What Happened to Sophie Wilder (19 page)

She wasn't much given to mysticism, at least in those days, but something in her believed that her parents were safe somewhere so long as the car was okay. At the same time, she rejected this magical thinking, wanted to unburden herself of it, so she made shows of carelessness toward the car, driving recklessly, taking it out late at night and accelerating through the darkness into the tight turns of the winding roads around the Manse.

We'd been stuck in unmoving traffic on a straight stretch of Route 1 in New Jersey when she first told me this. Even then I could feel her antagonism as she handled the car. I was never again entirely comfortable when she was behind the wheel, and that much was unchanged as she drove us from the station.

“You left in a hurry,” I said.

I hadn't realized until then how angry I was at her for closing that cab door and disappearing so abruptly, and how scared I was that she might disappear again.

“Something occurred to me, and I had to work it out.”

“You could have worked it out in New York,” I said. “I would have loaned you pen and paper.”

“That's not really my medium anymore, as you know.”

When I didn't say anything she added, “It felt too nice
being with you. If I hadn't left, then I might have stayed forever.”

“That wouldn't have been so bad,” I said.

“But I knew I had to leave. There was something I needed to do.”

 

The Old Manse was about ten miles from town. It sat on a quiet road amid a long row of horse farms with tall, white fences and empty, green fields broken up by the occasional animal. I hadn't been to the house in years, but everything looked the same. It was a white-shingled New England colonial with a large front porch, set on a smaller plot of land than its neighbors, but with a pool in the backyard and not far from it a small work shed that had been Sophie's father's home office.

It was an oddly warm day, more like summer than early autumn, and the afternoon sun throbbed in an otherwise empty sky. Sophie showed me to the guest room, where I set my bag down unopened on the bed.

“Do you want to go for a swim?” she asked. “It might be the last chance of the season.”

“I didn't bring a suit.”

“You can take one from my dad.”

We went upstairs, down the long hall to her parents' room, which had never changed in all my visits. There was a blown-up photograph of Sophie at two or three years old framed on one wall and a photograph of the family together on the wall facing it. Sophie found a pair of her father's trunks in the chest beside the bed and left me to change. The suit was short, with blue and white horizontal stripes. It was big around the waist, but I pulled the drawstring tight. I brought my clothes back to the room downstairs, where I quickly unpacked before heading outside.

Sophie wasn't out by the pool, but a pile of clean towels waited on a wrought-iron table between two Adirondack chairs on the deck. In the middle of the wall at the pool's shallow end, an underwater light made the surface shimmer as though reflecting the sun. I stood at the opposite end, looking down at the light. Then I dove in.

As soon as I passed into the cold water, I felt the swimsuit give way, slipping off my hips and down my legs. Rather than reach for it, I freed my feet with a scissor kick and swam toward the bottom, touching a hand against the pool's dark tiles. I went on to the wall in front of me, to the light, following the upward slope as it shallowed. My lungs were empty before I was halfway across. The pain came first to my chest and then extended up to my neck, calling me to the surface for a breath. Another, stronger force kept me down, sending me to the light. I swam with quick, thrusting strokes and violent kicks, my movements graceless and desperate. Everything depended on going on. All at once the end of the pool jumped out at me, and I nearly crashed against the light. I pressed my hands forward as though breaking a fall and thrust myself up to the air, which only a moment earlier had seemed so far away.

“Quite a performance,” Sophie said while I gasped angrily. She stood on the deck in a light blue robe, with a cigarette in her hand. She took a drag as she circled the pool to the deep end, near the place where I had stood before diving in. When she got there, she dropped the cigarette, which crackled as it went out on the wet deck. She took off her robe to reveal no suit underneath. She stood for a moment before me. Then she was in the water.

 

I first saw Sophie naked a few days after Max's visit to New Hampton. She and I had spent the night drinking in her
room and talking about books. This wasn't yet our regular habit, and it was unclear to me how the night would end. Eventually I fell asleep on her couch. When I woke she stood topless, changing for bed. Her dark, teardrop breasts hung loose from her body as she leaned over an open dresser drawer. She found a black T-shirt and put it on.

When she reached for the button of her jeans, I considered letting her know that I was awake, but I didn't make a sound. She shook teasingly as she slipped her pants over her hips. With both thumbs in the elastic waistband of her white cotton underwear, she pulled them down her legs in a single fluid motion. She gave a little jump when she reached her feet. Her legs splayed out in landing, and a few stray dark hairs peeked out between them.

She turned. Her T-shirt had Mickey Mouse on its front, and her hair below matched the black shirt so closely that they seemed to be of a piece. She didn't look embarrassed or surprised to find me watching her.

“Go back to sleep, you perv,” she said.

I rolled over on the couch, turning away from her. In another moment, the light went out. Even in the darkness I shut my eyes, like a child counting in a game of hide and seek. In fact, I did count quietly, holding my breath. Just as I reached zero she lay down beside me. She set her head between my shoulder blades. In a few minutes her breathing fell into a slow and regular rhythm, with the lightest hint of a snore on its exhale, and I knew she was asleep.

When I woke, she sat in her armchair in the corner, wearing the same black Mickey Mouse T-shirt with a pair of blue and white striped pajama bottoms, reading a Thomas Bernhard novel—
Gargoyles
, I think it was, or maybe
The Loser
. She smiled at me as I sat up on the couch. Another month passed before we wound up in bed together.

 

Now she moved quickly through the pool, though from where I was watching she appeared to do nothing to propel herself, like a bird that stays perfectly still while cutting through the sky. She seemed not so much a body as a shimmering trick of water and light. As she neared the wall I stepped aside, waiting for her to come up. Instead she executed a perfect flip turn, pushing her feet against the wall and shooting back from where she'd come. I felt suffocated, watching her swim away and remembering my own pounding chest. I wanted to pull her to the surface. I had to remind myself that she wasn't going to drown. If she needed air, she would come up for it.

Nonetheless, I felt relieved when she reached the other end. Even then she didn't emerge right away. She dropped to the bottom of the pool, curled in a ball like a sinking rock. When she hit the bottom, she unloaded the spring of herself, pressing her feet against the tile and sending herself upward.

In another moment she was back on the deck, hunched over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. She picked up her robe and pulled it back on. The whole thing had taken only a minute. She looked down at the pool defiantly, even a bit angrily, as if I had told her she couldn't do it and now she had proven me wrong. Her breath steadied and she reached into the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. By the time she got one lit she'd circled the deck and settled in a chair.

I swam to retrieve my suit, pulled it on, and climbed out of the pool. There was a second robe among the towels, and I put it on before sitting down next to her.

“My father and I built this together,” she said, waving as if she might be talking about the yard, the house, the whole world around us.

“Built what?” I asked.

“This,” she said. She pounded a foot against the wooden deck beneath us. “It took a few weeks in the summer after the pool was put in. He romanticized physical labor, like Tolstoy with his threshing. Every summer weekend he spent shirtless out in the sun, landscaping or gardening. And he always wanted me to help. We built that shack over there, where he set up his little home office. But that year it was the deck. He circled the pool with his posthole digger, shoving it into the ground, twisting it in the earth to cut away roots, then pulling them out and tossing them aside. I followed, planting a post in each hole and pouring quick-set concrete from a big bag I dragged along from hole to hole.”

“Seems pretty sturdy,” I said, and I gave the boards a playful kick. She didn't smile.

“My grandfather was a mason in central Pennsylvania.” She'd told me all this before, but I didn't interrupt. “All through high school and college my father spent his summers outside, carrying stones. For the rest of his life I think he believed there was something insufficient about office work. Real labor was something done with your hands. I think he considered it a failing that his occupation didn't yield tangible products. It earned him lots of money with which tangible products could be bought, but that's not the same thing. Mostly, he was disappointed that he couldn't pass on a trade to me. Three generations of Wilder masons. Not so long, he'd admit, in the stream of time, but something. That line of three had ended with his father. As far as he was concerned, shared work was the authentic basis for a father's relationship with his child. It was an apprenticeship. A trade was passed along, and it could only be passed along in the doing of it. So the work had two products. You
have a deck, and then you have the knowledge transmitted in making it.”

“It's nice to have those memories,” I said.

“I hated it,” Sophie answered. “It was playacting. He was a banker. Building decks wasn't his real job, and it wasn't ever going to be mine. What kind of kid wants to spend her summer break doing manual labor in the sun? I wanted to sit inside and read. Now, I wish I had some practical skills besides pouring concrete and dragging the hose around the yard. Maybe I'd have something to do with the rest of my life.”

“Writing is a practical skill,” I said. “You wind up with a product at the end.”

“Something else I realized,” she said. “My old preference for the self-contained work of art, which I'd always taken to be a cold aesthetic principle, was really just a sentimental predilection for craftsmanship. I'm my father's child after all.”

“So where's the problem in that?”

“The problem is I don't know what that craftsmanship is supposed to be for. What have you got when you're done? You can't sit on it, no matter how sturdy it is.”

“But you've made something beautiful.”

She let out a long stream of smoke and then waved at it, mixing it into the air in front of her.

“I'm not sure that's possible.”

“Since when?”

“Beauty comes from the fair and fit, Augustine says.”

“I don't follow.”

“In other words, it's a kind of byproduct of the elegance with which an object meets its purpose. A work whose purpose is to be beautiful gets trapped in circularity. It can't ever succeed in that goal. Beauty can only be arrived at while meeting some real need. So what's the point? What's
the thing writing is supposed to do, the aim it's after that along the way produces its beauty?”

“You don't think the need for beauty is a real need?”

“Sure we need it,” she said. “But it already exists without us. ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe. The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'”

“You've stumped me,” I said.

“It's Kant.”

“You've been reading Kant?”

“Bill Crane told me that.”

I wasn't ready for him yet. I wanted a chance to be with Sophie without the man's presence between us.

“Why did you invite me here?” I asked.

“Because I wanted to see you again, and not at that house with Max and all his friends. And because I wanted to say good-bye.”

“You came back to say good-bye?”

“I'm going away.”

“You were already away.”

“Now I'm going for good. It's time for me to be ushered off the stage.”

“I'm not going to usher you off,” I said. “I want to be with you. I want to marry you.”

It was true.

“That's impossible, Charlie. I'm already married.”

“You're divorced.”

“I'm separated.”

“So when does your divorce go through? I can wait.”

“It doesn't go through, Charlie. There is no divorce. I was married in the Church. That means I stay married.”

“Does Tom feel that way?”

“It doesn't matter how Tom feels. It's not up to him.”

“So if he goes off and marries that girl we saw in the street, you'll still be his wife as far as you're concerned?”

“That's right.”

“What about annulments? I mean, you were young when you got married, and you didn't stay together that long. Couldn't you get a priest to do something?”

“You're missing the point. I knew the vow I was taking. What would be the grounds for an annulment?”

“You can make something up. People do it.”

“Granted, people do it. I'm not going to.”

“It's irrational, Sophie. This isn't 1940. And it doesn't have anything to do with the things that religion is supposed to be about—charity, and love, and being good to others. Punishing yourself doesn't achieve anything.”