Sophie's Choice - William Styron [203]
But for the most part her mood was funereal when she spoke of Nathan, reminiscing with a persistent use of the past tense; it was as if she were speaking of someone long ago dead and buried. And when she related the story of their “suicide pact” on that weekend in the frosty Connecticut countryside, I was saddened and astonished. Even so, I do not think that my astonishment over that mournful little incident could have been exceeded by any form of surprise when, shortly before telling me about that aborted appointment with death, she revealed still another piece of dismal news.
“You know, Stingo,” she said a little hesitantly, “you know that Nathan was always taking drugs. I didn’t know if you could see this or not. Anyway, for some reason I have not been quite honest with you. I have not been able to mention it.”
Drugs, I thought, merciful God. I really found it almost impossible to believe. The up-to-date reader of this narrative has most likely assumed such a fact about Nathan already, but certainly I had not. In 1947 I was as innocent about drugs as I was about sex. (Oh, those lamblike forties and fifties!) Our present-day drug culture had not seen, that year, even the glimmerings of dawn, and my notion of addiction (if I had ever really thought of such a thing) was connected with the idea of “dope fiends”—goggleeyed madmen in strait jackets immured in backwater asylums, slavering molesters of children, zombies stalking the back streets of Chicago, comatose Chinese in their smoky dens, and so on. There was the taint about drugs of the irredeemably depraved, almost as evil as certain images of sexual intercourse—which until I was at least thirteen I visualized as a brutish act committed in secrecy upon dyed blondes by huge drunken unshaven ex-convicts with their shoes on. As for drugs, certainly I knew nothing about the types and subtle gradations of these substances. Save for opium, I do not think that I could name a single drug, and what Sophie disclosed about Nathan produced the immediate effect on me of having heard about something criminal. (That it was criminal was incidental to my moral shock.) I told her I didn’t believe it, but she assured me it was true, and when directly after this my shock merged into curiosity and I asked her what he had used, I heard for the first time the word amphetamine. “He took this stuff called Benzedrine,” she said, “also cocaine. But huge doses. Enough sometimes to make him crazy. It was easy enough for him to get this at Pfizer, at the laboratory where he was doing his work. Although, of course, it was not legal.” So that was it, I thought in wonder, that was behind those seizures of rage, of seething violence, of paranoia. How blind I had been!
Yet she was aware now, she said, that most of the time he had his habit under control. Nathan had always been high-strung, vivacious, talkative, agitated; since throughout the first five months they were together (and they were together constantly) she rarely saw him in the act of taking “the stuff,” she made only the most belated connection between drugs and what she simply thought was his somewhat frenetic but ordinary behavior. And she went on to say that during those months of the previous year his behavior—drug-induced or not—his presence in her life, his entire being, brought her the happiest days she had ever known. She realized how helpless and adrift she had been during that time when she first came to Brooklyn and to Yetta’s rooming house; trying to hold on to her reason, trying to thrust away the past from the rim of her memory, she thought she was in control of herself (after all, had not Dr. Blackstock told her that she was the most efficient secretary-receptionist