The Sun in Your Eyes (3 page)

I shook my head; the name didn't register.

“Socialite–actress–drug addict in swinging sixties London. She also had a home in Marrakesh. She OD'd and died and then became a style icon for the aristo-boho set.”

“I see.”

“So Linda goes, ‘If I hear one more word about Talitha Getty and Moroccan fucking chic—Talitha fucking Getty! You know what you need to do? You need to
Getty
a new idea!' If I told her what I wanted, where I was going—and I haven't told her anything—I'm sure she'd tell me it's time to Getty over it.”

I laughed, finally, and so did Lee.

“I
'M NOT SAYING
that she's that callous. Though maybe I am. It's just that almost everything I know about my father has come through Linda. Not that she's been keeping something from me or denying me something, but these recordings would be something that hasn't been filtered through her. Through anybody. One thing of his that was never public.”

She was nervous. It was new.

“So. What do you think? Will you come with me? To see Flintwick?”

It did seem kid-detective, Lee lighting out on a well-worn trail that had never led anywhere, as far as I knew. But she was
also the femme fatale—the one who shows up with a story full of holes and you, the cynic and the sap, still follow her. And the old friend whose powers of persuasion still held sway because those powers had once persuaded you of so, so much. I thought of a time a couple of years out of college when we'd sat at these exact spots. I was coming from a grad school workshop where something I'd written was met with a resounding “eh.” Nobody in the class could pinpoint what was wrong with it, they simply didn't find it all that compelling. And instead of getting angrily energized, developing a thicker skin, it was like I had no skin at all. On the subway afterward I stood looking at my reflection in the dark window of the doors as the train car tunneled along, thinking,
There's nothing really wrong with you, you're just not all that compelling.
I got off, walked to this restaurant, and there was Lee. Whatever we talked about wasn't that important. But it was like listening to a radio, having been stuck on static and then finding a channel that came through strong and played songs you loved. It was always like that with Lee. Sometimes it seemed we were tuned to a phantom frequency, something only we could hear. I won't belabor the metaphor. Lee said she would read the story and mark it up, double underlining everything she liked. She gave it back to me with pages full of railroad tracks.

My doubts were never much of a match for my tendency to say yes to her. If I thought that had changed, my difficulty in meeting her gaze now proved otherwise. She had this look—
You
have
to
.
You have to or you'll be missing out on a real adventure. I'm giving you this chance and all you have to do is take it
.

“Work is super busy at the moment, you know? There's a lot going on there. Jason and Justine—Jastine—are finally going to get married, only to honeymoon in a newly unstable island country.
They've survived cancer, kidnapping, and Count Andre, but it remains to be seen if they can they survive a coup.”

“Who is Count Andre?”

“The Slavic financier who almost split them up. I guess you're not watching the show.”

“Oh. Well, no. I wasn't sure you were still writing for it.”

“I am. And I don't think I can take off right now.”

“Sure. I understand.”

“But I don't know. Maybe I could get away?”

I suggested she come over to our apartment for dinner that night to discuss further. I hoped Andy being there, between us, would help me get my priorities straight. I also wouldn't have minded Lee seeing Andy and me in our cozy home. We could make her a meal, tend to her for a couple of hours, then send her on her way, maybe a little jealous of our life together.

Dinner would be great, she said, but she'd already made a plan to see another friend of hers tonight.

“What other friend?” I asked.

A
NDY AND
I
once mused about one of the unexpected benefits of our marriage: how it made flirting with other people easier. Because flirting became less a means to an end and more of an end in itself. Taking someone to that slightly charged but relatively innocent level of desire and not needing it to lead to anything more. Paradoxically, this works only if you have a relationship typically characterized as “good”—a solid foundation from which to venture forth and to which you can return, emboldened but never really shaken. Though Andy and I never said it, we smugly assumed that having this very conversation spoke to what a good relationship we had.

Going off with Lee for a while wasn't flirting. It was something more, though I tried to make it look to Andy as if it weren't. At breakfast the next morning I read the junk mail, the catalogs featuring adult-sized footed pajamas designed for a demographic that a marketing service had determined I now belonged to. From the windows in our front room, I could see the 7 train snaking above Queens Boulevard. Before we moved here, all I had known of Sunnyside was that Richard Yates referenced the neighborhood in a short story about an out-of-step World War II veteran, confounded by the fifties and his own masculinity. Now it was home to pockets of Irish immigrants, Eastern Europeans, Colombians, and the young professionals whose presence justified a
Times
article every six months or so declaring this borough the “next frontier.” Andy had found us a topfloor apartment with a distant view of the Empire State Building. A Versailles sitting room met cut-rate nursing home in the powder blue lobby with its complicated molding, oxidized mirrors, and fluorescent tube lighting. It was more space than I'd ever had in the city. The muffled rumble on the elevated tracks had become a sound I didn't hear anymore, until the silence of this morning. Finally I spoke:

“It's just a few days.”

“A few days can feel like an eternity.” I think he was quoting an early-results home pregnancy test commercial. It would have been an opportune time to tell him that I had, three days ago, taken one of those tests and that it had been positive. Instead I let the moment pass and sat there trying not to look conflicted.

“You want to go. That's fine. I just hope you know what to expect.”

“I don't know what to expect. I don't think Lee knows what to expect.”

“Lee and her spontaneity.”

“She wants one last thing of her father's.”

“She wants attention.”

“I can give her attention. I have enough to go around. And I'll be back before you even miss me.”

I didn't register the false cheer in my voice until Andy spoke again.

“I've
been
missing you.”

He leveled his gaze at me, but I couldn't meet it for more than a second or two, which incited him to keep going. “It's like you haven't been here for a while. So, really, what's the difference? You should go.”

Andy had tried to fight with me about how I didn't know how to fight. I could argue, meet logic with logic. I could write fights for the show, fangs out, one bitchy line after the next, but that was a circus act. It was engagement with a performance, not with another person. I had wanted to improve, to engage with Andy, for him, and I had gotten incrementally better. Still, I tended to meet confrontation with a full system shutdown.

“You don't have anything to say?”

“I don't know. You're right?”

“That's just it. It's not about me being right or wrong. Or you being right or wrong. It's what the fuck are you feeling and why can't you talk to me about it?”

“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.

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.”