Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  But his imagination balked at what would happen then.

  * * *

  “Valerie.” Adam’s voice was crisp and businesslike as he spoke into his office phone the next morning. He was closely shaven, immaculately dressed, keen-eyed: a man who was at last taking his destiny into his own hands. “She knows. Yes. Yes, last night.”

  Waves of joy rippled through Valerie. She was in a taxi on her way to the airport, having wound up the last details of the deal over breakfast. She threw back her head and laughed with sheer relief. Out the sunroof the tops of trees were zipping past, their leaves sparkling in the dappled sunlight. Gazing up at them, she vowed to remember, all her life long, the perfection and joy of that moment.

  “I’ll see you tonight, darling,” Adam said. “We’ll have dinner. Call me when you get in.”

  “Adam, wait!” She needed to prolong her happiness. “You’re a perfect man. How could I ever have doubted you?”

  “Just see to it you never do again.” God, it felt good saying that!

  Valerie introduced a note of concern into her voice. “How did she take it? What did she say?”

  Adam frowned and fiddled with a pencil on his desk, half expecting James to appear at the door in time to witness this latest awkward exchange. The doorway was empty, but James would still serve. “I can’t talk now. James is here pestering me. We’ll talk this evening. Yes… Yes, me too, darling. Yes, all right. Good-bye.” Adam hung up, drummed his fingers for a moment, then called his secretary. “Odette, has my wife rung this morning?… I see. Well, put her straight through, will you, when she does.… Thank you.” There shouldn’t be long to wait. Sophie would doubtless telephone when she… ah… found the… He cleared his throat and got on with his day’s work as best he could.

  * * *

  Humming, Sophie whipped into the laundry room with the basket of clean, crumpled shirts in her arms. She found that the dullness of ironing was compensated for, to a degree, by the hot, clean smell of it and the satisfying steamy hiss of the iron, things she had first experienced from the low angle of childhood, gazing up at her mother while she ironed, occasionally sighing and brushing a strand of hair out of her flushed face with the back of her hand. A strong and capable woman she had seemed then, a household goddess. Her young daughter noted her perpetual busyness and fatigue with approval, savoring the grown-up importance of it.

  Sophie shook out the first shirt and got started on it, doing only a passable job. Milagros, on the other hand, ironed beautifully, and, what’s more, she believed in ironing. It seemed to be a moral tenet of her native Spain: Good ironing equaled clean living. (Sophie pondered this. Was that because good women ironed, or was it the act of ironing that imparted goodness to women?) In the beginning she had struggled to curb Milagros’s ironing, for Milagros believed that everything needed ironing, including bath towels and underwear. “It preserves the fabric,” she insisted. It was not unusual in the early days for Sophie to discover Milagros holed up in the laundry room, having raced through the other chores in order to do secret extra ironing. “If I don’t iron this, it will rot!” In the end Sophie gave in. Milagros could iron even the oven gloves if she wanted to (and she did), because you can’t give someone work to do without relinquishing some power as well, and after all, Milagros was kind to the boys, she cleaned so thoroughly that it felt like an accusation, and she made succulent chickpeas with spinach—so she could iron anything in sight.

  Milagros had come to work for the Deans when Hugo was born. With a one-year-old and a newborn to take care of, Sophie was glad to have someone come in to clean and leave supper on the stove. Her mother had suggested she get help with the boys, but that was the wrong way around to Sophie’s way of thinking; she’d rather take care of the children herself and have someone else wash the floor. Adam was also in favor of their raising the children themselves and not hiring others to do it. When Sophie was pregnant the first time, he had talked movingly about the importance of a heavy investment of the parents’ time and attention in a child’s vital early years, and Sophie agreed completely. She quit working as a freelance editor without regret in her eighth month of pregnancy, disillusioned with editing anyway—all frenzied deadlines and wrestling in solitude with other people’s verbal tangles—and feeling exhilarated by the much more important task ahead. Adam earned enough for them to live on; they would simply scale their life to his income, and Sophie could work again later on, maybe at something new, maybe with people instead of words. Alternative medicine interested her, and shiatsu in particular after she had tried it for recurrent headaches. The treatment had been so successful, not only curing her headaches but making her feel well inside and out, that she had considered becoming a practitioner herself, but Adam had discouraged her, the whole thing seeming “rather fey” to him and a waste of her education. She would go back to work at something eventually, but in the meantime she pored over piles of books on childbirth and babies and toddlers and discussed them with Adam in the evenings. He was as enthusiastic as she was in those days, when it was all still theoretical. Matthew was born, and then, startlingly, when he was only five months old and Sophie was still feeling her way, she got pregnant again. Well… so much the better. More diapers, more late-night feedings, more snapping up of tiny garments, more kneeling on the bathroom floor supporting grapefruit-sized heads with one hand while splashing warm water over gyrating limbs with the other. More toys and books and bibs, more walks with the double stroller, and more first smiles, first teeth, first steps and words. In those early years, making it through each day was a challenge that sapped all Sophie’s energy and resourcefulness. She kept her head down and worked. But as the boys got older, the pace relaxed and the stardust began to settle. She was able at last to look around herself, and when she did, she made an unsettling discovery: She was alone with the children. Adam had not followed her into this new phase of their adventure together. He was standing off on his own, eyeing them with a blend of wistfulness, boredom, and irritation; somehow or other he had gotten left behind. It was hard to say how it had happened. Of course, as eager future parents, snuggled in bed among their toppling towers of child-raising books, they hadn’t foreseen how much his work would interfere with his fathering. It had been unrealistic to imagine that their parenting would be of equal intensity and importance. Inevitably, if he was at work all day and she was at home, the bulk of the work—and the rewards—would fall to her. Her commitment to raising their children was continuous and real; his could only be occasional and academic. She told herself regularly that as the boys grew up, he would become more involved with them. In a few years, they would have more in common, share more activities, grow closer. She reassured herself of that once again as she finished ironing the last of his shirts, and if there was a hollowish ring to it, she resolutely ignored it, not in the mood today to deal again with that mocking inner voice. Good, the sun was coming out; she could do a bit of weeding after lunch and plant those cuttings before they wilted. Then vacuum downstairs and make some little treat for after school—banana bread, must use those overripe bananas. Then get their sports clothes ready for tomorrow.

  Mind buzzing, body taut, mood upbeat although slightly harassed, Sophie gave a pat to the last shirt, set down the iron, which heaved a steamy sigh of relief, switched it off, placed the shirt on top of the others in the basket, picked up the basket, nudged the light switch off with her elbow as she opened the door with her foot, leaned into the kitchen to yank two wilted dishcloths off the rail by the sink, flung them back into the dirty-clothes hamper, caught the basket as it slipped off her hip, hiked it up again, and switched on the teakettle as she passed, thinking that if she had just tea and a sandwich for lunch, she’d have time for a quick shower after the gardening—she could scrub the sink and fold the towels before she jumped in. But first she would put these shirts away. On her path through the living room, she scooped up some teddy bears—it was a rule of hers never to take a trip up or down the stairs without
carrying a full load—and her step was springy as she headed down the hall to the master bedroom, the laundry basket bouncing on her hip. As she passed the boys’ door, she tossed the bears into the toy box with perfect aim.

  It was nearly the last action she would perform as a happily married woman.

  * * *

  Agatha was sitting at home in her South End apartment, typing; she wrote a style column for a middlebrow women’s magazine. If she had had an audience, she would have affected to hunt and peck artistically, but as she was alone, she prosaically touch-typed. Of course, if she had had an audience, she wouldn’t have been in this room to begin with, as this room was something of a shameful secret. It looked as if the owner of a large junk shop had been forced by circumstance to move into much smaller premises—​furniture, boxes, and clutter defying description were stacked in dangerous tilting columns nearly reaching the ceiling, the only clear space being a narrow tunnel from door to desk. Birdcages, old bicycle wheels, baskets, antique dolls, an airplane propeller, and examples of nearly every other man-made object filled the room, remnants of Agatha’s last interior-decorating phase, when she’d had one of those horror vacui places where “fun” objects take up every inch of table, shelf, and floor space, as well as being nailed to the walls and suspended by wires from the ceiling. There might have been a window in Agatha’s study, but if so it was obscured by junk. The only light came from a large desk lamp with a thick gray base designed to look like an elephant’s leg, complete with painted-on semicircular toes—awfully “fun.”

  Agatha was working away by the light of her elephant’s leg, surrounded by teetering towers of clutter, her fingers flying unerringly over the keyboard as she thought of witty and insightful things to say about cheese boards (truly witty and insightful things; she was good at her job), when the phone began to ring in the next room. Her typing slowed until it stopped altogether, and then began the familiar struggle with the question of whether or not to answer the phone when she was working. In theory the answer was no, which was why there was no phone in her study. No, she was working, therefore she was not “at home,” it being neither here nor there that her office happened to be two steps from her living room instead of across town. Whoever it was could leave a message, just as people always did when they called the house of someone who was at work. Ah, but those words: “whoever it was”! The whole problem lay there. As a woman with no husband, no boyfriend, who was dating no one and wished she were—when she had arrived so late for her date the other night, he hadn’t been there, and his phone was turned off, so either he had left in a huff or he had never shown up in the first place—Agatha did not feel she could afford to leave her telephone unanswered. She heaved a theatrical sigh of annoyance meant to mask from imaginary viewers the silly, hopeful lurch of the heart that she always felt—she couldn’t help it—when the phone rang. (Is this where my love story begins? Is this the pivotal moment of my life? Will I tell the story in years to come when I’m cozily married? Well, I was sitting at my desk one day, and the phone rang. So I got up and answered it, and it was this weird guy…. All laugh, as they know full well that it turns out to be her husband, who’s sitting there with them, smiling self-consciously at the frequently heard tale.)

  Agatha opened the door and started across the living room blinking, her arms extended to feel her way because, in harsh contrast to the study, the living room was bright and bare, and to eyes accustomed to the dim light cast by the elephant leg, the first impression was of a featureless glare. Everything in the room was white, and the camouflage effect achieved was so successful that on first glance the room seemed to contain nothing at all. It was only as pupils narrowed to pinpricks that faint detail could be made out: One white shape could be seen to differ slightly in tone from the white of the wall behind it and eventually be identified as a sofa, and so on, until gradually several pieces of furniture could be distinguished in the room. Agatha clacked across the white floorboards in high-heeled pink bedroom slippers with puffs on the toes, a garish blaze of color in her lime-and-fuchsia bathrobe, groping her way toward the sound of the ringing until she thrust her hand into a white cube balanced nearly invisibly on a white stand and silenced the telephone within.

  “Yeah?” she said belligerently into the white receiver. “Whaddaya want?” An aggressive sound was better than a timid voice cracking with hope, forlorn but brave. (And it would make the story of how she had met her husband funnier, too, in the retelling.) She waited, though, with bated breath. She hadn’t looked at the caller ID to see who it was, because she was convinced that doing so could be unlucky. Might scare him away.

  “Nice phone manner you have.”

  Only Valerie. Agatha could breathe again. “I happen to be in the middle of a piece due half an hour ago. I’ll call you back. Bye.” She made no move, however, to hang up.

  “What are you writing about?” Valerie asked silkily. It was most unlike her to show any interest in Agatha’s work, and immediately Agatha’s suspicions were aroused. Valerie was up to something, she was sure, and indeed she was: spinning out the delicious moment before she would knock Agatha sideways with her news.

  “Cheese boards. Who wants to know?”

  “Oh, Agatha, you’re so defensive. Don’t you ever let up? Look, I have news that’s going to make your day.”

  “Oh, yeah?” In spite of herself, Agatha felt her hopes rising ridiculously. Was this the way it would all begin? With a call from Valerie? I’ve just met this guy who’s perfect for you, and he’s dying to meet you.

  “It’s going to be the best news you’ve heard in a long, long time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s left her. Adam’s marriage is over. Finito. He’s chosen me.”

  “Oh.” Too late Agatha remembered that Valerie was one of those people who present their personal good news as though it were cause for worldwide rejoicing.

  “I knew he’d do it,” Valerie purred. “I knew it. It’s me he loves. Happy for me?”

  “Well, yeah. Sure I am. I’m just so… stunned. When did all this happen?”

  “Last night. But he only told me five minutes ago. I wanted you to be the first to know. Oh, Agatha, isn’t it bliss? I mean, my love life, the whole question of my love life, that giant question mark in the sky, is resolved now for good. A happy ending! ‘She got her man.’ Credits roll.”

  And speaking of credit… “Now, you see?” Agatha said. “You see? You took a chance, you showed him you had some respect for yourself, and it paid off. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I suppose you’re going to say it’s all thanks to you.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Then thank you, Agatha. You’re a real pal, and I mean that. Come on, we’ve got some celebrating to do. I’m on my way home now.”

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “The boss said I could take the day off. He likes me. Get dolled up and meet me for a late lunch, okay? The champagne is going to flow!”

  “Okay. But first I have to finish my article.” Real pal that she was, Agatha felt genuinely glad that the question mark over her best friend’s love life had been replaced by a drawing of a happy face, but she also felt a queer dread in her stomach, wondering if this were the beginning of a slow, inevitable rift between them, with happily partnered Valerie drifting farther and farther away from the lonesome shoreline where Agatha stood, a solitary silhouette, her hair whipping in the wind, waiting for a ship that might never come in.

  * * *

  “Odette? Have there been any calls? My wife or… ?… I see.… Yes, I’ll be in my office.” It had occurred to Adam in the course of the day that the tactic of leaving photographs for Sophie to find might be considered by some to be rather… ah… He couldn’t find quite the right word. But after all, he’d had no alternative, what with the impossibility of inserting those four seconds into the flow of his home life, and anyway, it was more fa
ce-saving for Sophie this way. She was bound to be taken aback, and it seemed kinder to let her adjust to the new situation without any witnesses to her initial discomfiture. More respectful of her dignity. Adam’s intense frowning study of his desktop was interrupted by James, wiggling a squash racket at him from the door.

  “What do you say to a game after work, buddy?” He skipped forward and mimed smashing the ball with his racket.

  Adam shook his head. “No. Thank you.”

  “What’s wrong? Afraid I’ll whup you?”

  “What?” Adam glanced up, distracted. “No, no squash. Thanks.”

  “Look at him! He’s afraid of getting his English ass whupped!”

  “James. Please go away.”

  James stopped dancing around with the racket and looked at Adam in surprise. He lowered his voice to a confidential note. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything is fine.”

  “Yeah. Hey, Adam, if you ever want to have a beer after work and, you know, just talk about things or whatever… or just have a beer… I’d be glad to do that. You just say the word. I’d like you to know that I consider you a… a good person to have a beer with. So you just let me know, okay, buddy?”

  “Thank you, James,” Adam felt compelled to say.

  “It’s okay! What I’m here for!” With a wave he was gone, and Adam sat wondering if the day would ever come when he found himself crying in his beer and recounting the details of his personal life to James.