I did not know where Nathan had spent the several days and nights since that awful performance he had put on at the Maple Court, although something Sophie said in an offhand way made me think that he had sought refuge with his brother in Forest Hills. But his absence and his whereabouts did not seem to matter; in the same way, his devastating attractiveness made it seem of small importance that he had recently reviled Sophie and me in such an outpouring of animosity and spite that it made us both physically ill. In a sense, the in-and-out addiction which Sophie had so vividly and scarily described to me had the effect of drawing me closer to Nathan, now that he was back; romantic as my reaction doubtless was, his demonic side—that Mr. Hyde persona who possessed him and devoured his entrails from time to time—seemed now an integral and compelling part of his strange genius, and I accepted it with only the vaguest misgivings about some frenzied recurrence in the future. Sophie and I were—to put it obviously—pushovers. It was enough that he had reentered our lives, bringing to us the same high spirits, generosity, energy, fun, magic and love we had thought were gone for good. As a matter of fact, his return to the Pink Palace and his establishment once again of the cozy love nest upstairs seemed so natural that to this day I cannot remember when or how he transported back all the furniture and clothing and paraphernalia he had decamped with that night, replacing them so that it appeared that he had never stormed off with them at all.
It was like old times again. The daily routine began anew as if nothing had ever happened—as if Nathan’s violent furor had not come close to wrecking once and for all our tripartite camaraderie and happiness. It was September now, with the heat of summer still hovering over the sizzling streets of the borough in a fine, lambent haze. Each morning Nathan and Sophie took their separate subway trains at the BMT station on Church Avenue—he to go to his laboratory at Pfizer, she to Dr. Blackstock’s office in downtown Brooklyn. And I returned happily to my homely little oaken writing desk. I refused to let Sophie obsess me as a love object, yielding her up willingly again to the older man to whom she so naturally and rightfully belonged, and acquiescing once more in the realization that my claims to her heart had all along been modest and amateurish at best. Thus, with no Sophie to cause me futile woolgathering, I got back to my interrupted novel with brisk eagerness and a lively sense of purpose. Naturally, it was impossible not to remain haunted and, to some extent, intermittently depressed over what Sophie had told me about her past. But generally speaking, I was able to put her story out of my mind. Life does indeed go on. Also, I was caught up in an exhilaratingly creative floodtide and was intensely aware that I had my own tragic chronicle to tell and to occupy my working hours. Possibly inspired by Nathan’s financial donation—always the most bracing form of encouragement a creative artist can receive—I began to work at what for me has to be described as runaway speed, correcting and polishing as I went, dulling one after another of my Venus Velvet pencils as five, six, seven, even eight or nine yellow sheets became piled on my desk after a long morning’s work.
And (totally aside from the money) Nathan returned once more to that role of supportive brother-figure, mentor, constructive critic and all-purpose cherished older friend whom I had so looked up to from the very beginning. Again he began to absorb my exhaustively worked-over prose, taking the manuscript upstairs with him to read after several days’ work, when I had acquired twenty-five or thirty pages, and returning a few hours later, usually smiling, almost always ready to bestow upon me the single thing I needed most—praise—though hardly ever praise that was not modified or honestly spiced by a dollop of tough criticism; his eye for the sentence hobbled by an awkward rhythm, for the attitudinized reflection, the onanistic dalliance, the less than felicitous metaphor, was unsparingly sharp. But for the most part I could tell that he was in a straightforward way captivated by my dark Tidewater fable, by the landscape and the weather which I had tried to render with all the passion, precision and affection that it was within my young unfolding talent to command, by the distraught little group of characters taking flesh on the page as I led them on their anxiety-sick, funereal journey across the Virginia lowlands, and, I think, finally and most genuinely by some fresh vision of the South that (despite the influence of Faulkner which he detected and to which I readily admitted) was uniquely and, as he said, “electrifyingly” my own. And I was secretly delighted by the knowledge that subtly, through the alchemy of my art, I seemed gradually to be converting Nathan’s prejudice against the South into something resembling acceptance or understanding. I found that he no longer directed at me his j