What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

“I hated it,” Sophie answered. “It was playacting. He was a banker. Building decks wasn’t his real job, and it wasn’t ever going to be mine. What kind of kid wants to spend her summer break doing manual labor in the sun? I wanted to sit inside and read. Now, I wish I had some practical skills besides pouring concrete and dragging the hose around the yard. Maybe I’d have something to do with the rest of my life.”

  “Writing is a practical skill,” I said. “You wind up with a product at the end.”

  “Something else I realized,” she said. “My old preference for the self-contained work of art, which I’d always taken to be a cold aesthetic principle, was really just a sentimental predilection for craftsmanship. I’m my father’s child after all.”

  “So where’s the problem in that?”

  “The problem is I don’t know what that craftsmanship is supposed to be for. What have you got when you’re done? You can’t sit on it, no matter how sturdy it is.”

  “But you’ve made something beautiful.”

  She let out a long stream of smoke and then waved at it, mixing it into the air in front of her.

  “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

  “Since when?”

  “Beauty comes from the fair and fit, Augustine says.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “In other words, it’s a kind of byproduct of the elegance with which an object meets its purpose. A work whose purpose is to be beautiful gets trapped in circularity. It can’t ever succeed in that goal. Beauty can only be arrived at while meeting some real need. So what’s the point? What’s the thing writing is supposed to do, the aim it’s after that along the way produces its beauty?”

  “You don’t think the need for beauty is a real need?”

  “Sure we need it,” she said. “But it already exists without us. ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe. The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’”

  “You’ve stumped me,” I said.

  “It’s Kant.”

  “You’ve been reading Kant?”

  “Bill Crane told me that.”

  I wasn’t ready for him yet. I wanted a chance to be with Sophie without the man’s presence between us.

  “Why did you invite me here?” I asked.

  “Because I wanted to see you again, and not at that house with Max and all his friends. And because I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “You came back to say good-bye?”

  “I’m going away.”

  “You were already away.”

  “Now I’m going for good. It’s time for me to be ushered off the stage.”

  “I’m not going to usher you off,” I said. “I want to be with you. I want to marry you.”

  It was true.

  “That’s impossible, Charlie. I’m already married.”

  “You’re divorced.”

  “I’m separated.”

  “So when does your divorce go through? I can wait.”

  “It doesn’t go through, Charlie. There is no divorce. I was married in the Church. That means I stay married.”

  “Does Tom feel that way?”

  “It doesn’t matter how Tom feels. It’s not up to him.”

  “So if he goes off and marries that girl we saw in the street, you’ll still be his wife as far as you’re concerned?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about annulments? I mean, you were young when you got married, and you didn’t stay together that long. Couldn’t you get a priest to do something?”

  “You’re missing the point. I knew the vow I was taking. What would be the grounds for an annulment?”

  “You can make something up. People do it.”

  “Granted, people do it. I’m not going to.”

  “It’s irrational, Sophie. This isn’t 1940. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the things that religion is supposed to be about—charity, and love, and being good to others. Punishing yourself doesn’t achieve anything.”

  “You’re right about that much,” she said.

  “So you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life, because you made a mistake when you were twenty-two?”

  “If my husband doesn’t come back, I will.”

  “God couldn’t possibly want you to suffer for the rest of your life when you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You may be right about that, too. I can’t know what God wants. I only know what I promised.”

  “Tom broke the promise, not you.”

  “My promise wasn’t to him.”

  “It’s over, Sophie. You kept your end of the bargain. It’s not your fault.”

  “This isn’t about whose fault it is.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “I never said it made sense. I don’t even understand it myself, but I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because,” she said, “I do not hope to turn again.”

  Pushing further with the conversation meant ruining what was left of our night. I told myself that I could convince her before my stay was over.

  “Let’s go inside,” Sophie said. “I’ll get dinner ready.”

  In the kitchen, she poured us each a glass of wine.

  “So you’re really going away?” I asked her.

  “I am,” she said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I haven’t entirely figured that out yet. I just know it’s time for me to leave this place.”

  She took a tray of baked pasta from the oven and served us each a bowl. I followed her to the table.

  “How long will you be gone?” I asked, as we sat down at the table. “You don’t really mean for good.”

  “I’m not sure about that, either. In the meantime, you should stay here as long as you want. My father’s old work shed makes a nice writing space.”

  “It’s a kind offer, Sophie, but I couldn’t do that.”

  “You should stay,” she said. “That is, I want you to. I’m not just being polite.”

  “I appreciate it, but I really don’t think I could stay without you here.”

  “Suit yourself,” she told me. “But think about it before you decide. I’m leaving it entirely to you.”

  Sophie poured herself another glass of wine.

  “What I said before, about hating working with my father?”

  “Yes?”

  “It wasn’t just that,” Sophie said. “Most of the time I hated him. He was such an unhappy man. I think he liked working that way because he thought that if he exhausted himself his mind would quiet down a little bit. I think his brain was torturing him. All of this, of course, I decided later. At the time I just thought he was unpleasant to be around. Maybe he’d done something he really regretted. Maybe he just wanted to forget. I wish I’d been more understanding.”

  I hadn’t seen her crying since the day that she told me she was pregnant. She might have made the same connection, because she said, “I thought about him after the miscarriage. I still don’t why.”

  She had never told me before how the pregnancy ended. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Enough of all that,” Sophie said, wiping the tears that had now made their way to her cheeks. “I don’t want to spoil our meal.”

  After my own father died, we’d driven in a long procession to the family plot on Long Island, where we buried him beside his own father. Before that, there had been a funeral mass, where the priest said that my father had been baptized into Christ and now had died into eternal life. Though the first part was strictly true—he’d been baptized a Catholic—I can’t speak to the rest. He wasn’t a particularly religious man. That is to say, it wasn’t the first thing someone would say about him, so it seemed strange that it should be the last, that we should memorialize him in this way.

  My uncle had taken care of all the arrangements, and he had a strong sense of tradition, of what was proper for the family. Whatever your beli
efs on every other day of your life, my uncle said, marriage and death were the times to return to the Church. My grandmother wanted to see her son laid to rest beside her husband, near the place where she would soon go, which couldn’t happen without a proper burial. I didn’t care about any of this at the time. What difference did it make to my dead father? Such things were done for the survivors. But now I thought differently. There were still people like Sophie, who took the words of faith as more than words. In light of that fact, it seemed wrong that all these others spoke for appearance’s sake.

  This was what I thought as I followed Sophie down the hall back to my room that night. We had finished two bottles of wine by then, having moved from the kitchen table to the den, where we’d sat beside each other on the couch. Now we arrived at the door to my room and stood uncomfortably near each other for a moment. Then I pulled her close, and she put her arms around me.

  “I love you, Sophie,” I told her.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  She pushed the door open and led me inside. I didn’t know what to make of this after what she’d told me at dinner about her marriage, but I followed her to the bed. I had imagined, over the years, being with Sophie again, though I knew how unlikely it was. Now we were both nervous and awkward and a little drunk. It took some time for us to find the rhythm of each other’s bodies. She pulled me on top of her, guided me inside, and then thrashed as if in fear, as if protecting herself. But when I gave way, she pulled me closer again. Almost as soon as we’d finished, she was up from the bed.

  “Goodnight, Charlie,” she said.

  “Do you really have to leave?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I wish things could be different.”

  She leaned over the bed to kiss me.

  “Then write it different.”

  3

  SOPHIE DIDN’T SLEEP well that night. She felt strange out of her own bed, in no bed at all, with one stiff drink in her belly and a second swirling in her head. She woke several times and sat up in darkness, listening to the hum of the world and wondering if she had energy left to make another life for herself. At last enough light came through the blinds to allow for giving up on the night.

  She pulled on her jeans and went to the kitchen, where she fried two eggs and put on a pot of coffee. Later she would make something for Crane, something he wouldn’t eat, but now she would let him sleep as long as he could. That would be hours, probably—it was just after 6:00 AM. Once he was awake, she would bring him a bowl of nuts and another protein drink, and their first full day together would begin. In the meantime, he was safe in bed, and there was nothing she could do for him by standing in the kitchen. After she finished eating, she went looking for a church.

  An old man slept on the sidewalk outside the building, tucked into a tunnel of cardboard, his feet wrapped in newspaper. Sophie walked around him to the corner. The streets were nearly empty, and the morning light gave the air a poignant clarity.

  It didn’t take long to find a Catholic church on a side street off Tompkins Square. The block was being developed, with three high-rise apartment buildings nearing completion. These unfinished hulks were already taller than the church, which would once have been the highest point on that street, visible from a distance, as churches had once been the highest points in every neighborhood, in every town. As it was, Sophie was nearly in front of it before she found it. A sign outside announced a daily mass at 7:00 AM.

  The church looked bigger inside than it had from the street, and the lights above bathed the tiled floor between irregular spiderwebs of shadow. Four old women filled the first row, but otherwise the pews were empty. Sophie entered quietly and knelt to pray. She had always prayed first for Tom, and it felt inconstant to do otherwise now.

  If he returned, she would take him in—he was still her husband—but knowing this wasn’t the same thing as wanting him back. She tried to imagine the other girl, not out of real interest but because she thought she should. She found that it wasn’t easy to take an interest in people. It brought responsibility. This was God’s work, Sophie thought: to think of us all the time, to continue imagining us, so that we might continue to exist.

  She prayed next for Tom’s sibling, the sister whose existence she now imagined. Doing so brought to mind naturally enough her own unborn child, whom she considered with a sad curiosity. It seemed likely to be the last child she would have. There weren’t as many chances as one might have thought to make a life.

  A bell rang in the sacristy, and the priest appeared with a single acolyte, a young girl of ten or eleven, carrying the cross. The first words of the mass disoriented Sophie. It took a moment for the feeling to resolve itself. There had been no indication of a foreign-language mass on the schedule outside, but the neighborhood was mostly Hispanic, or had been until the luxury buildings started going up, so it shouldn’t have surprised Sophie to hear the priest’s greeting made in Spanish. She didn’t know the language, but she knew the ceremony, so it was easy to follow along. Countless generations had spent their lives going to masses said in a language they didn’t speak out in the world, no longer a public language at all but the private means by which God communicated to his followers. The combination of familiarity and strangeness returned Sophie for the first time in years to the shocked grace she’d felt on that day when everything had changed. It arrived occasionally like this, unbidden, but the moment she recognized its presence it was gone, leaving her to ache in its absence. She wanted to think that returning to this mass on another morning would bring it back, but she knew it would not. It couldn’t be found by looking. You could only wait for it.

  At the kiss of peace, the priest stepped down from the altar and gave each of the women in the front row a lingering hug as though they were family, which they well might have been. He walked back to Sophie’s pew, and she slid toward the center aisle, preparing to offer her hand. But he took her into his arms just as he had the others and said, speaking in English as if he’d known all along that she’d wandered in by mistake, “Peace be with you.”

  Back in the apartment, Sophie felt a new reserve of energy available to her. It was after eight o’clock, and she decided to look in on Crane. The hospice worker wouldn’t arrive for three more hours, so she had plenty of time to get him up and make him presentable. She wasn’t sure why she should feel this necessary, why she needed whoever was sent to believe that she was taking proper care of him. She poured a glass of the drink and brought it to the bedroom. She knocked lightly on his door. When no answer came, she let herself in.

  The first thing she noticed was the empty bed. She stood in the doorway puzzling over the sight until her attention turned to where he lay on the floor. He was so still, his position so awkward, that she was certain at the sight of him that he was dead. She knelt to find him not only breathing but also awake, his open eyes staring up at her in terror and shame.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He made some effort to answer, but no sounds came. She reached her arms around his chest to pull him up into a sitting position. As she did, she nearly recoiled at the smell, like an open wound left untended.

  Sitting up, he came back to himself a bit.

  “I fell out of bed.”

  “When did it happen?”

  He looked up at her helplessly. What means did he have for marking the passing time?

  “I called out for you, but then I got tired.”

  “From now on,” she said, “I’ll sleep in here, so I’ll know if it happens again.”

  She handed him the glass and he took a careful sip. While he drank, she turned on the lights in the room and opened a window to let out the smell. She sat down beside him. When he had finished the glass, she tried to stand him up. It seemed impossible that he could have weakened so much overnight.

  “I can’t get up now,” he said.

  He was calmer, and his eyes had lost their look of empty fear. She thought of his struggling in the nigh
t, perhaps for hours, before giving up, exhausted but too frightened to sleep.

  “When you’re ready,” she said, “we’ll get you back into bed and you can get some rest. I’ll give you another pill.”

  “I don’t want to get in bed.”

  “We’ll move you into the middle,” she said. “I’ll stay right here and make sure you don’t fall out.”

  “It’s not that.”

  He had something more to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  “What is it?”

  “I shit myself,” he told her. “I don’t want to bring it into my bed.”

  “We’ll get you cleaned up.”

  She gathered what she would need to wash him there on the floor. From the bathroom she took some towels and a bar of soap. She found a bucket beneath the sink in the kitchen and filled it with warm water before bringing it back beside the bed along with a sponge and a roll of paper towels. She sat down and pulled off Crane’s sweaty shirt. It clung thickly to his body in resistance, and when it came off it brought a thin layer of skin with it. It wasn’t just the part of him covered in burns but all of his skin that seemed enflamed.

  Sophie soaped the water and dipped the sponge—a kitchen sponge, probably harsh against him, but all she could find. She squeezed it and ran it slowly down the outside of his left arm. He winced as she lifted the arm and ran the sponge back up the inner part. When she reached his armpit, she found the skin festering. She had torn some of it off while raising his arm, and a small wound had opened. He flinched when the sponge passed over it. She wasn’t sure this was good for the wound, but she didn’t know what else to do. When she’d finished she dried off his arm and let it rest back at his side. She went to the other one and from there to his chest and his back, after which there was nothing left but to pull off his soiled boxer shorts. They left a trail of greenish brown along his legs as they came off. Sophie dropped them into the trash bin near the bed.

  She couldn’t keep herself from taking a moment to look him over. His belly fell over his gray-black pubic hair, visible only in odd, isolated patches, like weeds growing through cracks in concrete. Below that was an inert jumble of skin, one part nearly indistinguishable from another. It was mostly tucked away between his legs as though in hiding, with the reddish flap of foreskin pinched against his thigh. The sponge felt suddenly heavy in her hands, and she let it fall back into the bucket. When she pulled his legs apart, she saw that she couldn’t go about the rest of the job from the front, couldn’t watch him mutely watching her work. She moved him onto his side and approached from behind, using the paper towel to wipe him. What she found between his legs was the same color and consistency as the drink she’d been forcing on him. She put a towel down on the floor and rolled him onto it.