The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (9 page)

Jacob

I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SOPHIE STARK. MY PRODUCER
, Gary, was the movie geek; he’d seen
Marianne
and said we had to get her to do the video. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to make a video anyway. The label thought it would sell records, and it didn’t, and I’ve never done another one, and I’m glad. But I was younger then, and I was still doing things because I thought they might help my career somehow and because deep down I didn’t like saying no to people. So the label execs, who were really just these guys four years older than me with an office in Brooklyn, said do a video, and Gary said Sophie Stark. And I picked the lake, because a masochistic part of me had always wanted to go back there.

We didn’t rent the same house my family used to stay in—that would’ve been too weird—but the one we got across the lake looked a lot like it. And it had the same smell, like if you made a dent in the floor, the lake water would well up. I thought about the ghost stories my dad used to tell—the little girl who drowned in the lake and left
wet footprints on the stairs, the old lady floating from room to room with her feet a few inches above the floor.

Ghosts or not, the shoot didn’t go real well. I can see now that the song wasn’t actually very good—“Deep” is the kind of fairy-tale-knockoff ballad that was sort of popular at the time but that now just sounds sort of twee and annoying. Sophie ignored a lot of the lyrics. The final video is mostly just this eleven-year-old actress she hired sharpening a knife and then rowing out into the middle of the lake. Now I recognize how good it is—it’s not dreamy or old-timey at all, like I wanted back then. Instead, the way she shot it makes it look almost like a documentary, even though some of the things in it couldn’t happen in real life, and that makes you want to watch it over and over, like you’re going to find out more about these people, even though they’re not real people and of course you aren’t.

At the time, though, I wanted her to do it my way. I didn’t get why she couldn’t put more scenes of me and the band in the video. I mentioned a verse where I sang about following the girl with the red shoes all the way through her life, from childhood to her death. We could shoot that in the forest, I thought. I could play the guy following her. This was during the time I thought I could be a real rock star, and it made me forget a lot of things about myself, like that I was a weird schlub who should not star in videos.

“Sorry,” was all Sophie said, “I just don’t think that part is very interesting.”

By Saturday night, the end of the three-day shoot, we were all pretty sick of one another. My bandmates were mad at me for roping them into this, I was mad at Sophie for ignoring all my ideas, and I wasn’t sure if Sophie was mad at anyone, but she looked depressed, and then she went outside to call her fiancée. The guys in the band
went into town to get drunk. I stayed at the house, allegedly to write more songs but really just to lie on my bed and think about how shitty my existing songs were and rhythmically stuff Doritos in my mouth. I’d suspected for a long time that the music I was playing was a crappy imitation of other people’s better music, and I was worried other people were starting to catch on. As I fell asleep I was thinking about my first piano lessons in third grade: the cold quiet room, the pretty Russian teacher with her thick low voice, the way the music cut through my brain and left it clean and bright and open.

Later that night I woke up to a loon calling on the lake. I remembered that sound from when I was a kid. I used to be able to make it myself—the grown-ups would turn to scan the water and I would let them squint with their grown-up eyes until I got too excited and had to laugh and scream that it was me. When my voice changed I couldn’t do it anymore, and since then the sound had always put me on edge. It was a warm night; the cameraman in the bed next to mine had a loud fan blowing across his face. I’d always slept so well in our old house, but here the night felt bent out of shape somehow; the loon’s voice shook me up and I couldn’t settle. When I heard it again I got up to look for it.

The view out the window calmed me down a little bit. The moon was high and full, and the lake was glass, and the light at the end of the general store dock was just where it always had been, and for a minute I could pretend I was back in the old place, and Mom was alive, and my sister, Jenna, was ten years old with Band-Aids on both knees and no thought in her head of marrying an evangelical minister and homeschooling their kids, and Dad still looked like some of his life might be ahead of him. And then I saw someone on the dock, a black outline on the water, and I knew it must be Sophie.

I told myself I was going to have a talk with her, get her to explain what was wrong with my song, but as I pulled on pants and walked down the path to the dock, I was thinking about fighting. I’d never been in a real fight—growing up, I was always the chubby, wimpy kid who said sorry before anyone could kick my ass. But for some reason I kept thinking I’d tap her on the shoulder and then she’d wheel on me and slug me in the face, and I’d fight back, but she’d fight harder and dirtier, biting me and kneeing me in the balls. I was getting mad as I walked down there, thinking about how she was cheating in the fight we weren’t having.

I stopped a couple of paces behind her. I was barefoot, and she still hadn’t heard me, and I realized I didn’t know what to say. Just “Hi” sounded weak, but “Hey!” sounded too angry, like she’d gotten to me already. Finally I decided to start with just her name, “Sophie,” just like that, but before I could say it, she turned around, and her face was covered in tears.

“You couldn’t sleep either,” she said.

She was all wrapped up in an afghan from the couch inside, and it made her look a little bit crazy, like somebody who didn’t know how to put on clothes. Her voice was thick and hiccupy with crying, and I felt kind of cheated, like I’d gotten all ready for something that wasn’t happening, but I wasn’t going to fight with her now.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing you have to worry about,” she said. “After tomorrow you never have to deal with me again.”

I was curious—I hadn’t pegged her for somebody who cried. But if she was going to be a dick, I couldn’t let myself stand there and take it. I used to worry about my dignity a lot then.

“Fine,” I said, and turned to leave. I’d walked halfway back up to
the house when I heard her voice again, completely different this time, all high and teary.

“Wait,” she called. “I’m sorry.”

I turned back. She was standing in the porch light’s beam and her face was so puffed and red from crying that it looked almost soft. She was twenty-six then but I’d pegged her for older because of how bossy she was; now she looked young and scared.

“I’m not usually this bad,” she said. “I mean, I’m not great. But I’ve had some difficult things recently, and I think it’s made me especially bad.”

I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, and I might not have, except that she sucked so hard at playing for sympathy, like she didn’t get how people talked about their problems. Still, I didn’t move.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, it’s fine. I’m going to be fine. It’s just—you know when someone leaves you and you realize that person was responsible for all the best parts of you, and now those parts are gone and you don’t know how to get them back?”

I remembered Tessa, five years before, the way her long back looked the day she said it was time for her to find a husband. I was twenty-three and she was thirty-five, and she said it the way she always said things to me, kind of offhandedly, like everything that happened between us was a joke to her. I said I’d be her husband, and she looked at me with a little pity-smile and said I hadn’t been listening—she wanted kids, a house. I said I’d get her a house, we’d have two kids—we’d even picked out their names together, I said, and right then I realized she’d just been playing the whole time. She cupped my chin in her hand and said, “Oh, honey, you’ll be a wonderful father someday,” and then left as easily as if I’d never existed.
I still missed the daydream of those kids—how I’d learn to braid Rebecca’s hair so Tessa could get an extra few minutes of sleep, how I’d tell Isaac I loved him every night so he’d never forget it, even after I was dead. And I missed Tessa—the way she got dressed in the morning, her hands, her straight, no-bullshit mouth. Since she’d left, all my relationships seemed to last about six months. The girl would start thinking she understood me, and I wouldn’t correct her, and then what she thought was going on between us and what I thought would get so far apart that when I broke up with her, she’d think I was proposing. It had gotten so regular that I could see all the stages before they happened. I’d meet someone and hear the clock start ticking.

“Sure,” I said. “You and your fiancée . . .” I started, not sure how to finish.

She shook her head. “We were never engaged. I just say that to make myself feel better. I made up this life where I ask her to marry me and she says yes, and then she gets really girly and traditional and buys all these bridal magazines and calls me a million times a day with questions about centerpieces, but none of that is true. She left in March.”

For years after my mom died, I sometimes told people she was still alive—mostly people I didn’t know very well, but sometimes even close friends like my college roommate, who acted like I was crazy when I finally told him the truth. I wasn’t crazy. I just wanted to skip the moment when people got all quiet and awkward trying to figure out what to say. And I wanted to forget those bad last years when Mom became someone none of us knew, and then not someone at all.

“What happened?” I asked.

Sophie gave the biggest shrug I’d ever seen. She threw her shoulders back and her face upward like she thought the sky might open and send her down an answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s not true. I know. I’m hard to be with.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, thinking about how she’d insulted me. She smiled a little bit, then got serious again.

“I don’t mean I’m a bitch. I mean, that’s a problem, too, but less so, most of the time. I just mean I don’t understand other people that well, and sometimes they don’t understand me either. It leads to trouble.”

“I can see how that could cause trouble,” I said, “but it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”

“Well,” she said, “I haven’t been alive all that long, but I’ve had enough breakups to know that the common element is me.”

This last part sounded like she’d read it in a self-help book, and I had a mental image of Sophie sitting cross-legged on a bed somewhere, paging through a pink paperback with a pen in her hand, trying to figure out how normal humans had relationships.

“Listen,” I said. “My mom was sick for a lot of her childhood and her teens, and she had a lot of surgeries and a lot of scars. When she got to college, she didn’t really know how to act with people her own age, and she was so sure nobody would ever want to date her that she didn’t know what to do when people did. And so she had a lot of bad boyfriends and boyfriends that hurt her. Then when she was twenty-five, her dad died, and she decided to stop dating and build a house on this lake and live here alone. And my dad was the guy she hired to help build the house. And when the house was done and my dad asked her to marry him, she asked him why he wanted her when he
could have someone with nothing wrong with them. My dad didn’t give her a bunch of compliments or anything like that. He just said, ‘No I couldn’t. That person doesn’t exist.’”

I didn’t tell her the rest of their story, how they married and loved each other for twenty years, and then in less than two years she went crazy and died. I didn’t think there’d be any need to tell her, because after we said good-bye the next day, I thought I’d never see her again. She was smiling now, her face still wet. I wanted to touch her, not even to kiss her necessarily but just to feel her skin, which I for some reason thought would be hot and thin and fragile like the skin of a mouse. I took a step toward her, and I could feel the heat coming off her. Then she brought her arm up between us and wiped her eyes with the afghan.

“Why did we come here?” she asked.

The night snapped back into focus. Frogs were singing in the woods; the moon was starting to set.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. It was the kind of question people back in the city would ask me at parties, meaning
What is our purpose in this world?
But Sophie didn’t seem like the type to get existential.

“I mean, why did you want to shoot here? I can tell you’ve been here before. What happened here?”

Her face was dry now, and she was looking at me hard with her big eyes, sizing me up. I remembered that I barely knew her at all.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” I said, turning away. “I’d better get some sleep.”

“Good night,” she said. And she put her hand on my arm, just for a second, and her skin was just like I’d imagined.

.   .   .

T
HE NEXT MORNING
the guys were loading up the van. I put the amps and guitars on board, but when I tried to help Sophie’s crew with the lighting equipment, they gave me a look like they didn’t know who I was, so I just stood around in the driveway, staring at the trees and my feet. I was thinking maybe this weekend would be good for me. I was feeling clear and alert. When I got back to the city, maybe I’d be able to write songs again. Then I felt skinny arms wrap around me from behind.

“Let’s not go today,” Sophie said. “Let’s stay.”

At first I thought we wouldn’t be able to do it. When I called, the owner said it was rented to someone else starting Monday, and when I asked if there was any way they could switch, he gave me a lecture about city people and the things we needed to understand. I thought of telling him I’d come here every summer for fifteen years, but I was worried he’d tell me bad news about the house, like the new owners had torn it down and put up a big new ugly house in its place. Instead I just hung up. But when I told Sophie it was a no-go, she called him back, and within fifteen minutes he had changed his mind.