Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Author:William Styron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780816156504
Publisher: G K Hall & Co
Published: 1992-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

In 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'clock 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 selfgratification 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.

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