What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  “You look beautiful,” I said, which was true but beside the point. She gave an ironic curtsy to diffuse the embarrassment of my remark.

  “We’re grabbing something to eat,” I told Max. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got to write a blog post about the cuckoo clock speech.”

  He would have easily forgotten his work if he’d wanted to join us, but I was glad that he’d let us go. Even after all the time that had passed, I couldn’t sit at a table with the two of them; I wanted Sophie to myself.“Behave, kids,” Max said as I got up. “Keep the Holy Spook between you.”

  We’d planned to get something nearby, at one of the Italian places on Sullivan or Thompson. But it was a beautiful, cool evening. Relief had finally come after a punishing summer only a few weeks gone, and we decided to walk. I told Sophie that I’d read the latest novel by our visiting professor from freshman year.

  “Do you still speak with him?” I asked.

  “He never even kissed me,” Sophie said. “Even that part I made up.” She laughed as though at a childhood eccentricity, but it seemed painful to her to remember. “I really didn’t know the difference back then. I couldn’t recognize the truth when I saw it.”

  “Sure you could,” I said. “But you were a fiction writer.”

  “If that’s what it means, then I’m glad I’ve given it up.”

  I couldn’t tell by the way she spoke if she wanted to talk about it.“You’re really done?” I asked. “Not just with this book?”

  “With everything.”

  It made me desperately sad to hear this. We had been so certain once.

  “It’s not too late,” I said, as much to myself as to her. “There’s always hope.”

  “Endless hope,” she answered. “But not for us.”

  On Clinton Street we passed a newly opened restaurant that had been written up in Max’s magazine the week before. It was recommended as a place to take a first date you were trying to impress, but I didn’t say this to Sophie when I suggested we try it. The hostess told us we’d have to wait for a table, so we found two seats at the bar. Sophie ordered us each a Jameson.

  “Your Irish,” I said.

  “My Irish,” Sophie said. “You must think I’m a terrible backslider.”

  “To be honest, I never understood why you quit. Most of the people we knew were worse off than we were.”

  “I made a few mistakes,” she said. “They turned out to have some real consequences.”

  We sat in silence until our drinks came. Once they did she raised her glass to me.

  “Anyway, I’ve done my penance. I can start making mistakes again.”

  I touched my glass to hers.

  We didn’t say much after that. I thought of long hours spent communing in quiet sadness. It would be easy to say we had just been two unhappy kids who’d both lost parents, seeking comfort in each other. Plenty of our classmates thought as much when they puzzled over our strangely intense relationship. But I missed the particular brand of unhappiness I had felt in those years.

  We were into our second round by the time a table was ready for us.

  “What are you writing these days?” Sophie asked. “How’s your follow-up?”

  “I tried to get started on something right away,” I said. “But I spent too much time thinking about how everything was going to change when the book came out. Maybe I wanted to be another Sophie Wilder.”

  “She was something, wasn’t she? What ever happened to her?”

  “It didn’t take long for the image to get swept away. But I can’t really figure out what to do next. It doesn’t seem to matter either way, since no one’s reading my work.”

  “I did.”

  “But I didn’t know that.”

  “It came at a complicated time,” Sophie said. “But I should have been in touch, just to tell you congratulations.”

  I thought I knew what complications she was talking about. A few months after the book came out, a friend told me that Sophie and Tom had split up. I didn’t know the circumstances, but I couldn’t help imagining it had something to do with me, that Sophie too had used our days together as a touchstone and found her life wanting. It would be wrong to say that the idea pleased me, but the timing of the news gave me hope that the book’s release might be the occasion for her return.

  “It’s not that I ever expected to become a celebrity,” I said. “But I looked around at the people I knew, the few people left who were supposed to care about these things, and even they didn’t give a shit. I just wanted to matter to someone in the way these things mattered to us.”

  I hadn’t spoken about this before, hadn’t even entirely known that I’d felt it. But Sophie would understand, even if no one else did. And yet, what help could she offer me, when she’d already given up on herself?

  “You’ll get it all straightened out,” she said. Her tone was not encouraging or insistent. She spoke as though from the future, reporting a simple and certain fact that she expected to be treated as such.

  After dinner, we wandered back to Gerhard’s, where we found Max and a crowd of others, drinking and laughing in the living room.

  “You do this every night?” Sophie said in mock disgust.

  “We try to,” Max said.

  “Did you finish your post?” I asked him.

  “It’s a fucking blog.”

  “Granted,” I told him. “But it’s part of the conversation.”

  “Somehow the conversation goes on apace without me. My commenters are having it out about The Pirates of the Caribbean as we speak.”

  I didn’t feel up for another evening of Max and our friends, but Sophie was already on her way to the kitchen for a drink. I waited for her on the couch, beside the aquarium.

  The tank was nearly ten feet long and three feet tall, held up on legs of turquoise brass with Art Nouveau embellishments that called to mind the entrance to a Paris metro station. Mossy vegetation grew up from its floor. There was nothing in the way of playful accoutrements within, no sunken treasure or deep-sea explorers in diving bells. The world was designed for its inhabitants, not for the spectators above. I didn’t know much about the half-dozen fish that occupied the tank, except that they were rare and that Gerhard had given careful instructions for attending to them. Properly speaking, this was Max’s job—my job was the dog—but he often forgot, so I tried to keep an eye out. Occasionally a drunken guest tapped crudely against the glass, but even this drew little response from the fish, who went about their lives, oblivious to the giants all around them, under whose attention they swam.

  Sophie returned with two glasses of whiskey.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your crowd?” she asked.

  I began with Morgan Bench, an old friend of Max’s who had gained some local notoriety while working for a daily gossip column, crashing parties, and misbehaving. He had since given up the job to write screenplays, but his reputation remained. He was thought of as irresistibly rakish, in the manner of a character in an old screwball comedy, and sometimes he was. But the persona didn’t come entirely naturally to him. He was at heart a better person than he wanted to be. That night, Morgan was dressed for brunch at a New England yacht club: Nantucket reds, loafers without socks, a blue blazer with a white pocket square. But under the blazer he wore a tight pink T-shirt with a drawing of Miss Piggy on it.

  “Morgan,” I said, “this is Sophie O’Brien, an old friend of mine.”

  “You’ve heard about Sophie,” Max said, correcting my inadequate introduction. It was important to Max, when curating crowds, that everyone be given a proper role. “She’s a wonderful writer. Writes under her maiden name, Wilder. You remember that collection, Visiting Professor, that got all that attention a few years back?”

  Morgan looked up at the ceiling and twitched his nose as though he had an itch he couldn’t reach.

  “Did they make a movie?”

  “A few of
the stories were optioned,” Sophie said. “But nothing came of them. They wouldn’t translate very well to the screen, to be honest.”

  Morgan looked her over sympathetically.

  “Maybe next time,” he said. “Anyway, you’ve got very nice tits.”

  “They wouldn’t translate to the screen, either.”

  Max left me to talk with Morgan while he guided Sophie to Colleen Lawrence, a staff writer at his magazine. It seemed from Colleen’s response that she was familiar with Sophie, perhaps had even read her work. Watching them talk, I imagined her asking what Sophie was working on now, while Sophie shrugged modestly, invoking the writer’s sacred right to secrecy. I had the sense one sometimes gets when watching a television on mute of the fundamental absurdity of even the slightest human gestures. I remembered the feeling I used to have watching Sophie from a distance on campus, when it seemed a travesty for her to be out in the world, interacting like a normal human being. But she had somewhere acquired that necessary adult talent for holding the better part of herself in reserve while offering enough of a face to keep the world fooled. It seemed that I’d made a great mistake in thinking that I had special access to the part of Sophie that remained hidden from everyone else. I may have seen a layer that others didn’t know, but the true depths remained forever unavailable.

  Beside Colleen stood Marvin Alexander, a Web designer who also played drums for a passable alt-country band. After they had spoken for a few minutes, Max brought her around to the rest of the group, mostly people I knew only vaguely or not at all. It was never clear to me where Max found the people who filled out those nights, or whether he found them at all. Perhaps they just appeared as needed. But inevitably Max knew them, or made some show of knowing them. It was part of his job. Though we lived there together, he was always the host.

  I exchanged a few crude jokes with Morgan, but when he went in search of a cigarette I retreated to the fish. I was watching them when Sophie approached in the reflection of the glass, walking unsteadily in the frame of the tank’s brass borders. She’d refilled her drink.

  “Now you’ve met the whole sick crew,” I said.

  “I have.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “What do I think?” She looked at the tank as though the answer were there. She pointed at Morgan, making no effort to conceal the gesture. “I think that he’s Sebastian Day.”

  This was the name of a minor character in my book, based entirely on Morgan.

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “And the girl in black, Colleen, is Sarah Staple.”

  Colleen and I had dated around the time I was writing the novel, and she had found her way to a more prominent part in the book. This time I didn’t even bother admitting to it.

  “Marvin is Paul Tanner. Though you turned him into a bass player, which hardly seems fair. Drummers are so much sexier.”

  “What about him?” I asked, pointing to a tall, ungainly guy with a shaved head. He was standing next to Max with an odd smirk on his face, taking in the whole party much as we were. I had noticed him talking to Sophie earlier, but as far as I knew we had never met before.

  Sophie didn’t skip a beat.

  “But that’s a trick question. He’s a character escaped from an entirely different book.”

  I wanted to say that she was wrong, that it wasn’t as simple as all that. But it had been precisely that simple. I’d written exactly the kind of book that Sophie hated so much: real-life experience thrown down on the page without any transformation. I’d started it after giving up on the enormous, unwieldy thing I’d been working on since meeting her, the novel that had grown out of our hours of writing and talking together. By the time I abandoned that other work and started over, I was tired of invention. I’d exhausted my imagination. Some scenes in the new one were nearly word-by-word transcriptions of stoned conversations in Max’s old loft or petty frustrations at the office where I’d temped while writing it. I don’t know how Sophie could tell this, since she hadn’t been following my life and had never met any of the people I’d written into the book. It must have been apparent just by reading it. She had confirmed all my worst fears about my writing.

  All the worst things about Sophie—her capriciousness, her streak of cruelty, her unwillingness to let pass even the most venial aesthetic sins—came back to me. If it had been wrong not to let her be just another girl once in a while, perhaps it had been wrong of her to hold me to her own standard, when we both knew that she had a talent I didn’t possess.

  “At least I haven’t stopped trying,” I said.

  When I looked over at her, she was staring into the tank, transfixed by the elegant, oblivious movements of the fish, or else by her own reflection. “I should head up,” she said. “I’m not used to late nights anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll come up, too.”

  “No, stay here. Have fun with your friends. There’s always tomorrow.”

  So I did stay. I walked over to the tall man I’d seen Sophie talking to. I realized as I approached that I did know him after all. He was a member of Marvin’s band. He’d always worn long hair before, and I hadn’t recognized him with his shaved head. Everyone always knew everyone at these parties, in the end.

  Once Sophie was gone, things seemed just as they always were on those nights. More people arrived, until the whole first floor was filled. I stayed up late, though I was tired, and tired of those nights. If someone had told me that there would soon be an end to them for me, I would have been relieved.

  6

  SOPHIE DECIDED TO wait for her head to clear before calling Tom at work. There came instead a thickening of her senses, followed by sleep. She was still asleep when the alarm sounded the next morning. She lay unmoving until Tom shook her lightly back into the world.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “All right,” she said.

  “You look sick.”

  And sick she felt, but she knew the aching in her throat and chest would pass before morning did. Tom pressed a hand to her forehead and pursed his lips with a look of concern. Sophie was sure she had no fever. Tom left the room without a word. A few minutes later he returned, with tea and a plate of toast.

  “You’re very good to me.”

  She said this just to recognize his gesture. She didn’t mean anything in particular by it.

  “Do you think so?” Tom asked. “I worry sometimes.”

  “You worry?”

  “That I’m not around enough. That it’s not good for us.”

  “You’re busy right now,” she said. “I’m busy too.”

  If she told him then about going to see his father, the few words they’d spoken so far that morning might still disappear as though they’d never been. By waiting, she let their talk solidify into a deception. Not having mentioned it sooner would become another thing to answer for. Finished with her toast, Sophie stood and went to the shower.

  Back in the room, Tom was dressed—not for work but in jeans and a polo shirt.

  “I called the office,” he said. “I told them I wouldn’t be coming in until the afternoon.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She still didn’t entirely understand the rhythms of his job. He had worked late every night since the summer started, but he could make time easily enough when the situation demanded it.

  “I’ve got a few things I can do from here, and everything else can wait.”

  “Really, I’m not feeling that bad,” she said. “I think that shower did the trick.”

  “Even better. We have the whole morning to ourselves.”

  Tom assumed that her schedule could open in simple answer to his. Whatever work she had was her own work, and so it could wait for another time. She was annoyed by the assumption even when it was right, and in this case the timing really was bad. She’d written nothing for the speech clinic, nothing about the deaf made to hear and how proper funding might help them also to speak. But time was short o
nly because it had been wasted on Bill Crane—thinking about him, writing about him, visiting him. To be suddenly jealous of her hours when Tom made claims on them would mean choosing the father over the son.

  They headed west, passing the subway stairs and then St. Agnes, throwing off routine together. In Central Park they walked beneath a cathedral of elm boughs through which fell panes of summer sun. An older couple went hand in hand in front of them, and Sophie reached for Tom, feeling a kinship with these two. She had the sense that she’d seen a picture of Tom’s future. Or rather, a negative image of it, for he was nothing like his father. She wanted to tell him about her visit just to tell him this: you are nothing like the man; you will never be anything like him.

  At school, her friends had taken Tom O’Brien for another diversion. Perhaps he had taken himself for as much when he sat down with her in the empty dining hall. Only Sophie had known that her break with Charlie was different this time. She had tested the limit, had always been testing, leaving and returning. Finally she’d broken through, and the limit was marked. But the act was irrevocable. She couldn’t remember after the fact why it had needed doing, but she had been sure when she’d done it. It was like a secret told in a dream that one struggles upon waking to recover.

  By the time Tom invited her home for Christmas things were “serious” between them, as she told her friends, though she wasn’t taking anything quite seriously since breaking with Charlie and losing the child. She felt separated from her own life, unreal to herself. But she remembered their earlier stay at Beth’s as a brief stretch of contented attachment amid all this floating, and she was hopeful as they drove down, looking forward to the two empty weeks ahead. She hadn’t written anything all semester, the longest spell in years, since before her parents died. But Greg was happy with the collection they’d started putting together, and this counted for something. Work was being done on the stories, even if she wasn’t the one doing it. In the trunk was a bag of books. If she still couldn’t write, she would spend those weeks reading.