The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (17 page)

When she started taking questions, I could tell something was different about her after all. She sounded more polite, more grown-up, but also tired and nervous. She’d never been like that when I knew her—I’d always liked how she said what she wanted without worrying about how it came off. She was fidgety, too—she kept scratching her arm through her dress. Someone asked what her favorite recent movie was, and she said
Aero-Man
, which I thought was funny because I hadn’t pegged her for a superhero fan.

“The way Veronica Dias plays the Parachutist,” she explains. “You’d think she’d be really tough, and she is, but she also looks so sad. Like it’s lonely to be a superhero.”

The audience laughed. I was proud of her then; maybe she knew how to work a crowd after all.

Then a woman asked, “Is it true this movie was based on your husband’s mother?”

Sophie looked behind her like maybe someone else was going to step up and answer the question. When no one did, she said, “Most of it, yes.”

“Did he work with you on this script?” the same woman asked.

“No,” Sophie said. “I wrote it on my own.”

“How does he feel about the movie?” a man in a weird, old-timey black hat asked.

Even from where I stood at the very back, I saw her face change—she looked scared and upset like she had when we talked that last time, thirteen years before. I wanted to tell the guy in the hat to shut
up, but I also wanted to hear what she said. Sophie was quiet for a minute. She scratched her arm and looked from side to side of the theater. Finally she said, “I guess you can’t really know how someone feels about something like that, can you? I mean, you can ask them, but they might not say. Or they might say one thing and then change their mind, but by then it’s too late to do anything about it.”

Hands were shooting up all over the room.

“Wasn’t
Marianne
based on Allison Mieskowski?”

Sophie bowed her head for a second. “That’s something I wouldn’t want to talk about without Allison here.”

“Do you ever feel guilty about using the people in your life as material?”

This one came from a man, too. I lifted up on my good leg to see him—scrawny, an ugly patchy beard. I thought about taking him outside and beating him up. I hadn’t hit anyone since eighth grade but I thought about punching him in the face. Sophie looked so weak and small then; she looked like she needed someone to hold her up. She lowered her head again, and I was worried she was going to cry. When she lifted it her face was different, harder.

“I don’t understand any of the words in that sentence. ‘Guilty’—I know what that means, but I don’t understand the point of it. And ‘use’—people say that like it’s so awful, but it’s just when you make something into something else, and people do that every day. And ‘material’—that’s like saying there’s some defined thing you have that you make movies out of, like clay or something, and everything else you leave out. Maybe some people make movies that way, but their movies are shit.”

Everyone was talking then, everyone’s hands were in the air, some people were just shouting questions out, but I didn’t want Sophie to
have to answer any of them. I was proud of her, and I thought she should have a rest from these people who didn’t know her. I raised my hand. I couldn’t tell if she recognized me, but I was tall and in the back and so she pointed at me, and I had that feeling of relief again, like finally I was here.

“I don’t usually get very emotional about movies,” I said. My voice sounded so loud in the theater. I was afraid of sounding stupid, so I raced through. “But when I watch your movies I do have really deep feelings. I’m just wondering how you do that.”

Sophie nodded. She didn’t smile, but she gave me that plain, serious look I remembered. I felt my heart race.

“For me, when people see my movies, it’s kind of like a translation. I put the images together, and when people see them, sometimes it translates into a feeling. Then they tell me about it, and I know a little bit more about them, and about the movie, too. But I have to start with the shots and scenes and let the emotions come if they can. I don’t understand them well enough to plan them.”

I wasn’t fully satisfied when she stopped talking—I didn’t really buy that she didn’t understand other people’s feelings, even though she’d said that same thing to me when we were twenty. It sounded too much like the kind of thing I would’ve said to some girl in college when she wanted to know why I hadn’t called her. But I knew we could talk more about it—I was sweating under my arms, thinking about how soon I’d be sitting right across from her.

“I think that’s all we have time for,” said the man who’d introduced her, and then I started shoving my way to the front. A bunch of reporters were already up there, asking Sophie more questions. She was tired again. I started to get anxious, waiting there, and I
saw her turn like she was going to walk off backstage, away from me. I panicked.

“Sophie!” I called out.

All the reporters looked at me like I was crazy, and Sophie turned around all startled, like I’d slapped her.

“It’s Daniel,” I said. My face was hot. “We were supposed to have coffee.”

She looked stunned for a minute, then tired again.

“That’s right,” she said. “Okay.”

We walked out together, not touching or talking. We hadn’t hugged. I realized I’d never walked with her anywhere. She walked fast, her head down against the wind. She had on one of those expensive coats that don’t look very warm. I had to struggle to keep up, but I liked that she didn’t say anything about the cane. We found a coffee shop and she went in without saying anything to me. I followed her.

We both got coffee and she poured half of hers out and filled the cup back up with milk and sugar. When we sat down she wrapped both her hands around the cup. They were dry and cracked, her nails all bitten down. She looked at me over the lid.

“When you knew me,” she asked, “did you think I would ever get married?”

I was so unprepared for the question that all I said was, “What?”

She kept staring at me. “Did you think I would ever get married?”

I thought about it. When I’d wanted her to be my girlfriend, I’d daydreamed about walking her to class, about taking her on a date downtown where she’d wear a fancy dress. I’d thought, for some
reason, about going to a cabin in the woods with her, holding the sides of her waist while she looked out the window. But I’d never thought about marrying her, and it was true that when I thought back to how she was then, how she never called me or wanted more from me, and how easy it was for her to leave, I was surprised she’d been able to share her life with someone else.

“I guess not,” I said. “You seemed pretty independent.”

She nodded at me, fast and hard, like Emma sometimes did when I guessed the right answer to a riddle.

“I didn’t think so either. I never thought I would get married. And now here I am. I’ve been married for three years.”

I wanted her to tell me something was wrong in her marriage—I was excited to think I could be the person she told that secret to, something she had to hide from all the reporters and critics and jerks in stupid hats who wanted to know about her and her life. I leaned forward. I could smell her—it reminded me of her messy bed and the first time we lay there and the last time, when she pinned me down like I was nothing and I let her, or made believe I let her. She was small but the longer we were together, the stronger she got.

“Do you like being married?” I asked her.

“Do you?” she asked.

That question felt like cold water. I moved back, away from her. I’d been trying not to think about Lauren. But the truth was I did like being married. I’d been afraid of it for all the usual reasons—I was worried I’d miss the feeling of being in bed with a new girl, the excitement of having her want me. But instead I liked the feeling of knowing who I’d be lying down with, what she thought of me, how to make her laugh. I used to get this cramping feeling in the back of my neck at the bar in college, looking at all the girls and wondering
which of them would want to go home with me, and one morning a few weeks before Emma was born, I realized I hadn’t felt it in years. There was no question that marriage—which meant Lauren, her face and her voice and the way she sighed when she was mad but she was letting me know it would be okay—was good for me, and knowing that made me feel sick to be sitting in a coffee shop with a woman I’d loved over ten years before, who I wanted to talk to about things I couldn’t tell my wife. But I didn’t get up.

“Yes,” I said. “I love it.”

She nodded. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed. I wanted her to think we had things in common.

“I mean, it’s really hard sometimes—” I started, but she interrupted me.

“That makes sense. You would be good at being married. But I’m just not good at it.”

I thought about what she’d said to me about love back in college and all the things I’d heard or read her say about feelings since then. I got excited—I could help her. She had a problem, and because I’d known her for so long and followed her so closely, I could solve it.

“I don’t think you’re bad at it,” I said. “I think you’re just different from other people. Other people talk about their feelings, but you actually show them, with your movies. And maybe that’s even better.”

She was shaking her head, but I kept going.

“I’ve thought about this. Some people, regular people like me, we play by the rules. We act a certain way, we say what we’re supposed to say. But if everybody was like that, the world would be a pretty boring place. That’s why there are people like you, who shake things up a little bit. And maybe it’s not always easy for the people around you, but overall you make the world better for everyone.”

She was shaking her head still. Now she was smiling too, but in a sad way.

“I used to think that,” she said. “I used to think I was special and that was why I seemed to fuck everything up all the time. But now I know it’s just because I’m not a very good person.”

When she said that I almost sobbed. For the first time I really said to myself what I’d been thinking for months, that I was counting on her to make me better. And now I knew she was feeling just the way I was feeling, maybe worse.

“That’s a terrible thing to say about yourself,” I told her.

She shrugged. “I call ’em like I see ’em,” she said. The phrase sounded weird, like she’d learned it from TV. She looked miserable, but she wasn’t crying. She looked like people look when they’ve cried all they can and they still don’t feel any better.

“I think you’re a great person,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah?” she asked. Her voice was almost mean. “What possible evidence could you have for that? What have I ever done for you?”

I wanted to tell her that I thought she might know me better than anyone. But I knew that wouldn’t be enough. I needed something specific. And then I thought of a day.

It was October, after Sophie started filming me but before we ever got together. I’d hurt my knee the week before—it was just a twinge, but the ACL was starting to tear, and the next season it would tear all the way, and I’d have to quit basketball forever. I didn’t know that yet, but I was anxious about the knee anyway—I wasn’t used to anything going wrong with my body. CeCe was acting weird, too—she was clinging to me when I tried to get out of bed in the morning, and
she kept talking about friends of hers who were getting engaged. We were having an Indian summer—the days were windy and warm, and at night the moon was fat and orange. I felt itchy under my clothes—I felt like something was about to happen, and I wasn’t sure if it was bad or good.

One day I felt like I had to get outside. We didn’t have practice—I should’ve gone to the gym to lift weights, but I was too restless to sit down. Instead I went to the park. It was midafternoon on a weekday, and there was nobody around.

When I was a kid I had a way I liked to let off steam. I’d go out in the field behind the house, all the way till it met the trees and no one could see me, and I’d spin around as fast as I could. I’d spin until I couldn’t stand up anymore, and then I’d fall to the ground and feel it pitch and roll under me like a ship. And then I’d get up and do it again. Finally I’d go back to the house all red-faced and sweating, and if anyone asked what I’d been up to I’d just say, “Playing.” The game was kind of like a pure version of basketball, just moving around for the excitement of it.

The truth was I hadn’t completely stopped the game when I started college. I never told anybody, obviously, but sometimes when the park was deserted I still played it. So that day, when I found the park empty and covered in dry leaves, I started to spin. All the red and brown October colors turned to stripes, and when I let myself fall, the ground humped up to meet me like a living thing. It’d been so long since I’d been just happy that I’d forgotten how it felt—even when I was drunk I never felt that loose and excited at the same time. At some point I kind of started yelling—not words, just sounds that welled up inside my body until I couldn’t help but let them out.
I’d stopped spinning and was just yelling, and maybe jumping a little, and waving my arms, when I saw some movement in the trees up by the swing set. It was Sophie, with her camera.

I charged her like a dog.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I screamed at her. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

The air was getting cold finally and she was only wearing a light fall jacket. She was shivering a little. She looked so small to me; I hadn’t realized how small.

“I’m sorry,” she said in that plain voice. “You looked really happy.”

And the tension went out of my muscles, and my hands unfisted, and it seemed ridiculous to be angry on that pretty day, the last one we’d have for months, because somebody thought my happiness was important enough to videotape.

S
OPHIE SMILED
when I finished that story.

“I remember that,” she said. “You were so mad, and I didn’t understand. I was pretty dense back then.”

“No,” I said, “I’m grateful.”