Sophie's Choice - William Styron [124]
“Dirty words in English or Yiddish sound better than they do in Polish,” she said after she had recovered. “Do you know what the word for fuck in Polish is? It’s pierdolić. It just doesn’t have the same quality that the English word has. I like fuck much better.”
“I like fuck much better too.”
The drift of conversation made me both flustered and a little aroused (from Nathan she had also absorbed an innocent candor I was still unable to get used to), and so I managed to change the subject. I pretended nonchalance even though her presence still stirred me to the very pit of my stomach, inflamed me in a way that was all the more distracting because of the perfume she was wearing—the same herbal scent, distinctly unsubtle and loamy and provocative, which had stung my libidinal longings on that first day when we went to Coney Island. Now that perfume seemed to float up from between her breasts, which to my great surprise were most amply on show, appetizingly framed by her low-cut silk blouse. It was a new blouse, I was sure, and not really her style. During the weeks I had known her she had been aggravatingly conservative and low-keyed in her dress (aside from the flair for costumery she shared with Nathan, which was a different matter) and wore clothes clearly not calculated to focus eyes on her body, especially her upper torso; she was excessively demure even at a time in fashion when the womanly figure, badly depreciated, was rather down and out. I had seen her bosom browsing about beneath silk and cashmere and a nylon swimsuit but never with any definition. I could only theorize that this was some psychic extension of the prudish way she doubtless had to cloak herself in the rigid Catholic community of prewar Cracow, a practice she must have found hard to abandon. Also, to a lesser degree, I think she may not have wanted to expose to the world what had been wreaked upon her body by the privation of the past. Her dentures sometimes came loose. Her neck still had unbecoming little wrinkles, slack flesh pulled at the back of her arms.
But by now Nathan’s year-long campaign to restore her to health and plumpness had begun to pay off; at least it seemed that Sophie was beginning to think so, for she had liberated her slightly freckled, pretty demiglobes as openly as she could and remain a lady, and I glanced at them with enormous appreciation. All it took for boobs, I thought, was great American nutrition. They caused me slightly to shift my focus of erogenous dreamery away from the few glimpses I had had of her achingly desirable, harmoniously proportioned Elberta peach of a derriere. Now I soon discovered that she had gotten herself rigged out in these sexpot duds because it was to be a very special evening for Nathan. He was going to reveal something wonderful about his work to Sophie and me. It was going to be, said Sophie, quoting Nathan, “a bombshell.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“His work,” she replied, “his research. He told me he would say to us tonight about his discovery. They finally make what Nathan calls the breakthrough.”
“That’s marvelous,” I said, genuinely excited. “You mean this stuff he’s been so... mysterious about? He’s finally got it licked, is that what you mean?”
“That’s what he said, Stingo!” Her eyes were ashine. “He’s going to tell us tonight.”
“God, that’s terrific,” I said, feeling a small but vivid interior thrill.
I knew virtually nothing about Nathan’s work. Although he had told me in large (though generally impenetrable) detail about the technical nature of his research (enzymes, ion transference, permeable membranes, etc., also the fetus of that miserable rabbit), he had never divulged to me—nor had I out of reticence asked—anything concerning the ultimate justification for this complex and, beyond doubt, profoundly challenging biological enterprise. I knew also, from what she had intimated, that he had kept Sophie in the dark about his project. My earliest conjecture—farfetched even for a scientific ignoramus like myself (even then I was