Sophie's Choice - William Styron [39]
Well, it takes all kinds, as I had been accustomed to hear from childhood. Dress. Beauty. Being human. What talk from a man who only shortly before had been mouthing savage words and, if Morris could be trusted, had been inflicting outrageous pain on this gentle creature now flitting about with plates and ashtrays and cheese, dressed like Ginger Rogers in an old movie. Now he could not have been more amiable and engaging. And as I relaxed fully, feeling the beer begin to softly effervesce throughout my limbs, I conceded to myself that what he was saying had merit. After the hideous uniformity in dress of the postwar scene, especially in a man-trap like McGraw-Hill, what really was more refreshing to the eye than a little quaintness, a bit of eccentricity? Once again (I speak now from the vantage point of hindsight) Nathan was dealing in small auguries of the world to come.
“Look at her,” he said, “isn’t she something? Did you ever see such a dollbaby? Hey, dollbaby, come over here.”
“I’m busy, can’t you see?” Sophie said as she bustled about. “Fixing the fromage.”
“Hey!” He gave an earsplitting whistle. “Hey, come over here!” He winked at me. “I can’t keep my hands off her.”
Sophie came over and plopped down in his lap. “Give me a kiss,” he said.
“One kiss, that’s all,” she replied, and smacked him lightly at the side of his mouth. “There! One kiss is all you deserve.”
As she squirmed on his lap he nibbled at her ear and squeezed her waist, causing her adoring face to glow so visibly that I could have sworn he had twisted some kind of knob. “I can’t keep my hands off you-u-u,” he hummed. Like others, I am embarrassed by unprivate displays of affection—or of hostility, for that matter—especially when I am the solitary onlooker. I took a large swallow of beer and averted my eyes; they of course lit upon the outsized bed with its coverlet of luscious apricot where my new friends had transacted most of these goings-on, and which had been the monstrous engine of so much of my recent discomfort. Maybe my renewed outbreak of coughing betrayed me, or I suspect Sophie sensed my embarrassment; at any rate, she leaped up from Nathan’s lap, saying, “Enough! Enough for you, Nathan Landau. No more kisses.”
“Come on,” he complained, “one more.”
“No more,” she said sweetly but firmly. “We’re going to have the beer and a little fromage and then we’re all going to get on the subway train and go have lunch at Coney Island.”
“You’re a cheater,” he said in a kidding voice. “You’re a tease. You’re worse than any little yenta that ever came out of Brooklyn.” He turned and regarded me with mock gravity. “What do you think of that, Stingo? Here I am pushing thirty years old. I fall crazy in love with a Polish shiksa and she keeps her sweet treasure all locked up as tightly as little Shirley Mirmelstein I tried to make out with for five whole years. What do you think of that?” Again the sly wink.
“Bad news,” I improvised in a jocular tone. “It’s a form of sadism.” Although I’m certain I kept my composure, I was really vastly surprised at this revelation: Sophie was not Jewish! I could not really have cared less one way or another, but I was still surprised, and there was something vaguely negative and self-preoccupied in my reaction. Like Gulliver among the Hounyhnhnms, I had rather thought myself a unique figure in this huge Semitic arrondissement and was simply taken aback that Yetta’s house should shelter another Gentile. So Sophie was a shiksa. Well, hush my mouth, I thought in mild wonder.
Sophie set before us a plate containing squares of toast upon which she had melted little sunbursts of golden Cheddar-like cheese. With the beer, they tasted particularly delicious. I began to warm to the convivial, gently alcoholic mood of our tiny gathering as does a hound dog who slinks out from chill, comfortless shadows