The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (27 page)

“You know,” she said, “when I met Veronica, I knew she was fragile in all the right places. I knew I could break her down. But I couldn’t do that to you again. Once you came on, I just had to let it be your movie.”

“That’s the only way you know how to make a movie?” I asked. “By making other people miserable?”

She just gave me a sad laugh and one of those huge shrugs I used to find so charming. But I’d given up my life for her and I didn’t have any sympathy.

“Fine,” I said. “Go rest somewhere else. Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, standing. I turned to face away from her, like a little kid.

“Jump off a fucking bridge,” I told her.

I didn’t feel guilty when I said it or when I heard her close the door on her way out. I was sure I would see her again.

NEW YORK STAR

A Queen Dethroned

By Benjamin Martin

Robbie

WHEN JACOB MARRIED MY SISTER, I WAS SORRY FOR HIM. NOT
at first, not when they met me at the airport and I saw how carefully she listened to him talk, how interested she was in him. Not at the altar, where she wore high-heeled shoes and looked beautiful and serious and said “I do” like she meant it. I felt sorry for him later, when the party had gone on well into the night, his friends laughing and playing music on the little spit of beach next to the house and quietly, without telling anyone, Sophie had slipped out of her dress and stepped into the lake. I didn’t see her go in. I turned with my glass of wedding wine and saw the dress lying on the dock and, far away, her bony shoulders in the lake, and when I turned back to the party, I saw that Jacob was watching, too.

“When did she learn to swim?” I asked him.

It made me sad that I had to ask, but long ago I’d had to accept that I would see and know Sophie on her terms and not mine. When she called to tell me she was getting married, I hadn’t talked to her in a year.

“I taught her,” he said.

He sounded proud, but then we both watched her swim out into the middle of the lake, putting her own wedding farther and farther behind her.

“She’s a quick study,” he said, and I wanted to tell him then to get used to it, that all my strongest memories of Sophie were of her leaving.

So when she said she wanted to stay with me for a while, I kept my expectations low. A weekend, maybe a week, and then she’d fly back to New York one day while I was teaching and, if I was lucky, leave a note. My wife, Reese, was worried.

“She always makes you feel bad,” she said.

It was true and it wasn’t. Our mom was dead, and I was the only family Sophie had, and I was pretty sure I understood her better than anybody else. Sometimes that felt good, like when she was giving an interview and she talked about
The Tick
or
Batman: The Animated Series
and I felt like she was winking at me. And sometimes it made me angry, because she didn’t let me help her. I knew she never should’ve gotten back together with Allison, for instance, but she wouldn’t listen to me. In fact, I thought she should never have gone to New York in the first place. She should’ve stayed in Iowa and built her career more slowly, and I could’ve helped her, and she wouldn’t have made so many crazy decisions or had so much pain in her life. I’d learned my lesson with CeCe; I was ready to protect her. But every time I told her to come home and figure things out from here, she said no. And now she was coming without my asking. I was glad, but I felt a little robbed too, like she always had to make things her idea.

On a rainy Wednesday she showed up at our door. It was always easy to forget how small my sister was, because she was square-shouldered
(all the way up through high school my shirts fit her snugly) and stood so straight and had those big serious eyes. But that day on my doorstep she looked tiny, her shoulders all hunched in. Her hair was greasy and her face had aged since I’d seen her last—she had lines on her forehead, dark stains under her eyes. She was thirty-four.

“Do you have any oatmeal?” she asked me.

For the first couple of days she barely talked. I tried to ask her about her next projects and give her what I thought was good advice, but she just answered me in monosyllables or not at all. She ate tiny amounts of oatmeal and canned fruit cocktail; she lay on the couch, wrapped in a blanket in the sticky heat of the Iowa summer, while Reese went to her office and I went to teach film theory to a bunch of twenty-year-olds. I was in the third year of my Ph.D., and my house was full of movies—movies we’d loved as teenagers (
Alien, The Silence of the Lambs
), movies Sophie had taught me to love in college (
Rebecca, Paranormal Activity
), movies I’d gotten into since then and wanted to show her (
Inside, Sunshine, Rampo Noir
). But all she wanted to watch, over and over, were the animated
Lord of the Rings
videos we’d watched as kids. She was especially obsessed with
The Return of the King
. One sweaty afternoon I caught her at the end of it; she looped right back to the beginning without even getting up to go to the bathroom.

“What is it with this movie?” I asked her. It wasn’t even our favorite from growing up—if she wanted to be nostalgic, she could’ve watched
E.T
.

“I like the elves leaving Middle-earth,” she said.

“Why?” I asked her. I didn’t like how her voice had been since she’d arrived, even flatter than usual, like she was reading aloud from a technical manual.

“I like how when they didn’t belong in the world anymore, they could leave and go somewhere safe.”

On screen, the elves were sailing their white ships into gray mist, disappearing.

Reese was the one who said we should take her to the doctor. Reese was loose-limbed and easygoing; she loved silly jokes and cheap beer and dancing. But she was also a tax accountant, and she had a wide seam of practicality running through her, and the older I got, the more grateful I was for it.

“She’s batshit,” Reese said calmly. “She needs help.”

I didn’t like the idea of taking Sophie to a stranger, but I thought maybe a doctor could get her to open up a little bit, and then she and I could go from there. I didn’t know much about therapists, and Sophie didn’t have insurance, so the first shrink I took her to was a weird old Freudian who only wanted to talk about Sophie’s dreams.

“I never remember my dreams,” she said in the car afterward. “Why didn’t he believe me?”

I knew it was true. As a kid I’d been jealous of how quickly she could fall asleep, while I lay awake terrified of the red-toothed old woman who crawled out from under my bed as soon as I shut my eyes.

“We’ll find you another one,” I said.

The second shrink was a sweet lady whose waiting room smelled like incense and who told Sophie the solution to her problems was to cut out gluten and get a Reiki massage.

“This is stupid,” Sophie told me. “I don’t need a doctor. I’m not sick.”

It was evening, June, hot and humid. In the old house where Reese and I lived, all the doors were swollen open.

“I don’t know how to help you,” I said. I was getting scared of the way her face looked.

“You are helping,” she said, and at dinnertime she made ravioli for us, which we ate even though she’d overcooked it. Then she let me make her watch
Sunshine
and listened patiently while I pointed out all the best parts, although her favorite scene was the very end, with the Sydney Opera House surrounded by snow.

I thought it would be a good idea for her to come visit my class. She liked talking about movies, and when she had a chance to explain things to people, she got very confident and authoritative. I wanted to see that side of her again. I asked her to talk a little about what it was like to be a director, and I showed the kids
Marianne
beforehand—I knew she was feeling sensitive about
Isabella
.

It got off to a decent start. She stood up straight, and her hair was clean. When she introduced herself, she put air quotes around “director,” but she seemed good-humored about it, and the kids laughed. The first person to ask a question was Mandy, who was always the first person to ask a question. She matched her sweaters to her socks and her pens to her notebooks, and I suspected the other kids didn’t like her.

“How did you know you wanted to be a director?” she asked.

I didn’t know the answer to that question. All I knew was that she’d shown up one day and demanded to use my camera. Sophie nodded and answered right away.

“There were things I wanted to talk about in the world,” she said, “but I had a hard time expressing them in words. So I learned to draw, and I did that for a little bit, and it was closer. And then I learned to take photos, and that was even closer, but it still wasn’t right. Finally when I was in college I learned how to make movies,
and that was the closest, even though there’s always a gap between what I want and what’s on the screen. I think that’s just how life is, but it still makes me sad.”

I’d been hoping she’d mention me, and even though I knew it was stupid, I was hurt when she didn’t. The students, though, were intrigued.

“Is it hard to get the actors to do what you want?” asked Tim, whose essays always compared movies to things that had happened in his frat.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But sometimes they know what to do better than you do.”

She sounded so sad when she said it that Tim looked shocked, like she’d flashed him. I’d read the reviews; I knew what people were saying about Allison. I’d read her interview in
Conversation
, and I thought she sounded stuck-up—she never acknowledged that she’d be nowhere without Sophie. But I had to admit she was talented; her face held your eye, and she knew how to tell a story with her hands, her shoulders.

Amy raised her hand. She was my youngest student, a seventeen-year-old trying to get a head start on her freshman year. She still had braces on her teeth, and she stuttered when Sophie called on her.

“What’s it like being famous?” she finally got out.

I thought it was sweet, but Sophie was stone-faced.

“I’m not famous,” she said, “so I wouldn’t know.”

Amy tried again. “But, I mean, what’s it like having people talk about you and stuff?”

Sophie looked right at her with that raptor gaze. Amy blinked back, innocent.

“It’s like having everybody mispronounce your name, every day. And at first you try to correct them, but they keep fucking it up, and then you start to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s wrong and that really is how to pronounce your name. And after a while you start to wonder if you even have a name. Are you even a person? Do you even exist? Who fucking knows!”

Amy was confused. My other students stared down at their notebooks or turned to one another looking freaked out and maybe pitying. I shot Sophie an expression that said,
Stop it
, but she wouldn’t look at me.

“Well,” I said with fake lightness, “if there are no more questions for Sophie, I guess we can move on to discussing
Frankenstein
.”

Then Helen raised her hand. Helen was a senior, black-haired, dark-eyed, still growing out of a bad case of acne. She wore the same thing to almost every class, a loose black dress that was nothing like what the other girls wore, and I’d never seen her laugh or gossip or check her phone. She didn’t talk much, but I felt more connected to her than I did to the other students, and now that she was in the same room as my sister, it was easy to see why.

For a minute I ignored her, though, hoping she’d give up and the Q& A would be over without Sophie saying anything sadder or more embarrassing. But Helen kept her hand up.

“I have a question,” she said in an uncharacteristically loud voice.

Sophie looked her up and down, then nodded.

“I read your interview in
Conversation
, where you talked about not fitting in when you were younger. I was wondering if you had any advice for people who feel like that now.”

A couple of the other kids smirked at each other—one of them
wrote something in her notebook and showed it to the boy next to her. I wanted Sophie to give Helen something, some piece of wisdom that would salvage what had clearly been a bad idea.

When Sophie spoke, her voice was a little kinder than before.

“If I did,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here. I’d probably be off having a nice life somewhere.”

The rest of the class was getting bored and uncomfortable, but Helen didn’t give up.

“I don’t want to be clichéd,” she said, “but what about art? Haven’t you used movies as a way to kind of get through to people?”

Sophie shook her head. “Nothing has driven me further away from people than making movies,” she said.

“So why do you do it, then?” Helen asked. “What’s the point?”

Sophie was quiet. She was quiet for so long that the kids started putting their books away and zipping up their backpacks. She was quiet for so long I started to worry something was wrong with her, but she didn’t look sick or upset. She looked like she was figuring something out.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s for other people to figure out what the point was.”

Helen nodded like she understood, but I didn’t understand.

“What did you mean by that?” I asked Sophie when we were safely in the car. “You say you’re okay but you really don’t sound okay.”

Sophie rolled down the window. A storm was gathering; I could smell the ozone.

“When did I say I was okay?” she asked.

“You said you didn’t need a therapist.”

A flock of crows flew over the road, squawking about the storm.

“I don’t need a therapist,” she said.

“Then you have to talk to me. I don’t even get what you’re so upset about. A couple of bad reviews? What do you care? You don’t even give a shit about people.”

I immediately felt guilty, but she didn’t look mad. She had that unreadable face that used to drive me nuts when we were kids. We reached the house. Out the back window of the car, the sky was black and low.

“Did you know I didn’t talk until I was three?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I learned to talk when you were born,” she said. “I never wanted to before.”

I didn’t know what to say. A rabbit paused on the lawn, looking at the sky.

“But you were just a baby,” she said. “You didn’t understand anything.”

“Is this seriously a guilt trip for not getting you when I was an infant?” I asked.

Sophie didn’t react. She just kept talking.

“That was okay. I figured you’d understand when you got older. But then you did, and there were still so many things I wanted to tell you that I couldn’t say.”

I rolled my eyes. Reese was home; she came to the kitchen window of our apartment and looked down at the car. I gave her an
In a minute
wave. My patience was low.

“Like what?” I asked Sophie. “What are these super-important thoughts that you can’t possibly express to mere mortals?”