William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  Nathan relaxed—I felt his foot move away from the crack—and I relaxed, not without a severe pang, however, at the sight of him as he suddenly grabbed Sophie around the waist and commenced to nuzzle her cheek. With the lazy appetite of a calf mooning over a salt lick, he smeared his sizable nose against her face, which caused her to emit a gay burbling laugh, like the fragment of a carol, and when he flicked at her earlobe with the pink tip of his tongue she gave the most faithful imitation of a cat’s electric purr I had ever seen or heard. It was a dumfounding tableau. Only brief hours before, he was ready to slice her throat.

  Sophie pulled the trick. I was helpless in the face of her plea, and mumbled a grudging “Well, okay.” Then just as I was at the point of unfastening the chain and letting them in, I changed my mind. “Screw off,” I said to Nathan, “you owe me an apology.”

  “I apologized,” he replied. His voice was deferential. “I said I wouldn’t call you Cracker any more.”

  “Not just that,” I retorted. “The bit about lynching and all that crap. About the South. It’s an insult. Suppose I told you that somebody with a name like Landau couldn’t be anything but a fat, hook-nosed, miserly pawnbroker out to cheat trusting Gentiles. It’d make you mad. It works both ways, these slurs. You owe me another apology.” I realized I had become a little pompous, but I was adamant.

  “Okay, I’m sorry for that too,” he said expansively, warmly. “I know I was off base there. Let’s forget it, okay? I beg your pardon, honestly. But we’re serious about taking you on a little outing today. Look, why don’t we leave it like this? It’s early yet. Why don’t you take your time and get dressed and then come upstairs to Sophie’s room. We’ll all have a beer or coffee or something. Then we’ll go to Coney Island. We’ll have lunch in a great seafood restaurant I know down there, and then we’ll go to the beach. I’ve got a good friend who makes extra money Sundays working as a lifeguard. He lets us lie on a special restricted part of the beach where there aren’t any people to kick sand in your face. So come on.”

  Sulking rather obviously, I said, “I’II think about it.”

  “Ah, be a sport, come on!”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll come.” To which I added a tepid “Thanks.”

  While I shaved and slicked myself up, I reflected with puzzlement on this odd turn of events. What devious motive, I wondered, caused such a good-will gesture? Could it be that Sophie had urged Nathan toward this cordial move, perhaps to get him to make up for his nastiness of the night before? Or was he simply out to obtain something else? I knew the ways of New York well enough by now to at least give passing credence to the idea that Nathan might just be some sort of con man, out to hustle up something as commonplace and as obvious as money. (This prompted me to check the condition of the slightly more than four hundred dollars I had secreted at the back of the medicine chest, in a box meant for Johnson & Johnson gauze bandages. The loot, in tens and twenties, was intact, causing me as usual to whisper a loving little threnody to my spectral patron Artiste, moldering to dust these many years in Georgia.) But that seemed an unlikely suspicion, after Morris Fink’s observation about Nathan’s singular affluence. Nonetheless, all these possibilities floated about in my head as I prepared with some misgivings to join Sophie and Nathan. I really felt I ought to stay and try to work, try to set some words down on the yawning yellow page, even if they be inane and random jottings. But Sophie and Nathan had quite simply laid siege to my imagination. What I really wondered about was the smoochy detente between the two of them, reestablished short hours after the most harrowing scene of lovers’ strife I could imagine this side of a low-grade Italian opera. Then I considered the fact that they both simply might be crazy, or outcast like Paolo and Francesca, caught up in some weird, shared perdition.

  Morris Fink was informative as usual, if not particularly illuminating, when I ran into him in the hallway just as I was leaving my room. While we were exchanging banalities I became for the first time aware of a church bell chiming, far-off but distinct, in the direction of Flatbush Avenue. At once poignant and reminiscent of Southern Sundays, it also unnerved me a little, since I had the firm impression that synagogues did not come equipped with belfries. Very briefly I closed my eyes as the chimes descended on the stillness, thinking of a homely brick church in a Tidewater town, piety and Sabbath hush, the dewy little Christian lambs with flower-stalk legs trouping to the Presbyterian tabernacle with their Hebrew history books and Judaical catechisms. When I opened my eyes Morris was explaining, “No, that’s no synagogue. That’s the Dutch Reformed church up at Church Avenue and Flatbush. They only ring it on Sundays. I go by there sometime when they got a service going. Or Sunday School. They sing their fuckin’ heads off. ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Shit like that. Those Dutch Reformed broads are something. A lot of them look like they need a blood transfusion... Or a hot meat injection.” He gave a lewd snort. “The cemetery’s nice, though. In the summer it’s cool in there. Some of these wild Jewish kids go in there at night and get laid.”

  “Well, Brooklyn’s got a little bit of everything, hasn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah. All religions. Jewish, Irish, Italian, Dutch Reformed, boogies, everything. Lots of boogies comin’ in now, since the war. Williamsburg. Brownsville. Bedford-Stuyvesant, that’s where they’re movin’ into. Fuckin’ apes, I call ’em. Boy, do I hate those boogies. Apes! Aaaa-gh!” He gave a shudder, and baring his teeth, made what I took to be a simian grimace. Just as he did so, the regal, celebrant strains of Handel’s Water Music shimmered down the stairs from Sophie’s room. And very faintly from above I heard Nathan’s laughter.

  “I guess you got to meet Sophie and Nathan,” Morris said.

  I allowed that I had, in a manner of speaking, met them.

  “What do you think of that Nathan? Don’t he break your balls?” A sudden light glowed in the lusterless eyes, his voice became conspiratorial. “You know what I think he is? A golem, that’s what. Some kind of a golem.”

  “Golem?” I said. “What on earth’s a golem?”

  “Well, I can’t explain exactly. It’s a Jewish... what do you call it?—not exactly religious, but some kind of monster. He’s been invented, that’s what, like Frankenstein, see, only he’s been invented by a rabbi. He’s made out of clay or some kind of shit like that, only he looks like a human. Anyway, you can’t control him. I mean, sometimes he acts normal, just like a normal human. But deep down he’s a runaway fuckin’ monster. That’s a golem. That’s what I mean about Nathan. He acts like a fuckin’ golem.”

  With a vague stir of recognition, I asked Morris to elaborate on his theory.

  “Well, this morning early, see, I guess you were asleep, I see Sophie go into Nathan’s room. My room is right across the hall and I can see everything. It’s about seven-thirty or eight. I heard them fightin’ last night, so I know that Nathan’s gone. Now guess what I see next? This is what I see. Sophie’s cryin’, softly, but still cryin’ her head off. When she goes into Nathan’s room she leaves the door open and lays down. But guess where she lays down? On the bed? No! On the fuckin’ floor! She lays down on the floor in her nightgown, all curled up like a baby. I watch her for a while, maybe ten, fifteen minutes—you know, thinkin’ it’s crazy for her to be in Nathan’s room layin’ on the floor like that—and then all of a sudden down below on the street I hear a car drive up and I look out the window and there’s Nathan. Did you hear him when he came in? He made a hell of a lot of noise, stampin’ and bangin’ and mutterin’ to himself.”

  “No, I was sound asleep,” I replied. “My noise problem there—in the crater, as you call it—seems to be mainly vertical. Directly overhead. The rest of the house I can’t hear, thank heaven.”

  “Anyway, Nathan comes upstairs and goes to his room. He goes through the door and there’s Sophie all curled up and layin’ on the floor. He walks over to her and stands there—she’s awake—and this is what he says. He says, ’Get out of here, you whore!’ Sophie doesn’t s
ay anything, just lays there cryin’, I guess, and Nathan says, ’Get your ass out of here, whore, I’m leavin’.’ Still Sophie doesn’t say anything and I begin to hear her cry and cry, and then Nathan says, ’I’m goin’ to count to three, whore, and if you’re not up and out of here and out of my sight I’m goin’ to kick your ass into the middle of next year.’ And then he counts to three and she doesn’t move and then he gets down on his knees and begins to slap the livin’ shit out of her.”

  “While she’s lying there?” I put in. I had begun to wish that Morris had not felt the need to tell me this story. My stomach stirred with queasy sickishness; though a man of nonviolence, I was nearly overwhelmed by the impulse to rush upstairs, where, accompanied by the Water Music’s sprightly bourrée, I would somehow exorcise the golem by battering its brains out with a chair. “You mean he actually hit that girl while she was lying there like that?”

  “Yeah, he kept slappin’ her. Hard, too. Right in the fuckin’ chops he kept slappin’ her.”

  “Why didn’t you do something?” I demanded.

  He hesitated, cleared his throat, then said, “Well, if you want to know, I’m a physical coward. I’m five foot five and that Nathan—he’s a big motherfucker. But I’ll tell you one thing. I did think about callin’ the police. Sophie was beginnin’ to groan, those clouts in the face must have hurt like a bastard. So I decided to come down here and call the police on the phone. I didn’t have anything on, I don’t wear anything sleepin’. So I went to my closet and put on a bathrobe and slippers—tryin’ to move fast, see? Who knows, I thought he might kill her. I guess I was gone about a minute, at first I couldn’t find my fuckin’ slippers. Then when I got back to the door... Guess what?”

  “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 accustome
d 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.”