Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“You go for it,” said Bill, “I like that.” He moved in toward me and brushed a crumb from the corner of my mouth. Then he placed his hands squarely on my shoulders and kissed my forehead, like some kind of dark rite. I wanted to wipe the kiss from my brow before it seeped into my bloodstream, permeated my uterine wall, and contaminated the tiny heart now developing inside of me.

“Are you all right, Viv? You seem a little sunstruck. Why don’t you go below for a bit and relax. Put your feet up. We’ve got a whole theater down there. What’s your poison? Home improvement shows? Prestige dramas? Absurdist faux-documentary sitcoms? Prime seventies-era Hollywood? Snuff-film webisodes of blood diamond mining? We’ve got it all.”

“I’ll keep her company,” said Kara brightly. “I’ve been dying to talk to you about THATH. Huge fan.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine. Really.”

Lee, understanding something I apparently didn’t, gave me a dissuading look, a French-person pout. As though she were resigned to being left alone with Carnahan. Her fatalism sent a wave of panic through me, and I squelched it with obedience.

Kara led me down into the cabin where she disturbed the hush by vigorously fluffing a couple of pillows along a burgundy velour banquette.

“Sit, sit!”

I sat.

“You can relax! It’s okay.”

“Okay.”

“You have beautiful skin.” It sounded taxidermic. Still, I thanked her and told her my father was a dermatologist, which she responded to by telling me her father had been a prison guard. Even in my discomfort, or maybe as a way to my dispel my discomfort, I thought how much Frank would love every word out of this woman’s mouth. How would he have written this? When the show’s budget had been bigger, Frank extricated a character from a bad maritime situation with the arrival of a cruise ship. He also considered a pod of Good Samaritan dolphins.

“So, I want to know. What’s going on with my girl Romola?”

“I’m not sure. I’m supposed to be working on that now.”

“I want Romy to be happy, and I know that goes against the grain or whatever, but she’s been through so much! She deserves some peace. Let her keep her baby.”

“What about Peyton?”

“It’s a dilemma. But I like Peyton best when she’s mean. I’ll take Peyton the bitch over Peyton the good mother any day.”

“Can’t she be both?”

“Ha. You sound like a professor. Is this what you’d call a teachable moment?”

“I didn’t mean to be pedantic. I wonder sometimes if Peyton can have it both ways. Without slipping back into a vegetative state. But, you know, I’m feeling better already. We could probably go back up.”

She poured me a glass of water and kept talking. “It’s tough. I don’t think that women really can have it all today. Something’s gotta give. The village is gone.”

“The village?”

“The village that used to raise your kids for you and go bowling with you and be all up in your business. I grew up in that village, and it had its advantages. But it didn’t have yachts.”

The longer our conversation continued, the more ludicrous it became, and I wondered if I hadn’t underestimated Kara at the very moment when I should have been on highest alert. If that wasn’t her intention all along. We had been down there for over half an hour. God knows what was going on above deck. I told Kara that whatever it was that had come over me had completely passed, thanks, and I really wanted to see those pictures of Jesse, it would be a shame not to, since we’d come all the way here. Wasn’t it time to go join Bill and Lee and head back?

“BY ALL MEANS.We’ll go up there. Give me a sec, okay? Gotta powder my nose.” I didn’t know if this meant she needed to use the toilet or something else. All I knew is I was getting tired of trying to read between the lines when I didn’t know where the lines were. Alone, I took out my phone, thinking I might try Frank, as though I had lost the right to call on Andy. That’s when I saw this:

Hi love. How’s the trip? Not too much going on here. Someone at w ork gave me a copy of that old David Foster Wallace essay on TV. Started reading it at the gym this morning and got distracted by the treadmill’s video screen. Hall and Oates trapped in a giant drum kit.

Does this make me part of the problem? Or is the problem so outdated that I’m not part of anything anymore?

Hope everything is ok. Call when you can.

“Shall we?” Kara returned, and I stowed my phone. Her eyes shone with anticipation, prepared to be delighted by what we might find on deck. Which turned out to be Bill, lying in Kara’s chaise, a skipper’s cap angled on his head. Lee stood by the railing, staring out at the water. Hard to tell if her hair, which sort of always had a rolled-out-of-bed look to it, had been mussed by Bill or by the wind. The bleached-out sun cast longer shadows before it slid behind clouds, the searing white and blue of the late morning giving way to a leaden afternoon.

“Hello, womenfolk,” Bill said.

“We interrupting?” asked Kara.

“Lee and I were just enjoying the silence of each other’s company.”

“I’m thinking it’s time to head in,” said Kara. “See those photographs you all are so hot about.”

“Yes,” said Lee, tuning in. “I do really want to see them. And we’ve already taken up a lot of your day.”

“You could say we’ve taken up yours,” said Bill. “You only have so much life energy. I’m so pleased you consented to expend it on me.” He wasn’t looking at Lee or at his wife. He’d set his sights on me, as if it was my turn.

That’s when I thought: I’m out. I’m done. I want to go home. I pictured Andy at the gym, trying to be healthier, for his sake, for mine, and for the sake of our child.

The Carnahans left us to go steer the boat.

“You know,” I said to Lee, “the whole self-destructive daddy-issues thing stops being glamorous and just gets sad after a certain point.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about whatever you let Carnahan do to you while I was down there with his freak wife.”

“Nothing happened.”

“So what was all that about the life energy you expended all over him?”

“Nothing happened. I swear. I bet you would have preferred if it had? Would that make you feel better? I’m sorry if I didn’t debase myself in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed.”

“You think I like seeing you put yourself in that position?”

“Yes, I think it works for you.”

“That’s ridiculous. And this is ridiculous, what we’re doing.”

“I told you nothing happened. Nothing, really. So I’m not turning back, not now. But if you want to go, just say so.”

“It’s just that you’re dragging me into something that’s really no good.”

“I’m dragging you?”

“Yes. I have a life and I’m fucking it up here with you.”

“You’re not actually trying to blame me, are you? You chose to sleep with Rodgers. You chose to blow off work. I didn’t force you to do anything.”

No, it wasn’t force. She had thrown me a rope that I had grabbed onto, and to pull apart its twisted strands demanded more resolve than I could muster. Woven in there still was the old ingrained inclination to protect her, which had always been a way of protecting myself. I didn’t know who I was angry with anymore. Both of us, probably. Fine, I would go with her to the Carnahans’ house, I told her, but that was it. Fine, she said. Fine.

AROUND THE TURNof the millennium the MBTA overhauled the train station where my father would always pick me up in college. When Lee started coming home with me for Thanksgivings, we would arrive at the small, one-story brick depot and find two empty seats among the discolored fiberglass chairs while I called home on a pay phone. The most up-to-date equipment in that room was a vending machine sponsored by a psychedelic fruit drink brand that existed briefly in the early nineties. A few years later, with the realization of high-speed rail service, the old building was torn down and a proper station was built for Boston’s swelling commuter population. Spacious and spiffy, its technological polish suggested efficiency and comfort. It was sleek and we were impressed by the degree to which we were impressed. So it was all the more jarring to see my father when he showed up at the new station in a shearling coat I’d never seen him wear in person, only in old photos. He looked like a time traveler. An unsettlingly young Jonathan Feld had slipped through a hole in the fabric of the universe and materialized here. As though he weren’t my father at all, had yet to be. I didn’t know how to talk to him.