Sophie's Choice - William Styron [85]
Sophie told me that she didn’t learn Nathan’s name until many hours after he rescued her at the library. What she most deeply and indelibly remembered about that first day, and the days which followed, was his truly awesome tenderness. At the beginning—perhaps only because she recalled him bending over her, murmuring, “Let the doctor take care of everything”—she could not tell that those words had been spoken facetiously, and so she thought he was a doctor even later as with a kind of commanding gentleness he held her against his arm, whispering words of comfort and encouragement while they rode back to Yetta’s in a taxi. “We’ve got to get you fixed up,” she remembered him saying, in a kind of half-jocular tone which brought to her lips the first trace of a grin since she had collapsed. “You can’t run around Brooklyn fainting in libraries and scaring people half to death.”
There was something so supportive, so friendly and benign, so caring in his voice, and everything about his presence inspired such immediate trust, that when they got back to her room (hot and stifling in the slant of afternoon sunlight, where she again had a brief fainting spell and slumped against him), she had not the slightest trace of discomfiture in feeling him gently unbutton and remove her soiled dress and then with delicate but firm pressure push her slowly down to her bed, where she lay stretched out clad only in a slip. She felt much better, the nausea had vanished. But as she lay there looking up, trying to return the stranger’s quizzical sad smile, she could feel the ponderous drowsiness and lassitude persisting to her bone marrow. “Why am I so tired?” she heard herself ask him in a faint voice. “What’s wrong with me?” She still had the notion that he was a physician and regarded his silent, vaguely sorrowing gaze upon her as being diagnostic, professional, until suddenly she realized that his eyes had fixed upon the number graven on her arm. Abruptly (and this was odd, for she had long since abandoned any self-consciousness about the marking) she made a move with her hand as if to cover it up, but before she could do so he had gently grasped her wrist and had begun to monitor her pulse as he had done at the library. He said nothing for a while, and she felt perfectly safe and at ease in his calm grip, drowsing off with his words in her ear, restorative, soothing, with that blessed touch of playfulness: “The doctor thinks you need a big pill to try to bring some color to that beautiful white skin.” Again: the doctor! Peacefully then she fell into a dreamless doze, but when, only moments after, she awoke and opened her eyes, the doctor was gone.
“Oh, Stingo, I remember so well, it was such a long time since I feel this terrible panic. And it was so strange, you know! I did not even know him. I did not even know his name! I had been with him an hour, I think even less, and now he was gone and I had this panic, this deep panic and fear that he might never come back, that he was gone forever. It was like losing a person very close to you.”
Some romantic whim of mine prompted me irresistibly to ask if she had fallen that swiftly in love. Could this have been the perfect example, I inquired, of that marvelous myth known as love at first sight?
Sophie said, “No, it wasn’t exactly like that—not love then, I don’t think. But, well, it may have been close to it.” She paused. “I just don’t know. How silly in a way for such a thing to happen. How could it be possible to know a man for forty-five minutes and feel this emptiness when he is gone? Absolument fou! Don’t you think? I was crazy for him to come back.”
A moveable picnic, our lunchtime repast took place in all of the sunny and shady corners of Prospect Park. I am no longer able to remember how many picnics Sophie and I shared—certainly half a dozen, perhaps more. Nor are most of the spots where we sprawled