The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  But that was just it. Linda couldn’t give her anything more of him. As though she were taking an inventory, Lee noticed something missing here among all the detail and revelation—the satisfaction, however small, however adulterated, that you might expect from someone asking your forgiveness. Linda was truly broken up. She was sorry for Lee. She just wasn’t exactly guilty about it. Linda failed to ask for her daughter’s forgiveness, Lee thought, not out of defiance or denial, but because Lee wasn’t the one she needed forgiveness from. Only Jesse. It was always, ultimately, between Linda and Jesse. That impenetrability they had. Hi, Jesse. Hi, Linda. Linda had been living with her boyfriend, and Jesse cornered her in the kitchen and that was that. I love you more than anything. It didn’t end, even when it was over. Even when Marion pulled him up off the floor at Flintwick’s and took him upstairs, and Linda found herself with a bottle of pills at a deserted resort, and Lee was in her pajamas, in a small bedroom at the house in Mamaroneck, Bubbe and Big Mort reading her a story before kissing her good night. Lee could blame her mother for taking her father away from her, but she suspected deep down that Jesse wasn’t hers to be taken, she never had the claim on him that Linda did. That maybe this is why it felt so sad and pathetic to be looking for some piece of him. It made her a misguided, humiliated Electra. And Jesse wasn’t an innocent victim in all of this. If it had gone the other way, if Jesse hadn’t swerved off the road, if he had hit Linda, if he had killed her, it would have been something he signed on for, part of the deal, their destructive dance. Marion was collateral damage, as was Lee. Was it any wonder she had felt so at home with Marion? Marion’s familiar and relaxing loneliness, like a long bath.

  Linda worked her fingers along the gold-hemmed edge of a colorful throw she’d picked up on a trip to India and reproduced for last fall’s Linda West Home line. The look would be “exotic but fresh,” as someone in Marketing put it. How Lee could have used someone in Marketing right about now, not to make sense of this situation but to package it, using words that no longer meant anything in order to sell it to her.

  Lee drank her water down though it did little to wet her throat. How could it be possible—she gauged her own astonishment—that she felt for Linda’s loss? Maybe it meant that her mother, not just her father, was something of a stranger, and Lee could swim in currents of sadness for strangers: people she watched on talk shows, people who posted pleading photocopied signs for their lost pets. So she felt for this woman she didn’t know. But in a snap, as if a change in barometric pressure thinned the air around her, the cruelty inside pushed outward with greater force.

  “It wasn’t an accident, though. You walked out into the road.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “You always know what you’re doing.” One of Linda’s best and worst qualities, one that required, as Ellen Shelley might put it, a shit-ton of compartmentalization. Lee hadn’t inherited that ability to hold herself together by splitting herself apart. But clearly she was good at keeping her own secrets.

  Lee had the urge to fling her empty glass across the room, followed by the pitcher and the tray, to upturn the coffee table, but she only stood and took her glass to the kitchen sink where she rinsed it, dried it, and put it away.

  “Lee,” Linda called from the living room. “What are you doing?”

  “I have to go,” she said. She stood in the hall, under the arch.

  “Go where?”

  That was the question. She thought of Viv, in a taxi back from JFK, in her fluorescent-lit lobby, taking the paint-coated elevator up to her graciously proportioned prewar apartment, slipping off her shoes and walking quietly down the hallway, pulling back the duvet and getting into bed with Andy, kissing the back of his neck, holding him close to her. Lee caught sight of the pink sofa and wondered why it had never occurred to her to buy one for her own place. When she’d moved back to New York, she thought her small one-bedroom in Gramercy might be temporary. But a designer she was friendly with, a French woman who wore only a limited color palette of black, white, and gray, offered to set up Lee’s place. She said it would be “sophisticated” and “classic” but still “lived in”—messy stacks of the right photography books—“and a little bit rocker.” Lee said that sounded fine. And it was fine. Fine like a trendy, upscale hotel.

  “I don’t know where I’m going to go,” said Lee. “I can’t be here.”

  Bony hands, sunken, fragile, swimming eyes. Linda was no longer the woman she had been even moments ago. The one who had, more or less, sat down and said, “Let me tell you how it is, little girl.” This woman couldn’t tell her anything. This woman couldn’t help her. This woman could only look on anxiously as her daughter walked out the door.

  HE WAS TELLING her a story he would later recount on a late night talk show, involving his six-year-old daughter and a canoe. This is why she had come here, because it was like watching TV. Hypnotic. She knew the sex with him would be the same way and it was. She hadn’t had to think or talk much, only smile when he told her how he missed the curve of her belly, grow wistful when he said he still thought about her all the time.

  “When was the last time you saw your daughter?” she asked.

  “A couple of months ago,” said Jack.

  “You should go see her.”

  “I know, but she’s in school, in New York, and I’m here right now. I’ll see her this summer.”

  “Yeah, but you should go sooner. Because you never know.”

  He didn’t do anything as obvious as wince, but she could see she was depressing him. Reminding him of other depressing women again—neither of them wanted that.

  “Sorry,” she said. A deflated plastic lounge chair lay by the side of the pool at the house he had rented. Behind it rose a hedge wall of shiny deep green leaves. Hollyleaf cherry, she almost said aloud. The way she used to name the birds, sitting by the water with Viv and Andy. Instead, she pointed to the drooping lounger. “Hey, can you blow this up?”

  “Sure. I’ll blow, you watch.”

  It was a line from a movie he’d been in, delivered by an actress making the transition from child star to adult roles. She’d accomplished this rather successfully, too, the actress. So it was possible. But you almost always had to say things like that. Jack had been about ten years younger then, his face fuller, rosier, but he was aging well, looking weathered, leaner, more interesting, less like a puppy dog. What would his daughter think someday, maybe years from now, when she went back and watched his old movies? Would she think, My dad was so beautiful once?

  a memory you didn’t know you had

  Viv, 2012

  The package arrived on a Saturday a few weeks ago, and went in a pile that Andy placed on the table in the front hall. We have a front hall now, with a narrow window running the length of the front door, throwing a rectangle of sunlight on the floor, on a pair of little shoes. We have a jacaranda tree shedding purple flowers in our yard. We have a yard. We have a son, who pulled the padded envelope down and said, “mail darf” as he struggled in vain to open it.

  “Maildarf,” said Andy. “The parcel service of Middle Earth.”

  “Dada,” said Leo, handing it to Andy.

  “Can you take that over to Mama?” Andy asked. “Then I’ll take you to the park.”

  “Mama,” said Leo.

  On the front was my name written in Lee’s hand, with an Austin, Texas, postmark, no return address. It had been more than two years since I’d heard anything from her. When she came back to New York following the confrontation with her mother, we met up for dinner, though only after repeated attempts on my part to pin down a time and place. Already again, she was not quite contrite enough, and I was mildly aggrieved. But that disappeared when she showed up steadied by the kind of calm that a beta-blocking agent or benzodiazepine provides. That calm was reinforced over the course of the evening by several glasses of Malbec that I matched with mineral water. She told me what had happened with Linda. I asked what she was go
ing to do. She’d already quit her job. There was no way she could keep working for her. No, I meant, was she going to go to the police? She didn’t think so. Marion never had. What good would it do anybody now, Linda serving out a sentence, if it even came to that? The law seemed so far removed from what had happened—inadequate in a sense. Lee wasn’t sure what was next. She thought she might travel for a while. Still, I thought. Still, after everything. To be someone who can just quit a job and go traveling with no fixed return. I envied her. That was as much as I knew.

  The envelope contained a CD (“How old school,” said Andy.) and a note for me. I knew, of course, what it must be and passed the disc to Andy. But I kept the note in my hand, not wanting to open it just yet. Some instinct told me I ought to be alone to read it. Whatever it contained belonged only to me, or someone I used to be.

  “Should we play it?” Andy asked.

  “You guys are all ready to go. Let’s play it when you get back.”

  “The suspense isn’t going to kill you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be anticlimactic.”

  “Yeah. After all this time.”

  “But Flintwick always said it was really good. Music is the one thing you could trust him about. Marion also said it was great.”

  I felt I should stop talking, that Lee and Linda and Jesse, the Parrish Wests, were like an ex that you could bring up every once in a while, just enough to stoke a healthy jealousy, but no more. I had to have my limits.

  “You guys go. I really have to get this stuff done. So we’ll just listen to it tonight.”

  “Okay. Don’t work too hard. We’ll see you later.”

  I’m writing at all hours now for a new set of characters in a different town. Verona Crossing, Wisconsin, is located somewhere between Milwaukee and Chicago. Verona Crossing is populated with its own magnates, supermodels, law enforcement agents, restaurateurs, and a disgraced mayor currently having a second act as a highly regarded cocktail mixologist. When word of THATH’s cancellation had come, Frank received an offer to work for one of the remaining L.A. soaps and suggested I go with him. “There’s nothing for us here,” he said of New York, as though it were time to leave the barren farm and hop a boxcar to a Hooverville. We had all seen the end coming. Andy thought we should do it. Pick up stakes, start again. His prospects were fine (“They have the Internet there.”) and the change, he believed, would be good for us, for our family.

  I want to compare it to a broken bone, what happened with Rodgers and coming clean with Andy. There had been a fracture and then I made the break complete. It could be fixed, it would heal, but we would have to immobilize it, work around it, learn to use other parts of our bodies in new ways. We would be able to walk again, and eventually there might not even be a limp. But still. There was a night, the end of a night, when I heard him come home to our apartment. I didn’t know where he’d been. He must have sat in the dark, in the living room, for an hour before he came into our room, just as it was getting light out. I wasn’t showing yet but I was already rounder, fuller. There was more of me in the bed. He lay down and put his body against mine, as if to make a seal between us. I wrapped his arms around me. There wasn’t one moment: I forgive you now. I had hurt him, hurt us, and that never went away. It took root, but it didn’t—allow me to switch metaphors—overrun or edge out everything else that could flourish between us.

  Soon after we settled in to a home in Highland Park, Linda got in touch and invited me to lunch. I considered saying no out of loyalty to Lee and respect for her feelings. But I didn’t know what Lee’s feelings were—she was gone from my life again. What surprised me was how infrequently I thought about her. It wasn’t an even exchange, Leo taking Lee’s place in a trio. I only registered the similarity of their names months after Leo was born. If Andy did, he didn’t say anything—we’d named him for Andy’s grandfather. But Leo’s presence demagnetized me to Lee’s old pull, which isn’t to say I didn’t welcome the temporary quiet now, the shutting of the door, being left with Lee’s letter. It’s just to say I didn’t miss her. Not like I used to. When I did things, I didn’t wonder what Lee would think, whether she would approve. I went to see Linda not because she was a link to Lee, not because they were made out of the same stardust and I wanted to be in a haze of it once more. I decided to see Linda because while I had been so naïve so often, I knew what knowing Linda West could do for me out here. That long-ago night—the redwood deck, the pool, the movie director.

  “Oh, Viv!” she gasped, clutching my shoulders, hands like hen claws. “You look wonderful!”

  “Breastfeeding,” I exclaimed, matching her excitement. “It’s the best diet ever.”

  “Yes, I have a dim memory of that.” She pulled me in for a hug while the host, whom she called by name, patiently gave us a moment before leading us to our table—a slab of salvaged wood by a window of reclaimed glass. “You know, I did nurse Lee. For a little while anyway. Not that I’d ever get any credit for it.” She raised her hands, palms toward me, as though surrendering to a judgment, a move I’d never seen her make. “So how is motherhood treating you?”

  It was wonderful, I said. Then she gave me her “Okay, for real, tell me, girlfriend” face. I quickly confessed to her how hard it had been, how unrelenting, especially at first. Sobbing in the shower, wondering how I would ever manage to leave the house again but not in an active, purposeful way, more in a mystified way: I used to leave the house? It was cold outside, a dirty New York winter. My body hurt. I wanted to convalesce. I had heard people say things like, “Parenthood is brutal but totally worth it.” They made it sound like a particularly challenging workout and not like you had plunged to the bottom of a lake and grown gills and that the world beyond the watery light of the surface was no longer yours.

  My maternity leave began just a few weeks before THATH’s cancellation came down, so I had no work to return to, no old, familiar structure. I read a lot of essays written by women who hated playgrounds. I worried that my love was not unconditional. I worried that I worried. But then my heart would leap as I watched my son sleeping. It would somersault when I sat him in my lap and patted his back to burp him, which he met with a calm but alert look, like a curious sightseer, with his arms out and folded over each other like a genie. He broke my heart when he rested his little hand on my waist as I nursed him and when his cry grew faint, exhausted and trembling. Sometimes he looked like a turtle. Once, squinting and full-cheeked, he looked like Wallace Shawn. And when he smiled at me as if I lit up his whole world, it lit up mine.

  I thought I had read enough baby-preparation books and seen enough diaper commercials to know what to expect: joy, aggravation, aggravated joy, joyous aggravation, lots of complaining about never having sex but not really caring because you were so tired and all you really wanted to do with that time was order takeout and watch TV. I expected to be changed in profound ways, though I didn’t know what that would necessarily involve because these changes seemed to be so profound they rendered language inadequate. But I thought they would have to do with me and the baby, not me and Andy. If anything, they would exclude Andy and that’s why we would have to remember to “prioritize our relationship” and I would have to remind myself that I was “not just a mom, but a woman!”

  I hadn’t expected mystery. Andy and I became mysterious to each other in a way I don’t think we’d been since that very first time I’d heard his voice on the phone when I called about the room. I would watch him standing by the window holding our son and think of him as someone I wanted to get to know. I would wonder about him. A wonder that led to a want that lifted a spell. As though part of me had been asleep.

  Somehow there was more space with three of us. It’s too simple to say that this new space we found was where Lee used to be. But her absence could be as defining as her presence. It reminded me of that day I ran into Kirsten, on my own. How sure of herself she was with Lee out of the picture, this girl who had called us a planet and herself an an
t. It also made me think of the way Frank had once swiftly absolved a character of insidious actions by attributing them to a brain tumor that merely had to be removed. Lee wasn’t a brain tumor and I couldn’t blame her for my being unfaithful to Andy. Nor could I simply excise the infidelity by not contacting Rodgers again. For a while, he became a kind of fantasy. I thought about him too much. I didn’t go places he was bound to be, but on occasions where there might be some chance, however slight, of running into him, I made sure I looked good. On days when I just happened to look particularly good (pregnancy worked for me), days when Andy would compliment me, I regretted that I never ran into Rodgers. I didn’t even try to reach out to Lee to talk about it. Instead I confided in new friends, women who had told me about similar confusions in their own lives and had trusted me to react sympathetically. Who understood fallibility. It wasn’t Lee’s fault. But she was a big part of it. Just as she had been a part of something for Andy that excluded me. Their attachment didn’t involve me, and then it did, and I had to be there in order to be left out. I could get lost in the paradoxes. But maybe it wasn’t that complicated. The old triangle fell apart. Andy and I created a new one.

  I didn’t tell Linda about the mystery, the wonder, the want. I took out my phone to show her a recent video of Leo, just under a year old then, laughing, and I could see her trying not to look bored. So I changed the subject.