What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha

Author:Christopher Beha [Beha, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781935639312
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2012-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

7

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.

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