Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“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 Carnahan, 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’Shome 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 DEEPLYand 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.”

“I love this song,” said Lisette’s friend Nate, talking to me. “That voice, it gives me such a hard-on.”

“Sure,” I said. Nate stepped closer to me, saying nothing for a few long seconds, but apparently forming a question as he looked into my eyes.

“Are you Greek?”

“No. Why?”

“You have Greek eyes.”

I lowered my newly Greek eyes and then glanced at Andy. He was watching me with an expressionless intensity that only highlighted the embarrassing nature of my back-and-forth with Nate. I wanted Andy to turn away so I could continue my embarrassing exchange. When he didn’t, I wondered what he wanted from me. Some kind of chance opened up for no more than an instant before it swallowed itself and disappeared. It was so brief I didn’t know what it even was, but I was disappointed by its disappearance. Lisette came back with drinks and positioned herself in Andy’s lap and I wanted to say to him, “You have the luxury of not having to say stupid things to people in public, you have the luxury of looking at me like that without having to think too much about what it might mean because here comes your girlfriend and now she’s sitting on you.”

“I hear Greece is amazing,” I said.

“Oh, man, Greece is fucking awesome.”

Nate professed his love for feta cheese while moving his hand to my waist, just under the edge of my shirt. He needed a smoke — did I want to come with him outside? Yes, I did. It would be the fourth cigarette of my life. I went to grab my coat and Andy stopped me. Glowering.

“Really?”

“What?”

“This guy?”

“Well, we can’t all be as smart as you, Andy.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Why do you even care?”

“I don’t — I just — on the level of — whatever. I don’t know.”

“Nate is fucking awesome,” Lisette interjected. “If Viv wants to go make out with him, I don’t see why it’s your problem.”

“Yeah, Andy, why is it your problem?” said Lee. She’d been watching the whole scene like a bird of prey, circling on high, waiting to dive down for the kill. The way she swooped in reminded me of that night when she’d led Andy up off that mattress and away from me. It was something secretive between Lee and Andy and yet I figured into it, inextricably.

“Fuck it,” he said. Then to Lisette: “Let’s get out of here.”

“Seriously?” asked Lisette.

“Yeah. And I fucking hate that word. Seriously. Like nobody can fucking tell when anybody is being fucking serious anymore?”

“So angry! My goodness.” Lisette cupped his face with her hands. “But it’s not even midnight yet. We have to make it to midnight.” It was New Year’s Eve, the turn of the millennium. If Lisette could have shrunk Andy into a figurine and put him in her pocket, I think she would have. He, just then, might have let her.

“Okay. Sorry. I’m sorry. Just forget I said anything.”

I would have gone home with Nate that night regardless, but I doubt I would have felt so purposeful about it if Andy hadn’t cared.

That spring Andy moved away, for a job in the Bay Area, but then came back several years later. He said it was, in part, because his boss, Jeffrey Sorbo, kept saying to him, “We’re so similar,” and Andy kept thinking, If that’s true, I’m fucked. Andy had started working as a programmer for Sorbo right before the technological innovator had started faux-humbly brushing off the labels of “visionary” and “savior” the press began routinely applying to him. Before the adulation from convocation speeches and conference talks had him considering a move into government, just to, you know, shake things up in Washington. Sorbo would have taken Andy with him (Where? Wherever they wanted to go!) if Andy had only believed in his ascendancy. Andy did believe in his ascendancy, which is what troubled him. Sorbo would go far, and then go farther, but to what end? What was he really motivating anyone to do when he fired up undergraduates about inventing yet another way for people to distract themselves, trigger a dopamine release, and twitchily buy things in the name of newfangled social interaction? Sorbo wasn’t even cynical about it. If he had been, Andy might have been able to cynically go along for the ride but Sorbo demanded a belief in his worldview that Andy couldn’t conjure. Maybe it had something to do with integrity? When had integrity come to be synonymous with self-defeat? Andy told me all of this one winter evening, as we were sitting in my studio apartment, essentially the old parlor of a cut-up brownstone. As he spoke, all I could think of was him, fifteen pounds heavier, in that shirt with the satin seahorse on it.