Sophie's Choice - William Styron [31]
When I went to bed the music was still playing. And when each of the scratchy shellac records reached its end, allowing me in the interval before the next to hear Sophie’s inconsolable weeping, I tossed and turned and wondered again how one mortal human being could be the vessel to contain such grief. It seemed nearly impossible that Nathan could inspire this raw, devastating woe. But clearly he had done so, and this posed for me a problem. For if, as I have said, I felt myself slipping already into that sick and unfortified situation known as love, wasn’t it foolish of me to expect to win the affection, much less to share the bed, of one so dislodgeably attached to the memory of her lover? There was something actually indecent about the idea, like laying siege to a recently bereaved widow. To be sure, Nathan was out of the way, but wasn’t it vain of me to expect to fill the vacuum? For one thing, I remembered I had so little money. Even if I broke through the barrier of her grief, how could I expect to woo this ex-starveling with her taste for fancy restaurants and expensive phonograph records?
Finally the music stopped and she stopped weeping too, while the restless creak of springs told me she had gone to bed. I lay there for a long time awake, listening to the soft night-sounds of Brooklyn—a far-off howling dog, a passing car, a burst of gentle laughter from a woman and a man at the edge of the park. I thought of Virginia, of home. I drifted off to sleep, but slept uneasily, indeed chaotically, once waking in the unfamiliar darkness to find myself very close to some droll phallic penetration—through folds, or a hem, or a damp wrinkle—of my displaced pillow. Then again I fell asleep, only to wake with a start just before dawn, in the dead silence of the hour, with pounding heart and an icy chill staring straight up at my ceiling above which Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer’s fierce clarity that she was doomed.
Chapter Three
“STINGO! OH, STINGO!” Late that same morning—a sunny June Sunday—I heard their voices on the other side of the door, rousing me from sleep. Nathan’s voice, then Sophie’s: “Stingo, wake up. Wake up, Stingo!” The door itself, while not locked, was secured by a night chain, and from where I lay against the pillow I could see Nathan’s beaming face as he peered at me through the wide crack in the door. “Rise and shine,” said the voice. “Hit the deck, kid. Up and at ’em, boy. We’re going to Coney Island!” And behind him I heard Sophie, in clear piping echo of Nathan: “Rise and shine! Up and at ’em!” Her command was followed by a silvery little giggle, and now Nathan began to rattle the door and the chain. “Come on, Cracker, hit the deck! You can’t lie there all day snoozin’ like some ole hound dog down South.” His voice took on the syrupy synthetic tones of deepest Dixieland—an accent, though, to my sleep-drugged but responsive ears, that was the product of remarkably deft mimicry. “Stir them lazy bones, honeychile,” he drawled in the munchiest cornpone. “Put on yo’ bathin’ costume. We gonna hab old Pompey hitch up the old coach-an’-foah and hab us a little picnic outin’ down by the seashoah!”
I was—to put it in restrained terms—somewhat less than exhilarated by all this. His snarling insult of the night before, and his general mistreatment of Sophie, had trespassed on my dreams all night in various allusive masks and guises, and now to awake to behold the same midcentury urban face intoning these hokey ante-bellum lyrics was simply more than I could tolerate. I leaped straight out of the bedclothes and hurled myself at the door.