Sophie's Choice - William Styron [234]
Sophie fell silent. I eased my face down against the sand, and thinking of Hart Crane, felt myself shiver to a gull’s cry, the rhythmic wash and heave of sullen waves. And you beside me, blessed now while sirens sing to us, stealthily weave us into day...
“How did he die?” I said again.
“After he killed Irena the Nazis found out about him. This was about a week later. The Nazis had these huge Ukrainians who done their killing. They came one afternoon when I was out and cut Jozef’s throat. When I arrived Wanda had already found him. He was bleeding to death on the stairs...”
Minutes passed before either of us spoke. Every word she said had been, I knew, absolutely true, and I was swept with desolation. It was a feeling deeply involved in a bad conscience, and although a logical part of my mind reasoned that I must not blame myself for cosmic events which had dealt with me in one way and with Jozef in another, I could not help but view my own recent career with repugnance. What had old Stingo been up to while Joszef (and Sophie and Wanda) had been writhing in Warsaw’s unspeakable Gehenna? Listening to Glen Miller, swilling beer, horsing around in bars, whacking off. God, what an iniquitous world! Suddenly, after the nearly interminable silence, with my face still downward in the sand, I felt Sophie’s fingers reach up into my trunks and lightly stroke that spectacularly sensitive epidermal zone down deep where thigh and buttock intersect, a scant centimeter from my balls. It was a sensation at once surprising and unabashedly erotic; I heard an involuntary gurgle rise up from the back of my throat. The fingers went away.
“Stingo, let’s take our clothes off,” I thought I heard her say.
“What did you say?” I replied dully.
“Let’s take our things off. Let’s be naked.”
Reader, imagine something for a moment. Imagine that you have lived for an indeterminate but longish time with the well-founded suspicion that you are suffering from some fatal disease. One morning the telephone rings and it is the doctor saying this: “You have nothing to worry about, it was all a false alarm.” Or imagine this. There have been inflicted upon you severe financial reverses, bringing you so close to penury and ruin that you have considered a way out in self-destruction. Again it’s the blessed telephone, with the message that you have won half a million dollars in the state lottery. I am not exaggerating (it may be recalled that I mentioned once that I had never yet really witnessed a female in the nude) when I say that these tidings could not have created the mingled astonishment and sheer brute happiness of Sophie’s gentle suggestion. Combined with the touch of her fingers, forthrightly lewd, it caused me to gulp air with incredible rapidity. I think I went into that state known medically as hyperventilation and I thought for a moment that I might black out completely.
And even as I looked up she was wriggling out of her Cole of California special, so that I beheld inches away that which I thought I would see only after reaching early middle age: a young female body all creamy bare, with plump breasts that had perky brown nipples, a smooth slightly rounded belly with a frank eyewink of a belly-button, and (be still, my heart, I remember thinking) a nicely symmetrical triangle of honey-hued pubic hair. My cultural conditioning—ten years of airbrushed Petty girls and a universal blackout of the human form—had caused me to nearly forget that women possessed this last item, and I was still staring at it, wonder struck, when Sophie turned and began to scamper toward the beach. “Come on, Stingo,” she cried, “take off your clothes