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

graduate school another shot. Sophie told me all this during one of her few visits to New York that summer. She didn’t suggest that the end of her hopes with Lila meant anything one way or another for our own relationship. She stayed for the day, ate dinner with me and my mother, and got on the train back home.
    If my father had still been alive, he would have made me work that summer. But he was gone, and my mother, busy again selling real estate, was happy to let me come and go as I pleased. I spent most of the summer reading and writing, thinking of Sophie doing the same up in Connecticut,
and feeling as though we were together. The stars, says Thoreau, are the apexes of what wonderful triangles.
    Back on campus in the fall, everything picked up just as it had been. We both had single rooms now, but it was always her room where we spent those long days and nights, drinking and talking and reading. We were supposed to have chosen our classes before getting back, but Sophie hadn’t filled out the forms, and she asked me what I was taking. She signed up for the ancient history survey and the philosophy class I’d picked, but she shook her head over the one course that had seemed obvious to me.
    â€œThose workshops are pointless,” she said.
    And so we gave up our writing classes, though they were the reason we’d both come to New Hampton in the first place. From then on we showed our work only to each other.
    Sophie returned to campus with a pile of short stories, perhaps a dozen of them. One was “Visiting Professor,” which would eventually become the title of her collection. The narrator of the story is a college student who goes to New York for a romantic dinner with an older professor she idolizes. She knows that the man wants to sleep with her, and she welcomes it. But outside the classroom he lacks all the charm and self-assurance that had attracted her. He gets drunk and cries embarrassingly over his wife, who has left him. The narrator comforts him. The apartment he’s been living in since his wife threw him out reminds her of a dozen dorm rooms she’s been brought to on other late nights, but she decides to stay there with him anyway. When they get to his bedroom he’s too drunk to do anything but take a feeble swing at her and tell her to leave. On the story’s last page, the narrator sits in Penn Station, waiting for the train back to New Jersey, thinking of the boy she loves back on campus. She imagines how
she’ll describe the evening to him, wondering what kind of story she wants it to be, whether to make it a comedy or a tragedy or some mixture of both.
    Between the night when she told me about the kiss in the office and the day she gave me those thirty pages, she had never mentioned our actual professor. I didn’t know if she had gone to see him or if the entire thing was invented. After reading the story, I couldn’t ask. Not just because I didn’t want to admit to being jealous, but because the story made the truth irrelevant. The telling was what mattered. So at least we believed then. I think now that we were wrong. What really happened does matter, even if we can only ever know it once it’s too late to do anything about it.
    Essentially everything that would wind up in her collection—a collection that won prizes, that “announced the debut of a great American writer,” as the visiting professor himself put it on the book’s dust jacket—was written during that time. My own work was strong enough, for undergraduate writing. But the decision to drop out of workshop was in part a declaration that we judged ourselves by other standards. By those higher standards, I was still lacking. It was something we both acknowledged without any particular discomfort: she was simply better than I was. But I was improving, writing with her in mind, knowing she wouldn’t let me get away with anything. And we had all the time we