What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - The Stars Above

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO - The Law Within

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  To my parents

  “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

  —ELIZABETH BISHOP, in a letter to Robert Lowell

  “If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?”

  —ROBERTO BOLAÑO , 2666

  PART ONE

  The Stars Above

  1

  BEFORE I CAME to stay at the Manse I lived in an old townhouse on the north side of Washington Square, where my cousin Max and I rented rooms from a middle-aged German man named Gerhard Gottlieb, the uncle of one of Max’s old flames. I was never entirely sure what business Gerhard was in, but he was usually out of the country, and he gave us the run of the place in his absence, provided we walked his dog, a purebred boxer named Ginger, and fed the tropical fish in his enormous Victorian aquarium. Max and I were the only ones paying rent, but there were often two or three others staying on the vacant floor above us. We were all “in the arts,” as we liked to say with intense but undirected irony, which is what left us free to take Ginger out during the day and to spend our nights entertaining ourselves in that old house, drinking bourbon and smoking those thin, elegant joints that we all rolled so easily.

  Max was the film critic for a local weekly. He didn’t like movies much, at least not the ones he was called upon to review, but he felt strongly that a critic who wasn’t part of the conversation—at a certain point in the night we could use such terms in earnest—was no critic at all. The artist was free to work in isolation, even to cultivate it. But the critic was an explainer. His job depended on an audience, and the audience went to the movies. So Max said on those evenings when an unseen judge called us to defend the manner in which we spent our days.

  The part about cultivating isolation he aimed at me. And it was true that no one had read my novel when it came out a few months before. But this wasn’t by virtue of any aesthetic stratagem. I would have been more than happy with an audience. My publisher had paid me well and put its energy, as they call it, behind the book. I’d been reviewed where one hopes to be reviewed; some of the notices had even been good. Max and I share the same last name—our fathers are brothers, or were while mine was still alive—and there had been brief talk, much of it generated by Max himself, about the Blakemans representing some new cultural moment. That had all passed after my book sank quietly from view. Outside the world of meanspirited media blogs no one had any idea who we were. Max secretly faulted me for this, though in truth people were simply tired of comfortable young white guys from New York. I couldn’t blame them; I was tired of us, too.

  For all that disappointment, the money had been real, and Gerhard barely charged rent, so I didn’t need much to get by. I could live on my advance while I figured out what came next. I understood that I shouldn’t expect too much from whatever that turned out to be. I’d been given my big chance—more than most get—and now I was on my own.

  In the meantime, we spent long hours in that house, talking about the Grand Gesture, whether it nowadays existed, of what it might consist if it did. We wanted badly to believe it was still possible to live off ideas, except when we wanted badly to believe that it was no longer possible, since then the failure to do so was not our own, not caused by a lack of discipline or talent or by the fact that we didn’t finally want the things we wanted as much as we thought we wanted them.

  In truth we were quickly reaching—had likely enough already reached—the age where it no longer made sense to talk about “promise.” It was around this time that I remarked to Max that no matter what we now achieved no one would say, “He’s so young.” Precocity had passed us by.

  “After twenty-eight,” I said sadly, “you’re judged on your merits.”

  “Unless one of us dies,” Max corrected me. “Then they’ll all say, ‘He was so young.’”

  All of this is by way of an honest accounting of where things stood for me on the early autumn evening when I came home from dinner to a crowded party and found Sophie Wilder sitting on the half-collapsed leather couch near that antique aquarium in the far corner of Gerhard’s living room.

  I had been thinking a lot about Sophie—she’s long been someone I think about—so I had an immediate sense, one I never entirely shook throughout all that followed, that I had summoned her to me. So far as I knew, she’d been gone from New York since her split with Tom, and now she was here. When I’d heard that her marriage was over, I wanted to reach out, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then I’d learned that she’d left town. There had been some speculation over her whereabouts. She was at a writers’ colony—not Yaddo or MacDowell, but one of those obscure ones out West. She had gone to work for an NGO in Africa. She was living in a convent near her childhood home in Connecticut.

  For all that, it made sense to me that she should appear now on Gerhard’s couch. I felt no surprise as I crossed the open space that occupied most of the house’s first floor, only a shiver of delight and an appreciation for the narrative shapeliness of it. That which was supposed to happen had happened.

  “Charlie,” she called, and she floated up to meet me. She had grown her black hair out long, and it softened a bit the usually sharp lines of her pale face. Otherwise she seemed unchanged from the girl I’d known. She leaned in to kiss me on the cheek.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  She took a step back, leaving her left hand to rest carelessly against my collarbone as if she’d forgotten it there, and she considered the question. This was something I only then remembered about her—the habit she had of taking everything I said seriously, even small talk, so that I wanted always to be my best self around her. I remembered too how this habit occasionally became suffocating, as the constant demand to be your best self naturally does.

  “Isn’t it a funny thing?” she said, as if she’d been caught out at something. “I came into the city for the day, just to go to some galleries, and I ran into your cousin on the street.”

  Max came in from the kitchen then, carrying two drinks, an unlit cigarette in the crook of his lower lip. Sophie withdrew her hand from my shoulder, bringing it to her face almost protectively, and I thought: Yes, Max. Another thing about her that I’d almost forgotten.

  In the beginning, there was only the name. Ten of us had been admitted to the Introduction to Fiction workshop my freshman fall at New Hampton, a small liberal arts college in central New Jersey, but only nine arrived for the first class. Our professor, a near-famous novelist, called our names alphabetically, finishing with Sophie Wilder. No one answered. The following week she was still not there, and we started to wonder.

  An otherwise undistinguished school, New Hampton was known for the novelists and poets it had gathered to teach its undergraduates, and many aspirants turned down more prestigious colleges to study with them. After enrolling, you had to submit a second application for the writing program, so that a student who had come to New Hampton solely for these workshops could still be shut out of them. To those of us who’d made the cut, it was hard to imagine someone had been accepted and not shown up.

  The
third week, she appeared.

  Even if she hadn’t missed our first two classes, she would have stood out to me. I want to say that she looked more adult than the rest of us, more experienced, but this isn’t quite so. In fact, she seemed terribly uncomfortable, as though there against her will. One might have expected such a person to be shy or unprepared, but when our professor asked her a question she answered with articulate care. She had considered opinions about all the work we discussed that week, but she would have let those opinions go unspoken had she not been forced to participate. She became more comfortable as the semester passed, but this pattern continued unchanged: she never commented voluntarily, but she always had something to say.

  The rest of us spoke as much as we could, mostly to impress our professor, which turned out to be little use. Sophie was the only one he took seriously. Whatever the cause of her early absences, he didn’t hold them against her. As the weeks passed, he pushed more and more frequently for her thoughts, often giving her the last word on our work. It was difficult not to resent her for this, though she did nothing to ask for this treatment and took no apparent pleasure in it.

  In the second month of the semester, Sophie’s turn to submit work came, and she distributed a seventy-five-page story to the class. Here was another thing to resent. Not that she was capable of writing at such length—though there was that; few of us could sustain a narrative much longer than ten pages—but that she would impose such writing on us. Her thoughtful responses throughout the semester now seemed designed to justify this imposition. And justify they did: after all her attention, it would have been shameful to show up to class without a proper reaction to this stack of paper, a novella really, too thick for a staple or a standard paper clip.

  I sat out in the courtyard near my dorm the day before that week’s workshop, smoking Parliaments and reading those pages. It was a kind of gothic tale about a young boy and girl—brother and sister, though this was never said outright—living by their wits in a large, empty mansion in the woods. Their parents were never mentioned, their absence never explained. In the middle of the story, a pack of wild animals surrounds the house, keeping the children from foraging for food in the woods. The animals howl through the night, so that the girl and boy can’t sleep. Days pass, the cupboards empty, and the two children sag with exhaustion. Finally, the boy descends without explanation to the cellar, where a shotgun with ammunition is waiting for him. This gun, the story suggests, is some kind of legacy the boy has avoided taking up before then. But now he has no choice. The boy brings the gun outside and, over the course of ten pages, he shoots and kills all the animals. Then he goes upstairs to his bed. While he sleeps, the girl digs a pit in which she buries the dead. When she has finished, she washes herself deliberately, with an air of ceremony, before heading to the bedroom she shares with the boy. She stands over him, watching him sleep. He has left the shotgun—his shotgun, now—leaning against the door frame. She takes it up and shoots the boy. Then she curls up beside him and closes her eyes.

  In class the next day I looked at the author of this strange tale and discovered that she was beautiful. This fact had been slow to reveal itself because, for all her beauty, Sophie wasn’t quite pretty. To find her so attractive suggested a kind of refinement on my part, I thought, like appreciating some quietly elegant story that bored the rest of the class. No one could possibly have called her “cute,” which was how desirable girls were universally described on campus. But she made the cute girls seem meretricious in their cuteness, with her boyishly short dark hair, her skin pale except where it was lightly freckled, on those high cheeks that despite their fullness seemed to struggle under the weight of her eyes. Her nose was long and sharp, and I suspect that this feature concealed her beauty from me at first, though it was a key to its richness once discovered. The light in the October air was still summer-sharp but turning somber, and she wore a thick, blue cable-knit sweater, out of style and overlarge, something a father throws over a little girl when they’ve both been surprised by the cold. The sleeves were pushed up above her elbows and both forearms were lined with wide wooden bracelets of every shade of green and gray.

  Throughout the half hour we spent on her work she kept her eyes on the table in front of her. It was almost immediately clear that we were all impressed, but she seemed desperate for the discussion to be over. I tried to respond as she would have, with carefully considered remarks, but I lost the thread of my thoughts while watching her squirm on the other side of the room. When I came to myself I found that I had been babbling on, and the rest of the class looked nearly as embarrassed as she did. I trailed off then, and our professor said a few closing words before letting us go.

  She caught up to me as I crossed the few blocks that separated the Fine Arts Center from the rest of campus, and she shadowed me silently as my shame deepened. She no longer seemed nervous or uncomfortable, only a little annoyed, though she was the one intruding on me.

  “I’m Sophie,” she said eventually, without prompting, as if it had just then occurred to her that we might talk while we walked.

  “Charlie,” I answered.

  “You’re from the city.”

  This was not a question but a statement, one not entirely directed at me, as though she were filling in my backstory while I listened. We had given our hometowns when introducing ourselves on the first day of class, but she hadn’t been there, so I didn’t know when she’d learned this about me.

  “Did you like growing up in New York?”

  “I’m glad I’m here now,” I said.

  My father had been sick throughout my high school years, and he’d died only a few months before I headed off to college. I felt guilty about leaving my mother alone, though I couldn’t imagine staying with her. She’d been unhappy long before she’d had any reason for it that I could understand, and after my father’s death her mute suffering filled the atmosphere of that apartment, of her life.

  “You like the Beats?”

  This too had come from class, when we had been asked to name our “influences.” Max had given me his copy of Dharma Bums a few years earlier, around the time that my father got sick, and I had thrown myself into Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and even Gary Snyder and Lucien Carr and Gregory Corso; they had been a great solace, for they suggested the life I might have some day, when being orphaned would be a kind of existential condition from which to make great work, rather than just another species of loss.

  “Burroughs is pretty good,” she went on, making a concession I hadn’t demanded. “Most of the rest is shit.”

  She expected a response, but I had none, so she continued.

  “There’s no control, no sense of form. They romanticize their methods, as if we should read how they wrote instead of what they wrote. Eventually it all turns sentimental, like a conversation with a sloppy drunk.”

  No one I knew—certainly no one our age—spoke this way about books. She made this kind of talk seem like one of the great excitements of our new near-adulthood lives, like being able to spend our days and nights as we wished.

  She smiled, waiting for me to fight back on behalf of these writers I was supposed to admire. But the authority of her tone overwhelmed me. To be honest, I didn’t read all that much then, although books had been prized in my home and I’d said from a young age that I wanted to write. Mostly I read what Max told me to read, since he was a year older and his tastes were beyond reproach.

  “I see what you mean,” I said, which was a weak start but true. As soon as she’d pronounced her verdict on the books I’d lived with for the past three or four years I understood it to be just. But my concession disappointed her. She expected a defense. It took a long time to understand this about Sophie: she never wanted submission; she wanted an evenhanded fight. It didn’t much matter to her whether she won or lost.

  “Who do you like?” I asked.

  “Nabokov.”

  “Lolita?”

  I had started the book a
year earlier, again on Max’s recommendation, and I had expected something in line with the other novels he’d been giving me. I had set it down when its elegance failed to turn lurid, and I hadn’t yet picked it back up.

  “Sure,” she said. “But I like Pale Fire better. And Ada. Some of the early Russian ones, too, like The Defense. I spent most of last year reading Proust, who put just as much of his life in his books as Kerouac did. But he believed in craft.”

  This would have been difficult to take from someone else, but it was somehow clear that she wasn’t showing off.

  “Sounds like you prefer the legend of the cork-lined room to the legend of the typewriter roll and the Benzedrine.”

  She laughed only briefly, but it was an honest laugh.

  We didn’t say all that much for the rest of our walk. I asked where she was heading, and I discovered that we lived in the same building, though I hadn’t seen her there before. I felt then for the first time that unsurprised feeling that returned when I found her on Gerhard’s couch, as if from then on whoever was writing us down would take care to keep us near each other, to return us to each other’s stories, even when all the forces of convention and plausibility spoke against it. She took a pack of cigarettes from her bag and offered me one. While we smoked and walked, we occasionally passed people we knew. One of us would stop to talk and the other would wait, and in this way we went from being two people who had happened to leave class at the same time to two people going somewhere together. If I could be just one thing now, that would be it: someone going somewhere with Sophie Wilder.

  There wasn’t a particular occasion for the party at Gerhard’s that night—we were often celebrating in those days, and there was rarely an occasion—but a pretty good crowd had assembled. Sophie and Max and I stood for a moment within it, facing one other beside Gerhard’s aquarium. Max gave Sophie the drinks, freeing his hands to light his cigarette. Then he took one back and touched his glass to hers.