Sophie's Choice - William Styron [32]
As she went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress. While it was a beautiful body, with all the right prominences, curves, continuities and symmetries, there was something a little strange about it—nothing visibly missing and not so much deficient as reassembled. And that was precisely it, I could see. The odd quality proclaimed itself through the skin. It possessed the sickish plasticity (at the back of her arms it was especially noticeable) of one who has suffered severe emaciation and whose flesh is even now in the last stages of being restored. Also, I felt that underneath that healthy suntan there lingered the sallowness of a body not wholly rescued from a terrible crisis. But none of these at all diminished a kind of wonderfully negligent sexuality having to do at that moment, at least, with the casual but forthright way her pelvis moved and with her truly sumptuous rear end. Despite past famine, her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass’s brief lodging—thirty seconds would do—within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms. Old Stingo, I mused as she climbed upward, there must be some perversity in this dorsal fixation. Then as she reached the top of the stairs she turned, looking down, and smiled the saddest smile imaginable. “I hope I haven’t annoyed you with my problems,” she said. “I am so sorry.” And she moved toward her room and said, “Good night.”
So then, from the only comfortable chair in my room, where I sat reading Aristophanes that night, I was able to see a section of the upstairs hallway through my partly open door. Once around midevening I saw Sophie take to his room the record albums which Nathan had commanded her to return to him. On her way back I could see that again she was crying. How could she go on so? Where did those tears come from? Later she played over and over on the phonograph the final movement of that First Symphony of Brahms which he so big-heartedly had allowed her to keep. It must have been her only album now. All evening that music filtered down through the paper-thin ceiling, the lordly and tragic French horn mingling in my head with the flute’s antiphonal, piercing birdcall to fill my spirit with a sadness and nostalgia almost more intense than any I had ever felt before. I thought of the moment of that music’s creation. It was music that, among other things, spoke of a Europe of a halcyon time, bathed in the soft umber glow of serene twilights—of children in pigtails and pinafores bobbing along in dogcarts, of excursions in the glades of the Wiener Wald and strong Bavarian beer, of ladies from Grenoble with parasols strolling the glittering rims of glaciers in the high Alps, and balloon voyages, of gaiety, of vertiginous waltzes, of Moselle wine, of Johannes Brahms himself, with beard and black cigar, contemplating his titanic chords beneath the leafless, autumnal beech trees of the Hofgarten. It was a Europe of almost inconceivable sweetness—a Europe that Sophie, drowning in her sorrow above me, could never have known.
When I went to bed the music was still playing. And when each of the scratchy shellac records reached its end, allowing me in the interval before the next to hear Sophie’s inconsolable weeping, I tossed and turned and wondered again how one mortal human being could be the vessel to contain such grief. It seemed nearly impossible that Nathan could inspire this raw, devastating woe. But clearly he had done so, and this posed for me a problem. For if, as I have said, I felt myself slipping already into that sick and unfortified situation known as love, wasn