Sophie's Choice - William Styron [288]
I was darkly considering this proposition, and then Jack’s commotion at the door brought me up sharp. “Wake up, junior, there’s a telephone call!” he shouted. I knew on the way downstairs that the call could only come from the Pink Palace, where I had left Jack’s number, and I had a sense of foreboding which was amplified enormously when I heard the familiar voice, dolorosa, of Morris Fink.
“You got to come down here right away,” he said, “all hell has broke loose.”
My heart faltered, then raced on. “What happened?” I whispered.
“Nathan’s went off his trolley again. This time it’s real bad. The miserable fucker.”
“Sophie!” I said. “How is Sophie?”
“She’s all right. He beat her up again, but she’s all right. He said he was goin’ to kill her. She ran out of the house and I don’t know where she is. But she asked me to call you. You’d better come.”
“And Nathan?” I said.
“He’s gone too, but he said he’d be back. The crazy bastard. You think I should call the police?”
“No, no,” I replied quickly. “For Christ’s sake, don’t call the police!” After a pause I said, “I’ll be there. Try and find Sophie.”
After I hung up I stewed for a few minutes, and when Jack came downstairs I joined him in a cup of coffee to try to settle my agitation. I had spoken to him before about Sophie and Nathan and their folie à deux but only in dim outline. Now I felt compelled to hurriedly fill in some of the more painful details. His immediate suggestion was to do what for some dumb reason it had not occurred to me to do. “You’ve got to call the brother,” he insisted.
“Of course,” I said. I jumped to the phone again, only to be met with that impasse which more often than not throughout life seems to stymie people at moments of extreme crisis. A secretary told me that Larry was in Toronto, where he was attending a professional convention. His wife was with him. In those antediluvian pre-jet days Toronto was as far away as Tokyo, and I gave a moan of despair. Then just as I had hung up, again the phone rang. Once more it was the steadfast Fink, whose troglodyte manners I had cursed so often but whom I now blessed.
“I just heard from Sophie,” he said.
“Where is she?” I shouted.
“She was at the office of that Polish doctor she works for. But she’s not there now. She went out to the hospital to get an x-ray of her arm. She said Nathan might of broke it, the fuckin’ bum. But she wants you to come down. She’ll stay at that doctor’s office this afternoon until you get there.” And so I went.
For many young people in the throes of late-adolescent growth, the twenty-second year is the most anxiety-filled of all. I realize now how intensely discontented, rebellious and troubled I was at that age, but also how my writing had kept serious emotional distress safely at bay, in the sense that the novel I was working on served as a cathartic instrument through which I was able to discharge on paper many of my more vexing tensions and miseries. My novel of course was more than this, too, yet it was the vessel I have described, which is why I so cherished it as one cherishes the very tissues of one’s being. Still, I was quite vulnerable; fissures would appear in the armor I had wrapped around me, and there were moments when I was assaulted by Kierkegaardian dread. The afternoon I hurried away from Jack Brown’s to find Sophie was one of these times—an ordeal of extreme fragility, ineffectualness and self-loathing. On the bus rocking south through New Jersey to Manhattan, I sat cramped and exhausted in a nearly indescribable miasma of fright. I had a hangover, for one thing, and the jangling nervousness heightened my apprehension, causing me to shudder at the coming showdown with Sophie and Nathan. My failure with Mary Alice (I had not even said goodby to her) had unpinned the very moorings of what was left of my virility, and made me all the more despondent over the