Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  “No, that’s not it. Actually… well, actually that would be wonderful. In fact, I can’t think of anything I could use more.”

  “Okay, then!”

  “All right!”

  “Consider it done.”

  “It’s awfully good of you.”

  “No trouble, pal.”

  * * *

  Adam put in a good work session on Saturday and nearly caught up. When he got home in the evening, his eyes and neck muscles tired from the long hours at his desk, he was greeted by a scene of peaceful domesticity. James was reading the newspaper, and at his feet the boys were building a Lego tower. They jumped up and ran to their father, shouting, “¿Cómo te llamas, Papá? ¿Cómo te llamas?”

  “Ah… let’s see… Llama Adam? I’m afraid I did French at school.”

  “No, Daddy! That’s not it! You’re supposed to say, ‘Me llamo Adam.’ And I say, ‘Me llamo Matthew,’ and Hugo says—”

  “I want to say it! Me llamo Hugo.”

  “Why, this is marvelous, James. One day in your company and they’re bilingual.”

  James shrugged modestly. “Oh, I brought over some beginner’s Spanish CDs I had hanging around the house—just a last-minute idea. They seemed to enjoy it, though.”

  “Milagros speaks Spanish,” Matthew told the men. “In the car, when she’s mad at the other cars. She shouts!”

  “I’ll bet she does,” James said, laughing.

  “Daddy,” Hugo said, “we ate chili for lunch, like cowboys.”

  “There’s more if you’d like,” James said to Adam. “Hungry?”

  “Starving. James, I’m amazed—”

  But James raised his hand to interrupt Adam, because Matthew had grabbed a stick and started twirling it over his head. “Now, Matt, what did we decide about the sticks? Do you remember?”

  “Not in the house,” he said reluctantly.

  “That’s right. And so?”

  “Come on, Hugo!” Hugo took his stick, too, and they ran outside.

  “I’m very impressed,” Adam said, handing James a beer. “I’m discovering new facets of you—teacher, cook, disciplinarian.”

  “Oh, I know all about kids. I know what makes them tick.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. I used to be one.”

  Adam laughed and opened a beer for himself. “It should be like that, shouldn’t it? We should all understand children instinctively. Why do we lose that, I wonder?”

  A couple of hours later, the boys were asleep, James had reheated the chili for supper, Adam had made a fire in the fireplace, and they had switched to scotch. A ways into the bottle, they started grumbling about work. They discussed Valerie’s partnership and its probable consequences, which led to sketching contingency plans of their own. Adam confided that he sometimes wished he had just a one-man shop, helping people design the houses they wanted and could afford. “Let’s make it a two-man shop,” James said, “and I’ll work out affordable ways of running those houses on renewable energy.” Warmed by fire, whiskey, and friendship, they grew enthusiastic as they fleshed out ideas that seemed more and more feasible. Then, after the crescendo of excitement passed, there came a lull in the shop talk, and as the whiskey mellowed them, talk turned to more personal matters.

  James, who had been gazing into the flames, suddenly threw back his head and laughed. “I just remembered. I made a real hit with my new neighbor this morning. She just moved in—beautiful girl—anyway, she knocks on the door to ask if I can help her move some stuff, then have lunch with her, but I tell her I can’t, I’m baby-sitting for a friend of mine. A single father. She was so impressed! You should have seen her face. It was a study, all the emotions that passed across it. First it gets all soft and awed, like, ‘What a caring human being,’ and then it hardens into this other look: ‘This one’s mine!’ Man, this baby-sitting line is perfect for picking up women.”

  “Yes, but will they let you go again?”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  “Not interested in marriage?”

  “Not really. You know how the center of the pork chop is the best because there’s no fat and no bone and it comes away in a nice little circle? And how in the center of a watermelon there’s no seeds? You can just twirl your spoon around and come away with a perfect spoonful of melon and no pits? Well, that’s how I feel about the beginning of affairs. The beginning’s the best part—no bones, no fat, no seeds. I’d rather have a life of just pure beginnings, if I could. I mean, I’ll eat a whole pork chop if I have to, of course I will, but if there’s a choice, I’d rather just eat those circles. Come on, wouldn’t anybody? And in love affairs, once I get into the seedy part, it just seems more sensible to start on a fresh melon.” He sighed and looked at the flames for a moment before adding, “It’s a sign of gross immaturity, as any number of women I’ve dated would be pleased to tell you.”

  “I’m sure they would.”

  “So… ah… is that what happened with Valerie? You guys hit the seeds?”

  “And the gristle. And the tendons.”

  “Yep.”

  There was silence around the fire, and then James sought to lighten the atmosphere by the simple means of saying in an upbeat tone, “Oh, well!”

  Adam refilled their glasses a trifle unsteadily. “As you say… oh, well.” They drank in silence. Then, with irritation, Adam said, “I just didn’t understand before about the children. I simply didn’t know. How could I be expected to? It’s a well-known fact that other people’s children are boring, and Matthew and Hugo were somebody else’s—my wife’s! I wasn’t involved on a day-to-day basis. Do you know I could hardly tell them apart? They were just a sort of a… an amorphous underaged mass. I wasn’t—” He broke off. “Well, there’s a lot I understand now that I didn’t before. A lot.”

  James cleared his throat. “You want her back, don’t you? Sophie.”

  Adam didn’t answer.

  “Well then, get her back. You can do it. Woo her! You did it once, you can do it again.”

  “What do you want me to tell her? ‘Valerie’s gone. You can come back now’? Or how about ‘I didn’t get the partnership, my job’s hanging by a thread, so why not come back and support us all’? I can’t do it, James. And anyway, she’s… she’s involved with… someone.”

  “Oh. Oh, I didn’t know.” James nodded and took a drink. “Oh, right.”

  “A man,” Adam clarified, brooding. The knowledge that Sophie had a lover sickened him. The fact that he had also had one—that Sophie, in fact, had one only because he had had one—was immaterial. In one’s own case, the breaking of conjugal vows is the result of a thousand mitigating circumstances and the necessary expression of one’s more complex sexuality. In a spouse it’s depravity.

  “A guy, huh?” James nodded some more. Drank and sighed. Then, with renewed energy, “But so what? What does it matter? She can dump him, sure she can! Win her back, Adam! Tell her, ‘I love you, I fucked up, give me another chance’—women go for that stuff!”

  Adam raised his somewhat bleary eyes to James’s glowing ones and studied them for a moment, turning over in his mind the possibility of what his friend was suggesting. But the immensity of it crushed him. “No,” he said thickly. “No.”

  * * *

  It’s unusual for ideas conceived in drunkenness to sound good in sobriety, but that was the case with the plan to win Sophie back. In the light of day, Adam’s fears were paler and James’s encouragement sounded less like mindless cheerleading and more like common sense, to such an extent that Thursday afternoon Adam left the office early and stationed himself outside the shiatsu school, waiting for Sophie to appear. It was Milagros, looking hopeful, who had informed him of the time and place.

  Adam stood outside the building for some time, checking his watch occasionally, correcting his posture now and then, moving his lips in silent rehearsal, and looking generally, he trusted, at ease and inconspicuous. At last people began to spill out the door—
a pretty scruffy-looking bunch on the whole—among them Sophie, wearing her backpack, tossing her loose hair, and laughing, walking arm in arm with a tall girl. She’s like a child, he thought, with a painful wrench of longing. And the irony of it struck him: It had taken his leaving his wife to make her into the kind of woman he would never leave. She stopped short when she saw him, pulling L to a halt, and the smile drained from her face.

  “We need to talk,” he said briskly, to cover his nervousness. “We need to decide what to do about the children.”

  “Why is it ‘we’ again all of a sudden?”

  “Ohhh-kaaay, friends,” L said, disengaging her arm. “I guess I’ll be heading off.”

  “The boys ask about you all the time. They ask when you’re coming home. They need their mother.”

  “They have their mother!”

  L leaned forward and smiled. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Sophie. By-eee!”

  Sophie didn’t notice her friend’s departure. “I’ve been here for them all along. I’ve made sure of that! The children are fine. Don’t try to use them as leverage.”

  He opened his mouth to answer angrily but thought better of it. “Let’s not quarrel, Sophie. Let’s just try to concentrate on our job as parents. The boys don’t understand why you won’t come home now that Valerie’s gone. Matthew’s having nightmares. Last night he dreamed he was running, and getting longer and thinner until he was afraid he would break. Hugo wet the bed. He comes in to sleep with me most nights. I’m worried about them, Sophie. And I thought you might be, too.”

  “Well, of course I’m sorry to hear you’ve screwed up their lives again. But I don’t see that it’s my responsibility—or even in my power—to sort out your love life.”

  He looked at her helplessly. “Never mind, then. I shouldn’t have come.” As she watched him walk away, her feeling of triumph faded into uneasiness. She was half inclined to run and catch up with him and say something. But she couldn’t think what, so she just watched him go.

  * * *

  “I’m kind of sorry Valerie’s gone, to tell the truth,” Sophie announced to Florence and Jean, “although I never thought I’d say that.” She and Florence were sitting at the long oak table in the kitchen of the Life Boat, a homey room crammed with interesting artifacts like collages and lumpy pottery made by the children. Jean was at the sink scrubbing vegetables for supper. Upstairs, all the children were playing and Mercy was resting after her shiatsu session (work Water channels to dispel fears). Sophie was practicing on all three women of the household ( Jean: disperse Gallbladder and tonify Heart), and finding them remarkably receptive. She continued: “I’d gotten used to the idea of her, and the boys liked her, which is so important. Who knows what’ll happen now? A brand-new woman for them to deal with, maybe with kids of her own this time and all the complications of that. Or just a constant stream of strange women tramping through their house.”

  “You really think Adam’s up to that?” Florence asked.

  “I have no idea. Also—I don’t know how to explain this, but… if Adam left me for the love of his life, that’s one thing. But if he left me for a casual relationship that was going to end a few months later, that’s even more humiliating.”

  “Why look at it that way?” Florence said brightly. “Why not view it as conclusive proof that the guy’s relationship-challenged and have a good laugh at the bastard? I think it’s funny.”

  “Hmm. You know, it was strange seeing him—this serious man, dressed in a suit, standing there in the street, holding a briefcase—and to think, ‘This is my husband.’ He still is technically, on paper.”

  “On toilet paper,” Florence corrected. “Well, whatever comes next, new stepmothers or whatever, you’ll deal with that when it happens. No point thinking about it now. How’s Henry?”

  “Henry is in Seattle with his twelve-year-old child and her mother.”

  Florence’s mouth dropped open, and Jean spun around from the sink with a gasp. “Can you rewind that, please, and play it again?”

  So Sophie told the story, in a flat, weary tone. She had turned it all over so often in her head—wondering who was right and who was wrong and whether she could feel justified in being so angry or just guilty about being so uptight—that the whole question had lost first its sting, then its urgency, and finally even its interest. It was worn out, cold, and flat, so that’s how she told it, winding up, “I just don’t have the energy anymore to wonder what he’s doing, or if he’s coming back, or anything else.” She lifted her arm and let it drop again. “I’m just not up to the old ‘We’re all free spirits’ and ‘No one owns anyone’ stuff. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like my lovers to grab surprise children out of a hat, complete with mothers that they do or do not sleep with, according to how they feel. Maybe it’s just me.”

  “No one owns anyone, Sophie, all the same,” Jean said from the sink. “He’s right about that. A relationship based on exclusivity and possessiveness will never allow the freedom to explore life and grow in consequence.”

  “Oh, really? Well. That’s something to think about, certainly.”

  Jean laughed and pulled out the stopper, making the sink gurgle while she peeled off the rubber gloves she always wore to wash dishes. The brand name of these made-in-China gloves was Chrysanthemum Elite, and they were a great joke in the Life Boat.

  “I’m sorry, Jean,” Sophie said. “What you’re saying may be true—probably is true—but to me it’s just words. A string of syllables.”

  “At least he didn’t lie,” Florence pointed out. “He never said he didn’t have a kid. He just didn’t mention her until there was a good reason to, and then you blew up at him. I think I’m on his side here, strange to say.”

  “Fine.” Sophie waved her hand carelessly. “Be on his side. You’re probably right, both of you. I just don’t see the point of floating through life with a casual partner, taking pleasure where you find it, no promises, no game plan. It all seems pointless to me. Vacuous.”

  But Florence shook her finger in warning. “Watch out for promises. Mercy says the scariest words she ever heard were ‘I will love you forever.’ He’s back in St. John, but she still gets up at night to double-check that the doors are locked.”

  “Human relations can’t be pinned down and labeled like butterfly specimens,” Jean said. “You can define a moment in a relationship, but that’s all, and by the time that moment’s defined, it’s already in the past. You can’t even pin down ‘now,’ much less anything to come. And that’s not an opinion, Sophie, that’s a fact.” Jean had been shaking the Chrysanthemum Elites for emphasis as she spoke. Mesmerized, Sophie’s eyes followed the flapping rubber gloves.

  “I guess I’m not very sophisticated,” she managed to say at last.

  * * *

  That night Sophie had a marvelous dream. She was in Seattle, or what was supposed to be Seattle, although it looked more like Egypt, and all the street signs were in Arabic. Henry was there, laughing and asking, “Have you got the switch?” His eyes were shining, his presence like a strong light. She felt piercing love for him. A girl with long black braids threw herself into Sophie’s arms. “Mama!” Sophie stared into the dark, beaming face in confusion until realization flooded her. This was her own darling daughter! The daughter she’d had years ago with Henry! How could she have forgotten her? “Oh, my sweetheart, my darling girl!” Sophie woke up filled with joy, quickly followed by an aching sense of loss.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand it,” James said, shaking his head. “I just don’t understand it. You go to her, cap in hand, you pour out your heart, and all she says is ‘Fuck off’?”

  “More or less,” Adam said. “She doesn’t actually say ‘fuck.’” Then he remembered. “Or rather, she didn’t used to. Now…” He shook his head.

  “Let me understand this. You told her how much you love her, you begged her for a second chance, you promised you wouldn’t stray again, so help you God—and it had no
effect whatsoever?”

  “Actually, we talked more about the children.”

  James groaned.

  “I told her the boys missed her—”

  “You didn’t!”

  “But it just sounded like blackmail. The whole thing was a mistake. I should never have gone. I’ve made a complete ass of myself.”

  “She must be a real tough nut. Most women can’t resist a guy on his knees. If only to drive their knee into his nose.”

  Adam lowered his eyes and began to fiddle with a pencil.

  “Hey, wait just a minute here,” James said. “You did tell her you loved her, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t that sort of moment.”

  “Oh, no? Oh, no? You want your wife back, but that’s not the moment to tell her you love her?”

  “I told her Matthew was having nightmares.”

  “Hey, that’s romantic! Is that the only reason you want her back—for the kids?”

  Adam frowned at the pencil.

  “Adam, do you love her or not? If I can’t tell, and I’m your friend, how is she supposed to know, especially after all the shit you’ve pulled? No wonder she tells you to fuck off, buddy—I would, too. You have to learn to express yourself, say things out loud. Like this, look.” Odette passed the glass door and glanced in just as James was saying with all the sincerity he wished Adam had been capable of, “I love you. And I want you back.” Her eyes bulged and she shot down the hall bursting with the news. “Now, go back and do it again,” James said. “And this time do it right.”

  “I’m afraid amateur theatricals are not in my line.”

  “It’s not amateur theatricals when you mean it.”

  * * *

  Later that morning Adam crossed Valerie in the hall. She lowered her eyes and might have walked on without speaking, but he said, “I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you.”

  “I was the best person for the job. They needed someone brave and decisive.”