Sophie's Choice - William Styron [27]
“Don’t give me any of that, you hear,” I heard him yell.
“You’re a liar! You’re a miserable lying cunt, do you hear me? A cunt!”
“You’re a cunt too,” I heard her throw back at him. “Yes, you’re a cunt, I think.” Her tone lacked aggressiveness.
“I am not a cunt,” he roared. “I can’t be a cunt, you dumb fucking Polack. When are you going to learn to speak the language? A prick I might be, but not a cunt, you moron. Don’t you ever call me that again, you hear? Not that you’ll ever get a chance.”
“You called me that!”
“But that’s what you are, you moron—a two-timing, double-crossing cunt! Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor. Oh God!” he howled, and his voice rose in wild uncontained rage. “Let me out of here before I murder you—you whore! You were born a whore and you’ll die a whore!”
“Nathan, listen...” I heard her plead. And now as I approached closer to the front door I saw the two of them pressed together, defined in obscure relief against the pink hallway where a dangling forty-watt lightbulb, nearly engulfed by a cloud of fluttering moths, cast its palsied chiaroscuro. Dominating the scene by his height and force was Nathan: broad-shouldered, powerful-looking, crowned with a shock of hair swarthy as a Sioux’s, he resembled a more attenuated and frenetic John Garfield, with Garfield’s handsome, crookedly agreeable face—theoretically agreeable, I should say, for now the face was murky with passion and rage, was quite emphatically anything but agreeable, suffused as it was with such an obvious eagerness for violence. He wore a light sweater and slacks and appeared to be in his late twenties. He held Sophie’s arm tight in his grasp, and she flinched before his onslaught like a rosebud quivering in a windstorm. Sophie I could barely see in the dismal light. I was able to discern only her disheveled mane of straw-colored hair and, behind Nathan’s shoulder, about a third of her face. This included a frightened eyebrow, a small mole, a hazel eye, and a broad, lovely swerve of Slavic cheekbone across which a single tear rolled like a drop of quicksilver. She had begun to sob like a bereft child. “Nathan, you must listen, please,” she was saying between sobs. “Nathan! Nathan! Nathan! I’m sorry I called you that.”
He thrust her arm down abruptly and drew back from her. “You fill me with in-fin-ite revulsion,” he shouted. “Pure un-a-dul-ter-a-ted loathing. I’m getting out of here before I murder you!” He wheeled away from her.
“Nathan, don’t go!” she implored him desperately and reached out to him with both hands. “I need you, Nathan. You need me.” There was something plaintive, childlike in her voice, which was light in timbre, almost fragile, breaking a little in the upper register and of a faint huskiness lower down. The Polish accent overlaying it all made it charming or, I thought, would have made it so under less horrible circumstances. “Please don’t go, Nathan,” she cried. “We need each other. Don’t go!”
“Need?” he retorted, turning back toward her. “Me need you? Let me tell you something”—and here he began to shake his entire outstretched hand at her, as his voice grew more outraged and unstrung—“I need you like any goddamned insufferable disease I can name. I need you like a case of anthrax, hear me. Like trichinosis! I need you like a biliary calculus. Pellagra! Encephalitis! Bright’s disease, for Christ’s sake! Carcinoma of the fucking brain, you fucking miserable whore! Aaaahooooo-o-o!” This last was a rising, wavering wail—a spine-chilling sound that mingled fury with lamentation in a way that seemed almost liturgical, like the keening of a maddened rabbi. “I need you like death,” he bellowed in a choked voice. “Death!”
Once more he turned away, and again she said, weeping, “Please don’t go, Nathan!” Then, “Nathan, where are you going?”
He was near the door now, barely two feet away from me where I stood at the threshold, irresolute, not knowing whether to forge on toward my room or to turn and flee. “Going?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you where I’m going—I’m going to get on the first subway train and go to Forest Hills! I