The Life and Death of Sophie Stark Read online

  After a couple of weeks I started expecting Bean to call. I hadn’t given him my phone number but my sister had it—he could easily ask her. At first I just wanted him to call me up and talk to me like nothing had happened, like he was just an old friend reminding me where I came from, that I’d once had a real floor and a dog instead of a fucked-up cat and a life that, even if it wasn’t that good or that happy, still made a little bit of sense. When it had been a month and still he hadn’t called, I started wanting him to say he missed me. I wanted him to tell me that he’d been stupid to let me go, that he wanted to see me again and he thought we could work things out. I felt terrible for the whole two months or so that I thought this way, and at the same time I imagined myself saying I missed him too, and yes, and yes, and yes.

  And then I started wanting him to apologize. By this time I’d managed to get a job waiting tables at a decent place in Williamsburg, and I was making enough money to move to the house with Irina, which was also dirty and crowded and full of cats, but at least it had real floors. I started to feel a little bit more in charge of my life, and I found myself standing on the subway platform or walking down Atlantic Avenue or carrying a slice of birthday cake to a customer, shielding the candle’s little flame with my hand, and suddenly wishing, as hard as I’d ever wished for anything in my life, that Bean would say he was sorry. I didn’t want him to explain, I didn’t want him to tell me he loved me or he missed me or he wished things were different—I just wanted him to say those two words and never talk to me again.

  The night I told the story it had been almost two years since I’d left Burnsville, and I still hadn’t heard from him. It had gotten weaker, but I still had the feeling that he had something of mine that he needed to give back, and that I couldn’t rest until I had it.

  Maybe that’s why I told the story about Bean that night, instead of one of the others I could’ve told—he still had a hold on me, and my mom and dad and my sisters and my stepdad didn’t, or at least I thought they didn’t at the time. But I wasn’t about to tell the real story and have everybody know my business, and I guess I thought I could fool people—usually Brooklyn kids would believe anything you told them about West Virginia. I hadn’t expected this little stranger standing in front of me, acting like she knew something about my life.

  “When people lie about their past,” she said, “they push their chests out and stand up straight, like someone’s going to challenge them.”

  “And I was doing that?”

  She nodded. “But some of it was true,” she went on, “because sometimes your whole body relaxed, like you knew the story in your sleep.”

  I was annoyed with her for pegging me so well. I told all kinds of little lies about my life to Barber and Irina, to people I met, making my family and my town sound better or worse than they really were depending on the situation. I’d always gotten away with it, and I was happy to be able to make my own past and have people accept it. But I sometimes hoped somebody would catch me out, so I could feel like they really knew me. And the first person to do it was a girl who didn’t know me at all.

  “What are you,” I asked, “some kind of psychologist?”

  “I make movies about people,” she said, “and I’d like you to be in one.”

  I thought she was fucking with me then. The arty kids I knew put on shows in crappy bars or made websites with a few cartoons on them—no one made movies. Either it was a joke, I figured, or she was one of those people who always had a crazy plan and never followed through. Plus Barber came back just then with a beer for me and wound his arm all the way around my back so he could touch the side of my left breast.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be in your movie, whatever.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll come by next week.”

  I DIDN’T KNOW HER NAME, and I hadn’t told her where I lived, and I figured I’d never see her again. But there she was the following Monday, at my door.

  “I’m Sophie,” she said, and sat down on my bed without asking.

  She kicked off her sneakers—her feet underneath were sockless, long and thin and graceful. She smelled good, like the dark valleys back home, cool even in the summer and full of ferns.

  “We start shooting in three weeks,” she said. “I need to raise a little more money, but I already know where I’m going to get it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I started to take her a little more seriously. My friends with their shows and websites rarely talked about raising money.

  “You’re going to star, so you need to be there pretty much every day.”

  “Hold on,” I said. Over the weekend Barber had told me that we needed to have an open relationship, because he and the bass player of his band, a tall blond girl named Victoria, needed to have sex.

  “It’s not even about the physical,” he said. “She’s just such an amazing artist.”

  I didn’t care that much about the open relationship—I hadn’t really been aware we were in a relationship at all. But I was jealous that he was so impressed with her; after my story I’d quickly gone back to being unimpressive.

  “I’m not an actress,” I told Sophie. “I can’t star in a movie.”

  She waved her hand in the air like she was swatting away a fly.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re the one I want.”

  She was staring at me. She reminded me of the boys I liked in high school, the pretty, intense boys with their fake swagger, their soft mouths. They wrote bad songs and sang them well, and their girlfriends talked lovingly about how fucked up they were, how they should’ve been born in another place, another time. They always had girlfriends; those had never been the boys who liked me.

  “What’s the movie about?” I asked.

  “It’s about your story,” she said.

  I was flattered, but I was worried again—I figured no real director makes a movie after hearing a ten-minute lie from someone she’s never met. And practically speaking, that meant she probably didn’t even have a script yet. Maybe this was all a joke, a way to fuck with me by making me think I was important.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “That’s not how people make movies.”

  She shrugged. “It’s how I do,” she said. “Movies are how I get to know people.”

  I laughed; she sounded so cocky. “How’s that working?” I asked.

  “Pretty well so far.”

  “For you or the people in the movies?” I asked.

  “Both,” she said.

  After that she came over every day so we could work on the script. Always my place, never hers—I don’t even know where she lived that year. She always sat close to me on my bed, but I wanted her closer. I wasn’t even sure if it was sexual at first—I just wanted to feel her sleek hair, her narrow bones. Her body gave off so much heat, like a field mouse, an animal that has to survive in the wild. I wanted to know what she looked like under her boys’ clothes—I imagined something neither boy nor girl, something I’d never seen before.

  On the third night we worked together she asked for the real story of what happened to me back home. The room seemed too small all of a sudden, and I made us go for a walk. It was summer, after midnight, warm as a bath. Williamsburg was still ugly then—as I talked, stray cats skulked in the gutters, all bullet heads and scrawny shoulders. I felt so far away from home.

  After I finished, we didn’t talk for a while. My chest felt hollow. We looped back, and when we got near the house I felt Sophie staring at me. I didn’t meet her eyes. I thought maybe I’d call Barber—telling the story made me lonely, and I wanted someone in my bed. But Sophie stopped outside the door, her hand on my arm. She made a face I’d never seen before—very serious, but with tenderness fighting through, like it almost hurt to show it. Like a knight from an old movie, I thought later, a hero.

  “I want you to know something,” she said.

  “What?” I wasn’t sure there was anything she could say to make me feel less los
t.

  “I would never do that to you,” she said. “I would never do anything you didn’t want me to do.”

  I wanted to laugh at first. Who was she to assume she’d get that opportunity? She didn’t even know if I liked girls—I didn’t even know. And even if I did, what was this little mouse going to do to me, when I had four inches and forty pounds on her? Then she took hold of my right wrist. Her hands were strong and she had me fixed with her giant eyes, and I thought maybe she could hurt me after all. I took a step toward her.

  It didn’t matter much that I’d never been with a woman before. Her body was so different from mine—her sharp hip bones, her boy’s ass, her breasts you could cover with tablespoons. She fucked me like a man too—not like the boys I’d been with, but like the men I’d meet later on, who’d learned to read a woman’s body and knew without asking that I wanted them to hold me down. She always knew how far to go and when to kiss me on the forehead or loosen her grip on my wrists so I didn’t get too scared. Every now and then something would surprise me—how delicate she looked when she was sleeping, how when she showered and put on deodorant, she smelled just like me. And I knew my mom would cry if she found out and say it was my dad’s fault for leaving us alone. But once I started spending all my time with Sophie, I didn’t think about anything but us. That summer she was a hot wind I blew through the city on.

  For a while after we got together, the movie seemed both real and not real. We talked about it all the time, and I helped Sophie with the screenplay. She submitted it for grants and fellowships—she was businesslike and organized and already knew what to do. I learned she was twenty-three, older than I was, that she’d already made a short film called Daniel and spent a year in a big-deal filmmaking program, that she knew dozens of people who worked on real movies and shows. I was always asking her to let me see Daniel, and she said she would, but somehow it never happened. All I knew about it was that it was about a boy she went to college with—which made me curious and jealous—and that she thought it had a lot of technical problems.

  “This one will be better,” she said. “I know how to make a movie now.”

  I liked this side of her, that talked about a complicated thing like it was easy and asked people for thousands of dollars like she knew they would say yes. And at the same time, I never thought we’d really make the movie. I thought we’d be working on it forever, the two of us, a project to keep us close, and all the other things that I now know make up a film seemed so strange and far away that I figured they’d never actually arrive.

  And then it was November and Sophie got a grant. It wasn’t quite enough to make the movie, but it was enough to start, and suddenly she was scouting out locations, calling grips she knew, and teaching me what the word “grip” meant. I started to get scared then. I’d made the whole story of the movie from something terrible, and I was worried I’d be punished somehow. Everybody in my family believed in ghosts, and my grandma said it wasn’t just bad people who turned into them, it was bad deeds too. I was worried I’d made Bean’s bad deed grow.

  Sophie said the world didn’t work that way. And she said even if it did, we should be punished if we didn’t make the movie, because we’d be depriving something great of the chance to exist. She never doubted herself in those days. She was more sure about everything she said than I’d ever been about anything. Eventually I got her to change my character’s name at least—I picked Marianne because I’d always thought it was perfect, plain but a little bit classy too. I told myself that made the movie just based on me, not really about me, and that made me feel better, for a while.

  I was still working at the bar then, and Sophie did all the casting without me. So I didn’t meet the guy she picked for Bean until our first day of shooting. He hadn’t come to the read-through—Sophie’s assistant director, a stuck-up girl named Susan who I already didn’t like, read his part in a schoolteachery voice. But there he was the first day, at the community center that was supposed to be my high school, wearing a white T-shirt that looked like it had been dipped in pee.

  “This is Peter,” Sophie said.

  I stuck out my hand, but he just nodded at it. He didn’t look like Bean, but he looked like the scary, cocky Bean I’d made up for the story. He wasn’t tall, but his arms were ropy and his hands were big, a fighter’s hands. His face was ugly in that way a lot of girls like, hard angles and slitty eyes. He held his body like he didn’t trust people.

  In the first scene that day, he was supposed to ask me about Stacey. The community center had a hallway with olive drab lockers that looked a lot like a high school; we took down the signs for senior-citizen groups, and Sophie had Peter lean up against one of the lockers like he was waiting for me. I didn’t like how she reached out to move his left shoulder down. He didn’t like it either; he rolled it away from her and gave her a junkyard-dog look. She didn’t back down, though. Instead she said, “You’re not mad in this scene. You’re relaxed.”

  “This is what I look like when I’m relaxed,” he said.

  “Well that’s not what Bean looks like when he’s relaxed. I need you to lower your shoulder.”

  He looked at her for a hard minute, and when she didn’t break her gaze he did drop his shoulder, but slowly, like it was a favor. Then the camera was ready; Sophie sent a couple teenagers we’d paid ten dollars to be extras down the hallway first, and I followed, carrying a backpack. People always talk about what a “natural” actor I am, like I don’t actually have any skills and I just grew out of the ground like this, some prized tomato. But really I have to think carefully all the time, because I don’t have any formal training. You learn a lot of things in drama class that I had to teach myself. Especially back then I was thinking constantly, because I wanted so hard to show Sophie she wasn’t an idiot for picking me, and also because I wanted everyone to see how great we both were, how well we worked together. That day in the hallway I was thinking about how I was in high school, ornery and impatient but starved for the feeling of being liked, for the feeling of somebody seeking you out to spend time with, not because you were making them dinner or fixing their broken doll or telling them no, they didn’t mess their life up. I thought of how it was to walk down the hall and see the real Bean, before he hurt me, the pleasure of running into somebody I didn’t have to make any effort with, and how it might have been to see fake Bean, who was supposed to be cool and scary and who I would have wanted to impress, and I tried to mix those things in my face and my body and the way I walked. It felt like a long walk down that short hallway with cameras on me for the first time ever, and when I reached Peter, I was relieved.

  But his face looked funny, like he was lost or something, and instead of saying his line he growled, “What are you looking at?”

  “That’s good,” Sophie called out. “But your line is actually, ‘Come here a minute, Marianne.’”

  What about that was good? I wanted to ask.

  But Peter just rocked back on his heels and slipped his thumbs into his pockets and said, “I know. I was just messing with Allie.”

  I hated when people called me that, but I thought Peter was trying to get a rise out of me, and I didn’t want to let him. I knew something else was going on too. Peter looked nervous. He took his hand out of his pocket to scratch his nose. I wondered if he was on drugs. I walked up again, and this time he said the line right, and I said, “What’s up?”—which was my line—and then he just said, “Not much,” and I looked up at Sophie because that wasn’t his line either—he was supposed to say, “How well do you know Stacey Ashton?”

  “Okay,” Sophie said. “Take a minute and look over the script again.”

  The skinny kid who was our production assistant handed Peter a copy of the script, and then Peter did something weird. He flipped through the whole thing for a minute, not even stopping on our scene at all.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m ready.”

  We went through it again, and this time instead of bringing up
Stacey he said, “I have to talk to you about something.”

  Sophie was getting frustrated.

  “Just stick to the script,” she said. “You don’t need to ad-lib.”

  But I knew Peter wasn’t ad-libbing. I’d seen that lost, defensive face before, on Arnie Phelps, who finally got passed to seventh grade because he was too big for the grade-school chairs. Peter couldn’t read.

  He must’ve known I knew, because he dropped the script on the floor and mumbled, “Whatever, this is bullshit,” and walked down the hall and out the door.

  Sophie stood empty-handed in the hallway. She looked as lost as he was.

  “What just happened?” she asked me.

  “He can’t read,” I said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Sophie said. “He was reading the script.”

  “He wasn’t,” I said. “He was pretending. Where did you find him anyway?”

  “He was working at this bakery I go to,” she said. “I liked the way he looked. Why would somebody pretend to know how to read?”

  “He’s embarrassed,” I told her. “He doesn’t want anyone to find out.”

  “Why?” Sophie said. “Who cares if he can’t read?”

  I was quickly learning that even though Sophie seemed to understand me so well at times, there were things she didn’t understand at all. That day I didn’t feel like explaining how normal people cared what everyone else thought of them or how if you weren’t good at school you always felt nervous around people who were, like any minute you might have to prove you really were as smart as them.

  “He thinks you’ll think he’s stupid,” was all I said.

  Sophie had a habit when she was frustrated—she would rake her fingers through her hair and pull it back hard from her face. It made her look like a hawk, diving.

  “It’s okay,” she said, more to herself than to the rest of us, who were gathered around looking confused.