Sophie's Choice - William Styron [303]
Sophie put her head down next to mine so that I felt her faintly fevered cheek, and she spoke into my ear with a muffled voice while I watched her silk-clad hips swaying lightly above me. “Oh, sweet Stingo, you’re such a love. You’ve taken care of me in so many ways. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” A pause, her lips brushing my neck. “Do you know something, Stingo, I’m beyond thirty. What would you do with an old lady like me?”
“I’d manage,” I said. “I’d manage somehow.”
“You would want someone closer to your age to have children with, not someone like me. Besides...” She fell silent.
“Besides what?”
“Well, the doctors have said I must be very careful about having children after...” There was another silence.
“You mean after what you went through?”
“Yes. But it’s not just that. Someday I’ll just be old and ugly and you’ll still be quite young and I won’t blame you if you go chasing after all the young and pretty mademoiselles.”
“Oh, Sophie, Sophie,” I protested in a whisper, thinking despairingly: She hasn’t said “I love you” in return. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll always be my—well, my...” I groped for a phrase that was properly tender, could say only, “Number One.” It sounded hopelessly banal.
She sat erect again. “I do want to go with you to this farm. I so much want to see the South after all you’ve said and after reading Faulkner. Why don’t we just go to this place for a little while and I could stay with you without us being married, and we could decide—”
“Sophie, Sophie,” I put in, “I’d love that. There’s nothing I’d like better. I’m not a maniac for marriage. But you don’t realize what kind of people live down there. I mean, they’re decent, generous, good-hearted Southern folks, but in a little country place like we’d be living in, it would be impossible not to be married. Jesus Christ, Sophie, it’s full of Christians! Once it got around that we were living in sin, as it’s called, those good Virginia people would cover us with tar and feathers and tie us to a long two-by-four and dump us over the Carolina line. God’s truth, that’s what would happen.”
Sophie gave a small giggle. “Americans are so funny. I thought Poland was so very puritanical, but imagine...”
I realize now that it was the siren, or choir of sirens, and the drumming pandemonium that accompanied their shrieks, that ruptured the fragile membrane of Sophie’s mood, which thanks in part to my own attentive ministrations had become peaceful, even luminous around the edges, if hardly sunny. City sirens even at a distance generate a hateful noise, almost always set loose in a soul-damaging, unnecessary frenzy. This one, rising from the narrow street only three floors directly below us, was amplified as if by canyon walls, bouncing from the grimy building opposite and entering the window next to us like an elongated snout, a solidified scream. It maddened the eardrum, pure sadistic torment made aural, and I jumped from the bed to pull the window down. At the end of the dark street a smudge of smoke plumed away from what looked like a warehouse, but the fire trucks just below, stalled by some nameless impediment, kept releasing skyward their unbelievable blasts.
I slammed down the window, which was of some relief, but it appeared not to have helped Sophie at all; she lay sprawled on the bed kicking her heels and with a pillow jammed down over her head. Recent city dwellers, we were both used to this common enough intrusion, but rarely so loud or so close. The pokey town of Washington had produced a racket I had never heard in New York. But slowly now the fire engines moved past their obstruction, the noise diminished, and I turned my attention to Sophie on the bed. She looked up at me. Where the horrible clamor had merely set my nerves ajangle, it had plainly lacerated her like some evil bullwhip. Her face was pink and contorted