What Happened to Sophie Wilder (9 page)

The mass was short, and on the way out Sophie shook Sam's hand and kissed him on the cheek before heading home. Back in the apartment, she sat at her desk and opened a notebook. She usually spent much of her day on the computer, doing research online, but she still wrote everything out longhand. It was the only way she could work. She was supposed to be finishing a draft of a proposal for a speech clinic that Sam had referred to her. The clinic worked with children with cochlear implants, born deaf and suddenly made to hear. In some cases, apparently, the complications that came with this gift were more dangerous than the disability itself. But Sophie's mind had wandered over the past week, and she'd written something very different.

The moment the phone rang she reached for it. Only then did she realize that she had been waiting all week to hear the sound, waiting for Bill Crane to call again.

“You're a hard girl to reach, Sophie Wilder.”

Only one person called that number and used Sophie's maiden name.

“Greg,” she said. “I haven't been avoiding you, I swear.”

“Listen,” he said, brightly. His manner was always
sweetness and light when he spoke to her. “I've been thinking about the follow-up.”

“No kidding.”

Most literary agents, as Sophie understood them at least, would simply forget about a writer who wasn't interested in writing. But her story collection had done very well by Greg, and he affected great loyalty to her. He might have better expressed that loyalty through tactful silence, she sometimes thought. The truth was that he hadn't done much to build on the success she represented for his own career, and he needed a follow-up, too. He had made a great show of understanding when she announced that she was abandoning years of work. But he was ready now for something to come of it. He called every few months to see how things were coming along, and he often had ideas for her.

“Have you thought of writing anything a bit more . . . autobiographical?”

She was certain they'd covered this before.

“You mean, a book about a twentysomething in New York, trying to write a book? That hasn't been done already?”

“People like stuff that's been done already. They know what they're getting. Besides, yours would have the female perspective. There's some novelty to that.”

“Every time I base a character on myself, I kill her off halfway through.”

What was clearly meant as a laugh came to her through the phone as an unhealthy wheeze.

“Kill her off, then. It will add some pathos.”

“I'll think about it,” Sophie said.

“The reason I bring this all up is that I had lunch with an editor a while back who gave me a new book that was getting a lot of buzz. I've just finished it, and it made me
think of you. I mean, it isn't half as good as what you're capable of, but it's in a line that might work for you. I'll send it over, and you can tell me what you think.”

“As a matter of fact,” Sophie told him, “you don't need to bother. I've started on something, and it's coming along really well.”

“That's great. Tell me about it.”

Only when Greg showed genuine interest did his usual enthusiasm sound fake by comparison.

“To begin with, it's not autobiographical. It's about an old man. A lonely, dying old man, in a room by himself, haunted by mistakes.”

“Sounds like a page-turner.”

“I should probably get back to it, actually.”

“Okay,” Greg said. “Well, listen, I'll still send this book over just the same. It never hurts to scope out the competition.”

He sounded uncertain of whether she was putting him on. Sophie wasn't sure herself. Where had she gotten the idea to say such a thing? She had spent much of the past week writing about Crane, but compulsively, with no intention of showing the results to anyone.

Once off the phone, she went over those pages, which she'd avoided doing before. The writing was clumsy, rough-draft writing. It was the first thing of this sort she'd written in a long time, and her tools had gone rusty and dull. The urge was strong to clean things up, to edit and arrange, but this would commit her to the idea of it, besides which there was little point, since none of it could go anywhere. It would be too cruel to Tom. She wouldn't have written anything if she'd allowed for the possibility of its being read by someone else.

It had only been a joke to get Greg off the phone. She wouldn't need to show those pages to him or anyone else.
But the mere idea of it stopped her short, and she knew she wouldn't get writing of any kind done that day.

 

The subway platform was mostly empty as the day neared noon, and she stood perfectly still, feeling the thick, warm underground air against her face. Then she heard the rattle in the distance and leaned out over the track to watch the two periods of light approach.

She had a book in her bag, and if she'd been headed anywhere—to run errands or to meet a friend for lunch—she would have taken it out to pass the time after entering the train and finding a seat. But she was riding now just to ride. She kept her bag closed between her legs and her attention on the car.

The subway, Sophie believed, was one of the few places on earth where one could observe the full array of humanity. All but the very wealthiest New Yorkers found themselves there from time to time. Even this late in the morning there were two men in expensive suits, reading the
Journal
on their way to work. There was also, at the opposite end of the train, a homeless woman, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat. Her hair was thickly matted, and the smell she gave off filled the car. She had entered at Grand Central, taken a seat, and started to sing to herself. The few people sitting nearby moved quickly away. Sophie wasn't near the woman, but if she had been she was sure she would have moved, too. To such people, she chided herself, the kingdom of heaven belonged. And yet it did no one any good—least of all the oblivious woman herself—to sit beside her, smelling the urine that soaked her socks, as though bearing witness. She kept singing until she got off at Astor Place, where the people near Sophie exchanged knowing and relieved looks.

By Spring Street most of the riders didn't know that the woman had been there a few stops earlier; they only knew that the car carried an unusually unpleasant smell. By Canal, even the smell was gone. This was another thing Sophie liked about riding: watching the different lives a train led over the course of its line.

“This is the last stop on this train,” came the automated conductor's voice when they reached Brooklyn Bridge. “Everyone please get off the train.”

Sophie stayed where she was as the rest of the car emptied out.

 

It had been years since she'd taken the six train to the end of the line, but there had been months, during the worst of it, when she did it almost every day. She would pass the subway stop on her way back from mass, and the prospect of going back to the apartment, back to work, was so daunting that she couldn't keep herself from going down the stairs, as if this train could take her anywhere.

This was all in her first years out of college, when she lived in a smaller apartment in the same building and Tom was uptown in law school housing. She was writing a novel then, because she had promised that she would.

“They're going to want rights to the big book, too,” Greg had told her, as he prepared to send her story collection to publishers. Of course there would be a big book. Why wouldn't there be, since she was so young? She assumed as much herself.

The collection sold quickly to a publisher, with much competition. The author was herself a good story, orphaned and very young. The editor who won the bidding war wanted to play up the “wildness” the stories suggested.
It had been his idea to make the title story “Visiting Professor,” with its intimations of lurid autobiography. Even her religious turn had its interest, a publicist had told her. (“It's like Graham Greene or something. I mean, who converts anymore? Unless they're converting
away
.”)

Sophie refused to speak of it. Not out of shyness or embarrassment; she just didn't want to use her faith to sell a book. So the book sold without it. To Sophie, who half believed the whole world read the way she did, the numbers didn't sound very impressive, but everyone insisted they were. There were profiles and interviews and photo sessions. Awkward boys declared their loyalty on Web sites. All of this took up a year of her life, during which she did no writing at all, was not expected to, and so was free to imagine that it would all work itself out.

Around the time the stories came out in paperback, people began talking about the follow-up. Sophie had hundreds of pages of stories that hadn't been included in the collection, and they seemed similar enough in setting and style and tone to turn into something unified and whole. But when she sat down to the work in her second year out of school, it required that she imagine herself back into the girl who had written those stories, the girl who wrote in that voice they all liked so much. And this was beyond her powers. It should have been a simple matter of stitching, but the effort was excruciating. She couldn't believe that such work had once come easily.

Time passed around her. In Tom's last year of law school, they married and moved into a bigger apartment in her building. He went off each day, first to school and after that year to work, and her own days passed as they had before. Somehow, she spent two years—not decades, admittedly; not even an unusual gestation for a novel, but
a good chunk of her life to that point—on a book that she'd known was dead before she'd started it. In truth, she had spent those years
with
the book, but not really
on
it. She still didn't know what she had spent the time on. She wasn't at all sure how it had happened.

The only thing that marked the days was the liturgy, which passed in and out of ordinary time, through Lent and Easter and Advent and Christmas. It was perhaps for this reason that she became a daily communicant during this period, though she had been rather casual about going to mass in the first years after her conversion. Back then, with the memory of the great transformation still alive within her, the terrestrial obligations of the faith seemed less pressing. But spending each day going over the things she'd written as a lost girl made her feel lost again, and so she started attending St. Agnes each morning, to remind herself of the force of her faith.

And then it was done. Two years of work had turned three hundred pages of good stories into two hundred and fifty pages of a terrible novel. When she announced that she was starting over, she expected anger or disappointment. She was ready to give all the money back. But her editor had since left the publishing house, so there was no one there to ask for it. She expected Greg, at least, to take her to task for all the time she'd wasted. Instead he confirmed his faith in her. She felt obliged to explain that whatever she did next wouldn't be much like the stories everyone had loved, because the girl who had written those stories didn't exist anymore. She had been regenerated.
Gennathei anothen
was the term, which she took to be not “born again,” exactly, but “born from above.” The follow-up, when it came, would likewise be born from a different place. This would be fine, he assured her. Even
with a different point of view, a different set of values, she still had her
style
.

Which confused Sophie, although she didn't say as much. What was style, if not a point of view? A set of values? She'd been reading Augustine, who said that beauty consisted in fairness and fitness—the elegance with which a thing suited its proper ends. She understood this to mean that beauty itself could not be a proper end. Where did that leave style? How could she exchange every part of herself but that one?

This concern turned out to be academic, because she simply couldn't write, in any style. Sometimes an idea would be there in front of her, beautiful in its promise. But as she tried to transmit it, a kind of aphasia took her in its grip. The simplest objects and ideas turned ineffable. She couldn't name a character, describe someone as “tall” or “short,” let alone participate in the alchemy by which such descriptions accrue into something like life.

Of all lies that she could have chosen to live, the lie that she was writing a book might have been the easiest to get away with. Out of superstition or for more practical reasons, most writers avoided discussing their works in progress, so people rarely questioned her. When they did, she sometimes said it was going well; at others she threw her hands up in frustration. But she was never pressed for specifics, by Tom or Greg or anyone else. No one even asked when she thought it would be done.

It was at this point that she had started riding trains. The hum of them quieted her distress. She mostly rode the local, but sometimes she transferred to the four or the five and continued on into Brooklyn. She might get off at Borough Hall and walk back into Manhattan over the bridge. On nice days the bridge would be crowded with tourists, stopping to take photos of each other while the cyclists
threatened to run them down. She preferred the dark days, when she had long swathes of the walkway to herself. She would gaze out at the fog sitting low upon the river, wondering at the numinous beauty of it and remembering a time when the curtain had been ripped and she had briefly glimpsed the world beneath the world. She imagined a life composed entirely of riding and walking. She thought she could live such a life.

Then Sam had come to the parish, and to tea, to ask her to write on behalf of the charity in Sri Lanka. As it turned out, he had only wanted her to look over something he'd written, to fix it up, correcting his grammar and spelling. But once she got started she knew she would have to work from scratch. She bought books about grant proposals and spent time teaching herself the form. She researched other foundations that might be interested beside the small one that Sam had already found. Then she spent three weeks writing. In the end, $30,000 was sent to Sri Lanka. Something she'd written had made a difference in the world. Lives had been changed by words she'd set down. She asked Sam if he knew anyone else who needed her help, and she had a new job.