Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  * * *

  Adam was kneeling on the floor of his study, unpacking his books and returning them to their shelves in order both alphabetical and according to subject, dusting as he went with the aid of a soft rag he had finally found in a plastic bag under the sink (God forbid that he should call Sophie and ask her a simple question like where she kept the rags!), wiping first the empty shelves and then each book as he put it away, all shockingly filthy—what did they pay Milagros for? It was a disheartening—and yes, humiliating—task that he had put off doing for as long as he still clung to the dwindling hope that Sophie would return. Well, at least the boys were asleep, that much he could be thankful for; they wouldn’t be interrupting him with a thousand questions or running off with his books or, worse yet, “helping.” He had learned that any task involving the organization of a large number of small objects could not be performed in the presence of his children. Wiping his rag over a study of Greek temples, Adam thought ruefully of how this dreary unpacking compared to the carefree way he had flung these books into these same boxes only—what was it?—nine, ten, eleven days ago. Could that be right? Had his life changed so utterly in only eleven days?

  Other men left their families. Other men packed their bags and walked away. How was it that he, Adam Dean, found himself, eleven days after his supposed departure in his one great bid for freedom and happiness, a prisoner in suburbia, shackled to his children, on his knees, dusting with a soft cloth?

  And now Sophie had moved into an apartment of some kind. He couldn’t gather much from the boys’ garbled account except that they were enthusiastic about it. Fine. They would be spending the weekend there, which would give him a chance to catch up on some of the work that had been piling up since Sophie left and he could no longer work late at the office, because he had to be home with the boys. A nice, quiet weekend at home—oh, the bliss of having the boys gone; he could almost whimper with gratitude. But there was Valerie, of course. She might not think much of his working all weekend when they had hardly seen each other since Sophie left—so annoying, how “since Sophie left” had become his time reference for everything! They had managed lunch a few times, not particularly successfully. She was so… wrathful about Sophie’s departure. It was fatiguing. It was all very fatiguing. Feisty Valerie, his battle maiden. Interesting how the qualities that first attracted one in a lover could be the very ones that… Well, he loved her. That was the point. He loved her, and he had succeeded in making her the woman of his life, so he could take heart. The fact that he would be living in this house a bit longer than he had expected was neither here nor there. To persevere calmly—that was the key now.

  It was Sophie’s reaction that he couldn’t get over. So extreme! And in retrospect he couldn’t help finding something suspicious about the alacrity—there was no other word, “eagerness” possibly overstating the case—with which she had left. It was insulting. Almost as if she were jumping at any excuse to go. Taking advantage of him. Using him.

  Adam rose to his feet, dusted his hands off, and surveyed his work grimly. Then he stacked the empty boxes into a cut pile and carried them out on his way to hunt for the vacuum cleaner.

  * * *

  That evening Sophie did the brave thing and opted for the painting exhibition, forgoing the dark safety of the movie theater. But she found that a painting exhibition is in fact another good place to go when you’re alone and feeling shy, as the people there don’t notice each other, not because they’re engrossed in the paintings, which are beside the point, but because they’re all too busy showing off. Sophie weaved her way through the gallery, plastic cup of tepid white wine in hand, studying the crowd with interest. There were the usual beards, black clothes, and swinging earrings, but most interesting were the identical expressions on every face, of hunted self-importance, as though in dread of being spotted and hounded by the paparazzi. Each imagined that all eyes in the room were upon him, and since none of them looked at one another, pretending to be too busy or too deep in thought, no one was ever disabused of this. In such a self-conscious crowd, it was impossible to tell who the true star of the evening was, the painter himself. But that was nice, Sophie decided; that way the glory was shared out—thanks to their egotism and determined mutual disregard, they could all be stars for a night. As for the paintings… well, they were the usual huge gray canvases with black and brown slashes and the odd splotch of red.

  Agatha had guessed that no friend of Howard’s wife could paint his way out of a paper bag, but still the unrelieved banality of the work rankled, although not half so much as the fact that Valerie had backed out of coming at the last minute, claiming she had too much work. “Somebody’s ass is going to get canned, and it’s not going to be mine,” she had said, the traitor. So Agatha was left facing the possibility of encountering her ex-lover and his wife by herself, and it was exhausting, simultaneously scanning the crowd (without appearing to) for the once-beloved-now-dreaded shape of Howard, while taking care to look animated and carefree, in case he spotted her first, and getting enough wine down her throat to bolster herself against this eventuality. After a nerve-racking hour of this, it became evident that he wasn’t going to come after all, but by that time it was too late to relax, or to stay sober, and Agatha, ensconced by the drinks table in desultory conversation with a hawk-eyed gallery owner, reflected sourly that even after all this time Howard was still managing to ruin her life. Not in big ways anymore, to be sure, but in little ways.

  “Oh, sorry!” Sophie turned to apologize to the woman she had just bumped into and saw that she was a sort of Cleopatra look-alike, with jet-black hair that fell to her jaw and a severe wall of bangs cut high over her arching, plucked eyebrows, wearing heavy cat’s-eye makeup and a dress made of shiny bits of mosaic, like armor. On further consideration, what she looked like was not so much an ancient Egyptian as an extra in a sixties movie about ancient Egypt.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Agatha said, and then, seeing that the blond woman was about to refill her glass with warm chardonnay, she added, “Psst! Don’t drink that weasel pee! Over here!” From beneath the table, she lifted out a bottle of chilled champagne and filled both their glasses.

  “A secret supply,” Sophie said. “Thank you.”

  “You go to enough of these things, you learn the tricks. Cheers.” Agatha knocked her glass right back, and after a moment’s hesitation Sophie did the same. Agatha laughed and refilled their glasses.

  Behind them a pompous voice began to hold forth. “It is my opinion,” it said, loudly enough for others to hear, “that he was uniquely his own man.”

  Agatha raised her eyebrows gleefully at Sophie, who smiled back.

  “I can’t agree,” countered another voice. “But I do think that he lived very much in his own time—perhaps more so than any other artist of his time. Or ours, for that matter.” The men nodded gravely and lifted their drinks to pursed lips, while the two women subsided into giggles, Agatha supporting herself for a moment on Sophie’s arm. It was then that she spotted Howard and his wife weaving toward her through the crowd, his bald head glinting, her red lips parted in the toothy silent scream that was her party smile. Agatha ducked behind Sophie. “Oh, my God, hide me! Be my human shield!”

  “Who is it?”

  “My ex-lover and his wife!”

  “Does she know about you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Will she claw your eyes out?”

  “Worse! She’ll condescend!” Sophie turned toward the crowd and positioned herself in a wide stance with one hand on her hip, allowing Agatha maximum room to crouch behind her and pivot her slowly for protection as the couple passed. When they had gone Agatha straightened up and blew out a sigh. “She’s still dining out on how understanding she was about our affair. She’d give her eyeteeth for another chance to be nice to me, the bloodthirsty bitch.”

  Sophie laughed. “Don’t tell me ‘the crisis served as a springboard to a healthier relationship’?”

>   “I’m afraid it did,” Agatha said bitterly. Then, “You’re a real pal. Thanks.” And she gulped thirstily from her glass.

  Sophie studied this rattled, champagne-guzzling, B-movie Cleopatra of an ex–other woman and smiled at the irony of finding herself a collaborator in the enemy camp. “It was a pleasure,” she said, lifting her glass in farewell, and as she drifted away, she found to her surprise that she meant it.

  The hawk-eyed gallery owner touched Agatha’s arm and lifted his chin toward Sophie’s departing back. “Who’s the Romy Schneider look-alike?”

  Agatha watched the blond ponytail retreat into the crowd and shrugged. “No idea.”

  * * *

  The next morning in shiatsu class, Malcolm paired Sophie with a lithe, dark man named Henry for practice on the Heart channel (a Fire channel, yin), and she went first, placing her “mother hand” comfortingly on his chest while her “child hand” worked down the channel—one hand stable, one hand moving, starting in the axilla, going along the underside of the arm, across the elbow, down the inner forearm to the edge of the hand, and ending at the nail of the little finger. She concentrated on finding the correct heart points and using her weight to lean into her thumb instead of just pushing with it. At the point on his wrist called “Mind Door,” he murmured appreciatively, and when it was his turn to work on her, she also noticed how good pressure felt there. His hands were strong, and after he had finished, she lay for a moment enjoying the tingling feeling along her arms. When she opened her eyes, he was smiling down at her, his teeth looking very white in his dark, lively face. He suggested they have lunch together.

  “Did you not come to class the first days?” Sophie asked him as they scooted their chairs up to a wobbly table at a vegetarian place around the corner. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I was there,” he said. “And I saw you.”

  “It’s funny I don’t remember.”

  “No, not really. I do it on purpose. I don’t like to bowl people over with my charm. I prefer it to sort of sneak up on them.”

  They ordered salads, and he ate hungrily, chatting about his upbringing (in France mainly, by his American mother and in the absence of his Pakistani father, who had returned to an arranged marriage in Pakistan shortly after Henry’s birth) and his travels (through Asia and Malaysia), pausing in his story only to swap the vase of flowers on their table for another that he liked better. When he had finished eating, he pushed his plate away and said, “Ah, that was good. I feel good now.”

  “I’m glad.” Sophie moved her fork around her own plate without much interest.

  “Eat your olives, they’re good for the skin.” He mimed patting under his chin to firm it up.

  Obediently, she speared an olive, and as she was eating it, he startled her by throwing his arms open wide and saying, “I feel so good! Don’t you? Don’t you feel good?”

  “Ah… probably not as good as you.”

  “I’m sorry. Is something wrong with your food?”

  “No, my salad is—” Abruptly, she stopped talking. Staring into her variegated lettuce, she found she could not utter another word. Her throat had closed. Her heart was thumping. And something was coming.… Something was looming up before her.… Something was drawing nearer.

  “What’s wrong? An olive pit?”

  “No,” she whispered, with what felt like her last breath of air ever.

  “Can I get you something?” He leaned closer, his forehead creased in concern. “Water?”

  Sophie waved her hand no, meaning, No sympathy! Don’t show me any sympathy!—because she knew that it would bring the huge thing closer. But she couldn’t get the words out. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  He studied her pale face and closed his hand lightly over hers. “Is there someone you’d like me to call? Your husband?”

  With that the floodgates gave way. Sophie opened her eyes and stared blankly at the approaching tsunami. In a flat voice, she said, “I don’t have a husband. He left me a few days ago for another woman.” With a detached part of her mind, she realized she had never said those words out loud before. “My husband is gone.” And then it smacked into her, that great wall of black water, and knocked her, churning, to the very bottom of the sea, swirling down into the grit.

  Of all the places, she wondered between sobs, why here? Why now? She fumbled in her bag, too blinded by tears to find a tissue. “I’ll do that,” Henry said, and she felt him take the bag from her and then press a tissue into her hand. She cried hard, like Matthew when he fell down the stairs. People must be staring, she knew, but there was nothing she could do about that. She jammed the soggy tissue against her face with both hands and sobbed, rocking back and forth rhythmically. After a time her rocking slowed, and finally it stopped. She opened her bleary eyes and saw Henry watching her with kindness, smiling a little, apparently completely at ease. “You cry with your whole body,” he said. “I would like to do that. Next time I’ll remember to cry like you.”

  She smiled in a watery way and whispered, “Thank you.” She cleared her throat, blew her nose, drew a shuddering breath, wiped her eyes, and looked away for a while, out the window, until her vision cleared and she felt, although still fragile, very calm. Then she said, “My stomach hurts. Like I’ve been kicked.” And she laughed weakly. “Ow!”

  “You have been kicked,” he said, “and shit upon. Your husband has kicked you and shit upon you.” Startled, she lifted a hand to protest, but he carried on. “He’s done everything in his power to make you feel bad, and so you do. But you won’t feel bad forever. Something will happen to give you the switch.” He snapped his fingers as he said it. “You know? The switch?” Snapping his fingers again. “And then you’ll be fine.”

  Sophie looked for solace in his words, but she was perplexed, feeling she ought to thank him, or apologize—but for what in either case? “The… switch?” she managed to ask, but she wasn’t up to snapping her fingers. She would cry again soon, she knew.

  “The switch.” He snapped again; it seemed to be obligatory. “The switch can be anything. It clicks your mind into a new groove, it jumps you onto another track. Look, I’m going to give you the switch right now. Not the big switch, just a little switch. Come on, come with me.” He stood up and gave her his hand. She stood, too, on shaky legs.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Swimming.”

  “Oh, no…”

  “It’s the perfect place to cry. Think of it. You can fill the pool with tears, and the more you cry, the saltier the water becomes. The saltier the water is, the better you float, so in the end your own sadness buoys you up. Come on. We’re going swimming.”

  “I really can’t. I have to pick up my children from school at two-thirty. They spend every afternoon with me. But… I…” She started to say she would like to do it another time, but she wasn’t sure that was true, and anyway she was crying again and couldn’t speak.

  “Cry,” he said. “You go ahead and cry.” And he led her out of the restaurant, still holding her hand.

  * * *

  It was only after she was able to cry that Sophie could bring herself to remember the early years with Adam, and with the merciless acuity of hindsight even those happy memories now seemed tainted with a foreshadowing of doom. Adam Dean, the handsome graduate student from England studying architecture at Harvard, met by Sophie Szabo, just finishing her master’s in English literature, at that long-ago party in Cambridge… Both reserved, both tentative, they had embarked on a courtship characterized by its silences—silences that at the time Sophie had taken as proof of their profound compatibility but that now, knowing what she knew, seemed a sinister portent. He was enchanted by her simplicity and kindness, finding in her the antithesis of his sarcastic, gin-drinking mother. He saw something prototypically American in Sophie, a sort of prairie woman: wise, capable, and strong, with great purity of spirit. She found his reticence restful and intriguing. He had declared his love in a way that charmed her: by givin
g her a present of a fine old volume of John Donne’s poetry with a white silk bookmark placed at the poem “Lovers Infinitenesse.” (He had been worried at the time about the presence on the periphery of Sophie’s life of another suitor: a man devoted to her, but from whom he had nothing to fear, had he but known it, this man being that type of genuinely wonderful person, beloved by all, whom no one wants to marry.) Sophie could still recite the poem from memory. It ended:

  Love’s riddles are, that though thy heart depart,

  It stayes at home, and thou with losing savest it:

  But wee will have a way more liberall,

  Than changing hearts, to joyne them, so wee shall

  Be one, and one another’s All.

  … One, and one another’s all.

  * * *

  At first glance Agatha and Valerie appeared to be hovering in midair, two gravity-defying splashes of color suspended against a backdrop of dazzling white. But in fact they were sitting in Agatha’s white front room on her white sofa near a window covered by a white rice-paper shade and surrounded by—nothing.

  “I can’t let you do it,” Agatha was saying. “Not this. Uh-uh.”

  “I’m not asking for your permission.” Valerie lit a cigarette and looked around, squinting against the glare, for somewhere, anywhere, to set her cigarettes and lighter: a table, a chair, a… a goddamned surface of some kind! But no. Testily, she tossed it all on the floor.

  Agatha watched her friend’s lighter skid to a halt, then continued. “You, stuck out in Milton? How long do you think you’d last out there? One day tops, and then you’d be biting off the wallpaper—which would be beige and textured, by the way. They call it ‘oatmeal.’”

  “I’m not going to let that woman outmaneuver me.”

  “Unless you’re trying to get back to your suburban roots—is that it? Missing good old Burlington? Ask yourself some tough questions, Valerie. Are you really strong enough to live with Laura Ashley curtains? Come on, let’s do a little creative visualization together. You come home after a hard day’s work and have to pick your way over cheap toys scattered on the carpet—the washable nylon kind of carpet, Valerie. Slightly sticky?”