The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (2 page)

Bean and I didn’t avoid each other after he raped me. Instead there was a weird energy between us, a brightness. We laughed too hard at each other’s jokes and argued loudly over nothing and ambushed each other from behind with big bear hugs. Some of my other friends asked me if we’d started sleeping together. And then we did.

At first I thought it was a way to erase what had happened. I thought that making it okay to have sex with him now would reach back in time and make it okay then. It didn’t, and once I knew it wouldn’t, the sex got violent. I banged my body against him, I bit his chest, I dug my nails into his back until he bled. He was rough with me too—he’d hold me down, grab big handfuls of my hair and yank my head straight back. It reminded me of the first time and I got scared, but I never told him to stop. I thought everything we did was fair somehow—in some way through this a score would be settled. Afterward we didn’t hold each other. We lay side by side sweating and panting, like boxers.

By the time graduation rolled around I started to worry I’d do something to really hurt Bean—gouge his eyes with my thumbnails while he fucked me, tear his lips off with my teeth. Something scary was awake in me and I wanted to put it back to sleep. I bought a bus ticket to New York with money I stole from my stepdad’s wallet over the course of a month, and I told my fourteen-year-old sister where I was going and that she was in charge now. Then I saw Bean one last time.

I don’t know why I told him where I was going. I know I wanted
to get away from him—that night in bed my body was itching to leave. But also our fucking was less angry than usual, almost tender, and I came, and afterward he held me and I felt not peace but some kind of stillness. The next day I left town for good.

My first days in New York were like a bad dream. I moved into a basement apartment with no floor, just dirt under our feet, which my three roommates thought was funny. They were an NYU student whose parents had supposedly cut him off but still called every day demanding to talk to him; a part-time art restorer named Lady; and a forty-year-old guy named Charles who did odd jobs and might’ve been a drug dealer, but not a very good one, because he never had any money. Charles had adopted a cat with a broken jaw but he couldn’t afford to take her to the vet, so he mashed her food up in water into a runny paste, some of which always leaked out of her mouth as she ate and for a while afterward, so when she sat on your lap you ended up with little drops of spit and mashed cat food on your pants. No one I knew back home lived like that, not even the Mastersons, whose mom was schizophrenic and made them wear surgical masks to school every day to keep the chemicals out. I worked at a diner until my manager started stealing my tips, and then as a bar waitress until a customer tried to follow me home, and then at a bodega where I had to stay because I had no ideas left, even though the owner always pressed his crotch against my ass when he walked behind me and yelled at me for not selling expired food. I felt like I’d come to a place for people who didn’t know how to be people, and if I was there I must not really know how to be a person either.

After a couple of weeks I started expecting Bean to call. I hadn’t given him my phone number but my sister had it—he could easily ask her. At first I just wanted him to call me up and talk to me like
nothing had happened, like he was just an old friend reminding me where I came from, that I’d once had a real floor and a dog instead of a fucked-up cat and a life that, even if it wasn’t that good or that happy, still made a little bit of sense. When it had been a month and still he hadn’t called, I started wanting him to say he missed me. I wanted him to tell me that he’d been stupid to let me go, that he wanted to see me again and he thought we could work things out. I felt terrible for the whole two months or so that I thought this way, and at the same time I imagined myself saying I missed him too, and yes, and yes, and yes.

And then I started wanting him to apologize. By this time I’d managed to get a job waiting tables at a decent place in Williamsburg, and I was making enough money to move to the house with Irina, which was also dirty and crowded and full of cats, but at least it had real floors. I started to feel a little bit more in charge of my life, and I found myself standing on the subway platform or walking down Atlantic Avenue or carrying a slice of birthday cake to a customer, shielding the candle’s little flame with my hand, and suddenly wishing, as hard as I’d ever wished for anything in my life, that Bean would say he was sorry. I didn’t want him to explain, I didn’t want him to tell me he loved me or he missed me or he wished things were different—I just wanted him to say those two words and never talk to me again.

The night I told the story it had been almost two years since I’d left Burnsville, and I still hadn’t heard from him. It had gotten weaker, but I still had the feeling that he had something of mine that he needed to give back, and that I couldn’t rest until I had it.

Maybe that’s why I told the story about Bean that night, instead of one of the others I could’ve told—he still had a hold on me, and my
mom and dad and my sisters and my stepdad didn’t, or at least I thought they didn’t at the time. But I wasn’t about to tell the real story and have everybody know my business, and I guess I thought I could fool people—usually Brooklyn kids would believe anything you told them about West Virginia. I hadn’t expected this little stranger standing in front of me, acting like she knew something about my life.

“When people lie about their past,” she said, “they push their chests out and stand up straight, like someone’s going to challenge them.”

“And I was doing that?”

She nodded. “But some of it was true,” she went on, “because sometimes your whole body relaxed, like you knew the story in your sleep.”

I was annoyed with her for pegging me so well. I told all kinds of little lies about my life to Barber and Irina, to people I met, making my family and my town sound better or worse than they really were depending on the situation. I’d always gotten away with it, and I was happy to be able to make my own past and have people accept it. But I sometimes hoped somebody would catch me out, so I could feel like they really knew me. And the first person to do it was a girl who didn’t know me at all.

“What are you,” I asked, “some kind of psychologist?”

“I make movies about people,” she said, “and I’d like you to be in one.”

I thought she was fucking with me then. The arty kids I knew put on shows in crappy bars or made websites with a few cartoons on them—no one made movies. Either it was a joke, I figured, or she was one of those people who always had a crazy plan and never followed through. Plus Barber came back just then with a beer for me
and wound his arm all the way around my back so he could touch the side of my left breast.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be in your movie, whatever.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ll come by next week.”

I
DIDN’T KNOW HER NAME
, and I hadn’t told her where I lived, and I figured I’d never see her again. But there she was the following Monday, at my door.

“I’m Sophie,” she said, and sat down on my bed without asking.

She kicked off her sneakers—her feet underneath were sockless, long and thin and graceful. She smelled good, like the dark valleys back home, cool even in the summer and full of ferns.

“We start shooting in three weeks,” she said. “I need to raise a little more money, but I already know where I’m going to get it.”

“Okay,” I said. I started to take her a little more seriously. My friends with their shows and websites rarely talked about raising money.

“You’re going to star, so you need to be there pretty much every day.”

“Hold on,” I said. Over the weekend Barber had told me that we needed to have an open relationship, because he and the bass player of his band, a tall blond girl named Victoria, needed to have sex.

“It’s not even about the physical,” he said. “She’s just such an amazing artist.”

I didn’t care that much about the open relationship—I hadn’t really been aware we were in a relationship at all. But I was jealous that he was so impressed with her; after my story I’d quickly gone back to being unimpressive.

“I’m not an actress,” I told Sophie. “I can’t star in a movie.”

She waved her hand in the air like she was swatting away a fly.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re the one I want.”

She was staring at me. She reminded me of the boys I liked in high school, the pretty, intense boys with their fake swagger, their soft mouths. They wrote bad songs and sang them well, and their girlfriends talked lovingly about how fucked up they were, how they should’ve been born in another place, another time. They always had girlfriends; those had never been the boys who liked me.

“What’s the movie about?” I asked.

“It’s about your story,” she said.

I was flattered, but I was worried again—I figured no real director makes a movie after hearing a ten-minute lie from someone she’s never met. And practically speaking, that meant she probably didn’t even have a script yet. Maybe this was all a joke, a way to fuck with me by making me think I was important.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “That’s not how people make movies.”

She shrugged. “It’s how I do,” she said. “Movies are how I get to know people.”

I laughed; she sounded so cocky. “How’s that working?” I asked.

“Pretty well so far.”

“For you or the people in the movies?” I asked.

“Both,” she said.

After that she came over every day so we could work on the script. Always my place, never hers—I don’t even know where she lived that year. She always sat close to me on my bed, but I wanted her closer. I wasn’t even sure if it was sexual at first—I just wanted to feel her sleek hair, her narrow bones. Her body gave off so much
heat, like a field mouse, an animal that has to survive in the wild. I wanted to know what she looked like under her boys’ clothes—I imagined something neither boy nor girl, something I’d never seen before.

On the third night we worked together she asked for the real story of what happened to me back home. The room seemed too small all of a sudden, and I made us go for a walk. It was summer, after midnight, warm as a bath. Williamsburg was still ugly then—as I talked, stray cats skulked in the gutters, all bullet heads and scrawny shoulders. I felt so far away from home.

After I finished, we didn’t talk for a while. My chest felt hollow. We looped back, and when we got near the house I felt Sophie staring at me. I didn’t meet her eyes. I thought maybe I’d call Barber—telling the story made me lonely, and I wanted someone in my bed. But Sophie stopped outside the door, her hand on my arm. She made a face I’d never seen before—very serious, but with tenderness fighting through, like it almost hurt to show it. Like a knight from an old movie, I thought later, a hero.

“I want you to know something,” she said.

“What?” I wasn’t sure there was anything she could say to make me feel less lost.

“I would never do that to you,” she said. “I would never do anything you didn’t want me to do.”

I wanted to laugh at first. Who was she to assume she’d get that opportunity? She didn’t even know if I liked girls—I didn’t even know. And even if I did, what was this little mouse going to do to me, when I had four inches and forty pounds on her? Then she took hold of my right wrist. Her hands were strong and she had me fixed
with her giant eyes, and I thought maybe she could hurt me after all. I took a step toward her.

It didn’t matter much that I’d never been with a woman before. Her body was so different from mine—her sharp hip bones, her boy’s ass, her breasts you could cover with tablespoons. She fucked me like a man too—not like the boys I’d been with, but like the men I’d meet later on, who’d learned to read a woman’s body and knew without asking that I wanted them to hold me down. She always knew how far to go and when to kiss me on the forehead or loosen her grip on my wrists so I didn’t get too scared. Every now and then something would surprise me—how delicate she looked when she was sleeping, how when she showered and put on deodorant, she smelled just like me. And I knew my mom would cry if she found out and say it was my dad’s fault for leaving us alone. But once I started spending all my time with Sophie, I didn’t think about anything but us. That summer she was a hot wind I blew through the city on.

For a while after we got together, the movie seemed both real and not real. We talked about it all the time, and I helped Sophie with the screenplay. She submitted it for grants and fellowships—she was businesslike and organized and already knew what to do. I learned she was twenty-three, older than I was, that she’d already made a short film called
Daniel
and spent a year in a big-deal filmmaking program, that she knew dozens of people who worked on real movies and shows. I was always asking her to let me see
Daniel
, and she said she would, but somehow it never happened. All I knew about it was that it was about a boy she went to college with—which made me curious and jealous—and that she thought it had a lot of technical problems.

“This one will be better,” she said. “I know how to make a movie now.”

I liked this side of her, that talked about a complicated thing like it was easy and asked people for thousands of dollars like she knew they would say yes. And at the same time, I never thought we’d really make the movie. I thought we’d be working on it forever, the two of us, a project to keep us close, and all the other things that I now know make up a film seemed so strange and far away that I figured they’d never actually arrive.

And then it was November and Sophie got a grant. It wasn’t quite enough to make the movie, but it was enough to start, and suddenly she was scouting out locations, calling grips she knew, and teaching me what the word “grip” meant. I started to get scared then. I’d made the whole story of the movie from something terrible, and I was worried I’d be punished somehow. Everybody in my family believed in ghosts, and my grandma said it wasn’t just bad people who turned into them, it was bad deeds too. I was worried I’d made Bean’s bad deed grow.