Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

It was a Saturday afternoon in October. I was rereading the script for Stuffed (a bereaved woman finds love with a taxidermist) and watching Babylon 5 . At first I thought the girl outside my window wearing a backpack and a flannel shirt was one of the beach drifters who sometimes went door-to-door looking for food or money. Then I recognized her face from Conversation . I hadn’t had a visitor, expected or unexpected, in months, and I had no idea what to say. I went with, “It’s so great to meet you.”

“Yeah,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was saying that it was great to meet me, too, or agreeing that yes, she was great. Her voice wasn’t rude, just flat, without feeling.

“This is an unexpected surprise,” I said, and I felt gross — my Hollywood politeness sounded so fake in front of her.

“Well, I needed to get out of town for a while,” she said, “and you called, so.”

From her films, and from the few pictures I’d seen in Conversation and newspapers, I’d expected someone cool and tall, elegant and forbidding. But Sophie was short, and her voice was casual and familiar. I knew she was around thirty, but she sounded like a smart twelve-year-old. I thought of Kat at twelve, bringing her books into my office to talk to me about molybdenum or stag beetles. It would be two years before she learned to hate me.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “If I’d known you were coming, I would’ve…”

I gestured awkwardly around my little living room. My apartment wasn’t messy, but it was embarrassingly empty — I’d moved there two months ago, after Taylor kicked me out of the place in Silver Lake I thought was ours. I’d gotten rid of most of my stuff when I moved in with her, not that I’d really had much since divorcing Nadia thirteen years before that, and since I’d been on my own again, I hadn’t really bothered to accumulate anything. A coffee table, an IKEA couch, a bed, a few photos of Kat, and some driftwood I’d picked up on the beach were pretty much all I had.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Sophie asked.

I showed her the tiny room — its window onto the beach was my favorite thing about the apartment, because I could watch the waves while I showered. She left her backpack in the living room — I almost wanted to go through it, just to see what I was dealing with. Her showing up at my place had thrown me. I had a pitch planned, but it was for the phone, and all my comparisons between Isabella and Sophie’s previous movies sounded dumb and pretentious when I imagined making them to her face. I guessed it was a good sign that she was here, but I didn’t know her — maybe she always showed up at people’s houses to catch them off guard.

“Who’s the girl?” she asked, coming back from the bathroom.

I had a photo of Kat, eight years old, in a picture frame painted with fish that she’d made in her third-grade class. At the time she’d said that fish things were for the bathroom, in that funny-serious way she had, like she was a judge delivering a verdict, and I’d kept it there in every house I’d lived in since the divorce so she’d feel at home when she visited. For the last ten years, though, since she’d become an adult and could make her own decisions, I’d mostly seen her for lunches in nice restaurants, and the only fatherly satisfaction I got out of those meetings was that I always knew what she’d order (Niçoise salad) and what she’d leave on her plate (we could never get her to eat capers, no matter what we did). I was surprised that Sophie asked, but I liked talking about my daughter. I missed the days when she was little and people would ask me about her all the time.

“It’s my daughter, Kat,” I said. “A long time ago.”

Sophie sat down, not on the couch but cross-legged on the floor.

“It’s a good name,” she said.

I thought so, too. I always planned to call her that when she was born, and I couldn’t help using it still, even though I was pretty sure it annoyed her.

“She goes by Ekaterina now,” I said. “It’s Russian. Her mom picked it out.”

“You’re not together anymore?” Sophie asked. Her tone was nonjudgmental, the way you might ask if I liked seafood, but I didn’t like talking about Nadia the way I liked talking about Kat. I was aware again that I had a stranger in my house, and I wasn’t sure what she wanted.

“Let’s talk about Isabella ,” I said. “You must have questions.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, scratching her leg. “When do we start shooting?”

I was surprised, and a little disappointed. I realized that I’d been looking forward to being able to convince her.

“So you’re interested?” I asked. “That’s great news. I know you must get a lot of offers.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but I need to do something different now.”

“Different how?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “I like Isabella because somebody else wrote it, so I can’t fuck with it too much. When I have too much freedom, I make mistakes.”

“But Woods is wonderful,” I said. “Your original work is some of the best I’ve seen.”

“Yeah,” she said, not humble but not flattered either. She stared out my window at the clouds rolling in over the ocean. I was annoyed with her then — I’d been hoping for a smart discussion with someone I respected, not a surly girl sitting on my floor. I wondered if I’d made a mistake.

“Maybe you’d like to talk a little bit about your vision for the movie,” I said. “Do you have any specific inspirations? Other films, visual art—”

“Actually,” she said, “I haven’t eaten. Could we get food?”

I didn’t have dinner plans — I was just going to eat Pop-Tarts and have my own sci-fi marathon like I did pretty much every night. But it made me even more frustrated that there was nothing I could say she was interrupting. I still tried to cultivate an air of importance, even though it was clear I’d never be the big studio honcho I’d dreamed of becoming. I screened my calls; I tried not to let people schedule meetings with me any less than a week out. I didn’t like that she thought she could come in and take over my day.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s been great to meet you, but I’m pretty busy tonight. Why don’t we set up a time while you’re in town, and you can come into the office, and we can really talk seriously about the movie.”

Then she put her face in her hands. I thought she was crying, and I was terrified. I’ve never known what to do when someone cries. But when she lifted her face she was just breathing hard, her nostrils flaring.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t have anywhere else to go.”

I TOOK HER to the taco stand near the boardwalk. We got chicken soft tacos — she wanted hers plain, no salsa or even onions — and sat on the beach. The sun was going down behind the clouds, and the light was all muffled — it could just as easily have been early morning. The beach was mostly empty; it was just us, a few joggers, and a guy walking a brown dog he’d let off the leash. The dog ran up to us and stuck its nose in Sophie’s face. She didn’t flinch, just petted it calmly between its eyes until its owner whistled and it ran to meet him.

“My ex-wife used to say if you could read a dog’s thoughts, they’d be smells,” I said, to break the silence.

Sophie didn’t answer. She bit into her taco.

“I know I shouldn’t have barged in on you,” she said after a minute, still chewing. “Things just got really bad really fast, and I’m not that good at having friends.”

“What got bad?” I asked.

I was still annoyed with her, but I didn’t want to turn her away now. It had been so long since anybody had asked me for help.