Sophie's Choice - William Styron [229]
“Oh, Stingo, no! Poor Stingo! Why?” She clambered out of bed, where, propped against the pillows, she had been reading a French translation of The Sun Also Rises. “Stingo! Who could have done such a thing to you?” In a flowered silk robe she threw herself impulsively around me. My turmoil was so intense that I could make no response even to the enjoyable pressure of her breasts. “Stingo! Robbed? How awful!”
I felt my lips quiver, I was despicably close to real tears. “Gone!” I said. “All gone! Three hundred and some dollars, all I had between myself and the poorhouse! How in God’s name will I ever get my book written now? Every penny I had on earth, except—” As an afterthought I grabbed my wallet and opened it. “Except for forty dollars—forty dollars that I was lucky enough to take with me when we went out last night. Oh, Sophie, this is complete disaster!” Half consciously I heard myself imitating Nathan: “Oy, have I got tsuris!”
Sophie had that mysterious knack of being able to calm wild passions, even those of Nathan when he was not uncontrollably out of his mind. A strange sorcery which I could never quite pin down, it had to do both with her Europeanness and something that was obscurely, seductively maternal. “Shush!” she would say in a certain tone of sham reproof, and a man would simply wilt and end up grinning. While my desolation at this point precluded any such thing as a grin, Sophie did quite easily manage to cool my frenzy. “Stingo,” she said, playing with the shoulders of my shirt, “such a thing is terrible! But you mustn’t act like the atomic bomb has fallen on you. Such a big baby, you look like you’re going to cry. What’s three hundred dollars? Soon when you’re a great writer you’ll be making three hundred dollars a week! Now it is bad, this loss, mais, chéri, ce n’est pas tragique, there is nothing you can do about it, so you must forget it all for this moment and come on let us go to Jones Beach like we said! Allons-y!”
Her words helped considerably and I quickly settled down. As devastating as my loss was, I realized, as she did, that there was almost nothing I could do to change things, so I resolved to relax and at least try to enjoy the rest of the weekend with Sophie. There would be time enough to confront the monstrous future come Monday. I began to look forward to our outing at the beach with the escapist euphoria of a tax dodger seeking to lose his past in Rio de Janeiro.
Rather surprised at my own priggish objections, I tried to forbid Sophie from stuffing the half-full bottle of whiskey into her beach bag. But she gaily insisted, saying “hair of the dog,” which was something I was sure she had picked up from Nathan. “You’re not the only one with a hangover, Stingo,” she added. Was it at that moment that I first became seriously concerned about her drinking? I think that previously I had regarded this thirst of Sophie’s as a temporary aberration, a retreat into momentary solace which was due more to Nathan’s abandonment of her than anything else. Now I was by no means so certain; doubt and worry plucked at me as we swayed together in the car of a rackety subway train. We got off soon. The bus itself left for Jones Beach from a dingy terminal on Nostrand Avenue, a place swarming with unruly Brooklynites jostling for position to get to the sun. On our bus Sophie and I were the last to climb aboard; standing in a sepulchral tunnel, the vehicle was malodorous, nearly pitch-black and utterly silent although packed with a dim and shifting mass of human bodies. The effect of silence was sinister, baffling—surely, I thought while we edged our way toward the rear, such a throng should give up a vagrant mumble, a sigh, some evidence of life—until the moment we found our tattered and rumpsprung seats.
Just then the bus lurched forward into sunlight, and I was able to discern our fellow passengers. They were all children, little Jews in their