What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  So far as I knew, Sophie hadn’t had a drink in years, since taking to marriage and God. But perhaps all that was over, now that she and Tom had separated. As for Max, he always stayed Max—if anything, became more Max-like—so that it was natural that he should depend on everyone to be just as he’d always known them to be.

  Sophie took a long sip from her glass and leaned lightly against him. I noticed then that they were both drunk. I took a cigarette from Max before heading to the kitchen.

  There were four or five people assembled there, none I’d ever seen before, all surrounding a tall, thin guy about my age wearing a bow tie and a tuxedo shirt with plastic studs over an outlandishly tight pair of black jeans. His mustache—“my mustaches,” I could almost hear him calling it—was waxed.

  “So I asked Wes what kind of palette he was thinking of using this time,” he was saying as I entered. “I told him I really dig the palettes that he chooses.”

  I pushed through the crowd to the cabinets and the sink.

  “Dude,” the guy in the tuxedo shirt said to me. “I think we’re supposed to use those.”

  He gestured with a tattooed finger to a sleeve of red plastic cups on the counter.

  “Thanks,” I said, continuing my search in the cabinet for a clean glass. “I live here.”

  I mixed a vodka-soda, more vodka than soda, which I drank while standing over the sink. I was suddenly very tired of these parties that occupied so much of my life. Or else I realized suddenly that I had grown tired of them long ago. I wasn’t sure if I was done with them because Sophie had appeared or if Sophie had appeared because I was done with them and so ready for her to come back.

  In the living room, Max was introducing Sophie to Jeff, a fact-checker at his magazine.

  “So,” Jeff said, “you knew Blakeman before he was famous. What on earth was he like?”

  Everyone called Max “Blakeman.” Sometimes even I did it, though it was my own name.

  “I was always famous,” Max insisted, “even when no one had heard of me.”

  This line had been funny once, before it looked possible that we might truly become famous. It seemed that it was funny again now that this possibility had passed.

  Max’s college roommate Rick Tanner, who now worked in a gallery in Chelsea, lightly set Jeff aside.

  “Sophie Wilder,” he said, and he kissed her on both cheeks. “Fucking hell, it’s been years. I heard you got married.”

  “We split up,” Sophie said.

  “You know who else split up?” Rick asked, speaking no longer to Sophie but to the others collecting around her. “Henry and Klara.”

  “They seemed like a perfect couple,” some dutiful straight man protested.

  “She practically had her head in the oven,” Rick said. “I mean, Henry’s the Ted Hughes of management consultants.”

  Everyone but Sophie laughed at this, and I took the opportunity to approach her.

  “How have you been?”

  “You already asked me that,” she said.

  “And you still haven’t answered.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s table the matter pending further review. How about yourself?”

  I’d been doing well enough, all things considered. But I didn’t tell her that. Instead I said, “I’ve missed you.”

  It was a ridiculous thing to tell her after all these years. But true. And I missed her more now that she was right there in front of me. She raised a hand and placed her palm against my cheek. Then she brought it down and said, “It’s a nice house,” and the spell was broken.

  “Gerhard, the guy who owns it, says Henry James lived here. But there’s no plaque or anything. Probably it’s bullshit.”

  “James hated Washington Square when he came back to the States,” Sophie said. “It made him feel like he’d been amputated.”

  I’d never heard this before, but it was just the kind of thing that Sophie knew. I was preparing my response when the room fell quiet. We both turned to see Eddie Hartley, an old friend Max and I had known since our days at St. Albert’s, now a struggling actor who appeared in commercials and an occasional Law and Order episode, standing on the leather ottoman. He began to read Wallace Stevens from a book he’d taken off one of the shelves:I sang a canto in a canton,

  Cunning-coo, O, cuckoo cock . . .

  The crowd around Eddie urged him on. He finished and bowed facetiously. Then he looked over to me.

  “Your turn, Charlie.”

  These performances—impromptu readings of modern poetry that were at the same time ironic mockeries of the sort of party where such impromptu readings might genuinely occur—were a common feature of our nights. I hadn’t thought much about them before, but I was embarrassed for Sophie to see a joke made of things that had mattered so much to us. Eddie handed me the book. I stood on the ottoman and gave a humorless reading of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” that took the life out of the crowd, much as I had hoped it would. I stepped down with the book still in my hand and headed back to where I had been standing with Sophie. But she had disappeared.

  In the kitchen I found only the same group of strangers, collected in a conspiratorial huddle around the oven. As I entered, a few stepped aside to reveal the one in the bow tie. He held a screwdriver, with which he had removed two knobs from the stove. Now he was working on a third. When he saw me watching he stopped.

  “Sorry, man,” he said. “Just fucking around.”

  “Be my guest,” I told him. “We don’t cook.”

  I poured another vodka.

  Back in the living room, I asked Jeff if he knew where Sophie had gone.

  “I think she left with Max,” he said.

  “You’re up,” I told him, handing him the book of poems.

  Then I took a seat on the couch beside the aquarium to watch Gerhard’s beautiful fish and ask myself, not for the first time or the last, What happened to Sophie Wilder?

  2

  THE PHONE WAS already ringing when she came home from mass that morning, and she let it go a while as she settled in. She crossed through the living room—the “common room,” Tom still sometimes called it, as if he and Sophie lived in a dorm, or as if the entire place weren’t common to them—and arrived at her desk after three or four rings. They had the landline only for the Internet connection, and they never used this phone, which was the cheapest thing they could find, off-white with a cord and a cradle and an oversized touchpad, as if one of them were going blind. In another setting it might have seemed knowing or campy, but here it looked bluntly functional, like most of the apartment; Sophie lacked the domestic instinct, and Tom was too rarely home to bother over such things.

  Nevertheless, the number was listed, and they occasionally got calls, mostly solicitations. The phone sat on her desk, near at hand, and if it rang while she was working she might pick it up and drop it back down without a word. She was often tempted to unplug it, but Tom would complain if he came home and found it that way.

  What if there’s an emergency?

  Who’s going to call? she would ask. No one has the number.

  I do, Tom would say.

  You can call my cell.

  But it’s never on.

  Which was fair enough. She turned off her phone each morning before mass and often forgot about it for the rest of the day. She wrote grant proposals for small charities, and her clients—ostensibly nonprofit directors but mostly just individuals with causes, sometimes nuns or parish priests seeking to serve their congregations in ways the archdiocese hadn’t provided for in the budget—had little need to be in touch while she made their cases to various corporate foundations. There was occasional fieldwork involved, trips to shelters and soup kitchens, once to the home of an old man, a former violent felon, who collected clothes for parolees to wear to job interviews. But mostly she sat at her desk all day as she had before, and she didn’t want to make herself entirely available to the world. A certain kind of disconnection felt necessary, though she couldn’t ex
plain to Tom why this was so.

  She worked in the same marbled notebooks she’d always used, and she opened one now while the phone rang for the tenth or eleventh time. They had no answering machine, so it might continue indefinitely. Perhaps it really was something important. More likely one of those recordings. She wondered if the computer cut off at some point, or if it went on forever.

  Once she’d decided to answer, she moved with slow deliberation, daring the caller to give up on her. She closed the notebook, which she’d bought along with half a dozen others three weeks before, after running through her last batch. She waited for the phone to sound out once more and then picked it up midring.

  “Hello?”

  A pause on the other end, as if for the drawing of breath. Later, when she told the story, trying to make something out of it, she said that she knew in that moment who was there. But who can say what intimations she really felt?

  “Thomas?”

  Her husband’s name came through to her, weak and uncertain. Then she did know, though she’d never heard this voice before. And she knew that she’d been waiting for the call.

  “Tom is at the office,” she said. When no response came, she added, “You can call back later if you’d like. He usually gets in around midnight.”

  This was not an exaggeration, but an outer estimate. Tom hadn’t come home before nine in weeks, and he was often still at the office when Sophie went to sleep.

  “Can you give me his number at work?”

  She didn’t mean to leave the man in suspense, but she took a moment deciding what to do, what Tom would want her to do. He filled the silence apologetically.

  “This is his father.”

  Something about the voice wasn’t right. He’s drunk, she thought. I can’t let him call Tom in this condition. As if in answer to her suspicion, he continued slowly, sounding out his words, letting each stand a moment on its own.

  “It’s an emergency.”

  Sophie gave him the number, but only because Tom would want to handle it himself, would want her to have as little as possible to do with the man, and because this seemed the quickest way to get him off the phone. After he’d hung up, she sat at her desk, receiver in hand, until the phone started to make that obnoxious sound it made when left off the hook, a plea for attention from the world of objects. She had waited years for a chance to speak to him, and now the chance had passed. Tom would do his best to make sure there wasn’t another.

  The notebook sat dead on her desk, and she left it there. She opened the sliding door and stepped out into the sticky heat of their small concrete terrace. From twenty-eight stories up she looked at New York, to which the late-morning humidity seemed applied like a wrapping of gauze. The sky above was cloudless, empty but curiously pale.

  Over the years, she had given many hours of thought to Tom’s father, wondering how it would feel if she still had a parent alive in the world, always present, and she never spoke to him. She and Tom had a long understanding that she would not ask about him, and she’d abided by it. Tom gave no sign that the man’s continued existence interested him at all, but Sophie couldn’t really believe this was true. For her own part, her father-in-law was among the most persistent puzzles in her life. She marveled now at the fact that she’d spoken with him only a moment before, even more at the idea that she had hurried him off the phone when she’d finally had a chance to speak with him. She regretted this rush in the uneasy way that she occasionally regretted doing something that she nonetheless felt had been right. Still, she wasn’t sure what she would have asked him, had she felt free to ask anything.

  Sophie worked a cigarette from the soft pack in her front pocket and lit it with a match. Since she’d started again, she used only matches, because each pack was always her last, a fifty-cent lighter always an unsound investment. A year into this relapse, she could still become light-headed and pleasantly queasy after smoking just one. When she eventually finished it, flicked it over the rail, and leaned to watch it disappear, she felt a gratifying vertigo. The butt twisted elegantly, leaving a light trail of ash in its wake. Then it seemed to catch on a bit of air and slow in its fall, and she imagined herself in its place. She swung her head back, as if to shake off the thought.

  Inside, the phone was ringing again. This time she answered without hesitation, knowing that it would be Tom. Once more the brief pause, the husbanding of strength.

  “Sophie?”

  How strange to hear her name in his voice. Five minutes earlier she couldn’t have said with certainty that he knew she existed.

  “Yes?”

  “This is your father. Your father-in-law. Bill Crane. Tom’s father.”

  The more he spoke, the more convinced she became that something was wrong with him.

  “I know who you are.”

  “We haven’t met,” he said, as though she might doubt it. “I feel bad about that. I’ve wanted to meet you.”

  “Why are you calling?”

  She didn’t like taking this tone but felt bound to it.

  “I’m at Saint Vincent’s, recovering from some surgery. Minor stuff, exploratory. Supposed to let me out two hours ago. But one of the nurses gave me something for pain. Now they say they have to release me into someone’s care.”

  Sophie took a moment with this news.

  “I’m sorry to hear about that,” she eventually said, which was true. “I hope you’re all right.”

  “Sixty-two-year-old man, and they can’t let me go without a chaperone.”

  “Did you try the number I gave you?”

  “Tom wouldn’t—that is, I couldn’t get through to him. I just need someone to come down here and walk me outside, that’s all. Maybe sign some kind of form. Once I’m out on the street I’ll be fine.”

  “If you wait a few hours, I’m sure they’ll let you go.”

  “I can’t wait,” he said. “I can’t stay here.”

  She felt then his desperation’s full force. The sound in his voice wasn’t drink, or even whatever drugs they’d given him, but terror fighting to contain itself.

  “Isn’t there anyone else who can help?”

  If there had been anyone else, he never would have called.

  “Perhaps you should try Tom again later.”

  They both knew he’d already reached Tom, already been refused.

  “I can’t leave on my own until tomorrow, and I can’t spend another night here.”

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to help the man, wasn’t even entirely sure that it was the right thing to do. The voice that urged her on, she recognized with some surprise, was one she hadn’t heard for some time—not the voice of conscience, but the voice of curiosity. The voice that said, It would make a great story.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  In her first years with Tom, Sophie had often thought about meeting his father. She had worried over it, dreamed of it. A great deal of mystery had built up around him, mystery that Tom was not inclined to address, and so it was natural that she should be curious. But her interest went further: if there was a mystery she wished to solve in meeting Tom’s father, it may have been Tom himself.

  She hadn’t thought at first that there was anything mysterious about him. He was just another of those boys who majored in economics and lived on the row, the boys she fell in with during her breaks from Charlie, boys who became temporarily enthralled, finding her unlike the other girls, but proved ready to move along as quickly as she was. It was senior year when he introduced himself, the second day of the fall recess. Though the dining hall was open, it was as empty as the rest of campus when she came in for lunch. She was sitting alone at one of the long rectangular tables, eating a salad in a large plastic bowl, when he set his tray down beside her.

  “You’re in my philosophy class,” he said.

  Indeed, she was. Introduction to Ontology.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she answered.

  “How’s that?”

  “
I mean, we may need to define our predicate more precisely.”

  He looked genially confused as he sat down.

  “I don’t really get it,” he told her. “I’m just fulfilling my Lib Arts requirement.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “Lib Arts. I’d forgotten about that requirement.”

  He didn’t seem to know that she was being rude. He might just have been dumb, but she suspected—and he later admitted—that he’d been waiting some time to talk to her and wouldn’t be put off by her sarcasm.

  “So what are you doing here?” she asked, trying to be friendlier now, though it didn’t come out that way.

  He’d been given an extension on a paper, which he’d finished that morning. He was headed home in a few hours.

  “How about you?”

  After several years of spending breaks in New York with the Blakemans, she was back to having no place to go when campus shut down, since she wasn’t speaking to Charlie. She didn’t say this, of course. She just told him she was hanging around for the week.

  “You could come with me, if you want,” he said. “There’s plenty of room at the family house, and we’re always happy for visitors.”

  He seemed to speak without thinking. She was against character types in theory but found them useful practically, and she told herself that she knew this type. He had taken a chance on a spontaneous invitation that might get him lucky over the break. She preferred believing this to believing that an actual act of kindness was being extended. She didn’t want to admit that right then she so badly needed a place for herself in the world that she would accept such kindness from a near stranger, but she could strike a more balanced deal.

  His name, Tom O’Brien, was nearly all she knew of him, so she pictured a large Irish brood: garrulous raconteur father and smiling mother who played at being put upon though everyone understood she was really in charge, endless brothers and sisters and indistinguishable cousins, perhaps a set of twins somewhere among them, amid all of which the odd friend from school might easily be lost. On the drive down—home, it happened, was in southern Jersey, just a few hours from New Hampton—she asked about his family.