Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

I wanted so badly to be someone who didn’t care. I wanted to go find Noah Stone or Rodgers Colston and sleep with one of them in a desultory way. I wanted to be someone who didn’t think to use the word “desultory” in relation to sex. I wanted to be lost and to surrender the way Andy just had. But I took Lee’s seduction of Andy personally, feeling somehow that she was making fun of me, of my ability to draw lines and my inability to cross them. The worst part is that I just lay there, believing Andy would come back, that we’d log a few more hours of sleep and then go home.

But I was on my own. I tossed and turned, scratched at what I assumed were fleas, and waited for the sky to lighten to a deep blue. When it finally did, I headed out to a parking lot, a near-treeless vista of abandoned warehouses and disused railroad tracks. Vacancy. A quiet morning. The rush of highway traffic faintly audible. Lee likely would have known how to orient herself by the sun’s low position in the eastern sky or something like that. Sometimes we would go to a park by the water — a strip of green between the interstate and the harbor — and sit on a bench in the sun, not doing much of anything beyond looking out and watching shore birds land on wooden pilings. Lee knew what the birds were — cormorants, great blue herons. It was incongruous. Who taught her these things? Was she one of those children who develops an interest and clandestinely pursues it? Had she kept a field guide under her bed and studied at night while Linda entertained in the hills above Los Angeles? Her ability to name a bird, or a tree, or a constellation, her knowledge of the natural world, conflicted with the idea she had of herself — as a bright enough but not particularly bookish girl who didn’t fully merit whatever academic success she’d achieved. It wasn’t her intelligence, she seemed to suggest, that had gotten her here, to the school that Andy and I had worked hard to get into. And maybe it wasn’t. Still, she would have known what to do here, standing at the edge of this rusting postindustrial plain. The childish part of me said it didn’t matter, that I might as well walk myself into a situation so terrible that Lee and Andy, but especially Lee, would feel, for the rest of their lives, the guilt of leaving me alone. Some other part of me, the underutilized, bootstrapping part, said, Buck the fuck up, you’re on your own and the day is mild and you have a city at your feet, so just go. I saw a Dunkin’ Donuts in the distance. To each his own lodestar.

Two patrons sat at small tables and a third leaned against a counter by the window while an employee in an orange and pink smock attended to a tray of crullers behind the register. I took my coffee and glazed donut to my own little table and sat there, feeling existential. I hadn’t noticed, until he’d moved and was standing over me, that the customer by the window was Rodgers Colston.

“Miss X.”

It sounded like Miss Sex. I tried hard not to drop the cup in my hand.

“Mister Colston.”

“Did you have a good time last night?”

“Yeah. It was great. Right?”

It didn’t matter what the words were, only that we had established a rhythm and kept it going. He sat down and we said more basic things while his eyes flashed with something like wry amusement. I remember focusing mine on his upper lip and wondering what it would feel like against my neck, the back of my thigh. He caught me staring.

“I still don’t know your name.”

“Viv. Vivian.”

“That suits you.”

“Does it?” Like a stylist. It reminded me of the hairdresser at the upscale salon my mother took me to when I was fifteen and going through a homely phase. He had thick swoopy hair, he could pull off a red buffalo plaid work shirt with white jeans, he was from Vermont, and I would have believed anything he said. I believed him when he told me I was pretty and that he was sure I’d have a boyfriend soon, if I wanted one. That I didn’t soon have a boyfriend, that I didn’t even really like the haircut he gave me, somehow didn’t make me question the first part of the statement. I never, for instance, wondered if my mother had tipped him to say such a thing, I just took heart in his compliment. It got me through sophomore year.

“I just mean it’s a nice name.”

“I like Rodgers.”

“It’s a family name.”

“Do people ever call you Rod?” I became very conscious of how I was swallowing my coffee.

“No.” Finally he full-on smiled. Crooked teeth. Pointy teeth. Back woods? Or so upper class as to be beyond orthodontia? “No one calls me Rod.”

We took our donuts and started walking past the deserted factories and down blocks of two-story houses with siding, beige, light blue, pale green, the main avenue of the city’s Little Italy, where two or three bakeries were raising their gates. We walked across the highway overpass, past the old stone office buildings downtown, the bus hub, the new river promenade, up the hill toward campus. The quiet of the early morning still hung over the city. At some point I realized he was walking me home.

“I don’t really see it,” said Rodgers, when Lee and Noah came up like celebrity gossip. “Why Noah?”

“Andy says it’s because he has no intellectual remove.”

“Could be.” He shook his head at Andy and intellectual remove. “Andy, I mean, he’s all right. He’s that guy, you know that guy, that kind of sexually ambiguous guy who is basically dating the record store and, you know, if he could only meet someone who likes Bedhead as much as he does, everything would be fine.”

I nodded and told myself to find out who Bedhead was. Also, Andy was sexually ambiguous?

“You nod a lot,” he said.

“Do I?”

“You do.” Like he was noticing details about me. But also like everyone knew what that was good for. There was some buoyant thrill at being taken for a sexual object.

“But I know what Andy means,” I said. “Noah’s so good-looking, and everything he does is just so awesome and so rad. ”

“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.