The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (24 page)

I knew she was right—none of the buildings we’d been to looked anywhere near as good as the church. But I wasn’t sure anybody would feel what I felt there—“haunted” I guess would be the word—if they watched us saying our lines in a banged-up warehouse.

“I don’t know,” I said.

But Sophie was looking all around at the scabby walls and the high barred windows and the place in the corner where a big snarl of copper wiring came right up out of the floor. I could tell she was excited—I knew her face when she was all lit up with a new idea. What I didn’t know then was how to tell her deep true solid joy from the kind of excitement that came from panic.

“I promise,” she said, “it’s going to look really beautiful.”

“Okay,” I said, “I trust you.”

It took a week to convince everyone else. Both the screenwriter and George threatened to take the movie away from us. But Sophie told them the same thing she’d told me: the movie was going to be even better this way. She said things I’d never heard her say before, like “boundary breaking.” She had this ability to sound completely confident, like it would be insane to ever doubt her. Finally she got her way.

So we started to shoot again. The bottle factory became the dank old farmhouse where Isabella’s brother puts her after their father dies. Isabella’s carriage to her brother’s castle was a yellow cab—the driver asked me if I was going to a Renaissance fair. The castle itself was a fancy old building on Eighty-sixth Street, and the throne room was an apartment in a Williamsburg high-rise with a view of the city. The owner was a friend of the producer—she was excited that we were making a movie in her house, and she kept giving us unhelpful tips about the light until we put her in a dress and gave her a nonspeaking role. The banquet hall was an actual Italian banquet hall in Bensonhurst. We hired the real staff to serve us dinner for the party where Isabella meets Ferdinand for the first time; in that scene we’re eating spaghetti bolognese and eggplant parm. Then they helped us put the tables and chairs away and we danced the way the choreographer had taught us before we had to stop paying her.

I thought it all looked good enough—the banquet hall even seemed kind of royal to me, with its fake marble floors and fat velvet curtains we kept bumping into as we danced. But Sergei, who played Ferdinand, kept getting more and more upset. He was short and
black-haired and pretty, and he’d been great in his scenes with Veronica—he had pale blue eyes and on cue he could make them flare up with desire. But at the banquet hall he acted like a teenager who has to babysit little kids at a party. He was supposed to kiss my hand and look up at me like he already loved me—instead he looked over my left shoulder at the door to the street.

As good as Sophie was sometimes at getting down to the soft core of you, she could be really shitty at giving notes.

“That doesn’t look right,” she said to Sergei. “You need to look like you like her.”

He rolled his pretty eyes. “You’ve made that a little difficult, haven’t you?” he asked.

Sophie looked at him with a blank, empty face, which made him madder.

“Come on,” he said, “this is a surprise to you? You throw me in a smelly party room with a girl twice my size and you expect me to act like nothing’s different?”

I tried not to show that this bothered me, but it did. I wasn’t twice his size—he was short and slim, but he had broad shoulders and big gym-rat arms. He probably outweighed me. But I was a lot bigger than Veronica—her Isabella dress wouldn’t zip up my back, and I had to wear the Beatriz costume with extra gold brocade we got at the craft store. And I was bigger than I’d been in
Marianne
. I knew how this worked—if the movie did well enough, there would be before-and-after pictures of me on the Internet, strangers calling me a cow. I didn’t really care so much—when I was by myself, with no cameras around, I liked the way I looked just fine. But I wanted Sophie to tell Sergei how stupid he was being, how beautiful I was, and how if he couldn’t do the scene it was his problem.

Instead she said, “Think about someone else if you have to. Just make sure you look at her face when you do it.”

In the next take he did make eye contact, but his mouth had a mean twist when he looked at me. I didn’t know who he was thinking about—his Russian wife with her big breasts over a tiny waist, her pretty calves in stiletto boots; Veronica, so delicate her arms looked boneless; or some other small, elegant woman. Whoever it was, I knew in his mind that person was much more beautiful than me.

When we were finally done for the day and Sophie and I were curled on the saggy couch of a bar called Stan’s, I asked her, “Do you think I’m not pretty enough to play Isabella?”

I’d never been the kind of person who asked that—I’d always hated girls who fished for compliments, who forced their boyfriends to tell them how pretty they were until the word lost all its meaning. And I knew Sophie wanted me; already in the bar’s graffiti-covered bathroom she’d made me come with her hands. But I didn’t like the way she wilted in front of Sergei. And I knew he was right in one way—for the movie to work, the audience had to want Isabella. I wanted Sophie to tell me that they would. Instead she said, “I don’t know.”

My thigh was touching hers and I jerked it away. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I like how you look. In the dailies you’re beautiful, with all your hair down. But you and Sergei don’t look good together.”

“He’s just not trying,” I said. “He’s pissed that I don’t make him look like a big man.”

“That’s probably true,” Sophie said. “But it still looks bad.”

“You’re the director,” I said. I was almost yelling, and a guy by the pool table looked over and gave me a smirk. “You’re supposed to direct the actors. That’s your job.”

She let her neck go slack, rolled her head away from me so she was talking at the wall.

“I just don’t feel it with this one,” she said.

Then she turned to look at me.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m fading,” she said, “Like I’m getting more transparent. Do you ever feel that way?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Never mind,” she said, and put her head on my shoulder, something she did all the time now that she never used to do. We sat like that for a minute while I worried about her, and was mad at her for making me worry, and then mad at myself for being mad. Just when I started to relax again into the smell and feel of her, she said, “Abe knows.”

I’d been cheating on him for three weeks at that point, and I hadn’t been careful at all—sneaking out to the living room to see her while Abe was asleep, going down on her in our bed before he got home from work. But I’d still been having sex with Abe, I still loved him, and I thought those things would keep him from suspecting. He wasn’t dumb, but he was easy to please, and I thought that if I just kept him warm at night and told him sweet things sometimes, he wouldn’t suspect I was fucking my ex-girlfriend in our house.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“We were eating cereal—” she started.

“What? When?”

I was annoyed that they still talked to each other without me, even now. A few nights before, Abe had told me he was worried about her—I’d just rolled over and pretended to be asleep.

“While you were in the shower,” she said. “We were joking about
how long you take. And then he got all serious and said to me, ‘It’s okay, you know. I understand.’”

This was worse than him knowing, that he might know and not even be mad. It made me feel like he must not love me as hard as I wanted him to.

“How did you know what he was talking about?” I asked. “Maybe he meant something else.”

“I asked him,” she said. “And he said he knew you and I had a history and he didn’t want to get in the way of that. He said he just wanted you to be happy.”

I tried to imagine that—the man I’d lived with for over a year and Sophie, who’d been back just a few months, talking about my happiness. Like I was a kid or a crazy person who couldn’t make decisions for myself.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“I asked him that too. He said he knew you loved him and he didn’t believe in being jealous. He said you had enough love for both of us.”

It takes a lot to make me miss my family, but that did it. I remembered when my sixteen-year-old sister’s boyfriend cheated on her with his ex, who had a kid with another guy and dirt-colored greasy hair like a stray dog. My sister sobbed on the phone so hard she choked, and when he came over with a fat pink teddy bear to win her back, we all came screaming down at him, my mom and all my sisters, whirling like a hurricane until he ran back to his car, terrified of us. Then we all got into my mom’s bed and petted my sister’s hair while she cried and told her she didn’t need him, she didn’t need anybody too weak to give her his whole heart.

And now here was Abe, saying lines out of some hippie relationship book. I was disgusted with him.

“What did you say?” I asked Sophie.

“I said okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

I didn’t know what I expected her to do, but I didn’t want her to just agree with him.

“Listen,” she said, “maybe it’s good. He makes you happy, and I’m not that good at doing that. Maybe you can have both.”

“You make me happy,” I said, but I knew she was right. Sophie would never know that on those nights when I felt like I didn’t belong in the city or maybe the world, like I’d given up my only home and I was never going to find another, what I really wanted was for someone to make me get dressed and take me dancing. She wouldn’t remember what my favorite ice cream was and buy it just rarely enough to surprise me every time, and she would never learn that the thing to do when I froze up during sex was to look me right in the eye and remind me, again and again, that I was safe. But Abe had known all these things without my telling him. He was good at loving me; it came easy to him. It was true I didn’t want to give that up.

“I said we’d talk about it later,” Sophie said, “but what if we don’t? What if we just keep doing what we’re doing and let it be?”

She looked tired—she was looking that way more and more lately—and now I was tired too.

I remembered something else from back home, when my stepdad was in the hospital after he missed one of our front steps drunk in the dark and fell down and broke his nose. It was so stupid I couldn’t look at him, and while he was in with the doctor, I asked my mom if she loved him.

“He’s pretty good to me,” she said. “He keeps me company. He helps out with the kids.”

“That’s not what I asked,” I said.

She looked me in the eye then, which she almost never did, and said, “I know, honey. But I don’t ask myself questions like that.”

And maybe it was good she didn’t. Maybe that was how you had to live, eventually—just let things be and never ask yourself if they were what you really wanted. The waitress came by—she was pretty and sad-eyed, and, up close, older than I’d thought—and I ordered us each another whiskey. I drank mine fast and the night got fuzzy around the edges. Sophie and I kissed on the train home, but when we got there I got into bed with Abe and we fucked quickly without talking. I fell asleep against him thinking,
Maybe, maybe, maybe
.

T
HE NEXT DAY
was the big scene between Isabella and Ferdinand—they think she’s about to marry someone else, so they agree to have sex at the house of a sympathetic noblewoman. We used a Holiday Inn on Third Avenue in Gowanus, warehouses out all the windows and the chemical smell of the canal whenever the wind turned. The address was written in permanent marker on the bedsheets. While the grip set up the lights, I sat on the bed in Abe’s bathrobe. Sergei was fully clothed.

“Look,” he said, “maybe we don’t do this scene at all. Maybe we just cut to, you know, flowers blooming or something.”

“Don’t be a dick,” I said.

“I’m trying to help. If we try to make this movie sexy, it’s going to look ridiculous. Maybe we take the high road, go for the Merchant-Ivory types, the grandmas.”

I looked at Sophie, but she was ignoring us, staring over the DP’s shoulder at the viewfinder and scowling.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s do this.”

I shrugged off my robe. I was wearing a nude thong Sophie and I had bought together; at the time I’d looked forward to wearing it and having her watch me. Now I just felt ashamed, like someone had pulled my pants down on the playground.

The first take was terrible. We were supposed to start lying on the bed, with Sergei straddling me, and then he’d pull me up so our faces were touching and say his line: “Never belong to anyone else.” But he never pulled. He just let me lie there waiting, looking confused, and then when I was sure he’d forgotten the line he said it, blandly, like it was a suggestion.

“You guys need to do that way better,” Sophie said, and I was mad that she was talking to both of us when Sergei was the only one not trying.

On the second take he did pull, but roughly, like I was dead weight, and my breasts slammed against his chest and he pulled back like I was disgusting, and we had to cut before he even said his line.

On the third take he scooted back as he pulled me, so we were a good two feet apart, and then he held my hand while he said the line with no heat in it at all.

“That time you looked like first-graders,” Sophie said.

I pushed myself out of bed. I didn’t bother to put on the robe. Sergei and the pimply grip and the angry DP and Sophie herself were just going to have to put up with my tits and belly and ass as I walked to the bathroom.

I locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror. I thought of
how many people had seen me naked in my life—my mom, my dad, my sisters when we went swimming in the quarry where the water snakes came up from their secret nests to scare and excite us, the boy from tenth grade whose name I’d forgotten and who rubbed me between my legs until he came in his own pants, Bean, Barber, all the men in New York I saw for a night or a week or a month and wanted nothing from except their skin on mine, Abe, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie. But probably almost nobody saw Isabella naked. Her nurse, maybe, the maid who bathed her. (I remembered hosing off my little sisters in the backyard after they got into an old can of house paint, their bodies wriggling like puppies.) Before she met Ferdinand, she herself was probably the only person who looked at her body and saw sex. And her brother was about to marry her off as a bargaining chip, not a body but a name. Ferdinand was a teenage boy—maybe if he was lucky he’d seen a naked woman once in his life, a hooker working her way through the court. It would be up to me to show him I was something to fight for.