Sophie's Choice - William Styron [217]
She hears him say, “Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there, won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jew-boy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside!”
She comes awake. She had anticipated his immediate embrace, wonders if she had put her diaphragm in before going to bed, remembers that she had done so and now lazily rolls over, smiling sleepily, to greet him. She recalls his incredible gluttonous passion when on such a high. Recalls it with voluptuary delight—everything—not alone the beginning hungry tenderness, his fingers on her nipples and their gentle yet insistent search between her legs but all else and one thing specifically, again anticipated with hungry, at last liberated (adieu, Cracow!), uninhibited, self-absorbed bliss: his extravagant ability to make her come—to come not once or twice but over and over again until an almost sinister final losingness of herself has been achieved, a sucking death like descent into caverns during which she cannot tell whether she is lost in herself or in him, a sense of black whirling downward into an inseparability of flesh. (It is almost the only time she thinks in or speaks Polish any longer, whispering loudly against his ear, “We? mnie, we? mnie,” which spills out mysteriously, spontaneously and means “Take me, take me,” although once when Nathan asked her the meaning she was gaily forced to lie, saying, “It means fuck me, fuck me!”) It is, as Nathan sometimes exhaustedly proclaims afterward, the twentieth-century Superfuck—think how bland human fucking was throughout the ages before the discovery of benzedrine sulphate. Now she is wildly aroused. Stirring, stretching like a cat, she reaches out an arm toward him, inviting him to bed. He says nothing. And then, puzzled, she hears him say again, “Come on! Up and at ’em! This Jew-boy’s going to take you for a trip to the country!” She begins, “But, Nathan—” His voice, interrupting, is at once insistent and jazzed-up. “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to hit the road!” She feels quick frustration while just then a memory of bygone decorums (bonjour, Cracow!) gives her a twinge of shame at her urgent and unbuttoned lust. “Come on!” he commands. Naked, she moves out of bed, glances up, sees Nathan gazing into the dappled morning sunlight as he sniffs deeply—from a dollar bill—at what she instantly knows is cocaine...
...In the New England twilight, past his band and its poison, she could see the inferno of leaves, one tree awash in vermilion, merging with another crafted of the most violent gold. Outside, the evening woods stood in quietude and the vast patches like maps of color were captured motionless, no leaf astir, in the light of the setting sun. Distantly, cars passed on the highway. She felt drowsy but did not seek sleep. She saw now that there were two capsules between his fingers, pink identical twins. “His and hers is one of the cutest contemporary concepts,” she heard him say. “His and hers all over the bathroom, all over the house, why not his and hers cyanide, his and hers fucking nothing? Why not, Sophielove?”
There was a knock at the door and Nathan’s hand twitched slightly in response. “Yes?” he said in a flat soft tone. “Mr. and Mrs. Landau,” said the voice, “this is Mrs. Rylander. I hate to disturb you!” The voice was overly ingratiating, sedulously sweet. “In the off-season the kitchen closes at seven o’clock. Just wanted to tell you, I hate to interrupt your nap. You’re the only guests here, so there’s no hurry yet, just wanted to tell you. My husband’s making his specialty tonight, corned beef and cabbage!” Silence. “Thank you very much,” Nathan said, “we’ll be down soon.”
Footsteps thumped down the ancient carpeted staircase; the timbers squealed like a hurt animal. Talktalktalktalktalk. He had talked himself hoarse. “Consider, Sophie-love,” he was saying now, caressing the two capsules, “consider how intimately life and death are intertwined in Nature, which contains everywhere the seeds of our beatitude and our dissolution. This, for instance, HCN, is