What Happened to Sophie Wilder (6 page)

“Just a girl from my writing class.”

 

When I woke the next morning, I didn't remember much of the night, but I knew that I'd wandered back to my room alone. I was surprised to find Max asleep on the couch.

“How was the rest of your evening?” I asked when he rose to find me reading and smoking out the window.

“We did important work,” he said. “It might have come too late for our own benefit, but future generations will thank us.” He picked a crumb of dry drool from his stubbled cheek and regarded it scientifically. “The most important part is no one got hurt.”

I laughed grimly. “You make any new friends?”

“You may have to be more specific,” he said. “They're all friends, really. I am for those who believe in loose delights. I dance with the drinkers and drink with the dancers. Or something like that.”

“You seemed to be after one delight, in particular.”

Now he laughed. “The confusions of young Charlie.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He threw off his blanket and got up from the couch, wearing only his boxer shorts. He looked around the room for his jeans, which he pulled on before taking a cigarette from their back pocket.

“How well do you know that girl Sophie?”

“Like I said last night, she's in my writing class. Why?”

“Well, good luck and all. As far as I can tell, she's a dyke.”

He sat back down on the couch and recounted the rest of his night to me. I'd left the basement angrily and without explanation—once he said it, this sounded plausible enough—and he and his friends had stayed out. They'd resumed talking to Sophie and the other girls, and when the house went off tap, they'd all gone back to campus to smoke pot and listen to music.

“Not sure whose room it was,” Max said.

He'd hoped to hook up with Sophie, he admitted, but he wasn't sure how to play things without a place to take her.

“So at some point, I sort of lost my shit for a second. Seemed like a second to me, but I guess it was longer, because I come to, and the music is still playing, but I'm the only one in the room, and I'm very stoned. I figure I should head back here, but I thought I'd look around a little first. Do not go gently, and all. So I give a knock on one of the bedroom doors, and I hear some rustling inside. I go ahead in, and your friend and one of the other girls are there in bed together.”

“So they went to sleep in the same bed. Girls do that.”

“So they do. And in support of your theory, the other girl was still wearing all her clothes. But Sophie was most of the way toward bare. I wouldn't quite say they were
in
flagrante
, but they weren't exactly
ex flagrante
, either. At any rate, it's a good thing we didn't come to blows over her last night, which is where you looked to be headed, because the winner would have had a catfight on his hands.”

“I think you might be experiencing a bit of psychic leakage,” I told him. “Or maybe just wish fulfillment.”

“The boy is incredulous. I guess they don't teach Plato at this school. The sexes are three, because the sun, moon, and earth are three.” He dropped his cigarette into an empty beer can at his feet and went in search of a T-shirt. “Come on,” he said. “Buy me some brunch and I'll tell you all about the birds and the bees.”

 

I hadn't realized before Max's visit how much this girl, about whom I really knew nothing, had taken over my thoughts. But the realization came just as the hope of acting on it was closed off. I was angry without knowing why, my anger both unjustifiable and out of my control, and so I kept to myself for several days. I didn't go to workshop that week. Only when the afternoon arrived at the point when we might have been walking back to campus together did I regret the decision. I couldn't wait another week to talk to her.

When I heard the knock half an hour after the end of class, I opened the door with a mixture of panic and relief. She presented herself to me as if I'd been expecting her. Which, I suddenly felt, I had. She walked past me into the room, heading right for a poster on my wall of a model in a bikini, drinking a bottle of beer.

“I like it,” she said after a moment of consideration. “It adds a quiet dignity.”

“My roommate put it up. She belongs to him.”

“Too bad.” She leaned over and picked up the book I'd set on the floor when she knocked. “Perhaps you can work
out a swap, one half-read copy of
Within a Budding Grove
for one young girl in flower.”

“Seems like a fair trade.”

She sat down on the windowsill where I'd been perched reading before her arrival, and I took a place on the couch.

“We missed you in class,” she said, still holding my book. “It's dreadful being literary without someone there to appreciate it.”

“I was falling behind on my education.”

“You should have started with Nabokov. He's a bit more concise.”

“I did.”

“Really, which one?”

“
Pale Fire
.
Ada
. A few of the early Russian novels.”

She seemed pleased but embarrassed to learn I'd been following her reading course, and she turned away to set down the volume of Proust.

“Have you gotten far enough to know the truth about Albertine?”

“There have been hints,” I said. “But the narrator seems a bit obtuse.”

“Maybe I can offer some insight, then.”

 

Of insight, Sophie had plenty. She had been a senior in high school when her parents were killed in a car crash while driving home from a party just a few miles from their house. She told me this as if describing the plot of an unconvincing book she'd been forced to read for class. She'd already been accepted by New Hampton at the time, but both the admissions office there and her high school counselor urged her to defer for a year. They must have assumed that she would spend that time with family, but she had no family to speak of. Since she was already eighteen—
“I'd reached my majority,” she told me, in a faux-clinical voice—she was free to live by herself in her parents' house. She wrote for days on end. When she wasn't writing, she haunted the local bookstore, run by a woman in her thirties who'd dropped out of grad school to take over the store when her parents, the owners, retired. The woman's name was Lila. She gave Sophie a reading list, and they conducted a kind of seminar together.

“Now here's the sordid, predictable part,” Sophie told me. “It wasn't just a literary education I received. If a certain kind of author were telling the story, we would turn the sign on the door from ‘open' to ‘closed' and fall into passion right there at the foot of the shelves. It wasn't quite like that. But close enough.”

By the time the next fall came around, Sophie was ready to give up on college entirely. But a few weeks into the semester, Lila decided she didn't want Sophie's future on her conscience.

“I was completely in love with her. She told me I could stay at home or come here, whichever was right for me, but either way things were through between us. I've called her a few times since I got here. She chats politely, but she doesn't want to give me ideas. To be honest, I'm not really sure that I like girls. I know that I like her, but she won't have me.”

What little I already knew about Sophie—that she wrote better than the rest of us, that she had read more and better books, that she was somehow not of this place—now made sense. I pictured her alone in her parents' empty house, writing that long story I'd read a few weeks before. It didn't diminish what she'd done, but it made it fathomable.

There wasn't anything I could say in response, so I told her the first thing that came to mind.

“My father died six months ago.”

I'd been hesitant before then to speak to people at school about his death. I didn't know what others would make of it. In truth, I didn't yet know what to make of it myself. I wasn't quite a child then, and so not quite a tragic case, but my loss was still an occasion for pity, which may have been what kept me from discussing it. I also had a vague sense that something of such importance would be cheapened by casual talk, becoming the thing that defined me in the superficial way that others were defined by the sport they played or the music they liked. But now that I had the chance to make myself known to Sophie, this was the first thing I mentioned.

She only nodded in response, as if to say: I know he did; that's why I found you.

And perhaps she did know. It was a small campus, where word spread around. At the very least, Max's friends would have already known. Or she might have heard something from Max himself. It was just the kind of thing one brought up, stoned and sentimental, at the end of such a night. I never asked her what she already knew about me when she came to my room that day. But before then we hadn't spoken at length about anything other than books, and now we each seemed desperate to be understood by the other.

The next week, I invited her to come to New York over winter break. My mother and I were both relieved to have someone else in the house, and Sophie seemed glad to have someplace to go. She came with us to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, an old family tradition that had largely been my father's doing, which we were enacting without him for the first time. We ate Christmas dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, and Max introduced Sophie to his parents as though she had come as his guest.

He liked to remind me in later years that my entire relationship with Sophie might never have happened without his visit. He did this playfully, but there was a point to it. He was saying that I had no special claim over her.

 

I expected the usual morning-after mess when I went downstairs, but Gerhard's living room was empty and clean, the windows open to let in car horns and breeze. The place looked less like the house that Max and I occupied than like its owner's best hopes for that house when he left it in our care. Sophie walked out of the kitchen with a dust pan and a broom.

“You didn't have to do all this,” I said.

“It's no trouble,” she answered. “I like housework. Except the dishes. I left those for you.”

Her hair was pinned up so that from the front she looked as she used to when she'd worn it short. Her outfit too, tight black jeans and a black T-shirt, reminded me of those days.

“You've changed.”

She laughed uncomfortably.

“The ravages of time.”

“Your clothes, I meant.”

Again she laughed, more freely, and she looked down at herself in feigned surprise.

“I did some shopping after mass this morning. Max tells me there's an empty room, if you don't mind my staying for a while.” Before I could respond she added, “Come have a seat. I just put some coffee on.”

“I have to walk the dog,” I said.

So it was that Sophie and I followed Ginger through Washington Square as a bright autumn morning neared noon.

“You published your novel,” she said.

“I did.”

“Congratulations. I'm sorry, I should have told you that a lot sooner.”

“That's all right. It's not very good.”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

“You read it?”

“Of course I read it.”

When the book appeared the previous spring, I'd expected some word from Sophie, and her silence had been a sad reminder of our falling-out. Over time, it grew to become the single big disappointment that stood in for the many small disappointments surrounding the book's failure, as if it all finally amounted to the absence of the one reader whose opinion mattered. Which it did: I'd been writing all along to her. I knew that what I'd done wasn't worth much, but I was ready to do something more. My great difficulty in getting started again—or so I had told myself—was the realization that she wasn't listening.

“Anyway, it was a start,” I said. “I'll do better with the follow-up.”

“You're precocious. It takes most writers years to regret their first book.”

I didn't need to tell her that I'd read the story collection she'd published the year after we graduated, the book that had briefly given her the literary fame that Max so badly wanted for us. Sophie and I had still been close when she wrote those stories, and I'd been the first to read them.

“How's your own follow-up going?” I asked.

“It's finished.”

“That's great,” I said. “When can I read it?”

“It's not that kind of finished. No one's going to read it.”

“Have you shown it to your editor?” I asked.

Sophie waved at the air in front of us, swatting away in one go my question and her book. She'd never been the
kind to disparage her work for form's sake or to elicit some empty reassurances. She'd never made a drama of it, never declared at the end of a bad day, It's all shit; I'm giving up. If she said she was through with her novel, she meant it.

Near the fountain, a crowd was gathering around three teenagers who were break-dancing to eighties hip-hop. Sophie and I stood on its outskirts, half watching the boys.

“Last week,” I said, “I bought my high school yearbook off the street.”

“Sounds promising,” she said. “Tell me more.”

“It was on Sixth Avenue, near the Jefferson Market library. I walked by one of those guys selling used books on the sidewalk. Leon Uris and Erica Jong. Fifteen-year-old issues of
Glamour
. You wonder where they get all this shit. And there was my yearbook. St. Albert's, class of '92.”