Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  “Oh, please, Sophie, please,” I retorted. I knew she was distraught, knew she couldn’t really mean any of this, knew also that with Nathan she found his Jewishness simply an easier target than Nathan himself, for whom obviously she was still daft with love. This nasty discharge vexed me, even though I thought I understood its source. Nonetheless, the power of suggestion is mighty, her savage bile touched in me some atavistic susceptibility, and as the bus rocked its way out onto the asphalt parking lot at Jones Beach, I found myself brooding blackly on my recent robbery. And Morris Fink. Fink! That fucking little hebe, I thought, trying vainly to belch.

  The little deaf-mutes debarked as we did, clambering down around us, stepping on our toes, hemming us in as they filled the air with their butterfly gesticulations. We could not seem to dislodge them; they formed an eerie, soundless retinue in our march across the beach. The sky that had been so bright in Brooklyn had become overcast; the horizon was leaden, the surf swelled with sluggish oily waves. Only a few bathers dotted the beach; the air was muggy and breathless. I felt almost unbearably anxious and depressed, yet my nerves were quiveringly aflame. My ears echoed with a delirious, inconsolable passage from the St. Matthew Passion which had wept out of Sophie’s radio earlier that morning, and for no special reason yet in fitting antiphony I recalled some seventeenth-century lines I had read not long before: “... since Death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die...” I perspired in the humid cocoon of my angst, worrying about my theft and my present near-destitution, worrying about my novel and how I would ever get it finished, worrying whether or not I should press charges against Morris Fink. As if responding to some soundless signal, the deaf-mute children suddenly dispersed and scattered like little shore birds, were gone. Sophie and I trudged along the water’s edge beneath a sky as gray as moleskin, the two of us alone.

  “Nathan had everything that is bad in Jews,” Sophie said, “nothing of the little bit that’s good.”

  “What’s good about Jews at all?” I heard myself say loudly, querulously. “It was that Jew Morris Fink that stole the money from my medicine cabinet. I’m certain! Money-mad, money-greedy Jewish bastard!”

  Two anti-Semites, on a summer outing.

  An hour later I calculated that Sophie had sloshed down perhaps one or two ounces less than half a pint of whiskey. She was putting it away like some female riveter at a Polish bar in Gary, Indiana. Yet there was no discernible lapse in coordination or locomotion. Only her tongue had slipped its tether (making her speech not slurred but simply runaway, sometimes breakneck) and as on the previous night, I listened and watched in wonder while the powerful solvent of those grain neutral spirits set loose her inhibitions. Among other things, the loss of Nathan seemed to have an effect on her that was perversely erotic, causing her to brood on bygone amour.

  “Before I was sent to the camp,” she said, “I had a lover in Warsaw. He was younger than me by a few years. He wasn’t even twenty. His name was Jozef. I never spoke of him to Nathan, I don’t know why.” She paused, biting her lip, then said, “Yes, I do. Because I knew that Nathan was so jealous, so crazy jealous that he would hate me and punish me for having a lover even in the past. That’s how jealous Nathan could be, so I didn’t ever say a word to him about Jozef. Imagine, hating somebody in the past who had been a lover! And was dead.”

  “Dead?” I said. “How did he die?”

  But she seemed not to hear. She rolled over on our blanket. In her canvas beach bag she had—to my great surprise and greater delight—transported four cans of beer. I was not even annoyed that she had forgotten to give them to me sooner. They were, of course, by now quite warm but I could not have cared less (I, too, badly needed that dog’s hair), and she opened the third of these, dripping foam, and handed it to me. She had brought along some nondescript-looking sandwiches too, but these lay uneaten. Deliciously isolated, we lay in a kind of hidden cul-de-sac between two high dunes lightly strewn with coarse grass. From here the sea—listlessly washing against the sand and a curious unsightly gray-green, like engine oil—was plainly visible, but we ourselves could not be seen except by the gulls that wavered overhead on the windless air. The humidity hovered around us in an almost palpable mist, the sun’s pale disc hung behind gray clouds that shifted and churned in slow motion. In a certain way it was very melancholy, this seascape, and I should not have wanted for us to stay there long, but the blessed Schlitz had stilled at least momentarily my earlier seizure of dread. Only my horniness remained, aggravated by Sophie next to me in her white Lastex bathing suit and the total seclusion of our sandy nook, the clandestine nature of which made me a little feverish. I was still also so maddeningly and helplessly priapic—my first such fit since the doomed night with Leslie Lapidus—that the image I entertained of self-castration was, for a fleeting moment, not absolutely frivolous. For the sake of modesty I lay determinedly belly-downward in my dumb-looking puke-green Marine Corps-issue swim trunks, playing as usual my patient confessor’s role. And again as my antennae went out, they relayed back the information that there was no evasion, nothing equivocal in what she was trying to say.

  “But there was another reason I would not have told Nathan about Jozef,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have told him even if he was not going to be jealous.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean he would not have believed anything about Jozef—anything at all. It had to do with Jews again.”

  “Sophie, I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, it’s so complicated.”

  “Try to explain.”

  “Also, it had to do with the lies I had already told Nathan about my father,” she said. “I was getting in—what is the expression?—over my head.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look, Sophie, you’re confusing me. Straighten me out. Please.”

  “Okay. Look, Stingo. Nathan would not believe anything good about Polish people when it come to the Jews. I couldn’t convince him that there were decent Polish people who had risked their lives to save Jews. My father—” She broke off for an instant; there was a catch in the back of her throat, then a long hesitation before she said, “My father. Oh, goddamnit, I’ve already told you—I lied to Nathan about him just like I lied to you. But I finally told you the truth, you see, I just couldn’t have told Nathan because... I couldn’t have told him because... because I was a coward. I had come to see that my father was so big a monster that I had to hide the truth about him, even though what he was and what he done was not my fault. Was not anything I should feel any blame about.” Again she hesitated. “It was so frustrating. I lied about my father and Nathan refused to believe it. After that I knew I would never be able to tell him about Jozef. Who was good and brave. And that would have been the truth. I remember this quotation that Nathan had which always sounded so American. ‘You win one and you lose one.’ But I couldn’t win anything.”

  “What about Jozef?” I persisted, a little impatiently.

  “We lived in this building in Warsaw that was bombed but fixed up. You could live in it. But only barely. It was a terrible place. You can’t imagine how terrible Warsaw was then during the occupation. So little food, often just a little water, and in the winter it was so cold. I worked in a factory that made tar paper. I worked ten, eleven hours a day. The tar paper made my hands bleed. They bled all the time. I didn’t work for money, really, but to keep a work card. A work card would keep me from being sent off to Germany to a camp for slave labor. I lived in a tiny little place on the fourth floor of the building and Jozef lived with his half sister downstairs. His half sister was named Wanda, she was a little over my age. They were both involved with the underground, the Home Army it would be called in English. I wish I could describe Jozef good but I can’t, don’t have the words. I was fond of him so very much. But there was no true romance, really. He was small, muscular, very intense and nervous. He was pretty dark for a Pole. Strange, we didn’t make love togeth
er very often. Though we slept in the same bed. He said he have to preserve his energies for the fight going on. He wasn’t very educated, you know, in a formal way. He was like me—the war destroyed our education chances. But he had read a lot, he was very bright. He wasn’t even a Communist, he was an anarchist. He worshipped the memory of Bakunin and was a complete atheist, which was a little strange too, because at that time I was still a very devout Catholic girl and I sometimes wondered how I could fall in love with this young man who don’t believe in God. But we made this agreement not ever to talk about religion, and so we didn’t.

  “Jozef was a murder—” She paused, then reconstructed the thought and said, “Killer. He was a killer. That was what he done for the underground. He killed Polish people that was betraying Jews, betraying where Jews were hiding. There were Jews hiding out all over Warsaw, not ghetto Jews, naturellement, but better-class Jews—assimiles, many intellectuals. There were many Polish people who would betray the Jews to the Nazis, sometimes for a price, sometimes for nothing. Jozef was one of those which the underground had to kill those who were betraying. He would strangle them with the wire from a piano. He would try to get to know them in some way and then strangle them. Each time he killed someone he would vomit. He killed over six or seven people. Jozef and Wanda and I had a friend in the next building that we were all very fond of—a beautiful girl named Irena, about thirty-five, so beautiful. She had been a teacher before the war. Strange, she taught American literature and I remember she had this expertise in a poet named Hart Crane. Do you know of him, Stingo? She worked for the underground too; I mean, so we thought—because after a while we learned secretly that she was a double agent and was also betraying many Jews. So Jozef had to kill her. Even though he had liked her so much. He strangled her with the piano wire one night late and all the next day he just stayed in my room looking out of the window into space, not saying a word.”

  Sophie fell silent. I eased my face down against the sand, and thinking of Hart Crane, felt myself shiver to a gull’s cry, the rhythmic wash and heave of sullen waves. And you beside me, blessed now while sirens sing to us, stealthily weave us into day...

  “How did he die?” I said again.

  “After he killed Irena the Nazis found out about him. This was about a week later. The Nazis had these huge Ukrainians who done their killing. They came one afternoon when I was out and cut Jozef’s throat. When I arrived Wanda had already found him. He was bleeding to death on the stairs...”

  Minutes passed before either of us spoke. Every word she said had been, I knew, absolutely true, and I was swept with desolation. It was a feeling deeply involved in a bad conscience, and although a logical part of my mind reasoned that I must not blame myself for cosmic events which had dealt with me in one way and with Jozef in another, I could not help but view my own recent career with repugnance. What had old Stingo been up to while Joszef (and Sophie and Wanda) had been writhing in Warsaw’s unspeakable Gehenna? Listening to Glen Miller, swilling beer, horsing around in bars, whacking off. God, what an iniquitous world! Suddenly, after the nearly interminable silence, with my face still downward in the sand, I felt Sophie’s fingers reach up into my trunks and lightly stroke that spectacularly sensitive epidermal zone down deep where thigh and buttock intersect, a scant centimeter from my balls. It was a sensation at once surprising and unabashedly erotic; I heard an involuntary gurgle rise up from the back of my throat. The fingers went away.

  “Stingo, let’s take our clothes off,” I thought I heard her say.

  “What did you say?” I replied dully.

  “Let’s take our things off. Let’s be naked.”

  Reader, imagine something for a moment. Imagine that you have lived for an indeterminate but longish time with the well-founded suspicion that you are suffering from some fatal disease. One morning the telephone rings and it is the doctor saying this: “You have nothing to worry about, it was all a false alarm.” Or imagine this. There have been inflicted upon you severe financial reverses, bringing you so close to penury and ruin that you have considered a way out in self-destruction. Again it’s the blessed telephone, with the message that you have won half a million dollars in the state lottery. I am not exaggerating (it may be recalled that I mentioned once that I had never yet really witnessed a female in the nude) when I say that these tidings could not have created the mingled astonishment and sheer brute happiness of Sophie’s gentle suggestion. Combined with the touch of her fingers, forthrightly lewd, it caused me to gulp air with incredible rapidity. I think I went into that state known medically as hyperventilation and I thought for a moment that I might black out completely.

  And even as I looked up she was wriggling out of her Cole of California special, so that I beheld inches away that which I thought I would see only after reaching early middle age: a young female body all creamy bare, with plump breasts that had perky brown nipples, a smooth slightly rounded belly with a frank eyewink of a belly-button, and (be still, my heart, I remember thinking) a nicely symmetrical triangle of honey-hued pubic hair. My cultural conditioning—ten years of airbrushed Petty girls and a universal blackout of the human form—had caused me to nearly forget that women possessed this last item, and I was still staring at it, wonder struck, when Sophie turned and began to scamper toward the beach. “Come on, Stingo,” she cried, “take off your clothes and let’s go in the water!” I got up then and watched her go, transfixed; I mean it when I say that no chaste and famished grail-tormented Christian knight could have gazed with more slack-jawed admiration at the object of his quest than I did at my first glimpse of Sophie’s bouncing behind—a delectable upside-down valentine. Then I saw her splash into the murky ocean.

  I think it must have been pure consternation that prevented my following her into the water. So much had happened so quickly that my senses were spinning and I stood rooted to the sand. The shift in mood—the grisly chronicle of Warsaw, followed in a flash by this wanton playfulness. What in hell did it mean? I was wildly excited but hopelessly confused, with no precedent to guide me in this turn of events. In an excess of furtiveness—despite the total seclusion of the place—I slid out of my trunks and stood there beneath the strange churning gray summer sky, helplessly flaunting my manly state to the seraphim. I gulped at the last beer, woozy with mingled apprehension and joy. I watched Sophie swim. She swam well and with what seemed relaxed pleasure; I hoped she was not too relaxed, and for an instant I worried about her mixing swimming with all that whiskey. The air was sweltering, close, but I felt myself in the clutch of malarial trembling and chills.

  “Oh, Stingo,” she said with a giggle when she returned, “tu bandes.”

  “Tu... what?”

  “You have a hard-on.”

  She had seen it immediately. Not knowing what to do with it, but trying to avoid the extremes of gaucherie, I had arranged it and me on the blanket in a nonchalant posture—or as nonchalant as possible in my fit of ague—with my distended part concealed beneath my forearm; the attempt was unsuccessful, it flopped into view just before she flopped down beside me, and we rolled like dolphins into each other’s arms. I have since then utterly despaired of trying to capture the tortured excitement of that embrace. I heard myself making little ponylike whinnies as I kissed her, but kissing was all I could manage; I clutched her around the waist with a maniac’s armhold, terrified of stroking her anywhere out of fear that she would disintegrate under my crude fingers. There was a fragile feel to her rib cage. I thought of Nathan’s kick but also of past starvation. My shivering and shaking continued; I was conscious now only of the whiskied sweetness of her mouth and my tongue and hers warmly mingled. “Stingo, you’re shaking so,” she whispered once, drawing back from my canine tongue play. “Just relax!” But I realized I was salivating stupidly—a further humiliation which preyed on my mind as our lips stayed wetly plastered together. I could not figure out why my mouth was leaking so, and this worry itself prevented me even more firmly from exploring breasts, b
ottom or, God help me, that innermost recess which had figured so thrillingly in my dreams. I was in the grip of a nameless and diabolical paralysis. It was as if ten thousand Presbyterian Sunday School teachers had massed above Long Island in a minatory cloud, their presence resolutely disabling my fingers. The seconds passed like minutes, the minutes like hours, and still I could make no serious move. But then, as if to put a stop to my suffering, or perhaps in an effort simply to get things going, Sophie herself made a move.