The Sun in Your Eyes Read online

  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.

  It was a relief—I can leave you too—when Ben Driggs Stern came along. At three A.M. in his apartment I couldn’t recall what exactly we’d talked about over drinks, but I remembered it being witty. He took my top off. I pulled at his belt. He said, “I like you, Viv,” and set me fluttering. Somewhere in the intervening hours he also said he’d like to read something I’d written. Was that before or after he told me he was an editor at a literary quarterly people had actually heard of?

  Three months later we were still seeing each other and a story of mine, “Rye, Toasted,” had appeared in the latest issue. “Rye, Toasted” was about a young man whose wife leaves him, refusing to see or speak to him. Sad and adrift on a snowy day, he goes to visit his mother-in-law in the hopes of getting through to her daughter. The young man and the mother-in-law are cut from the same cloth and have a strong affinity for each other. She makes him a sandwich and they end up sleeping together. She remembers her first love, the one before her husband. The snow is heavier than expected—the husband returns early from work, just before the roads close. The young man is stuck there for the awkward duration of the night, during which the husband, an amateur chef, expounds on the erotic nature of baking bread. And that was essentially it. A story that didn’t know whether it was a slice-of-life character study of two lonely souls with a few well-turned phrases and a cheap, obvious nod to James Joyce or if it was a carbohydrate-fueled sex farce. I wondered, of course, if Ben had published my story only because I was dating him. Did it matter? I secretly imagined this was the auspicious beginning of a career, not to mention a romance. While it didn’t return Lee and me to equal footing (we’d never been on equal footing), it narrowed the distance between our new levels.

  “No, he’s great,” said Lee, after meeting Ben. “He’s not as pretentious as he first seems. Have you met his mother yet?” His mother happened to be none other than Patti Driggs, Linda West’s old nemesis. “I don’t see Linda coming to the wedding is all I’m saying,” said Lee.

  The story of mine that Ben had published was the one that Lee least admired, the one she thought had “too many of those moments that are literary funny but aren’t, you know, actually funny.” Ben had told me “Rye, Toasted” had the “Olympian distance” I should strive for. That my writing wouldn’t suffer from “a colder eye.” Following his advice, I viewed him through such a lens. I began to have inklings that when he’d said, “I like you, Viv,” it wasn’t the heady beginning of something grand and passionate but rather the full extent of his feelings for me.

  Despite our growing dispassion Ben invited me to spend Thanksgiving at his mother’s.

  “She’s not as intimidating as she seems,” he said. “I showed her your story.”

  “You what? You did?”

  “She liked it. She said it reminded her of her stuff, starting out. Coming from an egomaniac of her caliber, that’s a big compliment.”

  I wanted to be asked to meet Patti Driggs more than I actually wanted to meet her and I was glad to have an out: it had become something of a tradition that Lee and I would go to my parents’ house for the holiday. I had assumed she would break the custom this year, with any number of exciting, possibly Parisian plans to choose from, but her only other offer involved spending it with her mother and Roy, Linda’s on-again off-again boyfriend, at Roy’s ranch.

  “Is Ben coming?” she asked. I equivocated, saying something about him probably needing to stay in the city for work.

  Ben Driggs Stern dumped me just before Christmas, and by that point, after what happened with that Thanksgiving, Lee and I weren’t speaking. The real breakup.

  Now here we were, sitting at an old picnic table on the back porch of Rodgers’ house.

  “Andy Andy?” asked Rodgers.

  “Andy Andy,” I said.

  “Wow. Good for you guys. Cheers.” He raised his beer and his twinkling eyes. I was having a hard time not meeting those eyes across the table.

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m single. I’m single and lovin’ it. I just love the fuck out of being single. Does that make me, like, a Charlotte or whoever?”

  “I think it makes you a Samantha,” I said.

  “It makes your references about ten years out of date,” said Lee.

  “Yeah, that’s happening to me more and more. I’ve decided to give in to it. I’m tired of trying to stay current. It’s too much work for too little payoff. I’m losing my edge, it’s fine.”

  “You’re losing your edge?” asked Lee.

  “This critic said he couldn’t fig
ure out whether my last show was ‘a very twenty-first-century struggle against the emptiness of being a man or simply underwhelming.’ And this woman I’m kind of seeing told me my work can get pseudo-plebian.”

  “I thought you were loving the fuck out of being single,” said Lee. “This woman sounds like your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t really consider people who use words like ‘pseudo-plebian’ to be girlfriend material.”

  “She probably doesn’t consider people whose work can be pseudo-plebian to be boyfriend material.”

  “Yeah, it’s doomed. Sometimes I’m fine with that. Other times I miss, you know, things like hope.” He smiled extravagantly and I was glad to see he hadn’t fixed his teeth even though he could afford to now. I had once gone to see an exhibition at the Whitney mostly because it included an installation of his: beautiful tunnels of colored light he had encased in large Styrofoam structures fabricated, seamlessly, from dollar store coolers. The box of curatorial text on the wall spoke of Marxism, religion, a debt to and critique of Minimalism, and though I could make myself see all of that in the piece, what moved me was the very materiality of it, that he had brought it out of his head and into existence. It was titled Fourth of July. It reminded me of that party on the roof, the fireworks in the night sky, his hand up my skirt.

  Rodgers seemed to be proof that vision plus talent plus drive was still a viable route to success, pseudo-plebian or not. But you had to have the right amounts of all three bubbling away in order for them to react; too little of one and not enough of another and you merely fizzled. Or, I suppose, you got a job writing dialogue for a past-its-prime soap opera.

  When the subject came up, I didn’t particularly want to tell Rodgers what I did for a living, what I had done with my life. I was supposed to have done better. Around the time I decided to drop out of grad school, my mother came to visit me in New York.

  “But you’ve worked so hard,” she said.

  “But I don’t want to be an academic.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do, then?”

  “I’m not sure. Do I have to always have everything figured out?”

  The look on her face said Yes. You’re not Lee. You can’t live like her. That friendship has spoiled you. It’s made you want things you’ll never have.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t. I just don’t want to see you throw this away and then regret it.”

  She was relieved though not very impressed when I started writing for THATH. I had defaulted on some bright promise but the shame of that was residual.

  Really, it wasn’t shame I felt at all. In college I once tagged along with Lee to see a showcase of student films. The most engaging one was composed of long, still takes of naked thighs, skyscrapers, an industrial park, a family at a picnic table, and what looked like a piece of chicken, all set to “My Heart Will Go On.” People laughed and I laughed too, because I knew it was supposed to be some kind of commentary on sexuality or sentimentality or consumerism or agribusiness or copyright infringement or all of the above. I could try to make the intellectual case for the song’s use, but secretly I just enjoyed hearing it. I used to try to make the intellectual case for the relevance of soaps. I never admitted that I just enjoyed hearing the song. Yes, THATH strained for highs of the biblical and Shakespearean variety and sank to lunatic lows. But you could argue that soaps were feminist in their focus on the day-to-day lives of women. You could argue that soaps were one of the few mainstream cultural productions in America that dealt with class. With a canvas of thirty characters, THATH had three families at its core: the upper-crust Sterlings, the middle- to upper-middle-class Howards, and the blue-collar Doughertys. You could make all the arguments you wanted and it wouldn’t matter. The appeal of soaps was emotional. You could spend years with these characters, typically played by the same actors. They could even die and come back. All those shared memories, all that youth, all that time.

  I was lucky to have my job and the truth is, I liked it. I needed it. I didn’t want to lose it. I loved Mill River and its swapped babies, its crazy old ladies working on strengthening their cores, its hookers and Judaism. I loved walking down the hall and passing soap legend Darcy Betts, who’d been with the show since its inception, originating the role of Elena Sterling Rappoport. No stranger to cosmetic work, she had refused Botox in order to preserve her unparalleled ability to meaningfully arch an eyebrow. A right brow tick for scorn, two full brow ticks for skepticism, three for delight, a subtle yet unmistakable right half tick for desire. The single full arch followed by a left suspended tick, which she often gave me, I interpreted as solidarity. She would call me “Vivian, darling!” and I would ask her how she was doing and she would say “I’m keeping it light, keeping it lively!”—her mantra, inspired by her favorite brand of fat-free cottage cheese.

  I didn’t want to talk to Rodgers about my job because I didn’t want to have to explain or champion my odd pride in it. But he asked, so I answered. He couldn’t believe it. His mother watched the show religiously. Who was that guy, that guy who’d been on it for years, the guy with the cheekbones? Rick Howard? Yes, Rick Howard!

  Under Frank’s reign, Dr. Rick Howard, world-renowned neurosurgeon, became addicted to Tumestrex, a Viagra-like drug he’d developed, fathered a child out of wedlock, and then removed all childbearing memories from his mistress’s brain. He eventually redeemed himself by standing up to a cabal of real estate developers angling to demolish Mill River University Hospital.

  “Someone made a YouTube montage of his cheekbones’ greatest moments,” I said. Now that I thought about it, that montage had been set to Jesse’s song “Whatever You Want,” which had experienced a resurgent popularity after it was used in a car commercial.

  We had to watch it just then, of course, and up came an assortment of Jesse Parrish–related clips. Lee had seen most of them. Jesse as a witty rock star on the Dick Cavett Show; once-rare footage of Jesse, incoherent, and Linda, totally loopy, interviewed on British TV; early publicity shots and later stills as a slideshow backdrop to his songs. A picture of Jesse and four-year-old Lee: Jesse leading her to the edge of a pool at the home of a now long-forgotten record executive. Her small fingers pressed in his large hand. She looks into the water in the serious way children do while Jesse has his head turned to catch something coming from a figure beyond the frame, a portrait, simultaneously, of parental care and negligence. Lee remembered she had been chewing spearmint gum the same light green as her swimsuit. Was it strange that she was allowed to chew gum at that age? By a pool, when she didn’t yet know how to swim? She didn’t remember where the gum had come from. She didn’t remember the before or the after to that moment.

  “Do you mind that that’s up here? That anyone can see it?” Rodgers asked.

  “It was never private. It just wasn’t quite as public, or so easy to reproduce. But it’s nothing compared to what people put out there.”

  “Sure,” said Rodgers. “So these tapes. Are you prepared for . . . like . . . what if you really do find them and what’s on them is just . . . bad?”

  “That could happen. But I think it’s unlikely the way people talk about them. People who were there. Like Charlie Flintwick.”

  “He’s got something of a stake in maintaining that legend, though,” I heard myself saying. Lee didn’t seem all that offended or stung. Which made me want to sting her more.

  “I mean, I wonder if it’s like how they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Because it’s always going to be disappointing. Not because they turn out to be assholes but because what you want is that hero fantasy and nobody can be that. So you meet them and you lose what you had in your head.”

  “I guess what you have to lose depends on how much you value living in your head,” said Lee.

  Rodgers looked at me with those disbelieving eyes and I looked down, but only before resolutely looking back up at him. When Lee said she should get back to the motel, to see what she could learn about Bill Ca
rnahan, I didn’t stop her. I only took Rodgers up on his offer to drive me back later. Until Lee left, Andy’s and my old theory about flirting seemed applicable here. I still had the presence of mind to think about it even as Rodgers and I were staring at each other out there on the porch. Nothing to stop our staring, still no call or text from Andy. A kiss goodbye that morning, which felt so far away—a kiss made only slightly less routine by his irritation with me—was the last contact I’d had with him.

  “Do you remember seeing each other on the subway that time?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “I should have said something.”

  “I should have stayed on that train.”

  My presence of mind left me then. It didn’t come back in the kitchen when Rodgers had his hand on the small of my back, when he brought his face close to mine. Then that theory became a wrong-headed conclusion reached by people who have never been tested.

  EVERYTHING IN RODGERS’S home was cared for, everything had a place. Rugs, records, plants, books. He saw the fineness in things. “I like your dress,” he had said, standing behind me in his kitchen, his reflection in the window, looking at me. He slipped his arms around me and I was nineteen once more, my dim understanding of the world at odds with what I wanted. I was also thirty-three and married and pregnant and beginning to be aware that my body would never be the same, that you only get so many chances, that years begin to disappear. That you’ll pack a flattering dress for a trip when you really shouldn’t need one.

  I hadn’t been drinking but I felt drunk. I mentioned Lee’s old suspicion to Rodgers as we leaned into each other in his hallway. “Oh, not on your face,” he said. “And anyway, I’d much rather fuck you.” A broad, crooked smile. Holy shit, I thought. And then I stopped thinking as he pulled me to him and turned me against the wall.

  I SLEPT DEEPLY and soundly and woke to an image: a string of white Christmas lights along a dark, narrow bar, a place that had no theme other than alcoholism. Lisette, Andy’s girlfriend, had brought us there. About a year after Lee and I moved to New York, and a couple of years before what I would come to think of as “the Thanksgiving incident,” the gentrification of Williamsburg was well under way but hadn’t reached its apex. Affluent, privileged kids lived there, but in warehouses, not luxury lofts. There were desolate corners and windowless establishments that looked, from the outside, busted and rough. Inside, this particular place was like a VFW post, a barroom and an adjoining room of card tables, a linoleum floor. From the jukebox came the synthesized hovering and racquetball percussion of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere.”