Sophie's Choice - William Styron [308]
“Wedding clothes,” she said somberly, “the wedding clothes from Saks that Nathan bought me. I don’t need any wedding clothes. Don’t you see...”
And yes, I did see. To my awful distress, I did see. It was bad. At this instant I sensed for the first time a distance separating us—an intolerable distance which, in my delusory dreams about a Southern love nest, I had not realized had been keeping us apart as effectively as a wide river in flood, preventing any real communion. At least on the loving level I so craved. Nathan. She was still totally absorbed in Nathan, so much so that even the sad nuptial garments she had transported so far had some huge importance to her that was both tactile and symbolic. And I suddenly grasped another truth: how ludicrous it was of me to think of a wedding and sweet uxorious years down on the old plantation when the mistress of my passion—standing before me now with her tired face so twisted with hurt—was lugging around with her wedding clothes meant to please a man she had loved to the point of death. Christ, my stupidity! My tongue had turned to a lump of concrete, I struggled for words but could say nothing. Over Sophie’s shoulder George Washington’s cenotaph, a blazing stiletto in the night sky, was washed in October mist, and tiny people crawled around its foundation. I felt weak and hopeless, with a central part of me in shambles. Each ticking moment seemed to bear Sophie away from me with the speed of light.
Yet just then she murmured something I didn’t understand. She made a sibilant sound, almost inaudible, and right there on Constitution Avenue, moved toward me in a rush and pressed herself into my arms. “Oh, Stingo dear,” she whispered, “please forgive me. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I still want to go to Virginia with you. Really I do. And we are going tomorrow together, aren’t we? It’s just that when you mention getting married, I get so... so full of trouble. So uncertain. Don’t you understand?”
“Yes,” I replied. And of course I did, although with thick-witted belatedness. I held her close. “Of course I do, Sophie.”
“Oh, we’ll go to the farm tomorrow,” she said, squeezing me, “we really will. Just don’t talk about marriage. Please.”
At that moment I also realized that something not quite genuine had attended my little spasm of euphoria. There had been an ingredient of escapism in my trying so doggedly to lay out the attractions of this garden of terrestrial happiness hard by the Dismal Swamp, where no blowflies buzzed, no pumps broke down, no crops failed, no underpaid darkies ever sulked in the cotton patch, no pig shit stank; for all I knew, despite the trust I had in my father’s opinion, dear old “Five Elms” might be a squalid demesne and a gone-to-seed wreck, and to booby-trap Sophie, so to speak, by enticing her into some tumbledown Tobacco Road would be an indefensible disgrace. But I dismissed all this from my mind, it was something I could not even consider. And there was a more troubling matter. What now had become hideously apparent was that our brief bubble bath of good spirits was flat, finished, dead. When we resumed strolling along, the gloom hovering around Sophie seemed almost visible, touchable, like a fog from which one, after reaching out to her, would withdraw a hand damp with despair. “Oh, Stingo, I need a drink so bad,” she said.
We walked through the evening in total silence. I gave up pointing out the landmarks of the capital, abandoning the tour-guide approach I had used to try to perk up Sophie during the beginning of our meander. It was clear to me that try as she might, she could not shake off the horror which she had felt compelled to spill forth in our little hotel room. Nor indeed could I. Here on Fourteenth Street in the frosty cider air of an early autumn night, with L’Enfant’s stylish oblong spaces luminescent all around us, it was plain that Sophie and I could appreciate neither the symmetry of the city nor its air of wholesome and benevolent peace. Washington suddenly appeared paradigmatically American, sterile, geometrical, unreal. I had identified so completely with Sophie that I felt Polish, with Europe