Sophie's Choice Read online

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “This time it’s the other way around. Like it’s opposite, see? This time Sophie’s sittin’ up on the floor with her legs crossed, and Nathan’s sort of crouched down and he’s got his head buried right in her crotch. I don’t mean he’s eatin’ her. He’s cryin’! He’s got his face right down in there and he’s cryin’ away like a baby. And all this time Sophie’s strokin’ that black hair of his and whisperin’, ‘That’s all right, that’s all right.’ And I hear Nathan say, ‘Oh God, how could I do it to you? How could I hurt you?’ Things like that. Then, ‘I love you, Sophie, I love you.’ And she just sayin’, ‘That’s all right,’ and makin’ little cluckin’ noises, and him with his nose in her crotch, cryin’ and sayin’ over and over again, ‘Oh, Sophie, I love you so.’ Ach, I almost heaved up my breakfast.”

  “And what then?”

  “I couldn’t take any more of it. When they finished all this crap and got up off the floor, I went out and got a Sunday paper and walked over to the park and read for an hour. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with either of them. But see what I mean? I mean...” He paused and his eyes morosely probed me for some interpretation of this evil masque. I had none. Then Morris said decisively, “A golem, if you ask me. A fuckin’ golem.”

  I made my way upstairs in a black squall of gusty, shifting emotion. I kept saying to myself that I couldn’t get involved with these sick characters. Despite the grip that Sophie had laid upon my imagination, and despite my loneliness, I was certain that it would be foolhardy to seek their friendship. I felt this not only because I was afraid of getting sucked toward the epicenter of such a volatile, destructive relationship, but because I had to confront the hard fact that I, Stingo, had other fish to fry. I had come to Brooklyn ostensibly “to write my guts out,” as dear old Farrell had put it, not to play the hapless supernumerary in some tortured melodrama. I resolved to tell them that I would not go with them to Coney Island, after all; that done, I would politely but decisively nudge them out of my life, making it plain that I was a solitary spirit who was not to be disturbed, ever.

  I knocked and entered as the last record ceased playing, and the great barge with its jubilant trumpets vanished around a turning on the Thames. Sophie’s room smote me instantly with delight. Though I know an eyesore when I see one, I have had very little sense of “taste,” of decor; yet I could tell that Sophie had achieved a kind of triumph over the inexhaustible pink. Rather than let the pink bully her, she had fought back, splashing the room with complementary hues of orange and green and red—a bright carnation bookcase here, an apricot bedspread there—and thus had vanquished the omnipresent and puerile stain. I wanted to burst out laughing at the way she had imbued that dumb Navy camouflage paint with such joy and warmth. And there were flowers. Flowers were everywhere—daffodils, tulips, gladioli; they sprouted from small table vases and from sconces on the wall. The place was fragrant with fresh flowers, and although they were abundant, there was no feeling of the sickroom amid all these blooms; they seemed instead simply festive, perfectly consonant with the gay flavor of the rest of the room.

  Then I suddenly realized that Sophie and Nathan were nowhere in sight. Just as I was puzzling this out, I heard a giggle and saw a Japanese screen in one of the far corners give a little vibration. And from behind the screen, hand in hand, flashing uniform vaudevillian smiles, came Sophie and Nathan dancing a little two-step and wearing some of the most bewitchingly tailored clothes I had ever seen. More nearly costumes really, they were decidedly out of fashion—his being a white chalk-stripe gray flannel double-breasted suit of the kind made modish more than fifteen years before by the Prince of Wales; hers a pleated plum-colored satin skirt of the same period, a white flannel yachting jacket, and a burgundy beret tilted over her brow. Yet there was nothing hand-me-down about these two relics, they were clearly expensive and too well-fitting to be anything but custom-made. I felt desolate in my white Arrow shirt and its rolled-up sleeves and with my nondescript baggy slacks.

  “Don’t worry,” Nathan said a few moments later, while he was fetching a quart bottle of beer from the refrigerator and Sophie was setting out cheese and crackers. “Don’t worry about your clothes. Just because we dress up like this is no reason for you to feel uncomfortable. It’s just a little fad of ours.” I had slumped pleasurably in a chair, utterly shorn of my resolve to terminate our brief acquaintance. What caused this turnabout is almost impossible to explain. I suspect it was a combination of things. The delightful room, the unexpected and farcical costumery, the beer, Nathan’s demonstrative warmth and eagerness to make amends, Sophie’s calamitous effect on my heart—all these had wiped out my will power. Thus I was once again their pawn. “It’s just a little hobby of ours,” he went on to explain over, or through, limpid Vivaldi as Sophie bustled about in the kitchenette. “Today we’re wearing early thirties. But we’ve got clothes from the twenties, World War One period, Gay Nineties, even earlier than that. Naturally, we only dress up like this on a Sunday or a holiday when we’re together.”

  “Don’t people stare?” I asked. “And isn’t it kind of expensive?”

  “Sure they stare,” he said. “That’s part of the fun. Sometimes—like with our Gay Nineties outfit—we cause a hell of a commotion. As for expense, it’s not much more expensive than regular clothes. There’s this tailor on Fulton Street will make up anything I want so long as I bring him the right patterns.”

  I nodded agreeably. Although perhaps a touch exhibitionistic, it seemed a fairly harmless diversion. Certainly with their splendid good looks, emphasized even more by the contrast between his smoky Levantine features and her pale radiance, Sophie and Nathan would be an eyeful sauntering along together in almost anything. “It was Sophie’s idea,” Nathan explained further, “and she’s right. People look drab on the street. They all look alike, walking around in uniform. Clothes like these have individuality. Style. That’s why it’s fun when people stare at us.” He paused to fill my glass with beer. “Dress is important. It’s part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that’s secondary.”

  Well, it takes all kinds, as I had been accustomed to hear from childhood. Dress. Beauty. Being human. What talk from a man who only shortly before had been mouthing savage words and, if Morris could be trusted, had been inflicting outrageous pain on this gentle creature now flitting about with plates and ashtrays and cheese, dressed like Ginger Rogers in an old movie. Now he could not have been more amiable and engaging. And as I relaxed fully, feeling the beer begin to softly effervesce throughout my limbs, I conceded to myself that what he was saying had merit. After the hideous uniformity in dress of the postwar scene, especially in a man-trap like McGraw-Hill, what really was more refreshing to the eye than a little quaintness, a bit of eccentricity? Once again (I speak now from the vantage point of hindsight) Nathan was dealing in small auguries of the world to come.

  “Look at her,” he said, “isn’t she something? Did you ever see such a dollbaby? Hey, dollbaby, come over here.”

  “I’m busy, can’t you see?” Sophie said as she bustled about. “Fixing the fromage.”

  “Hey!” He gave an earsplitting whistle. “Hey, come over here!” He winked at me. “I can’t keep my hands off her.”

  Sophie came over and plopped down in his lap. “Give me a kiss,” he said.

  “One kiss, that’s all,” she replied, and smacked him lightly at the side of his mouth. “There! One kiss is all you deserve.”

  As she squirmed on his lap he nibbled at her ear and squeezed her waist, causing her adoring face to glow so visibly that I could have sworn he had twisted some kind of knob. “I can’t keep my hands off you-u-u,” he hummed. Like others, I am embarrassed by unprivate displays of affection—or of hostility, for that matter—especially when I am the solitary onlooker. I took a large swallow of beer and averted my eyes
; they of course lit upon the outsized bed with its coverlet of luscious apricot where my new friends had transacted most of these goings-on, and which had been the monstrous engine of so much of my recent discomfort. Maybe my renewed outbreak of coughing betrayed me, or I suspect Sophie sensed my embarrassment; at any rate, she leaped up from Nathan’s lap, saying, “Enough! Enough for you, Nathan Landau. No more kisses.”

  “Come on,” he complained, “one more.”

  “No more,” she said sweetly but firmly. “We’re going to have the beer and a little fromage and then we’re all going to get on the subway train and go have lunch at Coney Island.”

  “You’re a cheater,” he said in a kidding voice. “You’re a tease. You’re worse than any little yenta that ever came out of Brooklyn.” He turned and regarded me with mock gravity. “What do you think of that, Stingo? Here I am pushing thirty years old. I fall crazy in love with a Polish shiksa and she keeps her sweet treasure all locked up as tightly as little Shirley Mirmelstein I tried to make out with for five whole years. What do you think of that?” Again the sly wink.

  “Bad news,” I improvised in a jocular tone. “It’s a form of sadism.” Although I’m certain I kept my composure, I was really vastly surprised at this revelation: Sophie was not Jewish! I could not really have cared less one way or another, but I was still surprised, and there was something vaguely negative and self-preoccupied in my reaction. Like Gulliver among the Hounyhnhnms, I had rather thought myself a unique figure in this huge Semitic arrondissement and was simply taken aback that Yetta’s house should shelter another Gentile. So Sophie was a shiksa. Well, hush my mouth, I thought in mild wonder.

  Sophie set before us a plate containing squares of toast upon which she had melted little sunbursts of golden Cheddar-like cheese. With the beer, they tasted particularly delicious. I began to warm to the convivial, gently alcoholic mood of our tiny gathering as does a hound dog who slinks out from chill, comfortless shadows into the heat of the midday sun.

  “When I first met this one here,” Nathan said as she sat down on the rug beside his chair and contentedly leaned against his leg, “she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year and a half after the Russians liberated that camp she was in. How much was it you weighed, sweetie?”

  “Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight kilos.”

  “Yeah, about eighty-five pounds. Can you imagine? She was a wraith.”

  “How much do you weigh now, Sophie?” I asked.

  “Just fifty.”

  “One hundred and ten pounds,” Nathan translated, “which still isn’t enough for her frame and height. She should weigh about one-seventeen, but she’s getting there—she’s getting there. We’ll make a nice big milk-fed American girl out of her in no time.” Idly, affectionately he fingered the butter-yellow strands of hair that curled out from beneath the rim of her beret. “But, boy, was she a wreck when I first got hold of her. Here, drink some beer, sweetie. It’ll help make you fat.”

  “I was a real wreck,” Sophie put in, her tone affectingly light-hearted. “I looked like an old witch—I mean, you know, the thing that chases birds away. The scarecrow? I didn’t have hardly any hair and my legs ached. I had the scorbut—”

  “The scurvy,” Nathan interjected, “she means she’d had the scurvy, which was cured as soon as the Russians took over—”

  “Le scorbut—scurvy I mean—I had. I lose my teeth! And typhus. And scarlet fever. And anemia. All of them. I was a real wreck.” She uttered the litany of diseases with no self-pity yet with a certain childish earnestness, as if she were reciting the names of some pet animals. “But then I met Nathan and he taked care of me.”

  “Theoretically she was saved as soon as the camp was liberated,” he explained. “That is, she wasn’t going to die. But then she was in a displaced persons’ camp for a long time. And there were thousands of people there, tens of thousands, and they just didn’t have the medical facilities to take care of all the damage that the Nazis had done to so many bodies. So then last year, when she arrived over here in America, she still had a quite serious, I mean a really serious, case of anemia. I could tell.”

  “How could you tell?” I asked, with honest interest in his expertise.

  Nathan explained, briefly, articulately, and with a straightforward modesty that 1 found winning. Not that he was a physician, he said. He was, rather, a graduate in science from Harvard, with a master’s degree in cellular and developmental biology. It had been his achievement in this field of study which had led him to be hired as a researcher at Pfizer, a Brooklyn-based firm and one of the largest pharmaceutical houses in the nation. So much, then, for the background. He claimed no intricate or extensive medical knowledge, and had no use for the lay habit of venturing amateur diagnoses of illness; his training had, however, made him more than ordinarily enlightened about the chemical vagaries and ailments of the human body, and so the moment he first laid eyes on Sophie (“this sweetie,” he murmured with enormous concern and gentleness, twisting the lock of her hair) he guessed, with dead accuracy as it turned out, that her ravaged appearance was the result of a deficiency anemia.

  “I took her to a doctor, a friend of my brother’s, who teaches at Columbia Presbyterian. He does work in nutrition diseases.” A proud note, not at all unattractive in the sense it conveyed of quiet authority, stole into Nathan’s voice. “He said I was right on target. A critical deficiency of iron. We put the little sweetie here on massive doses of ferrous sulfate and she began to bloom like a rose.” He paused and looked down at her. “A rose. A rose. A beautiful fucking rose.” He lightly ran his fingers over his lips and transferred his fingertips to her brow, anointing it with his kiss. “God, you’re something,” he whispered, “you’re the greatest.”

  She gazed up at him. She looked incredibly beautiful but somehow tired and drawn. I thought of the previous night’s orgy of sorrow. She lightly stroked the blue-veined surface of his wrist. “Thank you, Monsieur Senior Researcher at Charles Pfizer Company,” she said. For some reason, I could not help but think: Jesus Christ, Sophie honey, we’ve got to find you a dialogue coach. “And thank you for making me to bloom like a rose,” she added after a moment.

  All at once I became aware of the way in which Sophie echoed so much of Nathan’s diction. Indeed, he was her dialogue coach, a fact which became more directly evident now as I heard him begin to correct her in detail, like an exceedingly meticulous, very patient instructor at a Berlitz school. “Not ‘to bloom,’” he explained, “just ‘bloom.’ You’re so good, it’s about time you were perfect. You must begin to learn just when and where to add the preposition ‘to’ to the infinitive verb, and when to leave it out. And it’s tough, you see, because in English there’s no hard, fast rule. You have to use your instinct.”

  “Instinct?” she said.

  “You have to use your ear, so that it finally becomes instinct. Let me give you an example. You could say ‘causing me to bloom like a rose’ but not ‘making me to bloom.’ There’s no rule about this, understand. It’s just one of those odd little tricks of the language which you’ll pick up in time.” He stroked her earlobe. “With that pretty ear of yours.”

  “Such a language!” she groaned, and in mock pain clutched her brow. “Too many words. I mean just the words for vélocité. I mean ‘fast.’ ‘Rapid.’ ‘Quick.’ All the same thing! A scandal!”

  “ ‘Swift,’ ” I added.

  “How about ‘speedy’?” Nathan said.

  “ ‘Hasty,’ ” I went on.

  “And ‘fleet,’” Nathan said, “though that’s a bit fancy.”

  “ ‘Snappy’!” I said.

  “Stop it!” Sophie said, laughing. “Too much! Too many words, this English. In French it is so simple, you just say ‘vite.’ ”

  “How about some more beer?” Nathan asked me. “We’ll finish off this other quart and then go down to Coney Island and hit the beach.”

  I noticed that Nathan drank next to nothing himsel
f, but was almost embarrassingly generous with the Budweiser, keeping my glass topped off with unceasing attention. As for myself, in that brief time I had begun to achieve a benign, tingling high so surprisingly intense that I became a little uneasy trying to manage my own euphoria. It was an exaltation really, lofty as the summer sun; I felt buoyed up by fraternal arms holding me in a snug, loving, compassionate embrace. Part of what worked on me was, to be sure, only the coarse clutch of alcohol. The rest stemmed from all of those mingled elements comprising what, in that era so heavily burdened by the idiom of psychoanalysis, I had come to recognize as the gestalt: the blissful temper of the sunny June day, the ecstatic pomp of Mr. Handel’s riverborne jam session, and this festive little room whose open windows admitted a fragrance of spring blossoms which pierced me with that sense of ineffable promise and certitude I don’t recall having felt more than once or twice after the age of twenty-two—or let us say twenty-five—when the ambitious career I had cut out for myself seemed so often to be the consequence of pitiable lunacy.

  Above all, however, my joy flowed out from some source I had not known since I had come to New York months before, and thought I had abandoned forever—fellowship, familiarity, sweet times among friends. The brittle aloofness with which I had so willfully armored myself I felt crumbling away utterly. How wonderful it was, I thought, to happen upon Sophie and Nathan—these warm and bright and lively new companions—and the urge I had to reach out and hug both of them close to me was (for the moment at least, despite my desperate crush on Sophie) freighted with the mellowest brotherhood, cleanly, practically devoid of carnal accents. Old Stingo, I murmured, grinning foolishly at Sophie but toasting myself with the foaming Bud, you’ve come back to the land of the living. “Salut, Stingo!” said Sophie, tipping in return the glass of beer which Nathan had pressed on her, and the grave and delectable smile she bestowed on me, bright teeth shining amid a scrubbed happy face still bruised with the shadows of deprivation, touched me so deeply that I made an involuntary, choking sound of contentment. I felt close to total salvation.