The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (4 page)

The day we were supposed to shoot the big scene at the restaurant was the first day of February. Our version didn’t end the way my story had; instead of letting him leave, I was going to shove a knife into Bean’s belly. We were in the parking lot behind a Turkish restaurant in Bay Ridge whose owner loved movies. Inside we made it bright and cheesy-looking with checkered tablecloths and menus we printed out at the DP’s mom’s house, but the parking lot was still dirty and lonely, a sad place to end up. I took my mark, my back against the faded red door. Peter stood in front of me. The makeup artist, who was the nineteen-year-old grip’s big sister, had given him
a close shave, and in his polo shirt and khakis and leather shoes he looked like a stranger. The wedding ring we borrowed from the other grip fit like it was his.

“You ready?” I asked him, smiling, trying to get comfortable.

He nodded, but he was looking past my shoulder at the beat-up door. Sophie counted down.

“You know why it didn’t bother me, running into you today?” he asked.

His voice was different—he sounded slick, polite almost. For the first time, I realized he was good at this, at being someone else.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I came here on purpose,” he said. “Just to see you.”

Then he moved close to me, the way he’d been in the run-through, so close I could smell him and feel the heat coming off his chest. And then he came closer. He was fully against me, pressing on me with all his weight. I looked at him to get him to ease up, but his eyes were flat. I looked at Sophie but she was staring over the DP’s shoulder at the picture of us in the viewfinder. Peter pressed harder, and I could feel his cock against my belly, through those stupid khaki pants, and I wanted to scream so he would stop, but the take would be ruined and everyone would know how weak I was, how someone could scare me just by pretending.

“Why would you come to see me?” I asked him, and people who love the movie have told me this is their favorite part, the fear and anger in my voice feel so real, so authentic. I hate it when people say that.

“Because I want you to know that I know how to find you. Wherever you go, I’ll always be there.”

And then he grabbed my chin and put his mouth on my mouth.

People who have been raped talk about flashbacks, and I believe them. But that’s not what I felt while Peter was holding me against the door and mashing his lips against mine. What I felt was pure shame. I’d gone to such trouble to tell a good story about my life, a story that was exciting and didn’t make me look bad, and now the cast and crew and anyone who saw the movie would see the other story anyway. They would see me letting Peter do something I didn’t want; they would see me fearful and helpless and struggling. And even though it was just a movie, even though I was supposed to be Marianne and he was supposed to be Bean, Peter was taking my dignity away, and everybody knew it.

It went on for a long time before I remembered I could stop it, and I felt even worse that I’d forgotten. I took the retractable knife from my apron pocket and jabbed him in the ribs, hard enough to bruise. He fell back, crushing the blood packets in his shirt; the red paint bloomed from his body, and I wished it was real. After the cameras stopped rolling, he asked me if I was okay, but I ignored him. I left the set and walked down the street in the cold to a coffee shop. I ordered a mocha, which I’ve always hated, and I sat at the table staring at it. After a while Sophie came in. She sat down across from me and put her hand over mine on the table, but I pulled away.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I hated girls who pretended nothing was wrong when they were obviously mad, but if Sophie actually didn’t understand why I was upset, I didn’t think she deserved an explanation.

“That’s not true,” she said.

I shrugged. The whipped cream on top of the mocha was melting.

“Are you upset about how Peter played the scene?”

She said it slowly, in that way she had of puzzling out things that would’ve been obvious to any normal human, and this time it made me furious.

“You think?” I asked. “You think I might not like how he held me down and kissed me without any warning, in front of everyone? You think I might be a little upset about that?”

I realized then that I’d never really yelled at her before. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Maybe she’d break up with me. Maybe she’d cry. I was scared, but I was excited too, like I’d climbed up to a high place and I was looking down. But she didn’t cry, and she didn’t yell back. She just looked at me for a minute, and then she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was going to do that. I should’ve stopped him.”

This was also the first time she’d ever apologized to me. The words sounded weird coming out of her mouth, like a foreign language, but hearing them made my heart crack open a little bit. I felt like I was seeing a part of her I’d never seen before, a part that wasn’t totally sure she was right all the time, a part that could admit she’d fucked up. And seeing that made me love her more than I had the whole time we’d been working on the movie, when she’d seemed so perfect and competent and impenetrable.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m sorry anyway,” she said. “I wish I could’ve protected you.”

This time I reached out and took her hand. “It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

We still had a few scenes to shoot, and they went easily. Sophie promised to edit the kiss out of the final cut, and I felt closer to her than ever. She’d moved into my room at the house with Irina by then, and we started talking about what we’d do when the movie
was finished, how we’d enter it in festivals where everyone would see how great it was. We talked about winning at Cannes, how we’d go up together to accept the award. We talked about how I’d look in my red-carpet dress.

I didn’t see Peter again until after the shoot was over. The last day had been odds and ends in what was supposed to be Burnsville, footage of me sitting on bleachers, waiting for the bus. It made me laugh, how little it was like home—the cameras in my face, the bright light, the city poking out through the smog on the horizon. Later I’d see the movie and shake for days at how real it looked, and forever after the fake memory would lie on top of the real one in my head, covering it over. But that day the air was sweet with the beginning of spring, and I was happy, and Peter came to the house to see me.

I was in our room, drinking wine from a jar and trying to hang the pretty Indian cloth I’d just bought for curtains. Sophie was in the editing room, and I’d just started to wonder when she’d be home. These days I wanted her to spend all her time with me, lazy in our bed, like I imagined she’d do if I were pregnant. But it was more like she was having the baby, and she had to work hard every day to make sure it got born right.

One of our housemates must have let Peter in. I heard someone on the stairs and I ran to the door with my face all shining, ready for Sophie, and when I saw Peter I turned away. I was embarrassed to let him see me so happy, like I was waiting for him.

“Hi Allison,” he said.

“What do you want?” I asked.

My mother always said good manners were for people who deserved them. This attitude used to get her in a lot of trouble, but it was one of the few things I ever learned from her that I liked.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Well I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

It wasn’t true. Really I wanted to ask him why, why he thought he could act that way to me, just shove himself against me without warning when we’d already gone over the scene. I was worried there was something about me, something that said,
Do what you want with this one
, some kind of smell on my skin. That’s why when Peter said again that he wanted to talk to me and asked if he could come in, I moved aside and let him sit at the edge of the bed. I stayed standing, holding my wine, looking down at him like that would give me the advantage somehow.

“First,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry.”

“A little late,” I said.

He went on. “I’m sorry because I knew you’d be scared when I kissed you, and I did it anyway.”

He was talking fast and flat, like he’d written the speech out beforehand, and he wasn’t meeting my eyes. I didn’t want to give him any more power than he already had; I didn’t want him to know how much he’d rattled me.

“I wasn’t scared,” I said. “It was just a shitty thing to do, that’s all.”

He looked up at me then. “I knew it would scare you,” he said, “because Sophie told me it would.”

Sometimes when something bad is about to happen, I get this rushing feeling, almost like joy. Right then I wanted to jump in the air or throw my jar of wine across the room. Instead I sat down on the bed next to Peter.

“What did she tell you?” I asked.

He stared at the floor. I was embarrassed about the T-shirts and panties and wine corks that lay there, all the evidence of the months
we’d been fucking and drinking and sleeping and loving in that room, but it was too late to clean anything up.

“She said she didn’t like the way things were going. She wanted the last scene to be different.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What didn’t she like?”

He paused. I could tell he was choosing his words and that he wasn’t very good at it.

“It wasn’t that she didn’t like your performance. She liked it. It’s just, she wanted something more intense for the end.”

I could feel acid rising up my throat. Ever since the beginning, Sophie’d had only good things to say about my acting. She was always talking about how we were going to make so many more movies together. I wanted to kick Peter out, tell him he had no idea what he was talking about, but I also wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“And?” I asked.

“She said I should get in your face a little bit, to make the scene better.”

“Get in my face?”

He stuck his hands in his hair, looked at his shoes. “I don’t remember how she put it—she just said I should get close to you, even kiss you maybe. She told me to do that. I wouldn’t have come up with it on my own.”

I thought I had him figured out. He acted all hard, but really he was one of those guys who couldn’t stand to have anybody hate him. Now that he’d had his fun freaking me out, he was going to pin everything on Sophie and look like the good guy.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Get out of here.”

He stood up. I stood too. I’d expected him to try to argue, but he looked defeated, almost relieved.

“Okay,” he said.

But at our door, he turned back to me, and now he looked scared.

“She told me this other thing,” he said. “She told me that because of something that happened to you, you might get really mad if I tried to kiss you. That you might even leave the set. But that I shouldn’t worry because that was part of it. Whatever happened to you—she didn’t say what—was going to make the movie better.”

I had to sit back down.

“I didn’t ask what it was,” he went on. “I should have. I knew we were doing something fucked up to you, and I did it anyway, and I’m sorry.”

And then he did leave, and I was alone, and I didn’t know if I believed him, but I noticed that I was picking all my clothes up off the floor, like I didn’t want them touching hers anymore.

S
OPHIE CAME HOME HOURS LATER
. I’d finished the bottle of wine and started in on somebody’s cheap vodka from the kitchen freezer, and I was in what my mom used to call a bloodred mood. I wanted Sophie to ask me what was wrong, but she came in all important, talking about her day, wearing a new suit jacket she’d bought, and finally when she lay back on the bed and started talking at the ceiling without even looking at me, I gave up and interrupted.

“Peter came to see me today,” I told her.

She didn’t look worried. She didn’t look at me at all. She was still staring at the ceiling like something was written up there.

“I thought you weren’t speaking to him,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” I said.

Sophie looked at me then. She sat up on her elbows and fixed me
with those giant eyes, but still she didn’t look angry or upset. She just looked focused, like she was in the editing room, cutting a tough scene.

“Did you tell him to kiss me?” I asked.

“Did he say that?” Sophie asked.

“Is it true?”

I wanted so badly for her to say something that made sense, something simple and obvious that would make Peter the liar and not her. Instead she stood up, took her jacket off, ran her fingers through her hair. She still just looked like she was thinking.

I started yelling. “Tell me if it’s fucking true!”

“Can we talk about this in the morning?” she asked.

She held her hand out to me the way she did when she wanted me to come to bed. I took it and dug my nails into it the way I did when she was making me feel so good it hurt.

“Did you tell Peter to kiss me?” I asked again.

She looked away. “I did,” she said.

I threw my jar of vodka against the wall. When it shattered into a million pieces, I picked up the bottle and threw that too. I was looking around for something else to throw when Sophie started talking in a new voice, loud and with a panicky edge on it.

“Allison, you know when you want something to be perfect?”

“No!” I shouted.

“Well, you know when
I
want something to be perfect?”

I turned to face her. My blood was pounding in my ears.

“Sometimes I just want that so badly that I don’t think about what will happen or how other people feel. I can’t think about it, even though I know I should.”

“Why can’t you?” I asked.

Her eyes were wet. I realized she was scared now, as scared as I’d ever seen her. She raised her arms in a silent shrug, and I remembered how small she was, how fragile.

“Well, you need to learn,” I said. I wasn’t yelling anymore. I was hoarse. “You can’t be like this forever.”

“I know,” she said. She held out her hand again, and this time I took it and lay down on the bed with her. But all that night I dreamed a dog was chasing me, barking and biting at my heels.