The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  “I like your tin foil, Miss X.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Miss X-Files.” He pronounced it X-falls, which sounded so much looser and better than the pinchy way I would say it: X-fiy-uls. I realized I was still holding the book of calisthenics. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. Topics of conversation popped up in my mind like Whac-A-Moles: David Duchovny, squat thrusts, the Civil War. Everything got the mallet. I wondered if he could somehow read my thoughts because he just stood there, stooped over me, his mouth a little open and on the verge of a smile. Finally he said, “I’ll see y’round.”

  I turned to Lee but she had gone. Out in the main room I spotted Andy on the sidelines of a throng by the stage. He raised his arms and gave me a “please save me” look, and I felt a huge surge of affection for him for being pudgy and wearing an ill-fitting shirt with a big satin seahorse on it. The performance ended and the sound system came on; the music grew progressively dronier as the crowd thinned. Still no sign of Lee. Andy and I found a disgusting mattress in a back room, and I was so tired all I wanted to do was lie down on it. It was disgusting in a way that I romanticized as arty.

  I didn’t remember falling asleep, but a murmur woke me up. By then the place was silent. Lee knelt by Andy’s head, her mouth close to his ear. What she was saying I couldn’t make out, but something tender-seeming as her fingers brushed the side of his face. She kissed his temple, his forehead, and then she kissed him on the mouth. He sat up and pulled her closer, his hand in her hair. Through a triangle of space, my arm crossed over my face, I could watch without their knowing. Or so I thought. When Lee drew back for a moment, I shut my eyes but not before a flicker of contact had been made. She moaned a little, but the kissing continued until it was replaced by shifting and creaking. “Mmm,” I heard her say. “C’mon.” The springs in the mattress rose. Footsteps. I opened my eyes and they were gone.

  I wanted so badly to be someone who didn’t care. I wanted to go find Noah Stone or Rodgers Colston and sleep with one of them in a desultory way. I wanted to be someone who didn’t think to use the word “desultory” in relation to sex. I wanted to be lost and to surrender the way Andy just had. But I took Lee’s seduction of Andy personally, feeling somehow that she was making fun of me, of my ability to draw lines and my inability to cross them. The worst part is that I just lay there, believing Andy would come back, that we’d log a few more hours of sleep and then go home.

  But I was on my own. I tossed and turned, scratched at what I assumed were fleas, and waited for the sky to lighten to a deep blue. When it finally did, I headed out to a parking lot, a near-treeless vista of abandoned warehouses and disused railroad tracks. Vacancy. A quiet morning. The rush of highway traffic faintly audible. Lee likely would have known how to orient herself by the sun’s low position in the eastern sky or something like that. Sometimes we would go to a park by the water—a strip of green between the interstate and the harbor—and sit on a bench in the sun, not doing much of anything beyond looking out and watching shore birds land on wooden pilings. Lee knew what the birds were—cormorants, great blue herons. It was incongruous. Who taught her these things? Was she one of those children who develops an interest and clandestinely pursues it? Had she kept a field guide under her bed and studied at night while Linda entertained in the hills above Los Angeles? Her ability to name a bird, or a tree, or a constellation, her knowledge of the natural world, conflicted with the idea she had of herself—as a bright enough but not particularly bookish girl who didn’t fully merit whatever academic success she’d achieved. It wasn’t her intelligence, she seemed to suggest, that had gotten her here, to the school that Andy and I had worked hard to get into. And maybe it wasn’t. Still, she would have known what to do here, standing at the edge of this rusting postindustrial plain. The childish part of me said it didn’t matter, that I might as well walk myself into a situation so terrible that Lee and Andy, but especially Lee, would feel, for the rest of their lives, the guilt of leaving me alone. Some other part of me, the underutilized, bootstrapping part, said, Buck the fuck up, you’re on your own and the day is mild and you have a city at your feet, so just go. I saw a Dunkin’ Donuts in the distance. To each his own lodestar.

  Two patrons sat at small tables and a third leaned against a counter by the window while an employee in an orange and pink smock attended to a tray of crullers behind the register. I took my coffee and glazed donut to my own little table and sat there, feeling existential. I hadn’t noticed, until he’d moved and was standing over me, that the customer by the window was Rodgers Colston.

  “Miss X.”

  It sounded like Miss Sex. I tried hard not to drop the cup in my hand.

  “Mister Colston.”

  “Did you have a good time last night?”

  “Yeah. It was great. Right?”

  It didn’t matter what the words were, only that we had established a rhythm and kept it going. He sat down and we said more basic things while his eyes flashed with something like wry amusement. I remember focusing mine on his upper lip and wondering what it would feel like against my neck, the back of my thigh. He caught me staring.

  “I still don’t know your name.”

  “Viv. Vivian.”

  “That suits you.”

  “Does it?” Like a stylist. It reminded me of the hairdresser at the upscale salon my mother took me to when I was fifteen and going through a homely phase. He had thick swoopy hair, he could pull off a red buffalo plaid work shirt with white jeans, he was from Vermont, and I would have believed anything he said. I believed him when he told me I was pretty and that he was sure I’d have a boyfriend soon, if I wanted one. That I didn’t soon have a boyfriend, that I didn’t even really like the haircut he gave me, somehow didn’t make me question the first part of the statement. I never, for instance, wondered if my mother had tipped him to say such a thing, I just took heart in his compliment. It got me through sophomore year.

  “I just mean it’s a nice name.”

  “I like Rodgers.”

  “It’s a family name.”

  “Do people ever call you Rod?” I became very conscious of how I was swallowing my coffee.

  “No.” Finally he full-on smiled. Crooked teeth. Pointy teeth. Back woods? Or so upper class as to be beyond orthodontia? “No one calls me Rod.”

  We took our donuts and started walking past the deserted factories and down blocks of two-story houses with siding, beige, light blue, pale green, the main avenue of the city’s Little Italy, where two or three bakeries were raising their gates. We walked across the highway overpass, past the old stone office buildings downtown, the bus hub, the new river promenade, up the hill toward campus. The quiet of the early morning still hung over the city. At some point I realized he was walking me home.

  “I don’t really see it,” said Rodgers, when Lee and Noah came up like celebrity gossip. “Why Noah?”

  “Andy says it’s because he has no intellectual remove.”

  “Could be.” He shook his head at Andy and intellectual remove. “Andy, I mean, he’s all right. He’s that guy, you know that guy, that kind of sexually ambiguous guy who is basically dating the record store and, you know, if he could only meet someone who likes Bedhead as much as he does, everything would be fine.”

  I nodded and told myself to find out who Bedhead was. Also, Andy was sexually ambiguous?

  “You nod a lot,” he said.

  “Do I?”

  “You do.” Like he was noticing details about me. But also like everyone knew what that was good for. There was some buoyant thrill at being taken for a sexual object.

  “But I know what Andy means,” I said. “Noah’s so good-looking, and everything he does is just so awesome and so rad.”

  “And you hate that.”

  “I don’t hate it. I just hate feeling like I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “Of what? Are you going to tell me I wish I was fucki
ng Lee?”

  “Heh. No. I think you want to do something awesome and rad. It’s easier to not try to do anything than to admit you have any kind of ambition.”

  “I’m not putting myself out there?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s like Flaubert said, you should be ordinary and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so you can be violent and original in your art.” Wow, you really know how to flirt. Flaubert. Jesus.

  “Okay. But that easily turns into an excuse for not really living. Especially if you’re a bad artist. Then all you are is a . . . bourgeois.” This was the first time I’d come close to experiencing what I’d seen in movies—the romance of walking and talking.

  We’d reached my front steps. I was supposed to do something unbourgeois. Something Lee might do. But another voice in my head said Lee wouldn’t approve. Twenty bucks says Lee will tell you something about him that will leave you feeling humiliated. Fifty bucks says those are the real terms of your friendship: her judgment, your humiliation. And, in the scheme of things, what small, petty sums! Where was this even coming from? When had Lee ever judged me, other than to think I looked a little lonely and sad on those library steps?

  I tried to give Rodgers a meaningful look that probably came off as constipated. He took my hand and I had no idea what he was going to do with it and maybe he didn’t either because he just held it for an incredibly long ten seconds.

  “I’m missing my chance,” he said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  We kissed in the street and kept kissing until I could no longer stand on my tiptoes. In a way, it was my first kiss. The first one that ever made me feel the way I’d heard kissing described. Not merely something you did as a prelude to sex, but a key reason for having a body. So your breath could be taken away, so you could go weak in the knees.

  It was almost too much for me and I pulled back.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Then, because I couldn’t think: “My calves are cramping.”

  “Is that your way of asking me in?”

  I just stared at him. I was missing my chance.

  “I’m glad you went to that party,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “All right.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see y’round, Miss X.”

  He looked back at me and then turned the corner as I fished my keys out of my bag. Our neighbors—Lee and Andy called them Moose and Chipmunk—were on their porch, stretching for their morning run. Lee had lived on their hall freshman year and she regarded them with something less than scorn but more than indifference. Moose had a long face, knobby features, and a prominent chin. Globally, she seemed sweet and dull. Chipmunk, with her round cheeks, ski-slope nose, and darting eyes, looked meaner and capable of crossing you. Sometimes, on the sidewalk, Chipmunk would bare her white, white teeth and let out a sustained shriek. She called this laughing. Moose and Chipmunk played tennis. They wore preppy shirts with thin stripes and driving moccasins. The closest we came to real feeling for either of them was the time Lee read an article about plastic surgery in Vogue. “I wonder what Chipmunk thinks when these doctors talk about aesthetic improvements in the field, how today’s look is more natural, less cookie-cutter, how they’d never do a ski-slope nose now. What does Chipmunk do with that?”

  “Late night?” said Chipmunk.

  It took me a second to realize she was talking to me.

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Nice dress,” said Moose in the friendliest tone.

  “Thanks,” I said morosely and ducked inside. What was my problem? Why did I have to be such an asshole?

  Nobody else was home and I found myself stopping in the hall, tipping my face upward at the angle it had made while I was kissing Rodgers, opening my mouth, moving my lips. I replayed moments from that morning, in the shower, over a bowl of cereal, on the couch as I tried and failed to read a post-structuralist essay on Terms of Endearment.

  “Where were you?” Lee and Andy asked when they finally came back.

  “Where were you?”

  “We looked all over for you.”

  “It’s fine. Rodgers Colston took me home.”

  “Rodgers. How about that.”

  “What do you mean, how about that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Then the three of us acted as though we had shrugged the whole thing off, but a change in mood came over our little household after that day. Several years later, in a grad school seminar, I would come across a passage in Kafka’s diaries, a fragment of what he would eventually publish as “In the Penal Colony.” A man compares himself to a dog: “With his hand on his heart, he said ‘I am a cur if I allow that to happen.’ But then he took his own words literally and began to run around on all fours.” That seemed about right when it came to Lee and Andy and that time. I spent the rest of the summer trying to prove to them (but mostly to myself) that not only was I not their pet, but I didn’t want to be. Which was hard, because I had liked making myself into their responsibility. I was Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause—Lee was James Dean, of course, which made Andy Natalie Wood. Lee spent more and more time off with Noah Stone. I got to know Andy better, hanging out together enough so that we each forgot the other was the next best thing.

  I ran into Rodgers Colston on the street and he told me about another party and wondered if I would be there. I thought I should be blasé, so I said maybe. But then we high-fived and he held on to my hand for a long moment. A curling began in my stomach and unfurled throughout my body. I couldn’t stop smiling the rest of the day.

  I mentioned the party to Lee, thinking for once I might know about something she didn’t.

  “Yeah. You want to go? Is this, like, a thing? You and Rodgers?”

  “No. I don’t know. What do you know about him?”

  “Not too much. But I have this feeling he’s the kind of guy who wakes you up the next morning wanting to jerk off on your face.”

  “That’s a kind of guy?”

  “And he’s old.”

  “He’s, like, twenty-four. He’s in grad school. And wasn’t Bruce old? Older?”

  “Bruce. God. Yeah, well, that’s my point.”

  If old Rodgers had woken me up that way, I don’t think I would have minded. It was the fact that Lee thought it was objectionable. My interest in Rodgers couldn’t stand up to her judgment.

  I went to the party with Lee. We were drunk, on a roof, lying in plastic lounge chairs. Firecrackers went off over our heads. Rodgers sat by me, moving his hand up and down my calf, then behind my knee and up under my skirt. Lee couldn’t see, or pretended not to. I had two thoughts: What is he doing? And Please, don’t stop. But I couldn’t leave Lee and go with him when he suggested we get out of there. So he left and I didn’t see him again that night.

  Soon enough, he had a girlfriend and on the occasions I ran into him he would just say hello and give me a slanted smile.

  It shouldn’t have meant anything to me, the prospect of seeing him now. It shouldn’t have made me nervous.

  “I don’t know why you never went out with Rodgers.” Lee had her phone in hand now, scrolling through her contacts.

  “Maybe because you told me he would masturbate on my face?”

  “What did I know?”

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “Viv, I was dating a guy who wouldn’t fuck me.”

  “Noah Stone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “He couldn’t get it up.”

  “But he had such a reputation.”

  “He said it was his meds. He was good at other stuff.”

  “You and Noah, you were together for a while.”

  “I figured I would eventually be the one to help him out of it. Typical.”

  She acted as though she weren’t rearranging the entire past as I’d understood it, but merely picking up an ob
ject and blowing the dust from it before putting it back into place. Why had she never told me this before?

  “I’m calling Rodgers.”

  “I doubt he even remembers me.”

  “I doubt that’s true.”

  I had seen Rodgers exactly once after college. Headed home at an hour so late I can only marvel at it now, I stepped into a subway car and saw him knit together with a woman in one of the seats. He looked up at me but neither of us said a word. I didn’t have the confidence to speak to him, but I thought too much of myself to believe a simple Hey! would do. If there was anything to our what-might-have-been, if it wasn’t entirely in my mind, then he must have felt the same thing. As they rose to get off the train two stops later, he looked back at me. Confirmation. The doors closed.

  “I’m calling him.” Before I could pretend to protest, Lee was talking to him, making a plan.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’d love to see us. He’s up here. We’re going over.”

  “What?”

  “What what?”

  “What is this?”

  “It’s hanging out with an old friend.”

  “Remember when we thought he was so old because he was twenty-four?”

  “I know! He was only twenty-four? God. It’s like once you hit twenty-five, you stop using Keats as a measure for accomplishment. At twenty-seven you stop using all those dead twenty-seven-year-olds. And then, I don’t know, you try to find some late bloomers to admire.”

  “Grandma Moses.”

  “Grandma Moses. Father Time.”

  “Father Time is eternal. That’s different.”

  When had Keats ever been a model for Lee? I remembered seeing the Norton Anthology on the floor of her room, its onionskin pages unmarked. But what had I known? Nothing of Noah Stone’s sad flaccidity. And what had I really known about Rodgers? And what did I know now about Lee and Andy and the state of my marriage? About what was happening inside me? All I knew was that for the first time since pregnancy hormones had flooded my body, I suddenly wasn’t so, so tired.

  THIS WAS SHAPING up to be the kind of night I no longer had, when my life lay ahead of me like an ocean and I could swim out beyond any mistake. At least, that’s what my early twenties had felt like.