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By Root 12237 0

’t forget, Stingo, I’m going to miss you too. After all, you’re about the best friend I have, you and Dr. Blackstock.” We went into her room. It looked already close to being vacated. I was struck by the fact that the radio-phonograph was still there; somehow I recalled from Morris Fink that Nathan had intended to come back and carry it away with him, but he obviously had not. Sophie turned the radio on and from WQXR the sound of the overture to Russlan and Ludmilla blared forth. It was the sort of romantic fustian we both barely tolerated, but she let it play; the hoofbeats of the Tartar kettledrums began thudding through the room. “I’ll write down my address for you,” she said, fumbling through her pocketbook. It was an expensive bag—Moroccan, I believe—made of handsome tooled leather, an item that caught my eye only because I remembered the day a few weeks before when Nathan, with extravagant loving pride, had given it to her. “You’ll come to see me often and we’ll go out to dinner. There are a lot of restaurants there that are good but cheap. Funny, where’s that slip of paper with the address on it? I don’t even remember the number myself yet. Someplace on a street called Cumberland, it is supposed to be close to Fort Greene Park. We can still take walks together, Stingo.”

“Oh, but I’m going to be very lonesome, Sophie,” I said.

She looked up from the radio and cocked her eye at me in an expression which I suppose might have been regarded as impish, plainly oblivious of my undisguised Sophiemania, and now uttering words which made up the last type of half-assed sentiment I wanted to hear. “You’ll find some beautiful girl, Stingo, very soon—I’m sure of that. Someone very sexy. Someone like that good-looking Leslie Lapidus, only less of the coquette, more complaisante—”

“Oh God, Sophie,” I groaned, “deliver me from the Leslies of the world.”

Then suddenly something about the entire situation—Sophie’s imminent departure, but also the handbag and the near-empty room with its associations of Nathan and the days of the recent past, the music and the high hilarity and all the glorious times we had had together—filled me with such ruinously enervating gloom that I let out another groan, loud enough that I saw a startled light like a flash of beads come to Sophie’s eyes. And quite violently disturbed now, I found myself gripping her firmly by the arms.

“Nathan!” I cried. “Nathan! Nathan! What in God’s name has happened? What has happened, Sophie? Tell me!” I was close to her, nose to nose, and I was aware of one or two flecks of my spittle landing on her cheek. “Here is this incredible guy who’s madly in love with you, the Prince Charming of all time, a man who adores you—I’ve seen it on his face, Sophie, like a form of worship—and all of a sudden you’re out of his life. What in God’s name happened to him, Sophie? He puts you out of his life! You can’t tell me it’s just because of some simple-minded suspicion that you’ve been unfaithful to him, like he said the other night at the Maple Court. It’s got to have some deeper meaning, some deeper cause than that. Or what about me? Me? Me!” I began to smite my chest to emphasize my own involvement in the tragedy. “What about the way he treated me, this guy? I mean, Sophie, Jesus Christ, I don’t have to explain to you, do I, that Nathan came to be like a brother to me, a fucking brother. I never knew anyone like him in all my life, anyone more intelligent, more generous, more funny and fun to be with, more—oh Jesus, simply no one as great. I have loved that guy! I mean, practically single-handed it was Nathan who when he read my first stuff gave me the faith to go on and be a writer. I felt he did it out of love. And then out of nowhere—out of the fucking blue, Sophie—he turns on me like a snarling dog with rabies. Turns on me, tells me my writing is shit, treats me as if I were the most contemptible asshole he had ever known. And then cuts me out of his life as firmly and finally as he cut you.” My voice had risen its usual uncontrolled octaves, becoming an epicene mezzo-soprano.