The Sun in Your Eyes (12 page)

“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 fucking 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 object 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.

T
HIS 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.

After college, both Lee and I moved to New York. Lee was working as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit for reproductive rights, a short-staffed and underfunded organization, which made her position fairly thankless, the kind you might take to pay your dues before applying to law school or pursuing a future in public policy. If you lacked either pragmatism or idealism, then it was merely a drab, difficult, not very remunerative job. Lee never struck me as especially pragmatic or idealistic (she'd never mentioned law school or public policy) so her motivation remained unclear to me, but I suspected it was a way to distance herself from her mother's
fabulousness.
I had enrolled in a comparative literature Ph.D. program I would eventually abandon, and I was writing short stories nobody wanted to publish. Lee read everything I showed her and I loved that she loved my description of a small window with chintz curtains in the basement of a suburban house. I loved the notes she wrote in the margins. “This is hit hard on the chin music.” “Failure of sex.” “Oh my fucking God!” Her belief in me was legitimizing. Why would she take the time to read my work if it wasn't good, if it wasn't worth it? Why would she spend so much time with me if I wasn't worth it?

And we did spend a lot of time together. We may as well have been dating each other. We went to a party once in a packed Brooklyn apartment where a young woman told us how she and her fiancé planned to donate the money they would have spent on wedding favors to a foundation promoting the legalization of gay marriage. She was determined, compassionate, doing her part for lesbians everywhere. She wished us the very best.

Lee took me to other parties, occasionally thrown by people I had read about. I saw the insides of homes I never would have even known existed beyond the pages of a magazine: Soho lofts bought for
nothing in the seventies, Tribeca lofts bought for a little more in the eighties, whole brownstones in the Village, a penthouse on the Upper East Side. But there was something Cinderella-at-the-ball about those experiences. Something unreal, time-stamped. At the stroke of midnight this ends. There was another city for us that seemed as if it would go on forever. On a Saturday I would say, “They're playing
Gloria
at Anthology” and we would go, and fall in love with Gena Rowlands, her mauve-painted nails, her cigarettes, her pocketbooks, her gun. Then Lee would say “Let's go to the Bronx, Washington Heights, wherever Cassavetes filmed that.” So on Sunday we would go, and just walk and walk and walk. There were always more movies, more neighborhoods. There was always time.

Lee would tell me about nights when we weren't hanging out when she would go to a party or a bar and leave with someone she would likely never see again. Maybe I was supposed to view this as self-destructive behavior, but it impressed me. I took it to be a measure of her power, over men and over me. The one-nightness of these encounters I attributed to Lee's attachment to me. At the same time, it said:
Look how easily I could leave you.

Soon enough, she did leave me, though not for a guy. Linda, increasingly bi-coastal, threw a soiree that Lee reluctantly attended. Her lack of enthusiasm was taken for aloof confidence and she was handed a two-year contract from a French fashion house to be the face of its perfume. Off she went on extended stays in Paris and to a different plane of existence, embracing the birthright she had been trying to deny. When she came back to New York, she still made time for me, but I felt as if she had outgrown and needed to break up with me. Neither of us knew how to talk about it that way, though.