Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“You didn’t really need anything,” she said finally. “I thought it would be good for me to be with someone who needed something from me.”

I needed you , I wanted to scream, but then I thought, Let her think I was strong. Let her think I didn’t take every pill I could buy or steal in the year after I left, hoping one of them would delete the person that was me. Let her think I didn’t have to fuck thirty different terrible men just to forget the way she smelled .

“He needed someone to listen to him really well,” she went on, “and I thought I could do that.”

“And you couldn’t?” I asked.

“Well, I didn’t.”

She picked up a jar lid I was going to throw away and washed it very carefully, like it was expensive china.

“Or, I did and then I didn’t,” she said. “Maybe that’s worse. I did a lot of things wrong.”

I bet you did , I thought, but I felt sorry for her too. I knew she didn’t ask to be the way she was. I thought of my stepdad, how every time he came back to us he wanted to get it right, stay out of trouble and be a good dad. But he just didn’t know how to think about the future or how to keep his mouth shut, and those things were always going to get him in shit whether he wanted to be good or not. And I thought of my mom, too, who let him keep coming back, even though she knew as well as anyone that he was never going to be any different.

“I’m sure it wasn’t all your fault,” I said.

“No, it was.” She paused with her hands in the sudsy water, like she was taking a bath. “You know, right before I left, he asked me to quit making movies.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “Who was he to ask you that?”

“Well, he was my husband. He still is my husband. And he might’ve been right. I might be better if I didn’t make movies.”

I thought of Peter forcing his face at me, and I thought she might be right. But I’d survived that. If I could suffer to let Sophie do what she loved, then everyone else in her life should have to do that too.

“Making movies is your life’s work,” I told her. I’d read that phrase somewhere and I thought it was cheesy, but it was what I had. “Anyone who loves you should understand that.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that much,” she said. “At this point if I stopped making them, I’d probably die.”

And then Abe came back in with the cold air, smelling like smoke, and she went back to being his little cat again.

ON SET THE PROBLEM was Veronica. I’d been sort of scared to meet her, because she’d been on the covers of all the big magazines, but when I saw her the first day I just thought, Oh . It’d been a long time since I’d lived with one, but I could still spot an alcoholic right away. It was okay in the first few scenes we shot, where she just had to look queenly and pissed off; she had that drunk-lady way of lifting her chin and narrowing her eyes like what were any of us staring at? But when we tried to shoot the scene in her bedroom — the prop guys had hung expensive-looking tapestries in a back room of the church and wheeled in a gigantic bed — she totally fell apart. Our lines were pretty modern-sounding — the screenwriter didn’t want anything flowery — but she still couldn’t deal. She got through the very beginning of the scene okay — Isabella tells Beatriz about her money-grubbing half brother Henry’s latest plan for her marriage, a rich nobleman who will top up Spain’s treasury. Beatriz at first isn’t too sympathetic — the guy’s rich, after all, and he’ll take care of Isabella. But Isabella explains that she’s not going to let herself get shipped out to the countryside to be somebody’s wife, that she’s going to sit on the throne like the queen she is. I liked the speech because it wasn’t about freedom and love like some Disney princess; it was about power. I knew I would’ve nailed it; I practiced it sometimes when no one was around, just to see how it sounded. But Veronica couldn’t handle it.

“I’m not made to be a rich man’s wife,” she said, and then she just paused and stared at me, like I had the lines printed on my face. We cut. The script guy showed her the line and she nodded and looked annoyed, like she knew it all along. But the next time she got to the same spot and crashed again. The third time she got as far as, “I’m not going to move to Osuna and supervise servants,” before she stopped and looked up at Sophie hopefully, like maybe that was it. The fourth time she said, “I’m not made to be a man’s rich wife,” and instead of laughing she looked like she was going to sob.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I need a minute.” And then she ran to her trailer in her big heavy Isabella dress.

Sophie was scratching her arms. She started to follow Veronica, but she looked exhausted.

“Let me talk to her,” I said.

Sophie looked relieved, but a little dark thought was growing in my brain.

Veronica said, “Come in,” in a thick voice, and when I opened the door, she shoved something behind her mini-fridge. The trailer was full of little-girl stuff — a pink teddy bear and a unicorn poster and a jewelry box with rainbow stickers on it. Veronica lit a scented candle and then lit a cigarette from it.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said. “It’s a tough scene, you know.”

“It’s a tough role,” I said.

She looked at me like she was grateful. She’d rubbed away some of the makeup under her eyes, and the skin there was greenish and shiny.

“I used to have an easier time,” she said.

I remembered just a few years before, when she’d been in her first big movie. They called her “the thinking man’s starlet.” She’d gone to Columbia and spoke three languages and her dad was some kind of diplomat and she looked so pretty and classy and smart and she always said the right thing in interviews, like she’d gotten the best of everything her whole life but she knew how to be humble about it. Of course I was jealous of her.

“This must be really hard for you,” I said. “All the pressure, the attention.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest. Her big skirt was getting wrinkled, but I didn’t say anything.

“I used to feel like I was in control,” she said. “I’d step out of my house in the morning and think, Anything I want today, I can have . Now I don’t even feel like I control my own brain.”

She reached behind the fridge, pulled out a bottle of green tea, drank deeply, and winced.

“You want some?” she asked.

I didn’t, but I said yes. I needed to be on her side. The bottle was about half tea and half vodka. It was disgusting, like lukewarm bitter gasoline. That had always been one of the saddest things about drunks to me — the shit they were willing to put in their mouths. One summer my stepdad quit beer and switched to cough syrup, and that sweet smell in the sticky heat made me heave every time I walked into the house. Even my youngest sister wouldn’t go near him.

“You are in control,” I said, “but not for long.”

She looked pissed off, set the bottle down. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“I’m not the only one who knows you have a problem,” I said.

This was a cross between the truth and a lie. I hadn’t actually talked to Sophie or anyone else about Veronica’s drinking. But I was pretty sure they’d pick up on it soon, if they hadn’t already. Veronica looked worried but not convinced. I went on.

“I’m not going to tell anybody,” I said, “but there’s thirty other people working on this movie, and a lot of them are pissed off at you right now. It’s only a matter of time before somebody talks to the press.”