Sophie's Choice - William Styron [276]
Oh, my poor Sophie. She was hollow-eyed and disheveled, exhausted-looking, and the skin of her face had the washed-out sickly blue of skim milk—but mainly she looked aged, an old lady of forty. I took her gently in my arms and we said nothing for a while. She did not weep. Finally I looked at her and said, “Your arm. How is it?”
“It’s not broken,” she replied, “just a bad bruise.”
“Thank God,” I said, then added, “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,“ she murmured, shaking her head, “I just don’t know.”
“We’ve got to do something,” I said, “we’ve got to get him in some kind of custody where he won’t harm you.” I paused, a sense of futility overpowering me, along with ugly guilt. “I should have been here,” I groaned. “I had no business going away. I might have been able to—”
But Sophie halted me, saying, “Hush, Stingo. You mustn’t feel that way. Let’s go get a drink.”
Sitting on a stool at the fake-morocco bar of a hideous mirrored Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street, Sophie told me what had happened during my absence. It was bliss at first, unqualified joy. She had never known Nathan to be in such a serene and sunny mood. Much preoccupied with our coming trip south, and plainly looking forward to the wedding day, he went into a kind of prothalamic fit, taking Sophie through a weekend buying spree (including a special excursion to Manhattan, where they spent two hours at Saks Fifth Avenue) during which she wound up with a huge sapphire engagement ring, a trousseau fit for a Hollywood princess, and a wildly expensive travel wardrobe calculated to knock the eyes out of the natives of such backwater centers as Charleston, Atlanta and New Orleans. He had even thought to drop into Cartier’s, where he had bought me a watch as a best man’s gift. Subsequent evenings they spent boning up on Southern geography and Southern history, both of them tackling various travel guides and he spending long hours with Lee’s Lieutenants as preparation for the tours around the Virginia battlefields I had promised to inflict upon them.
It was all done in Nathan’s careful, intelligent, methodical way, with as much attention to the arcana of the various regions we would be traveling through (the botany of cotton and peanuts, the origins of certain local dialects such as Gullah and Cajun, even the physiology of alligators) as that of a British colonial empire builder of the Victorian era setting forth toward the sources of the Nile. He infected Sophie with his enthusiasm, imparting to her all sorts of useful and useless information about the South, which he accumulated in gobs and bits like lint; loving Nathan, she loved it all, including such worthless lore as the fact that more peaches are grown in Georgia than in any other state and that the highest point in Mississippi is eight hundred feet. He went so far as to go around to the Brooklyn College library and check out two novels by George Washington Cable. He developed an adorable drawl, which filled her with gaiety.
Why had she not been able to detect the warning signals when they began to glimmer? She had watched him carefully all this time, she was certain he had stopped taking his amphetamines. But then the day before, when they had both gone to work—she to Dr. Blackstock’s, he to his “lab”—something must have caused him to slip off the path, just what, she would never know. In any case, she was stupidly off guard and vulnerable when he put out the first signals, as he had before, and she failed to read their portent: the euphoric telephone call from Pfizer, the voice too high-pitched and excited, the announcement of incredible victories in the offing, a grandiose “breakthrough,” a majestic scientific discovery. How could she have been so dumb? Her description of Nathan’s furious eruption and the ensuing damage and debris was for me—in my frazzled state—agreeably laconic, but somehow more searing by its very brevity.
“Morty Haber was giving a party for a friend who was going off for a year to study in France. I worked late to help send out bills at the office and I had told Nathan that I would eat near the office and meet him later at the party. Nathan didn