Sophie's Choice - William Styron [208]
She lay down for what she thought would be a nap, but in her exhaustion slept for a long time, although restlessly. Waking up in the dark, she saw by the alarm clock’s dim green eyes that it was past ten o’clock and she was seized by grave, immediate alarm. Nathan! It was so unlike him not to be there at the appointed hour, or at least to fail to leave a note. She felt a frantic sense of desertion. She leaped up from bed and turned on the light and began aimlessly to pace the room. Her only thought was that he had come home from work, then gone out for something and had met with a terrible accident on the street. Each recollected sound of a police siren, screeching just now through her dreams, betokened certain catastrophe. Part of her mind told her that this panic was foolish, but it was something she could not help or avoid. Her love for Nathan was so totally consuming, yet at the same time was defined by such childlike dependence in a hundred ways, that the terror that surrounded her in his unexplained absence was utterly demoralizing, like being caught in that strangling fear—the fear that she might be abandoned by her parents—which she had often felt as a little girl. And she knew that this, too, was irrational but beyond remedy. Turning the radio on, she sought a news announcer’s empty distraction. She continued to pace the room, visualizing the most ghastly mishaps, and she was on the verge of dissolving into tears when he suddenly and noisily burst through the door. At that instant she felt an immediate blessing like showering light—resurrection from the dead. She remembered thinking: I cannot believe such love.
He smothered her in his arms. “Let’s fuck,” he breathed into her ear. Then he said, “No, let’s wait. I’ve got a surprise for you.” She trembled in his irresistible bear hug, as pliantly feeble with relief as the stalk of a flower. “Dinner—” she began fatuously.
“Don’t talk about dinner,” he said loudly, releasing her. “We’ve got better things to do.” As he moved around her in a happy little jig she looked into his eyes; the flashing eccentric glitter there, together with his overflowing, overpowering voice—near-frenzy, manic—told her at once that he was high on his “stuff.” Yet although she had never seen him quite this extravagantly agitated, she was not alarmed. Amused, vastly relieved, but not alarmed. She had seen him high before. “We’re going to a jam session at Morty Haber’s,” he announced, rubbing his nose like a lovesick moose across her cheek. “Get your coat on. We’re going to a jam session and celebrate!”
“Celebrate what, darling?” she asked. Her love for him and her sense of salvation were at that moment so lunatic that she would have tried to swim the Atlantic with him had he commanded her to do so. Nonetheless, she was perplexed and all but engulfed by his electric fever (an intense feeling of famishment stabbed her too) and she reached out her hands in a vain, fluttering effort to quiet him down. “Celebrate what?” she said again. She couldn’t restrain herself from chortling at his loud runaway enthusiasm. She kissed his schnoz.
“Remember the experiment I was telling you about?” he said. “That blood-classification thing that had us stumped all last week. The problem I was telling you about having to do with serum enzymes?”
Sophie nodded. She had never understood the vaguest thing