Sophie's Choice - William Styron [71]
“What is that playing?” It was naggingly familiar, something from Bach I should have been able to name as from a child’s first music book, but which I had unaccountably forgotten.
“It’s from Cantata 147, the one that in English has the title Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,”
“I envy you that phonograph,” I said, “and those records. But they’re so goddamned expensive. A Beethoven symphony would cost me a good hunk of what I used to call a week’s pay.” It then occurred to me that what had further bolstered the kinship I felt for Sophie and Nathan during these nascent few days of our friendship had been our common passion for music. Nathan alone was keen on jazz, but in general I mean music in the grand tradition, nothing remotely popular and very little composed after Franz Schubert, with Brahms being a notable exception. Like Sophie, like Nathan too, I was at that time of life—long before Rock or the resurgence of Folk—when music was more than simple meat and drink, it was an essential opiate and something resembling the divine breath. (I neglected to mention how much of my free time at McGraw-Hill, or time after work, had been spent in record stores, mooching hours of music in the stifling booths they had in those days.) Music for me at this moment was almost so much in itself a reason for being that had I been deprived too long of this or that wrenching harmony, or some miraculously stitched tapestry of the baroque, I would have unhesitatingly committed dangerous crimes. “Those stacks of records of yours make me drool,” I said.
“You know, kid, you’re welcome to play them anytime.” I was aware that in the past few days he had taken to calling me “kid” at times. This secretly pleased me more than he could know. I think that in my growing fondness for him I, an only child, had begun to see in him a little of the older brother I had never had—a brother, furthermore, whose charm and warmth so outweighed the unpredictable and bizarre in him that I was swift to put his eccentricities quite out of my head. “Look,” he went on, “just consider my pad and Sophie’s pad as a couple of places—”
“Your what?” I said.
“Pad.”
“What’s that?”
“Pad. You know, a room.” It was the first time I had ever heard the word used in the argot. Pad. I liked the sound.
“Anyway, consider yourself welcome up there anytime you want to play the records during the day when Sophie and I have gone to work. Morris Fink has a passkey. I’ve told him to let you in anytime you want.”
“Oh, that’s really too much, Nathan,” I blurted, “but God—thanks.” I was moved by this generosity—no, nearly overwhelmed. The fragile records of that period had not evolved into our cheap items of conspicuous consumption. People were simply not so free-handed with their records in those days. They were precious, and there had never been made available to me so much music in my life; the prospect which Nathan offered me filled me with cheer that verged close to the voluptuous. Free choice of any of the pink and nubile female flesh I had ever dreamed of could not have so ravishingly whetted my appetite. “I’ll certainly take good care of them,” I hurried to add.
“I trust you,” he said, “though you do have to be careful. Goddamn shellac is still too easily broken. I predict something inevitable in a couple of years—an unbreakable record.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“Not only that, not only unbreakable but compressed—made so that you can play an entire symphony, say, or a whole Bach cantata on one side of a single record. I’m sure it’s coming,” he said, rising from the chair, adding within the space of a few minutes his prophecy of the long-playing record to that of the Jewish literary renaissance. “The musical millennium is close at hand, Stingo.”
“Jesus, I just want to thank you,” I said, still genuinely affected.
“Forget it, kid,” he replied, and his gaze went upward in the direction of the music. “Don’t thank me, thank Sophie. She taught me to care about music as if she had invented it, as if I hadn