Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

The audience laughed. I was proud of her then; maybe she knew how to work a crowd after all.

Then a woman asked, “Is it true this movie was based on your husband’s mother?”

Sophie looked behind her like maybe someone else was going to step up and answer the question. When no one did, she said, “Most of it, yes.”

“Did he work with you on this script?” the same woman asked.

“No,” Sophie said. “I wrote it on my own.”

“How does he feel about the movie?” a man in a weird, old-timey black hat asked.

Even from where I stood at the very back, I saw her face change — she looked scared and upset like she had when we talked that last time, thirteen years before. I wanted to tell the guy in the hat to shut up, but I also wanted to hear what she said. Sophie was quiet for a minute. She scratched her arm and looked from side to side of the theater. Finally she said, “I guess you can’t really know how someone feels about something like that, can you? I mean, you can ask them, but they might not say. Or they might say one thing and then change their mind, but by then it’s too late to do anything about it.”

Hands were shooting up all over the room.

“Wasn’t Marianne based on Allison Mieskowski?”

Sophie bowed her head for a second. “That’s something I wouldn’t want to talk about without Allison here.”

“Do you ever feel guilty about using the people in your life as material?”

This one came from a man, too. I lifted up on my good leg to see him — scrawny, an ugly patchy beard. I thought about taking him outside and beating him up. I hadn’t hit anyone since eighth grade but I thought about punching him in the face. Sophie looked so weak and small then; she looked like she needed someone to hold her up. She lowered her head again, and I was worried she was going to cry. When she lifted it her face was different, harder.

“I don’t understand any of the words in that sentence. ‘Guilty’—I know what that means, but I don’t understand the point of it. And ‘use’—people say that like it’s so awful, but it’s just when you make something into something else, and people do that every day. And ‘material’—that’s like saying there’s some defined thing you have that you make movies out of, like clay or something, and everything else you leave out. Maybe some people make movies that way, but their movies are shit.”

Everyone was talking then, everyone’s hands were in the air, some people were just shouting questions out, but I didn’t want Sophie to have to answer any of them. I was proud of her, and I thought she should have a rest from these people who didn’t know her. I raised my hand. I couldn’t tell if she recognized me, but I was tall and in the back and so she pointed at me, and I had that feeling of relief again, like finally I was here.

“I don’t usually get very emotional about movies,” I said. My voice sounded so loud in the theater. I was afraid of sounding stupid, so I raced through. “But when I watch your movies I do have really deep feelings. I’m just wondering how you do that.”

Sophie nodded. She didn’t smile, but she gave me that plain, serious look I remembered. I felt my heart race.

“For me, when people see my movies, it’s kind of like a translation. I put the images together, and when people see them, sometimes it translates into a feeling. Then they tell me about it, and I know a little bit more about them, and about the movie, too. But I have to start with the shots and scenes and let the emotions come if they can. I don’t understand them well enough to plan them.”

I wasn’t fully satisfied when she stopped talking — I didn’t really buy that she didn’t understand other people’s feelings, even though she’d said that same thing to me when we were twenty. It sounded too much like the kind of thing I would’ve said to some girl in college when she wanted to know why I hadn’t called her. But I knew we could talk more about it — I was sweating under my arms, thinking about how soon I’d be sitting right across from her.

“I think that’s all we have time for,” said the man who’d introduced her, and then I started shoving my way to the front. A bunch of reporters were already up there, asking Sophie more questions. She was tired again. I started to get anxious, waiting there, and I saw her turn like she was going to walk off backstage, away from me. I panicked.

“Sophie!” I called out.

All the reporters looked at me like I was crazy, and Sophie turned around all startled, like I’d slapped her.

“It’s Daniel,” I said. My face was hot. “We were supposed to have coffee.”

She looked stunned for a minute, then tired again.

“That’s right,” she said. “Okay.”

We walked out together, not touching or talking. We hadn’t hugged. I realized I’d never walked with her anywhere. She walked fast, her head down against the wind. She had on one of those expensive coats that don’t look very warm. I had to struggle to keep up, but I liked that she didn’t say anything about the cane. We found a coffee shop and she went in without saying anything to me. I followed her.

We both got coffee and she poured half of hers out and filled the cup back up with milk and sugar. When we sat down she wrapped both her hands around the cup. They were dry and cracked, her nails all bitten down. She looked at me over the lid.

“When you knew me,” she asked, “did you think I would ever get married?”

I was so unprepared for the question that all I said was, “What?”

She kept staring at me. “Did you think I would ever get married?”

I thought about it. When I’d wanted her to be my girlfriend, I’d daydreamed about walking her to class, about taking her on a date downtown where she’d wear a fancy dress. I’d thought, for some reason, about going to a cabin in the woods with her, holding the sides of her waist while she looked out the window. But I’d never thought about marrying her, and it was true that when I thought back to how she was then, how she never called me or wanted more from me, and how easy it was for her to leave, I was surprised she’d been able to share her life with someone else.

“I guess not,” I said. “You seemed pretty independent.”

She nodded at me, fast and hard, like Emma sometimes did when I guessed the right answer to a riddle.

“I didn’t think so either. I never thought I would get married. And now here I am. I’ve been married for three years.”

I wanted her to tell me something was wrong in her marriage — I was excited to think I could be the person she told that secret to, something she had to hide from all the reporters and critics and jerks in stupid hats who wanted to know about her and her life. I leaned forward. I could smell her — it reminded me of her messy bed and the first time we lay there and the last time, when she pinned me down like I was nothing and I let her, or made believe I let her. She was small but the longer we were together, the stronger she got.

“Do you like being married?” I asked her.

“Do you?” she asked.

That question felt like cold water. I moved back, away from her. I’d been trying not to think about Lauren. But the truth was I did like being married. I’d been afraid of it for all the usual reasons — I was worried I’d miss the feeling of being in bed with a new girl, the excitement of having her want me. But instead I liked the feeling of knowing who I’d be lying down with, what she thought of me, how to make her laugh. I used to get this cramping feeling in the back of my neck at the bar in college, looking at all the girls and wondering which of them would want to go home with me, and one morning a few weeks before Emma was born, I realized I hadn’t felt it in years. There was no question that marriage — which meant Lauren, her face and her voice and the way she sighed when she was mad but she was letting me know it would be okay — was good for me, and knowing that made me feel sick to be sitting in a coffee shop with a woman I’d loved over ten years before, who I wanted to talk to about things I couldn’t tell my wife. But I didn’t get up.