Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  “No!”

  “I knew it. Don’t you see you’re nothing but a spoiled brat? No wonder he misses living with a grown-up.” She had to shout over Valerie to get the next part in. “And another thing, you manipulative creep—you didn’t have a date for that prom either! It’s taken me twenty-three years to figure it out, but I’ve figured it out at last! You pretended you were doing it all for my benefit in order to make me feel indebted to you, but no one had invited you to the prom either! In your own way, Valerie, you were just as fat as I was!”

  Valerie leaped to her feet. “I think I understand, Agatha,” she said crisply, beginning to pace her office. “This is where all your bottled-up envy of me comes spewing forth at last, after years and years of secretly hating me. It’s Plain Jane’s Revenge Hour! You failed to get Howard to leave his wife, so now home wrecking is evil. Okay, I can follow your reasoning, no problem. But what I’d like to know is, who are you to talk about grown-ups? You, the eternal adolescent, the pathetic poseur, all affectation! You have to go as someone, because you are no one. You’ve got no life, only a lifestyle. You know, Agatha, if only you could become a real person one day, then maybe you—”

  But a thin, sustained note cut in on the line. Agatha had hung up. Fine! Valerie snapped her phone shut. It was high time to get that envious bitch out of her life anyway. It never pays to have insecure girlfriends; sooner or later they knife you in the back. Friendship can only flourish among equals!

  What a day. Valerie toyed gloomily with her phone, wondering what a girl could do when she had quarreled with her lover and now her best friend was history. Easy: take solace in her work. Work. Work her way up and out of trouble, just as she’d always done, leaving all the tiny envious people behind, choking on her dust.

  She called Masterson and asked if he was free to talk over some doubts she had about the new project she was presenting. He invited her to lunch, and she accepted.

  * * *

  Agatha chuckled after she hung up on Valerie. She got up and stretched and went to the mirror. Adjusting her bangs, she was struck by two things: one, that she was looking rather attractive, flushed and bright-eyed after the battle, and two, that there was nothing second-rate about the role of catalyst. How could she ever have thought so? Transformer, bewitcher, Agatha Weatherby remodeled the lives of those she met; in the wake of her passage, all were transfigured—as poor old Valerie had good reason to know! Agatha frowned at her reflection, seeking just the right word to describe what she saw, and her brow cleared when she found it: an enchantress.

  Serenely, she returned to her article.

  * * *

  James popped his head around Adam’s door near the end of the day. “Looks like you were right, pal. They didn’t renew Harris’s contract. He’s out on his ass. I’m getting kind of worried.”

  “Don’t. They’re just cutting fat off the top. He wasn’t worth what they were paying him. You’re all right. You’re the best technician in the firm, and everyone knows it.”

  James excelled at making the engineering interface that fit the electricity, plumbing, and security needs smoothly and economically into the images of whichever partner was titular architect of the project—not a glamorous role, perhaps, but bloody useful, and Adam greatly admired his work and dedication.

  “Well, Adam, you’re our great ‘idea man.’ That petrochemical project ought to safeguard your job… for a while anyway. ‘We’re green because we say so!’ That was a good ’un!”

  “I hope you’re right. Otherwise I’ve sold my soul for nothing.”

  James laughed and turned to go. “Well, I just thought you’d want to hear the latest.”

  “Thanks. Oh, James? Ah… I was wondering.… Are you free for a drink after work?”

  “Sure.” James looked a little puzzled by Adam’s air of constraint. “See you around six, then.”

  He left, and Adam frowned deeply at his desktop to cover the embarrassment he felt. There was nothing wrong with asking James to have a drink after work. They always had one after a squash game, so why did he feel embarrassed about it now? Well, because a drink after squash is to quench thirst, and a normal drink after work is to talk shop, but tonight Adam wanted to talk—not shop, just talk. To talk-talk, as teenaged girls might put it, he thought with distaste. And that was certainly new to his experience.

  In Adam’s view, conversation between men could have several perfectly acceptable tones—jocular, whimsical, challenging, thoughtful—and deal with many subjects—work, politics, travel, history, the arts. But the one objectionable tone was earnestness—the comment “Rather an earnest sort of fellow, I thought,” was not anything one wanted said about oneself—and the subject to avoid at all costs was, of course, one’s private life. Thus far Adam had never had any impulse to deliver impassioned monologues on the topic of his love life. He was discreet almost to a fault—all right, to a fault—and he found that particularly American tendency to gush intimate biographical detail to others a comical and repellent one.

  And yet here he was. He and James were on their second beer, and they had exhausted all possible shop talk about downsizing. They sipped in silence, Adam trying to ignore the feeling that a large black question mark was hovering cartoon-style over their table, trying to pretend that the air was not reverberating with James’s carefully unspoken question—So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?—and that this was just a restful silence, such as two people who know each other well and who are tired after a long day can share.

  “So!” James said after a while. And that didn’t make things any better, the fresh silence sitting even more heavily than the earlier one. He guffawed loudly, then drank deeply. “Hey, should I ask them to put your beer in the microwave for you?” He hooted again, slapping the bar top, and Adam smiled patiently at the old joke. The only fact that many Americans seemed to know about the British Isles was that beer there was drunk at room temperature. Hardly a week went by that Adam was not teased about warm beer.

  “Actually, lager in Britain is served cold,” he said eventually. He felt that the task of easing gracefully into the conversation was beyond him; it would have to be straight in or nothing. Quietly, he said, “I never thought Sophie would leave the children.”

  But the change of gears was too fast for James, and it caught him off balance. Still in nervous, hearty mode, he replied too loudly, practically a shout: “Well, I bet she never thought you’d leave her!” His eager look invited Adam to join him in a big laugh, but that didn’t happen. Too late, he slammed his own gearshift into low, saying with ponderous gravity, “Oh… yeah… it’s… Yeah.” He fingered a beer mat, frowning so hard that Adam doubted he could see anything. “It’s… I… I never met Sophie, but…” A little time passed. “But Valerie’s… quite a woman.”

  “She is,” Adam said, and James’s shoulders slumped with relief. “She doesn’t feel really comfortable with the children, naturally enough. But she does her best with them. She tries, she really does.” A “but” floated unspoken in the air.

  “Yeah, well, kids are…” James began, but he seemed to run into another snag. “Marriage… it’s tough—not that I’m an expert! And with kids, too, it’s… well, it’s…”

  “It’s tough,” Adam finished for him briskly. “You’re quite right. Women, marriage, kids—it’s all tough. Drink to that?” He lifted his glass and drank, feeling humiliated that James had had to point out the obvious: that sniveling about one’s personal life was not the thing to do—as Adam knew damned well.

  It could have ended like that, with Adam’s timid attempt to confide thwarted by James, the hint taken by Adam, and their relationship remaining on the same footing as before, no harm done. But James spoke again. “Look, Adam, I…”

  Adam tried to wave his words away, but there was no deterring James now.

  “I don’t know anything about marriage, and not a lot about women—half the time I’m not even seeing anyone. I don’t have children, so I’m not mu
ch good there either. But I do realize you’ve been going through a difficult time, and if there’s any way I could help you, I would like to. Now, I have spent some time with my nephews—not a lot, but some—and I’m pretty sure that I could cope with your boys for an evening or a Saturday or whatever. I could figure out some way of keeping them occupied. At the very least, they’d be safe with me, you could be sure of that. And I’d be happy to do it. I mean that.”

  Adam blinked as he registered the touching fact that James was offering to baby-sit. His first thought was to laugh it off with a defensive joke, but he resisted that, and bravely he said only, “Thank you, James.”

  * * *

  Usually Milagros double-parked outside Sophie’s apartment and rang the bell, and Sophie brought the boys down for her to take back to their father’s house. But sometimes, when she had time to spare and she could find a parking space, Milagros came upstairs for a chat.

  The boys were playing industriously out on the porch, bundled up against the cold, constructing forts out of sofa cushions, dismayed at first when the fort walls kept falling over, then incorporating that into the game—earthquake! Build the fort again! Sophie smiled at them from the kitchen window as she poured out tea for her guest. They called each other Mila and Sophie now. Formality between them had ended along with the Deans’ marriage, and anyway, Milagros worked for Adam now, so their relationship as boss and employee was over. After her ritual complaint about the traffic, which, when bad, could double the twenty-five minutes it usually took her from Milton, Milagros turned to her favorite topic: Valerie.

  “Always with the cigarette in the mouth. Like this on the patio.” Milagros waved two fingers stiffly in the air, lips pursed, miming smoking. “No ashtray, no. Just throws the butts on the ground—¡toma ya! Well, what are you going to do? The woman is a pig.”

  “I hope she doesn’t smoke in the house?” Sophie asked, and when Milagros shook her head almost regretfully, she insisted, “It’s a bad example for the boys. Why does Adam put up with it?”

  Milagros snorted in a way that left no doubt as to the ineffectualness of Mr. Dean in that household, but all she said was, “He’s too busy doing all the work. She does nothing of nothing. Except make coffee in her fancy machine.” She rose with a grunt and went to the door to call to the boys, “Come on, time to go,” countering their wails of protest with, “We got cushions at home,” and then she said to Sophie, “That house is a disaster, a big mess every day. But I don’t touch her garbage. I just clean up after the boys. And I put away Mr. Dean’s things, of course.”

  However, that wasn’t exactly true. That very morning there had been something of Mr. Dean’s that Milagros had not put away: a few papers she had come across, handwritten attempts at a letter to Sophie, three sheets in all. Each said “Sophie” at the top of the page, followed by a sentence or two that was scribbled out but still legible if you really tried, and Milagros figured that Valerie would. Milagros had found these efforts abandoned in plain sight in Adam’s trash can, lying uncrumpled on the top, where anyone could read them without even going to the trouble of smoothing them out. And somehow or other, they had wound up on the side table where Valerie usually set her wineglass after work. “Come on, boys! I said you can play that at home!” Milagros allowed herself a small smile. Her job had its satisfactions.

  * * *

  When Adam got home that evening after his talk with James, he found Valerie sitting as usual with a glass of wine in her hand and her work spread out on the chesterfield. The house was quiet.

  “Good evening,” she said in a controlled voice that sounded very nearly pleasant. Adam, at any rate, didn’t notice anything unusual about it. “Late again, my goodness,” she went on. “That makes two nights in a row. More walking in the rain alone?”

  There was a slight emphasis on the word “alone” that Adam also missed. “I had a drink with James tonight, actually,” he replied. “Are the kids upstairs?”

  “Fast asleep. Fed, bathed, read to, and tucked in.”

  “Oh, thanks, Valerie.” He sighed and dropped into a chair. “Thanks.”

  “It wasn’t part of our agreement, but I had no choice. You weren’t here to do it, and I have stacks of work to do, so… We need that nanny, Adam. Badly.”

  He grunted in that way men have, indicating neither agreement nor disagreement, but merely that they want the topic to go away.

  “So how was James—it was James you were with, wasn’t it?”

  “He’s fine. He’s a good fellow, James.”

  “If not terribly bright.”

  “He is bright, actually. And he’s a good, solid architect. A fine draftsman.”

  “Hmm. I guess his buildings don’t actually fall down.”

  “And he’s unpretentious.”

  “Yes. Well, I suppose he’d have to be, really.”

  Silence. “I think I’ll go soak in a hot bath,” Adam said.

  “Good idea.” She let him turn toward the stairs before adding, “But before you go, perhaps you could explain why you left these unfinished letters to your ex-wife lying around for me to find? I mean, I understand perfectly that it’s an act of nonverbal hostility—that’s no problem. My only question is, why?”

  “What?” He looked alarmed.

  “It’s the ineloquence of them that’s so pathetic, like a lovesick schoolboy—“‘Sophie’… ‘Sophie’… ‘Sophie,’” she read, waving the sheets in the air as she flipped through them. “‘I hardly know where to begin.…’ Well, that’s obvious. Maybe if you can’t tell her what’s on your mind, you’d better tell me. What’s going on, Adam?”

  “You have no right to read my private correspondence.”

  “Then why do you shove it under my nose?”

  “I’d hardly call it that!” Adam had not thought Valerie the type to root through wastepaper baskets.

  “What is this, Adam? An attempt at reconciliation?”

  “This is outrageous!”

  “Spit it out.”

  “If you must know, I was working on a reply to a letter I received from her.”

  “I see. How long have you been corresponding in secret?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s only written this once. But I have every right to correspond with her. She’s the mother of my children.”

  “But you’re not writing about the children, are you? Because if you were, you would ‘know where to begin’!”

  “Valerie, let me make it clear to you that I will never seek your permission to contact my wife. We have our children in common, and that means we will be in touch frequently and for the rest of our lives. That’s a simple fact. Your feelings about it are irrelevant.”

  “How you thrill me when you talk tough. Fact number one: This is not your wife. You left her for me, remember? Fact number two: It is to me that you owe allegiance, honesty, and loyalty. And writing love letters to another woman is none of the fucking above.”

  “It wasn’t a love letter.” Adam sat down and began to massage his temples. Occasionally Valerie’s bellicose quality, initially so attractive to him, wearied him deeply, and a vision of Sophie as he had first conceived of her would flash through his mind—that soothing, peaceable woman, her face to the prairie wind, apron strings and loose hair streaming behind her. Trite, of course, to view them like that: the hawk and the dove. And inaccurate! The new Sophie was nothing if not pugnacious. “She wrote me a… a venomous letter. I was quite taken aback. Astonishing, really, the sheer force of her hatred. I had no idea.”

  A little hope flickered in Valerie. “I guess she’s angry about my being here. Regrets leaving? Wants to come back?”

  “No, no.” Adam gave a bitter laugh. “Not at all. If anything, I think she’s grateful to me for leaving her.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Just fucking wonderful.”

  * * *

  “Imagine what a poor time of it women had back in the days when marriage meant ‘security.’ What could be less secure than marriage?
Imagine gambling everything, even the roof over your head and the food on your table, on your ability to get along with one man—and he with you. It’s insanely risky.”

  The park was covered with snow, already dirty, and the children were playing with plastic sleds, or trying to, the lack of hills proving a drawback. Sophie was sitting hunched against the cold, her hands tucked muff-style into her sleeves. She turned to look at Florence on the bench beside her, but the edge of her hood was in the way. “Brr!” was all she replied.

  “But you’re doing things right,” Florence continued. “You get a lover, great, you move him in. It goes sour, fine, you chuck him out. All the important elements of your life—your house, your kids, your work—are still in place and rock solid. Now, that’s what I call security. Always be in a position where you can change the lock on the front door. ‘Change the locks!’—that was my mother’s battle cry.”

  “Why? What was your father like?”

  “No idea. I’m a third-generation single mother. Fathers don’t run in our family.”

  “Then who was she changing the locks on?”

  “Boyfriends. She always used to tell my sister and me that if we ever lived with a man and he took to drink or violence or religion or whatever, we should change the locks right away. No fooling around with second chances and hollow promises.”

  “Is that what happened to your father? He came home one day and he was locked out?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him. Or want to.”

  “Isn’t it natural to be curious?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, I sprang full-blown from my mother’s loins. The same as Josie and Emerson sprang from mine.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know. It’s all very defensive, this image of being barricaded in, changing the locks.… It’s not really attractive to me. I still cling to the romantic idea of finding a traveling partner for the voyage through life”—she laughed self-consciously—“in spite of everything.”