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By Root 12496 0

more threatening than if his voice had been a roar; it was a bleak, reedy, thin, almost bureaucratic rage and his choice of phrase—“whorish behavior”—sounded incongruously tight-assed and rabbinical. “I thought somehow you would see the light, that you would abandon your ways after that escapade with Doctor Katz”—the accent on Doctor was a consummate sneer—“I thought I’d warned you off after that smooching business in his car. But no, I guess those pants you wear get a little too urgently hot in the crotch. And so when I caught you in a bit of hanky-panky with Blackstock, I wasn’t surprised, given your bizarre predilection for chiropractic penises—I wasn’t surprised, as I say, but when I blew the horn on you and put an end to it I thought you’d be chastened enough to abandon this wretched, degrading promiscuity. But no, once again I was wrong. The libidinal sap which courses so frantically in your Polish veins would allow you no ease, and so today once again you choose to fall into the ridiculous embrace—ridiculous, that is, if it weren’t really so vile and demeaning—of Doctor Seymour Katz.”

Sophie had begun to sniffle softly into a handkerchief clutched in white-knuckled fingers. “No, no, darling,” I heard her say in whispers, “it just isn’t true.”

Nathan’s stilted, didactic enunciation might have been, under different circumstances, vaguely comical—a burlesque of itself—but now was edged with such real threat, rage and obdurate conviction that I could not help but give a small shiver and feel at my back the approach, like the thudding of gallows-bound footsteps, of some awful and unnamed doom. I heard myself groan, clearly audible above the harangue, and it occurred to me that this dreadful assault on Sophie had weirdly identical resonances to those of the fracas in which I had first glimpsed him acting out his implacable enmity, the scenes distinguished one from the other mainly by the tone of voice—fortissimo that evening weeks ago, now singularly level and restrained but no less sinister. Abruptly I was conscious that Nathan was aware of my presence. His words were flatly uttered and edged with the faintest frost of hostility as he said to me, without looking up, “Why don’t you sit down next to the premiere putain of Flatbush Avenue.” I sat down but said nothing, my mouth having become parched and speechless.

As I seated myself, Nathan rose to his feet. “It seems to me that a little Chablis is in order now for furtherance of our celebration.” I gaped up at him while he spoke in this humorless, declamatory way. Suddenly I got the impression that he was exercising a severe control over himself, as if he were trying to prevent his entire big frame from flying apart or crumpling like a marionette on strings. I saw for the first time that shiny streams of sweat were coursing down his face, though our corner was ventilated by almost frigid breezes; also, there was something funny about his eyes—exactly what, at the moment, I could not tell. Some jittery and feverish nervous activity, I felt, some abnormally frantic interchange of neurons in their chaotic synapses, was taking place under each square millimeter of his skin. He was so emotionally jazzed up that he almost seemed to be electrified, as if he had strayed into a magnetic field. Yet it was all held back under tremendous composure.

“Too bad,” he said, again in tones of leaden irony, “too bad, my friends, that our celebration cannot continue in the vein of exalted homage I had intended for this evening. Homage to devoted hours in pursuit of a noble scientific goal which just this day has seen the light of triumph. Homage to days and years of a team’s selfless research terminating in victory over one of the greatest scourges to beset a suffering humanity. Too bad,” he said again, after a prolonged pause that was almost unendurable in the burden it imposed on the silently spun-out seconds, “too bad our celebration will be of a more mundane stripe. To wit, the necessary and all-too-healthy severance of my relationship with the sweet siren of Cracow—that inimitable,