Sophie's Choice - William Styron [30]
“Kept,” I said. Without overdoing it, I will from time to time have to try to duplicate the delicious inaccuracies of Sophie’s English. Her command was certainly more than adequate and—for me, anyway—actually enhanced by her small stumbles in the thickets of syntax, especially upon the snags of our grisly irregular verbs. “Kept what?” I asked.
“Kept the carte, the menu I mean. I so often would keep the menu, put it in my bag for a souvenir. He said a menu cost money, that I was stealing. He was right about that, you know.”
‘Taking a menu doesn’t exactly seem like grand larceny to me, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Look, again I know it’s none of my business, but—”
Clearly determined to resist my attempts to help restore her self-esteem, she interrupted me, saying, “No, I know it was wrong. What he said was true, I done so many things that were wrong. I deserved it, that he leave me. But I was never unfaithful to him. Never! Oh, I’ll just die now, without him! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
For a moment I was afraid that she might soar off on another little mad fugue of grief, but she gave only a single hoarse gulping sob, like some final punctuation mark, then turned away from me. “You’ve been kind,” she said. “Now I must go up to my room.”
As she went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress. While it was a beautiful body, with all the right prominences, curves, continuities and symmetries, there was something a little strange about it—nothing visibly missing and not so much deficient as reassembled. And that was precisely it, I could see. The odd quality proclaimed itself through the skin. It possessed the sickish plasticity (at the back of her arms it was especially noticeable) of one who has suffered severe emaciation and whose flesh is even now in the last stages of being restored. Also, I felt that underneath that healthy suntan there lingered the sallowness of a body not wholly rescued from a terrible crisis. But none of these at all diminished a kind of wonderfully negligent sexuality having to do at that moment, at least, with the casual but forthright way her pelvis moved and with her truly sumptuous rear end. Despite past famine, her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass’s brief lodging—thirty seconds would do—within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms. Old Stingo, I mused as she climbed upward, there must be some perversity in this dorsal fixation. Then as she reached the top of the stairs she turned, looking down, and smiled the saddest smile imaginable. “I hope I haven’t annoyed you with my problems,” she said. “I am so sorry.” And she moved toward her room and said, “Good night.”
So then, from the only comfortable chair in my room, where I sat reading Aristophanes that night, I was able to see a section of the upstairs hallway through my partly open door. Once around midevening I saw Sophie take to his room the record albums which Nathan had commanded her to return to him. On her way back I could see that again she was crying. How could she go on so? Where did those tears come from? Later she played over and over on the phonograph the final movement of that First Symphony of Brahms which he so big-heartedly had allowed her to keep. It must have been her only album now. All evening that music filtered down through the paper-thin ceiling, the lordly and tragic French horn mingling in my head with the flute’s antiphonal, piercing birdcall to fill my spirit with a sadness and nostalgia almost more intense than any I had ever felt before. I thought of the moment of that music