Sophie's Choice - William Styron [120]
And I thought: Oh shit, he’s got my number, all right, it really is just a bunch of derivative trash. I wanted to sink through the chocolate-ripple and chrome-splotched tiles of the Maple Court and disappear among the rats into the sewers of Flatbush. I clenched my eyes shut—thinking: I never should have shown it to this con man, who is now going to give me a line about Jewish writing—and at the moment I did so, sweating and a trifle nauseated, I jumped as his big hands grasped my shoulders and his lips smeared my brow with a wet and sloppy kiss. I popped my eyes open, stupefied, almost feeling the warmth of his radiant smile. “Twenty-two years old!” he exclaimed. “And oh my God, you can write! Of course you’ve read those writers, you wouldn’t be able to write a book if you hadn’t. But you’ve absorbed them, kid, absorbed them and made them your own. You’ve got your own voice. That’s the most exciting hundred pages by an unknown writer anyone’s ever read. Give me more!” Sophie, infected by his exuberance, clutched Nathan’s arm and glowed like a madonna, gazing at me as if I were the author of War and Peace. I choked stupidly on an unshaped little cluster of words, nearly fainting with pleasure, happier, I think—at only small risk of hyperbole—than any single moment I could then remember in a life of memorable fulfillments, however basically undistinguished. And all the rest of the evening he made a glorious fuss over my book, firing me with all the vivid encouragement which, in the deepest part of me, I knew I had desperately needed. How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous, mind-and-life-enlarging mentor, pal, savior, sorcerer? Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous.
July came, bringing varied weather—hot days, then oddly cool, damp days when the wanderers across the park muffled themselves in jackets and sweaters, finally several mornings at a stretch when thunderstorms grumbled and threatened but never broke. I thought that I could live there in Flatbush at Yetta’s Pink Palace forever, or certainly for the months and even years it would take to finish my masterpiece. It was hard to hold to my high-minded vows—I still fretted over the lamentably celibate nature of my existence; this aside, I felt that the routine I had established in company with Sophie and Nathan was as contented a daily state as any in which a budding writer could possibly find himself. Buoyed up by Nathan’s passionate assurance, I scribbled away like a fiend, constantly lulled by the knowledge that when the fatigue of my labors overtook me I could almost always find Sophie and Nathan, singly or together, somewhere nearby ready to share a confidence, a worry, a joke, a memory, Mozart, a sandwich, coffee, beer. With loneliness in abeyance and with my creative juices in full flow, I could not have been happier...
I could not have been happier, that is, until there came a bad sequence of events which intruded themselves on my well-being and made me realize how desperately at odds Sophie and Nathan had been (and still were) with each other, how unsimulated