Sophie's Choice - William Styron [212]
She heard the radio snap off, and Nathan hustled around behind the screen and took her in his arms. She was used to such precipitate cowboy assaults. His eyes were glittery bright; she could feel how high he was from the vibrations that pulsed through him as from some mysterious new source of captured energy. He kissed her again and once more his tongue probed and explored her mouth. Whenever he was on one of these pill jags he became like a stud bull, feverishly and unapologetically sexual, treating her with an enveloping hot epidermal directness which usually had the power to cause her own blood to stampede and make her immediately ready to receive him. And at this moment she felt start her own warm wetness. He guided her hand down to his prick; she stroked it, feeling it as stiff and rigid and as clearly defined beneath the dampish flannel as the thick end of a broomstick. She weakened in the legs, heard herself moan, and plucked at the tab of his zipper. There had evolved—at such moments—between her animated hand and his receptive prick a familiar, symbiotically loving connection that was exquisitely natural; whenever she began to grope for him she was reminded of the way a tiny baby’s hand goes out to clutch an outstretched finger.
But suddenly he broke away from her. “Let’s go now,” she heard him say. Then: “We’ll have so much fun later. A ball!” And she knew what he meant. Sex with Nathan in his amphetamine thrall was no mere fun—it was unharnessed, oceanic, otherworldly. And it went on forever...
“I didn’t think anything terrible was going to happen until late in the party,” Sophie told me. “This jam session at Morty Haber’s. It was a fear I never felt before with Nathan. Morty Haber had a big loft in a building not far from Brooklyn College and that’s where the party was. Morty—you met him on the beach that day—was an instructor in biology at the college and was one of Nathan’s good friends. I liked Morty, but to be very honest, Stingo, I wasn’t terribly fond of most of Nathan’s friends, male or female. Some of this was my fault, I know. I was very shy, for one thing, and my English wasn’t all that good then. I really mean it when I say I could speak English better than I could understand it, and I would get so lost when they all begun to talking so fast. And they were always talking about things I have no knowledge of or interest in—Freud and psychoanalysis and penis envy and things such as that which maybe I would have cared for a little bit more if they hadn’t been solemn and serious about it all the time. Oh, I got along with them all right, you must understand. I would just turn my mind off and think of other things when they begun talking about the theory of the orgasm and orgones and such. Quel ennui! And I think they liked me okay too, though they had always been a little suspicious of me, and curious, because I would never tell much of my past life and remained a little aloof. Also, I was the only shiksa in the crowd and a Polack also. That made me kind of strange and mysterious, I think.
“Anyway, it was late when we come to the party. You see, I tried to persuade him not to, but before we left Yetta’s he take another Benzedrine pill—a Benny he called it—and by the time we got into his brother’s car to drive to the party he was high, unbelievably high, like a bird, high like an eagle. Don Giovanni was playing on the car radio—Nathan knew the libretto by heart, he sang very good opera Italian—and he joined in and sung at the top of his voice and got so wound up in the whole opera