” But she, in her own pain and confusion able somehow to anticipate this moment, has plucked over the edge of the back seat a carton of gingerale from the picnic basket they had never touched and now, wrestling with the fiendish opener, flips off the cap of a bottle in a shower of foam and thrusts it into his hand. He gulps the pills, and watching him, she thinks the oddest thought. Poor devil, she thinks, which are the words he—yes, he—had whispered only weeks before while watching The Lost Weekend and a crazed Ray Milland in quest of the salvation of his whiskey bottle. “Poor devil,” Nathan had murmured. Now, with the green gingerale upended and the muscles of his throat working in rapid convulsions, she is reminded of that movie scene and thinks: Poor devil. Which in itself would not be odd at all, she reflects, were it not for the fact that it is the very first time she has experienced an emotion having to do with Nathan that resembles anything so degrading as pity. She cannot stand pitying him. And the shock of this realization makes her face go numb. Slowly she lowers herself to a sitting position on the ground and leans against the car. The trash in the parking lot eddies about her in gritty slow whirlpools of wind and dust. The pain in her side beneath her breast stabs her, scintillant, glowing sharply like the sudden return of an ugly recollection. She strokes her ribs with her fingertips, lightly, tracing the feverish outline of the ache itself. She wonders whether he might not have broken something. Feeling dazed now, and in the hurtful slow delay of the daze, she is aware that she has lost all track of time. She barely hears him when from the front seat where he lies sprawled with one leg twitching (the twitching mud-spattered trouser cuff is all she can see) he murmurs something which though muffled and obscure sounds like “the necessity of death.” And the laugh comes, not loud: Harharharhar... For a long time there is no sound. Then, “Darling,” she says quietly, “you mustn’t call me Irma.”
“Irma was something I just couldn’t bear,” Sophie told me. “I could take anything from Nathan but that... that he should turn me into Irma Griese. I saw that woman once or twice at the camp—that monster woman, she would have made Wilhelmine appear to be an angel. It hurt me more than all his kicking that he called me Irma Griese. But before we got to the inn that night I tried to make him stop calling me that, and when he begun to call me Sophielove I knew he was not so high—so crazy—any more. Even though he was still playing with those little capsules of poison. This scared me now. I didn’t know how far he was going to go. I was out of my mind with the idea of our life with each other and I didn’t want us to die—separate or together. No. Anyway, the Nembutal begun to work on him, I could tell that, he came slowly down off his high and when he squeezed me it hurt so bad I thought I would faint and I gave this scream and then he realized what he had done to me. He was so full of guilt then, kept whispering in bed, ‘Sophie. Sophie, what have I done to you, how could I have hurt you?’ And such as that. But the other pills—what he called the barbies—were beginning to make this effect on him and he couldn’t keep his eyes open and pretty soon he was asleep.
“I remember the woman who owned the inn walked upstairs again and asked me through the door when were we coming down, it was getting late, when were we coming down for the rum punch and the dinner. And when I told her we were tired, we were just going to sleep, she got very upset and angry and said it was the most thoughtless thing, et cetera, but I didn’t care, I was so very tired and sleepy myself. So I went back and lie down next to Nathan and begun to go to sleep. But then, oh my God, I thought of the capsules of poison that were still in the ashtray. I was filled with this panic. I was just terrified because I didn