Sophie's Choice - William Styron [35]
Sophie pulled the trick. I was helpless in the face of her plea, and mumbled a grudging “Well, okay.” Then just as I was at the point of unfastening the chain and letting them in, I changed my mind. “Screw off,” I said to Nathan, “you owe me an apology.”
“I apologized,” he replied. His voice was deferential. “I said I wouldn’t call you Cracker any more.”
“Not just that,” I retorted. “The bit about lynching and all that crap. About the South. It’s an insult. Suppose I told you that somebody with a name like Landau couldn’t be anything but a fat, hook-nosed, miserly pawnbroker out to cheat trusting Gentiles. It’d make you mad. It works both ways, these slurs. You owe me another apology.” I realized I had become a little pompous, but I was adamant.
“Okay, I’m sorry for that too,” he said expansively, warmly. “I know I was off base there. Let’s forget it, okay? I beg your pardon, honestly. But we’re serious about taking you on a little outing today. Look, why don’t we leave it like this? It’s early yet. Why don’t you take your time and get dressed and then come upstairs to Sophie’s room. We’ll all have a beer or coffee or something. Then we’ll go to Coney Island. We’ll have lunch in a great seafood restaurant I know down there, and then we’ll go to the beach. I’ve got a good friend who makes extra money Sundays working as a lifeguard. He lets us lie on a special restricted part of the beach where there aren’t any people to kick sand in your face. So come on.”
Sulking rather obviously, I said, “I’II think about it.”
“Ah, be a sport, come on!”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll come.” To which I added a tepid “Thanks.”
While I shaved and slicked myself up, I reflected with puzzlement on this odd turn of events. What devious motive, I wondered, caused such a good-will gesture? Could it be that Sophie had urged Nathan toward this cordial move, perhaps to get him to make up for his nastiness of the night before? Or was he simply out to obtain something else? I knew the ways of New York well enough by now to at least give passing credence to the idea that Nathan might just be some sort of con man, out to hustle up something as commonplace and as obvious as money. (This prompted me to check the condition of the slightly more than four hundred dollars I had secreted at the back of the medicine chest, in a box meant for Johnson & Johnson gauze bandages. The loot, in tens and twenties, was intact, causing me as usual to whisper a loving little threnody to my spectral patron Artiste, moldering to dust these many years in Georgia.) But that seemed an unlikely suspicion, after Morris Fink’s observation about Nathan’s singular affluence. Nonetheless, all these possibilities floated about in my head as I prepared with some misgivings to join Sophie and Nathan. I really felt I ought to stay and try to work, try to set some words down on the yawning yellow page, even if they be inane and random jottings. But Sophie and Nathan had quite simply laid siege to my imagination. What I really wondered about was the smoochy detente between the two of them, reestablished short hours after the most harrowing scene of lovers’ strife I could imagine this side of a low-grade Italian opera. Then I considered the fact that they both simply might be crazy, or outcast like Paolo and Francesca, caught up in some weird, shared perdition.
Morris Fink was informative as usual, if not particularly illuminating, when I ran into him in the hallway just as I was leaving my room. While we were exchanging banalities I