The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (22 page)

“And I wanted to thank you,” Steven went on, “for setting the whole thing up. I’m just really jazzed about it on a personal level. I’m actually heading out to New York in a couple of weeks to look at locations with Sophie.”

I thought he was confused; I was glad to have something over him.

“Actually,” I said, “we’ll be filming here.”

“Oh,” said Steven, and his voice got tight the way it always did when he was saying something he knew was going to make someone else uncomfortable. “Maybe there’s been a miscommunication. It’s just—I talked to Sophie, and it sounds like she’s been planning to shoot in New York with her crew.”

“You talked to her about this?” I asked.

“Well, yes.”

My stomach went cold. “You talked to her today?”

“We’ve touched base a couple of times since we met. I’m sorry, I assumed you were in the loop.”

I tried to remember if Sophie and I had ever actually agreed to shoot in L.A. or if I’d just assumed we had.

“Right,” I said. “Okay. Well I’ll be coming out to New York too then.”

“Of course,” said Steven. “This is your baby. Like I said, it sounds like she’s got everything pretty well figured out, but obviously we totally welcome your input.”

I realized then I wouldn’t be going to New York. I’d assumed
Sophie wanted to work with me. Now it looked like she’d only needed me to introduce her to the people she wanted to meet and give her a place to stay while she made the deal. I could take the script back, insist on a director who’d give me more control. But I didn’t want to work with another director on
Isabella
. I wanted to work with Sophie.

“Thanks for calling,” I told Steven.

“See you in New York!” he said.

I hung up the phone.

F
OR THE NEXT FEW DAYS
, I didn’t do much. I just watched and rewatched old movies—
Vertigo
and
Edward Scissorhands
and
I Shot Andy Warhol
, the kind of movies I’d always loved but never made. Two days after Sophie left, I watched
Daniel
. I’d forgotten how amateurish it was—the muddy sound, all the misframed shots. I’d also forgotten how good it was. When I finished it, I watched it again from the beginning. At the end, when Sophie stood in the bathroom with her shaved head, I watched her face—her crooked mouth, those giant eyes. I remembered how she’d looked on my couch the night before she left. I thought there might be a human thing inside her, trying to get out.

The next day I found the note. It was underneath my box of Pop-Tarts, now empty. It said,
“Thanks and sorry. Talk soon, Sophie.”

I was surprised by the last part, coming from her, and I half took it seriously. For months I expected her to show up at my door again, hoping to be fed. I didn’t know if I would let her in.

Allison

THE MONTHS RIGHT BEFORE SOPHIE CAME BACK TO ME WERE
some of the happiest of my life. After
Marianne
some other young directors called me, but I didn’t want to be in movies anymore. I didn’t like the feeling of someone else being in charge of me. At least onstage what I did was what they saw—no cuts, no tricks, no surprises. That summer I had a part in an off-Broadway play about a family whose dad was a donkey. I thought the play itself was kind of silly, but I liked my role as the mean, moneygrubbing youngest sister, and I liked that the director and the rest of the cast respected me and treated me like a real actor. We were friends and we went out together after the show. During the day I worked at a coffee shop in Chelsea that was clean and not too crowded, and my boss paid me on time and never tried to grab my ass. I lived in Prospect Heights with my boyfriend, Abe, who was kind and funny and who I loved, but not enough to keep me awake at night or make my chest hurt with wanting. On the night Sophie showed up, he and I were re-
watching
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, and he was rubbing my feet. It was fall and raining hard, and she stood at my door soaking wet, no umbrella, in this little ugly dress that looked like it cost a lot of money. I could’ve punched her.

“I’m sorry I came here,” she said.

“Why are you sorry?” I said. It still knocked the wind out of me, seeing her, even though it had been over three years. “I never said I didn’t want to see you.”

Actually, I’d tried to get in touch lots of times—I’d called and e-mailed. I couldn’t bring myself to congratulate her on
Marianne
, but I’d sent her a long e-mail when
Woods
came out. She never responded to any of it. I assumed she was mad at me, and I got mad at her for being mad.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you all those times, and now I’m talking to you because I need to.”

“Okay,” I said. “Jesus, come in.”

I was surprised she’d made it anywhere in such heavy rain—she’d always hated water. At first she made it sound all mysterious and existential, but later she told me the older kids had held her head underwater at the pool one time and she almost drowned. It was easy to forget sometimes that Sophie wasn’t always Sophie, that she used to be just a weirdo kid the other kids made fun of.

Now she was dripping on the living room carpet. Abe stared at her, and as I introduced them, I had this terrible feeling of dread. She did that thing she used to do when she met people she didn’t care about, where she just looked right through them like they didn’t exist in her universe. I thought about how I’d apologize for her later. I told myself Abe and I would be in bed together and we’d laugh
about how crazy she was. I walked her to the bathroom, where she immediately took her dress off. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Jesus,” I said again. I shut her in the bathroom and stood outside trying to act like I wasn’t remembering every time we’d ever fucked, every time she’d thrown me down or held my wrists back or pinned me to the bed so hard I thought her little body must be made of iron—and that I wasn’t also having this protective feeling I’d never had before, like I wanted to wrap myself around her and dry her off with my skin.

“What?” Sophie said from the bathroom. I didn’t even answer. After some time she must’ve figured it out, because she said, “Okay, I’m dressed now.”

I was worried Abe might’ve heard, so I rolled my eyes at him like.
Who knows what the fuck is going on with this girl?
But he just looked confused. I went back in the bathroom.

Sophie was sitting on the edge of the tub. She was swimming in my sweatpants and Abe’s old Virginia T-shirt. She was looking down at her feet.

“You know how people say you can tell your health by your toenails?” she said. “I think my toenails mean I’m unhealthy.”

“I’ve never heard anyone say that,” I told her. “Are you okay? Are you on drugs?”

I hated myself. I sounded like some suburban mom I’d only seen on TV. Sophie smiled at me. I’d forgotten how tiny and perfect her teeth were, how sharp the canines.

“I’m not on drugs,” she said. “I just need help.”

I put down the toilet lid and sat on it. “Help with what?”

“I’m supposed to do this movie, and I can’t do it.”

“What movie?”

She dropped her face into her hands, stuck her fingers up in her wet hair. “God, it’s so bad. I don’t even want to tell you.”

I just waited. Finally she lifted her head.

“Okay,” she said, “the first thing is, I didn’t write it. The second thing is, it’s a period piece. The third thing is, it’s set in Spain.”

I laughed. I imagined Sophie trying to direct a bunch of matadors and ladies in flamenco outfits.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the story?”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s about Queen Isabella. Like as in Columbus. This woman who wears big necklaces and smiles too much wrote a book about her, and now they want me to make a movie.”

She sounded like an angry teenager, and in my baggy clothes she looked like one too. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her. Most people would be excited to have people begging them to make movies.

“Why are you doing it?” I asked her.

Her face changed then, and I remembered she wasn’t actually a teenager anymore. She looked older than when I’d seen her last; lines were starting around her eyes. I had a flash of what she’d look like as a really old lady, with bright white hair and knobby fingers.

“I figured the stuff I write just gets me in trouble,” she said. “Then I got this script. It wasn’t good, but I liked Isabella. I could see how I wanted her to be. I thought that would be enough and the rest of it would come to me. I thought it would be like a project, doing something I wasn’t as close to.”

“And it’s not enough?” I asked.

“Nothing else is coming to me. I mean, I’ve got a cast, I’ve got locations, but I’m not excited about any of it, and I can tell it’s not going to be good.”

I just waited. If she wanted help, I was going to make her ask.

“I want you to be in the movie. I think if you were in it, I might care.”

“You want me to be Isabella?”

“I did,” she said, “but I’m working with a studio this time. Not a big one, but still, they won’t pay unless there’s a star. So Veronica Dias is going to be Isabella. But I want you to be her handmaid, Beatriz.”

I thought of the movies I’d seen where the queen has a handmaid. Usually this is what she does: giggle, whisper, say people’s names, put shoes on the queen’s feet.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked her.

“We can pay you twenty thousand dollars,” she said. “And also, I need you.”

Sophie understood a lot more about people and how to play them than she ever let on. I think she knew that I still loved her and that I’d be flattered that she needed me. I think the minute I opened the door, she knew she had me around her finger. I thought all this even then. And I’d talked a lot over the years about how Sophie was bad for me. Just the week before, I’d told my castmates after a couple of beers that I thought she was too self-centered to ever really love anyone. But now when I think about that night, I think about something my stepdad once said when my mom yelled at him for quitting AA. He just told her in this sad, quiet voice, “Sometimes the sick part of me just seems like the truest part.”

And if it was a sick part of me that wanted to do whatever Sophie asked for, then I thought maybe it was the truest part too. Also, I couldn’t stop looking at her wrists, those little delicate bones.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“Thank you,” she said, and it was sweeter than any thanks I’d ever gotten.

Then she added, “Also, I need a place to stay.”

B
EATRIZ WASN’T A BAD ROLE
. In one scene she serves rotten meat to the cruel and ugly Afonso V to make him sick and sabotage the plan to marry Isabella off to him. In another scene she explains sex to Isabella before her secret meeting with Ferdinand—it turns out Beatriz has been sleeping with a nobleman. Plus, it was exciting to work on such a big movie. We’d made
Marianne
for almost no money, and now there was a PA who’d bring you a sandwich if you asked and five guys just to work the lights. For the palace where Isabella lives as a teenager, we had this old Eastern Orthodox church in Bay Ridge—I’d never cared about old buildings before, but I liked to walk up and down the pews when it wasn’t my scene, touching the dark wood and thinking about ghosts. I knew that really all the people who’d prayed and been married and baptized and buried there were normal Brooklyn people with jobs in stores and offices, but I kept thinking of royalty sitting there in heavy jewels, daggers hidden in their clothes. I started to feel like I was part of a dark, exciting story.

I think Sophie felt it too. Nobody would’ve known she was nervous about the movie—the very first day, she walked onto the set with a swagger I’d never seen. She wore boys’ pants and boots and red lipstick and everybody watched her in a way that would’ve made me jealous if she hadn’t pulled me aside at least once a day to tell me, “I couldn’t do this without you.” How could I not be flattered? On
Marianne
she’d been smart, but also weird and distant and twitchy,
like a robot that didn’t work very well. But she’d grown up since then; now she could be graceful. She took Ferdinand aside and taught him how to hold his head like a king; she joked with the lighting guys; she yelled, “Perfect!” and we all felt like we were.

“Move your hair off your shoulders,” she told me as I approached the throne. “I want to see your neck.”

I knew everyone in the church could feel the tension between us, and I was embarrassed and also proud. But Veronica was always the center of attention. She was the one Sophie talked to most often, telling her how to stand and walk and how Isabella’s face would look when she was sitting on the throne for the first time. I knew Veronica wasn’t Sophie’s type—too thin and nervous, more beautiful than sexy—but I still noticed how much of Sophie’s focus she took up, how often Sophie touched her on the arm to show her how to move. When I watched the two of them, it was hard to believe Sophie really couldn’t make the movie without me.

At home Abe treated Sophie like a pet. When she didn’t eat the chicken and asparagus he cooked for us her first night, he started making the things she liked—canned peaches, oatmeal with cinnamon and sugar. He served them to her in a little bowl with flowers on it, and she scarfed them like a hungry cat. I asked him how he knew what to feed her, and he said he’d asked, of course. I wondered when they’d talked without me hearing. I realized I really wanted them to hate each other. Once I even caught him patting her on the head after she did some tiny chore, and I wanted to grab him by the arm and tell him to be afraid of her. I didn’t say anything. In bed at night he told me how glad he was that we could help her, and that she could stay as long as she wanted.

When I could get her alone—in the kitchen, doing dishes, when Abe went out for a cigarette—I asked her about her husband.

“It didn’t work out,” she said. It was one of those normal-people phrases I figured she’d memorized from TV.

“Are you getting divorced?” I asked.

She was bad at doing dishes. She started to put one away with tomato sauce still sticking to it, and I took it from her hand.

“I don’t think he wants to,” she said.

“Do you want to?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t care. I don’t want to live with him anymore, though.”

“Why’d you marry him anyway?” I asked.

I guess I was hoping she’d tell me she did it for money or because she thought it was time to get married, even though neither of those reasons seemed like Sophie at all. Instead she started going at a nonstick pan with a wad of steel wool. I took it from her so she wouldn’t ruin it.

“You didn’t really need anything,” she said finally. “I thought it would be good for me to be with someone who needed something from me.”

I needed you
, I wanted to scream, but then I thought,
Let her think I was strong. Let her think I didn’t take every pill I could buy or steal in the year after I left, hoping one of them would delete the person that was me. Let her think I didn’t have to fuck thirty different terrible men just to forget the way she smelled
.

“He needed someone to listen to him really well,” she went on, “and I thought I could do that.”

“And you couldn’t?” I asked.

“Well, I didn’t.”

She picked up a jar lid I was going to throw away and washed it very carefully, like it was expensive china.

“Or, I did and then I didn’t,” she said. “Maybe that’s worse. I did a lot of things wrong.”

I bet you did
, I thought, but I felt sorry for her too. I knew she didn’t ask to be the way she was. I thought of my stepdad, how every time he came back to us he wanted to get it right, stay out of trouble and be a good dad. But he just didn’t know how to think about the future or how to keep his mouth shut, and those things were always going to get him in shit whether he wanted to be good or not. And I thought of my mom, too, who let him keep coming back, even though she knew as well as anyone that he was never going to be any different.

“I’m sure it wasn’t all your fault,” I said.

“No, it was.” She paused with her hands in the sudsy water, like she was taking a bath. “You know, right before I left, he asked me to quit making movies.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “Who was he to ask you that?”

“Well, he was my husband. He still is my husband. And he might’ve been right. I might be better if I didn’t make movies.”

I thought of Peter forcing his face at me, and I thought she might be right. But I’d survived that. If I could suffer to let Sophie do what she loved, then everyone else in her life should have to do that too.

“Making movies is your life’s work,” I told her. I’d read that phrase somewhere and I thought it was cheesy, but it was what I had. “Anyone who loves you should understand that.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that much,” she said. “At this point if I stopped making them, I’d probably die.”