Sophie's Choice - William Styron [224]
crazy to indulge my little whim like that, darling Sophie, sweet Sophie, I think you must have no ego at all! (And she thinking then as now: I would do anything for you, anything, anything!) But now somehow his attempt to piss down on her begins to unloose his first panic of the day. “Open your mouth wide,” he orders her. She waits, watches, mouth agape, receptive, lips quivering. But he fails. One, two, three drops, soft and warm, spatter her brow, and that is all. She shuts her eyes, waiting. There is only the sense of him hovering above her, and the damp and the cold beneath, a far-off thrashing pandemonium of wind, tree branches, leaves. Then she hears him begin to moan, the moan quavering with terror. “Oh Christ, I’m going to crash!” She opens her eyes, stares at him. Suddenly greenish white, his face reminds her of the underbelly of a fish. And she has never (and in this cold) seen a face perspire so; the sweat seems plastered there like oil. “I’m going to crash!” he wails. “I’m going to crash!” He sinks down beside her in a crouched position, thrusts his head into his hands, covers his eyes, moans, trembles. “Oh Jesus, I’m going to crash, Irma, you’ve got to help me!” And then in precipitate dreamlike flight they are hurtling down the mountainside path, she leading him over the hard-pebbled slope like a nurse fleeing with a wounded man, gazing back from time to time to guide his progress beneath the trees as he stumbles, self-blinded by the hand worn like a pale bandage across his eyes. Down and down they go alongside a rushing stream, across a plank bridge, through more woods ablaze with pink, orange, vermilion, slashed by the slender upright white pilasters of birch trees. She hears him, whispering this time, “I’m going to crash!” Finally, then, in the level clearing, the abandoned car lot of the state park where the convertible waits near an upset trash can, the scene a cyclonic cloud of grimy milk cartons, whirling paper plates, candy wrappers. Finally! He leaps toward the rear seat where the luggage is perched, grabs his suitcase and throws it on the ground, begins to rummage through it like some berserk ragpicker in search of an indescribable treasure. Sophie stands aside, helpless, saying nothing while the innards of the suitcase shower the air, festoon the frame of the car: socks, shirts, underwear, ties, a madman’s haberdashery thrown to the winds. “That fucking Nembutal!” he roars. “Where did I put it! Oh shit! Oh Jesus, I’ve got to...” But he does not finish his words, instead straightens up and whirls around, hurling himself into the front seat, where he sprawls out beneath the steering wheel and frantically fiddles with the latch of the glove compartment. Found! “Water!” he gasps. “Water!” But she, in her own pain and confusion able somehow to anticipate this moment, has plucked over the edge of the back seat a carton of gingerale from the picnic basket they had never touched and now, wrestling with the fiendish opener, flips off the cap of a bottle in a shower of foam and thrusts it into his hand. He gulps the pills, and watching him, she thinks the oddest thought. Poor devil, she thinks, which are the words he—yes, he—had whispered only weeks before while watching The Lost Weekend and a crazed Ray Milland in quest of the salvation of his whiskey bottle. “Poor devil,” Nathan had murmured. Now, with the green gingerale upended and the muscles of his throat working in rapid convulsions, she is reminded of that movie scene and thinks: Poor devil. Which in itself would not be odd at all, she reflects, were it not for the fact that it is the very first time she has experienced an emotion having to do with Nathan that resembles anything so degrading as pity. She cannot stand pitying him. And the shock of this realization makes her face go numb. Slowly she lowers herself to a sitting position on the ground and leans against the car. The trash in the parking lot eddies about her in gritty slow whirlpools of wind and dust. The pain in her side beneath her breast stabs her, scintillant, glowing sharply like the