What Happened to Sophie Wilder (10 page)

When she spoke of taking on freelance work—just something to fill the days when the novel wasn't coming along—Tom was encouraging. He'd been proud of her book's success but on balance mystified by her writing. He mostly knew that it wasn't going well. It wasn't important to him that she finish her book, only that she be happy. Anyway, she wasn't giving up on fiction; she was just taking some time from it. But the satisfaction of this new kind of writing, which seemed to represent her faith in action, was too great to set aside.

There was no grand pronouncement. She said nothing to the people who were waiting for the novel. But she gradually
came to understand that she was done. She knew that she would easily enough be forgotten. Some of her stories might be anthologized somewhere, but the collection would go out of print and when it did Sophie Wilder would leave the shelves. Even Greg would forget eventually. He would find new clients or not, but either way he would give up on her. This was all a relief. In the meantime, she handled his quarterly calls, told him things were getting on track, and continued sending proposals to the grandchildren of robber barons, asking them to direct their families' money to parish soup kitchens or adoption programs. She had thought she was happy with the choice, which anyway hadn't felt like a choice, exactly. But all it had taken was one conversation to send her back to the trains, into the secret station.

 

The downtown six, after emptying out its last passengers at Brooklyn Bridge, continued on to the City Hall station, no longer open but still there, beautiful in its shining tiles. Sophie remembered the first time she'd discovered the place, an occult destination, it had seemed to her, another reminder of the world beneath the world. It always surprised her a little each time to find it still there. She sat alone while the train made its way through the station and back out at the Brooklyn Bridge stop on the uptown track.

Sophie rode from there with every intention of going back home, but when they reached Bleecker, she left the train and went upstairs. She knew before she was out on the street where she meant to go. When she reached Bill Crane's building, she rang the bell, and he buzzed her inside without asking who was there.

Halfway between the second and third floors, she got her first hints of the scent of pot in the stairwell, still familiar though it had been years since she'd smoked it and
months at least since she'd so much as smelled it at a party. It had been present enough in her earlier life to summon now large blocks of the past. She thought of those days and imagined some young hipster couple living somewhere in the building among the Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

After a single knock and a brief rustling beyond, the door opened. Crane stood for a moment blocking the way, considering her. Even before the smoke followed after him, she knew from his face, the tired looseness about the jowls, that the smell had been coming from his apartment. His look of confusion slowly gave way to recognition, but he still didn't step aside to let her in. He couldn't have been expecting her back, but he didn't seem surprised to see her. He was simply fumbling over the meaning of her appearance.

“Come in, come in,” he said after another moment, retreating into the apartment.

Her cleaning work had been entirely undone, the folders that she'd piled up were spread again across the floor, as if he'd been working with them. On the wooden coffee table, beside a pile of books, sat a glass ashtray that held a newly lit joint. He picked it up and took a pull as she closed the door behind her.

“Do you think that's a good idea?”

“Girlie, I'm dying,” he said. “This is doctor-prescribed.”

“Is that how it works now?”

She had been tempted to drink only once or twice in the years since giving it up, and not once to take drugs. But when he offered the joint in his hand she accepted without a thought, as though obeying the rules of his house.

“Have a seat,” he said, clearing some books from beside him on the couch. And she did.

She took just a slow, shallow drag, wanting the taste in her throat but not to distance herself overmuch from the world.

“Does Thomas know you're here?”

He could have guessed the answer; he seemed to want her to admit it.

“No,” she said. “And he wouldn't be happy if he did.”

He took the joint from her.

“Tell me about him.”

She couldn't begin to answer such a question.

“I suppose that if he wanted you to know, he would have come here himself.”

He took this better than she might have expected.

“Tell me about yourself, then.”

She had come uninvited and could hardly complain, but she didn't like this interrogation.

“I'm a writer.”

“Oh, I know that,” Crane said. “You're famous. Wrote a book about fucking older men.”

She couldn't tell how maliciously he intended the look he now gave her. She handed the joint back to him.

“And what about your family?” he asked.

“What about them?”

He laughed. “Most of what you need to know of a person you can learn just by seeing how her folks turned out.”

“They died years ago.” She wasn't sure how much more to say. “It's just me and Tom. And Aunt Beth.”

“Beth.” He said the name as though it made her present in the room. “A fine woman, from what I remember. Always found her cold, though. And a bit of a religious nut.”

“She's my godmother.”

“Oh, yes. You're a convert? Do I have that right?”

Convert. From the Latin, to turn. As in Eliot:
Because I do not hope to turn again
.

She nodded, wondering uncomfortably where his knowledge of her ended.

“Was that Beth's requirement, or Tom's?”

“Neither.” She didn't feel defensive; she only wanted him to understand. She took another drag before going on. “I didn't convert to marry Tom or anything like that. I chose to do it.”

“But for Thomas's sake?”

“It hardly matters to Tom,” she said. “I did it for myself.”

She could see him struggling to make sense of it.

“I suppose it's some consolation?”

“Most of the time it scares the shit out of me.”

This answer pleased him. The already deep wrinkles in his face deepened further as he smiled. She took the joint back and settled into the couch.

“It's funny,” he said. “After all this time, people still can't do without God. I never would have guessed that He'd survive to your generation. Even the atheists are militant. They can't quite get over Him.”

“Most of my friends don't think one way or another about it,” Sophie told him. “They're not for it or against it; they're just beyond it.”

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe. The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

“You've got a real way with words,” she said.

They had finished the joint, and she stubbed it out. It made a brief hiss where the ashtray was wet, and then it was done.

“That's Kant,” he said. When she didn't respond, he asked, “How much do you know about me?”

She wondered what answer he would prefer. Perhaps he liked to be a mystery, liked surprising her with his own knowledge of her career while she had no commensurate knowledge about his.

“Only that you exist,” she said. “And even that I'm a little fuzzy on.”

How strange it really was, after all, that Tom should have said so little about his father. Though she wasn't sure how much Tom knew himself, since he wouldn't even admit to the extent of his ignorance. Her true betrayal might have been learning facts about Bill that Tom didn't know. And yet, what beside the desire to do so had brought her there?

“The
via negativa
,” Crane said. “That's one way of approaching me.”

If he meant to provoke her with this low-grade blasphemy, he would only be disappointed. After a long silence, he spoke.

“Do you believe in God? Or is it just the smell of incense that appeals to you?”

“No,” she said. “I believe. And you?”

“Oh, I would have to believe in Him, to hate Him as much as I do.”

She wasn't sure she had it in her then to do the excavation he seemed to be demanding. There was so much there—an entire life. All she knew of it now was that it would soon be done. She couldn't say how long the next silence lasted. And then she might have spoken, though she couldn't have said this for certain either. She had once enjoyed the sense of disconnection, the uncertainty about what had been communicated and what remained within, that came with getting high. Now it terrified her. She turned to find him carefully rolling another joint. He looked very old as he did it.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I'm afraid I need to go,” she said. “I'm not sure why I came.”

“Neither am I,” he said before setting the makings of the joint on the table and walking her to the door.

She wanted him to ask her to come back, but she knew that he would not.

“Are you all right here alone?” she asked.

He seemed tempted to take offense, but instead he smiled.

“It's a little late to start worrying about me.”

She'd worried about him before she knew he existed. She would have said as much, but he was already closing the door. As Sophie walked down the stairs, she caught herself composing the scene in her head.

AFTER JUNIOR YEAR, Sophie rented an apartment in the Village with money left by her parents. She interned at a poetry press, and someone there introduced her to Greg, who would become her literary agent. I never met him, but he sounded like another of those young and prematurely jaded guys, just out of school, seemingly everywhere then, whose ranks I didn't yet know I would be joining. He was still an assistant, but he asked to read Sophie's stories and started sending them out. He sold one to the
Paris Review
and another to the
New Yorker
, guaranteeing Sophie a book contract. Her collection would allow him to give up answering the phone for his boss and take on clients full-time.

That summer I began a novel that would swell to a thousand pages before I abandoned it. Now graduated, Max started opening mail and answering phones for the weekly where he still works. He lived with three other guys in a loft on Thompson Street, a big, open space, nearly as suitable as Gerhard's house for crowded parties, which
Max and his roommates threw often. I want to say that this was the summer when all three of us came to see writing as a job rather than just as our way of being in the world. I want to say that we lost our innocence, and that afterward we weren't quite sure what the loss had bought us in return. That Sophie and I both realized, without admitting as much to each other, that the hermetic world in which we'd enclosed ourselves had begun to chafe. But it was all much simpler than that. This was the summer when Sophie fucked Max.

It happened in late August, a few weeks before we were due back at school. I'd been sick for a few days, and when I got better I went downtown to meet Sophie for lunch.

“How's the shut-in?” she asked.

“I'm feeling better,” I told her. “Still mostly shut in.”

She talked about her job, which she treated with amused detachment, offering character sketches of all the important people she was supposed to be trying to impress. But I could see she was uncomfortable about something. Outside the restaurant she said, “I've got some time still.”

We walked a few blocks just north of Houston Street. With the university still out for the summer, and the dog days upon us, MacDougal was abandoned, its smoke shops empty except for the exotic water pipes in the windows, all looking alive and sinister.

“I stayed with Blakeman last night,” Sophie said.

“What do you mean?”

“Max,” she said. “I mean Max. I mean that I slept with him.”

Her bluntness I recognize now as a kind of defense. She hoped the shifting nature of our relationship could protect her in the face of a bad mistake.

“You might have picked anyone else.”

“It wasn't like that,” she said. “It was late, and we were the last two left at the party. It wasn't a big thing.”

She offered no apology. She didn't even allow that I might have expected one. Having followed her lead, I had no choice but to play along. Somehow I kept up conversation until we got to her office on Broadway. Then I went home.

A few days later, Max came to the apartment while my mother was out at work. At first he spoke vaguely about how Sophie and I weren't really together. He reminded me that I had told him about Sophie's interludes with other guys. I had even told him that they didn't bother me. But finally he recognized the thing for what it was, and he told me he was sorry. In the end, Max was Max. One couldn't expect all that much of him. We both knew that I would forgive him eventually. I didn't see either of them for the rest of that summer, and I don't know how much they saw of each other.

Back on campus for senior year, Sophie knocked on my door. When I answered, she started crying—something I'd never seen her do. I'd been waiting for her to come to me, to beg for my forgiveness.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I need your help.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't.”

“It's not about Max,” she said. “It's something else.” Then she corrected herself. “I mean, it's not really about him.”

“I don't care what it's about,” I said.