What Happened to Sophie Wilder (11 page)

“I'm pregnant.”

The news took a moment to settle. It was plausible enough, but I wanted to think it was just another story, a rather conventional one, about the scared young girl who has gotten herself into trouble.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Were you two really that careless?”

“Yes,” she said. “We really were.”

I think now of what might have been different in that moment. Even if I'd realized that this was my last chance with Sophie, I can't be sure I would have taken it. Maybe I was ready to throw off the life that we'd had, which now seemed insupportable to me. And perhaps I was right to feel insulted that she should expect me to help her bear up to the consequences of what she'd done with Max.

“I can't help you anymore,” I said.

She looked startled in a profound way, as though the outcome of our conversation had never been in doubt to her, and a great many things now had to be recalibrated to assimilate this unforeseen turn.

“So we're not going to get over this?” she asked.

I didn't answer.

“Well what am I supposed to do, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I made you,” she whispered.

She was right, even if it didn't change anything to say it now. I asked her to repeat herself not because I thought I'd misheard but because I wanted to hear it again, wanted to take proper hold of the idea.

“I need you,” she said.

 

We ran into each other on campus, but we didn't speak much until I went to Sophie's room in early winter. It was the beginning of December, almost exactly three years since Max's visit to campus. Over the years, her single rooms had been almost indistinguishable, but this one was different from the others, mostly just cleaner. There weren't papers and books all over the furniture and floor. There were no burning joints or cigarettes, no half-empty bottles.

“It looks nice,” I said.

“Well, I can't do as much damage by myself.”

“I guess not.”

“Listen, Charlie. I'm so sorry.”

“You don't have to,” I told her.

“No, really,” she said. “I'm sorry for all of it. I knew what I was doing. I'm sorry for pretending it didn't matter. And I'm sorry for coming to you to clean up the mess.”

“About that part,” I said. “I'm sorry, too.”

She nodded, and that was all we said about it. I never asked what she'd done about the pregnancy.

“I thought you might like to stay with us for Christmas,” I said. “It's become something of a tradition by now. And maybe we can work some things out, get ourselves back on track.”

The invitation seemed to surprise her.

“I appreciate it, Charlie. But I have plans.”

“You have plans?”

“I'm spending the break at Tom O'Brien's place,” she said. “With Tom and his aunt.”

Like that, she floated back out of reach.

In a certain way, I was glad that she'd chosen Tom, of all people. I'd been in a few classes with him, known him a little over the years. He was a quiet kid. Unimaginative, he seemed to me. He would not have impressed me even as one of her two-week indulgences from earlier years, and I doubted that he would last long.

“You guys are serious?”

“We've been together since fall break.”

People had been keeping it from me, which suggested that my struggles over Sophie had been more apparent than I'd thought.

“You'd like him if you got to know him.”

I doubted it.

“Sure I would,” I said. “I've always followed you in matters of taste.”

 

It took time to understand that Sophie wouldn't pass so quickly out of the Tom phase. I spent the rest of senior year trying to figure out what kind of person I was going to become, now that she wasn't watching. I dated a girl in the class below ours, one who still keeps in touch and who deserved better than the person I was that year.

One day I ran into my old roommate, Dean, who told me his parents had visited that weekend. They'd all gone to mass together, not at the campus chapel but at the church in town.

“I saw Sophie Wilder there, sitting in the back by herself. I didn't know she was Catholic.”

“She's not,” I said. “It must have been someone else.”

“I know what she looks like,” Dean said. “The two of you were inseparable when we lived together. It was Sophie.”

I considered the possibility.

“It's probably for some story she's writing.”

Later I would hear from others that she was going to mass regularly, never with other students, always in town. Some said she had spoken with the local priest about getting baptized, but this sounded like a rumor and I didn't think much about it.

After we graduated, Sophie published her story collection, which she dedicated to the memory of her parents. My name came right after Tom's on the acknowledgements page. The collection made her briefly famous, in the local, limited way that was all we could have wanted. The object of this fame was a girl I didn't really know anymore, but the occasion for it—those stories—I knew better than anyone, better perhaps than the author herself did. It was strange
to watch it happen, to watch it pass, and to be left waiting just like any other fan for the big book to come out.

We sometimes wound up at parties together, but I didn't spend much time with our college friends, preferring the disaffected literary crowd that circled around Max. Amid that crowd Sophie's name came up occasionally. Some of them had met her the summer before and knew what had happened between us, but to others she was just the girl with the big book contract. They talked about her in the vaguely suspicious way we talked about young writers we hadn't read but whose reputations we'd decided were undeserved.

“We went to school together,” I'd tell them. “We used to be good friends.”

People remembered this, I guess, because as time passed they started to ask me, “What happened to Sophie Wilder?” And I'd just shrug, secretly asking myself the same thing.

It had all amounted to a little less than three years, and none of it needed to mean anything as time went by. But to me, it did. Those days with Sophie became a touchstone against which I measured the passing time, my relationships, my writing, and found it all wanting. This wasn't just nostalgia—though I might have idealized what we'd had, I didn't want to recover the past. It was the incompleteness of it that haunted me. The story wasn't finished.

I thought often of those words—
I made you
—that she might or might not have ever really said. Then I remembered the first weeks of freshman year, wandering through the bookstore looking for all the books she'd pushed on me. Sophie had been led in the same way by Lila the year before, and she'd come to campus hoping to meet someone with whom she could share these things. When that person failed to appear, she turned me into him. Perhaps this is
why I felt that things had to have a different ending: she couldn't abandon her own creation.

If I'm falling into old habits here, becoming too precious or too literary, let me keep to the realm of hard fact. I can no longer imagine the person I was before I met Sophie, a boy whose father is still alive, whose mother is still fixed to the earth, not etherized and floating. My entire life before she caught up to me after class that day feels like backstory sketched in by Sophie while we walked through campus that afternoon. Sophie Wilder invented me.

 

As we walked Gerhard's dog down Mercer Street, I waited for Sophie to tell us back into ourselves. But the story she told was a different one. It was about Tom's father, a man named Bill Crane, and it began with a telephone call. Sophie recounted delivering Crane from the hospital, taking him to his apartment and helping him to bed. She spoke about cleaning up the kitchen and the papers on his floor. She described the foreboding she felt, witnessing his disheveled life.

This was fine, so far as it went. Her story didn't have to have anything to do with us. It was just the kind we might have told each other after passing some tired, middle-aged man on the street. I could have picked up the thread halfway through and somehow known how everything turned out between Bill Crane and his daughter-in-law. I was happy just to be walking with Sophie again. We headed east on Bleecker, back uptown on Broadway, then east again toward Tompkins Square. We moved with no logic that I could discern, neither one guiding the other, just as we always had. But some intention on her part, conscious or not, led us to an old tenement on the Lower East Side.

“This is it,” Sophie said.

“What?” I asked.

“Crane's building.”

I looked it over carefully, as though I already understood I would be called upon to give an account of the place. The front of the building was white up to the top edges of the first-floor windows, painted in broad, careless roller strokes, with workmen's hands still visible in the paint's lined unevenness. After the first floor the crumbling red brick was uncovered. On a few levels potted plants or flower boxes had been placed out on the fire escape, and there were colored plastic lights and a statuette of Mary in the ground-floor window nearest us.

Sophie didn't point out Crane's window, but I tried to imagine his apartment from what she'd told me. The conditions she'd described weren't much different from the ones in which we had once lived together, in which I lived still. Even if I didn't mean to be living that way in another thirty years, I wasn't eager to acknowledge the tragedy of such a life.

As we stood there, the curtains of the ground-floor window opened. An old woman's face appeared, surrounded by the lights and the statuette, seeming to flicker in and out of existence. It wasn't an unkind face, but there was something terrifying about it. Sophie grabbed my arm and led me away. The woman's appearance in the window seemed to deflate Sophie. Our walk was over then, and we took the shortest route back to Washington Square.

 

When we arrived, Max was smoking a joint on the couch and watching
The Third Man
. He paused the DVD and asked how our morning had been.

“We played
flâneur
,” Sophie said. “It was exhausting. I'm entirely out of practice.”

She headed for the stairs. I watched Max watching her go before I joined him on the couch. He turned the movie back on and offered me the nub of his joint, which I declined. On the screen, Joseph Cotten was calling toward a darkened doorway in bombed-out Vienna. A woman upstairs turned on a light to reveal Orson Welles's sly face, looking almost embarrassed by its own charm.

“Probably due for a reconsideration,” I said.

Max looked quizzically at the joint that had gone out in his hand.

“It's a fine performance,” he said, “but I always preferred him in those Mondavi wine commercials.”

“I followed his shadow,” Joseph Cotten explained. “Till suddenly, well, this is where he disappeared.”

When
The Third Man
ended, Max started it from the beginning. He never went out to the movies except to see something he was assigned to review, but he could sit on this couch watching an old favorite three or four times running. He reached a kind of fugue state; people would enter and leave the house, and he would give no sign of noticing.

We were still watching when Sophie came down with a new outfit on—a sleeveless top and dark skirt that reached just below the knees. She looked rested but subdued. There was a slackness to her, as if she were waking up from a long sleep.

“You look beautiful,” I said, which was true but beside the point. She gave an ironic curtsy to diffuse the embarrassment of my remark.

“We're grabbing something to eat,” I told Max. “You're welcome to join us.”

“That's all right,” he said. “I've got to write a blog post about the cuckoo clock speech.”

He would have easily forgotten his work if he'd wanted to join us, but I was glad that he'd let us go. Even after all the time that had passed, I couldn't sit at a table with the two of them; I wanted Sophie to myself.“Behave, kids,” Max said as I got up. “Keep the Holy Spook between you.”

 

We'd planned to get something nearby, at one of the Italian places on Sullivan or Thompson. But it was a beautiful, cool evening. Relief had finally come after a punishing summer only a few weeks gone, and we decided to walk. I told Sophie that I'd read the latest novel by our visiting professor from freshman year.

“Do you still speak with him?” I asked.

“He never even kissed me,” Sophie said. “Even that part I made up.” She laughed as though at a childhood eccentricity, but it seemed painful to her to remember. “I really didn't know the difference back then. I couldn't recognize the truth when I saw it.”

“Sure you could,” I said. “But you were a fiction writer.”

“If that's what it means, then I'm glad I've given it up.”

I couldn't tell by the way she spoke if she wanted to talk about it.“You're really done?” I asked. “Not just with this book?”

“With everything.”

It made me desperately sad to hear this. We had been so certain once.

“It's not too late,” I said, as much to myself as to her. “There's always hope.”

“Endless hope,” she answered. “But not for us.”

On Clinton Street we passed a newly opened restaurant that had been written up in Max's magazine the week before. It was recommended as a place to take a first date
you were trying to impress, but I didn't say this to Sophie when I suggested we try it. The hostess told us we'd have to wait for a table, so we found two seats at the bar. Sophie ordered us each a Jameson.