Sophie's Choice - William Styron [310]
“But I don’t know,” Sophie said at last, gazing at me dry-eyed but sliding into the slurred diction which glass after glass of alcohol lent to her tongue, along with the merciful and grief-deadening anodyne it provided for her battered memory. “Is it best to know about a child’s death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again? I don’t know either for sure. Suppose I had chosen Jan to go... to go to the left instead of Eva. Would that have changed anything?” She paused to look out through the night at the dark shores of the Virginia of our destination, removed by staggering dimensions of time and space from her own benighted, cursed and—to me even at that moment—all but incomprehensible history. “Nothing would have changed anything,” she said. Sophie was not given to actresslike gestures, but for the first time in the months I had known her she did this strange thing: she pointed directly to the center of her bosom, then pulled away with her fingers an invisible veil as if to expose to view a heart outraged as desperately as the mind can conceive. “Only this has changed, I think. It has been hurt so much, it has turned to stone.”
I knew that it was best that we should get well rested before continuing our trip down to the farm. Through various conversational stratagems, including more agricultural wisdom leavened by all the good Southern jokes I could extract from memory, I was able to infuse Sophie with enough cheer to make it through the rest of the dinner. We drank, ate crab cakes and managed to forget Auschwitz. By ten o’clock she was again quite befuddled and unsteady of gait—as was I, for that matter, with an unconscionable amount of beer stowed away—and so we took a taxi back to the hotel. She was already drowsing against my shoulder by the time we reached the stained marble steps and tobacco-fragrant lobby of the Hotel Congress, and she clung with weary heaviness to my waist as we rode the elevator up to the room. Onto the sway-back bed she flung herself wordlessly, without removing her clothes, and was instantaneously asleep. I put a blanket over her, and after stripping to my skivvy drawers, lay down beside her and fell asleep myself like one bludgeoned. At least for a time. Then came dreams. The church bell sounding intermittently through my slumber was not entirely unmusical, but it had a clangorous, hollow, Protestant ring, as if fashioned of low-pitched alloys; demonically, in the midst of my turbulent erotic visions, it tolled with the voice of sin. The Reverend Entwistle, drugged with Budweiser and in bed with a woman not his wife, was basically ill-at-ease in this illicit ambience, even while asleep. DARK DOOM! DARK DOOM! pealed the wretched bell.
Indeed, I’m sure it was both my residual Calvinism and my clerical disguise—also that damnable church bell—which helped cause me to falter so badly when Sophie woke me. This must have been around two in the morning. It should have been that moment in my life when literally, as the saying goes, all my dreams came true, for in the half-light I realized both by feel and evidence of my sleep-blurred eyes that Sophie was naked, that she was tenderly licking the recesses of my ear, and that she was groping for my cock. Was I asleep or awake? If all this were not puzzlingly sweet enough—the simulacrum of a dream—the dream melted instantly away at the sound of her whisper: “Oh... now, Stingo darling, I want to fuck.” Then I felt her tugging off my underpants.
I began to kiss Sophie like a man dying of thirst and she returned my kisses, groaning, but this is all we did (or all I could do, despite her gently expert, tickling manipulation) for many minutes. It would be misleading to emphasize my malfunction, either its duration or its effect on me, although such was its completeness that I recall resolving to commit suicide if it did not soon correct itself. Yet there it remained in her fingers, a limp worm. She slid down over the surface of my belly and began to suck me. I remember once how, in the abandonment of her confession regarding Nathan, she fondly spoke of him calling her