Sophie's Choice - William Styron [46]
I noticed that summer that under certain circumstances having to do with the mysterious vicissitudes of his mind and mood, Sophie was able to work upon Nathan such tricks of alchemy that he was almost instantaneously transformed—the ranting ogre become Prince Charming. European women often boss their men too, but with a beguiling subtlety unknown to most American females. Now she pecked him lightly on the cheek, and holding his outstretched hands by her fingertips, stared at him appraisingly as the beet-hued, choleric passion he had vented on me began to recede from his face.
“Vraiment, je t’adore, chéri,” she said softly and then, tugging at his wrists, sang out in the most cheery voice of the day, “To the beach! To the beach! We’ll build sand castles.”
And the tempest was over, the thunderclouds had rolled away, and the sunniest good humor flooded into the color-splashed room, where the curtains made a tap-tapping sound upon a sudden gusty breeze from the park. As we moved toward the door, the three of us, Nathan—looking a bit like a fashionable gambler now in his suit out of an old Vanity Fair—looped his long arm around my shoulder and offered me an apology so straightforward and honorable that I could not help but forgive him his dark insults, his bigoted and wrong-headed slurs and his other transgressions. “Old Stingo, I’m just an ass, an ass!” he roared in my ear, uncomfortably loud. “I don’t mean to be a shmuck, it’s a bad habit I’ve got, saying things to people without any regard for their feelings. I know it’s not all bad down South. Hey, I’ll make you a promise. I promise never to jump on you about the South again! Okay? Sophie, you’re the witness!” Squeezing me, tousling my hair with fingers that moved across my scalp as if they were kneading dough and like some overgrown and ludicrously affectionate schnauzer poking his noble scimitar of a nose into the coral recesses of my ear, he fell into what I began to identify as his comic mode.
We walked in the gayest of spirits toward the subway station—Sophie between us now, her arms linked in ours—and he returned to that grits-and-molasses accent he rendered with such fantastic precision; there was no sarcasm this time, no intent to needle me, and his intonation, accurate enough to fool a native of Memphis or Mobile, caused me to nearly choke with laughter. But his gift was not mimicry alone; what emanated from him so drolly was the product of dazzling invention. With the loutish, swollen, barely comprehensible diction I had heard bubble up out of the tonsils of all sorts of down-home rustics, he embarked on an improvisation so crazily funny and so deadly precise and obscene that in my own hilarity I quite forgot that it all involved those people whom he had been flaying only moments before with unpitying and humorless rage. I’m sure Sophie missed many of the nuances of his act, but affected by the general contagion, joined me in filling Flatbush Avenue with noisy runaway laughter. And all of it, I dimly began to realize, was blessedly purgative of the mean and threatful emotions which had churned up like an evil storm in Sophie’s room.
Along a block and a half of the city’s crowded, easygoing Sunday street, he created an entire southern Appalachian scenario, a kind of darkling, concupiscent Dogpatch in which Pappy Yokum was transformed into an incestuous old farmer consecrated to romps with a daughter that Nathan—ever medically aware—had christened Pink Eye. “Ever git yore dick sucked