Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“What’s the movie about?” I asked.

“It’s about your story,” she said.

I was flattered, but I was worried again — I figured no real director makes a movie after hearing a ten-minute lie from someone she’s never met. And practically speaking, that meant she probably didn’t even have a script yet. Maybe this was all a joke, a way to fuck with me by making me think I was important.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “That’s not how people make movies.”

She shrugged. “It’s how I do,” she said. “Movies are how I get to know people.”

I laughed; she sounded so cocky. “How’s that working?” I asked.

“Pretty well so far.”

“For you or the people in the movies?” I asked.

“Both,” she said.

After that she came over every day so we could work on the script. Always my place, never hers — I don’t even know where she lived that year. She always sat close to me on my bed, but I wanted her closer. I wasn’t even sure if it was sexual at first — I just wanted to feel her sleek hair, her narrow bones. Her body gave off so much heat, like a field mouse, an animal that has to survive in the wild. I wanted to know what she looked like under her boys’ clothes — I imagined something neither boy nor girl, something I’d never seen before.

On the third night we worked together she asked for the real story of what happened to me back home. The room seemed too small all of a sudden, and I made us go for a walk. It was summer, after midnight, warm as a bath. Williamsburg was still ugly then — as I talked, stray cats skulked in the gutters, all bullet heads and scrawny shoulders. I felt so far away from home.

After I finished, we didn’t talk for a while. My chest felt hollow. We looped back, and when we got near the house I felt Sophie staring at me. I didn’t meet her eyes. I thought maybe I’d call Barber — telling the story made me lonely, and I wanted someone in my bed. But Sophie stopped outside the door, her hand on my arm. She made a face I’d never seen before — very serious, but with tenderness fighting through, like it almost hurt to show it. Like a knight from an old movie, I thought later, a hero.

“I want you to know something,” she said.

“What?” I wasn’t sure there was anything she could say to make me feel less lost.

“I would never do that to you,” she said. “I would never do anything you didn’t want me to do.”

I wanted to laugh at first. Who was she to assume she’d get that opportunity? She didn’t even know if I liked girls — I didn’t even know. And even if I did, what was this little mouse going to do to me, when I had four inches and forty pounds on her? Then she took hold of my right wrist. Her hands were strong and she had me fixed with her giant eyes, and I thought maybe she could hurt me after all. I took a step toward her.

It didn’t matter much that I’d never been with a woman before. Her body was so different from mine — her sharp hip bones, her boy’s ass, her breasts you could cover with tablespoons. She fucked me like a man too — not like the boys I’d been with, but like the men I’d meet later on, who’d learned to read a woman’s body and knew without asking that I wanted them to hold me down. She always knew how far to go and when to kiss me on the forehead or loosen her grip on my wrists so I didn’t get too scared. Every now and then something would surprise me — how delicate she looked when she was sleeping, how when she showered and put on deodorant, she smelled just like me. And I knew my mom would cry if she found out and say it was my dad’s fault for leaving us alone. But once I started spending all my time with Sophie, I didn’t think about anything but us. That summer she was a hot wind I blew through the city on.

For a while after we got together, the movie seemed both real and not real. We talked about it all the time, and I helped Sophie with the screenplay. She submitted it for grants and fellowships — she was businesslike and organized and already knew what to do. I learned she was twenty-three, older than I was, that she’d already made a short film called Daniel and spent a year in a big-deal filmmaking program, that she knew dozens of people who worked on real movies and shows. I was always asking her to let me see Daniel , and she said she would, but somehow it never happened. All I knew about it was that it was about a boy she went to college with — which made me curious and jealous — and that she thought it had a lot of technical problems.

“This one will be better,” she said. “I know how to make a movie now.”

I liked this side of her, that talked about a complicated thing like it was easy and asked people for thousands of dollars like she knew they would say yes. And at the same time, I never thought we’d really make the movie. I thought we’d be working on it forever, the two of us, a project to keep us close, and all the other things that I now know make up a film seemed so strange and far away that I figured they’d never actually arrive.

And then it was November and Sophie got a grant. It wasn’t quite enough to make the movie, but it was enough to start, and suddenly she was scouting out locations, calling grips she knew, and teaching me what the word “grip” meant. I started to get scared then. I’d made the whole story of the movie from something terrible, and I was worried I’d be punished somehow. Everybody in my family believed in ghosts, and my grandma said it wasn’t just bad people who turned into them, it was bad deeds too. I was worried I’d made Bean’s bad deed grow.

Sophie said the world didn’t work that way. And she said even if it did, we should be punished if we didn’t make the movie, because we’d be depriving something great of the chance to exist. She never doubted herself in those days. She was more sure about everything she said than I’d ever been about anything. Eventually I got her to change my character’s name at least — I picked Marianne because I’d always thought it was perfect, plain but a little bit classy too. I told myself that made the movie just based on me, not really about me, and that made me feel better, for a while.

I was still working at the bar then, and Sophie did all the casting without me. So I didn’t meet the guy she picked for Bean until our first day of shooting. He hadn’t come to the read-through — Sophie’s assistant director, a stuck-up girl named Susan who I already didn’t like, read his part in a schoolteachery voice. But there he was the first day, at the community center that was supposed to be my high school, wearing a white T-shirt that looked like it had been dipped in pee.

“This is Peter,” Sophie said.

I stuck out my hand, but he just nodded at it. He didn’t look like Bean, but he looked like the scary, cocky Bean I’d made up for the story. He wasn’t tall, but his arms were ropy and his hands were big, a fighter’s hands. His face was ugly in that way a lot of girls like, hard angles and slitty eyes. He held his body like he didn’t trust people.

In the first scene that day, he was supposed to ask me about Stacey. The community center had a hallway with olive drab lockers that looked a lot like a high school; we took down the signs for senior-citizen groups, and Sophie had Peter lean up against one of the lockers like he was waiting for me. I didn’t like how she reached out to move his left shoulder down. He didn’t like it either; he rolled it away from her and gave her a junkyard-dog look. She didn’t back down, though. Instead she said, “You’re not mad in this scene. You’re relaxed.”

“This is what I look like when I’m relaxed,” he said.

“Well that’s not what Bean looks like when he’s relaxed. I need you to lower your shoulder.”