Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“I’m supposed to do this movie, and I can’t do it.”

“What movie?”

She dropped her face into her hands, stuck her fingers up in her wet hair. “God, it’s so bad. I don’t even want to tell you.”

I just waited. Finally she lifted her head.

“Okay,” she said, “the first thing is, I didn’t write it. The second thing is, it’s a period piece. The third thing is, it’s set in Spain.”

I laughed. I imagined Sophie trying to direct a bunch of matadors and ladies in flamenco outfits.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the story?”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s about Queen Isabella. Like as in Columbus. This woman who wears big necklaces and smiles too much wrote a book about her, and now they want me to make a movie.”

She sounded like an angry teenager, and in my baggy clothes she looked like one too. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her. Most people would be excited to have people begging them to make movies.

“Why are you doing it?” I asked her.

Her face changed then, and I remembered she wasn’t actually a teenager anymore. She looked older than when I’d seen her last; lines were starting around her eyes. I had a flash of what she’d look like as a really old lady, with bright white hair and knobby fingers.

“I figured the stuff I write just gets me in trouble,” she said. “Then I got this script. It wasn’t good, but I liked Isabella. I could see how I wanted her to be. I thought that would be enough and the rest of it would come to me. I thought it would be like a project, doing something I wasn’t as close to.”

“And it’s not enough?” I asked.

“Nothing else is coming to me. I mean, I’ve got a cast, I’ve got locations, but I’m not excited about any of it, and I can tell it’s not going to be good.”

I just waited. If she wanted help, I was going to make her ask.

“I want you to be in the movie. I think if you were in it, I might care.”

“You want me to be Isabella?”

“I did,” she said, “but I’m working with a studio this time. Not a big one, but still, they won’t pay unless there’s a star. So Veronica Dias is going to be Isabella. But I want you to be her handmaid, Beatriz.”

I thought of the movies I’d seen where the queen has a handmaid. Usually this is what she does: giggle, whisper, say people’s names, put shoes on the queen’s feet.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked her.

“We can pay you twenty thousand dollars,” she said. “And also, I need you.”

Sophie understood a lot more about people and how to play them than she ever let on. I think she knew that I still loved her and that I’d be flattered that she needed me. I think the minute I opened the door, she knew she had me around her finger. I thought all this even then. And I’d talked a lot over the years about how Sophie was bad for me. Just the week before, I’d told my castmates after a couple of beers that I thought she was too self-centered to ever really love anyone. But now when I think about that night, I think about something my stepdad once said when my mom yelled at him for quitting AA. He just told her in this sad, quiet voice, “Sometimes the sick part of me just seems like the truest part.”

And if it was a sick part of me that wanted to do whatever Sophie asked for, then I thought maybe it was the truest part too. Also, I couldn’t stop looking at her wrists, those little delicate bones.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“Thank you,” she said, and it was sweeter than any thanks I’d ever gotten.

Then she added, “Also, I need a place to stay.”

BEATRIZ WASN’T A BAD ROLE. In one scene she serves rotten meat to the cruel and ugly Afonso V to make him sick and sabotage the plan to marry Isabella off to him. In another scene she explains sex to Isabella before her secret meeting with Ferdinand — it turns out Beatriz has been sleeping with a nobleman. Plus, it was exciting to work on such a big movie. We’d made Marianne for almost no money, and now there was a PA who’d bring you a sandwich if you asked and five guys just to work the lights. For the palace where Isabella lives as a teenager, we had this old Eastern Orthodox church in Bay Ridge — I’d never cared about old buildings before, but I liked to walk up and down the pews when it wasn’t my scene, touching the dark wood and thinking about ghosts. I knew that really all the people who’d prayed and been married and baptized and buried there were normal Brooklyn people with jobs in stores and offices, but I kept thinking of royalty sitting there in heavy jewels, daggers hidden in their clothes. I started to feel like I was part of a dark, exciting story.

I think Sophie felt it too. Nobody would’ve known she was nervous about the movie — the very first day, she walked onto the set with a swagger I’d never seen. She wore boys’ pants and boots and red lipstick and everybody watched her in a way that would’ve made me jealous if she hadn’t pulled me aside at least once a day to tell me, “I couldn’t do this without you.” How could I not be flattered? On Marianne she’d been smart, but also weird and distant and twitchy, like a robot that didn’t work very well. But she’d grown up since then; now she could be graceful. She took Ferdinand aside and taught him how to hold his head like a king; she joked with the lighting guys; she yelled, “Perfect!” and we all felt like we were.

“Move your hair off your shoulders,” she told me as I approached the throne. “I want to see your neck.”

I knew everyone in the church could feel the tension between us, and I was embarrassed and also proud. But Veronica was always the center of attention. She was the one Sophie talked to most often, telling her how to stand and walk and how Isabella’s face would look when she was sitting on the throne for the first time. I knew Veronica wasn’t Sophie’s type — too thin and nervous, more beautiful than sexy — but I still noticed how much of Sophie’s focus she took up, how often Sophie touched her on the arm to show her how to move. When I watched the two of them, it was hard to believe Sophie really couldn’t make the movie without me.

At home Abe treated Sophie like a pet. When she didn’t eat the chicken and asparagus he cooked for us her first night, he started making the things she liked — canned peaches, oatmeal with cinnamon and sugar. He served them to her in a little bowl with flowers on it, and she scarfed them like a hungry cat. I asked him how he knew what to feed her, and he said he’d asked, of course. I wondered when they’d talked without me hearing. I realized I really wanted them to hate each other. Once I even caught him patting her on the head after she did some tiny chore, and I wanted to grab him by the arm and tell him to be afraid of her. I didn’t say anything. In bed at night he told me how glad he was that we could help her, and that she could stay as long as she wanted.

When I could get her alone — in the kitchen, doing dishes, when Abe went out for a cigarette — I asked her about her husband.

“It didn’t work out,” she said. It was one of those normal-people phrases I figured she’d memorized from TV.

“Are you getting divorced?” I asked.

She was bad at doing dishes. She started to put one away with tomato sauce still sticking to it, and I took it from her hand.

“I don’t think he wants to,” she said.

“Do you want to?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t care. I don’t want to live with him anymore, though.”

“Why’d you marry him anyway?” I asked.

I guess I was hoping she’d tell me she did it for money or because she thought it was time to get married, even though neither of those reasons seemed like Sophie at all. Instead she started going at a nonstick pan with a wad of steel wool. I took it from her so she wouldn’t ruin it.