Sophie's Choice - William Styron [126]
“It’s a knockout,” I said, understating my admiration.
“It’s very... daring, I think. Anyway, Stingo, the point is that while we are in this shop and he has paid for the clothes and we are ready to leave, I see something strange about Nathan. I have seen it before but not too often and it always scares me a little. He said suddenly that he had a headache, back here, at the back of his head. Also, he was suddenly very pale and make sweat—perspiring, you know. You see, I think it was as if all the excitement was too much for him and he was having this reaction that made him a little sick. I told him he should go home, back to Yetta’s and lie down, take the afternoon off, but no, he said he must go back to the laboratory, there was still much to do. The headache, he said, was terrible. I wanted him so much to go home and rest but he said he must go back to Pfizer. So he took three aspirin from the lady who own the shop, and he is calm now, no longer excited like he was. He is quiet, mélancholique even. And then very quietly he kissed me goodby and said he would see me tonight, here—here with you, Stingo. He wants the three of us to go down to Lundy’s Restaurant for a wonderful seafood dinner to celebrate. To celebrate winning the Nobel Prize of 1947.”
I had to tell her no. I was absolutely crushed at the idea that because of my father’s visit I would be unable to join them for the jamboree celebration; what a wicked disappointment! This augury of fabulous news was so itchingly teasing that I simply could not believe that I would be denied participating in the announcement when it came. “I’m just sorry beyond belief, Sophie,” I said, “but I’ve got to meet my father at Penn Station. But look, before I go, maybe Nathan can at least tell me what the discovery is. Then in a couple of days after my old man’s gone we can go out and have another celebration some other night.”
She appeared not to be listening any too closely, and I heard her continue in a voice that seemed to me both subdued and invaded by hints of foreboding. “I just hope he is okay. Sometimes when he gets excited so much and gets so happy—then he gets these terrible headaches and sweats so much it go through his clothes, like he’s been in the rain. Then the happiness is gone. And oh, Stingo, it don’t happen every time. But sometimes it make him so very, very strange! It’s like he gets so tellement agité, so happy and flying that he is like an airplane going up and up into the stratosphere where the air is so thin that he can’t fly no more and the only way is down. I mean all the way down, Stingo! Oh, I hope Nathan’s okay.”
“Listen, he’s going to be all right,” I assured her, a little uneasily. “Anyone with the story Nathan is going to tell has a right to act a little peculiar.” Although I could not share what were obviously her deep misgivings, I had to confess to myself that her words put me a bit on edge. Even so, I thrust them out of my mind. I wanted only for Nathan to arrive with news of his triumph and an explanation for this unbearably tantalizing mystery.
The jukebox started to blare. The bar was beginning to fill up with its gray evening habitué-—most of them middle-aged and male, porridge-faced even in midsummer, North European Gentiles with flabby paunches and serious thirsts who ran the elevators and unplugged the plumbing of the ten-story Jewish pueblos whose homely beige-brick ranks stretched for block after block in the region behind the park. Aside from Sophie, few females ever ventured into the place. I never saw a single hooker—the conventional neighborhood