Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“I used to play football,” said Andy.

“You did?”

“Yeah, varsity.”

“Really? So, do you have, like, a varsity jacket?”

“I do.”

Lee laughed.

“Is that funny?”

“No, it’s not funny. I don’t know why I laughed. I just had no idea. You’re like a scholar athlete.”

“Well, I’m not much of an athlete anymore. It was just something I did growing up. It wasn’t a big deal in my town. I broke my arm junior year and I was out all season and that was it.”

“But you were kind of a jock.”

“Yeah. It was very character-building.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I miss being on a team. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a joiner, and I always kind of want to think of myself as a lone wolf, but I’m not. Can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“This is weird. That we’re here, walking around, and a month ago I was just, like, in my room.”

“Is that a Beach Boys reference?” One of maybe five Beach Boys songs, including “Kokomo,” she knew just by osmosis, just from living in the world. But she figured Andy would appreciate it.

“I guess it is. Everything is a reference now. But do you know what I mean?”

She did. It meant she would have to stop with the superficialities and they would have to talk about her parents.

“I know these things about you and about your life,” he said. “So I feel like I know where you’re coming from, but maybe I have no idea.”

“I have no idea either, sometimes. So.”

Andy was staring at his feet as he walked, as if to hide some frustration with her. As if he had risked something and she hadn’t.

“I’m not being glib. What I’m trying to say is you love my father. He clearly means a lot to you. You obviously know who my mother is. But what I’m trying to say is that I really don’t know who they are. I’ve listened to Motel Television I don’t know how many times in my life and, honestly, I never really heard it until about a week ago. So maybe you do know where I’m coming from, even if I don’t.”

“What did you hear when you heard it?”

“Oh, the things people talk about. Haunting. Heartbreaking.” She knew she wasn’t close to arriving at what it was she actually heard. “What do you hear?”

”It depends. It changes. But what I love about that record, in particular, is that there’s such a prettiness to his singing but you can feel this edge to it, like he’s trying to keep it from curdling into something else, something kind of vindictive. And the music, half the time, is already there, over that edge, if it’s not loping toward it. I think I just really admire the effort, how pretty he wants it to be, and then I just love the failure, when he gives over to everything underneath. The production on that album was genius. It adds this sheen to everything and that probably made it go down easier. It’s so easy to listen to. Like, the last song, “Waves,” it’s basically a lullaby, right? It might as well be spooning you, the take that’s on the album. But have you ever listened to the demo version? They put it in the box set but before that it was an extra track on the bootleg of his 1972 tour. It’s the same melody but the arrangement — there is no arrangement really. It’s just Jesse and it’s really intimate and, I don’t know, like, wounding. It’s kind of a precursor to the stuff on The Garden of Allah. When things got really troubled.”

Andy being spooned. Like he had any experience with that. He still had never mentioned a girl. But she hadn’t yet mentioned any of the boys she’d known either. None of whom she’d ever spooned.

“I should stop talking,” he said.

“No.”

But he did. So did she. The long, uncomfortable pause that was “his scene.” Only it wasn’t that uncomfortable. Their silence contained a reverberation, as though they were still communicating on a low, infrasonic frequency. They picked up on each other’s vibrations. His: I want to keep walking with you. Hers: Yes.

WHEN LEE ANDAndy sat across from each other in a café, books splayed, she would think, I shouldn’t touch my lips like that or let my hair fall into my face and then she would touch her lips and let her hair fall in a way that most likely made him want to touch her lips and brush her hair back. She didn’t know why she did that with Andy. More to the point, why she did that and then found herself encouraging him toward other girls.

“Like what about Sarah or Porter down the hall?” she asked.

“Moose and Chipmunk?” he said. “No.”

She figured it was her role to discourage his negativity, but she just couldn’t. Moose and Chipmunk. His negativity was perfect. She asked herself, Why not Andy? There was a night, out walking with him, when he took her hand. He wasn’t even tentative. He just took it, and she let him. As long as she did, they were suspended, safe, moving along in a hypnotic state. It brought them to wherever they were going and then she must have let go. Neither of them ever mentioned it afterward. Soon she started sleeping with Jeremy from her playwriting workshop, effectively establishing a pattern later borne out in her relationship with slimy-yet-seductive Bruce.

She thought the whole thing with Bruce and Mind Faith might have finally dulled Andy’s feelings for her, but he was still there for her when she came back to school. He practically took her in. Though she didn’t know what she would have done if he hadn’t been there, she was also annoyed at that fact. It made her want to lash out at him and then feel guilty about it; take up with Noah Stone in a sexless relationship. A penitent one. Like a nun.

Noah tried. He said he wanted to but he almost never could. She would lie there while he went down on her and think: This is nice and it’s enough. But then there was a month or so when he had a lot of dental work done and barely touched her and finally she felt the not-very-nunlike frustration of it. That night at his place, the night of that party, when all he wanted to do was hold her and fall asleep, she couldn’t take it any longer.

“Did you not have fluoride in your water? What’s the deal with your teeth?”

“It’s my gums, actually. And it’s not that.”

She didn’t feel entitled to an explanation from him and felt even worse that he trusted her enough to offer one: his antidepressants. She hadn’t thought Noah had enough emotional range to be depressed. Even as he told her this, she still didn’t see him as an entirely real person. He held her after he shared this with her and she ran her fingers along his face until he fell asleep. Then she got out of the fortlike bed he’d constructed from lumberyard scraps. She didn’t know for sure but she thought maybe Andy was secretly still a virgin and maybe she would be doing him a favor. That’s how she’d justified it when she pulled him up off that mattress, taking him away from Viv and over to the sofa in the room they called the study. But he probably wasn’t a virgin because it seemed like he knew what he was doing, the way he touched her as though he was guiding her and not the other way around. When she came, she wasn’t thinking about anyone else and then she looked down and saw he still had on that T-shirt with the seahorse and she thought: Oh. No.

IF SHE HADonce been irritated with Andy for some reason she could never quite understand, taking her free-floating anger out on him, soon it seemed as if all that was left between them was a sadness she had created. She could never bring herself to tell him what it was, that she had been pregnant, could never bring herself to tell any of them. Even when Noah had picked her up after her appointment at the clinic, he apparently believed she just had this “ovary thing” to take care of. Viv had no idea, though she’d seen her go off with Andy the night of that party. Viv’s eye through the crook of her elbow.