Sophie's Choice - William Styron [232]
“Nathan had everything that is bad in Jews,” Sophie said, “nothing of the little bit that’s good.”
“What’s good about Jews at all?” I heard myself say loudly, querulously. “It was that Jew Morris Fink that stole the money from my medicine cabinet. I’m certain! Money-mad, money-greedy Jewish bastard!”
Two anti-Semites, on a summer outing.
An hour later I calculated that Sophie had sloshed down perhaps one or two ounces less than half a pint of whiskey. She was putting it away like some female riveter at a Polish bar in Gary, Indiana. Yet there was no discernible lapse in coordination or locomotion. Only her tongue had slipped its tether (making her speech not slurred but simply runaway, sometimes breakneck) and as on the previous night, I listened and watched in wonder while the powerful solvent of those grain neutral spirits set loose her inhibitions. Among other things, the loss of Nathan seemed to have an effect on her that was perversely erotic, causing her to brood on bygone amour.
“Before I was sent to the camp,” she said, “I had a lover in Warsaw. He was younger than me by a few years. He wasn’t even twenty. His name was Jozef. I never spoke of him to Nathan, I don’t know why.” She paused, biting her lip, then said, “Yes, I do. Because I knew that Nathan was so jealous, so crazy jealous that he would hate me and punish me for having a lover even in the past. That’s how jealous Nathan could be, so I didn’t ever say a word to him about Jozef. Imagine, hating somebody in the past who had been a lover! And was dead.”
“Dead?” I said. “How did he die?”
But she seemed not to hear. She rolled over on our blanket. In her canvas beach bag she had—to my great surprise and greater delight—transported four cans of beer. I was not even annoyed that she had forgotten to give them to me sooner. They were, of course, by now quite warm but I could not have cared less (I, too, badly needed that dog’s hair), and she opened the third of these, dripping foam, and handed it to me. She had brought along some nondescript-looking sandwiches too, but these lay uneaten. Deliciously isolated, we lay in a kind of hidden cul-de-sac between two high dunes lightly strewn with coarse grass. From here the sea—listlessly washing against the sand and a curious unsightly gray-green, like engine oil—was plainly visible, but we ourselves could not be seen except by the gulls that wavered overhead on the windless air. The humidity hovered around us in an almost palpable mist, the sun’s pale disc hung behind gray clouds that shifted and churned in slow motion. In a certain way it was very melancholy, this seascape, and I should not have wanted for us to stay there long, but the blessed Schlitz had stilled at least momentarily my earlier seizure of dread. Only my horniness remained, aggravated by Sophie next to me in her white Lastex bathing suit and the total seclusion of our sandy nook, the clandestine nature of which made me a little feverish. I was still also so maddeningly and helplessly priapic—my first such fit since the doomed night with Leslie Lapidus—that the image I entertained of self-castration was, for a fleeting moment, not absolutely frivolous. For the sake of modesty I lay determinedly belly-downward in my dumb-looking puke-green Marine Corps-issue swim trunks, playing as usual my patient confessor’s role. And again as my antennae went out, they relayed back the information that there was no evasion, nothing equivocal in what she was trying to say.
“But there was another reason I would not have told Nathan about Jozef,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have told him even if he was not going to be jealous.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean he would not have believed anything about Jozef—anything at all. It had to do with Jews again.”
“Sophie, I don’t understand.”
“Oh, it’s so complicated.”
“Try to explain.”
“Also, it had to do with the lies I had already told Nathan about my father,” she said. “I was getting