What Happened to Sophie Wilder (15 page)

“Are you ever here when you say you are during the day?”

She hadn't told him anything yet, but he knew enough to be angry. Things were already out of her control.

“Of course I'm here. Where would I be?”

Then she saw her notebook in his hand, being waved like a weapon.

“With him.”

“None of that came from him,” she said. “I made all that up.”

She knew this wouldn't help.

“So you were writing a story about it?”

“I don't know,” she admitted. “I don't think so. I don't think I was really going to show it to anyone. This was just my way of making sense of things. You have to trust me.”

“Then where were you today?”

Now she swept into action, sharing with him their new burden, which she'd carried all these blocks uptown.

“I got a call from the hospital, and I didn't have any choice. He's very sick. He can't live on his own anymore.
What he did to you was terrible, maybe unforgivable. But you don't have to forgive him to help him. We're the only family he has, and he needs us very badly. So I told the doctors we would take care of him. He only has a few weeks to live, I think. And I know you'll feel better for having done this. Although you won't really have to
do
anything. You just need to let me do it.”

She continued on like this, not sure where the words were coming from. None of it bore any relation to the measured speech she'd prepared on her walk uptown. That script had been lost. Finally, she stopped and waited for something to register on Tom's blank face.

“You were with him today?”

He was no longer angry. He seemed confused, almost deflated.

“You never answer the phone,” he said. “You're not here when you say you'll be.”

As he spoke, it came to her.

“Why did you go through my notebook? You've never done that before in all these years.”

He looked at it in his hands as if unsure how it had arrived there. Then he set it down on her desk like something fragile.

“I thought you'd started seeing someone.”

She almost laughed in relief. It would all be so simple to clear up.

“Oh, Tom. But that's silly. I would never.”

“It's not silly,” he said. “People do it all the time.”

How badly they had misunderstood each other, perhaps from the very beginning.

 

She was a summer at the firm. In a few more weeks she'd be returning to Charlottesville to finish law school. He wasn't
sure that they would be together when she came back to New York in the spring, but she'd made him realize that he needed to live on his own for a while.

“I guess I've never really done that,” he said, as if Sophie had deprived him of the chance.

“All right,” Sophie said.

“All right?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I thought you might raise your voice for once.”

“Fuck you.” She said it quietly. Not out of spite—it was just the way she talked.

A bag had been packed. How far in advance this had been done was not disclosed. Tom didn't say he was going to stay with the girl, but he didn't say otherwise. He might already have had an apartment somewhere.

“You owe me more than just walking out like this,” Sophie said, though she wasn't sure he owed her anything. Anyway she didn't want him to stay and explain himself. If he was going, she wanted him to leave. There would be time for endless talk if talk was deemed necessary. All of that could come later. She had walked a long way, and she was exhausted now.

When she looked him over, duffel bag in hand, standing proud and afraid like a child, a great surprising store of love and goodwill and pity took over her heart. She thought of him waiting all day with this news in his gut, wondering where she was.

After he was gone, she lit the rest of the candles, turning the kitchen counter into an altar. Sister Dymphna, the nun who ran the classes for initiates, had said that God was like electricity. We couldn't see Him, most of us couldn't understand Him, but we knew we needed Him and we knew—indirectly, from His works—that He was always there.

When the urge for a cigarette came, she walked instinctively out on the deck, though now there was nothing stopping her from smoking inside. The only lights she saw below were from the cars. Sophie imagined living according to the rhythms of natural light. When the sun set, the day was done. Such a time seemed very far away. She looked up, expecting to see the usual empty New York sky. Instead she saw stars, and she thought of home. She thought of the Old Manse. The heavens were full of light, and seeing it she was herself illuminated by a shiver of dumb wonder.

THE NEXT MORNING
The Third Man
was back on the screen, and Max was back on the couch. Beside the overfilled ashtray on the table in front of him sat a cocktail glass whose contents might have been Max's breakfast or left over from the night before.

“You're making progress,” I said.

“Progress is a self-serving bourgeois myth.”

We were quiet then, watching Harry Lime run through the Viennese sewers.

“The cuckoo clock,” I said eventually.

“The cuckoo clock,” Max agreed.

Sophie had always been an early riser, and she'd gone to bed hours before we had, but the morning was mostly over before she came down. She still looked tired, standing beside the couch, smoking one of Max's cigarettes and reconciling herself to the new day.

“Hungry?” she asked me eventually.

We left Max with his movie and walked together to a diner on Waverly, where Sophie slumped across from me
in the booth. Some unraveling had taken place since her arrival, or else she had all along been unraveled and I was only gradually recognizing it.

“I'm not sure I'm cut out for this lifestyle of yours,” she said.

“Me neither,” I told her. “No one is, really.”

When we'd finished our lunch, Sophie led us west on Waverly toward Christopher, away from the house.

“You don't mind?” she asked. “I don't want to keep you from your writing.”

She seemed to know well enough that she wasn't keeping me from anything. I hadn't done any work on the follow-up in weeks. It was tough to say what I'd been doing with my time before Sophie's arrival. I didn't even take these long walks anymore. Everything I passed on the street conspired to make my life inconsequential. Whatever reinvigorating force I needed couldn't be found there. Whenever I joked with Max about some bit of pop culture detritus that he had addressed with professional seriousness in the pages of his magazine, he quoted Schiller:
A man must be a good citizen of his age, as well as of his country.
I wasn't much of a citizen of either. In fact, it had become difficult even to step outside without a high-grade case of the late-capitalist heebie-jeebies. But as I turned up Seventh Avenue with Sophie, I didn't feel so ill-suited to the world.

“This is where I was when the lights went out,” she said at Twelfth Street.

“At the hospital?”

“Getting Crane.”

The blackout had happened only a few months before. I hadn't really placed Crane's story in time and it unsettled me to feel it creeping up on us. Sophie described that day as we continued uptown from St. Vincent's. We were in
Chelsea before I realized that we were retracing the walk to her apartment. We crossed town along the bottom of Central Park, where the sidewalk was crowded with vendors, caricaturists, street-corner singers, and the tourists for whom they all existed.

This was near the neighborhood where I'd grown up, where my mother still lived. I'd known that Sophie was living there, that she'd been going to the church my family had once attended. But I wasn't sure exactly where her apartment was, so I didn't know how far from it we were when I spotted Tom. He was half a block away and heading toward us. I hadn't seen him for years, and to my eyes he had grown fat and satisfied. He had his arm around a small, smiling blonde, the kind of cute New Hampton girl he should have been with all along. If this was the girl, she would have gone back to law school by then, which meant that she had come up to visit him. Otherwise Tom was already on to someone else, exercising his new freedom.

I noticed him before Sophie did, and I had time to say something or gracefully guide us across the street. But I did nothing. I wanted Tom to see us together. I liked the symmetry of the four of us coming face to face. It put me in the same category as this girl who'd broken up their marriage. And I thought it might be good for Sophie to have me there when she encountered Tom, as she would have to eventually.

The girl looked up at us, and she knew. Somehow, through a whispered word or a stiffening of her body, she communicated the knowledge to Tom, who also looked up the block. Only Sophie remained unaware of what was coming.

“Tom,” I said quietly when they were about ten feet away, as much warning Sophie as greeting him.

“Charlie Blakeman,” Tom said suspiciously, as though I were an old friend whose sudden appearance with his estranged wife constituted a betrayal. I was reminded how little I actually knew Tom. We'd spoken only a few times in four years of college together, and after that he was just the boyfriend, and then the husband, of the girl I loved. I'd known nothing before that week of the details of his life, the circumstances of his childhood. Now that I did, I wasn't sure what to do with these facts. Nothing about his appearance had ever seemed informed by tragedy. I felt something I hadn't felt even after first discovering that Sophie had chosen him: I hated Tom. It was a relief to see that he and Sophie couldn't even look at each other.

“What brings you to this neighborhood?” he asked, as though the answer weren't standing next to me.

“Just on a walk,” I said. “This may be the last good walking day we'll get for a while.”

“You never know,” Tom answered. “Some things hang around longer than we expect.”

We all waited for him to introduce the girl. When he didn't, she offered her hand to me and said, “I'm Willa.”

“I'm Charlie. I went to college with Tom.”

She turned to Sophie, who had been watching all this without a word but now extended her hand and smiled.

“I'm Sophie,” she said. “I'm your boyfriend's wife.”

“We have to run,” Tom said then, still addressing only me. “I'm sorry to be rude, but we're in a rush.”

Then they were gone. The whole thing had taken only a moment. I waited to see what Sophie would make of this encounter.

“After he left,” she said, “I went out on the deck and looked up at the stars. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen them.”

“Me neither.”

“It just happened, though. The disappearance of the stars, I mean. Not in our lifetime, maybe, but within a few generations. We don't think that much about it, but we're historically unprecedented. Standing out there, I imagined that the whole world was lit up like a city, so that no one ever saw the stars. It's going to happen eventually. What will people make of us then, and all our talk about the heavens? Songs about constellations. Stargazing poetry.”

I felt obliged to play along.

“‘How countlessly they congregate,'” I said. “‘O'er our tumultuous snow.'”

“‘His heart was darker than the starless night,'” Sophie said. “What will that mean once every night is starless? They'll think we all suffered some mass delusion.”

“Or else they'll know we saw something they can't see anymore.”

“Even worse.”

Predictably, Max and I had used the blackout as an occasion for a party. We'd gone to Gerhard's roof and looked out at the darkened city. But I didn't remember anyone looking up at the stars or thinking anything about them.

“Maybe they won't be bothered by it,” I said. “They'll get the convenience of cities, the survival of mankind. That will be worth the disappearance.”

“How will they know it was worth it, if they've never seen the stars? How could they measure their loss beneath an empty sky?”

I didn't know how to answer this.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“After you stepped back inside and forgot about the stars.”

“I went downtown to save Crane's soul.”

 

It started to rain before we arrived at Sophie's building. Not a clear-skied summer rain, but heavy from charcoal clouds. The wind picked up, knocking over a trash can on the corner, spilling paper and coffee cups into the gutter. I hailed a cab and we took it back to Gerhard's. We were both soaking wet, and Sophie's hair, longer than I had ever seen it, was pressed against her face.

“I should go home,” she said. “I've imposed on you and Max long enough.”

We both knew that her presence was the opposite of an imposition.

“Some visitors stay for months,” I said.

“Well, I'm not that sort.”

“You haven't finished your story,” I said.

“I've told you enough.”

The cab pulled up outside Gerhard's, and I paid the driver. Sophie pulled me close and pressed her wet face to mine. I didn't understand what was happening. I stepped from the cab and waited for her to follow me out. Then the door closed, and she was gone. I hadn't heard her say anything to the driver, and I didn't know where he was taking her. I was too surprised to do anything but stand in the rain, watching her go.