Sophie's Choice - William Styron [87]
She was aware that her appetite had returned and felt an eager spasm in her empty stomach. When he poured the consommé into one of her cheap plastic bowls she raised herself up on one elbow and ate pleasurably, savoring the soup, cool and gelatinous with a tart aftertaste. Finally she said to him, “Thank you, I feel much better now.”
She sensed again such intensity in his gaze as he sat beside her, not speaking for a nearly interminable space, that despite her trust in him, she began to feel a little uneasy. Then at last he said, “I will bet anyone a hundred dollars that you have a severe deficiency anemia. Possibly folic acid or B-twelve. But most probably iron. Baby, have you been eating properly recently?”
She told him that except for the short period a few weeks before, when she had caused herself to suffer a half-voluntary rejection of food, she had for the past six months eaten more healthy and handsomely than at any time in her life. “I have these problems,” she explained. “I cannot eat much fat of animals. But all else is okay.”
“Then it’s bound to be a deficiency of iron,” Nathan said. “In what you describe you’ve been eating you’d have had more than adequate folic acid and B-twelve. All you need is a trace of both. Iron’s a great deal trickier, though. You could have fallen behind with iron and never had a chance to catch up.” He paused, perhaps aware of the apprehension in her face (for what he had been saying puzzled and troubled her), and gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s one of the easiest things in the world to treat, once you’ve got it nailed down.”
“Nail down?”
“Once you understand what the trouble is. It’s a very simple thing to cure.”
For some reason she was embarrassed to ask his name, although she was dying to know. As he sat there beside her, she stole a glimpse of his face and decided that he was exceedingly agreeable-looking—unmistakably Jewish, with fine symmetrical lines and planes in the midst of which the strong, prominent nose was an adornment, as were his luminously intelligent eyes that could switch from compassion to humor and back again so rapidly and easily and naturally. Once more his very presence made her feel better; she was suffused by a drowsy fatigue but the nausea and deep malaise were gone. Then suddenly, lying there, she had a lazy, bright inspiration. Earlier in the day, after looking at the radio schedule in the Times, she had been badly disappointed to learn that on account of her English class she would miss a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on the early-afternoon concert over WQXR. It was a little like her rediscovery of the Sinfonia Concertante, yet with a difference. She remembered the symphony so clearly from her past—again, those concerts in Cracow—but here in Brooklyn, because she had no phonograph and because she always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Pastoral had completely eluded her, forever tantalizingly announcing itself but remaining unheard like some gorgeous but mute bird flitting away as she pursued it through the foliage of a dark forest.
Now she realized that due to today’s misadventure she could at last hear the music; it seemed far more crucial to her existence at the moment than this medical talk, no matter how encouraging its overtones, and so she said, “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” She had scarcely spoken the words when he reached across her and switched it on just an instant before the Philadelphia Orchestra, with its murmurous strings, hesitant at first then jubilantly swelling, commenced that inebriate psalm to the flowering globe. She experienced a sensation of beauty so intense that it was as if she were dying. She shut her eyes and kept them firmly closed to the very end of the symphony, at which point she opened them again, embarrassed by the tears streaming down her cheeks