Sonia came back to London more and more often from Paris on what she called business trips, trips to see her lawyer about a lawsuit (or lawsuits) she would only talk about when drunk, and then so incoherently one couldn’t understand except for the great importance of it (or them) to her. She said, “Once I win—and I’ve put everything I’ve got into winning—I’ll kill myself.” There was a sense one got from her during these business trips that she was unable to explain her legal problems because they, complex as they were, had to do with something more complex in Sonia, which she did not want to go into—which she could not go into. Her drunken attempts to describe her litigation always ended with her saying, “It’s all much much more complicated than can be imagined, and much much more awful. It’s desperate.”
I went to Paris to visit her. She asked me, please, to come to lunch, to supper, to lunch the next day.
Nothing was going right for her.
She lived in a narrow, L-shaped room in a low building, like a cottage, at the back of an alley. There was a small kitchen and a bathroom off the kitchen where the air smelled slightly of escaping gas. She met friends in expensive restaurants, where she insisted, always, on paying the large bills.
In a dim restaurant—decorated with chamber pots on shelves—I said, “It must be wonderful living in Paris.”
“You don’t understand Paris,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Even I don’t understand Paris. I’m a foreigner, and I realize I don’t, after all, speak French very well.”
“Will you stay?”
“I’ve got to stay.”
When the waiter came to the table to ask if there was anything we wanted, she shouted at him, “Laissez nous en paix,” and he, startled, stepped back and said, “Tres bien, madame.” She said to me, “Why did I do that? Why? Yesterday a young woman stopped me in the street to ask me the time, and I shouted at her, ‘Do you think I can give the time to everyone who stops me in the street?’ Afterwards, I wondered why I’d been so rude to her. Why? Why am I so filled with anger?”
I said nothing.
She said, “I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life.”
When I kissed her goodbye before getting into a taxi, I saw there were tears in her eyes.
In London, I visited her painter friend to talk about her. I felt a need to talk about Sonia with her friends. I sat with him at one end of a long room; bare bulbs hung on wires from the low ceiling. I asked him if Sonia had ever attacked him, as she attacked so many of her friends.
“No,” he said, “she never has.”
“Why, I wonder.”
He thought. “I don’t know why.”
“I suspect she’s never attacked you because she’s frightened of you.”
“Why should Sonia be frightened of me?”
“Because she’s frightened of people whom she thinks have succeeded totally in what they paint, write, compose. She’s suspicious of anyone who tries to, I think, and, even more, hates the presumption in anyone who tries. She believes, I’m sure, that very, very few people succeed, and that because of the great, the superhuman demands they put on themselves. She thinks most people are pretending. She thinks I’m pretending. And to that I can only say, Well, maybe I am.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know why she should think I’m not.”
I said, “Do you imagine that Sonia has ever wanted to write?”
He was thoughtful again. “Yes, I think she has. I know she was once asked by an editor to do an article, and she was very enthusiastic, but when she submitted it, it was found to be unpublishable. This was a great shock to her. She believed, then, that she didn’t have the talent.”
“I wonder if her realization that she didn’t have talent changed her from the bright, charming, young woman everyone says she was to the dark woman I know her as.”
“She lives in terms of others’ creativity. She has no illusions about being creative herself.”
I said, “I suppose she’s simply killed it in herself.”
While Sonia was on one of her business trips to London, a mutual friend rang me to say that she was in hospital. He wasn’t sure what had happened; she’d been in terrible pain, was taken to hospital, operated on and found to be bleeding internally, but the doctors didn’t know what caused the bleeding. However, the friend said, it wasn’t grave. Sonia didn’t want anyone to visit her in hospital. I realized she would not want anyone to see her suffering, even, perhaps, to know she was suffering.
When, weeks later, she came to dinner, she hardly spoke; she drank two glasses of wine and smoked two cigarettes. She left early.
Then I heard she was in hospital again.
Out of hospital, she moved into a hotel. I rang her there. Her voice sounded alarmingly like that of a little girl. Anxious, I went to the hotel. That little girl’s voice told me to come in when I knocked on her door.
She was in bed. She was very thin. In her gaunt, distorted face, the skin around the sockets of her eyes sunk in, her teeth were large and yellow. Shocked, I leaned towards her and kissed her and I sobbed. When I drew back she was smiling; her entire face appeared to be a smile. She suddenly looked very beautiful.
I sat by her bed. I did not know if I should refer to her state, if she’d prefer I didn’t; then I thought she of course would have seen it, would have seen it as a fact that had to be accepted for what it was, and I might ask her about her condition as unsentimentally, as matter-of-factly as she had accepted it. I asked, simply, “How are you, Sonia?” “Well,” she said, “either I’ll survive or I’ll die, and though of course we’re all faced with either, in my case the either/or will be decided in a very short time. Now tell me about the house in Italy.”
I told her stories about the house to make her laugh. When I invited a mutual friend to come stay with me, I told her, he had said, “I think I’ll wait till after Sonia’s second visit.” She laughed, perhaps out of appreciation of my wanting to make her laugh.
Then she said, “I’m very tired.”
From Tulsa, I wrote letters to her, one long one about Germaine Greer, who was also at the University of Tulsa.
In early December, in Tulsa, I received a telephone call from London to tell me that Sonia had died that morning. The mutual friend who called was hardly able to speak for weeping. Sonia had bequeathed her organs to the hospital for research; apart from that she had left no instructions as to what was to be done with her body after her death.
I couldn’t do anything during the day. In the evening, I went to a friend’s for dinner. Germaine was there.
I said, “Sonia died today.”
Germaine said nothing. All evening, while I silently listened, she and our friend sang madrigals.