“I got up and walked to the window and looked at the woods—they were bright and flaming, so beautiful. I almost forgot the pain in my side and all that had happened, and the poison and the mad things Nathan have done. When I was a little girl in Cracow and very religious I would play a game with myself which I called ‘the shape of God.’ And I would see something so beautiful—a cloud or a flame or the green side of a mountain or the way light filled the sky—and I would try to discover God’s shape in it, as if God actually took the form of what I was watching and lived in it and I was able to see Him there. And that day when I looked out the window at those incredible woods that sweeped down to the river and the sky so clear above, why, I forgot myself and for a moment I felt like a little girl again and begun to try to see God’s shape in these things. There was a wonderful smell of smoke in the air and I saw smoke rising far off in the woods and I saw God’s shape in that. But then—but then it came to my mind what I really knew what was really the truth: that God have left me again, left me forever. I felt I could actually see Him go, turning His back on me like some great beast and go crashing away through the leaves. God! Stingo, I could see this huge back of Him, going away in the trees. The light faded then and I felt such an emptiness—the memory coming back and knowing what I would have to say.
“When Nathan finally waked up I was beside him on the bed. He smiled and said a few words and I felt he hardly knew what had happened all these last hours. We said one or two ordinary things to each other, you know, sleepy waking-up things, and then I bent down close to him and said, ‘’Darling, I have something I must say to you.’ And he begun to come back with a laugh. ‘Don’t look so—’ Stopping like that, and then he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You thought I have been some kind of unattached woman from Poland who was never married and so on, with no family or anything in the past.’ I said, ‘It has been easier for me to make it look like that, for I’ve not wanted to dig up the past. I know it has been easier for you, maybe, too.’ He looked painful and then I said, ‘But I must tell you. It is just this. I was married a number of years ago and I had a child, a little boy named Jan who was with me at Auschwitz.’ I stopped speaking then, looking away, and he was silent for a long, long time, and then I heard him say, ‘Oh good God, oh good God.’ He kept saying this over and over. Then he was quiet again, and finally he said, ‘What happened to him? What happened to your little boy?’ And I said to him, ‘I don’t know. He was lost.’ And he said, ‘You mean dead?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. It don’t matter. Just lost. Lost.’
“And that’s all I could say, except for one thing. I said, ‘Now that I’ve told you I must make you promise this. I must make you promise never to ask about my child ever again. Or speak of him. Nor will I ever speak of him either.’ And he promised with one word—‘Yes,’ he said—but the look on his face was filled with such sorrow that I had to turn away.
“Don’t ask me, Stingo, don’t ask me why—after all this—I was still ready for Nathan to piss on me, rape me, stab me, beat me, blind me, do anything with me that he desired. Anyway, a long time passed before he spoke to me again. Then he said, ‘Sophielove, I’m insane, you know. I want to apologize for my insanity.’ And after a bit he said, ‘Want to fuck?’ And I said right away without even thinking twice, ‘Yes. Oh yes.’ And we made love all afternoon, which made me forget the pain but forget God too, and Jan, and all the other things I had lost. And I knew Nathan and me would live for a while more together.”
Chapter Twelve
IN THE SMALL HOURS of that morning, after her long soliloquy, I had to put Sophie into bed—pour her into bed, as we used to say in those days. I was amazed that after all the booze she had guzzled she could remain so coherent throughout the evening; but by the time the bar closed at four o’cock I saw that she was pretty well smashed. I splurged and we took a taxi the mile or so back to the Pink Palace; on the way she dozed heavily against my shoulder. I maneuvered her up the stairs, pushing at her waist from behind, and her legs wobbled dangerously. She uttered only the smallest of sighs when I eased her down into her bed, fully clothed, and watched her pass instantly away into a pale coma. I was drunk and exhausted myself. I threw a coverlet over Sophie. Then I went downstairs to my own room and after undressing slithered between the sheets, falling into the blank slumber of a cretin.
I woke up with the late-morning sunlight ablaze in my face, and the sound in my ears of birds squabbling among the maples and sycamores, and the distant froggy noise of boys’ adolescent voices—all refracted through an aching skull and the pulsating consciousness of the worst hangover I had experienced in a year or two. Needless to say, beer too can undermine body and soul, if downed in enough quantity. I succumbed to an abrupt and terrible magnification of all sensations: the nap of the sheet beneath my naked back felt like cornfield stubble, the chitter of a sparrow outside seemed the squawk of a pterodactyl, a truck’s wheel striking a pothole on the street made a clamor like the slamming of the gates of hell. All my ganglia were quivering. Another thing: I sweltered with lust, helpless in the throes of an alcohol-induced concupiscence known, at least in that day, by the name of “the hangover hots.” Normally the prey of an ever-unfulfilled randiness—as the reader by now must be aware—I became, during these mercifully infrequent seizures of morning-after engorgement, a godforsaken organism in absolute thrall to the genital urge, capable of defiling a five-year-old of either sex, ready for coition with almost any vertebrate having a pulse and warm blood. Nor could loutish self-gratification quell this imperious, feverish desire. Desire like this was too overwhelming, sprang from sources too demandingly procreative to be satisfied by some handy makeshift. I do not think it hyperbolic to describe this derangement (for such it really was) as primordial: “I would have fucked mud” was the Marine Corps description for such a mania. But suddenly with a manful zeal that pleased me I bestirred myself and leaped out of bed, thinking of Jones Beach and Sophie in the room above me.
I stuck my head out into the hallway and called upstairs. I heard the faint strains of something of Bach. Sophie’s response from behind her door, while indistinct, sounded chipper enough, and I retreated and splashed about in my morning purification. It was a Saturday. The night before, in what seemed a rush of (perhaps inebriate) affection toward me, Sophie had promised to spend the entire weekend at the house before moving off to her new place near Fort Green Park. She also agreed enthusiastically to an outing with me to Jones Beach. I had never been there but I knew it to be an oceanside strand far less congested than Coney Island. Now while I soaped myself beneath the tepid trickle in the pink mildewed upright metal coffin which served as my shower stall, I began to scheme in earnest about Sophie and the immediate future. I was more than ever aware of the tragicomic nature of my passion for Sophie. On the one hand I possessed enough of a sense of humor to be aware of the ludicrousness of the contortions and writhings her very existence inflicted upon me. I had read romantic literature in sufficient bulk to know that my wretched frustrated moonings could in their collective despair almost laughably exemplify the word “lovelorn.”
Yet it was only half a joke, really. Because the anxiety and pain which this one-way love caused me was as cruel as the discovery that I had acquired some terminal disease. The only cure for this disease was her love in return—and such a genuine love seemed as remote as a cure for cancer. At times (and this moment was one) I was able actually to curse her out loud—“Bitch, Sophie!”—for I almost would have preferred her scorn and hatred to this proximate love which could be called affection or fondness but never love itself. My mind still echoed with her outpouring of the past night, with its awful vision of Nathan and its brutality and despairing tenderness and perverse eroticism and its stink of death. “God damn you, Sophie!” I said half aloud, slowly enunciating the words while I lathered my crotch. “Nathan’s out of your life now, gone for good. That death-force is gone, finished, kaput! So now love me, Sophie. Love me. Love me! Love lif
e!”
Drying myself off, I considered in a businesslike way the possible practical objections Sophie might have to me as a suitor, provided of course that I could speak my way through those emotional walls and somehow gain her love. They were rather troublesome, her potential complaints. I was, of course, years younger (and a postpubescent pimple blossoming next to my nose, glimpsed in the mirror just then, underscored the fact), but this was a trifling matter with many historical precedents to make it right, or at least acceptable. Then, too, I was not nearly so solvent financially as Nathan had been. Although she could scarcely be called avaricious, Sophie loved the fat American life; self-denial was not among her most obvious qualities, and I wondered with a soft but audible groan how on earth I’d be able to provide for the two of us. And at that moment, as if in some odd reflexive response to the thought, I reached in and took my Johnson & Johnson bank down out of its hiding place in the medicine chest. And to my absolute horror I saw that every last dollar had vanished from the little box. I was wiped out!
Of the tumult of black emotions that sweeps through one after a robbery—chagrin, despair, rage, hatred of the human race—the one that usually comes last is also one of the most poisonous: suspicion. I could not help pointing an inner finger of accusation at Morris Fink, who prowled around the premises and had access to my room, and the sleaziness I felt at my unproved suspicion was somehow compounded by the fact that I had begun to feel a remote liking for the molelike janitor. Fink had done me one or two small favors, which only complicated the mistrust I felt for him now. And of course I could not voice my suspicion even to Sophie, who received the news of the depredation done me with affecting sympathy.
“Oh, Stingo, no! Poor Stingo! Why?” She clambered out of bed, where, propped against the pillows, she had been reading a French translation of The Sun Also Rises. “Stingo! Who could have done such a thing to you?” In a flowered silk robe she threw herself impulsively around me. My turmoil was so intense that I could make no response even to the enjoyable pressure of her breasts. “Stingo! Robbed? How awful!”
I felt my lips quiver, I was despicably close to real tears. “Gone!” I said. “All gone! Three hundred and some dollars, all I had between myself and the poorhouse! How in God’s name will I ever get my book written now? Every penny I had on earth, except—” As an afterthought I grabbed my wallet and opened it. “Except for forty dollars—forty dollars that I was lucky enough to take with me when we went out last night. Oh, Sophie, this is complete disaster!” Half consciously I heard myself imitating Nathan: “Oy, have I got tsuris!”
Sophie had that mysterious knack of being able to calm wild passions, even those of Nathan when he was not uncontrollably out of his mind. A strange sorcery which I could never quite pin down, it had to do both with her Europeanness and something that was obscurely, seductively maternal. “Shush!” she would say in a certain tone of sham reproof, and a man would simply wilt and end up grinning. While my desolation at this point precluded any such thing as a grin, Sophie did quite easily manage to cool my frenzy. “Stingo,” she said, playing with the shoulders of my shirt, “such a thing is terrible! But you mustn’t act like the atomic bomb has fallen on you. Such a big baby, you look like you’re going to cry. What’s three hundred dollars? Soon when you’re a great writer you’ll be making three hundred dollars a week! Now it is bad, this loss, mais, chéri, ce n’est pas tragique, there is nothing you can do about it, so you must forget it all for this moment and come on let us go to Jones Beach like we said! Allons-y!”
Her words helped considerably and I quickly settled down. As devastating as my loss was, I realized, as she did, that there was almost nothing I could do to change things, so I resolved to relax and at least try to enjoy the rest of the weekend with Sophie. There would be time enough to confront the monstrous future come Monday. I began to look forward to our outing at the beach with the escapist euphoria of a tax dodger seeking to lose his past in Rio de Janeiro.
Rather surprised at my own priggish objections, I tried to forbid Sophie from stuffing the half-full bottle of whiskey into her beach bag. But she gaily insisted, saying “hair of the dog,” which was something I was sure she had picked up from Nathan. “You’re not the only one with a hangover, Stingo,” she added. Was it at that moment that I first became seriously concerned about her drinking? I think that previously I had regarded this thirst of Sophie’s as a temporary aberration, a retreat into momentary solace which was due more to Nathan’s abandonment of her than anything else. Now I was by no means so certain; doubt and worry plucked at me as we swayed together in the car of a rackety subway train. We got off soon. The bus itself left for Jones Beach from a dingy terminal on Nostrand Avenue, a place swarming with unruly Brooklynites jostling for position to get to the sun. On our bus Sophie and I were the last to climb aboard; standing in a sepulchral tunnel, the vehicle was malodorous, nearly pitch-black and utterly silent although packed with a dim and shifting mass of human bodies. The effect of silence was sinister, baffling—surely, I thought while we edged our way toward the rear, such a throng should give up a vagrant mumble, a sigh, some evidence of life—until the moment we found our tattered and rumpsprung seats.
Just then the bus lurched forward into sunlight, and I was able to discern our fellow passengers. They were all children, little Jews in their late childhood and early teens, and all of them were deaf-mutes. Or at least I assumed they were Jews, since one of the kids held a big hand-lettered placard which read: Beth Israel School for the Deaf. Two motherly, bosomy women roamed the aisle with cheery smiles, flicking their fingers in sign language as if conducting a voiceless choir. Here and there a child, beaming, would flick back winglike fluttering hands. I felt myself shudder within the bottomless drainpipe of my hangover. I had an awful sensation of doom. My jangled nerves together with the sight of these incapacitated angels and the smell of faulty combustion leaking up from the engine—all merged into a phantasm of aching anxiety. Nor was my panic alleviated by Sophie’s voice at my side and the bitter flavor of what she had to say. She had begun to take little nips from the bottle and had become incredibly garrulous. But I was really astounded at the words she spoke about Nathan, the blunt rancor in her voice. I could scarcely believe this new tone, and blamed it on the whiskey. Over the roar of the engine and in a bluish haze of hydrocarbons I listened to her in numb discomfort, praying for the purity of the beach.
“Last night,” she said, “last night, Stingo, after I told you about what happened in Connecticut, I realized something for the first time. I realized I was glad that Nathan left me like he done. Really and truly glad, I mean. I was so completely dependent on him, you see, and that was not a healthy thing. I couldn’t move without him. I couldn’t make a simple little décision without thinking of Nathan first. Oh, I know I had this debt to him, he done so much for me—I know that—but it was sick of me to be just this little kitten for him to fondle. To fuck and fondle—”
“But you said he was on drugs,” I interrupted. I felt an odd need to say something in his defense. “I mean, isn’t it true that he was so awful to you only when he was high on these drugs—”
“Drugs!” she said sharply, cutting me off. “Yes, he was on drugs, but does that have to be an excuse, for God’s sake? Always an excuse? I’m so tired of people that always says that we must pity a man, he is under the influence of drugs and so that excuses his behavior. Fuck that noise, Stingo!” she exclaimed in a perfect Nathanism. “He almost killed me. He beat me! He hurt me! Why should I continue to love a man like that? Do you realize that he done something to me that I didn’t tell you about last night? He broke one of my ribs when he kicked me. One of my ribs! He had to take me to a doctor—not Larry, thank God—he had to take me to a doctor and I had x-rays and I had to wear all this tape for six weeks. And we had to invent a story for this doctor—that I slipped up and fell and crack my rib on the pavement. Oh, Stingo, I’m glad I’m rid of such a man! Such a cruel person, so... so malhonnête. I
’m happy to leave him,” she proclaimed, wiping a tiny smear of moisture from her lip, “I’m really ecstatic, if you wish to know the truth. I don’t need Nathan no more. I’m still young. I have a nice job, I’m sexy, I can find another man easy. Ha! Maybe I’ll marry Seymour Katz! Wouldn’t Nathan be surprised if I married this chiropractor he was falsely accusing me of having a relationship? And his friends! Nathan’s friends!”
I turned to look at her. There was a glint of fury in her eyes; her voice rose shrilly and I wanted to hush her up, until I realized that there was no one but myself to listen. “I really couldn’t stand his friends. Oh, I was very fond of his brother. Larry. I will miss Larry and I liked very much Morty Haber. But all these other friends. These Jews with their psychoanalysis, always picking their little sores, worrying about their little brilliant brains and their analysts and everything. You heard them, Stingo. You know what I mean. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous? ‘My analyst this, my analyst that... ’ It is so disgusting, you would think they had suffered something, these comfortable American Jewish people with their Doctor So-and-So they pay many dollars an hour to examine their miserable little Jewish souls! Aaa-h!” A tremor ran through her body and she turned away.
Something about Sophie’s fury and bitterness, combined with her drinking—all of these so new to me—aggravated my jitters until the feeling became almost insupportable. While she babbled on I realized dimly that I had undergone unfortunate bodily changes: I had severe heartburn, I was sweating like a coal stoker, a wayward neurasthenic tumescence had caused my beloved waif of a cock to stiffen bone-rigid against my pants leg. And our conveyance had been rented by the devil. Heaving and rocking its way through the bungalow barrens of Queens and Nassau, clashing gears, exuding fumes, the decrepit bus seemed likely to imprison us forever. As in a trance, I listened to Sophie’s voice soar like an aria over the children’s speechless, antic mummery. And I wish I had been better prepared emotionally to accept the burden of her message. “Jews!” she exclaimed. “It’s really true, in the end they are all exactly alike sous la peau, under the skin, you understand. My father was really right when he said that he had never known a Jew who could give something in a free way, without asking for something in return. A quid pro quo, as he would say. And oh, Nathan—what an example Nathan was of that! Okay, so he helped me a lot, make me well, but so what? Do you think he done that out of love, out of kindness? No, Stingo, he done such a thing only so he could use me, have me, fuck me, beat me, have some object to possess! That’s all, some object. Oh, it was so very Jewish of Nathan to do that—he wasn’t giving me his love, he was buying me with it, like all Jews. No wonder the Jews were so hated in Europe, thinking they could get anything they wished just by paying a little money, a little Geld. Even love they think they can buy!” She clutched me by the sleeve and the odor of rye whiskey reached me through the gasoline fumes. “Jews! God, how I hate them! Oh, the lies I have told you, Stingo. Everything I told you about Cracow was a lie. All my childhood, all my life I really hated Jews. They deserved it, this hate. I hate them, dirty Jewish cochons!”