The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (25 page)

B
ACK IN THE ROOM
, we were getting gold late-afternoon light through the cheap window blinds. I could feel it in my hair and on my skin as I walked back to the bed. Everybody got quiet.

“Let’s go,” I said.

This time instead of waiting for him to pull me I reared up on my own. Instead of waiting for him to come close I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my belly against his. I thought of when I’d first met Abe, at a dance club in Harlem, how he lifted me over his head like it was nothing and on the way down I put my hands
over his hands, pressing his fingers into my flesh. I thought of when I’d first met Sophie, how I’d been the one to move toward her on the street outside my house. I thought of how I’d chosen them both, about how badly I’d wanted them, how badly I wanted them still. I looked hard into Sergei’s blue eyes and said, “Never belong to anyone else.”

For a minute it was silent and I could hear the trucks on Third Avenue, the blood in my ears. Then Sophie said, in a soft voice, “Okay, that’s good, I think we got it.”

The rest of the day was smooth—the light was beautiful, Sergei behaved, I felt calm and good in Isabella’s head. We finished ahead of schedule. And then, while everyone was packing up and I was getting dressed, Sophie came to me and grabbed my wrist so hard it hurt. Her eyes were huge. She said, “I want you to leave him.”

T
HEN WE HAD THE FIGHT
I’d been wanting. We told Abe together, standing in the living room, holding hands. He looked at Sophie with a cold rage I’d never seen before and said, “Get out of here so I can talk to Allison.”

“No,” she said. I could tell she was scared, but I wasn’t sure of what.

“Fine,” he said. “Allison, let’s talk in the bedroom.”

I followed him like a child. I expected him to scream at me for betraying him, and if he’d done that, maybe I would’ve stayed. Instead he said, “You know you’re making a huge mistake, don’t you?”

I just looked at him.

“How long is it going to last? A week? A month?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that Abe and I had a good shot at being old together and Sophie and I did not. But all I wanted then was to be with Sophie; I couldn’t hold anything else in my head.

“When it’s over,” he said, “don’t think you can just come back. I won’t be here.”

“I know,” I said, even though I hadn’t till right then. He’d been a safe place for me to go for such a long time; I guess I thought maybe he’d always be one.

“This is your last chance,” he said. “You can change your mind now, and we can go back to how we were. Better, maybe, because we’ve been through this.”

I saw how much it was going to hurt to lose him. I saw it far away, like a thing on the horizon, like a mad dog we watched walk down our street one ugly Sunday back home, its mouth full of disease. But I couldn’t feel the hurt yet. I was filled with a dull calm.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I went to get my suitcase from the closet.

I heard him walk to the door, stop, turn back.

“I hope you know what you’re getting into,” he said.

It made me angry that he would condescend to me like that.

“I’m a grown-up,” I said, rolling my dancing dress up into a ball. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not talking about you,” he said. “I know you’ll be fine. You always are. But Sophie’s heading for something bad, and if you’re the one that’s with her, that’s going to be on you.”

“You don’t know anything about Sophie,” I said, but when I left the house with everything that was really mine in a suitcase and a garbage bag, I was scared.

.   .   .

W
E WERE AT THE SUBWAY STATION
—her holding my hand, me shaking—when we realized we had no idea where to go. All we had between us was a little money Sophie had saved from a few lectures and classes she’d done after
Woods
and the now-tiny amount I was getting paid for
Isabella
. We ended up going back to the Holiday Inn where we’d just been shooting. The room we’d used was taken, but they put us in one exactly like it, except the mirror had some kind of dark stain that looked like a ghost when we turned out the lights. At first it was kind of a joke for us, staying there, but then it started to feel safe, like we could drop out of the real world and live in our movie. We finished the shoot—the last scenes we had were Isabella’s meeting with the rebel leader (shot at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, where they wouldn’t let the actors carry their fake swords) and Isabella’s marriage to Ferdinand (in Prospect Park, between rainstorms, a dog running back and forth across the shot). Then Sophie started editing, and it was just like
Marianne
—the two of us lying awake together, talking about how great we’d be. Except now Sophie knew what success looked like, so her daydreams were more specific. She wanted to premiere at Sundance. She wanted a big nationwide release in lots of theaters. She wanted a review in
The New York Star
.

I wanted all that too, mostly because Sophie wanted it. But unlike with
Marianne
, I also had dreams for myself. I wanted a big magazine profile like Sophie had gotten, where they’d praise my acting with words like “luminous” and talk about my favorite breakfast cereal like it was something important. I wanted the Coen brothers
to call me and offer me a role in their next movie—I’d turn it down because I was already shooting another movie with Sophie, but then they’d work around my schedule because there was just no way they could make the film without me.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be famous, exactly. For one thing, I didn’t want my family to see the movie—I didn’t want any connection between them and my life now. And I didn’t think about people stopping me in the street, or women’s magazines putting me on the cover, or fancy restaurants saving a table for me. I just knew that for the first time in my life I’d done really, really well at something, and I wanted important people to talk about it.

I didn’t tell Sophie about any of this. She was nervous—she came home every night from editing with her shoulders all hunched together. I did things to make her days easier, like getting single-serving packets of oatmeal and making sure she left with a few every morning, and at night, after she curled away from me, I lay awake with my excitement.

We didn’t get into Sundance—Sophie said she wasn’t upset, but then she got into the bathtub and stayed there for hours, until I had to fish her out of the cold water, dry her off, and put her to bed. We did get into the Hudson Film Festival, though, and that seemed to calm Sophie enough that she could eat real meals and look me in the face when she talked. She started working on something new—she wouldn’t talk about it, but she said I could see it as soon as it was done—and we had two months of good time. She wasn’t paying much attention to how she looked then; she’d stopped slicking her hair back and it fell soft around her face, and sometimes while she slept I could imagine the child she’d been before she met me. I knew
she’d been Emily when she was little, not Sophie, and sometimes I called her that in my mind, a secret name nobody who saw our movies would ever know.

I got my job at the coffee shop back, and I picked up shifts at a midtown bar too. Living at the motel was stupidly expensive, but every time I talked about leaving, Sophie got all closed off, and I learned not to mention it. I was good at being good to her then. Sometimes she came to the bar at the end of my shift and we would tease the drunk businessmen together. She liked to tell them we were sisters, and I’d play along—“Twins, in fact,” I’d say. “We’re very close.” And if the men reacted right, I’d lean across the bar and kiss her deeply, they’d cheer and buy her shots and over-tip. Once, right before the festival, a middle-aged guy with a corned-beef face was hitting on me—nothing intense, just asking if I was single and what kind of guys I liked. I laughed, but Sophie interrupted—“You know that’s my wife you’re talking about.” I knew she was kidding around, but that word made me excited and scared. The beef-face guy apologized.

“I didn’t mean anything,” he said.

“No, it’s okay,” she told him. “This happens all the time. And it’s only going to get worse.”

“Why?” he asked. I didn’t know the answer either.

“Because she’s about to become a movie star. Her movie comes out in a couple of weeks, and then everyone in New York is going to want her.”

He was impressed and tried to ask us more questions, but I was busy trying and failing to read Sophie’s face. On the way home I wanted to ask her what she meant by “wife,” but she was quiet on the subway, gripping my hand and staring straight ahead, so I didn’t bring it up.

.   .   .

O
N THE NIGHT OF THE PREMIERE
, I wore a dark blue dress Sophie had bought me, cut low and tight in the bust and flowy around my hips and thighs. People who knew Sophie kept telling me how beautiful I looked and then asking her where she’d been and if she was going to whatever other event or party or screening they wanted to show off their invites to. I knew she could work a crowd if she tried, but today she just mumbled some excuses about being really busy and sat down in the back with me, clutching my hand.

I hadn’t been in the editing room, so the way the movie looked was a shock to me. In
Marianne
Sophie always made us wait for the most beautiful light, even for the saddest scenes, so the whole movie looked golden. The few reviews we got all mentioned that. But
Isabella
opened at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on a cloudy day with a yellow-gray sky. I didn’t remember shooting the scene—Sophie must have gone without me. The opening credits rolled over the gray water and the empty boats; once a seagull flew across the frame. I thought maybe the shot was supposed to be sad in a poetic way, but instead it looked flat, like Sophie’s face when you couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I started to worry that I was already missing the point of the movie. Then the scene changed and there I was, in the bottle factory in my Isabella dress.

At first I was vain and nervous and I stared at myself on the screen to see if I looked fat. But then I forgot to look at my chin, my waist, the neckline of the dress where the flesh of my breasts came up, and instead it was like when I was little and I would wake up early in the morning to hear my mom crying. She could never sleep then, after my dad went away for the last time and before she met my
stepdad, and she’d be up sobbing at four a.m. and banging mugs and bowls around in the kitchen, I think hoping I or my sister would wake up and go make her feel better. I tried it once, but it didn’t work—she just cried harder and talked about being a bad mom—and so after that when I couldn’t go back to sleep I’d just lie in bed and pretend to be someone else.

Sometimes it was Charlotte, a tall, pretty girl in my grade whose parents already had a college fund for her. Sometimes it was Tom Winston, Mom’s second cousin who moved to Richmond and bought a car dealership and came back every year for the Fourth of July with a fat watch and pictures of his wife and daughters, all blond and perfect-looking, like they’d never in their lives stayed up all night crying. But it wasn’t just people who had it good that I thought about. Sometimes I’d pretend to be the old man with no teeth who sold peanuts at the bus stop in town, while all the high school boys kicked dust on him and made fun of his baby gums. Or I’d be Melissa Osburn, who lost her leg all the way up to the hip when drunk Brandon Phelps ran her over, and now her mom wouldn’t even let her go to school anymore because something else might happen. The point was just to leave myself and run away into somebody else’s life, and I got really good at it—so good that I carried the other person with me long after it was time to get up, through breakfast and waiting for the bus and the first sludgy hours of school, and when I passed by a mirror I’d be surprised to see my own face looking back.

That was how I felt all during the movie, and when the lights came up I was still sitting straight and queenly, holding my hands in my lap like they were covered with heavy rings. So I was surprised when people started coming up to me, trying to shake my hand. A
woman in thick makeup said, “I want you to know I cried when you told Henry he couldn’t push you around anymore. I thought of all the times I wanted to do that and couldn’t, and I just bawled.”

I looked more closely at her—her eyeliner was all smeared and feathered, her eyes red.

A man asked, “Why haven’t we seen you onstage?” And before I could tell him he could have, he shoved a business card into my hand and closed my fingers over it.

Another man, tall and thin and old, told me, “You shone out of that movie, just shone out of it.”

I thought that was a strange thing to say, and then I saw that Sophie was already heading for the exit, all by herself, and nobody was trying to talk to her.

In the lobby people kept stopping me, and I knew I should just push past them to get to Sophie, but it was hard when they kept saying everything I’d hoped someone would say. I started to feel like I’d won a big race, a marathon. I wanted to put my hands in the air. When I reached the glass doors of the theater I could see Sophie—she was sitting on a bench, far away from everyone, with her blank face on. I was going to run and join her when a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She was less dressed up than everyone else, jeans and a blazer, and she looked calm and a little bored and immediately I wanted to please her.

“I’m Lucy,” she said. “I write for
Conversation
. I’d love to talk to you more sometime.”

I felt like kissing her. Instead I said, “How about tomorrow?”

She smiled like she was surprised, and I realized I should’ve tried to act busy.

“How about Wednesday lunch?” she asked.

I thought of pretending I had something to do then, to seem important, but I couldn’t make myself do it.

“Great,” I said, and she gave me her business card, which I put in the special tiny pocket of my purse so I’d never lose it.

By the time I got outside, Sophie was gone.

I called her phone, and when she didn’t answer I ran all around the theater and side streets, calling her name.