What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha

the excavation he seemed to be demanding. There was so much there—an entire life. All she knew of it now was that it would soon be done. She couldn’t say how long the next silence lasted. And then she might have spoken, though she couldn’t have said this for certain either. She had once enjoyed the sense of disconnection, the uncertainty about what had been communicated and what remained within, that came with getting high. Now it terrified her. She turned to find him carefully rolling another joint. He looked very old as he did it.
    â€œWhat was that?” he asked.
    â€œI’m afraid I need to go,” she said. “I’m not sure why I came.”
    â€œNeither am I,” he said before setting the makings of the joint on the table and walking her to the door.
    She wanted him to ask her to come back, but she knew that he would not.

    â€œAre you all right here alone?” she asked.
    He seemed tempted to take offense, but instead he smiled.
    â€œIt’s a little late to start worrying about me.”
    She’d worried about him before she knew he existed. She would have said as much, but he was already closing the door. As Sophie walked down the stairs, she caught herself composing the scene in her head.

5
    AFTER JUNIOR YEAR, Sophie rented an apartment in the Village with money left by her parents. She interned at a poetry press, and someone there introduced her to Greg, who would become her literary agent. I never met him, but he sounded like another of those young and prematurely jaded guys, just out of school, seemingly everywhere then, whose ranks I didn’t yet know I would be joining. He was still an assistant, but he asked to read Sophie’s stories and started sending them out. He sold one to the Paris Review and another to the New Yorker , guaranteeing Sophie a book contract. Her collection would allow him to give up answering the phone for his boss and take on clients full-time.
    That summer I began a novel that would swell to a thousand pages before I abandoned it. Now graduated, Max started opening mail and answering phones for the weekly where he still works. He lived with three other guys in a loft on Thompson Street, a big, open space, nearly as suitable as Gerhard’s house for crowded parties, which
Max and his roommates threw often. I want to say that this was the summer when all three of us came to see writing as a job rather than just as our way of being in the world. I want to say that we lost our innocence, and that afterward we weren’t quite sure what the loss had bought us in return. That Sophie and I both realized, without admitting as much to each other, that the hermetic world in which we’d enclosed ourselves had begun to chafe. But it was all much simpler than that. This was the summer when Sophie fucked Max.
    It happened in late August, a few weeks before we were due back at school. I’d been sick for a few days, and when I got better I went downtown to meet Sophie for lunch.
    â€œHow’s the shut-in?” she asked.
    â€œI’m feeling better,” I told her. “Still mostly shut in.”
    She talked about her job, which she treated with amused detachment, offering character sketches of all the important people she was supposed to be trying to impress. But I could see she was uncomfortable about something. Outside the restaurant she said, “I’ve got some time still.”
    We walked a few blocks just north of Houston Street. With the university still out for the summer, and the dog days upon us, MacDougal was abandoned, its smoke shops empty except for the exotic water pipes in the windows, all looking alive and sinister.
    â€œI stayed with Blakeman last night,” Sophie said.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œMax,” she said. “I mean Max. I mean that I slept with him.”
    Her bluntness I recognize now as a kind of defense. She hoped the shifting nature of our relationship could protect