“You answered.”
How happy she was to hear her husband’s voice, to find it unchanged by what she’d done.
“Are you coming home soon?”
“I wish you would have picked up earlier. I’ve been calling for hours.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was out. You should have called my cell.”
“It’s been turned off all day.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“What have you been up to?” She sensed him trying to calm himself, waiting for her to confirm his fears.
“I went to get your father from the hospital.”
As she said this, it might have been just another chore that they’d both known she had to fulfill, as it would in another family.
“Soph.”
“I had no choice, Tom. The man is old and very sick and alone.”
“It’s his own fault he’s alone.”
She wanted to tell him how it felt in Crane’s apartment, wanted to say that she saw there all the things that he had saved her from. More than that, she wanted him to want to hear about his father.
“Maybe so,” she finally said.
“And if he didn’t need something from us, he never would have called.”
“That’s probably true.”
In the quiet that followed, certain ideas burst forth that she guarded carefully. He had a parent, as she did not, and it was inhuman of him to forsake this legacy, no matter what the man had done.
“Let’s not do this now,” she said. “We can talk when you get home.”
“I’m going to be held up here for a while.”
“Okay. I’ll try to wait up. If I can’t, I’ll make us a big breakfast and we’ll talk in the morning.”
“All right.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’ll get over it,” he said.
“I love you,” she told him.
“You too, kid.”
A moment before she would have liked to talk with him forever. Now she hung up the phone in relief.
3
LONG AFTER WANDERING upstairs that night, I heard the laughter and talk on the floor below. We’d always let those parties run their natural course, and I had learned to sleep amid that murmur, like one who lives near the sea. But on that night I stayed up, listening to the noise downstairs, trying to make out Sophie’s voice. I had waited about an hour downstairs before giving up on her return, and I still couldn’t sleep without knowing if she’d come back. By my best estimate, it had been a year since I’d seen Sophie, at the wedding of a New Hampton friend. Now that we had been returned to each other, I didn’t want her to disappear again. She came in finally to say good night, stepping through a sheet of dusty light in the doorway, as though she knew I’d been waiting for her.
“Sleep,” she said, when I sat up to reach for her. “In the morning, we can talk.”
But the uneasiness didn’t pass once she was gone. I realized that I had known all along that she would find a couch or one of the spare beds when the party wound down, that I would see her in the morning. I had been listening for her not because I doubted her return, but because I wanted to know she wasn’t with Max.
Max was a sophomore at Yale the year Sophie and I started college. Early in December, he took the train down to visit me. Two of his high school friends went to New Hampton, and the three of them took me out that weekend. It was typical that Max should show me around my own campus. Though he was only a year older, I had always followed his lead.
I hadn’t socialized much in the first two months of the semester. Each Friday afternoon I’d ridden New Jersey Transit into Penn Station to spend the weekend with my mother. She insisted it wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t feel right going out with friends while she stayed at home so soon after my father’s death. His illness had been a slow process of subtraction—his hair was taken, his strength, his teeth, his mind—so that it was hard to say exactly what was lost on that day a few weeks before my graduation from St. Albert’s when the last of him went. Yet nothing that came before had prepared us for it. It may be that whatever remained of his consciousness was relieved to have it end, but I wanted only for him to still be there, even in all his suffering.
When my father was alive, we’d eaten at the table in the dining room, but now it seemed too big for us. My mother would make dinner on Friday night, and we would sit on stools at the kitchen counter while we ate. Each weekend I arrived with the hope of being a comfort, but once I was with her I found it impossible. I suppose I wanted her to comfort me, though I knew that this too was impossible. She asked about my classes, but there wasn’t much to say, since I wasn’t going to most of them, having discovered that I could get away with doing almost no work at New Hampton. I had already decided never to submit to the rituals of job interviews and grad school applications, so grades meant little to me. I only needed to pass so I could take my fiction workshop. I stayed in my room, writing stories or reading the books that Sophie mentioned on our walks back from class, while my textbooks sat untouched.
After we’d exhausted my academic life as a topic of discussion, my mother would ask about my classmates and my social life. It was Friday night and I was eating dinner with my mother an hour away from campus—that was my social life. Sophie was the only person I’d met who mattered to me, and I was somehow unable even to mention her name.
My mother was still working, ostensibly at least, as a real estate agent, but she had stopped picking up listings while taking care of my father, and she was struggling to get back to it. I wanted to learn how she was doing, but I didn’t know where to begin such a conversation. “What fills your days?” I might have asked, but who asks such a thing? What answer could she have given that I was prepared to hear? My presence did nothing for her suffering except embarrass it with an audience.
An open bottle of wine sat on the counter between us each night. I generally drank a glass or two while my mother drank the rest. Sometimes I drank more, so that there would be less left for her, but this approach had its own risks. If I took too much from the bottle, she would open another. After dinner, we went to her room, where we climbed into bed together and watched reruns until she fell asleep. She woke when I turned off the TV, so I learned to leave it on, lowering the volume a bit before creeping to the door and dimming the lights. Then I headed down the hall with a sour taste in my mouth to spend the rest of the weekend as I would have had I been at school—alone in my room. By the time I left, we both felt a bit worse than we had upon my arrival, and I told myself that I would stay on campus from then on. But when Friday came around again, I went back to New York.
This continued until Thanksgiving, which we spent with Max and his parents at their apartment. After that, I stayed three days in my room, working on a short story whose details I have since entirely forgotten.
“You need to have a normal life at school,” my mother said that Sunday before sending me off for my train. “Why don’t you stay down there next weekend?”
“I don’t mind,” I told her. “I can come back up.”
“Charlie,” she said, her tone soft but insistent. “I don’t want you to come back up.”
On campus I discovered that my classmates had been working tirelessly. Unlike course work, constructing a social life required sustained attention. You couldn’t hang around one Saturday out of three or four and expect to follow along with others who had been doing all the reading and taking all the notes. My roommate, Dean, a friendly but somewhat awkward kid from Cleveland who had not struck me as a social adept, invited me to a party in another freshman’s room. When it finished, I followed him to the fraternity houses.
“Do you have any blues?” he asked as we stood in a line outside a Tudor-style mansion filled with drunk kids.
“What’s that?”
“Jesus, man,” Dean said. “You can’t get in the door without a pass. They rotate the colors. Tonight it’s blue.”
“No, I don’t have any blues.”
<
br /> “I’d like to help you out,” he said. “But I’ve been hustling all week to get three passes, and I told this cute girl from Orgo that I’d get her and her roommate in.”
Dean looked at me as though I had presented him with a serious ethical dilemma.
“No big deal,” I said. “It’s just a party.”
So I passed the balance of another night reading alone in my room.
This all changed when Max arrived the next weekend. Like Dean, he took me to a room party, but this one was in an upper-class dorm, where we drank beer from a half keg lodged behind two couches in case of an inspection by the campus police. Max reintroduced me to his old friends, two guys I’d known vaguely at St. Albert’s. When the crowd started to thin, we sat in a circle getting stoned from a six-inch plastic water pipe.
“Charlie, man,” one of Max’s friends said. “I knew you were here, but I never see you. We need to hang out.”
“I’ve been working a lot lately,” I said. “But I’m starting to go out more. I mean, yeah, we should do something.”
As we walked out to the fraternity houses, I realized that I didn’t have any passes, didn’t even know what colors would be accepted. But the issue never came up. We walked to the front of a line stretching off the porch onto the manicured lawn and were ushered inside. I had found my way into a few of the houses by then, but none of the more popular ones, which seemed to serve some related but separate population.
We were in the basement, standing near a Ping-Pong table, when I felt the tap on my shoulder. Before I could turn around, Sophie had wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re here!” she said, as if it were a great shock that I should be out with everyone else. Which to me it was, though I wouldn’t have expected her to notice it. We’d walked back from class each week for a month, but otherwise we hadn’t spoken much. Now I was stoned and she was drunk, and for a moment we stood stupidly regarding each other. I tried not to be disappointed at how well she fit in with the others, how wholly comfortable she looked among them. She seemed to be thinking the same about me. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t so. Max introduced himself and his friends, and Sophie introduced the girls who stood beside her. A few minutes of conversation passed, the kind of empty talk such situations demand, at which Max has always excelled. All the while Sophie and I looked at each other as if to say, We aren’t really like this, are we?
“What’s her story?” Max asked, when we were alone again.
“Just a girl from my writing class.”
When I woke the next morning, I didn’t remember much of the night, but I knew that I’d wandered back to my room alone. I was surprised to find Max asleep on the couch.
“How was the rest of your evening?” I asked when he rose to find me reading and smoking out the window.
“We did important work,” he said. “It might have come too late for our own benefit, but future generations will thank us.” He picked a crumb of dry drool from his stubbled cheek and regarded it scientifically. “The most important part is no one got hurt.”
I laughed grimly. “You make any new friends?”
“You may have to be more specific,” he said. “They’re all friends, really. I am for those who believe in loose delights. I dance with the drinkers and drink with the dancers. Or something like that.”
“You seemed to be after one delight, in particular.”
Now he laughed. “The confusions of young Charlie.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He threw off his blanket and got up from the couch, wearing only his boxer shorts. He looked around the room for his jeans, which he pulled on before taking a cigarette from their back pocket.
“How well do you know that girl Sophie?”
“Like I said last night, she’s in my writing class. Why?”
“Well, good luck and all. As far as I can tell, she’s a dyke.”
He sat back down on the couch and recounted the rest of his night to me. I’d left the basement angrily and without explanation—once he said it, this sounded plausible enough—and he and his friends had stayed out. They’d resumed talking to Sophie and the other girls, and when the house went off tap, they’d all gone back to campus to smoke pot and listen to music.
“Not sure whose room it was,” Max said.
He’d hoped to hook up with Sophie, he admitted, but he wasn’t sure how to play things without a place to take her.
“So at some point, I sort of lost my shit for a second. Seemed like a second to me, but I guess it was longer, because I come to, and the music is still playing, but I’m the only one in the room, and I’m very stoned. I figure I should head back here, but I thought I’d look around a little first. Do not go gently, and all. So I give a knock on one of the bedroom doors, and I hear some rustling inside. I go ahead in, and your friend and one of the other girls are there in bed together.”
“So they went to sleep in the same bed. Girls do that.”
“So they do. And in support of your theory, the other girl was still wearing all her clothes. But Sophie was most of the way toward bare. I wouldn’t quite say they were in flagrante, but they weren’t exactly ex flagrante, either. At any rate, it’s a good thing we didn’t come to blows over her last night, which is where you looked to be headed, because the winner would have had a catfight on his hands.”
“I think you might be experiencing a bit of psychic leakage,” I told him. “Or maybe just wish fulfillment.”
“The boy is incredulous. I guess they don’t teach Plato at this school. The sexes are three, because the sun, moon, and earth are three.” He dropped his cigarette into an empty beer can at his feet and went in search of a T-shirt. “Come on,” he said. “Buy me some brunch and I’ll tell you all about the birds and the bees.”
I hadn’t realized before Max’s visit how much this girl, about whom I really knew nothing, had taken over my thoughts. But the realization came just as the hope of acting on it was closed off. I was angry without knowing why, my anger both unjustifiable and out of my control, and so I kept to myself for several days. I didn’t go to workshop that week. Only when the afternoon arrived at the point when we might have been walking back to campus together did I regret the decision. I couldn’t wait another week to talk to her.
When I heard the knock half an hour after the end of class, I opened the door with a mixture of panic and relief. She presented herself to me as if I’d been expecting her. Which, I suddenly felt, I had. She walked past me into the room, heading right for a poster on my wall of a model in a bikini, drinking a bottle of beer.
“I like it,” she said after a moment of consideration. “It adds a quiet dignity.”
“My roommate put it up. She belongs to him.”
“Too bad.” She leaned over and picked up the book I’d set on the floor when she knocked. “Perhaps you can work out a swap, one half-read copy of Within a Budding Grove for one young girl in flower.”
“Seems like a fair trade.”
She sat down on the windowsill where I’d been perched reading before her arrival, and I took a place on the couch.
“We missed you in class,” she said, still holding my book. “It’s dreadful being literary without someone there to appreciate it.”
“I was falling behind on my education.”
“You should have started with Nabokov. He’s a bit more concise.”
“I did.”
“Really, which one?”
“Pale Fire. Ada. A few of the early Russian novels.”
She seemed pleased but embarrassed to learn I’d been following her reading course, and she turned away to set down the volume of Proust.
“Have you gotten far enough to know the truth about Albertine?”
“There have been hints,” I said. “But the narrator seems a bit obtuse.”
“Maybe I can offer some insight, then.”
Of insight, Sophie had plenty. She had been a senior in high school when her parents were k
illed in a car crash while driving home from a party just a few miles from their house. She told me this as if describing the plot of an unconvincing book she’d been forced to read for class. She’d already been accepted by New Hampton at the time, but both the admissions office there and her high school counselor urged her to defer for a year. They must have assumed that she would spend that time with family, but she had no family to speak of. Since she was already eighteen— “I’d reached my majority,” she told me, in a faux-clinical voice—she was free to live by herself in her parents’ house. She wrote for days on end. When she wasn’t writing, she haunted the local bookstore, run by a woman in her thirties who’d dropped out of grad school to take over the store when her parents, the owners, retired. The woman’s name was Lila. She gave Sophie a reading list, and they conducted a kind of seminar together.
“Now here’s the sordid, predictable part,” Sophie told me. “It wasn’t just a literary education I received. If a certain kind of author were telling the story, we would turn the sign on the door from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ and fall into passion right there at the foot of the shelves. It wasn’t quite like that. But close enough.”
By the time the next fall came around, Sophie was ready to give up on college entirely. But a few weeks into the semester, Lila decided she didn’t want Sophie’s future on her conscience.
“I was completely in love with her. She told me I could stay at home or come here, whichever was right for me, but either way things were through between us. I’ve called her a few times since I got here. She chats politely, but she doesn’t want to give me ideas. To be honest, I’m not really sure that I like girls. I know that I like her, but she won’t have me.”
What little I already knew about Sophie—that she wrote better than the rest of us, that she had read more and better books, that she was somehow not of this place—now made sense. I pictured her alone in her parents’ empty house, writing that long story I’d read a few weeks before. It didn’t diminish what she’d done, but it made it fathomable.
What Happened to Sophie Wilder Page 4