The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  “I love this song,” said Lisette’s friend Nate, talking to me. “That voice, it gives me such a hard-on.”

  “Sure,” I said. Nate stepped closer to me, saying nothing for a few long seconds, but apparently forming a question as he looked into my eyes.

  “Are you Greek?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You have Greek eyes.”

  I lowered my newly Greek eyes and then glanced at Andy. He was watching me with an expressionless intensity that only highlighted the embarrassing nature of my back-and-forth with Nate. I wanted Andy to turn away so I could continue my embarrassing exchange. When he didn’t, I wondered what he wanted from me. Some kind of chance opened up for no more than an instant before it swallowed itself and disappeared. It was so brief I didn’t know what it even was, but I was disappointed by its disappearance. Lisette came back with drinks and positioned herself in Andy’s lap and I wanted to say to him, “You have the luxury of not having to say stupid things to people in public, you have the luxury of looking at me like that without having to think too much about what it might mean because here comes your girlfriend and now she’s sitting on you.”

  “I hear Greece is amazing,” I said.

  “Oh, man, Greece is fucking awesome.”

  Nate professed his love for feta cheese while moving his hand to my waist, just under the edge of my shirt. He needed a smoke—did I want to come with him outside? Yes, I did. It would be the fourth cigarette of my life. I went to grab my coat and Andy stopped me. Glowering.

  “Really?”

  “What?”

  “This guy?”

  “Well, we can’t all be as smart as you, Andy.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Why do you even care?”

  “I don’t—I just—on the level of—whatever. I don’t know.”

  “Nate is fucking awesome,” Lisette interjected. “If Viv wants to go make out with him, I don’t see why it’s your problem.”

  “Yeah, Andy, why is it your problem?” said Lee. She’d been watching the whole scene like a bird of prey, circling on high, waiting to dive down for the kill. The way she swooped in reminded me of that night when she’d led Andy up off that mattress and away from me. It was something secretive between Lee and Andy and yet I figured into it, inextricably.

  “Fuck it,” he said. Then to Lisette: “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Seriously?” asked Lisette.

  “Yeah. And I fucking hate that word. Seriously. Like nobody can fucking tell when anybody is being fucking serious anymore?”

  “So angry! My goodness.” Lisette cupped his face with her hands. “But it’s not even midnight yet. We have to make it to midnight.” It was New Year’s Eve, the turn of the millennium. If Lisette could have shrunk Andy into a figurine and put him in her pocket, I think she would have. He, just then, might have let her.

  “Okay. Sorry. I’m sorry. Just forget I said anything.”

  I would have gone home with Nate that night regardless, but I doubt I would have felt so purposeful about it if Andy hadn’t cared.

  That spring Andy moved away, for a job in the Bay Area, but then came back several years later. He said it was, in part, because his boss, Jeffrey Sorbo, kept saying to him, “We’re so similar,” and Andy kept thinking, If that’s true, I’m fucked. Andy had started working as a programmer for Sorbo right before the technological innovator had started faux-humbly brushing off the labels of “visionary” and “savior” the press began routinely applying to him. Before the adulation from convocation speeches and conference talks had him considering a move into government, just to, you know, shake things up in Washington. Sorbo would have taken Andy with him (Where? Wherever they wanted to go!) if Andy had only believed in his ascendancy. Andy did believe in his ascendancy, which is what troubled him. Sorbo would go far, and then go farther, but to what end? What was he really motivating anyone to do when he fired up undergraduates about inventing yet another way for people to distract themselves, trigger a dopamine release, and twitchily buy things in the name of newfangled social interaction? Sorbo wasn’t even cynical about it. If he had been, Andy might have been able to cynically go along for the ride but Sorbo demanded a belief in his worldview that Andy couldn’t conjure. Maybe it had something to do with integrity? When had integrity come to be synonymous with self-defeat? Andy told me all of this one winter evening, as we were sitting in my studio apartment, essentially the old parlor of a cut-up brownstone. As he spoke, all I could think of was him, fifteen pounds heavier, in that shirt with the satin seahorse on it.

  Snow steadily accumulated into the night as Andy and I talked. It grew late and the storm gave him a good excuse to stay at my place, but I expected we would go to sleep and wake up in the morning and nothing else would happen. Only I didn’t really expect that. Because of the way he was looking at me, the way I looked at myself for more than a moment in the bathroom mirror. How many times had I hugged Andy? How many times had he put his arm around me? Now, with him next to me by the window, watching the snow float down below the streetlight, all I could think about was how close could we possibly stand without touching?

  I went into the bathroom again and got into a T-shirt and sweats (not Sunday-paper-and-a-latte loungewear, but thick, gray, elasticized-ankle Rocky pants. Gonna fly now!) and Andy took off his sweater but kept on the rest of his clothes. We both got into my double bed. I lay uncomfortably still, daring myself to do something—you could make it look accidental—and then backing down. Why do you have to make it look accidental? Why can’t you just be honest and unafraid? Ten minutes passed on the nightstand clock. Fifteen. Nineteen.

  “I’m not sleeping,” he said.

  “Me neither.”

  On our sides, facing each other, he slowly moved his hand beneath the waistband of the sweats and my underwear, touching my ass, brushing my upper thigh and then making circles along my lower back. I didn’t know where to put my hand so I brought it to his face and I wondered why we weren’t kissing yet and it made me think of a movie with a prostitute whose services included everything but kissing, too intimate, too personal, and why did I have to be thinking about that right now? Stop it. Stop finding ways to distract yourself. Kiss him. Take your fucking sweatpants off.

  He pulled me on top of him. There were smiles, some maneuvering, but no discussion.

  That came later. Questions like: Had you ever thought about that? But when had you thought about it? When we first met? In that way that whenever you meet someone new you think about it? He had thought about it then, in that way. Later, he thought about it in a different way. He thought about it out in California. He thought a lot about it on the way over to my place that night. We didn’t talk about what was next. Because we didn’t want to pressure each other? Because we both already knew.

  In the insulated, snowy whiteness of the morning, I crouched down to look beneath the bed for Andy’s wallet, which was no longer in the back pocket of his pants.

  “It’s not under here. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I get to see you on all fours.”

  Who was this? It was Andy. And me: a big, gleeful grin for the dust bunnies.

  If Andy had been any other guy, I would have called Lee soon after he left. Eventually I told her what had happened, but only in the broadest strokes. And surrounded it with a false air of disbelief and casualness.

  “I’M PREGNANT,” I said to the ceiling and Rodgers. Now one more person who wasn’t Andy knew.

  “Good morning to you, too.” Rodgers propped himself up. With the sheet wrapped around his legs he looked like a merman.

  “No, really. I am.”

  I could see Rodgers actively thinking before he finally came out with: “I’m excited for you.”

  “You don’t think it’s weird that I slept with you knowing I’m pregnant? Or that I slept with you at all?”

  “It’s kind of fucked up. But a lot of good things are.”

  “Thank you for s
aying that. It is fucked up. Not just this”—taking in the bed, the whole of our night with my hands—“but it’s fucked up that you seem to be more excited for me than I am for myself.”

  “I kind of envy you.”

  “Like you wish you had a uterus?”

  “When you have a kid doesn’t it relieve you, in a way, of all that self-absorption and striving to do something with your life because there, you’ve done it?”

  “I don’t know. You’ve already done something with your life, though, so I don’t know why you’re even talking like that.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  Without a child, I was another no-longer-young person whose youth fueled her ambition until it stalled out over a lack of drive or talent or money. As a mother, wouldn’t I have a clearer purpose? My THATH wages wouldn’t be cause for existential questioning or a reminder of some abandoned dream; they would be, say, a college fund. So that one day my child would have the opportunity to be overeducated and underemployed. “You’ve achieved what you wanted. And you wanted big things.”

  “It’s not as satisfying as you think.”

  “But it must be satisfying just to be able to say that.”

  “I guess it is. But a kid! Literally, that may be the most creative thing you can do. You’re creating a fucking person.”

  True, but it also sounded like a sop. My fear was that it was one of the most distracting, preoccupying things I could do. The biggest excuse for not doing anything else. And what kind of person lays that on their child? What if a baby didn’t relieve you of self-absorption and didn’t relieve you of your dreams? What if your self-absorption remained and your dreams remained just that—dreams—and you were left angry, frustrated, and resentful? For the rest of your life.

  “Maybe you’ll have new dreams,” said Rodgers.

  “I never realized you were such an optimist.”

  “Me neither.”

  He got up to make us coffee. Already I wondered what I would say to Rodgers if I ever saw him again, the assumption being that I wouldn’t. Not any time soon. Would I include him in the mass-email birth announcement Andy and I would no doubt send around to friends and family? (That is, if Andy and I continued to be “Andy and I” and everything turned out okay with the pregnancy.) The bulk email slip-in for Rodgers. Was that wholly inappropriate or actually the perfect vehicle of communication in this instance? I had about thirty-six weeks to figure that out. To hope that questions like this might be put to rest by the arrival of an overwhelmingly strong and calm mother-knowledge that would make my inner voice sound less like mine and more like that of a midwife full of folk wisdom.

  As Rodgers drove me back to the motel later that morning, I thought, This is why people think they can carry on affairs. His truck wasn’t crashing, swerving off the road, running out of gas. The pitch of awkwardness wasn’t even all that high. I accepted that this is what happens between people, and people are large enough to absorb it without shattering. Not until we pulled into the lot and I saw Lee standing on the cement parking strip in front our room did it occur to me that I had been wrong. The unit, the twosome of the previous night wasn’t Rodgers and me. It was—my stomach sank—Lee and Rodgers. That little dance the night before that left Lee subtly insulted, that gave her a reason to go. Maybe they hadn’t sat down and choreographed it beforehand, but still, they were co-conspirators. But for what? My satisfaction? My degradation? A spasm of need reverberated through me and I hastily attached it to Andy.

  “Hey,” said Lee. “Thanks for bringing her back to me.”

  Rodgers nodded. Then he walked around to the passenger side. The paranoia bloomed and, if anything, Lee and Rodgers now seemed like parents. Not mine, but strange, shadow parents. I was a child in the grips of learning that what she knows about the world is small, and dictated by other people, and that she sees only what they choose to let her see.

  Still, when Rodgers held me to him, despite everything, my body seemed both to sink into and draw a taut energy from his. I didn’t move until he did, tilting his head and smiling his crooked, almost embarrassed smile. “See y’round?”

  “See you around.”

  I went over to Lee and we stood there, Lee with her hand to her forehead like a visor, me squinting in the sun, arms folded, as Rodgers drove away.

  “I need a shower,” I said without looking at her, without saying anything else.

  I still smelled like sex. I must have stood in the tub for half an hour, the water running off the pink tile and my back. Soaping up seemed ceremonial. If you are now or have ever been a whore, do you have to go through a special cleansing ritual? For a brief, low moment, I wondered if the previous night could count as some kind of archetypal, Joseph Campbell initiation. But initiation into what? The world of adultery? Then I wondered if it was possible to create a scratch n’ sniff sticker of an after-sex scent, if that were a thing that people did—have sex, make a commemorative sticker—would I want one, as a kind of sense-memory aid to remind me of Rodgers? I could bury it in a drawer of socks. It would be there when I was old and Andy had died and our child had moved away. I would take it out then and think about a night long ago. I wouldn’t have a sticker for Andy. I wouldn’t need one. I would have so much of him. I would have a whole lifetime of him. Wouldn’t I?

  While I was in the bathroom, Lee was busy making phone calls. First to Linda, in Los Angeles, who camouflaged any genuine reaction to the news that her daughter had talked to Flintwick with an effusive interest in the man. Oh, how is old Charlie? He didn’t do anything too unspeakable did he? But I don’t understand—how did you run into him? Oh, I see, but what were you doing up around there? Oh, honey, I wish you’d leave this alone. I just don’t think you’re going to find what you’re really looking for.

  The second call Lee made had been to Bill Carnahan. If you weren’t on his preapproved list of callers, you had to talk your way past a team of receptionists and a good cop/bad cop pair of executive assistants before you were granted the opportunity to leave a message for the “massively busy” man himself. But Carnahan called Lee back within five minutes, while driving his Ferrari down I-95, headed to a property he owned on a bluff in Rhode Island. He would be there all weekend and hey, he had an idea. Wouldn’t you know those photographs he’d purchased from Charlie Flintwick were hanging in a widow’s walk he had converted into a carpeted strip of a room that he used for thinking and pacing. It was here that he waited “for his ships to come in.” It would be his pleasure to let Jesse Parrish’s daughter have a look at those prized possessions. Carnahan loved company, as did his wife.

  “What do you think?” Lee asked me.

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  She was more or less ready to go, running on some kind of efficient drive that seemed so foreign to me just then. I was standing there in a thin, scratchy white towel that didn’t quite cover me, and I was at a loss. Even drying off seemed too complicated to do.

  Lee went into the bathroom and came out with two more towels. She wrapped my wet hair up and then began to pat down my shoulders and my arms. I just watched her work on me. She was like a nurse. A blind, bandaged soldier would have fallen in love with her, with her touch, her manner, not knowing at all what she looked like.

  “Okay. Stop,” I said. Turning away, finding my clothes.

  “I’ll drive you back home,” she said. “And then go see Carnahan on my own.”

  “No,” I said. I should have gone home, but I couldn’t. Not now, not yet. I couldn’t even call Andy. He’d texted me when I was in the shower.

  Sorry I missed you last night. You OK?

  I texted him back. The modern telegram, where you leave so much out, including your silence.

  OK. Miss you. Love.

  Then I got into the car with Lee.

  NEITHER OF US spoke. Lee drove, and I said I needed to check in with work. So I emailed Frank, unnecessarily, and then searched “insane custody cases,” trying to figure out how to approac
h our Romola Dougherty story. Two years ago, on the night that a tornado tore through Mill River, Romola had given birth to a stillborn girl, and an orderly, obsessed with the Doughertys’ sharp-tongued daughter, switched the baby with another delivered at approximately the same time, presenting it to Romola as her own. Romola hadn’t made it to the hospital; she labored in the middle of a power outage at Pine Lawn, the town’s psychiatric facility. The baby’s biological mother, Peyton Sterling, had been committed to Pine Lawn during her seventh month of pregnancy, when she developed a rare psychomotor disorder that left her immobile and incommunicative. Now, Peyton had come out of that fog, remembered giving birth, and wanted her lost child back while Romola greived and raged. Romola and Peyton had been best friends; they had been troubled and cynical and fun together. They had been pregnant together, comparing notes and confiding hopes, until Peyton slipped out of this world. Romola had blossomed into a wonderful mother. Peyton’s mental condition was perfectly fine now but doctors said she could lapse into a vegetative state at any time. Who would you root for? What would become of their friendship?

  I tried, but I couldn’t get lost in the characters. Out the window, the green rolling hills of western Massachusetts weren’t working for me either.

  “What did I just do?” I said. “What am I going to say to Andy?”

  “Do you have to say anything?” said Lee, as if picking up some place we’d left off. “You guys don’t have one of those arrangements where you’re allowed a certain number of, like, indiscretions?”