The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (28 page)
Read The Life and Death of Sophie Stark Online
Authors: Anna North
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Literary
Sophie shut her eyes and ran her hands through her hair. She looked tired, but she still didn’t look mad.
“Somebody told me once that if you could read a dog’s thoughts,
a lot of them would probably be smells. For a long time, I thought maybe if you could see my thoughts, they’d be like my movies, but I don’t think that anymore.”
“So what do you think, Sophie? What is your problem? I’ve known you my entire life, and I still don’t understand what it is.”
I heard the tears in my voice before I realized my eyes were wet. Just that year I’d started to feel like I’d built a good life. Reese and I had started talking about having kids, and even though I was scared, I thought being a father was something I could do. And then Sophie came back to remind me that I’d failed at being close to the person in my life I was supposed to be closest to, the one I’d loved first and most.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. “I didn’t come here to fight with you,” she said. “I came to tell you I love you and I trust you. That’s all.”
“I love you, too,” I said. “But what do you mean, you trust me?”
“I trust you to do right by me.”
“Of course I’ll do right by you,” I said. “Just tell me what you need.”
“I will,” she said. “Right now can we make dinner?”
Soon after we got inside, the rain started. It lashed the windows and fell in an unbroken sheet from the awning above the door. Reese set up a pot under the leak in the closet, and Sophie and I started dinner. I remember thinking she seemed better—warmer and more alert. She agreed to eat spicy beans and rice for dinner instead of asking for oatmeal. She looked out the window and said, “It’s so beautiful,” and it was—the soaked bright grass, the dark pin oak, the streaming sky.
When it got dark, Reese and I watched TV while Sophie wrote in
her journal. When I asked what she was working on, she said it was a new thing she was trying out.
“A documentary, kind of,” was all she would say.
“It’s good that you’re working on something new,” I told her, and instead of shrugging she nodded.
“I think it’s going to be good,” she said.
Reese and I got ready for bed. As she left the bathroom, she kissed me and squeezed both my arms, something she did that always made me feel at home and safe. Sophie saw; for a second we’d forgotten she was there. Reese went into our bedroom, but Sophie kept looking at me.
“What?” I said.
“You’re happy,” she said.
I couldn’t tell if it was a question. “I am,” I said.
She smiled, the first time I’d seen her smile since she came to see me.
“I’m glad I couldn’t screw you up,” she said.
I smiled too. She lowered her head, and I put my hands around it and squeezed like I used to do. I imagined her mind as a thick forest where animals darted, hunted, hid. She put her hands on my hands for a second, pressed, took them away.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night,” I told her, and I went to bed feeling calm.
Our bedroom ceiling was flush with the roof, and the rain rang loud as cymbals above our heads all night. In the morning the sky was clear and Sophie was gone. I’m embarrassed now at where I looked for her. In the park, under the dripping trees, water gushing up around my shoes with every step. In the parking lot of the old church. In the cemetery, where one evening recently I’d seen a falcon
take apart a mourning dove, its feathers falling like snow. In all these places I called out for her, and I double-checked all the vantage points with the most scenic views, as if she’d gone sightseeing. And when I went home to regroup, I still thought she might be there with canned peaches, or pudding cups, something she’d wanted in the early morning and just run out to get. I was less worried than mad she hadn’t told me where she was going, and when the officer came to the door, at first I didn’t understand what he was saying.
“That can’t be,” I said. “She’s staying with us.”
And the poor policeman, who must’ve drawn the short straw to have to tell me in the first place, had to explain again.
That morning around three o’clock—later I’d thank a God I no longer believed in that she’d done it then, and not while I’d been looking for her in the park like an idiot—my sister had checked in to the La Quinta Inn across the river. She’d written a note to the housekeeping staff, which she posted on the bathroom door. It read,
“Danger. Do not enter. Please call 911 immediately.”
Then she’d run a bath and slit her wrists all the way up to the elbows.
For the first two days I was consumed with rage. All I could think about was how careful she’d been with the feelings of people she didn’t even know, how she’d tried to make sure the women who cleaned the room wouldn’t see her body. And still she hadn’t worried about how the people who loved her would feel when we found out we weren’t enough to keep her in the world. She hadn’t thought that someone would have to identify her, and that person would be me, and I would look down at her body like a carved bone, thin and small as when we were kids together, and I’d have to think about all the things I could’ve done over the course of my whole life to keep my sister from wanting to destroy herself. For those two days I couldn’t
cry or talk to Reese when she tried to comfort me. I could only bite my nails down to blood and drink coffee and whiskey and whiskey and coffee until I vomited in the sink.
On the third day, abruptly, I was sad. That day was beautiful, Iowa in the midst of its green summer, the sun in the oak leaves and the cicadas singing and everything full and lush and living. I thought of how if we’d had a day like this instead of the storm, Sophie might not have killed herself. If the rain hadn’t made such a racket in the house, I might’ve heard her getting up from the couch where she lay pretending to sleep and sneaking out the door into the night. And I could’ve caught her by the shoulder and asked her where she was going, and after a couple of unconvincing lies—she was never a very good liar—I would’ve gotten it out of her. And then I could have taken her to the hospital and found her a real doctor and the right drugs, and maybe she would’ve gotten better not just from what was hurting her the last few weeks but from whatever was wrong her whole strange life. She might’ve finally been healed.
On the fourth day, I started arguing with her out loud.
“You had a fine life,” I yelled at her ghost in our house. “Nothing was wrong.”
The ghost was silent, frustrating as when she was alive.
Then I started going through her things. I wanted something that would answer for her. I unpacked her clothes from the little suitcase where she’d been storing them and laid them out all over the house. Her boys’ button-down shirts, her one nice cashmere sweater, a few of those floral dresses, threadbare now, still ugly. Which of these was drag? They all smelled like her—dark and musky, like something that slips through the woods, unseen. She’d brought so little else with her—a toothbrush, a blunt-handled hairbrush I’d
never seen her use. A tube of bright red lipstick that made me so sad I had to throw it out. A key card from a Holiday Inn.
And then, in the top drawer of my desk, I found something I’d forgotten: her journal. I opened it—at the top of the first page were the words “The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.” And then a list of names, a cast and crew. I saw Allison’s name, Jacob’s, my own. I started reading, and then I got out my phone to call Allison. I didn’t want to talk to her, but I needed to tell her that Sophie was gone and that she’d left something for us to do.
From
The Collected Essays of Ben Martin
The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
I had no desire to appear in
The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
. When I heard of her death, I felt—even more strongly, I’m ashamed to say, than sorrow—a sense of mingled guilt and embarrassment. I felt guilty for giving the last film she ever directed a bad review and for contributing, in any way, to whatever she was feeling at the end of her life. At the same time, I felt embarrassed for thinking that anything I did could have mattered to her. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about Sophie Stark; I wanted to be left alone.
For almost a year prior to that, I’d been concerned that I was wasting my life. I’d always been liberated by the feeling that no one was really paying attention to my writing; it didn’t matter if my opinions were stupid, because they didn’t matter anyway. Then, finally, I was in a position where they did matter, and I felt like a terrible fraud. Writing about movies had always been fun to me, a way to play with ideas, an escape from whatever was lonely and unsatisfying about my life. I knew that I could see the same movie on two different days and have two totally different opinions, and that what I thought said less about the movie than about me and how tired or sad or angry or nostalgic I was when I walked into the theater. Then, suddenly, I was the film critic for the
Star
. I kept writing up my unreliable, could’ve-been-different-if-I’d-had-a-better-breakfast-that-day opinions, but now people quoted them on movie posters or cited them as
evidence that someone’s career was going south. Both made me feel horrible. My review of
Isabella
bothered me especially—I’d tried to psychoanalyze Stark, and it was clear after her death that I’d known nothing whatsoever about her. But all my reviews, toward the end, disgusted me. I asked to be transferred to the foreign desk, and my editors generously agreed.
I was in Mexico City when I got Robbie’s e-mail. I was shocked that Sophie would want me to be in a movie about her life, and then I was disturbed—if she’d been thinking of me at the end, it couldn’t have been good. I wondered if it was some sort of trick, a way to humiliate me somehow. I wondered if I was crazy to think this. Ultimately I just said no—I was abroad, I told him, and I wouldn’t be able to get back for filming. I also told him I’d quit criticism, hoping that would stand in for an apology.
Over the next few months, though, it ate at me. I felt guilty—here was a way to do something for her, the only thing I could possibly do, and I was pushing it away. Also, I’ll admit that I was curious—Sophie Stark had made me want to watch movies for a living in the first place, but I knew I hadn’t fully understood her as a director or as a human being. I thought if I agreed to be in the movie, if I met and talked to all the people who loved her, then I might get a better idea of what was going on inside her head.
Still, I might have put it off forever if I hadn’t gone to a party for a reporter who was moving back to the States. There were a lot of Americans there, and one woman recognized my name and wanted to talk about Sophie Stark.
“It’s sad, of course,” she said, “but it was bound to happen.”
Usually I excused myself when Stark came up, as she did from time to time, her death having significantly increased her fame. But I had had a couple of beers and some good ceviche, and I was feeling generous.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, she just saw people so clearly, you know? You can tell from the work. She saw people for what they really are, and I think if you’re that perceptive, you just can’t live in the world for very long.”
I thought maybe if I didn’t say anything, she would stop. I took another sip of beer.
“Think about it,” she went on. “To see the truth of life the way she did—it would become unbearable.”
I called Robbie as soon as I got home. If I could keep people from reducing Sophie Stark to some kind of magical prophet—a tendency fed, to some degree, by my earlier work—I was willing to do whatever it took.
I’m not sure that I succeeded. Those who have seen the film know it’s essentially a documentary. Stark left behind detailed instructions for lighting (those for lighting and styling Allison Mieskowski run several pages), location, and editing and outlined some events she wanted us—myself, Robbie, Allison, Jacob O’Hare, Daniel Vollker, and the producer-turned-director George Campos—to address. I, in what may have been a cruel joke, was tasked with reading my reviews of Stark’s films aloud on camera. I tried to make this a little easier on myself by offering commentary on Stark and on my relationship to the films, much of which George (or Robbie, who assumed a lot of directing duties, even though his sister hadn’t asked him to)
chose to cut. I find my portions of the film unbearable to watch; others I return to often.
As a whole the film did not dispel the notion of Stark as prophet—it remains all too common, especially among her younger fans. Nor, I think, does the film enable the viewer to understand Stark. I appeared in it and spent months talking to the people Stark loved most, and I still don’t understand her—that is, I don’t feel I know what she was thinking at any point in her life. This continues to worry me; when I watch her films now, I’m always looking for clues.
I’ve tried to find the photographer from whom, at least according to Campos, Stark took her name. I haven’t had any luck. I suppose it’s possible that she made the whole thing up. Stark wasn’t above feeding her own myth when it suited her, and she may have created a fake origin story just for the sake of misdirection. Or maybe cooking up a false namesake made her feel better about the way her life had gone. Whether she meant to or not, Emily Buckley created a character that was Sophie Stark, and while that character made brilliant movies, she also caused a great deal of pain. Maybe she wanted to offload the responsibility for the name at least onto somebody else. Ultimately, though, I believe the story about the photograph, even though I can’t find any evidence for it. I believe that Stark told Campos the truth; especially as she got older, I believe she wanted to be known.
And despite its limitations, I feel
The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
served a purpose. Forcing your loved ones to tell your life story after you commit suicide seems, on the face of it, like an act of unforgivable hubris, and in a way it was. But I think it
was an act of generosity, too. Sophie was so often accused—rightly, in many cases—of stealing other people’s stories, and now she was letting us tell hers. In a way she left herself to us.
In retrospect most of Robbie’s cuts to my commentary were good decisions. But there’s one story I wish he’d left in—the story of the last time I saw Sophie. It was 2016, after my
Conversation
profile came out but before
Isabella
. She was at Sundance, by herself, drinking whiskey and dressed all in white. I was standing directly behind her, trying to think of something polite to say, when she wheeled around and said my name.
“How did you know I was here?” I stammered.
She smiled then, the only time I ever saw her do so in person. She tapped the corner of her eye.
“I have superhuman vision, remember?”
At first I didn’t know what she meant—then I realized she’d read my profile and was making fun of my idea that maybe she could see more than everybody else. I was embarrassed then, even resentful. Now it’s one of my favorite memories. I believe it pained Sophie how poorly other people understood her, how little she could make herself understood, how easy it was to turn her into an angel or a monster. I’m glad to know she also found it funny.