The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (13 page)

“I can’t imagine it,” I said to Sophie.

Her eyes were shut. “I can,” she said, and then she smiled in a way that wasn’t very happy but was completely and totally sincere.

And when people ask me why I married her that September, even though I’d only known her for three months and I knew it wouldn’t last, I tell them that a life is a heavy burden and imagine if someone just carried it for you for a while, just picked it up and carried it.

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Daniel

IN A WAY I GUESS I FORGOT ABOUT SOPHIE. IT’S TRUE THAT I
didn’t think about her much for a long time—there were years in there when her name probably didn’t cross my mind at all. But it wasn’t the kind of forgetting where you lose something forever, like the capitals of all the countries in South America, where if you want to know it again you’ve got to relearn it from scratch. It was the kind where something’s just hidden below the surface a little bit, but it’s there. I know that because in 2008 her movie
Marianne
came on the indie-movie channel, and my wife, Lauren, and I watched it. We were trying a lot of new things then. Lauren liked the movie and thought it was beautiful but hard to understand. I told her I liked it too, but really it got under my skin. It wasn’t the plot so much as the way everything looked, all closed up and closed in, like when Marianne was cooped up with her family and she couldn’t get a breath of fresh air or enough space to lie down safe in, even. And the only time you get a break is at the very end, when she stabs Bean and
then you see the whole empty parking lot and the trees and the street, nobody on it anywhere.

That feeling stuck with me and bothered me, so finally I looked up the movie on the Internet, and that’s when I recognized Sophie’s name. At first I was just so surprised I had to tell somebody, so I called Lauren in.

“Look,” I said, “we went to school with her.”

Lauren didn’t remember. “How did we know her?” she asked.

“She was that kind of alternative girl with the camera. She’s a director now.”

Lauren looked at me funny. “I don’t remember anybody with a camera,” she said.

That’s when I remembered that Lauren wouldn’t have known Sophie, that the only way I knew her was because she made that movie about me and then we dated—or hooked up, really—for a couple of weeks our junior year, before I ever dated Lauren. And I couldn’t really tell Lauren that, because I was cheating on CeCe at the time. I treated CeCe like shit, I’ll admit it; I went behind her back with so many other girls I can’t even remember them all now. I kept telling myself I would stop, but every time there was a new reason to keep going, mostly that CeCe would never find out, and so it would be like it hadn’t happened, except that she did, and it did. I’d never cheated on Lauren in seven years of marriage, and I’d managed to keep her from knowing about that side of me. So I just said, “She had a crush on me when we were juniors.”

“Yeah?” Lauren asked. “Did you like her back?”

“No,” I said quickly, and it wasn’t completely a lie—at first I hadn’t liked Sophie. She wore weird clothes and she wasn’t pretty, or at least
not the kind of pretty I liked back then, the kind CeCe was and Lauren was and is. And believe it or not, I didn’t really like attention. Don’t get me wrong—I liked being on the court, people cheering, girls flirting with me. But someone asking me questions about myself, with a camera right there—I didn’t want that. I didn’t want her listening to me so closely, staring at me with her big eyes. I did like her later, more than I knew what to do with, but I didn’t tell Lauren that.

“She was pretty weird,” I said instead.

“Like her movie,” said Lauren, and I laughed and nodded, but I was thinking about the other movie, the one she made about me. I’d never seen it, and now I wished I had. I wanted to know how I came off.

Lauren went to bed early that night. We had sex first—after the accident I’d been afraid she wouldn’t want to anymore, but as soon as I was off the hardest painkillers she started reaching for me, maybe to prove to both of us that she could. I knew she was probably scared of my left leg, of the stump below the knee that still freaked me out every morning when I got out of bed. She never looked at it or touched it, but I didn’t want her to anyway. I was glad she’d still touch the rest of me. But I sometimes felt like I was far away when we had sex, like I couldn’t feel it the way I used to. That night I couldn’t go to sleep, so I stayed up at the computer reading sports blogs.

It was after two a.m. when I had the idea to e-mail Sophie. I wasn’t drunk—I never drank much, especially after the accident—but I was in that weird kind of mood you get sometimes late at night, like the world isn’t real and nothing you do matters. Once I started
Googling her it was easy to find her website. It had a still from the movie—Marianne looking out the bus window at the beginning—and when I clicked through to the “About” page I saw a picture of Sophie. She was wearing a man’s suit, and her hair was slicked back from her forehead, but her face was just like I remembered: chin up, daring you to fuck with her. That’s how she looked at school when I started liking her, how I started to get curious. The second and third and fourth time she came around, after I told her I didn’t want her and I never would, she had that face—shoving that chin at me, those eyes. She reminded me of a kid I once beat up in the fourth grade. I wasn’t a bad kid, but sometimes something bad would get into me. I’d see a kid who was so little and scrawny and I’d just get this rage, this urge. And this kid Eldon was always asking for it, sitting in my seat on the bus, refusing to move. The first time I waited until we were off the bus and I gave him a wedgie in front of everyone. While they laughed, his little face got all red and angry, but he didn’t cry. The next day he was back in that spot again like nothing had happened, so I shoved him into the big pothole in front of the school, full of motor oil and freezing water. The third time I was starting to worry that he was making me look like an idiot, so I found him during recess, in the cafeteria, and punched him twice in the stomach and kicked him in the nuts. I told him if he ever sat in my seat again it would be like that, but twice as bad. It worked—after that he never sat in my seat again. But he did something that was almost worse—he started being really nice to me. He always said hi to me in the hall, asked me how I was doing, offered me pieces of his fruit roll-up—and always with that expression, head up, eyes wide, like I hadn’t really beaten him at all. It got so I was kind of scared of him, and then at the end of the year his family moved
and I never saw him again. But he stuck with me, and when Sophie kept coming around acting like I hadn’t just treated her like shit, I thought of him.

“Sophie Stark is the writer and director of the film
Marianne
,”
her bio said.
“She is the recipient of a James Award and a Cleveland First Feature Fellowship. She is currently at work on her second feature. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the musician Jacob O’Hare.”

I looked him up on Google Images. He looked uglier than I expected, kind of overweight with a stupid beard. I couldn’t find any pictures of them together, so I couldn’t see what they looked like—if they loved each other, if they held hands, if they had that sort of surprised expression I sometimes saw in photos of Lauren and me, like we’d been dropped off suddenly in a place we’d never been.

The site didn’t list an e-mail for Sophie, just a contact form with big white boxes. I figured she probably didn’t even read what people wrote in there—she probably got a lot of crazies who thought her movie explained everything about them—and maybe that’s why I started typing instead of getting embarrassed and going to bed.

Hi Sophie
,

How’s it going. I’m the guy you made a movie about back in junior year, Daniel Vollker. I want to let you know that I saw “Marianne” last weekend, and I didn’t even know it was by you. Now I do obviously. I thought it was really interesting, but I didn’t understand why Marianne didn’t change her name when she went to New York and why she put back the hair dye in the store, unless she wanted to be found
.

Anyway I know you’re really busy but if you have a chance to
write back sometime I’d love to hear what you’re up to and what your new movie is about, if you’re allowed to talk about it
.

Talk soon (maybe),
Daniel

Every day that next week I got up excited, hoping I’d hear from her. I’d even get excited whenever I got a mass e-mail from Sophia Clayburn, my boss’s boss, because for a second I thought it might be her. I was checking a lot of e-mail then, because I still wasn’t back at work, so it was easy to get kind of obsessed. It was a weird feeling—it had been a long time since I’d really had something to wait for.

I was at the physical therapy clinic when I saw Sophie on TV. They had one up above the leg machine, and I was watching it to distract myself from how I had to wear a plastic leg with a fake shoe for the rest of my life and I didn’t even know how to use it yet.

“I know that lady,” I said to Phil.

Phil was the guy who worked with me. I didn’t like him because he was sort of spacey and talked about positive energy a lot, and because he was clearly in way better shape than I had been even when I had two legs. Since I hurt my knee and had to quit basketball I hadn’t really felt like working out; going to the gym just wasn’t the same as playing.

“Who?” he asked, and then he looked at the door to see if someone had come in, which made me like him even less.

“No, on the TV. That director. I know her.”

She was getting interviewed on some cable channel, but there was no sound, so I had to read what she was saying on the captions.

I MAKE MOVIES BECAUSE I CAN’T
—, the caption said, but it was messed up like they always are, and even though her mouth kept moving, there were no more words. I didn’t remember Sophie ever explaining why she wanted to make movies, but then she didn’t say much about herself in the time we were together. Now I wished I’d asked more questions.

Phil was watching the TV now.

“You know her?” he asked.

“She was my girlfriend in college,” I said.

Immediately when I said it I imagined what it would’ve been like if it had been true. One thing I know about Lauren, and about anyone you meet when you’re pretty young and manage to love and stay with, is that they affect the kind of person you become. Lauren definitely made me a better man—harder-working, more humble, better at thinking about other people. I wondered what kind of a man I would’ve turned into if I’d been with Sophie in those early years instead. It was like trying to imagine having different parents—everything goes blank, with a question mark where your face should be. I did remember that Sophie was always looking at me—she’d stare not just when I took my shirt off but when I was doing normal, boring things like tying my shoes. It was like she recognized something great in me, and maybe if we’d stayed together, that thing would’ve come out.

“Huh,” Phil said, like he wasn’t impressed. That made me angry, even though I’d just lied to him.

“She’s really famous now,” I said. “She might win an Oscar.”

“Yeah?” he asked. “You still in touch?”

“We e-mail,” I said.

.   .   .

T
HAT NIGHT
I wrote Sophie again:

I know you probably don’t have a lot of time for e-mail but I realize I didn’t tell you that much about myself last time, so I thought I’d fill you in. I did not go on to become a professional basketball player, which maybe will not surprise you haha. Instead I got my master’s degree in communications and now I work for a company that makes farm equipment. I know that probably sounds boring to you but I do get to travel and talk to farmers all over the Midwest. I’m not working right now because I was injured in a car accident, but I’m looking forward to getting back to work soon
.

I have a wonderful wife (Lauren) and a beautiful daughter (Emma) who is five and shaping up to be a big soccer star I think. They have been great helping me recover from the accident and are my biggest joy in life. Well that’s pretty much all the important stuff about me. If you get a chance, I’d love to hear how you’re doing and if you remember the good times we had, like when you showed me your photo collection. I still think about those photos all the time
.

Talk soon, I hope,
Daniel

Sophie showed me those photos the first time I ever went to her apartment. She’d been stalking me with her camera for weeks by that point, and then she just stopped all of a sudden. I figured she was probably playing hard to get—I’d had some girls freeze me out
like that before, just to get me to call them—but after a couple of days I really missed her. I caught myself getting excited when I saw her out of the corner of my eye, then getting disappointed when it was some more normal girl. I found out where she lived from this girl Andrea I knew who dated her brother. When I knocked on her door I thought she wouldn’t be there—I was sort of surprised she even lived in an apartment at all. I always imagined her in a weird old house or a tent or something. But she answered, and she looked surprised and maybe sort of annoyed to see me, but when I asked if I could come in, she said okay.

Her room looked like the kind of nest my sister’s hamster used to make out of shredded newspaper. Her bed was covered in clothes—these weird dresses she used to wear and jeans and T-shirts and some plain white panties that looked like a little girl’s. There were papers and old food wrappers and magazines with the pages torn out all over the floor, except for a narrow little path to the bed. The only thing that wasn’t totally buried in crap was the desk, which had some kind of a diagram or comic strip on it and nothing else. As soon as I came in, Sophie shoved it in a drawer.

“I haven’t seen you around lately,” I said. I was trying to sound casual.

“The movie’s finished,” she said.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t come say hi sometimes,” I told her.

“That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” she said. She ran a hand over her head—her hair was just starting to grow back in. I’d heard what had happened to her at the party, or part of it anyway—a couple of the guys had told me they played a trick on her by shaving her head. I didn’t find out CeCe was in on it till much later; I guess they were covering for her. I told them I thought it was a shitty thing to
do, but they just said it was a joke and what, did I
like
Sophie or something? I let it go. I used to put up with people being dicks then; we all did. I’m not proud of it.