Sophie's Choice - William Styron [21]
The yellow page remained empty. I felt restless, a little goatish, and in order to keep the curtain drawn down over my brain’s ever-handy peep show of lewd apparitions—harmless, but in relation to work distracting—I got up and paced the room, which the summer sun bathed in a lurid flamingo light. I heard voices, footsteps in the room above—the walls I realized were paper thin—and I looked up and glared at the pink ceiling. I began to detest the omnipresent pink and doubted gravely that it would “wear” on me, as Yetta had said. Because of the problems of weight and volume involved, I had brought only what I considered essential books with me; few in number, they included The American College Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, my collection of John Donne, Oates and O’Neill’s Complete Greek Drama, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (essential to my hypochondria), the Oxford Book of English Verse and the Holy Bible. I knew I could eventually build up my library piecemeal. Meanwhile, now to help summon my own muse, I tried to read Marlowe, but for some reason that lilting music failed to stir me as it usually did.
I put the book aside and moseyed into the tiny bathroom, where I began to take inventory of the articles I had placed in the medicine chest. (Years later I would be fascinated to discover a hero of J.D. Salinger duplicating my ceremony, but I claim priority.) This was a ritual, deeply rooted in the soil of inexplicable neurosis and materialistic urgency, which I have gone through many times since when vision and invention have flagged to the point of inertia, and both writing and reading have become burdensome to the spirit. It is a mysterious need to restore a tactile relationship with mere things. One by one with my fingertips I examined them where I had placed them the night before, there on the shelves of the wall cabinet which like everything else had fallen prey to Sol Zimmerman’s loony incarnadine paint brush: a jar of Barbasol shaving cream, a bottle of Alka-Seltzer, a Schick injector razor, two tubes of Pepsodent toothpaste, a Dr. West’s toothbrush with medium bristles, a bottle of Royall Lyme after-shave lotion, a Kent comb, an “injecto-pack” of Schick injector blades, an unopened cellophane-wrapped box of three dozen rolled and lubricated Trojan condoms with “receptacle tips,” a jar of Breck’s anti-dandruff shampoo, a tube of Rexall nylon dental floss, a jar of Squibb multivitamins, a bottle of Astring-o-sol mouthwash. I touched them all gently, examined the labels, and even unscrewed the cap of the Royall Lyme shaving lotion and inhaled the fruity citrus aroma, receiving considerable satisfaction from the total medicine-chest experience, which took about a minute and a half. Then I closed the door of the cabinet and returned to my writing table.
Sitting down, I lifted my gaze and looked out the window and was suddenly made aware of another element which must have worked on my subconscious and caused me to be drawn to this place. It was such a placid and agreeable view I had of the park, this corner known as the Parade Grounds. Old sycamore trees and maples shaded the sidewalks at the edge of the park, and the dappled sunlight aglow on the gently sloping meadow of the Parade Grounds gave the setting a serene, almost pastoral quality. It presented a striking contrast to remoter parts of the neighborhood. Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue, a place intensely urban, cacophonous, cluttered, swarming with jangled souls and nerves; but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and