Sophie's Choice - William Styron [129]
“Haven’t I told you that the only single thing I absolutely demand from you is fidelity?” he said.
“Yes, but—” She could not get the words in.
“And didn’t I tell you that if you were ever with this guy Katz—ever again, outside of work—that if you ever so much as walked ten feet with this cheap shmatte, I’d break your ass?”
“Yes, but—”
“And this afternoon he brings you home again in his car! Fink saw you. And not only that, that cheap motherfucker, you take him up to the room. And you’re there for an hour with him. Did he lay you a couple of times? Oh, I’ll bet you Katz does quite a number with that fast chiropractor’s dick of his!”
“Nathan, let me explain!” she implored him. Her composure was fast dissolving, and her voice cracked.
“Shut your fucking yap! There’s nothing to explain! You’d have kept it a secret too, if my good old pal Morris hadn’t told me he’d seen the two of you go up there together.”
“I would not have kept it secret,” she wailed. “I would have tell you now! I did not have a chance yet, darling!”
“Shut up!”
Again the voice was not loud so much as chillingly domineering, scathing, irruptive. I yearned for an exit, but only stood there behind him, hesitant, waiting. My intoxication had bubbled away and I felt the blood pounding against my Adam’s apple.
She tried to persist in her plea. “Nathan darling, listen! The only reason I took him to the room was because of the phonograph. The changer part has not been working, you know that, and I told him and he said he might be able to fix it. He said he was an expert. And he did fix it, darling, that was all! I’ll show you, we’ll go back and play it—”
“Oh, I’ll bet old Seymour’s an expert,” Nathan put in. “Does he do a quick routine on your spinal column when he’s humping you? Does he get your vertebrae all in order with those slippery hands? The cheap fraud—”
“Nathan, please!” she entreated him. She was leaning forward toward him now. The blood seemed to have drained from her face, which wore an expression of terminal agony.
“Oh, you’re some dish, you are,” he said softly and slowly, in tones of sarcasm that sounded unbearably heavy, graceless.
He obviously had visited their lodgings at Yetta’s after returning from the lab; I inferred this not only because of his reference to Morris Fink’s outrageous tattle but because of his dress: he was decked out in his fanciest oyster-white linen suit, and heavy oval gold links sparkled on the cuffs of his custom-made shirt. He smelled pleasantly of a light, jaunty cologne. Plainly he had intended to match Sophie’s gala get-up that evening and had gone home to transform himself into the fashion plate I now beheld. There, however, he had been confronted with evidence of Sophie’s betrayal—or what he construed as such—and now there seemed no doubt that the celebration had not only become aborted, it was headed for unknown depths of disaster.
Writhing inwardly as I stood there, I held my breath and listened while Nathan continued. “You’re really some Polish dumpling. It was. over my dead body that I let you degrade yourself by continuing to work with these charlatans, these horse doctors. Bad enough you accept the money they make stretching the spines of ignorant, gullible old Jews just off the boat from Danzig, with pains that might be rheumatism or might be carcinoma but go undiagnosed because these snake-oil shysters con them into thinking that a simple back massage will return them to glowing health. Bad enough you managed to talk me into continuing this disgraceful collaboration with a couple of medical hoodlums. But it’s fucking unbearable to think that behind my back you would let either of these mangy characters get into that twat of yours—”
She tried to interrupt. “Nathan!”
“Shut up! I’ve had just about enough of you and your whorish behavior.” He was not talking loudly but there was something mincingly savage in his throttled-back rage that seemed