Sophie's Choice - William Styron [275]
“Of course,” I said. I jumped to the phone again, only to be met with that impasse which more often than not throughout life seems to stymie people at moments of extreme crisis. A secretary told me that Larry was in Toronto, where he was attending a professional convention. His wife was with him. In those antediluvian pre-jet days Toronto was as far away as Tokyo, and I gave a moan of despair. Then just as I had hung up, again the phone rang. Once more it was the steadfast Fink, whose troglodyte manners I had cursed so often but whom I now blessed.
“I just heard from Sophie,” he said.
“Where is she?” I shouted.
“She was at the office of that Polish doctor she works for. But she’s not there now. She went out to the hospital to get an x-ray of her arm. She said Nathan might of broke it, the fuckin’ bum. But she wants you to come down. She’ll stay at that doctor’s office this afternoon until you get there.” And so I went.
For many young people in the throes of late-adolescent growth, the twenty-second year is the most anxiety-filled of all. I realize now how intensely discontented, rebellious and troubled I was at that age, but also how my writing had kept serious emotional distress safely at bay, in the sense that the novel I was working on served as a cathartic instrument through which I was able to discharge on paper many of my more vexing tensions and miseries. My novel of course was more than this, too, yet it was the vessel I have described, which is why I so cherished it as one cherishes the very tissues of one’s being. Still, I was quite vulnerable; fissures would appear in the armor I had wrapped around me, and there were moments when I was assaulted by Kierkegaardian dread. The afternoon I hurried away from Jack Brown’s to find Sophie was one of these times—an ordeal of extreme fragility, ineffectualness and self-loathing. On the bus rocking south through New Jersey to Manhattan, I sat cramped and exhausted in a nearly indescribable miasma of fright. I had a hangover, for one thing, and the jangling nervousness heightened my apprehension, causing me to shudder at the coming showdown with Sophie and Nathan. My failure with Mary Alice (I had not even said goodby to her) had unpinned the very moorings of what was left of my virility, and made me all the more despondent over the suspicion that throughout these years I had deluded myself about my faggot propensities. Somewhere near Fort Lee, I caught a reflected glimpse of my ashen, unhappy face superimposed against a panorama of filling stations and drive-ins and tried to close my eyes and mind to the horror of existence.
The hour was getting on toward five in the afternoon by the time I made it to Dr. Blackstock’s office in downtown Brooklyn. It was apparently after office hours, for the reception room was empty save for a rather pinched and spinsterish woman who alternated with Sophie as secretary-receptionist; she told me that Sophie, who had been gone since late morning, had not yet returned from having her arm x-rayed but should be back at any moment. She invited me to sit and wait, but I preferred to stand, and then found myself pacing about restlessly in a room painted—drowned would be more exact—in the most gruesome shade of deep purple I had ever seen. How Sophie had worked day after day basking in such a creepy hue baffled me. The walls and ceiling were done in the same mortician’s magenta which Sophie had told me adorned the Blackstock home in St. Albans. I wondered if such berserk decorator’s witchery might not also have been concocted by the late Sylvia, whose photograph—decked with black bunting, like that of a saint—smiled down from one wall with a kind of engulfing benignancy. Other photographs plastered everywhere attested to Blackstock’s familiarity with the demigods and goddesses of pop culture, in one after another frantically gemütlich display of palship: Blackstock with a popeyed Eddie Cantor, Blackstock with Grover Whalen, with Sherman Billingsley and Sylvia at the Stork Club, with Major Bowes, with Walter Winchell, even Blackstock with the Andrews Sisters, the three songbirds with their plentiful hair closely surrounding his face like large grinning bouquets, the doctor poutingly proud above the inked scrawl: Love to Hymie from Patty, Maxene and LaVerne. In the morbid, nervous mood I was in, the pictures of the merry chiropractor and his friends brought me as far down into bottomless despondency as I had ever been, and I prayed for Sophie to arrive and help relieve my angst. And just then she came through the door.