Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

But Veronica was looking out the window — she looked a little woozy and unfocused. She smiled vaguely and took a sip of water.

“If you want to be Isabella,” Sophie said, “you have to move differently.”

My stomach fell. I gave Sophie a Shut up look and tried to think of a graceful way to pretend she’d never said that.

“Excuse me?” said Veronica. Now she looked focused.

“Sophie just got here from New York, and she’s really jet-lagged,” I began, hoping the excuse would start to make more sense as I said it. That didn’t happen. Instead the waiter showed up just as I was running out of words. Veronica ordered a salad; I got a burger. Sophie asked for a plain chicken sandwich. None of this distracted Veronica.

“I want to hear what that’s supposed to mean,” she said. “Move differently?”

Sophie looked totally calm. “You keep your shoulders hunched and your elbows too close to your body. All your muscles are too tight. You move like you don’t know you’re beautiful.”

I hoped the compliment would calm Veronica down a little, but I knew it was too equivocal to do much good. Starlets are used to being told they’re beautiful; you have to really drown them in praise for it to have any effect.

“Veronica’s been working nonstop lately,” I said to Sophie, my eyes yelling, Shut up, shut up, shut up . “She can’t have perfect yoga posture every minute.”

Veronica ignored me. She was staring at Sophie.

“How should I move?” she asked.

Her voice was too loud — people were looking at us. Whatever was up with her, Sophie was making it worse.

Sophie drew herself up straight. She threw her shoulders back, picked up Veronica’s water glass, and then, with an easy flick of her wrist, poured its contents on the floor. Then, just as easily, she opened her fingers and let the glass go; it hit the hardwood floor and shattered musically into a million shining pieces.

An older woman sitting next to us yelped. Everybody stared. A busboy rushed over to clean up the mess, and I tried to apologize: “It just slipped right out of her hand.”

Veronica pushed back her chair.

“I have to use the restroom,” she said, and walked unsteadily away.

“What are you thinking?” I hissed at Sophie. “You can’t treat people like that.”

Sophie shrugged.

“We need her more than she needs us,” I said. “Without an actress we don’t have a movie.”

Sophie’s face had changed. It was stubborn and unreadable. I thought of an animal — a cat, a wolf.

“I’m going to have a movie,” she said.

The waiter brought our food. Sophie bit into her chicken sandwich. I sat staring at the glittering orange slices in Veronica’s salad. I tried to think of a lunch that had gone as badly as this one. I remembered one fifteen years ago, when I was still making arty, risky movies. I was trying to get funding for a project starring a cult singer-songwriter named Charlie Buck, who I thought was a genius. It was his first movie; he showed up filthy and obviously stoned, and he told a story about having a threesome with a sixty-year-old woman and a sixteen-year-old girl. The older, very square producer we were hoping to get money from just sat there bug-eyed. Finally I leveled with him.

“Look,” I said, “it’s obvious that Charlie’s offensive, unpredictable, and hard to work with. You should only do it if you’re brave.”

He signed on within the week. So I decided to try the same tactic again. When Veronica sat back down, I got started.

“Listen,” I said, “Sophie has very high standards. I know she’d agree she’s not the easiest person to work with.”

I turned to Sophie, hoping for some sort of recognition. But she was looking at Veronica, not me. Veronica was moving differently now; her joints looser, her shoulders more relaxed. Her eyes smoldered; she looked, I had to admit, queenly.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, her voice dark.

“Better,” said Sophie.

Veronica nodded. She speared a single orange slice, brought it to her mouth, chewed. Then she gripped her plate between her thumb and forefinger and, in a single graceful motion, flung it across the room. The busboys looked at each other disgustedly; the manager shot out of the kitchen. Before any of them could reach our table, Veronica stood up and walked out of the restaurant.

I put my head in my hands. I couldn’t look at Sophie.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked her from between my fingers.

“That was good,” Sophie said. “She’ll be good, I think.”

I lifted my face. Sophie was eating her sandwich. The manager was hovering a few steps behind her, looking like he was trying to hold in a scream.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed. “We’ll pay for it.”

I turned back to Sophie.

“She’s going to think you’re crazy,” I said, “and she’s not going to want to work with you.”

“Then she shouldn’t work with me,” Sophie said.

I admired her a little then, how sure she was that she was right, how little she was willing to compromise. I took a deep breath.

“I know you have your vision for this movie, and I respect that. You just need to learn how to deal with people. You need to learn to stroke their egos a little.”

Sophie was silent for a moment, like she was considering what I’d said. Her eyes were pointed at mine without actually meeting them, like my face was an object she was examining. Finally she said, “I don’t think I do need to learn that.”

THAT NIGHT I COULDN’T SLEEP. Even if Veronica said yes, I was worried she wasn’t going to be able to work with Sophie. Sophie was worse than I’d thought, further away from normal. The coldness I’d seen in her movies wasn’t something she just called up every now and then to help her with a scene; it was the way she was. I’d had such a clear picture in my head of us working together — her watching each take with her keen eye and saying perceptive things to me about the actors and the lighting and the camera angles, and me moving easily about the set, my arm around the DP, my voice in the actress’s ear, translating what was in Sophie’s head into reality. Now I couldn’t imagine it anymore.

I got up to go to the bathroom; from the hallway I looked in at the couch. Sophie was sitting awake at the end of it, her arms wrapped around her knees. I thought of going in and sitting down with her and asking what was wrong, but right then I felt so unable to help or understand her that I decided to let it go. I told myself she’d probably rather be alone.

IN THE MORNING Sophie was gone. I looked in the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom where I’d just come from, as though she might be hiding under my bed. I called for her on the hazy beach; a jogger with neck tattoos looked at me like I was crazy. A girl came up to me, seven or eight years old, dragging a long string of kelp behind her like a tail.

“Did you lose your dog?” she asked me.

I didn’t have Sophie’s phone number, so I called her agent, but the line went to voice mail. I went to her website and sent her an e-mail. My apartment had no trace of her, except for a dent in the pillow where she’d laid her head and a smell — maybe it was my imagination — like fallen leaves.

In the afternoon Steven called. I’d been sitting on my couch staring at my TV, watching Battlestar Galactica without paying attention.

“I just wanted to touch base,” Steven said, “and tell you how excited I am.”

“Excited about what?” I asked. I sounded like Sophie, no feeling in my voice.

“About Isabella ,” he said. “I talked to Veronica this morning. I’ve never heard her so psyched about a project.”