Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“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?”