Sophie's Choice - William Styron [293]
And then his voice, transmuted back into what I had always conceived as Educated High Brooklyn, became a snarl of such ferocity that even the myriad intervening and humming electronic synapses could not filter out the force of its crazed but human rage. “You unspeakable creep! You wretched swine! God damn you to hell forever for betraying me behind my back, you whom I trusted like the best friend I ever had! And that shit-eating grin of yours day after day cool as a cucumber, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it, when you gave me a piece of your manuscript to read—‘ah gee, Nathan, thank you so much—’ when not fifteen minutes earlier you’d been humping away in bed with the woman I was going to marry, I say was going to, past tense, because I’d burn in hell before I’d marry a two-timing Polack who’d spread her legs for a sneaky Southern shitass betraying me like...”
I removed the receiver from my ear and turned to Sophie, who, with mouth agape, had clearly divined what it was that Nathan had been raging about. “Oh God, Stingo,” I heard her whisper, “I didn’t want you to know that he kept saying it was you that I was...”
I listened again, in impotence and anguish: “I’m coming to get you both.” Then there was a moment’s silence, resonant, baffling. And I heard a metallic click. But I realized the line was not dead.
“Nathan,” I said. “Please! Where are you?”
“Not far away, old pal. In fact, I’m right around the corner. And I’m coming to get you treacherous scum. And then you know what I’m going to do? Do you know what I’m going to do to you two deceitful, unspeakable pigs? Listen—”
There was an explosion in my ear. Too diminished by the distance or by whatever in a phone mercifully deamplifies noise and prevents it from destroying human hearing, the impact of the gunshot stunned rather than hurt me yet nonetheless left a prolonged and desolate buzzing against my eardrum like the swarming of a thousand bees. I will never know whether Nathan fired that shot into the very mouth of the telephone he was holding, or into the air, or against some forlorn, anonymous wall, but it sounded close enough for him to be, as he had said, right around the corner, and I dropped the receiver in panic and, turning, clutched for Sophie’s hand. I had not heard a shot fired since the war, and I’m almost certain that I thought I would never hear another shot again. I pity my blind innocence. Now, after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever there has occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Nathan—the poor lunatic whom I loved, high on drugs and with a smoking barrel in some nameless room or phone booth—and his image has always seemed to foreshadow these wretched unending years of madness, illusion, error, dream and strife. But at that moment I felt only unutterable fear. I looked at Sophie, and she looked at me, and we fled.
Chapter Fifteen
THE NEXT MORNING the Pennsylvania train that Sophie and I were riding to Washington, D.C., on our way down to Virginia, suffered a power failure and stalled on the trestle opposite the Wheatena factory in Rahway, New Jersey. During this interruption in our trip—a stop which lasted only fifteen minutes or so—I subsided into a remarkable tranquillity and found myself taking hopeful stock of the future. It still amazes me that I was able to maintain this calm, this almost elegant repose, after our headlong escape from Nathan and the fretful, sleepless night Sophie and I spent in the bowels of Penn Station. My eyes were gritty with fatigue and a part of my mind still dwelt achingly on the catastrophe we had barely avoided. As time had worn on that night it seemed more and more probable to both Sophie and me that Nathan had not been in our vicinity when he made that telephone call; nonetheless his merciless threat had sent us running madly from the Pink Palace with only one large suitcase