Read Online Sophie's Choice by William Styron - Free Book Online Page A

terrifying--no mere copulatory rite but a tournament, a rumpus, a free-for-all, a Rose Bowl, a jamboree. The diction was in some form of English, garbled and exotically accented, but I had no need to know the words. What resulted was impressionistic. Male and female, the two voices comprised a cheering section, calling out such exhortations as I had never heard. Nor had I ever listened to such goads to better effort--to slacken off, to push on, to go harder, faster, deeper--nor such huzzahs over gained first downs, such groans ofdespair over lost yardage, such shrill advice as to where to put the ball. And I could not have heard it more clearly had I been wearing special earphones. Clear it was, and of heroic length. Unending minutes the struggle seemed to last, and I sat there sighing to myself until it was suddenly over and the participants had gone, literally, to the showers. The noise of splashing water and giggles drifted down through the flimsy ceiling, then there were padding footsteps, more giggles, the sharp smack of what sounded like a playful paw upon a bare bottom and finally, incongruously, the ravishing sweet heartbeat of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony from a phonograph. Distraught, I went to the medicine chest and took an Alka-Seltzer. Shortly after I returned to my table I realized that now in the same room above a spirited argument was in progress. It had come with phenomenal speed, this dark and stormy mood. I couldn't hear the words, due to some acoustical quirk. As with the marathon venery just completed, I could hear the action in almost baroque detail but the speech stayed muffled and indistinct, so I got the impression of shuffling angry feet, chairs wrenched around impatiently, banged doors, and voices rising in rage uttering words I was only partly able to comprehend. The male's voice was dominant--a husky and furious baritone that all but drowned out the limpid Beethoven. By contrast the voice of the female seemed plaintive, defensive, growing shrill at moments as if in fright but generally submissive with an undertone of pleading. Suddenly a glass or china object--an ashtray, a tumbler, I knew not what--crashed and shattered against a wall, and I could hear the heavy male feet stamping toward the door, which flew open in the upstairs hallway. Then the door went shut with a tremendous clatter, and I heard the man's footsteps tramping off into one of the other second-floor rooms. Finally the room was left--after these last twenty minutes of delirious activity--in what might be termed provisional silence, amid the depths of which I could hear only the soft heartsick adagio scratching on the phonograph, and the woman's broken sobs on the bed above me. I have always been a discriminating but light eater, and never sit down to breakfast. Being also by habit a late riser, I await the joys of "brunch." After the noise subsided above, I saw that it was past noon and at the same time realized that both the fornication and the fracashad in some urgent, vicarious way made me incredibly hungry, as if I had actually partaken in whatever had taken place up there. I was so hungry that I had begun to salivate, and felt a touch of vertigo. Except for Nescafé and beer, I had not yet stocked either my cupboard or my minuscule refrigerator, so I decided to go out to lunch. During an earlier stroll through the neighborhood there had been a kosher restaurant, Herzl's, on Church Avenue which had caught my eye. I wanted to go there because I had never before tried authentic, that is to say echt, Jewish cuisine and also because--well, When in Flatbush... I said to myself. I shouldn't have bothered, for of course, this being the Sabbath, the place was closed, and I settled on another, presumably non-Orthodox restaurant further down the avenue named Sammy's, where I ordered chicken soup with matzoh balls, gefilte fish and chopped liver--these familiar to me as an offshoot of wide reading in Jewish lore--from