After the film, Saul and Sofia wander through the tree-lined paths of Washington Square Park, trying their best not to look like good targets for pickpockets. They stop in a dingy artists’ bar on MacDougal and Saul buys them half pints of dark beer, which they drink standing, leaning together at a tall corner table. Sofia likes the light and foolhardy feeling it gives her and drinks another while Saul nurses a cigarette. She makes conversation about the movie; she makes up stories about the other patrons （a mistress, the woman with the too-tight dress and the carefully arranged curls; a journalist, notebooks in tow, twisting a wedding band around his finger, who doesn’t want to go home yet; an artist, who moved out of her parents’ home in New Jersey and has only milk crates for furniture）。 She fills the empty space in their conversation, all the while thinking about the bones of Saul’s arms, the jut of his knuckles against the skin, his dancing dreaming eyelashes. Inside of Sofia, the thing that has yawned open paces back and forth. It is hungry. Saul is quiet; his eyes look through her.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks, and Saul opens his eyes wider and focuses on her, as though he has forgotten where he is. He makes a twisted face; an inside joke, one he throws over the shoulders of men he is talking to when Sofia is standing just outside the room, watching. I’m right here, is what that face is supposed to say. But I would rather be just over there, with you.
“Nothing,” he says, which is what he says when he is thinking about his family, and Germany, and the layers of unspeakable mystery surrounding his life in Europe.
Sofia reaches for Saul’s hand, and he takes it, but his gaze stays neutral, focused somewhere above her shoulder. She doesn’t know where he goes, but she wishes he would come back.
“You’re somewhere else,” she says.
“I’m right here,” he says. He isn’t, though. And Sofia, who often falls back into her own thoughts when her conversations with Saul reach this impasse, sets her mouth and puts her hand on Saul’s chest. “Tell me,” she says.
“You haven’t seen the news?” asks Saul.
“Of course I have,” she says.
“Well, I’m—” Saul stops. He shrugs. “I suppose I’m thinking about that, then.”
“I suppose I’m trying not to,” says Sofia. She is thinking about Saul’s hands, about bubbles rising to the top of a glass of beer.
“I suppose,” says Saul, “I can’t help it.”
“Fine,” says Sofia. She wants to be enough for Saul. She wants her presence to draw him up and out. She wants to see herself do this, and feel like maybe she is good, after all; like there is not empty space ahead of her where a path should be. “Maybe I should go,” she says. It would comfort her to comfort him.
“Sofia,” says Saul, and there is an urgency Sofia does not recognize in his voice, “do you even care that the world is falling apart? They think thousands of people died yesterday. And it’s war, so the result of people dying will be more people dying. And each of those people is part of something. They have mothers, they have sons—” Saul breaks off abruptly. A pink flush has risen in his cheeks and his eyes are bright and animated.
“Of course I care,” says Sofia. “But I came here to escape my family, to see you, and you are acting just like them, and there is nothing I can do to reach you, like there is nothing I can do to reach anyone, to do anything. I can’t just feel so helpless, Saul. And I could go home, but my mamma would hand me a—a—a sock to knit, and I don’t think knitting a sock is helpful!”
“Okay,” says Saul. “Okay.” Patrons at other tables are watching them out of the corners of their eyes. Saul nods toward the door and he and Sofia sidle out of the bar and onto the icy street. “I think you’re right,” says Saul.
“What?” Sofia has steeled herself for a fight.
“This worrying—it doesn’t help. I just feel guilty.”
Sofia has pent-up energy now, angry anxious breath, adrenaline pumping. But she has not been offered a fight, and she does not know how to resolve it without letting it out, without screaming into the weak and wavering winter sun, without destroying everything in her path. “There’s nothing for you to feel guilty about,” she snaps, harsher than she meant.
“What kind of son wouldn’t feel guilty for abandoning his mother?”
“You didn’t abandon her,” Sofia says.
“But I did,” says Saul. The simplicity of that threatens to pull tears from Sofia’s throat. The two of them are hobbling down MacDougal to Bleecker. They are leaning in toward one another for warmth. Fingers of December air tunnel into their coats. The agony of being helpless rises in Sofia again, rakes her throat with its claws.