Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

After a couple of weeks we did get an offer, about a quarter of what the studio had promised. We’d have to lose a lot of the crew and the nonspeaking cast — the footmen and scullery maids, Columbus’s sailors. We’d have to cut all the scenes with ships and horses. And we’d lose the big old church that had made me want to play Isabella in the first place. Sophie took a week to think about it. I was afraid she’d give up. We went to old buildings we could use cheaply, warehouses and restaurants where Sophie knew people, but none of them looked right. Then we found the old bottle factory. The floor was covered in broken glass, and the walls were full of holes where the equipment had been ripped out. I figured we should move on to the next place on our list, which was a high school gym, but Sophie got a look in her eyes like when a dog smells something on the wind, and then she went crunching around in the glass in her little expensive shoes, muttering to herself. Finally she turned to me.

“Let’s just get rid of Spain,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not going to look right no matter what. Let’s just put it in New York and use whatever locations we want.”

I knew she was right — none of the buildings we’d been to looked anywhere near as good as the church. But I wasn’t sure anybody would feel what I felt there—“haunted” I guess would be the word — if they watched us saying our lines in a banged-up warehouse.

“I don’t know,” I said.

But Sophie was looking all around at the scabby walls and the high barred windows and the place in the corner where a big snarl of copper wiring came right up out of the floor. I could tell she was excited — I knew her face when she was all lit up with a new idea. What I didn’t know then was how to tell her deep true solid joy from the kind of excitement that came from panic.

“I promise,” she said, “it’s going to look really beautiful.”

“Okay,” I said, “I trust you.”

It took a week to convince everyone else. Both the screenwriter and George threatened to take the movie away from us. But Sophie told them the same thing she’d told me: the movie was going to be even better this way. She said things I’d never heard her say before, like “boundary breaking.” She had this ability to sound completely confident, like it would be insane to ever doubt her. Finally she got her way.

So we started to shoot again. The bottle factory became the dank old farmhouse where Isabella’s brother puts her after their father dies. Isabella’s carriage to her brother’s castle was a yellow cab — the driver asked me if I was going to a Renaissance fair. The castle itself was a fancy old building on Eighty-sixth Street, and the throne room was an apartment in a Williamsburg high-rise with a view of the city. The owner was a friend of the producer — she was excited that we were making a movie in her house, and she kept giving us unhelpful tips about the light until we put her in a dress and gave her a nonspeaking role. The banquet hall was an actual Italian banquet hall in Bensonhurst. We hired the real staff to serve us dinner for the party where Isabella meets Ferdinand for the first time; in that scene we’re eating spaghetti bolognese and eggplant parm. Then they helped us put the tables and chairs away and we danced the way the choreographer had taught us before we had to stop paying her.

I thought it all looked good enough — the banquet hall even seemed kind of royal to me, with its fake marble floors and fat velvet curtains we kept bumping into as we danced. But Sergei, who played Ferdinand, kept getting more and more upset. He was short and black-haired and pretty, and he’d been great in his scenes with Veronica — he had pale blue eyes and on cue he could make them flare up with desire. But at the banquet hall he acted like a teenager who has to babysit little kids at a party. He was supposed to kiss my hand and look up at me like he already loved me — instead he looked over my left shoulder at the door to the street.

As good as Sophie was sometimes at getting down to the soft core of you, she could be really shitty at giving notes.

“That doesn’t look right,” she said to Sergei. “You need to look like you like her.”

He rolled his pretty eyes. “You’ve made that a little difficult, haven’t you?” he asked.

Sophie looked at him with a blank, empty face, which made him madder.

“Come on,” he said, “this is a surprise to you? You throw me in a smelly party room with a girl twice my size and you expect me to act like nothing’s different?”

I tried not to show that this bothered me, but it did. I wasn’t twice his size — he was short and slim, but he had broad shoulders and big gym-rat arms. He probably outweighed me. But I was a lot bigger than Veronica — her Isabella dress wouldn’t zip up my back, and I had to wear the Beatriz costume with extra gold brocade we got at the craft store. And I was bigger than I’d been in Marianne . I knew how this worked — if the movie did well enough, there would be before-and-after pictures of me on the Internet, strangers calling me a cow. I didn’t really care so much — when I was by myself, with no cameras around, I liked the way I looked just fine. But I wanted Sophie to tell Sergei how stupid he was being, how beautiful I was, and how if he couldn’t do the scene it was his problem.

Instead she said, “Think about someone else if you have to. Just make sure you look at her face when you do it.”

In the next take he did make eye contact, but his mouth had a mean twist when he looked at me. I didn’t know who he was thinking about — his Russian wife with her big breasts over a tiny waist, her pretty calves in stiletto boots; Veronica, so delicate her arms looked boneless; or some other small, elegant woman. Whoever it was, I knew in his mind that person was much more beautiful than me.

When we were finally done for the day and Sophie and I were curled on the saggy couch of a bar called Stan’s, I asked her, “Do you think I’m not pretty enough to play Isabella?”

I’d never been the kind of person who asked that — I’d always hated girls who fished for compliments, who forced their boyfriends to tell them how pretty they were until the word lost all its meaning. And I knew Sophie wanted me; already in the bar’s graffiti-covered bathroom she’d made me come with her hands. But I didn’t like the way she wilted in front of Sergei. And I knew he was right in one way — for the movie to work, the audience had to want Isabella. I wanted Sophie to tell me that they would. Instead she said, “I don’t know.”

My thigh was touching hers and I jerked it away. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I like how you look. In the dailies you’re beautiful, with all your hair down. But you and Sergei don’t look good together.”

“He’s just not trying,” I said. “He’s pissed that I don’t make him look like a big man.”

“That’s probably true,” Sophie said. “But it still looks bad.”

“You’re the director,” I said. I was almost yelling, and a guy by the pool table looked over and gave me a smirk. “You’re supposed to direct the actors. That’s your job.”

She let her neck go slack, rolled her head away from me so she was talking at the wall.

“I just don’t feel it with this one,” she said.

Then she turned to look at me.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m fading,” she said, “Like I’m getting more transparent. Do you ever feel that way?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Never mind,” she said, and put her head on my shoulder, something she did all the time now that she never used to do. We sat like that for a minute while I worried about her, and was mad at her for making me worry, and then mad at myself for being mad. Just when I started to relax again into the smell and feel of her, she said, “Abe knows.”