Sophie's Choice - William Styron [217]
I stuck my head out into the hallway and called upstairs. I heard the faint strains of something of Bach. Sophie’s response from behind her door, while indistinct, sounded chipper enough, and I retreated and splashed about in my morning purification. It was a Saturday. The night before, in what seemed a rush of (perhaps inebriate) affection toward me, Sophie had promised to spend the entire weekend at the house before moving off to her new place near Fort Green Park. She also agreed enthusiastically to an outing with me to Jones Beach. I had never been there but I knew it to be an oceanside strand far less congested than Coney Island. Now while I soaped myself beneath the tepid trickle in the pink mildewed upright metal coffin which served as my shower stall, I began to scheme in earnest about Sophie and the immediate future. I was more than ever aware of the tragicomic nature of my passion for Sophie. On the one hand I possessed enough of a sense of humor to be aware of the ludicrousness of the contortions and writhings her very existence inflicted upon me. I had read romantic literature in sufficient bulk to know that my wretched frustrated moonings could in their collective despair almost laughably exemplify the word “lovelorn.”
Yet it was only half a joke, really. Because the anxiety and pain which this one-way love caused me was as cruel as the discovery that I had acquired some terminal disease. The only cure for this disease was her love in return—and such a genuine love seemed as remote as a cure for cancer. At times (and this moment was one) I was able actually to curse her out loud—“Bitch, Sophie!”—for I almost would have preferred her scorn and hatred to this proximate love which could be called affection or fondness but never love itself. My mind still echoed with her outpouring of the past night, with its awful vision of Nathan and its brutality and despairing tenderness and perverse eroticism and its stink of death. “God damn you, Sophie!” I said half aloud, slowly enunciating the words while I lathered my crotch. “Nathan’s out of your life now, gone for good. That death-force is gone, finished, kaput! So now love me, Sophie. Love me. Love me! Love life!”
Drying myself off, I considered in a businesslike way the possible practical objections Sophie might have to me as a suitor, provided of course that I could speak my way through those emotional walls and somehow gain her love. They were rather troublesome, her potential complaints. I was, of course, years younger (and a postpubescent pimple blossoming next to my nose, glimpsed in the mirror just then, underscored the fact), but this was a trifling matter with many historical precedents to make it right, or at least acceptable. Then, too, I was not nearly so solvent financially as Nathan had been. Although she could scarcely be called avaricious, Sophie loved the fat American life; self-denial was not among her most obvious qualities, and I wondered with a soft but audible groan how on earth I