Sophie's Choice - William Styron [75]
“Your what?” I said.
“Pad.”
“What’s that?”
“Pad. You know, a room.” It was the first time I had ever heard the word used in the argot. Pad. I liked the sound.
“Anyway, consider yourself welcome up there anytime you want to play the records during the day when Sophie and I have gone to work. Morris Fink has a passkey. I’ve told him to let you in anytime you want.”
“Oh, that’s really too much, Nathan,” I blurted, “but God—thanks.” I was moved by this generosity—no, nearly overwhelmed. The fragile records of that period had not evolved into our cheap items of conspicuous consumption. People were simply not so free-handed with their records in those days. They were precious, and there had never been made available to me so much music in my life; the prospect which Nathan offered me filled me with cheer that verged close to the voluptuous. Free choice of any of the pink and nubile female flesh I had ever dreamed of could not have so ravishingly whetted my appetite. “I’ll certainly take good care of them,” I hurried to add.
“I trust you,” he said, “though you do have to be careful. Goddamn shellac is still too easily broken. I predict something inevitable in a couple of years—an unbreakable record.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“Not only that, not only unbreakable but compressed—made so that you can play an entire symphony, say, or a whole Bach cantata on one side of a single record. I’m sure it’s coming,” he said, rising from the chair, adding within the space of a few minutes his prophecy of the long-playing record to that of the Jewish literary renaissance. “The musical millennium is close at hand, Stingo.”
“Jesus, I just want to thank you,” I said, still genuinely affected.
“Forget it, kid,” he replied, and his gaze went upward in the direction of the music. “Don’t thank me, thank Sophie. She taught me to care about music as if she had invented it, as if I hadn’t cared about it before. Just as she taught me about clothes, about so many things...” He paused and his eyes became luminous, distant. “About everything. Life! God, isn’t she unbelievable?” There was in his voice the slightly overwrought reverence sometimes used about supreme works of art, yet when I agreed, murmuring a thin “I’ll say she is,” Nathan could not even have been faintly aware of my forlorn and jealous passion.
As I have said, Nathan had encouraged me to keep Sophie company, so I had no compunction—after he had gone off to work—about walking out in the hallway and calling up to her with an invitation. It was Thursday—one of the days off from her job at Dr. Blackstock’s, and when her voice floated down over the banister, I asked if she would join me for lunch in the park a little after noon. She called out “Okay, Stingo!” cheerily, and then she fled from my mind. Frankly, my thoughts were of crotch and breast and belly and bellybutton and ass, specifically of those belonging to the wild nymph I had met on the beach the previous Sunday, the “hot dish” Nathan had so happily served me up.
Despite my lust, I returned to my writing desk and tried to scratch away for an hour or so, almost but not quite oblivious of the stirrings, the comings and goings of the other occupants of the house—Morris Fink muttering malevolently to himself as he swept the front porch, Yetta Zimmerman clumping down from her quarters on the third floor to give the place her morning once-over, the whalelike Moishe Muskatblit departing in a ponderous rush for his yeshiva, improbably whistling “The Donkey Serenade” in harmonious bell-like notes. After a bit, while I paused in my labors and stood by the window facing the park, I saw one of the two nurses, Astrid Weinstein, returning wearily from her night-shift job at Kings County Hospital. No sooner had she slammed the door behind her in the room opposite mine than the other nurse, Lillian Grossman, scurried out of the house on her way to work at the same hospital. It was difficult