What Happened to Sophie Wilder (2 page)

In class the next day I looked at the author of this strange tale and discovered that she was beautiful. This fact had been slow to reveal itself because, for all her beauty, Sophie wasn't quite pretty. To find her so attractive suggested a kind of refinement on my part, I thought, like appreciating some quietly elegant story that bored the rest of the class. No one could possibly have called her “cute,” which was how desirable girls were universally described on campus. But she made the cute girls seem meretricious in their cuteness, with her boyishly short dark hair, her skin pale except where it was lightly freckled, on those high cheeks that despite their fullness seemed to struggle under the weight of her eyes. Her nose was long and sharp, and I suspect that this feature concealed her beauty from me at first, though it was a key to its richness once discovered. The light in the October air was still summer-sharp but turning somber, and she wore a thick, blue cable-knit sweater, out of style and overlarge, something a father throws over a little girl when they've both been surprised by the cold. The sleeves were pushed up above her elbows and both forearms were lined with wide wooden bracelets of every shade of green and gray.

Throughout the half hour we spent on her work she kept her eyes on the table in front of her. It was almost immediately clear that we were all impressed, but she seemed desperate for the discussion to be over. I tried to respond as she would have, with carefully considered remarks, but I lost the thread of my thoughts while watching her squirm on the other side of the room. When I came to myself I found that I had been babbling on, and the rest of the class looked nearly as embarrassed as she did. I trailed off then, and our professor said a few closing words before letting us go.

She caught up to me as I crossed the few blocks that separated the Fine Arts Center from the rest of campus, and she shadowed me silently as my shame deepened. She no longer seemed nervous or uncomfortable, only a little annoyed, though she was the one intruding on me.

“I'm Sophie,” she said eventually, without prompting, as if it had just then occurred to her that we might talk while we walked.

“Charlie,” I answered.

“You're from the city.”

This was not a question but a statement, one not entirely directed at me, as though she were filling in my backstory while I listened. We had given our hometowns when introducing ourselves on the first day of class, but she hadn't been there, so I didn't know when she'd learned this about me.

“Did you like growing up in New York?”

“I'm glad I'm here now,” I said.

My father had been sick throughout my high school years, and he'd died only a few months before I headed off to college. I felt guilty about leaving my mother alone, though I couldn't imagine staying with her. She'd been
unhappy long before she'd had any reason for it that I could understand, and after my father's death her mute suffering filled the atmosphere of that apartment, of her life.

“You like the Beats?”

This too had come from class, when we had been asked to name our “influences.” Max had given me his copy of
Dharma Bums
a few years earlier, around the time that my father got sick, and I had thrown myself into Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and even Gary Snyder and Lucien Carr and Gregory Corso; they had been a great solace, for they suggested the life I might have some day, when being orphaned would be a kind of existential condition from which to make great work, rather than just another species of loss.

“Burroughs is pretty good,” she went on, making a concession I hadn't demanded. “Most of the rest is shit.”

She expected a response, but I had none, so she continued.

“There's no control, no sense of form. They romanticize their methods, as if we should read
how
they wrote instead of
what
they wrote. Eventually it all turns sentimental, like a conversation with a sloppy drunk.”

No one I knew—certainly no one our age—spoke this way about books. She made this kind of talk seem like one of the great excitements of our new near-adulthood lives, like being able to spend our days and nights as we wished.

She smiled, waiting for me to fight back on behalf of these writers I was supposed to admire. But the authority of her tone overwhelmed me. To be honest, I didn't read all that much then, although books had been prized in my home and I'd said from a young age that I wanted to write. Mostly I read what Max told me to read, since he was a year older and his tastes were beyond reproach.

“I see what you mean,” I said, which was a weak start but true. As soon as she'd pronounced her verdict on the
books I'd lived with for the past three or four years I understood it to be just. But my concession disappointed her. She expected a defense. It took a long time to understand this about Sophie: she never wanted submission; she wanted an evenhanded fight. It didn't much matter to her whether she won or lost.

“Who do you like?” I asked.

“Nabokov.”

“
Lolita
?”

I had started the book a year earlier, again on Max's recommendation, and I had expected something in line with the other novels he'd been giving me. I had set it down when its elegance failed to turn lurid, and I hadn't yet picked it back up.

“Sure,” she said. “But I like
Pale Fire
better. And
Ada
. Some of the early Russian ones, too, like
The Defense
. I spent most of last year reading Proust, who put just as much of his life in his books as Kerouac did. But he believed in craft.”

This would have been difficult to take from someone else, but it was somehow clear that she wasn't showing off.

“Sounds like you prefer the legend of the cork-lined room to the legend of the typewriter roll and the Benzedrine.”

She laughed only briefly, but it was an honest laugh.

We didn't say all that much for the rest of our walk. I asked where she was heading, and I discovered that we lived in the same building, though I hadn't seen her there before. I felt then for the first time that unsurprised feeling that returned when I found her on Gerhard's couch, as if from then on whoever was writing us down would take care to keep us near each other, to return us to each other's stories, even when all the forces of convention and plausibility spoke against it. She took a pack of cigarettes from
her bag and offered me one. While we smoked and walked, we occasionally passed people we knew. One of us would stop to talk and the other would wait, and in this way we went from being two people who had happened to leave class at the same time to two people going somewhere together. If I could be just one thing now, that would be it: someone going somewhere with Sophie Wilder.

There wasn't a particular occasion for the party at Gerhard's that night—we were often celebrating in those days, and there was rarely an occasion—but a pretty good crowd had assembled. Sophie and Max and I stood for a moment within it, facing one other beside Gerhard's aquarium. Max gave Sophie the drinks, freeing his hands to light his cigarette. Then he took one back and touched his glass to hers.

So far as I knew, Sophie hadn't had a drink in years, since taking to marriage and God. But perhaps all that was over, now that she and Tom had separated. As for Max, he always stayed Max—if anything, became more Max-like—so that it was natural that he should depend on everyone to be just as he'd always known them to be.

Sophie took a long sip from her glass and leaned lightly against him. I noticed then that they were both drunk. I took a cigarette from Max before heading to the kitchen.

There were four or five people assembled there, none I'd ever seen before, all surrounding a tall, thin guy about my age wearing a bow tie and a tuxedo shirt with plastic studs over an outlandishly tight pair of black jeans. His mustache—“my mustaches,” I could almost hear him calling it—was waxed.

“So I asked Wes what kind of palette he was thinking of using this time,” he was saying as I entered. “I told him I really dig the
palettes
that he chooses.”

I pushed through the crowd to the cabinets and the sink.

“Dude,” the guy in the tuxedo shirt said to me. “I think we're supposed to use those.”

He gestured with a tattooed finger to a sleeve of red plastic cups on the counter.

“Thanks,” I said, continuing my search in the cabinet for a clean glass. “I live here.”

I mixed a vodka-soda, more vodka than soda, which I drank while standing over the sink. I was suddenly very tired of these parties that occupied so much of my life. Or else I realized suddenly that I had grown tired of them long ago. I wasn't sure if I was done with them because Sophie had appeared or if Sophie had appeared because I was done with them and so ready for her to come back.

In the living room, Max was introducing Sophie to Jeff, a fact-checker at his magazine.

“So,” Jeff said, “you knew Blakeman before he was famous. What on earth was he like?”

Everyone called Max “Blakeman.” Sometimes even I did it, though it was my own name.

“I was always famous,” Max insisted, “even when no one had heard of me.”

This line had been funny once, before it looked possible that we might truly become famous. It seemed that it was funny again now that this possibility had passed.

Max's college roommate Rick Tanner, who now worked in a gallery in Chelsea, lightly set Jeff aside.

“Sophie Wilder,” he said, and he kissed her on both cheeks. “Fucking hell, it's been years. I heard you got married.”

“We split up,” Sophie said.

“You know who else split up?” Rick asked, speaking no longer to Sophie but to the others collecting around her. “Henry and Klara.”

“They seemed like a perfect couple,” some dutiful straight man protested.

“She practically had her head in the oven,” Rick said. “I mean, Henry's the Ted Hughes of management consultants.”

Everyone but Sophie laughed at this, and I took the opportunity to approach her.

“How have you been?”

“You already asked me that,” she said.

“And you still haven't answered.”

“Fair enough. Let's table the matter pending further review. How about yourself?”

I'd been doing well enough, all things considered. But I didn't tell her that. Instead I said, “I've missed you.”

It was a ridiculous thing to tell her after all these years. But true. And I missed her more now that she was right there in front of me. She raised a hand and placed her palm against my cheek. Then she brought it down and said, “It's a nice house,” and the spell was broken.

“Gerhard, the guy who owns it, says Henry James lived here. But there's no plaque or anything. Probably it's bullshit.”

“James hated Washington Square when he came back to the States,” Sophie said. “It made him feel like he'd been amputated.”

I'd never heard this before, but it was just the kind of thing that Sophie knew. I was preparing my response when the room fell quiet. We both turned to see Eddie Hartley, an old friend Max and I had known since our days at St. Albert's, now a struggling actor who appeared in commercials and an occasional
Law and Order
episode, standing
on the leather ottoman. He began to read Wallace Stevens from a book he'd taken off one of the shelves:

The crowd around Eddie urged him on. He finished and bowed facetiously. Then he looked over to me.

“Your turn, Charlie.”

These performances—impromptu readings of modern poetry that were at the same time ironic mockeries of the sort of party where such impromptu readings might genuinely occur—were a common feature of our nights. I hadn't thought much about them before, but I was embarrassed for Sophie to see a joke made of things that had mattered so much to us. Eddie handed me the book. I stood on the ottoman and gave a humorless reading of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” that took the life out of the crowd, much as I had hoped it would. I stepped down with the book still in my hand and headed back to where I had been standing with Sophie. But she had disappeared.

In the kitchen I found only the same group of strangers, collected in a conspiratorial huddle around the oven. As I entered, a few stepped aside to reveal the one in the bow tie. He held a screwdriver, with which he had removed two knobs from the stove. Now he was working on a third. When he saw me watching he stopped.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “Just fucking around.”

“Be my guest,” I told him. “We don't cook.”

I poured another vodka.