Sophie's Choice - William Styron [202]
I got her the whiskey—a fifth of rye—which helped enable her to tell me about some bad moments during the turbulent year she spent with Nathan, before I came on the scene. All of which might be considered unnecessary to recount were it not for the fact that he would return to possess our lives again.
In Connecticut, somewhere on the beautiful winding arboreal highway that stretches north and south along the riverbank between New Milford and Canaan, there had been an old country inn with slanted oak floors, a sunny white bedroom with samplers on the wall, two damp panting Irish setters downstairs and the smell of applewood burning in the fireplace—and it was there, Sophie told me that night, that Nathan tried to take her life and then end his own in what has come to be known in the vernacular as a suicide pact. This happened in the fall of the year when the leaves were fiercely incandescent, a few months after their first meeting in the Brooklyn College library. Sophie said she would have remembered the terrible episode for many reasons (for example, it was simply the first time he had really even raised his voice at her since they met) but she would never be able to obliterate the chief reason: his raging insistence (again for the first time since they had been together) that she justify to his satisfaction the way in which she survived Auschwitz while “the others” (as he put it) perished.
When Sophie described this browbeating and then told the wretched tale of the ensuing events, I was of course immediately reminded of Nathan’s wild behavior on that recent night in the Maple Court when he bade both of us his adamantly final, unfond farewell. I was about to point out to Sophie the similarity and question her about it, but by this time—devouring a huge steaming mound of spaghetti in a little Italian restaurant she and Nathan used to frequent on Coney Island Avenue—she had become so totally absorbed in her chronicle of their life together that I hesitated, faltered helplessly, then lumpishly kept silent. I considered the whiskey. It was baffling about Sophie and her whiskey—baffling and a little overpowering. For one thing, she had the capacity of a Polish hussar; it was astounding to see this poised, lovely and usually painfully correct creature put away the booze; fully a quarter of the fifth of Seagram’s I had bought her had vanished by the time we took a taxi to the restaurant. (She also insisted on transporting the bottle, upon which, it is important to add, I committed no incursions, sticking, as always, to beer.) I attributed this new indulgence to grief over Nathan’s abandonment.
Even so, I was more struck by the manner of Sophie’s drinking than the amount. For the fact is that these powerful eighty-six-proof spirits diluted with only a little water had no apparent disorganizing effect on Sophie’s tongue or thought processes at all. At least this was true when I first witnessed her new-found diversion. Utterly composed, each yellow lock in place, she could slosh it down with the toothy glee of a barmaid out of Hogarth. I wondered if she was not protected by some genetic or cultural adaptation to alcohol which Slavic people seem to share with the Celts. Save for a tender rosiness, there were only two ways in which Seagram’s 7 seemed to alter her expression or her manner. It did turn her into a runaway talker. It made her pour it all out. Not that she had ever held back with me when speaking about Nathan or Poland or the past. But the whiskey transformed her speech into a spillway notable for its precise, unhurried cadences. It was a kind of lubricated diction in which many of the more briery Polish-accented consonants became magically smoothed over. The other thing whiskey did to her was quite fetching. Fetching, that is, in a maddeningly frustrating way: it let loose practically all of her dammed-up reticences about sex. I squirmed with mixed discomfort and delight as she spoke of her past love life with Nathan.