The Life and Death of Sophie Stark Read online

  “It’s fine. We’ll just explain the story to him and let him ad-lib it.”

  She waved at the production assistant. “Chris, come here, we’ll make some notes. Allison, you want to go out there and get Peter?”

  I didn’t. I didn’t like Peter, and I didn’t like that Sophie did. I didn’t like that she liked the look of him, all skinny and hard everywhere that I was soft. We hadn’t talked much about men but I knew she’d been with them, and I thought maybe what she liked in them was the opposite of everything about me. I was worried that one day she’d be with a man and tell him I was disgusting—my big ass, the way I submitted to her without question. I loved her in that headlong way that makes people jealous and anxious and greedy.

  But loving her also meant I loved it when she was strong and in charge, when she knew what she wanted and she took it, even from me. And she wanted Peter to be in our movie.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Peter was outside, leaning against the dirty wall of the community center, smoking a cigarette. Across the street was a park where the grass was dead for the winter, and some starlings were pecking at it. He was watching them.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He jumped a little bit, and I felt good that I could startle him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I came to tell you that you don’t have to read off the script,” I said. “You can just ad-lib from now on. Sophie says it’ll be fine.”

  He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and ground it out with his shoe. “No,” he said. “I’m done with this shit. I told her I wasn’t an actor.”

  There was a wooden bench pushed up against the wall near where he was standing, and I sat down on it. I wanted to show that I wasn’t afraid of him.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t know you. I don’t know if you can act or what. But Sophie wants you to be in the movie, and she knows what she’s doing.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “She’s going to be a big deal someday,” I added.

  I hadn’t thought about this before I said it, but I realized it was true. Right then I imagined the day I would be talking about Sophie in the past tense, when people would ask me about her. I hoped I’d say, That was the beginning of our life together. But Peter didn’t ask anything. He ran a hand through his oily hair. That’s when I saw the tattoo, black-green on his white inner arm. It was an amateur job—a tiger with a head way bigger than its body, and one leg all long and wiggly like a hairy snake. The edges were blurring—ten years and it’d just look like a bruise.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked him.

  He looked at me then, and his mean mouth had gone a little bit soft, and I realized he wasn’t much older than I was, probably twenty-five. He didn’t answer, but he seemed like he wanted to, kind of.

  “Prison?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Juvie.”

  “What did you do?”

  He shrugged again.

  “My dad was in prison,” I told him.

  Peter lit another cigarette.

  “What’d he do?” he asked.

  I used to make up stories about my dad, like he was a bank robber or a gunrunner or a hit man. But I didn’t think Peter would like those stories, so I told him the dumbest, saddest one of all, which was the truth.

  “He stole a car outside of Richmond and he was going to take it home to my mom and me to surprise us. But then he got lost and he pulled in to a gas station for directions, and the gas station was across from a police station, and the cops recognized the car and arrested him.”

  Peter shook his head. “Your dad was a dumb-ass.”

  My mom used to say this about him while he was away, from when I was three to when I was seven. When he came back, though, she cried and wrapped her legs around him, and they tried to make it work for a while and even had one of my sisters. But he was just missing the thing that lets people get by in the world, and he was always getting in trouble for no reason, getting thrown out of McDonald’s for trying to smoke or fired from jobs for skipping three days just because he felt like it. He wasn’t evil or even all that stupid; he was just really, really bad at following rules, and eventually he left us and moved out to the desert, where he said there were no rules at all. I didn’t tell Peter this, though. I just said, “Yeah.” I didn’t want him to think he’d riled me.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Some older kids were selling weed and I was the lookout, that’s all.”

  “How long were you away?” I asked him.

  “Well once I was in there I kept getting in trouble for other stuff. Fighting. So six months and then another six, and then I got transferred and then two years. So three years.”

  “That’s a long time,” I said, and then I took a little risk. “I bet you missed a lot of school.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “So?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Where I grew up the schools were shit, and a lot of kids didn’t go anyway. I knew a lot of people who couldn’t read.”

  “Don’t fucking condescend to me,” he said in a low hot rage-whisper. “I know she thinks I’m a fucking retard and I don’t need you to explain it to me.”

  His face went all tense the way boys’ faces get when they’re trying not to cry. I realized then that even if he didn’t care much about acting, he cared about impressing Sophie. I wondered if all the cast and crew were people like us, people who loved Sophie a little or a lot and were willing to do whatever she said. It made me jealous—I wanted to be the only one. But it also made me feel warm toward him; we were in the same boat.

  “Sophie didn’t even know you couldn’t read. She thought you were just being a jerk, and she didn’t care. If she wanted trained Shakespearean actors, she could’ve gotten them. She wanted us. And that should make you feel good.”

  “Why do you care about this so much?” Peter asked. “It’s not like you like me.”

  “I love her,” I said, “and I want to make her happy.”

  This was true, but there was something else I didn’t say—I could tell people were going to start coming between me and Sophie, and if I could take charge of Peter, maybe I could take charge of the next one too. And if I was in charge, maybe they wouldn’t make it as far in and it wouldn’t hurt as much.

  Peter give me a little smirk then, held up two fingers in front of his face, flicked his tongue.

  “So you guys are, like, lezzies?” he asked.

  I almost liked him then; he looked like a twelve-year-old kid.

  “Yeah,” I said, bugging my eyes out, making fun of him, “we do this.” And I flicked my tongue between my two fingers too.

  He laughed. Then he shook two cigarettes out of his pack and handed me one without asking. I’ve never been a big smoker, but I had a cigarette with him and watched the starlings, and then we both went inside.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS were exciting ones. We were constantly behind schedule, and the production assistant quit, and the nineteen-year-old grip dropped one of the lights and sprayed broken glass all over the floor, and the little trust-fund girl who was playing Stacey cut her foot and cried and talked about a lawsuit, but Sophie just powered through all that with this kind of scary joy. She was barely eating and her collarbones stuck way out and her eyes were huge. One night she yanked my hair and snarled and bit me on the thigh, and I wore a short skirt the next day so everyone could see the bruise.

  Because Peter was ad-libbing we all ended up doing it a little, and we kind of got into a rhythm with each other, especially Peter and me. Hating each other was a joke we kept pushing further and further. Once during a take of the scene where Bean tells Marianne he knows how to snap someone’s neck, we just busted up laughing for no reason, and Sophie came charging over yelling at us, asking what was so funny. We couldn’t explain. I could tell she was a little jealous, and I didn’t mind. Peter started to flirt with me—he asked me did I ever date guys, and did girls have special tricks, and could they ever teach them to a man or w
ere there things only a woman could ever do—and I didn’t mind that either. I still didn’t think Peter was good-looking, but there was something raunchy and sneaky about him that I liked. He always smelled like sweat, and I liked that too.

  The day we were supposed to shoot the big scene at the restaurant was the first day of February. Our version didn’t end the way my story had; instead of letting him leave, I was going to shove a knife into Bean’s belly. We were in the parking lot behind a Turkish restaurant in Bay Ridge whose owner loved movies. Inside we made it bright and cheesy-looking with checkered tablecloths and menus we printed out at the DP’s mom’s house, but the parking lot was still dirty and lonely, a sad place to end up. I took my mark, my back against the faded red door. Peter stood in front of me. The makeup artist, who was the nineteen-year-old grip’s big sister, had given him a close shave, and in his polo shirt and khakis and leather shoes he looked like a stranger. The wedding ring we borrowed from the other grip fit like it was his.

  “You ready?” I asked him, smiling, trying to get comfortable.

  He nodded, but he was looking past my shoulder at the beat-up door. Sophie counted down.

  “You know why it didn’t bother me, running into you today?” he asked.

  His voice was different—he sounded slick, polite almost. For the first time, I realized he was good at this, at being someone else.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I came here on purpose,” he said. “Just to see you.”

  Then he moved close to me, the way he’d been in the run-through, so close I could smell him and feel the heat coming off his chest. And then he came closer. He was fully against me, pressing on me with all his weight. I looked at him to get him to ease up, but his eyes were flat. I looked at Sophie but she was staring over the DP’s shoulder at the picture of us in the viewfinder. Peter pressed harder, and I could feel his cock against my belly, through those stupid khaki pants, and I wanted to scream so he would stop, but the take would be ruined and everyone would know how weak I was, how someone could scare me just by pretending.

  “Why would you come to see me?” I asked him, and people who love the movie have told me this is their favorite part, the fear and anger in my voice feel so real, so authentic. I hate it when people say that.

  “Because I want you to know that I know how to find you. Wherever you go, I’ll always be there.”

  And then he grabbed my chin and put his mouth on my mouth.

  People who have been raped talk about flashbacks, and I believe them. But that’s not what I felt while Peter was holding me against the door and mashing his lips against mine. What I felt was pure shame. I’d gone to such trouble to tell a good story about my life, a story that was exciting and didn’t make me look bad, and now the cast and crew and anyone who saw the movie would see the other story anyway. They would see me letting Peter do something I didn’t want; they would see me fearful and helpless and struggling. And even though it was just a movie, even though I was supposed to be Marianne and he was supposed to be Bean, Peter was taking my dignity away, and everybody knew it.

  It went on for a long time before I remembered I could stop it, and I felt even worse that I’d forgotten. I took the retractable knife from my apron pocket and jabbed him in the ribs, hard enough to bruise. He fell back, crushing the blood packets in his shirt; the red paint bloomed from his body, and I wished it was real. After the cameras stopped rolling, he asked me if I was okay, but I ignored him. I left the set and walked down the street in the cold to a coffee shop. I ordered a mocha, which I’ve always hated, and I sat at the table staring at it. After a while Sophie came in. She sat down across from me and put her hand over mine on the table, but I pulled away.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  I hated girls who pretended nothing was wrong when they were obviously mad, but if Sophie actually didn’t understand why I was upset, I didn’t think she deserved an explanation.

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  I shrugged. The whipped cream on top of the mocha was melting.

  “Are you upset about how Peter played the scene?”

  She said it slowly, in that way she had of puzzling out things that would’ve been obvious to any normal human, and this time it made me furious.

  “You think?” I asked. “You think I might not like how he held me down and kissed me without any warning, in front of everyone? You think I might be a little upset about that?”

  I realized then that I’d never really yelled at her before. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Maybe she’d break up with me. Maybe she’d cry. I was scared, but I was excited too, like I’d climbed up to a high place and I was looking down. But she didn’t cry, and she didn’t yell back. She just looked at me for a minute, and then she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was going to do that. I should’ve stopped him.”

  This was also the first time she’d ever apologized to me. The words sounded weird coming out of her mouth, like a foreign language, but hearing them made my heart crack open a little bit. I felt like I was seeing a part of her I’d never seen before, a part that wasn’t totally sure she was right all the time, a part that could admit she’d fucked up. And seeing that made me love her more than I had the whole time we’d been working on the movie, when she’d seemed so perfect and competent and impenetrable.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I’m sorry anyway,” she said. “I wish I could’ve protected you.”

  This time I reached out and took her hand. “It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

  We still had a few scenes to shoot, and they went easily. Sophie promised to edit the kiss out of the final cut, and I felt closer to her than ever. She’d moved into my room at the house with Irina by then, and we started talking about what we’d do when the movie was finished, how we’d enter it in festivals where everyone would see how great it was. We talked about winning at Cannes, how we’d go up together to accept the award. We talked about how I’d look in my red-carpet dress.

  I didn’t see Peter again until after the shoot was over. The last day had been odds and ends in what was supposed to be Burnsville, footage of me sitting on bleachers, waiting for the bus. It made me laugh, how little it was like home—the cameras in my face, the bright light, the city poking out through the smog on the horizon. Later I’d see the movie and shake for days at how real it looked, and forever after the fake memory would lie on top of the real one in my head, covering it over. But that day the air was sweet with the beginning of spring, and I was happy, and Peter came to the house to see me.

  I was in our room, drinking wine from a jar and trying to hang the pretty Indian cloth I’d just bought for curtains. Sophie was in the editing room, and I’d just started to wonder when she’d be home. These days I wanted her to spend all her time with me, lazy in our bed, like I imagined she’d do if I were pregnant. But it was more like she was having the baby, and she had to work hard every day to make sure it got born right.

  One of our housemates must have let Peter in. I heard someone on the stairs and I ran to the door with my face all shining, ready for Sophie, and when I saw Peter I turned away. I was embarrassed to let him see me so happy, like I was waiting for him.

  “Hi Allison,” he said.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  My mother always said good manners were for people who deserved them. This attitude used to get her in a lot of trouble, but it was one of the few things I ever learned from her that I liked.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said.

  “Well I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  It wasn’t true. Really I wanted to ask him why, why he thought he could act that way to me, just shove himself against me without warning when we’d already gone over the scene. I was worried there was something about me, something that said, Do what you want with this one, some kind of smell on my sk
in. That’s why when Peter said again that he wanted to talk to me and asked if he could come in, I moved aside and let him sit at the edge of the bed. I stayed standing, holding my wine, looking down at him like that would give me the advantage somehow.

  “First,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “A little late,” I said.

  He went on. “I’m sorry because I knew you’d be scared when I kissed you, and I did it anyway.”

  He was talking fast and flat, like he’d written the speech out beforehand, and he wasn’t meeting my eyes. I didn’t want to give him any more power than he already had; I didn’t want him to know how much he’d rattled me.

  “I wasn’t scared,” I said. “It was just a shitty thing to do, that’s all.”

  He looked up at me then. “I knew it would scare you,” he said, “because Sophie told me it would.”

  Sometimes when something bad is about to happen, I get this rushing feeling, almost like joy. Right then I wanted to jump in the air or throw my jar of wine across the room. Instead I sat down on the bed next to Peter.

  “What did she tell you?” I asked.

  He stared at the floor. I was embarrassed about the T-shirts and panties and wine corks that lay there, all the evidence of the months we’d been fucking and drinking and sleeping and loving in that room, but it was too late to clean anything up.

  “She said she didn’t like the way things were going. She wanted the last scene to be different.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What didn’t she like?”

  He paused. I could tell he was choosing his words and that he wasn’t very good at it.

  “It wasn’t that she didn’t like your performance. She liked it. It’s just, she wanted something more intense for the end.”

  I could feel acid rising up my throat. Ever since the beginning, Sophie’d had only good things to say about my acting. She was always talking about how we were going to make so many more movies together. I wanted to kick Peter out, tell him he had no idea what he was talking about, but I also wanted to hear the rest of the story.