Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

I’d been cheating on him for three weeks at that point, and I hadn’t been careful at all — sneaking out to the living room to see her while Abe was asleep, going down on her in our bed before he got home from work. But I’d still been having sex with Abe, I still loved him, and I thought those things would keep him from suspecting. He wasn’t dumb, but he was easy to please, and I thought that if I just kept him warm at night and told him sweet things sometimes, he wouldn’t suspect I was fucking my ex-girlfriend in our house.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“We were eating cereal—” she started.

“What? When?”

I was annoyed that they still talked to each other without me, even now. A few nights before, Abe had told me he was worried about her — I’d just rolled over and pretended to be asleep.

“While you were in the shower,” she said. “We were joking about how long you take. And then he got all serious and said to me, ‘It’s okay, you know. I understand.’”

This was worse than him knowing, that he might know and not even be mad. It made me feel like he must not love me as hard as I wanted him to.

“How did you know what he was talking about?” I asked. “Maybe he meant something else.”

“I asked him,” she said. “And he said he knew you and I had a history and he didn’t want to get in the way of that. He said he just wanted you to be happy.”

I tried to imagine that — the man I’d lived with for over a year and Sophie, who’d been back just a few months, talking about my happiness. Like I was a kid or a crazy person who couldn’t make decisions for myself.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“I asked him that too. He said he knew you loved him and he didn’t believe in being jealous. He said you had enough love for both of us.”

It takes a lot to make me miss my family, but that did it. I remembered when my sixteen-year-old sister’s boyfriend cheated on her with his ex, who had a kid with another guy and dirt-colored greasy hair like a stray dog. My sister sobbed on the phone so hard she choked, and when he came over with a fat pink teddy bear to win her back, we all came screaming down at him, my mom and all my sisters, whirling like a hurricane until he ran back to his car, terrified of us. Then we all got into my mom’s bed and petted my sister’s hair while she cried and told her she didn’t need him, she didn’t need anybody too weak to give her his whole heart.

And now here was Abe, saying lines out of some hippie relationship book. I was disgusted with him.

“What did you say?” I asked Sophie.

“I said okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

I didn’t know what I expected her to do, but I didn’t want her to just agree with him.

“Listen,” she said, “maybe it’s good. He makes you happy, and I’m not that good at doing that. Maybe you can have both.”

“You make me happy,” I said, but I knew she was right. Sophie would never know that on those nights when I felt like I didn’t belong in the city or maybe the world, like I’d given up my only home and I was never going to find another, what I really wanted was for someone to make me get dressed and take me dancing. She wouldn’t remember what my favorite ice cream was and buy it just rarely enough to surprise me every time, and she would never learn that the thing to do when I froze up during sex was to look me right in the eye and remind me, again and again, that I was safe. But Abe had known all these things without my telling him. He was good at loving me; it came easy to him. It was true I didn’t want to give that up.

“I said we’d talk about it later,” Sophie said, “but what if we don’t? What if we just keep doing what we’re doing and let it be?”

She looked tired — she was looking that way more and more lately — and now I was tired too.

I remembered something else from back home, when my stepdad was in the hospital after he missed one of our front steps drunk in the dark and fell down and broke his nose. It was so stupid I couldn’t look at him, and while he was in with the doctor, I asked my mom if she loved him.

“He’s pretty good to me,” she said. “He keeps me company. He helps out with the kids.”

“That’s not what I asked,” I said.

She looked me in the eye then, which she almost never did, and said, “I know, honey. But I don’t ask myself questions like that.”

And maybe it was good she didn’t. Maybe that was how you had to live, eventually — just let things be and never ask yourself if they were what you really wanted. The waitress came by — she was pretty and sad-eyed, and, up close, older than I’d thought — and I ordered us each another whiskey. I drank mine fast and the night got fuzzy around the edges. Sophie and I kissed on the train home, but when we got there I got into bed with Abe and we fucked quickly without talking. I fell asleep against him thinking, Maybe, maybe, maybe .

THE NEXT DAY was the big scene between Isabella and Ferdinand — they think she’s about to marry someone else, so they agree to have sex at the house of a sympathetic noblewoman. We used a Holiday Inn on Third Avenue in Gowanus, warehouses out all the windows and the chemical smell of the canal whenever the wind turned. The address was written in permanent marker on the bedsheets. While the grip set up the lights, I sat on the bed in Abe’s bathrobe. Sergei was fully clothed.

“Look,” he said, “maybe we don’t do this scene at all. Maybe we just cut to, you know, flowers blooming or something.”

“Don’t be a dick,” I said.

“I’m trying to help. If we try to make this movie sexy, it’s going to look ridiculous. Maybe we take the high road, go for the Merchant-Ivory types, the grandmas.”

I looked at Sophie, but she was ignoring us, staring over the DP’s shoulder at the viewfinder and scowling.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s do this.”

I shrugged off my robe. I was wearing a nude thong Sophie and I had bought together; at the time I’d looked forward to wearing it and having her watch me. Now I just felt ashamed, like someone had pulled my pants down on the playground.

The first take was terrible. We were supposed to start lying on the bed, with Sergei straddling me, and then he’d pull me up so our faces were touching and say his line: “Never belong to anyone else.” But he never pulled. He just let me lie there waiting, looking confused, and then when I was sure he’d forgotten the line he said it, blandly, like it was a suggestion.

“You guys need to do that way better,” Sophie said, and I was mad that she was talking to both of us when Sergei was the only one not trying.

On the second take he did pull, but roughly, like I was dead weight, and my breasts slammed against his chest and he pulled back like I was disgusting, and we had to cut before he even said his line.

On the third take he scooted back as he pulled me, so we were a good two feet apart, and then he held my hand while he said the line with no heat in it at all.

“That time you looked like first-graders,” Sophie said.

I pushed myself out of bed. I didn’t bother to put on the robe. Sergei and the pimply grip and the angry DP and Sophie herself were just going to have to put up with my tits and belly and ass as I walked to the bathroom.

I locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror. I thought of how many people had seen me naked in my life — my mom, my dad, my sisters when we went swimming in the quarry where the water snakes came up from their secret nests to scare and excite us, the boy from tenth grade whose name I’d forgotten and who rubbed me between my legs until he came in his own pants, Bean, Barber, all the men in New York I saw for a night or a week or a month and wanted nothing from except their skin on mine, Abe, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie. But probably almost nobody saw Isabella naked. Her nurse, maybe, the maid who bathed her. (I remembered hosing off my little sisters in the backyard after they got into an old can of house paint, their bodies wriggling like puppies.) Before she met Ferdinand, she herself was probably the only person who looked at her body and saw sex. And her brother was about to marry her off as a bargaining chip, not a body but a name. Ferdinand was a teenage boy — maybe if he was lucky he’d seen a naked woman once in his life, a hooker working her way through the court. It would be up to me to show him I was something to fight for.