What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  There wasn’t anything I could say in response, so I told her the first thing that came to mind.

  “My father died six months ago.”

  I’d been hesitant before then to speak to people at school about his death. I didn’t know what others would make of it. In truth, I didn’t yet know what to make of it myself. I wasn’t quite a child then, and so not quite a tragic case, but my loss was still an occasion for pity, which may have been what kept me from discussing it. I also had a vague sense that something of such importance would be cheapened by casual talk, becoming the thing that defined me in the superficial way that others were defined by the sport they played or the music they liked. But now that I had the chance to make myself known to Sophie, this was the first thing I mentioned.

  She only nodded in response, as if to say: I know he did; that’s why I found you.

  And perhaps she did know. It was a small campus, where word spread around. At the very least, Max’s friends would have already known. Or she might have heard something from Max himself. It was just the kind of thing one brought up, stoned and sentimental, at the end of such a night. I never asked her what she already knew about me when she came to my room that day. But before then we hadn’t spoken at length about anything other than books, and now we each seemed desperate to be understood by the other.

  The next week, I invited her to come to New York over winter break. My mother and I were both relieved to have someone else in the house, and Sophie seemed glad to have someplace to go. She came with us to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, an old family tradition that had largely been my father’s doing, which we were enacting without him for the first time. We ate Christmas dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house, and Max introduced Sophie to his parents as though she had come as his guest.

  He liked to remind me in later years that my entire relationship with Sophie might never have happened without his visit. He did this playfully, but there was a point to it. He was saying that I had no special claim over her.

  I expected the usual morning-after mess when I went downstairs, but Gerhard’s living room was empty and clean, the windows open to let in car horns and breeze. The place looked less like the house that Max and I occupied than like its owner’s best hopes for that house when he left it in our care. Sophie walked out of the kitchen with a dust pan and a broom.

  “You didn’t have to do all this,” I said.

  “It’s no trouble,” she answered. “I like housework. Except the dishes. I left those for you.”

  Her hair was pinned up so that from the front she looked as she used to when she’d worn it short. Her outfit too, tight black jeans and a black T-shirt, reminded me of those days.

  “You’ve changed.”

  She laughed uncomfortably.

  “The ravages of time.”

  “Your clothes, I meant.”

  Again she laughed, more freely, and she looked down at herself in feigned surprise.

  “I did some shopping after mass this morning. Max tells me there’s an empty room, if you don’t mind my staying for a while.” Before I could respond she added, “Come have a seat. I just put some coffee on.”

  “I have to walk the dog,” I said.

  So it was that Sophie and I followed Ginger through Washington Square as a bright autumn morning neared noon.

  “You published your novel,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “Congratulations. I’m sorry, I should have told you that a lot sooner.”

  “That’s all right. It’s not very good.”

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  “You read it?”

  “Of course I read it.”

  When the book appeared the previous spring, I’d expected some word from Sophie, and her silence had been a sad reminder of our falling-out. Over time, it grew to become the single big disappointment that stood in for the many small disappointments surrounding the book’s failure, as if it all finally amounted to the absence of the one reader whose opinion mattered. Which it did: I’d been writing all along to her. I knew that what I’d done wasn’t worth much, but I was ready to do something more. My great difficulty in getting started again—or so I had told myself—was the realization that she wasn’t listening.

  “Anyway, it was a start,” I said. “I’ll do better with the follow-up.”

  “You’re precocious. It takes most writers years to regret their first book.”

  I didn’t need to tell her that I’d read the story collection she’d published the year after we graduated, the book that had briefly given her the literary fame that Max so badly wanted for us. Sophie and I had still been close when she wrote those stories, and I’d been the first to read them.

  “How’s your own follow-up going?” I asked.

  “It’s finished.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “When can I read it?”

  “It’s not that kind of finished. No one’s going to read it.”

  “Have you shown it to your editor?” I asked.

  Sophie waved at the air in front of us, swatting away in one go my question and her book. She’d never been the kind to disparage her work for form’s sake or to elicit some empty reassurances. She’d never made a drama of it, never declared at the end of a bad day, It’s all shit; I’m giving up. If she said she was through with her novel, she meant it.

  Near the fountain, a crowd was gathering around three teenagers who were break-dancing to eighties hip-hop. Sophie and I stood on its outskirts, half watching the boys.

  “Last week,” I said, “I bought my high school yearbook off the street.”

  “Sounds promising,” she said. “Tell me more.”

  “It was on Sixth Avenue, near the Jefferson Market library. I walked by one of those guys selling used books on the sidewalk. Leon Uris and Erica Jong. Fifteen-year-old issues of Glamour. You wonder where they get all this shit. And there was my yearbook. St. Albert’s, class of ’92.”

  In fact, the yearbook had been from the class ahead of mine—Max’s class—and I’d found it months before. But I wanted to tell her a story, the way we had always done, and this was the first that came to mind.

  “I stopped and opened it up to look at the inscriptions. It had belonged to a guy named Justin. He was a scholarship kid, I remember, transferred from public school around sixth or seventh grade. I’d known him pretty well. I mean, we weren’t close or anything, but it was a small school. We all knew each other. I guess he threw the yearbook out after graduation, or gave it away, or sold it with a bunch of old textbooks or something.”

  “Had you written anything in it?” Sophie asked.

  “Sure,” I answered, as if to say, If that’s what you want to have happened. “I wrote, ‘To Justin—Your secret is safe with me.’”

  In better days, this is where Sophie and I would have begun spinning a plot out together, trying to outdo each other or leading the tale through baroque digressions and leaving the other to bring it back out. I had given her an easy opening, and now I watched her struggle to do something with it, disappointed that we couldn’t fall more easily into old habits. We were both out of practice, but this was more than that. She looked exhausted.

  “So, I bought the thing,” I said eventually. “It was two or three bucks. I thought I’d track Justin down, find out what he’s up to, and give the book back to him.”

  “But you won’t,” Sophie said.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You don’t want to hear the ending.”

  “Because the story’s too good.”

  During our freshman spring, when we’d been close for only a few months but already felt certain that our lives were bound together, Sophie told me about a habit of the young Henry James. Probably Lila had told her first. During his early years in London, James went out to dinner parties every night and listened while the other guests talked. When someone started a story that sounded promising, that gave him a donnée, as he called those initial germs of his books, Jam
es would ask the speaker to stop. If he knew how the story turned out, all its potential would be spoiled for him. I thought she was suggesting some connection between the two of us and the seemingly feckless young man who would become the Master on whom nothing was lost.

  “If he ever did that to me,” Sophie said, “I’d tell him to fuck off. It’s my story, Hank.”

  This was on one of those long nights we spent in Sophie’s room, chain-smoking Camels and drinking Jameson. She called the whiskey “my Irish,” which was an old line from her father. Perhaps because of her family situation, Sophie had been given a single room, a rarity for freshmen, and by that point I had more or less moved in. We shared the same bed, though this meant different things at different times. So much of our ardor was spent on talk and drink that we were often exhausted by the time we ended the night beside each other. At other times, we fell into fucking as though it were a conversation; it mattered, of course, but so did everything else we did together.

  In the morning we’d wake up hungover and write while the rest of the world went off to class. We could spend hours just a few feet apart without saying a word. After lunch, we went walking.

  Speaking again of his days in London, of walking home each night from an evening out, James described one of his novels as “the ripe round fruit of perambulation.” Our relationship was that, I think. It began with walks back from class, but it developed in those long spring afternoons, when we meandered off campus through the surrounding town of New Hampton.

  It was then that we initiated the game of telling stories together. One of us might look at an old woman and a younger man walking down the street together and say, “Everyone thinks she’s my mother, that’s the hardest part about falling in love.” Half an hour later we’d have outlined an entire relationship. One or the other or both of us might eventually try to write something down about it, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that there were stories everywhere, waiting to be discovered by invention.

  When I was young I played a solitary game: I closed my eyes and counted steps while walking down the street. After one or two, I still sensed exactly where I stood in relation to the world. At three I became uncomfortable, and by four or five I opened my eyes with great relief to discover familiarity all around me, to see that I could have gone on for many more steps. But it was too late; I could only start over. That is how my writing went before I met Sophie, beginning with great excitement and hopefulness that survived for a page or two despite growing disorientation. By page six I would open my eyes in the fear that I had become completely lost. It was on those walks, telling those stories, that I learned how to keep my eyes closed, how to give up this world and live in another long enough to make it seem real.

  After we tired of telling stories, we talked about whatever we’d been reading that morning—a John Hawkes novel, a long poem by Merrill or Stevens. We spoke of them as she had spoken to me about the Beats and Nabokov on our first walk together, as we imagined those writers would have spoken about each other. Alfred Kazin once said of Saul Bellow that he was the first person he’d met who spoke of Lawrence and Hemingway not as idols but as competitors. This is how we tried to speak. We didn’t pretend to be the equals of the writers we loved, but we were all in the same trade. Sometimes too we spoke about our classes, but only to disparage them.

  “They wanted to talk about what we learned from Keats,” Sophie said. “It’s like asking what you learn from getting laid. I learned that I like how he makes me feel.”

  We walked until we were exhausted, and then we sat down on the sidewalk to rest before walking back to campus. Around this time, we both read the essay in which Thoreau offers the French sans terre as a root for the verb “to saunter.” A true saunterer, he said, is without a land of his own. Our own wandering had in it that element of homelessness. There was something desperate to the way we walked, just as there was something desperate to the way we read and wrote, to the way we drank and smoked when we finally found our way back to her room.

  During another of our late-night sessions, she mentioned that the semifamous visiting novelist who’d taught our workshop in the fall had kissed her during office hours. He was gone from campus by the time she told me, and he wanted her to visit him in New York.

  “Are you going?” I asked.

  She took a long sip of her Irish and her face puckered into itself. She shook it out. “It would make a great story,” she said.

  This had become a refrain between us, and at different times it meant different things. We spoke about our own lives almost exclusively as material, as a rough draft in which one learned what would work on the page. If Sophie thought that taking the train to New York was the best way to make a story out of our professor’s proposition, then that’s what she would do. But the expression also suggested the opposite: that stories could free us from experience, allowing us to spend days at a time silently near each other without feeling we were missing the world outside. If you could imagine a story into life, then you didn’t need to live it. So her reply said nothing, really, about her intentions.

  No one went on dates at New Hampton, but any couple that was sleeping together with some amount of exclusivity was said to be dating. In that sense, the term applied as well to us as to anyone. In the eyes of our friends, Sophie and I had been dating for several months. But she still spoke to me about Lila, and she still made occasional efforts to remind me that nothing between us was fixed. Whatever else it was, talk of our professor’s invitation was another of these reminders.

  Another story she liked to tell, handed down from Lila, involved Edmund Wilson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had been a classmate of Wilson’s sister at Vassar. After Wilson discovered her work in an undergraduate anthology and helped to make her name in New York, Millay became the great bohemian beauty. Everyone fell in love with her, Wilson most of all. One day on the back porch of the Millay family home the age’s greatest critic took a knee and proposed to her. After considering for a second she said, “I suppose that might solve it.” She had assumed that he was offering a kindness, a convenient sheen of respectability beneath which she might go on writing her poems and sleeping with men and women as she liked. But Wilson meant only to make her his wife.

  When the school year ended, I went back to my mother’s apartment and Sophie went back to that big empty house in Connecticut. She hoped to spend the summer with Lila at the bookstore, but she returned to find the store closed. Lila responded to her e-mail after a few days, saying that she was traveling through Europe, sharpening up her languages before giving graduate school another shot. Sophie told me all this during one of her few visits to New York that summer. She didn’t suggest that the end of her hopes with Lila meant anything one way or another for our own relationship. She stayed for the day, ate dinner with me and my mother, and got on the train back home.

  If my father had still been alive, he would have made me work that summer. But he was gone, and my mother, busy again selling real estate, was happy to let me come and go as I pleased. I spent most of the summer reading and writing, thinking of Sophie doing the same up in Connecticut, and feeling as though we were together. The stars, says Thoreau, are the apexes of what wonderful triangles.

  Back on campus in the fall, everything picked up just as it had been. We both had single rooms now, but it was always her room where we spent those long days and nights, drinking and talking and reading. We were supposed to have chosen our classes before getting back, but Sophie hadn’t filled out the forms, and she asked me what I was taking. She signed up for the ancient history survey and the philosophy class I’d picked, but she shook her head over the one course that had seemed obvious to me.

  “Those workshops are pointless,” she said.

  And so we gave up our writing classes, though they were the reason we’d both come to New Hampton in the first place. From then on we showed our work only to each other.

  Sophie returned to campus with a pile of short sto
ries, perhaps a dozen of them. One was “Visiting Professor,” which would eventually become the title of her collection. The narrator of the story is a college student who goes to New York for a romantic dinner with an older professor she idolizes. She knows that the man wants to sleep with her, and she welcomes it. But outside the classroom he lacks all the charm and self-assurance that had attracted her. He gets drunk and cries embarrassingly over his wife, who has left him. The narrator comforts him. The apartment he’s been living in since his wife threw him out reminds her of a dozen dorm rooms she’s been brought to on other late nights, but she decides to stay there with him anyway. When they get to his bedroom he’s too drunk to do anything but take a feeble swing at her and tell her to leave. On the story’s last page, the narrator sits in Penn Station, waiting for the train back to New Jersey, thinking of the boy she loves back on campus. She imagines how she’ll describe the evening to him, wondering what kind of story she wants it to be, whether to make it a comedy or a tragedy or some mixture of both.

  Between the night when she told me about the kiss in the office and the day she gave me those thirty pages, she had never mentioned our actual professor. I didn’t know if she had gone to see him or if the entire thing was invented. After reading the story, I couldn’t ask. Not just because I didn’t want to admit to being jealous, but because the story made the truth irrelevant. The telling was what mattered. So at least we believed then. I think now that we were wrong. What really happened does matter, even if we can only ever know it once it’s too late to do anything about it.

  Essentially everything that would wind up in her collection—a collection that won prizes, that “announced the debut of a great American writer,” as the visiting professor himself put it on the book’s dust jacket—was written during that time. My own work was strong enough, for undergraduate writing. But the decision to drop out of workshop was in part a declaration that we judged ourselves by other standards. By those higher standards, I was still lacking. It was something we both acknowledged without any particular discomfort: she was simply better than I was. But I was improving, writing with her in mind, knowing she wouldn’t let me get away with anything. And we had all the time we needed. We never doubted that we would both make it. It had to happen, because we wanted it so badly. The certainty of that wanting left us free to ignore everything else around us, to give ourselves entirely.