The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  “Okay, I guess I’m feeling angry at you right now for telling me what it is and isn’t about.”

  “You guess? Be angry then. But don’t act like there’s nothing going on and like you just want to help out a friend. Or whatever Lee is.”

  It wasn’t acting, though. Acting suggests you can turn it on and off. This was a reflex—a turtle going into its shell. And I was only beginning to see this as a problem. My problem. One that was related to but distinct from a more generalized marital malaise. I wanted the malaise to be generalized, part of some matrimonial bargain you strike that involves using phrases like “date night.” I had willed myself to believe that over time two people simply reach a point where they harness the electrical current between them for something like the smooth functioning of an efficient refrigerator—this is just what happens and maybe this even meant it was time to have a child. I told myself the closeness we had, a brain-centered intimacy, more than compensated for what I missed. But what was the closeness if we weren’t close enough to talk about what was missing? If I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it? I didn’t know how to tell him that the choices I’d made with him—to get married, to go off the pill—had started to make me feel that I no longer knew who I was and that I wasn’t ready to become someone new.

  Lee, who didn’t need me to be someone new, had appeared at just the right time. I wasn’t entirely sure why she had come back when she did, but I knew that what propelled her was longing—an almost physical tug.

  I’d like to think I would have gathered some courage, looked up, and tried to get all of this across to Andy if he’d stayed at the table for one minute more instead of going to the kitchen sink and wordlessly rinsing his dishes before getting in the shower.

  Luxelovah, Massachusetts: I heart Jastine! I haaaaated Jason when he was with Lillian. They were the most boring couple ever (lol!). Justine brings out his fun, verbal side. But don’t tell me Justine is carrying Count Andre’s baby.

  Debbysmom, Michigan: Why did they kill off Liza if there just gonna bring her back??!! I hurt she lost weight but shes not even pretty. She looks like a wrinkled raisin!

  CaseyP, Florida: If I wanted left-wing politics, I’d watch network news. Enough with the Afghanistan veteran story line. NOT. BUYING. IT. Writers, you are running the show into the ground. Hel-LO? You are driving away your fan base!!

  I had seen CaseyP before, though I hadn’t noticed until now that she (he?) had a black-and-white image of Ayn Rand for an online icon. Debbysmom had a kitten, Luxelovah a hot-pink handbag. CaseyP vented with a prune-consuming regularity and I had tried to stop taking the remarks personally because it only led to a reflexive antipathy (Who takes the time to write these things?) that turned in on itself (Who takes the time to read these things?). The dignified reaction was to see this as proof that viewers still cared enough about To Have and to Hold to get worked up and post in forums. Proof that we still had viewers, despite the constant, dispiriting reports of dwindling ratings. To Have and to Hold (THATH to its devoted audience) belonged to a dying breed: daytime, English-language soap operas. And its few surviving New York kin had decamped to Los Angeles to cut costs.

  It was time to stop procrastinating and head to my boss’s office to discuss Samantha Trudeau, who had come to Mill River, a fictional town located somewhere between Manhattan and Philadelphia, as a conniving call girl and blackmailed her way to becoming a cosmetics executive at Blythe Beauty. We were in the process of revealing that she was the long-lost daughter of district attorney Saul Rappaport. The news would not only rock the town, it would start Samantha on a path of transformation, which would involve her discovering her Jewish heritage.

  “If you are now or have ever been a whore, do you have to go through a special cleansing ritual?” Frank asked as I came in and took the chrome-and-leather chair facing his desk.

  “I’ll have to check my handbook and get back to you.”

  “I didn’t know they still made handbooks. That’s why I count on you, young person. You keep me up to date.”

  Frank Sussman: mid-fifties, tailored khakis, V-neck sweaters, and the driest delivery of anyone I have ever known. His first day, he’d gathered us around and said, without breaking stride: “I’m not into posturing, but we do need to pump some virility into the shriveled men of Mill River. I think the last time Rick Howard’s dick saw the light of day, or even the crepuscular half-light, was 1985. I know we love us some divas around here but—” He sighed then plaintively sang the words “vagina dentata” to the tune of “Hakuna Matata.”

  “Special cleansing ritual. You mean like a mikvah?”

  “Yes. Do we need to go there?” Frank shifted his chin in rumination. “How about we wait a few months, back-burner it for the summer, then have her atone on Yom Kippur and apologize to all the people she’s hurt clawing her way to the top. We could do for Yom Kippur what we do for Christmas.” Christmas on the soaps was an expertly sentimentalized snowy time of hearth and home. Frank stopped himself. “On second thought, no. We’d have to keep this somber. Have Samantha really struggle with who she is. For a day or two.”

  “What if we gave her a friend? A woman she could talk to, confide in?”

  “Humanize her in a realistic way? It’s worth exploring.” He jotted down a note, or pretended to, and then handed me a sheaf of marked-up pages. “Moving on. Let’s talk about these Jastine scenes, shall we? I can tell you’ve been doing some research. Reading up on Latin American juntas.”

  “I have, actually.”

  “That’s the problem. Jason and Justine get schooled in rural poverty and state-sanctioned violence by Miguel, the hotel proprietor? His daughter relates the secret history of CIA involvement over a plate of arroz con pollo? Admirable, but we’re not trying to be NPR here. Look, it’s like in Anna Karenina. Levin starts going on about farming and peasants and you’re like, dear Lord, can we please get back to Anna and the Vron? You need to think of this coup not as a sociopolitical event but as an obstacle for Jason and Justine—how are they going to make it through? It’s also an excuse for Justine to interact with a few hot, if sinister, men in uniform. You can do better.”

  “I can?”

  “You’re going to have to. Don’t be so conscientious. Think hammocks and coconuts, colonial shutters and crumbling stucco, Jastine cavorting on a beach, sitting in a hotel lounge with a Graham Greene vibe or however Graham Greene–y we can get within budget. Maybe they’re at the bar, talking to Miguel.

  “Jason: ‘Miguel, I used to think love was the greatest con of all. But if it is, I want to go right on being a sucker.’

  “Justine: ‘Ahem?!’

  “Miguel: ‘I’ll drink to that, my friend.’

  “Something like that. End of the day, okay, Pro?”

  I could never quite tell if Frank was being ironic when he called me Pro, since it sounded like something he’d gleaned from a manual on effective team leadership. But I was heartened to hear it. In the six years I had reported to Frank, he had always seen potential in me. It made me want to never let him down.

  “I’m on it. But, Frank, then I need to take a few days off.”

  “What? No. Not now you don’t. What you need to do is this rewrite and then you need to get started on the Romola Dougherty custody case. Did sweeps suddenly slip your mind?”

  “I’ll check in as often as I can. I’m really sorry, but you know I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t important.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s personal.” He looked a little offended.

  “Vivian, this is just such terrible timing.”

  Vivian. Like a parent.

  “I know. I know.”

  Frank’s anger resided in his jaw. The arteries in his neck thickened into tree roots.

  “Do what you have to do.” No Pro. He just raised his hands, as if surrendering to my free will as a human being while questioning my longevity as his protégé. But Frank’s disappointment couldn’t suppress the wave of free
dom and escape that carried me down the hall.

  “I WAS LISTENING to some Jesse songs on my way home,” said Andy. Standing in the doorway of our bedroom after we’d eaten dinner in front of the TV and I had started to pack my bag. “I realized I hadn’t, in a long time. And it was weird. I felt like I was inside a giant brain scan or something, walking through a gray area I lost use of and now it was all lit up again.”

  “Sounds psychedelic.”

  “Kind of, yeah. It was this really physical sensation.”

  I wanted him to keep talking about Jesse Parrish as I packed. To feel his anger yielding to something closer to interest in what I had decided to do. He was no longer in the mood for a fight, which was a relief. And yet, it made me sad to think that he had given in. Given up.

  You are being impossible, I thought. What more do you want from him?

  “I’m gonna sound like I’m high if I try to explain it more.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “It just brings up so many associations that used to hold everything together, in a way, and all of those associations are still there, but they don’t have the same meaning for me anymore. I think there are things you have to come to at exactly the right age to really fall in love with them. If you’re too young, you don’t quite get it. And if you’re too old, you get it, you appreciate it, but it doesn’t necessarily move you so much. You don’t identify in the same way.”

  “You don’t think the music changes with you? That you can experience it differently over time?”

  The look on his face: I didn’t mean to make this a metaphor for our relationship.

  I held his look, long enough to feel that something between us would crack wide open if neither of us averted our eyes. But he did. I pulled more things from drawers. If he’d noticed that I was reaching for the best versions I had—my most flattering jeans, the T-shirt that hangs just so, my “good” underwear, as opposed to the tattered yet still functional pairs I wore around the house all the time, around him—he didn’t say anything. And whatever might have combusted between us under slightly more pressure merely dissipated. The rest of the night passed like so many other recent ones, ending with the two of us in bed, reading. Andy turning off the lamp on his side and rolling over. Me turning off my lamp and doing the same.

  THE NEXT DAY was Saturday and I realized I should have chosen a spot to meet Lee instead of having her pick me up at my apartment. Leaving Andy would have been tense but not nearly as complicated as it was now. Because now he was home with nowhere in particular to be. If he’d come up with something to do, it would have been a signal: I must take my strong feelings elsewhere. I still have strong feelings when it comes to Lee. No, he would have to stay and be here when she arrived. They would have to interact, I would have to watch them interact, and then he would watch me go with her. I was the one who had put us all in this position. I didn’t want to ask myself why.

  Lee rang the buzzer as I was getting a few toiletries together. Andy let her up, and part of me wanted to stay in the bathroom forever and just listen to them.

  “Andy,” I heard her say by the door. And it was so much at once: greeting, apology, request, demand, past, and present.

  “It’s good to see you, Lee.”

  I gave them time for what might have been an intense hug before calling out, “I’ll be right there!” and heading into the hallway, ready to go.

  “This is such a nice place you guys have,” she said.

  I thanked her but didn’t ask if she wanted to look around. Something had already shifted since I saw her at the diner, when I’d wanted to have her over, to show off to her. But Andy offered her a tour. He took her from the kitchen into the living room, and she complimented the ways we’d filled the space. The teak sideboard Andy’s parents had passed down to us, a marble and brass lamp we’d bought one weekend in Cold Spring, an old framed mirror. Furnishings that conveyed intentions, building a life together. Through her eyes, though, I saw them as an arrangement of props. Staged domesticity.

  Andy didn’t ask her about the last few years, and she didn’t offer him details. Maybe it was understood that I’d already let him know. Maybe neither of them cared, in the sense that it didn’t matter to them; they would always just pick up wherever they had left off. Or maybe I was reading too much into it and each of them wanted to get this over with and get moving. Andy asked Lee if she’d like a cup of coffee and she said no thanks, she’d had one earlier and didn’t want to get overcaffeinated. Everything was smooth, polite, and strange. The way Lee and Andy said goodbye. Even the way Andy and I said goodbye. A quick kiss before he pulled away.

  “Call me from the road?”

  I nodded.

  “Good luck.”

  And then Lee and I were in the elevator. An old contraption, with a door you had to pull, walls thick with decades of paint. Taking it always seemed like a bit of a risk, and maybe we should’ve used the stairs, I said to Lee. It was all I could think of to talk about just then. She went along with it—trying to read a name someone had etched into the latest coat of taupe—until we got to the lobby.

  “So the car’s a few blocks away. Street parking isn’t easy around here.”

  “I should’ve said so. You could’ve called me and I could’ve come down.”

  “Oh, but that wouldn’t have been half as awkward.”

  Her flashing eyes. Her smile. I wanted to forget everything. I wanted to link my arm in hers. To walk down the block like that, leaning together, the camera behind us, watching us go.

  I MET LEE the summer after my freshman year of college and nothing before that seemed to matter much, despite my having scribbled down all the details. I know I had opinions, reactions, beliefs that had guided me to where I was. I’d had what I thought were formative suburban high-school experiences. Slept with a boy who was fixated on a friend of mine, a willowy, emotionally unstable cross-country runner. His infatuation with her baffled me—her taste in and knowledge of just about everything except athletic shoes was far less discerning than his. I thought, If only I could lift the scrim and make him see! But see what? I knew exactly what he liked about her: she ran long distances through forested paths with determination and agility. It didn’t matter what she was thinking, whether she had ever seen My Own Private Idaho or Stranger Than Paradise. Heard of Sonic Youth or Cocteau Twins. To watch her run along the perimeter of the school fields at practice was to want whatever it was she had. That, and she was incredibly moody. When her parents committed her to an in-patient psychiatric program, he asked me how she was doing. I used our mutual concern to get closer to him and I didn’t really see anything wrong with that until I was sitting on his bed, putting my sturdy beige bra back on, wishing I were a better friend. Wishing I were more willowy, more emotionally unstable, so that he would fall in love with me. He offered to drive me home and while the day before I would have jumped at the opportunity to sit in the black bucket passenger seat of his dusk-blue Chevy Nova, I decided to walk. And then I started running, halfway across town back home. As if I could outrun my shame. But what really powered me was pride. I’d done it. With him. I remember thinking I couldn’t have run like that in less supportive underthings.

  I had some measure of personality and direction, a solid enough core to resist no less than three offers to join cults my first semester freshman year. By the third time I realized the joke: I was one of those people who was waiting to be approached, to be tapped and told, “Your life is going to start now.” And those people who wait for life to come to them, they do get approached, only they get told something like: “Your life is going to start now and it’s going to be a series of communal breakfasts and questionable sexual encounters with a messianic father-figure.”

  By the third time, as soon as the girl sat down next to me on the broad steps of the humanities library, I knew what she was after. The thick paperback she pulled out—Earth on the cover against a glossy black background with a flaming red lozenge hurtling toward the
blue planet—confirmed it. But she was striking without trying too hard in her sundress and gray sweatshirt and her sunglasses, which made me think she was part of a group I should want to belong to.

  “This is a good spot for reading.” Her manner was laid-back and content. She possessed a secret knowledge.

  “Yeah, it’s nice.”

  “Not that anyone aside from us students reads much of anything anymore. All people do now is shop, right?” The hitch in her delivery, the narc falseness of “us students” belied her tranquil conviction. “As if rampant consumerism is going to fill the void created by modern society. It fills the void in the way a candy bar does, satisfying your craving but rotting your teeth.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not saying we should go live in the woods, survive on berries, and make our own clothes. It’s not that simple, obviously, but I do think there’s a better way.” She opened her big book and I looked at her shoes—a pair of latticed plastic skimmers you could buy in drugstores, the sartorial line between a certain stripe of style-conscious girl and diabetic septuagenarian. It could have gone either way, but we both knew those shoes, on her, were cooler than mine on me.

  On a stained and highlighted page of her tome, an elaborate mathematical formula hovered above an illustration of a wormhole and the bolded words “Sentries of Perception.” She started to explain but her rising enthusiasm muddled her clarity. She apologized. “I know it probably seems like nonsense or bullshit. But I swear, it’s not. It’s complicated, but in the way that, like, breathing is complicated. If you think about everything that goes into your taking a breath, well, it’s obviously incredibly complex. But”—she exhaled—“most people don’t think about it.”

  “Right.”

  “Listen, there’s this study group I belong to—study group makes it sound like work—it’s more like we have get-togethers over dinner. Maybe you’d want to check it out sometime? I think you’d really like it.”