Sophie's Choice - William Styron [29]
He thrust her arm down abruptly and drew back from her. “You fill me with in-fin-ite revulsion,” he shouted. “Pure un-a-dul-ter-a-ted loathing. I’m getting out of here before I murder you!” He wheeled away from her.
“Nathan, don’t go!” she implored him desperately and reached out to him with both hands. “I need you, Nathan. You need me.” There was something plaintive, childlike in her voice, which was light in timbre, almost fragile, breaking a little in the upper register and of a faint huskiness lower down. The Polish accent overlaying it all made it charming or, I thought, would have made it so under less horrible circumstances. “Please don’t go, Nathan,” she cried. “We need each other. Don’t go!”
“Need?” he retorted, turning back toward her. “Me need you? Let me tell you something”—and here he began to shake his entire outstretched hand at her, as his voice grew more outraged and unstrung—“I need you like any goddamned insufferable disease I can name. I need you like a case of anthrax, hear me. Like trichinosis! I need you like a biliary calculus. Pellagra! Encephalitis! Bright’s disease, for Christ’s sake! Carcinoma of the fucking brain, you fucking miserable whore! Aaaahooooo-o-o!” This last was a rising, wavering wail—a spine-chilling sound that mingled fury with lamentation in a way that seemed almost liturgical, like the keening of a maddened rabbi. “I need you like death,” he bellowed in a choked voice. “Death!”
Once more he turned away, and again she said, weeping, “Please don’t go, Nathan!” Then, “Nathan, where are you going?”
He was near the door now, barely two feet away from me where I stood at the threshold, irresolute, not knowing whether to forge on toward my room or to turn and flee. “Going?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you where I’m going—I’m going to get on the first subway train and go to Forest Hills! I’m going to borrow my brother’s car and come back here and load up my things in the car. Then I’m going to clear out of this place.” All of a sudden his voice diminished in volume, his manner became somewhat more collected, even casual, but his tone was dramatically, slyly threatening. “After that, maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit down and write a registered letter to the Immigration Service. I’m going to tell them that you’ve got the wrong visa. I’m going to tell them that they should issue you a whore’s visa, if they’ve got one. If they don’t, I’m going to tell them they’d better ship you back to Poland for peddling your ass to any doctor in Brooklyn that wants a quick lay. Back to Cracow, baby!” He gave a satisfied chuckle. “Oh, baby, back to Cracow!”
He turned and plunged out the door. As he did so he brushed against me, and this caused him to whirl about again and draw up short. I could not tell whether he thought I had overheard him or not. Clearly winded, he was panting heavily and he eyed me up and down for a moment. Then I felt that he thought I had overheard, but it didn’t matter. Considering his emotional state, I was surprised at his way with me, which if not exactly gracious seemed at least momentarily civil, as if I had been magnanimously excluded from the territory of his rage.
“You the new roomer Fink told me about?” he managed between breaths.
I answered in the feeblest, briefest affirmative.
“You’re from the South,” he said. “Morris told me you were from