The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (26 page)

Some older ladies in nice clothes were chatting by the side entrance; I charged at them breathless and panicked, and asked if they’d seen her.

“Well, yes,” said the tallest one, with a big ugly opal necklace in her cleavage. “We saw her in the theater.”

“No,” I said, “I mean after that. Just now.”

They edged away from me. They looked the way strangers sometimes do when you’re really freaking them out, like you might infect them with something.

“We haven’t seen her,” said the woman with the necklace.

As I ran off she called, “You were very good.”

Finally I had to give up. On the train I felt guilty because I’d just been lapping up compliments instead of taking care of Sophie, but also I was angry, because couldn’t she just let me feel important for a little while? By the time I got back to the motel, I had at least ten apologies and as many accusations all written out in my head.

Sophie was sitting on our unmade bed, with her computer open.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Where have you been?”

She showed me the screen. It was full of listings for apartments.

“I think we should find a real place to live together,” she said.

I was still mad at her for scaring me.

“Now you want to?” I asked. “I’ve been trying and trying to get you to move out of this shithole for months.”

She looked at me with the same face she’d worn when she decided to make the movie modern—big-eyed and hopeful—but too much somehow, I could see now. Kind of desperate.

“I want to move in together as soon as possible,” she said. “I want to start a real life together.”

I sat down on the bed with her. I was worried now.

“What’s up with you?” I asked. “Why did you run off?”

Her face shut down then. She looked at the computer instead of at me.

“The movie isn’t good,” she said.

“Of course it is,” I told her. “It’s great. Everybody was saying nice things about it.”

“No,” she said. “You’re good. The movie is bad.”

I hadn’t seen her like this before—after
Marianne
wrapped, she’d been excited, full of plans. I tried to think back to the movie, take myself out of it and look at it like a stranger would. I thought about the opening shot of the harbor, how it looked bleak and gray and flat, like Sophie’s face with all the feeling sucked out of it. Other parts of the movie were like that, too, I remembered now—the glass-and-metal front of the building that was Henry’s palace, the conference room where Isabella makes her deal with the rebels, even the stretch of Sixth Avenue where Ferdinand and Isabella have their wedding procession. Now that I thought about it, it was true that the movie had started to lose me whenever Isabella wasn’t talking. But that had to be normal—I’d never seen myself on the big screen before. I’d waited years to watch
Marianne
. Of course, like all the egomaniac actors I knew, I’d be most interested in watching myself.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “The movie’s beautiful. You’re just nervous because it’s the premiere, that’s all.”

Sophie didn’t nod or look up.

“What if we moved to Maine?” she said. “I’ve been looking there too.”

“What’s in Maine?” I asked. I was getting exhausted trying to follow her train of thought.

“We could get a little house on the beach and catch fish. We could build a boat. We could really get away from everything.”

I was a little mad at her again—why would I want to run away now, when for the first time in my whole life I was in a place where people thought I was great? But also I was pretty sure Sophie had never been in a boat, let alone built one, so I decided not to take her seriously.

“Okay,” I said, “but if we do that I want lobster pots. I want to eat lobster every day.”

“We’ll do that too,” she said. “Maybe we can get jobs on a lobster boat, and they’ll pay us in lobster.”

Her face and voice were dreamy, like a little kid’s. I took off my clothes and got under the covers with her, and we held each other and talked about lobster until she fell asleep.

T
HE FIRST REVIEW WASN’T TERRIBLE
. It was a short blurb in the
Daily Bridge
calling the movie “flawed” but “well acted” and “occasionally moving.” Sophie seemed nervous but not too upset; she made a list of apartments to visit, and we saw two on Monday. The first one was nice enough inside but sat between two chicken plants,
so the air all around it smelled like shit and old blood. The second was pretty, on a street with trees and an elementary school, but the landlady squinted at us and said, “If you live here, you can’t be coming and going all the time. To work, okay, but we can’t have people coming in and out at night. This is a family building.”

We couldn’t figure out if she was bigoted or insane. Tuesday we took the day off from looking, and I went to meet the manager of a new bar where I was applying to be shift manager. He liked me and hired me right away, but I explained I couldn’t start till Thursday.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I have an interview with a magazine.”

I met Lucy at a fancy vegetarian restaurant in Chelsea. She was just like I remembered, calm and pretty in jeans and a blazer and leather moccasins, and looking at her made me think maybe a person could fit in everywhere if they just had the right clothes. She told me the Korean-style rice bowl was delicious, and I ordered it to be polite and because nothing else on the menu looked very good anyway. The waitress brought us tea and then pumpkin soup in little bowls, which was lukewarm and sweet and reminded me of my sister’s baby food, and while I tried to find a way to like it, Lucy asked me where I was from. I sometimes lied about this to people, especially people I’d never been close to, not because I was embarrassed but because I didn’t think I should have to think about home just to satisfy some stranger’s curiosity. But I was scared to lie to a reporter, and also I wanted her to know what I was really like, where I came from—I wanted people who read the magazine to know that and like me anyway.

“West Virginia,” I said, and when she said, “Oh, it’s beautiful down there,” I said, “Not where I’m from.”

Immediately I was worried that was rude and she’d be mad at me, but she just went right on to the next question. I told her about my dad and my mom and my stepdad and my sisters, and I only stopped telling the truth when we got to Bean. No good had ever come from exposing that weak part of myself. When she asked me why I left home I just said I was getting away from a bad boyfriend, and she nodded, and the main course came. I’d been expecting something that looked like fried rice, and I burned myself right away on the heavy iron pot that was still cooking my food. I was ashamed, and I stared stupidly at the red blister rising on my finger, until Lucy noticed and said, “I do that all the time,” and told me to hold my finger against my cold water glass until the pain went down.

“So when you took the Isabella role,” she said, her own iron pot steaming untouched in front of her, “you were replacing someone much higher-profile. And correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you don’t have any formal training. Were you nervous?”

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t nervous at all.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me, like we were friends and it was okay to tell her what I
really
thought, and it occurred to me that if I knew her better, I might not necessarily like her.

“Really?” she asked. “Not even for a minute?”

I looked right at her, wishing I hadn’t burned my thumb or shown up in a flowered dress that was both too fancy and not fancy enough, and I said, “I knew I’d be great. And if anybody doubted that, I was going to show them.”

Lucy nodded, neatly scooped up a piece of tofu from her pot, and blew on it. “Did Sophie doubt you?”

“What?”

I knew what she’d said, but I needed her to say it again so I’d
have time to calm down. The suggestion—and the way she smiled when she said it—made me want to smack her.

“You weren’t her first choice. Was she worried you couldn’t handle it?”

Of course I’d been afraid of that. And maybe part of the reason Sophie was acting so weird about the movie was that she never expected me to be so good. I was even madder at Lucy because I thought she might be right.

“Sophie’s always believed in me,” I said.

Lucy nodded. She picked up a mushroom with her chopsticks, popped it in her mouth.

“Is it ever hard to work with your girlfriend?” she asked.

I tried to eat some of my rice bowl. It was still steaming hot; a bite of rice and some spinachy vegetable burned my tongue and made me pant. I tried to think of an answer that would make her feel dumb for asking and also would make me feel better about me and Sophie and our future.

“No,” I said finally. “She motivates me. Being with her makes me want to be better.”

“And this movie hasn’t strained your relationship at all?”

I was starting to sweat. I thought of Sophie at our grungy motel, looking at pictures of Maine on her computer.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you’ve gotten so much praise, and she’s gotten a lot of criticism.”

“No she hasn’t,” I snapped back. “What criticism?”

“Well, the
Bridge
review and the one in the
L.A. Times
and then the blogs. And Martin’s got a review coming out today or tomorrow.”

I’d avoided learning that much about movie criticism; I didn’t
even know what blogs she meant. But I did know that Ben Martin was the movie critic for the
Star
and that his review would be more important than any other.

“A bad one?” I asked.

But she just waved her hand vaguely, took another bite of tofu.

“Look, I’m not trying to say anything bad about the movie. I loved it. I’m just curious about how you’re handling the response as a couple.”

I wondered if they’d taught her this in her journalism classes, what to say if a subject got upset. I wondered if she’d thought that I’d be easy to interview, that I’d give up all kinds of dirt because I didn’t know any better. I promised myself I’d disappoint her.

“We don’t care what other people say about us,” I said. “Especially Sophie. The only important thing is making good movies and making each other happy.”

“So she’s supportive of your career, even if it doesn’t involve her?”

The idea that I would do movies without Sophie really hadn’t occurred to me until right then. I had no idea how she’d feel about that. But I was on a good track now, and I was going to stay on it.

“Of course,” I said. “We’re behind each other a hundred percent. We don’t have any choice. We’re each other’s everything.”

On the train ride home, I was proud of myself for what I’d said. I’d tell Sophie, and she’d be proud too. We’d both do a lot more interviews, I thought, and we’d keep saying the same things, and eventually we’d have no choice but to live by them.

At the motel Sophie had her suitcase out on the bed. She was carefully folding her clothes into it.

“Where are you going?” I asked, smiling even though I was already scared. “Maine?”

“No,” she said.

She folded up a boy’s button-down shirt that I recognized from our old days together.

“Sophie,” I asked, “what’s going on?”

“The
Star
review came out,” she said. She pointed to her laptop.

I’d been so worried about what to say to Lucy that I’d almost forgotten the review. But once I started reading it, I couldn’t look away. Ben Martin started by talking about Sophie’s career, calling her movies “deeply unsentimental.” Then he said, “There’s a fine line between unsentimental and outright unfeeling, and
Isabella
has crossed it.” I had the thought that I should stop, go comfort Sophie, tell her that what that asshole said didn’t matter. But I kept reading. He talked about Sophie’s “fundamental flaw.” He compared her to a robot. He said the only good thing about the movie was me.

I still think that after I read the review, there was a chance for us. If I’d told myself it was bullshit, if I’d slammed the laptop shut, and looked at Sophie with all the love and respect I’d felt when we were first together, and gone to her and told her she was so much better than he said, and believed it, I think we would’ve come through. But instead I believed him. Not completely—I didn’t think Sophie was a no-talent loser who would never make a good film again. But looking back, I did think the movie was drab and ugly. And I did think I was the best thing about it. It felt good to let myself believe that—after letting Sophie convince me that she was the only one who could make a movie good, that sometimes she had hurt me to do it and that had to be okay, I wanted to feel like actually I was the one her movies couldn’t live without.

So I did go to her and rub her shoulder and kiss her cheek, but all I said to her was, “What do you care what that guy thinks?”

“I care if it’s true,” she said. Her voice was flat and dull.

“Of course it isn’t true,” I said, but I didn’t sell the line, and when she turned to me, she saw I didn’t really believe it.

“I’m going to go stay with my brother for a while,” she said.

Sophie didn’t talk about Robbie much, but still I’d always been jealous of him. She’d once said he was the only person she could talk to without feeling bad about herself—when I asked her if I made her feel bad about herself she said no, but it sounded forced.

“How long are you going for?” I asked.

She shrugged. She was doing something that always scared me, moving like she had almost no strength in her body, like she was about to fall right down on the floor.

“A month,” she said, “maybe longer.”

“A month?” I almost yelled. “I thought we were going to look for a place together.”

“I thought so too,” she said. “I thought that would help. But I don’t think so now.”

I hated when she talked like that, like she was so mysterious. I thought she was being petty, so I was petty right back.

“You’re so mad that I got a good review and you didn’t that you don’t want to live with me anymore? Maybe you need to grow the fuck up.”

She didn’t flinch, just sat down on the bed and looked up at me.