Sophie's Choice - William Styron [279]
“No, buddy,” he put in suddenly, “I don’t mean Southern nooky! What I mean is Polack nooky! What I mean is that when ol’ Nathan goes off to see Mr. Jeff Davis’s White House or the ol’ plantation where Scarlett O’Hara whupped all those niggers with her ridin’ crop—why, there’s ol’ Stingo back at the Green Magnolia Motel, and guess what he’s doin’? Just guess! Guess what ol’ Stingo’s up to with his best friend’s wife! Why, Stingo and her are in bed and he has actually mounted that tender willing little Polish piece an’ they jus’ fuckin’ their fool heads off! Hee hee!”
As he said these words I was aware that Sophie had drawn near, hovering at my elbow, murmuring something I could not comprehend—the incomprehensibility being partly due to the blood pounding at a hot gallop in my ears and perhaps also to the fact that, distracted and horrified, I could pay little attention to anything save for the incredible jellylike weakness in my knees and my fingers, which had begun to twitch out of control. “Nathan!” I said in a choked voice. “Good God—”
And then his voice, transmuted back into what I had always conceived as Educated High Brooklyn, became a snarl of such ferocity that even the myriad intervening and humming electronic synapses could not filter out the force of its crazed but human rage. “You unspeakable creep! You wretched swine! God damn you to hell forever for betraying me behind my back, you whom I trusted like the best friend I ever had! And that shit-eating grin of yours day after day cool as a cucumber, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it, when you gave me a piece of your manuscript to read—‘ah gee, Nathan, thank you so much—’ when not fifteen minutes earlier you’d been humping away in bed with the woman I was going to marry, I say was going to, past tense, because I’d burn in hell before I’d marry a two-timing Polack who’d spread her legs for a sneaky Southern shitass betraying me like...”
I removed the receiver from my ear and turned to Sophie, who, with mouth agape, had clearly divined what it was that Nathan had been raging about. “Oh God, Stingo,” I heard her whisper, “I didn’t want you to know that he kept saying it was you that I was...”
I listened again, in impotence and anguish: “I’m coming to get you both.” Then there was a moment’s silence, resonant, baffling. And I heard a metallic click. But I realized the line was not dead.
“Nathan,” I said. “Please! Where are you?”
“Not far away, old pal. In fact, I’m right around the corner. And I’m coming to get you treacherous scum. And then you know what I’m going to do? Do you know what I’m going to do to you two deceitful, unspeakable pigs? Listen—”
There was an explosion in my ear. Too diminished by the distance or by whatever in a phone mercifully deamplifies noise and prevents it from destroying human hearing, the impact of the gunshot stunned rather than hurt me yet nonetheless left a prolonged and desolate buzzing against my eardrum like the swarming of a thousand bees. I will never know whether Nathan fired that shot into the very mouth of the telephone he was holding, or into the air, or against some forlorn, anonymous wall, but it sounded close enough for him to be, as he had said, right around the corner, and I dropped the receiver in panic and, turning, clutched for Sophie’s hand. I had not heard a shot fired since the war, and I’m almost certain that I thought I would never hear another shot again. I pity my blind innocence. Now, after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever there has occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Nathan—the poor lunatic whom I loved, high on drugs and with a smoking barrel in some nameless room or phone booth