Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

An image came to Lee — nano-sized Henry Millers inside of everyone. Like that movie where Dennis Quaid was a miniaturized Air Force lieutenant injected into Martin Short’s blood stream and zaniness ensued. Had she spent her whole childhood watching TV and movies on TV? Or did her mind just always go there and, if so, what did that say about her mind?

“Would you really come with me to Big Sur?”

She had wondered how to ask this of Viv. That is, she knew how to ask — the same way, more or less, she’d asked anything of Viv, including, from the very beginning, asking her to join a cult. It was like whatever she asked was always directly in line with Viv’s id. Even when they first met on those library steps. Her one and only Reach Out! Viv had fled, but not very far. The question now wasn’t how but why ? Why ask Viv to come with her? Why had she encouraged Viv to come with her in the first place? And put Viv in that kind of position with Andy. And called Rodgers Colston. And when she saw where it was going with Rodgers, why didn’t she do anything to stop it? Barbara had asked why she thought she was the bad one. Because look at what I do. I don’t know how to let someone know I need them and I don’t know how to say goodbye.

Viv would go back to her life with Andy and she would tell him she was pregnant and she wouldn’t tell him about Rodgers, or she would, but it wouldn’t tear through them; they would give with it, like the reasonable people they were together. The reasonable duo they had formed. Viv may have romanticized a certain destructive urge in others, Lee above all, but when it came to her own life she was too level-headed and honestly too lazy to behave like that herself. Andy was the same way.

WHEN VIV CALLEDher after that snowstorm, it had all seemed obvious and inevitable. Lee expected she would go through the motions of feeling happy for her two friends at their wedding. That’s what you did at weddings. She didn’t expect that she would feel happy — not just happy for them but for herself. As if Viv and Andy were actually beaming love. Transmitting it to her. She’d experienced a similar surprising sense of belonging a few days earlier, doing a practice run styling Viv’s hair. When she’d first read Kirsten’s tutorial on “loose, romantic waves,” she’d thought, What the fuck? This was Kirsten’s life now? This was Viv’s? But then she couldn’t stop paging through all of Kirsten’s posts on brow pencils and “splurgy pjs.” The girlishness of it, which initially put Lee off, drew her in. It wasn’t something that excluded her, but something she and Viv could share.

She found herself gently squeezing Jack’s hand when Viv and Andy said their vows. And Jack, who’d been through a bitter divorce and custody battle over his young daughter, squeezed back. Viv’s parents had walked their daughter down the aisle and, in what had always struck Lee as a bit of regressive parlance, given her away. But Lee felt that she too had given Viv away that evening. By the time Viv and Andy got married, Lee had been back in L.A. for almost a year and it was so much easier to be far from the place where Viv and Andy had made a home together. She hadn’t exactly left because of them but, after that snowstorm, she’d had an inkling that time was about to be up.

Her fizzy happiness boosted by champagne carried her along through the toasts — she kept hers simple, spoke of hearing their laughter through the door, left out the part about turning away from it — through the buffet dinner and on to the dancing. She hadn’t known Jack was such a good dancer and then she remembered that years ago he’d been in that Hitler youth/swing dancing movie where his character had fallen in love at the dancehall with a sure-footed Jewish girl. She couldn’t remember if big band music saved either of them in the end. But Jack must have learned from the choreographer on set how to move his body in a conscious, muscular way that looked, and felt, effortless, light as watercolor. She was aware that people were looking at them while trying to appear that they weren’t looking at them. Which she had experienced before, and it was amplified here because of Jack, who had reached that level of fame where even if everyone didn’t know exactly who he was, they knew he was someone. Even with his Chekhov beard.

All her life Lee had heard about the great love her parents had. A tumultuous love of such elemental force that it bound them to each other always even when it couldn’t keep them together. She had wondered if she would ever have anything that compared. Maybe falling in love was effortless and light, but love itself was something else. Maybe she’d had that something else and hadn’t recognized it. With Andy. With Viv, too, in a way. Maybe she wouldn’t have what Linda and Jesse had but here, dancing with Jack, she was outside the realm of comparison. So far outside that she didn’t dwell on the unsettled expression she happened to catch on Linda’s face in between songs — an expression that quickly hid itself behind a standard teary-eyed smile.

Later in the night as the party thinned, she spotted Andy out in the stone courtyard. A hearty aunt in a black sequined dress that looked like jazzy mourning garb had just said goodbye. He was momentarily alone, standing by the dying flames of the fire pit. The cake cutting was over. He looked dazed and pleased.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

“This was all so wonderful.”

“I’m glad you could make it.” She knew it was late in a very long day and that he must have been tired of making conversation, but: Glad she could make it? The kind of thing you say to anyone. Wasn’t she a part of it? She had cleared her calendar a year ago and flown in days early.

“I never knew that, what you said before, about standing by the door. I never thought of you as a standing-by-the-door type.”

“Sometimes you see things happening between two people. I don’t know that you were falling in love then, but it was that thing where you think it’s going to make you jealous to see it, but it actually makes you kind of hopeful. You know?” A revision. A lie, in other words.

“I mostly think of those days as me being hung up on you.” There was no melancholy in his voice, no hint of anything other than having so thoroughly moved beyond that time in his life that he now considered it a youthful folly. How ridiculous he’d been, moping over her. How different he was now. She had no hold on him. Which was fine, totally how it should be. So why did it bring her up short?

“Jack seems cool.”

“He is. It’s early, I guess, but I really like him.”

“I hope it works out for you guys.” He said it as if he knew it probably wouldn’t but wanted to be charitable. As if he felt sorry for her. For whatever it was about her that made things not work out. The iridescent bubble she had floated over here on just popped.

“That’s very nice of you, Andy.”

“I mean it. I hope it works out. I want that for you.”

“Because we’re still such good friends.”

“The way I see it, you’re the one who stopped being my friend. Not that you were even that great of a friend to begin with, but you know, I never minded that. Because in a way, you were never just my friend. And it’s not like I expected we’d fuck and that would change everything and all of a sudden we’d be together, but I didn’t think you would basically ignore me afterward. I thought that whatever it was, it had meant more than that. But you made it pretty clear that it didn’t.”

“But it did. I was so stupid and messed up then. I made everything so weird between us and I didn’t know what to do about it. I’m sorry. I really am sorry.” She couldn’t tell him in full why it was never the same. Not on his wedding day. Not with Viv in her ivory gown, yards away, chatting with a guest but turning to see them, gratification on her face.