Sophie's Choice Page 6
I felt curiously happy, very much in my element. Enjoy, enjoy, Stingo, I said to myself. Like numerous Southerners of a certain background, learning and sensibility, I have from the very beginning responded warmly to Jews, my first love having been Miriam Bookbinder, the daughter of a local ship chandler, who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race; and then later I experienced a grander empathy with Jewish folk which, I am persuaded, is chiefly available to those Southerners shattered for years and years by rock-hard encounter with the anguish of Abraham and Moses’ stupendous quest and the Psalmist’s troubled hosannas and the abyssal vision of Daniel and all the other revelations, bittersweet confections, tall tales and beguiling horrors of the Protestant/Jewish Bible. In addition, it is a platitude by now that the Jew has found considerable fellowship among white Southerners because Southerners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb. In any case, sitting there that lunchtime at Sammy’s I positively glowed in my new environment, as it dawned on me with no surprise at all that an unconscious urge to be among Jews was at least part of the reason for my migration to Brooklyn. Certainly I could not be more deep in the heart of Jewry had I just been set down in Tel Aviv. And leaving the restaurant, I even confessed to myself a liking for Manischewitz, which in fact was lousy as an accompaniment to gefilte fish but bore a syrupy resemblance to the sweet scuppernong wine I had known as a boy in Virginia.
As I wandered back to Yetta’s house I was a bit upset once more by the happening in the room above me. My concern was largely selfish, for I knew that if such a thing went on too often, I would get little sleep or peace. Another part that bothered me, though, was the strange quality of the event—the jolly athletic amour so obviously and exquisitely enjoyed, yet followed by the precipitous slide into rage, weeping and discontent. Then, too, what further got my goat was the matter of who was doing it to whom. I was irked that I should be thrust into this position of lubricious curiosity, that my introduction to any of my fellow tenants should not be anything so ordinary as a “Hi” and a straightforward handshake but an episode of pornographic eavesdropping upon two strangers whose faces I had never even seen. Despite the fantasy life I have described myself as having led so far during the course of my stay in the metropolis, I am not by nature a snoop; but the very proximity of the two lovers—after all, they had nearly come down on my head—made it impossible for me to avoid trying to discover their identity, and at the earliest feasible moment.
My problem was almost immediately solved when I met my first of Yetta’s tenants, who was standing in the downstairs hallway, going through the mail which the postman had left on a table near the entrance. He was an amorphously fleshed, slope-shouldered, rather ovoid-looking young man of about twenty-eight, with kinky brick-colored hair and that sullen brusqueness of manner of the New York indigene. During my first days in the city I thought it a manner so needlessly hostile that I was driven several times to acts of near-violence, until I came to realize that it was only one aspect of that tough carapace that urban beings draw about themselves, like an armadillo’s hide. I introduced myself politely—“Stingo’s the name”—while my fellow roomer thumbed through the mail, and for my pains, got the sound of steady adenoidal breathing. I felt a hot flash at the back of my neck, went numb around the lips, and wheeled about toward my room.
Then I heard him say, “This yours?” And as I turned he was holding up a letter. I could tell from the handwriting that it was from my father.
“Thanks,” I murmured in rage, grabbing the letter.
“You mind savin’ me the stamp?” he said. “I collect commemoratives.” He essayed something in the nature of a grin, not expansive but recognizably human. I made a humming noise and gave him a vaguely positive look.
“I’m Fink,” he said, “Morris Fink. I more or less take care of this place, especially when Yetta’s away, like she is this weekend. She went to visit her daughter in Canarsie.” He nodded in the direction of my door. “I see you got to live in the crater.”
“The crater?” I said.
“I lived there up until a week ago. When I moved out that’s how you got to move in. I called it the crater because it was like livin’ in a bomb crater with all that humpin’ they were doin’ in that room up above.”
There had been suddenly established a bond between Morris and me, and I relaxed, filled with inquisitive zeal. “How did you put up with it, for God’s sake? And tell me—who the hell are they?”
“It’s not so bad if you get them to move the bed. They do that—move it over toward the wall—and you can barely hear them humpin’. Then it’s over the bathroom. I got them to do that. Or him, that is. I got him to move it even though it’s her room. I insisted. I said Yetta would throw them both out if he didn’t, so he finally agreed. Now I guess he’s moved it back toward the window. He said something about it bein’ cooler there.” He paused to accept one of the cigarettes I had offered him. “What you should do is ask him to move the bed back toward the wall again.”
“I can’t do that,” I put in, “I just can’t go up to some guy, some stranger, and say—well, you know what I’d have to say to him. It would be terribly embarrassing. I just couldn’t. And which ones are they, anyway?”
“I’ll tell him if you’d like,” said Morris, with an air of assurance that I found appealing. “I’ll make him do it. Yetta can’t stand it around here if people annoy each other. That Landau is a weird one, all right, and he might give me some trouble, but he’ll move the bed, don’t you worry. He doesn’t want to get thrown out on his ass.”
So it was Nathan Landau, the first name on my list, who I realized was the master of this setup; then who was his partner in all that din, sin and confusion? “And the gal?” I inquired. “Miss Grossman?”
“No. Grossman’s a pig. It’s the Polish broad, Sophie. Sophie Z., I call her. Her last name, it’s impossible to pronounce. But she’s some dish, that Sophie.”
I was aware once more of the silence of the house, the eerie impression I was to get from time to time that summer of a dwelling far removed from the city streets, of a place remote, isolated, almost bucolic. Children called from the park across the way and I heard a single car pass by slowly, its sound unhurried, inoffensive. I simply could not believe I was living in Brooklyn. “Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Well, let me tell you something,” said Morris. “Except maybe for Nathan, nobody in this joint has enough money to really do anything. Like go to New York and dance at the Rainbow Room or anything fancy like that. But on Saturday afternoon they all clear out of here. They all go somewhere. For instance, the Grossman pig—boy, is she some fuckin’ yenta—Grossman goes to visit her mother out in Islip. Ditto Astrid. That’s Astrid Weinstein, lives right there across the hall from you. She’s a nurse at Kings County Hospital like Grossman, only she’s no pig. A nice kid, but I would say not exactly a knockout. Plain. A dog, really. But not a pig.”
My heart sank. “And she goes to see her mother, too?” I said with scant interest.
“Yeah, she goes to see her mother, only in New York. I can somehow tell you’re not Jewish, so let me tell you something about Jewish people. They very often have to go see their mothers. It’s a trait.”
“I see,” I said. “And the others? Where have they gone?”
“Muskatblit—you’ll see him, he’s big and fat and a rabbinical student—Moishe goes to see his mother and his father, somewhere in Jersey. Only he can’t travel on the Sabbath, so he leaves here Friday night. He’s a big movie fiend, so Sunday he spends all day in New York goin’ to four or five movies. Then he gets back here late Sunday night half blind from goin’ to all those movies.”
“And, ah—Sophie and Nathan? Where do they go? And what do they do, by the way, aside from—” I was on the verge of an obvious jest but held my tongue, a point lost in any case, since Morris, so garrulous, so fluently and freely informative, had anticipated what
I had been wondering and was rapidly filling me in.
“Nathan’s got an education, he’s a biologist. He works in a laboratory near Borough Hall where they make medicine and drugs and things like that. Sophie Z., I don’t know what she does exactly. I heard she’s some kind of receptionist for a Polish doctor who’s got a whole lot of Polish clients. Naturally, she speaks Polish like a native. Anyway, Nathan and Sophie are beach nuts. When the weather’s good, like now, they go to Coney Island—sometimes Jones Beach. Then they come back here.” He paused and made what seemed to approximate a leer. “They come back here and hump and fight. Boy, do they fight! Then they go out to dinner. They’re very big on good eating. That Nathan, he makes good money, but he’s a weird one, all right. Weird. Real weird. Like, I think he needs psychiatric consultation.”
A phone rang, and Morris let it ring. It was a pay phone attached to the wall, and its ring seemed exceptionally loud, until I realized that it must have been adjusted in such a way as to be heard all over the house. “I don’t answer it when nobody’s here,” Morris said. “I can’t stand that miserable fuckin’ phone, all those messages. ‘Is Lillian there? This is her mother. Tell her she forgot the precious gift her Uncle Bennie brought her.’ Yatata yatata. The pig. Or, ‘This is the father of Moishe Muskatblit. He’s not in? Tell him his cousin Max got run down by a truck in Hackensack.’ Yatata yatata all day long. I can’t stand that telephone.”
I told Morris that I would see him again, and after a few more pleasantries, retired to my room’s nursery-pink and the disquietude that it had begun to cause me. I sat down at my table. The first page of the legal pad, its blankness still intimidating, yawned in front of me like a yellowish glimpse of eternity. How in God’s name would I ever be able to write a novel? I mused, chewing on a Venus Velvet. I opened the letter from my father. I always looked forward to these letters, feeling fortunate to have this Southern Lord Chesterfield as an advisor, who so delighted me with his old-fashioned disquisitions upon pride and avarice and ambition, bigotry, political skulduggery, venereal excess and other mortal sins and dangers. Sententious he might occasionally be, but never pompous, never preacherish in tone, and I relished both the letters’ complexity of thought and feeling and their simple eloquence; whenever I finished one I was usually close to tears, or doubled over with laughter, and they almost always set me immediately to rereading passages in the Bible, from which my father had derived many of his prose cadences and much of his wisdom. Today, though, my attention was first caught by a newspaper clipping which fluttered out from the folds of the letter. The headline of the clipping, which was from the local gazette in Virginia, so stunned and horrified me that I momentarily lost my breath and saw tiny pinpoints of light before my eyes.
It announced the death by suicide, at the age of twenty-two, of a beautiful girl with whom I had been hopelessly in love during several of the rocky years of my early adolescence. Her name was Maria (rhyming in the Southern fashion with “pariah”) Hunt, and at fifteen I had been so feverish in my infatuation for her that it seems in retrospect a small-scale madness. Talk about your lovesick fool, how I exemplified such a wretch! Maria Hunt! For if in the 1940s, long before the dawn of our liberation, the ancient chivalry still prevailed and the plastic June Allysons of a boy’s dreams were demigoddesses with whom one might at most, to use the sociologists’ odious idiom, “pet to climax,” I carried self-abnegation to its mad limit and with my beloved Maria did not even try to cop a feel, as they used to say in those days. Indeed, I did not do so much as place a kiss upon her heartlessly appetizing lips. This is not on the other hand to define our relationship as Platonic, for in my understanding of that word there is an element of the cerebral, and Maria was not at all bright. To which it must be added that in those days of the forty-eight states, when in terms of the quality of public education Harry Byrd’s Virginia was generally listed forty-ninth—after Arkansas, Mississippi and even Puerto Rico—the intellectual tang of the colloquy of two fifteen-year-olds is perhaps best left to the imagination. Never was ordinary conversation cleft by such hiatuses, such prolonged and unembarrassed moments of ruminant non-speech. Nonetheless, I had passionately but chastely adored her, adored her for such a simple-minded reason as that she was beautiful enough to wreck the heart, and now I discovered that she was dead. Maria Hunt was dead!
The advent of the Second World War and my involvement in it had caused Maria to fade out of my life, but she had been many times since in my wistful thoughts. She had killed herself by leaping from the window of a building, and I found to my astonishment that this had occurred only a few weeks before, in Manhattan. I later learned that she had lived around the corner from me, on Sixth Avenue. It was a sign of the city’s inhuman vastness that we had both dwelt for months in an area as compact as Greenwich Village without ever having encountered each other. With a wrench of pain so intense that it was almost like remorse, I pondered whether I might not have been able to save her, to prevent her from taking such a terrible course, had I only known of her existence in the city, and her whereabouts. Reading the article over and over again, I verged very close to a state of real upheaval, and found myself moaning aloud at this senseless story of young despair and loss. Why did she do it? One of the most poignant aspects of the account was that her body had for complicated and obscure reasons gone unidentified, had been buried in a pauper’s grave, and only after a matter of weeks had been disinterred and sent back for final burial in Virginia. I was sickened, nearly broken up by the awful tale—so much so that I abandoned for the rest of the day any idea of work, and recklessly sought a kind of solace in the beer I had stored in the refrigerator. Later I read this passage from my father’s letter:
In re the enclosed item, son, I naturally thought you would be more than interested, inasmuch as I remember how so terribly “keen” you were on young Maria Hunt six or seven years ago. I used to recall with great amusement how you would blush like a tomato at the mere mention of her name, now I can only reflect on that time with the greatest sorrow. We question the good Lord’s way in such a matter but always to no avail. As you certainly know, Maria Hunt came from a tragic household, Martin Hunt a near-alcoholic and always at loose ends, while Beatrice I’m afraid was pretty unremitting and cruel in her moral demands upon people, especially I am told Maria. One thing seems certain, and that is that there was a great deal of unresolved guilt and hatred pervading that sad home. I know you will be affected by this news. Maria was, I remember, a truly lustrous young beauty, which makes it all the worse. Take some comfort from the fact that such beauty was with us for a time...
I brooded over Maria all afternoon, until the shadows lengthened beneath the trees around the park and the children fled homeward, leaving the paths that crisscrossed the Parade Grounds deserted and still. Finally I felt woozy from the beer, my mouth was raw and dry from too many cigarettes, and I lay down on my bed. I soon fell into a heavy sleep that was more than ordinarily invaded by dreams. One of the dreams besieged me, nearly ruined me. Following several pointless little extravaganzas, a ghastly but brief nightmare, and an expertly constructed one-act play, I was overtaken by the most ferociously erotic hallucination I had ever experienced. For now in some sunlit and serene pasture of the Tidewater, a secluded place hemmed around by undulant oak trees, my departed Maria was standing before me, with the abandon of a strumpet stripping down to the flesh—she who had never removed in my presence so much as her bobbysocks. Naked, peach-ripe, chestnut hair flowing across her creamy breasts, desirable beyond utterance, she approached me where I lay stiff as a dagger, importuning me with words delectably raunchy and lewd. “Stingo,” she murmured. “Oh, Stingo, fuck me.” A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia, little blisters of sweat adorned the dark hair of her mound. She wiggled toward me, a wanton nymph with moist and parted mouth, and now bending down over my bare belly, crooning her glorious obscenities, prepared to take between those lips unkissed by my own the bone-rigid stalk of my passio
n. Then the film jammed in the projector. I woke up in dire distress, staring at a pink ceiling stained with the shadows of the oncoming night, and let out a primeval groan—more nearly a howl—wrenched from the nethermost dungeons of my soul.
But then I felt another nail amplify my crucifixion: they were going at it again upstairs on the accursed mattress. “Stop it!” I roared at the ceiling, and with my forefingers plugged up my ears. Sophie and Nathan! I thought. Fucking Jewish rabbits! Although they might have let up for a brief time, when I listened once more they were still in action—no riotous sport this go-round, however, and no cries or arias, only the bedsprings making a decorous rhythmical twanging—laconic, measured, almost elderly. I did not care that they had slowed down their pace. I hurried—truly raced—outside into the dusk and walked distractedly around the perimeter of the park. Then I began to stroll more slowly along, growing reflective. Walking underneath the trees, I began seriously to wonder if I had not made a grave mistake in coming to Brooklyn. It really was not my element, after all. There was something subtly and inexplicably wrong, and had I been able to use a turn of phrase current some years later, I might have said that Yetta’s house gave off bad vibrations. I was still shaken by that unmerciful, lascivious dream. By their very nature dreams are, of course, difficult of access through memory, but a few are forever imprinted on the brain. With me the most memorable of dreams, the ones that have achieved that haunting reality so intense as to be seemingly bound up in the metaphysical, have dealt with either sex or death. Thus Maria Hunt. No dream had produced in me that lasting reverberation since the morning nearly eight years before, soon after my mother’s burial, when, struggling up from the seaweed-depths of a nightmare, I dreamed I peered out the window of the room at home in which I was still sleeping and caught sight of the open coffin down in the windswept, drenched garden, then saw my mother’s shrunken, cancer-ravaged face twist toward me in the satin vault and gaze at me beseechingly through eyes filmed over with indescribable torture.