“Wow,” I say. “I mean, goddamn!”
She laughs. “I thought you might like it. I never come in here! But it’s such a beautiful room.”
She releases me and glides onto the dance floor. She does a spin, her dress levitating; then she curtsies to me.
“Really, Sophie?”
“You, my darling, do not take me seriously,” she says. She sits on the floor and produces a corkscrew, seemingly out of thin air. She begins to open the wine. “Oh. I forgot glasses.”
“We could swig straight from the bottle like degenerates,” I say.
She removes the cork with a satisfying pop! She waves me over. “You first.”
She offers me the bottle and I take it. I lift it to my lips and have a small sip. It’s great wine. It slinks across my tongue and down my throat. It leaves a sweetness in its wake.
I give the bottle back to Sophie, before I’m tempted to down the whole thing.
“Annie,” she says, “may I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure,” I say, seating myself beside her. I’ve already told her about my dead mother, my aloof father and getting dumped a few weeks shy of my thirtieth birthday. What could she want to know that’s more personal than that?
She gives me the wine back. I take a gulp.
“What do you want? Out of life, I mean,” she says. She’s now lying on her side with her head on her shoulder, arm outstretched.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Like, my goals?”
“Not goals. Wants. What do you want?”
“I guess I haven’t really thought about it. I wanted to be a teacher. I’m a teacher. So there’s that.”
“Did you want to be a teacher because you wanted to be a teacher, or was it only because you wanted to find a way to be close to your mother?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a bolt of lightning slice through a monstrous black cloud. This room is all windows, and they provide a frightening view of the storm outside. It rages over the flat green of the lawn, a series of sculpted hedges, a rose garden.
I wait for the thunder to come, and when it does, it shakes the chandeliers.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie says. “We can talk about something else.”
“No,” I say, “you have a point. I don’t know if I want things. I guess I wanted Sam. I wanted for us to get married, be happy. Be together. To have someone.”
“Were you happy? With Sam? I mean truly happy. Did you feel fulfilled? Did you wake up excited? Have a sense of contentment, of gratitude?”
I don’t know how to answer, so I drink more wine.
“Forgive me,” she says. “I thought, perhaps if I knew what you wanted, I could help. You’re such a joy, and yet you’re sad. It seems an injustice.”
“That’s nice of you,” I say. “Thank you.”
“We don’t have to talk about anything serious for the rest of the night,” she says. “We can finish the wine and I’ll get us some food and we can watch something. I keep my thickest, softest blankets down in the theater room.”
“Okay, yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”
There’s another flash of lightning, and the lights flicker.
Sophie rolls her eyes. She stands up, marches over to one of the windows and says, “Stop that.”
I assume she’s talking to the sky. “You tell it,” I say.
The clouds mumble.
“There’s a limit to my powers,” she says, though the clouds have suddenly rolled back, and I no longer hear the rain. “Shall we?”
“You want the rest of the wine?”
She shakes her head. “No, you drink it.”
“If you say so.” I finish the bottle. It puts a fuzz on everything.
We go back to the kitchen and Sophie prepares a platter of cheese and bread and different spreads. She gets another bottle of wine. It’s night now, and the house is so dark I can barely see.
Being a little drunk probably isn’t helping.
Sophie helps me down a narrow, winding staircase to a room that’s all red velvet drapes and big chairs. There’s an elevated stage flanked by gold Corinthian columns. There’s a projector screen that Sophie has to pull down.
“What would you like to watch?” she asks me.
“Whatever you want,” I say.
She puts on Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman. She opens the wine and this time she’s remembered glasses. She pours me one, and by the time I finish it, I can barely keep my eyes open.