Sophie's Choice - William Styron [71]
Another thing I remember so well about that earliest period at Yetta’s was the new-found ease and security I felt—this too, I’m sure, the result of my friendship with Sophie and Nathan. I had sensed a glimmering of this in Sophie’s room that Sunday. While I had droned in the hive at McGraw-Hill there had been something sick, self-flagellating in my withdrawal from people into a world of fantasy and loneliness; on my own terms it was unnatural, for I am a companionable person most of the time, impelled genuinely enough toward friendship but equally smitten by the same horror of solitude that causes human beings to get married or join the Rotarians. There in Brooklyn I had come to the point where I sorely needed friends, and I had found them, thus soothing my pent-up anxieties and allowing me to work. Certainly only the most sickly and reclusive person can finish hard labor day after day without contemplating in dread the prospect of a room that is a vessel of silence, rimmed by four empty walls. After setting down my tense, distraught little funeral tableau so permeated by human desolation and bereavement, I felt I had earned the right to a few beers and the fellowship of Sophie and Nathan.
Considerable time had to pass, however—at least several weeks—before I was fated to get involved with my new chums in a fever of the same emotional intensity which threatened to consume us all when I first encountered them. When this storm broke anew it was horrible—far more threatful than the squabbles and black moments I have described—and its explosive return almost totally confounded me. But this was later. Meanwhile, like a floral extension of the pink room I inhabited, a ripe peony sending forth its petals, I blossomed in creative contentment. Another point: I no longer had to worry about the boisterous noise of lovemaking from above. During the year or so that Sophie and Nathan had maintained rooms on the second floor, they had cohabited in a rather casual, flexible way, each keeping separate accommodations but sleeping together in whichever bed at the moment seemed more natural or convenient.
It is perhaps a reflection on the severe morality of that period that despite Yetta’s relatively tolerant attitude toward sex, Sophie and Nathan felt constrained to live technically apart—separated by a mere few yards of linoleum-covered hallway—rather than moving in together into either one of their commodious rooms, where they would no longer have to enact their formal charade of devoted companions lacking any carnal interests. But this was still a time of worshipful wedlock and cold, marmoreal legitimacy, and besides, it was Flatbush, a place as disposed to the extremes of propriety and to neighborly snooping as the most arrested small town in the American heartland. Yetta’s house would have received a bad name had it gotten around that two “unmarrieds” were living together. So the upstairs hallway was for Sophie and Nathan merely a brief umbilicus between what in effect were separate halves of a large two-room apartment. What made it now more restful and silent for me was that my two friends soon transferred both their sleeping arrangements and their deafening amatory rites to the bed in Nathan’s quarters—a room not nearly so cheery as Sophie’s but now, with the coming of summer, somewhat cooler, so Nathan said. Thank God, I thought, no more annotated climaxes to intrude on my work and composure.
During those first weeks I managed fairly successfully to bury my infatuation for Sophie. I so carefully banked the fires of my passion for her that I am certain that neither she nor Nathan was able to detect the molten hunger I suffered every moment I was in her presence.