Sophie's Choice - William Styron [322]
“Now then,” I said in my best pastor’s counseling voice, “I have a feeling from some of the things you mentioned that you think you’re going to be out of place down there. But listen, nothing’s further from the truth. They might be a little stand-offish at first—and you’ll worry about your accent and your foreignness, and so on—but let me tell you something, Sophie darling, Southerners are the warmest and most accepting people in America, once they get to know you. They’re not like big-city hooligans and shysters. So don’t worry. Of course, we’ll have to do a little adjusting. As I said before, I think the wedding ceremony will have to come pretty soon—you know, to avoid ugly gossip if nothing else. So after we get the feel of the place and introduce ourselves around—this’ll take several days, that’s all—we’ll make out a big shopping list and take the truck and drive up to Richmond. There’ll be thousands of things we’ll need. The place is filled with all the basics, but we’ll need so many other things. Like I told you, a phonograph and a bunch of records. Then there’s the little matter of your wedding clothes. You’ll naturally want to be dressed nice for the ceremony, and so we’ll shop around in Richmond. You won’t find Paris couture there but there are some excellent stores—”
“Stingo!” she cut in sharply. “Please! Please! Don’t run on like that, about wedding clothes and such as that. What do you think I have in my suitcase right now? Just what!” Her voice had risen, cross and quavering, touched with an anger she had rarely ever aimed at me.
We stopped walking, and I turned to look at her face in the shadows of the cool evening. Her eyes were clouded with murky unhappiness and I knew then, with a painful catch in my chest, that I had said the wrong thing, or things. “What?” I stupidly asked.
“Wedding clothes,” she said somberly, “the wedding clothes from Saks that Nathan bought me. I don’t need any wedding clothes. Don’t you see...”
And yes, I did see. To my awful distress, I did see. It was bad. At this instant I sensed for the first time a distance separating us—an intolerable distance which, in my delusory dreams about a Southern love nest, I had not realized had been keeping us apart as effectively as a wide river in flood, preventing any real communion. At least on the loving level I so craved. Nathan. She was still totally absorbed in Nathan, so much so that even the sad nuptial garments she had transported so far had some huge importance to her that was both tactile and symbolic. And I suddenly grasped another truth: how ludicrous it was of me to think of a wedding and sweet uxorious years down on the old plantation when the mistress of my passion—standing before me now with her tired face so twisted with hurt—was lugging around with her wedding clothes meant to please a man she had loved to the point of death. Christ, my stupidity! My tongue had turned to a lump of concrete, I struggled for words but could say nothing. Over Sophie’s shoulder George Washington’s cenotaph, a blazing stiletto in the night sky, was washed in October mist, and tiny people crawled around its foundation. I felt weak and hopeless, with a central part of me in shambles. Each ticking moment seemed to bear Sophie away from me with the speed of light.
Yet just then she murmured something I didn’t understand. She made a sibilant sound, almost inaudible, and right there on Constitution Avenue, moved toward me in a rush and pressed herself into my arms. “Oh, Stingo dear,” she whispered, “please forgive me. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I still want