What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  I miss that about those days—the freedom to want; the belief that our desires could never disappoint us, so long as we remained loyal to them; the sense that we could choose our fate, as though the absence of choice weren’t exactly what made it fate.

  For all that, I shouldn’t make it sound as though we spent three years in a hothouse together. In most ways, we lived like everyone on campus. At meals we sat with our classmates and had predictable dining hall conversations. We went to class when the spirit moved us and during those points in the year when it became unavoidable if one wanted to pass. On sunny days near the beginning and end of each school year we joined the world out in the courtyard, lying on blankets in the shade of our fake-Gothic dormitory, taking surreptitious sips from cans of warm beer. On weekends we sometimes went drinking with everyone else. But when Monday morning came, we began the week together, reading and writing on Sophie’s couch, and days passed when we hardly spoke to anyone else.

  Every few months, she closed her door to me. She might look up casually from a novel she was reading and ask, “Don’t you think you ought to leave?” Or else, at the end of our usual walk she would announce that she was returning to her room in a tone that made clear I wasn’t invited back with her. The first few times this happened, I asked if I’d done something wrong. She looked at me as though I was being ridiculous. Was it really so strange for her to want a bit of time to herself? Of course it wasn’t, but it wasn’t the deal I thought we had worked out.

  Eventually, I came to see these breaks—the shortest a few days, the longest a few weeks—as part of the rhythm of time. They even brought some relief. Once away from her, I realized how constricting our life together could be. And yet I fell eagerly back into that life as soon as she was ready for me.

  In the meantime, there were certain rules I came to understand. After she shut me out, I couldn’t go to her. I had to wait for her to come to me, which she eventually did, usually in the middle of the night. She’d wake me gently, and then I would find her on top of me.

  I knew she slept with other guys during our time apart. They were blond, sunny, unserious boys, business majors and players of squash. They seemed good-natured but perplexed by her sudden attention. She never made any attempt to conceal them from me, which would have been impossible at a school that size. Impossible, too, to avoid running into each other. I could be sure of seeing her every few days, walking to class with a group of other girls or even with the boy she was briefly trying out. She would wave or smile as if I were just another friend, and the latest boy, who knew that Sophie and I had been “together” in some amorphous way, would duck his head deferentially.

  What I felt then wasn’t as simple as jealousy. She lost focus for me. I saw her through the eyes of those others, for whom she was a figure of comic caprice or just an average girl. Worse, I felt myself come out of focus when I didn’t have her attention. It wasn’t just my writing but my entire life that I had come to compose with one reader in mind.

  As we crossed Washington Square all those years later, back to our walking ways, we both came into focus again. I had the idea that we might be on the edge of a new life together, as though the past few years had been one of those regular interludes, and her marriage to Tom just another fling with a boy she’d picked out from nowhere. The crowd around the break-dancers had grown to include us, and Ginger ran tight circles around my legs, wrapping me in her leash as in a trap.

  “You can have it if you want,” I told Sophie. We were speaking still of the yearbook, but I meant the idea of it, the germ it represented. “I haven’t been able to make it into much.”

  “I’m done with all that,” she said. “Not just the novel.” She seemed surprised to have to say as much, as though I should have known from looking at her. Perhaps I should have; I noticed again how tired she seemed, how much at a loss. “I gave up.”

  Had this been a recent decision, perhaps related to the end of her marriage, or had she given up long before? I could have asked, but I didn’t. The Sophie who had existed all these years, her life running parallel to mine though out of sight, the one to whom I’d all along been sending secret messages I’d understood somehow were being received and even answered, that Sophie was still committed to our grand project. It didn’t seem possible that she’d abandoned it without my knowing. So I chose to believe that she’d given up only recently, that she’d come to me for help on account of it.

  4

  SOMETIMES SHE WOKE too quickly, on the cusp of morning, before the world was ready for her. Then she would hear a hum in the distance that an untrained ear might mistake for falling rain or the labor of the air conditioner but which she knew for what it was: the sound of all the elements that make up a life, floating free of their proper place, awaiting the call to cohere. In that moment, before these parts had responded to her arrival, it was possible still for some new past to coalesce behind her, some new future to fix itself ahead, some other life to take her in its grip.

  When Tom was there, his restless snore blew everything back into the shape of the one life to which she belonged, rather than one of the many to which she might have belonged and did not. But when he traveled for work there was only that hum, and the possibilities lingered.

  This time, Tom stirred at her side. He opened his eyes to the half-darkened room and his wife sitting straight up in bed.

  “Dreams?” he asked, giving the word a worried lilt. He was handsome now in the darkness.

  “Dreams,” she answered, and they were both already on their way back to sleep.

  They took their time over breakfast. Even when Tom was busy his workday started late, a minor benefit in the life of a young attorney. That morning Sophie scrambled eggs and served them on whole wheat toast. So far as she could discern, their silence at the table was a comfortable one.

  In the first days after she’d gone to get his father from the hospital, Tom had withdrawn from Sophie. She’d taken him then to be angry, which made sense to her, though she still believed she had done the only thing she could. After another day of his detachment she suspected that he felt more embarrassed than anything else. She had seen something that he had meant to keep hidden forever from her. She wanted to say, He can’t show me anything that will make me love you less. She wanted to say, Nothing needs to be hidden between us. But she only said, “He’s dying. He won’t be around much longer.”

  Tom had not responded one way or another to the news. Nor had he asked about her time with Crane, what they’d talked about, what his own father was like. He didn’t ask if they’d spoken about him. She had difficulty believing he didn’t want to know these things. And yet he’d always insisted as much. Since the first days of their relationship, the topic had simply been off-limits. She didn’t even know what terrible thing Crane had done to place himself beyond concern.

  “I don’t want you to see him again,” he’d said. This wasn’t precisely a command. Tom would never try to dictate her behavior, but he understood the force his wants held, a greater force than any command. And she didn’t really wish to see Bill Crane again. There was something fearsome in it.

  A week had passed before Tom was back to himself.

  “Maybe I can come by the office this afternoon?” she asked now to break the silence. “For a cup of coffee or something?”

  “I’d like that,” he said, which she knew meant that it wouldn’t happen. “Today’s tough for me. We’ve got to take the summers to lunch, and those things go on forever, so I’ll be tied to my desk when I get back.”

  Summers were the law school students who worked for the firm during their vacation. Tom had been a summer himself not so long before, and such terms of art were most of what Sophie knew about his job even now.

  “Another time,” she said. It was important that he know she didn’t resent his unavailability, for it was part of the life they’d chosen, and after all she was often unavailable herself, in her own way. “I’ll call.”

  They walked t
ogether as far as the subway stairs on Lexington, where Sophie left Tom before continuing another block to St. Agnes, the church she attended each morning. When she arrived for ten o’clock mass, five other congregants were scattered over the first three pews. There were the two widows, well into their eighties, who came to this mass every morning and always interceded during the prayer of the faithful on behalf of their husbands’ souls. There was the middle-aged woman who came not every day but most with her son, who looked to be in his thirties, neatly dressed and cleanly shaven but distracted and childlike, his jaw circling beneath his face with compulsive stubbornness, indicating some vague disability.

  Only the man in the second row wasn’t a regular. Dressed in a suit and tie, his gray hair neatly slicked back, he knelt uncomfortably with his head bowed and his eyes pressed shut. His appearance suggested that he lived in the neighborhood, while his unfamiliarity to Sophie and the awkwardness with which he filled his pew suggested that he had entered the church impulsively that morning. Such figures weren’t uncommon at St. Agnes, though their attendance was always short-lived. Sophie inevitably wondered what spiritual emergency—illness or death or some irrevocable act the guilt of which one wished to expiate—brought these supplicants to enact unfamiliar or long-abandoned rituals among strangers. But she put him out of mind and bowed her own head until the priest stepped out from the sacristy to begin mass.

  Father Seneviratne was a shy, thoughtful man whose sometimes incomprehensible voice cracked while he sang the Gloria and the Agnus Dei. He’d come to the parish three years earlier, seeming serenely baffled that his vocation had led him thousands of miles from home to provide provisional comforts to wealthy whites on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

  A few weeks after his arrival, Sophie invited Seneviratne—Sameera was his first name, and he asked her to call him Sam—to the apartment for tea. As a convert she’d had little firsthand contact with the cultural trappings of the church. What she knew, or thought she knew, came from books, most of them more than a generation old. She had made the invitation assuming it was a custom when a new priest came to the parish, but Sam made it known while accepting that he had not received many other offers.

  Two days later she waited outside the church after mass while he changed. He emerged from the parish house next door having traded his vestments and his collar for khaki pants, a button-down oxford shirt, and a blue blazer. He looked almost like a schoolboy, though Sophie guessed he was in his midthirties. He thanked her again for the invitation as they walked to the corner, passing what had once been tenement houses and were now single-family dwellings that routinely sold for millions of dollars.

  “I’m glad to be here,” Sam said, in response to a question that Sophie had not asked.

  “It’s a nice neighborhood,” Sophie answered. She understood that he was speaking about an area broader than a few square blocks.

  “You have lived here long? Since childhood?”

  “Just since getting out of school a few years ago.”

  As they headed east, the townhouses gave way first to Park Avenue’s apartment buildings, then the commercial stretches of Lexington and Third, and finally to the enormous high-rise on Second Avenue where Sophie lived with Tom.

  “Are you from India?” she asked him as they rode the elevator upstairs.

  “Sri Lanka,” Sam said, and merely saying the words seemed to unlock something in him. By the time they were settled in the apartment, Sophie knew much of his life story. He had grown up Catholic—“My country has every type of religion,” he said—and studied at a Catholic school in Colombo. He had decided to become a priest at a very young age. There had been a long civil war throughout his childhood, in which several family members had died, and the priesthood seemed the best way to escape to Europe or America. He said this without apology, without any sense that it was an imperfect reason for declaring a vocation. And why not? Sophie thought. He did work in the parish that no one else seemed inclined to do.

  “For three years, I was in Ireland,” he said, still marveling a bit at the very idea. “Now I am in New York.”

  And that was it. Sophie’s turn had come, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her privileged childhood in Connecticut horse country suddenly embarrassed her. Even the difficulties she’d faced seemed relatively meager. She considered saying something about her conversion, about her religious feelings, but it seemed overly intimate and anyway beside the point. Sam himself had spoken of the Church as an institution, of the things it provided his family and himself, but had not mentioned God.

  So they sat quietly together, drinking tea and eating cookies that Sophie had bought for the occasion. It felt something like a first date, or what she imagined a first date would feel like, having never really been on one. She caught him staring over her shoulder, at the mess on her desk. She’d cleaned much of the apartment before his arrival, but left the piles of papers—her manuscript struggling to be born—as it was.

  “I’m a writer,” she said then.

  “Really?” he asked. “You write? I am looking for a writer.”

  His whole body rose with excitement over the idea, and he started to speak more quickly, so that she struggled to understand him. He was raising money for a charity in Sri Lanka that found homes for children displaced by the war. There was a foundation that might help, but there was an application to be written, forms to be filled out, and his own writing wasn’t strong.

  “To be a writer is a very useful thing,” he said. “If you are a writer, perhaps you can help?”

  Three years later, Father Seneviratne—she thought of him this way only during mass; at all other times he was Sam—arrived at the altar, turned to the congregation, and greeted them.

  It had taken time after Sophie’s conversion for her to understand that many of the formalities she’d read about the Church belonged to a different era and were no longer practiced. Even then, she’d been surprised at how casual these weekday services could sometimes be. On some days she would have liked the priest to turn his back to her and intone in a dead tongue, the better to summon the necessary grandeur. But she had come to find in these short morning ceremonies something more practical in place of the sublime, just as she had come to see the holiness in Father Seneviratne, even though he admitted that his path to the priesthood had been directed by earthly concerns.

  The mass was short, and on the way out Sophie shook Sam’s hand and kissed him on the cheek before heading home. Back in the apartment, she sat at her desk and opened a notebook. She usually spent much of her day on the computer, doing research online, but she still wrote everything out longhand. It was the only way she could work. She was supposed to be finishing a draft of a proposal for a speech clinic that Sam had referred to her. The clinic worked with children with cochlear implants, born deaf and suddenly made to hear. In some cases, apparently, the complications that came with this gift were more dangerous than the disability itself. But Sophie’s mind had wandered over the past week, and she’d written something very different.

  The moment the phone rang she reached for it. Only then did she realize that she had been waiting all week to hear the sound, waiting for Bill Crane to call again.

  “You’re a hard girl to reach, Sophie Wilder.”

  Only one person called that number and used Sophie’s maiden name.

  “Greg,” she said. “I haven’t been avoiding you, I swear.”

  “Listen,” he said, brightly. His manner was always sweetness and light when he spoke to her. “I’ve been thinking about the follow-up.”

  “No kidding.”

  Most literary agents, as Sophie understood them at least, would simply forget about a writer who wasn’t interested in writing. But her story collection had done very well by Greg, and he affected great loyalty to her. He might have better expressed that loyalty through tactful silence, she sometimes thought. The truth was that he hadn’t done much to build on the success she represented for his own career, and
he needed a follow-up, too. He had made a great show of understanding when she announced that she was abandoning years of work. But he was ready now for something to come of it. He called every few months to see how things were coming along, and he often had ideas for her.

  “Have you thought of writing anything a bit more . . . autobiographical?”

  She was certain they’d covered this before.

  “You mean, a book about a twentysomething in New York, trying to write a book? That hasn’t been done already?”

  “People like stuff that’s been done already. They know what they’re getting. Besides, yours would have the female perspective. There’s some novelty to that.”

  “Every time I base a character on myself, I kill her off halfway through.”

  What was clearly meant as a laugh came to her through the phone as an unhealthy wheeze.

  “Kill her off, then. It will add some pathos.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Sophie said.

  “The reason I bring this all up is that I had lunch with an editor a while back who gave me a new book that was getting a lot of buzz. I’ve just finished it, and it made me think of you. I mean, it isn’t half as good as what you’re capable of, but it’s in a line that might work for you. I’ll send it over, and you can tell me what you think.”