Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“I want to move in together as soon as possible,” she said. “I want to start a real life together.”

I sat down on the bed with her. I was worried now.

“What’s up with you?” I asked. “Why did you run off?”

Her face shut down then. She looked at the computer instead of at me.

“The movie isn’t good,” she said.

“Of course it is,” I told her. “It’s great. Everybody was saying nice things about it.”

“No,” she said. “You’re good. The movie is bad.”

I hadn’t seen her like this before — after Marianne wrapped, she’d been excited, full of plans. I tried to think back to the movie, take myself out of it and look at it like a stranger would. I thought about the opening shot of the harbor, how it looked bleak and gray and flat, like Sophie’s face with all the feeling sucked out of it. Other parts of the movie were like that, too, I remembered now — the glass-and-metal front of the building that was Henry’s palace, the conference room where Isabella makes her deal with the rebels, even the stretch of Sixth Avenue where Ferdinand and Isabella have their wedding procession. Now that I thought about it, it was true that the movie had started to lose me whenever Isabella wasn’t talking. But that had to be normal — I’d never seen myself on the big screen before. I’d waited years to watch Marianne . Of course, like all the egomaniac actors I knew, I’d be most interested in watching myself.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “The movie’s beautiful. You’re just nervous because it’s the premiere, that’s all.”

Sophie didn’t nod or look up.

“What if we moved to Maine?” she said. “I’ve been looking there too.”

“What’s in Maine?” I asked. I was getting exhausted trying to follow her train of thought.

“We could get a little house on the beach and catch fish. We could build a boat. We could really get away from everything.”

I was a little mad at her again — why would I want to run away now, when for the first time in my whole life I was in a place where people thought I was great? But also I was pretty sure Sophie had never been in a boat, let alone built one, so I decided not to take her seriously.

“Okay,” I said, “but if we do that I want lobster pots. I want to eat lobster every day.”

“We’ll do that too,” she said. “Maybe we can get jobs on a lobster boat, and they’ll pay us in lobster.”

Her face and voice were dreamy, like a little kid’s. I took off my clothes and got under the covers with her, and we held each other and talked about lobster until she fell asleep.

THE FIRST REVIEW WASN’T TERRIBLE. It was a short blurb in the Daily Bridge calling the movie “flawed” but “well acted” and “occasionally moving.” Sophie seemed nervous but not too upset; she made a list of apartments to visit, and we saw two on Monday. The first one was nice enough inside but sat between two chicken plants, so the air all around it smelled like shit and old blood. The second was pretty, on a street with trees and an elementary school, but the landlady squinted at us and said, “If you live here, you can’t be coming and going all the time. To work, okay, but we can’t have people coming in and out at night. This is a family building.”

We couldn’t figure out if she was bigoted or insane. Tuesday we took the day off from looking, and I went to meet the manager of a new bar where I was applying to be shift manager. He liked me and hired me right away, but I explained I couldn’t start till Thursday.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I have an interview with a magazine.”

I met Lucy at a fancy vegetarian restaurant in Chelsea. She was just like I remembered, calm and pretty in jeans and a blazer and leather moccasins, and looking at her made me think maybe a person could fit in everywhere if they just had the right clothes. She told me the Korean-style rice bowl was delicious, and I ordered it to be polite and because nothing else on the menu looked very good anyway. The waitress brought us tea and then pumpkin soup in little bowls, which was lukewarm and sweet and reminded me of my sister’s baby food, and while I tried to find a way to like it, Lucy asked me where I was from. I sometimes lied about this to people, especially people I’d never been close to, not because I was embarrassed but because I didn’t think I should have to think about home just to satisfy some stranger’s curiosity. But I was scared to lie to a reporter, and also I wanted her to know what I was really like, where I came from — I wanted people who read the magazine to know that and like me anyway.

“West Virginia,” I said, and when she said, “Oh, it’s beautiful down there,” I said, “Not where I’m from.”

Immediately I was worried that was rude and she’d be mad at me, but she just went right on to the next question. I told her about my dad and my mom and my stepdad and my sisters, and I only stopped telling the truth when we got to Bean. No good had ever come from exposing that weak part of myself. When she asked me why I left home I just said I was getting away from a bad boyfriend, and she nodded, and the main course came. I’d been expecting something that looked like fried rice, and I burned myself right away on the heavy iron pot that was still cooking my food. I was ashamed, and I stared stupidly at the red blister rising on my finger, until Lucy noticed and said, “I do that all the time,” and told me to hold my finger against my cold water glass until the pain went down.

“So when you took the Isabella role,” she said, her own iron pot steaming untouched in front of her, “you were replacing someone much higher-profile. And correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you don’t have any formal training. Were you nervous?”

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t nervous at all.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me, like we were friends and it was okay to tell her what I really thought, and it occurred to me that if I knew her better, I might not necessarily like her.

“Really?” she asked. “Not even for a minute?”

I looked right at her, wishing I hadn’t burned my thumb or shown up in a flowered dress that was both too fancy and not fancy enough, and I said, “I knew I’d be great. And if anybody doubted that, I was going to show them.”

Lucy nodded, neatly scooped up a piece of tofu from her pot, and blew on it. “Did Sophie doubt you?”

“What?”

I knew what she’d said, but I needed her to say it again so I’d have time to calm down. The suggestion — and the way she smiled when she said it — made me want to smack her.

“You weren’t her first choice. Was she worried you couldn’t handle it?”

Of course I’d been afraid of that. And maybe part of the reason Sophie was acting so weird about the movie was that she never expected me to be so good. I was even madder at Lucy because I thought she might be right.

“Sophie’s always believed in me,” I said.

Lucy nodded. She picked up a mushroom with her chopsticks, popped it in her mouth.

“Is it ever hard to work with your girlfriend?” she asked.

I tried to eat some of my rice bowl. It was still steaming hot; a bite of rice and some spinachy vegetable burned my tongue and made me pant. I tried to think of an answer that would make her feel dumb for asking and also would make me feel better about me and Sophie and our future.

“No,” I said finally. “She motivates me. Being with her makes me want to be better.”

“And this movie hasn’t strained your relationship at all?”

I was starting to sweat. I thought of Sophie at our grungy motel, looking at pictures of Maine on her computer.

“What do you mean?” I asked.