Sophie's Choice - William Styron [19]
I stayed long enough at the University Residence Club to receive the check from my father. Given proper management, the money should last me through the summer, which was just beginning, and maybe even into the fall. But where to live? The University Residence Club was no longer for me a possibility, spiritual or physical. The place had reduced me to such a shambles of absolute impotence that I found that I could not even indulge myself in my occasional autoerotic diversions, and was reduced to performing furtive pocket jobs during midnight strolls through Washington Square. My sense of solitariness was verging, I knew, on the pathological, so intensely painful was the isolation I felt, and I suspected that I would be even more lost if I abandoned Manhattan, where at least there were familiar landmarks and amiable Village byways as points of reference to make me feel at home. But I simply could no longer afford either the Manhattan prices or the rent—even single rooms were becoming beyond my means—and so I had to search the classified ads for accommodations in Brooklyn. And that is how, one fine day in June, I got out of the Church Avenue station of the BMT with my Marine Corps seabag and suitcase, took several intoxicating breaths of the pickle-fragrant air of Flatbush, and walked down blocks of gently greening sycamores to the rooming house of Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman.
Yetta Zimmerman’s house may have been the most open-heartedly monochromatic structure in Brooklyn, if not in all of New York. A large rambling wood and stucco house of the nondescript variety erected, I should imagine, sometime before or just after the First World War, it would have faded into the homely homogeneity of other large nondescript dwellings that bordered on Prospect Park had it not been for its striking—its overwhelming—pinkness. From its second-floor dormers and cupolas to the frames of its basement-level windows the house was unrelievedly pink. When I first saw the place I was instantly reminded of the facade of some back-lot castle left over from the MGM movie version of The Wizard of Oz. The interior also was pink. The floors, walls, ceilings and even most of the furniture of each hallway and room varied slightly in hue—due to an uneven paint job—from the tender rosé of fresh lox to a more aggressive bubblegum coral, but everywhere there was pink, pink admitting rivalry from no other color, so that after only a few minutes contemplating my prospective room under the proud eye of Mrs. Zimmerman, I felt at first amused—it was a cupid’s bower in which one could only barely restrain raucous laughter—and then really grimly trapped, as if I were in a Barricini candy store or the infants’ department at Gimbels. “I know, you’re thinking about the pink,” Mrs. Zimmerman had said, “everybody does. But then it gets you. It wears on you—nice, really nice that is, I mean. Pretty soon, most people they don’t want no other color.” Without my questioning, she added that her husband, Sol—her late husband—had lucked into a fantastic bargain in the form of several hundred gallons of Navy surplus paint, used for that—“you know”—and halted, finger quizzically laid aside her porous spatulate nose. “Camouflage?” I ventured. To which she replied, “Yeah, that’s it. I guess they didn’t have much use for pink on those boats.” She said that Sol had painted the house himself. Yetta was squat and expansive, sixty or thereabouts, with a slightly mongoloid cast to her cheerful features that gave her the look of a beaming Buddha.
That day I had been persuaded almost at once. First, it was cheap. Then, pink or not, the room she showed me on the