Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  “I’m not against romance, you understand. I’m just against the package deal. I believe I can create my own setup, perfectly suited to me. I want a life that’s made to measure and sewn by hand, with each element carefully chosen by me and for me. I don’t want that plastic life that comes in a kit and you just snap it together.”

  “A married life, straight off the hanger,” Sophie said, feeling suddenly weary and sad. “I guess that’s what I had—from the ready-to-wear line.” She roused herself. “But you would never set up house with any man because it’s too risky. Is that right?”

  “It’s not that I never would, but I’d have to think about it ver-y care-fully. And it wouldn’t have to be a man either, although it could be. A brief footnote here, Sophie, on my sexual orientation—I wouldn’t reject a perfect life partner simply because she happened to be a woman. I vote for the candidate, not the party.”

  Sophie thought about it. “That’s lucky, really. It doubles your chances of finding your perfect partner, doesn’t it?”

  “It should.”

  Sophie shivered and tucked her chin deeper into her coat collar. Florence seemed impervious to the cold, sitting casually with her legs stretched out before her and her hands in her pockets, scanning the park. “Actually, I told you a lie back then,” she said after a while. “It isn’t true that I never, ever wondered about my father. When I was a kid, you know… but why dwell? I decided on a line years ago, and I’m sticking to it.” And before Sophie could say anything, “Hey, take a look. What’s going on with your kids?” Over near the merry-go-round, Matthew and Hugo were giving each other air kisses and exclaiming, “Dar-ling, mwah, mwah!” in affected tones.

  A car horn tooted; it was Milagros behind the wheel, ready to take the boys home. “Come on, boys!” Sophie called. “Where in heaven’s name did you learn to do that?” She shot an inquiring look at Milagros, who shook her head sourly.

  “Valerie showed us. It’s so she doesn’t get lipstick on us. You do it, too, Mommy! Mwah, mwah, dar-ling!”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, angels. Bye-bye.” Sophie watched the car pull away, feeling odd. So Valerie was fun. And inventive. Well, she would have to be an interesting person; look at all Adam had done for her—and given up for her. It hurt Sophie to think about that, but jealousy wasn’t the odd feeling; she was used to that. The odd feeling was a curious little pocket of gladness. Somewhere deep within her, Sophie was glad that Valerie was fun. Only for the boys’ sake, of course, not for Adam’s, and it made her feel rather left out as well, so it was hardly a Pauline conversion, but still she was, definitely, just a tiny bit glad. And there was a delicious restfulness in that feeling. Through that narrow porthole, she could foresee oceans of peace.

  Sophie wasn’t able to put a name to this moment, but Henry could have. And he would have snapped his fingers as he said it.

  * * *

  A bird sang, the only sound in the Sunday-morning quiet. Cold winter sunlight shone in the stained-glass window, casting an oblong pool of color onto the wooden floorboards and partway up the wall. In a bowl on the windowsill some blue hyacinths had opened early, fooled by the warmth of the radiator, and their sweet smell was heavy in the air. Clement’s house had never been more pleasing to all the senses, Sophie thought as, through the open bedroom door, she watched Henry stride around the kitchen, deftly opening the correct cupboards and drawers, finding things without asking, managing to be at ease without seeming proprietary, a guest in her house, but a competent one.

  She was sitting up in bed, her legs crossed, the crumpled white sheet over her lap, ready to receive the breakfast tray when he brought it. She studied his muscular back and buttocks as he reached for plates and glasses and rinsed out the teapot, moving in that proud, happy way men have when they first walk around a woman’s house naked. He turned, and through the doorway he tossed her an orange, which she caught. They had been lovers for three days.

  “You know, I think I’ve got the switch,” she said, peeling the orange.

  “Yes, you have,” he said, busy with the teaspoons.

  “Was it making love with you that gave it to me?”

  “No.” He came in carrying the laden tray, which she took on her lap while he climbed into bed beside her. “I was waiting for you to get it first.”

  “That was considerate of you.”

  “Yes. Considerate to me, above all.”

  “How so?”

  “So you would be thinking only of me. I didn’t want anyone else on your mind, not while we were making love. Afterward, of course…” He shrugged and passed her a cup of tea. “Does that sound possessive?”

  “No.” She sipped. “I think everyone feels that way. It’s part of why sexual infidelity is so painful—finding out there was a ghost in your bed. And while he was making love to you, his mind was… elsewhere. You know, when we make love, I think of geometric shapes.”

  “Do you?” He smiled. “How scholarly!”

  “I feel that mysterious geometric equations are resolving themselves.”

  “Well then, listen to this.” He whispered sexily in her ear. “In a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square… of the two sides.”

  It had all begun very simply with a knock on the door. She had opened it, and there he was, standing there smiling. For a moment she stared, wondering if she had willed him to her door. Then he held out his arms, and she rushed into them without a word. It was Friday, Adam’s weekend with the boys, and she’d meant to pick them up at school as usual and keep them until he got home from work, but as two-thirty drew near, she saw that it wouldn’t be possible after all. She reached out of bed for the phone, started to call Marion, thought better of it, called Florence instead, made some arrangements, and then, miraculously, she was free for two more days.

  “Why did you come over here on Friday anyway?” she asked, lying in his arms after breakfast.

  “To make love to you.”

  “Only that? You didn’t have an excuse ready, in case?”

  “No.” He kissed her palm and held it against his chest until he dropped off to sleep again, but she stayed awake, watching the patch of colored sunlight creep across the wall and onto the bedspread.

  It was the first day of the Chinese New Year.

  5.

  Sophie had just locked her door, ready to set off for school, when the telephone started ringing inside the apartment. Keys in hand, she stood wondering whether to answer it and decided no, she was already gone, or as good as gone. It wouldn’t be Henry, as they were about to see each other in class. Whoever it was could leave a message or call her cell phone. But the phone continued to ring plaintively. It could be Milagros, something about the children, and she was still home, really. No, gone. Home. Gone. The children. Yes, okay, home! She unlocked the door with clumsy haste and dashed back in. Now that she’d made up her mind to answer, the idea that it might stop ringing was unbearable. She scooped up the receiver and gasped “Hello!” She listened anxiously for the toneless hum that would mean she was too late and the caller had hung up. But no, there was silence, it was all right, someone was there.

  “Sophie, I received some papers from your lawyer this morning.”

  For a moment she couldn’t place the voice, and when she did, it came as a surprise that Adam still existed in this world. He seemed to belong to the remote past, or a parallel universe, but here he was, saying, “Sophie? Sophie, are you there?”

  She cleared her throat. “Yes. Hello, Adam.” The words felt odd in her mouth. She said no more, marveling at the strangeness.

  He misunderstood her silence. “I know you asked me not to call, but we need to get together to talk about this. I don’t seem to have the time that you have for letter writing.”

  Oh. The letter. She’d forgotten all about it. She’d also forgotten that she’d asked him not to call. It had been a long time since she’d heard his voice. Months.

  “I’d like to get together tod
ay. There are a few points we need to discuss.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s too complicated to talk about over the phone, but it won’t take long. Can you make it this evening?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Six o’clock?”

  “Can it be later?”

  “It could be, but I don’t want to inconvenience Milagros.”

  Milagros! Her first impulse was to say, Do you know Milagros, too? It was weird hearing someone else say that name, but of course Adam saw Milagros every day, the same as she did. Milagros was Adam’s, too—as were the children, come to that. Yet it seemed an amazing coincidence. Sophie pulled herself together and agreed to meet him at six at a wine bar across from the Pru, not somewhere they’d ever been together. Obviously, he had given this some thought, choosing a neutral place with no associations. But as she walked to school, her sense of wonder wore off and she began to feel annoyed at herself for being so passive. He had no right calling her in the first place, much less ordering her around. Be at this place at this time. The nerve. And all she had said was, “Okay.”

  “It looks like he’s finally ready to talk,” Henry said when she told him. They were sitting outside on a wall during the morning break, drinking tea from a thermos. She sat cross-legged, facing his profile, and he sat with his legs dangling, sometimes straightening his right leg, then relaxing it and letting his heel bounce to a halt against the wall.

  “I don’t think going over a divorce settlement counts as talking,” she said.

  “Then it’s an excuse to see you. To see how you are. He’s probably concerned about you.”

  “How unbearably condescending.”

  “It could be genuine. Put yourself in his position. What if you had left him for another man? You’d be concerned about him.”

  “So I’m supposed to show him I’m okay so he needn’t feel guilty? Talk about self-serving.”

  Henry laughed. “Maybe all he wants is to talk about the divorce. Don’t condemn him yet.”

  But Sophie was angry. “Wouldn’t it make you angry, Henry? Doesn’t anything make you angry? Or are you so understanding that you can justify anything, in any situation?”

  He answered mildly, “No, not everything. I can’t justify a woman’s screaming at me and spilling hot tea on me, all because she’s nervous about speaking to her ex-husband.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, mopping the spill on his leg. “It just seemed like you were trying to defend him.” She frowned, dabbing at his leg over and over with a tissue. “And I suppose… I suppose…”

  He moved his leg away. “You suppose what?”

  “I’m ashamed to admit this, but I will anyway. I suppose I expected you… not to be glad I was going to see him tonight. But you don’t seem to care a bit. In fact, you’re taking his side, and I guess I expected you to… mind. A little.”

  “To be jealous, you mean?” he said with surprise, and he laughed again.

  Sophie listened carefully to his laugh, hoping to detect something defensive in it, but alas, it was purely good-​natured. Annoyed in spite of herself, she said, “I don’t think I’ll see him after all. It’ll only upset me—it already has. He’s just being lazy. He can write down perfectly well any objections he has to the settlement. There’s no need for this meeting, and I’m not going to play along. Now, how do I cancel? Or do I just stand him up?”

  “You have to get used to talking to him sometime.”

  “Why? We lead separate lives.”

  “Come on. Once you have a child with someone, that’s it. You’re bound together for life.”

  “But that’s exactly what I don’t want!”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want. You’re fellow parents, so you need to have the lines of communication open. He’s like Milagros, or the boys’ teachers, only more important, because he’s more important to them.”

  “Are you a family counselor or something? This seems to roll off your tongue.”

  He smiled. “It’s not an uncommon problem. You’re not the first to go through this, or the last, believe it or not. You have to see their father. The first time is the hardest. The second time is the second-hardest, and so on. Soon you’ll be able to meet him normally, like the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker, and that’s the goal. He’ll be like a female friend. Like Milagros.”

  “Adam is like the candlestick maker,” she repeated, trying to convince herself. “He’s my co–child raiser. We have to interact easily and frequently. Adam is like a female friend.”

  “That’s it. And because you’ve already dreaded this first meeting so much, you can be pretty sure it’ll go smoothly. You’ve done all your suffering in advance.”

  * * *

  Henry was nearly right about that, Sophie thought after seeing Adam. Right enough to say, if you were rounding things off, that he was right. But if you were nitpicking and counting every little thought and emotion, then you’d have to say he was not entirely right—there were teeny twinges of suffering during the meeting, and the ghost aura of “husband” wafted once or twice over Adam’s otherwise curiously alien form.

  He looks old, was the first thing she thought when she sat down opposite him. Had he changed, or was she used now to looking at Henry’s lineless face? Adam looked gray and creased and stooped—altogether less threatening than the image of him she had built in her mind. Not an ogre, just a tired, middle-aged man.

  “You look very nice,” he said formally, thinking that she looked younger and harder, more jagged, somehow. She used to be soft and smooth.

  She glanced around the wine bar to get her bearings: bland and generic, so featureless as to defy description.

  “Thank you. So do you. What did you want to talk about?” She hadn’t meant to be so curt, but once she’d blurted that out, she felt exhilarated and realized that this was the way she wanted to conduct the meeting: brusquely. Up to then she hadn’t known what tone to take. In mental rehearsals of how the interview would go, she had drawn a blank. She noted with satisfaction that he was taken aback by her abruptness and trying to hide it by busying himself with some papers in his briefcase, and she recognized in herself a desire to hurt him, which surprised her, but wasn’t displeasing. “I’m sorry to rush you,” she said, “but I’m meeting someone. I want to hear you out, of course, but I can’t be late, so let’s be quick.” She smiled glacially, marveling inside at what she had said. Was she going to tell him about Henry, then? She hadn’t thought of it until now—and even now she wasn’t sure.

  “Of course.” Flustered, he flipped through the papers, unable to find what he was looking for. “I just want to discuss the division of our property. The house, of course, will go to you—”

  She laid her hand over his papers, trapping them on the table. “I don’t want it.”

  “Maybe not now, but—”

  “I mean it. Why don’t you keep it and buy me out? Or if you don’t want it either, put it on the market.”

  “Sophie, it’s the boys’ home.” The note of reproach in his voice lent acidity to hers.

  “But not mine. You’ve made very sure of that.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course you should have it. It’s yours by right.”

  “Why? Because convention has it that abandoned wives get the house? To assuage their husbands’ guilt or compensate for it? That house is contaminated. It stinks of deceit and treachery.” Adam struggled to mask the alarm he felt with a gesture merely impatient, but she saw his fear and thrilled at it as she went on, now in a gentler tone. “What I’m trying to say, Adam, is that if it weren’t for the cowardly, dishonest way you did it, I suppose I could thank you for ending our marriage. Because now, instead of being a bored but brave little housewife with a cheating husband, I’m using my brain again, learning to do fulfilling new work, living in a place I love, and sharing my time with a man who cares about me. A man who speaks! A man I can talk to and laugh with, who views the world in refreshing ways and broadens my
vision with his, as I broaden his with mine.” From the queasy look on Adam’s face, she knew that this waxing-lyrical stuff was good, and she gushed on. “Life with him is a larger thing than life alone. Life with you was narrower. We had just a tiny crack of a life, a vertical slit in a castle wall. We had pared down two complete lives to just the part we had in common. With him I have my whole life to myself again, and I also share his. This is what life in a couple was meant to be, Adam—a life doubled, not a life halved.” She paused, breathless, and reached forward to squeeze his hand. “Anyway,” she said, fakely shy, “thank you.”

  He withdrew his hand. “Who is he?”

  “The children haven’t met him yet,” she went on, freshly inspired. “I thought they needed time to adjust to our separation first. I thought it would be unfair, even damaging, to introduce them too soon. Eventually I’ll let them know that ‘Mommy has a friend.’” Adam winced, as she had known he would. “And I’ll leave it up to them to ask to meet him. Their natural curiosity will bring them around to it”—she cocked her head and smiled—“in their own good time.”

  “This… man. Is it anyone I know?”

  “No.” She checked her watch and started girlishly. “Oh, I’ve got to run.” She jumped up and, planting both hands on the table, leaned over him in a commanding position. “Let me know about the house, if you want to buy me out or sell.”

  He continued to stare at the door long after it had closed behind her.

  * * *

  Later, as Adam walked up his garden path—crazy-paved, to be sure—he was greeted by strains of Van Halen pouring out of the house. Inside, the music was deafening. Valerie was lounging on the chesterfield, surrounded by all her usual clutter, directing the boys in how to play air guitar, which they were doing frenziedly, tossing their heads back and forth until their hair stood on end.

  “Babe, look at this! It’s priceless!” Valerie shouted to him over the music. “Now drop to your knees! You got it, Hugo! Don’t forget your fingering! Matthew, head back, screw up your face! Adam, I think I have a Mary Poppins streak in me after all!”