Read Online What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha - Free Book Online

together, as we imagined those writers would have spoken about each other. Alfred Kazin once said of Saul Bellow that he was the first person he’d met who spoke of Lawrence and Hemingway not as idols but as competitors. This is how we tried to speak. We didn’t pretend to be the equals of the writers we loved, but we were all in the same trade. Sometimes too we spoke about our classes, but only to disparage them.
    â€œThey wanted to talk about what we learned from Keats,” Sophie said. “It’s like asking what you learn from getting laid. I learned that I like how he makes me feel.”
    We walked until we were exhausted, and then we sat down on the sidewalk to rest before walking back to campus. Around this time, we both read the essay in which Thoreau offers the French sans terre as a root for the verb “to saunter.” A true saunterer, he said, is without a land of his own. Our own wandering had in it that element of homelessness. There was something desperate to the way
we walked, just as there was something desperate to the way we read and wrote, to the way we drank and smoked when we finally found our way back to her room.
    During another of our late-night sessions, she mentioned that the semifamous visiting novelist who’d taught our workshop in the fall had kissed her during office hours. He was gone from campus by the time she told me, and he wanted her to visit him in New York.
    â€œAre you going?” I asked.
    She took a long sip of her Irish and her face puckered into itself. She shook it out. “It would make a great story,” she said.
    This had become a refrain between us, and at different times it meant different things. We spoke about our own lives almost exclusively as material, as a rough draft in which one learned what would work on the page. If Sophie thought that taking the train to New York was the best way to make a story out of our professor’s proposition, then that’s what she would do. But the expression also suggested the opposite: that stories could free us from experience, allowing us to spend days at a time silently near each other without feeling we were missing the world outside. If you could imagine a story into life, then you didn’t need to live it. So her reply said nothing, really, about her intentions.
    No one went on dates at New Hampton, but any couple that was sleeping together with some amount of exclusivity was said to be dating. In that sense, the term applied as well to us as to anyone. In the eyes of our friends, Sophie and I had been dating for several months. But she still spoke to me about Lila, and she still made occasional efforts to remind me that nothing between us was fixed. Whatever else it was, talk of our professor’s invitation was another of these reminders.

    Another story she liked to tell, handed down from Lila, involved Edmund Wilson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had been a classmate of Wilson’s sister at Vassar. After Wilson discovered her work in an undergraduate anthology and helped to make her name in New York, Millay became the great bohemian beauty. Everyone fell in love with her, Wilson most of all. One day on the back porch of the Millay family home the age’s greatest critic took a knee and proposed to her. After considering for a second she said, “I suppose that might solve it.” She had assumed that he was offering a kindness, a convenient sheen of respectability beneath which she might go on writing her poems and sleeping with men and women as she liked. But Wilson meant only to make her his wife.
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    When the school year ended, I went back to my mother’s apartment and Sophie went back to that big empty house in Connecticut. She hoped to spend the summer with Lila at the bookstore, but she returned to find the store closed. Lila responded to her e-mail after a few days, saying that she was traveling through Europe, sharpening up her languages before giving