Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

BACK IN THE ROOM, we were getting gold late-afternoon light through the cheap window blinds. I could feel it in my hair and on my skin as I walked back to the bed. Everybody got quiet.

“Let’s go,” I said.

This time instead of waiting for him to pull me I reared up on my own. Instead of waiting for him to come close I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my belly against his. I thought of when I’d first met Abe, at a dance club in Harlem, how he lifted me over his head like it was nothing and on the way down I put my hands over his hands, pressing his fingers into my flesh. I thought of when I’d first met Sophie, how I’d been the one to move toward her on the street outside my house. I thought of how I’d chosen them both, about how badly I’d wanted them, how badly I wanted them still. I looked hard into Sergei’s blue eyes and said, “Never belong to anyone else.”

For a minute it was silent and I could hear the trucks on Third Avenue, the blood in my ears. Then Sophie said, in a soft voice, “Okay, that’s good, I think we got it.”

The rest of the day was smooth — the light was beautiful, Sergei behaved, I felt calm and good in Isabella’s head. We finished ahead of schedule. And then, while everyone was packing up and I was getting dressed, Sophie came to me and grabbed my wrist so hard it hurt. Her eyes were huge. She said, “I want you to leave him.”

THEN WE HAD THE FIGHT I’d been wanting. We told Abe together, standing in the living room, holding hands. He looked at Sophie with a cold rage I’d never seen before and said, “Get out of here so I can talk to Allison.”

“No,” she said. I could tell she was scared, but I wasn’t sure of what.

“Fine,” he said. “Allison, let’s talk in the bedroom.”

I followed him like a child. I expected him to scream at me for betraying him, and if he’d done that, maybe I would’ve stayed. Instead he said, “You know you’re making a huge mistake, don’t you?”

I just looked at him.

“How long is it going to last? A week? A month?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that Abe and I had a good shot at being old together and Sophie and I did not. But all I wanted then was to be with Sophie; I couldn’t hold anything else in my head.

“When it’s over,” he said, “don’t think you can just come back. I won’t be here.”

“I know,” I said, even though I hadn’t till right then. He’d been a safe place for me to go for such a long time; I guess I thought maybe he’d always be one.

“This is your last chance,” he said. “You can change your mind now, and we can go back to how we were. Better, maybe, because we’ve been through this.”

I saw how much it was going to hurt to lose him. I saw it far away, like a thing on the horizon, like a mad dog we watched walk down our street one ugly Sunday back home, its mouth full of disease. But I couldn’t feel the hurt yet. I was filled with a dull calm.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I went to get my suitcase from the closet.

I heard him walk to the door, stop, turn back.

“I hope you know what you’re getting into,” he said.

It made me angry that he would condescend to me like that.

“I’m a grown-up,” I said, rolling my dancing dress up into a ball. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not talking about you,” he said. “I know you’ll be fine. You always are. But Sophie’s heading for something bad, and if you’re the one that’s with her, that’s going to be on you.”

“You don’t know anything about Sophie,” I said, but when I left the house with everything that was really mine in a suitcase and a garbage bag, I was scared.

. . .

WE WERE AT THE SUBWAY STATION — her holding my hand, me shaking — when we realized we had no idea where to go. All we had between us was a little money Sophie had saved from a few lectures and classes she’d done after Woods and the now-tiny amount I was getting paid for Isabella . We ended up going back to the Holiday Inn where we’d just been shooting. The room we’d used was taken, but they put us in one exactly like it, except the mirror had some kind of dark stain that looked like a ghost when we turned out the lights. At first it was kind of a joke for us, staying there, but then it started to feel safe, like we could drop out of the real world and live in our movie. We finished the shoot — the last scenes we had were Isabella’s meeting with the rebel leader (shot at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, where they wouldn’t let the actors carry their fake swords) and Isabella’s marriage to Ferdinand (in Prospect Park, between rainstorms, a dog running back and forth across the shot). Then Sophie started editing, and it was just like Marianne —the two of us lying awake together, talking about how great we’d be. Except now Sophie knew what success looked like, so her daydreams were more specific. She wanted to premiere at Sundance. She wanted a big nationwide release in lots of theaters. She wanted a review in The New York Star .

I wanted all that too, mostly because Sophie wanted it. But unlike with Marianne , I also had dreams for myself. I wanted a big magazine profile like Sophie had gotten, where they’d praise my acting with words like “luminous” and talk about my favorite breakfast cereal like it was something important. I wanted the Coen brothers to call me and offer me a role in their next movie — I’d turn it down because I was already shooting another movie with Sophie, but then they’d work around my schedule because there was just no way they could make the film without me.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be famous, exactly. For one thing, I didn’t want my family to see the movie — I didn’t want any connection between them and my life now. And I didn’t think about people stopping me in the street, or women’s magazines putting me on the cover, or fancy restaurants saving a table for me. I just knew that for the first time in my life I’d done really, really well at something, and I wanted important people to talk about it.

I didn’t tell Sophie about any of this. She was nervous — she came home every night from editing with her shoulders all hunched together. I did things to make her days easier, like getting single-serving packets of oatmeal and making sure she left with a few every morning, and at night, after she curled away from me, I lay awake with my excitement.

We didn’t get into Sundance — Sophie said she wasn’t upset, but then she got into the bathtub and stayed there for hours, until I had to fish her out of the cold water, dry her off, and put her to bed. We did get into the Hudson Film Festival, though, and that seemed to calm Sophie enough that she could eat real meals and look me in the face when she talked. She started working on something new — she wouldn’t talk about it, but she said I could see it as soon as it was done — and we had two months of good time. She wasn’t paying much attention to how she looked then; she’d stopped slicking her hair back and it fell soft around her face, and sometimes while she slept I could imagine the child she’d been before she met me. I knew she’d been Emily when she was little, not Sophie, and sometimes I called her that in my mind, a secret name nobody who saw our movies would ever know.

I got my job at the coffee shop back, and I picked up shifts at a midtown bar too. Living at the motel was stupidly expensive, but every time I talked about leaving, Sophie got all closed off, and I learned not to mention it. I was good at being good to her then. Sometimes she came to the bar at the end of my shift and we would tease the drunk businessmen together. She liked to tell them we were sisters, and I’d play along—“Twins, in fact,” I’d say. “We’re very close.” And if the men reacted right, I’d lean across the bar and kiss her deeply, they’d cheer and buy her shots and over-tip. Once, right before the festival, a middle-aged guy with a corned-beef face was hitting on me — nothing intense, just asking if I was single and what kind of guys I liked. I laughed, but Sophie interrupted—“You know that’s my wife you’re talking about.” I knew she was kidding around, but that word made me excited and scared. The beef-face guy apologized.