Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Viv,” said Lee. No answer. She turned, propped herself up on her arm, and looked at her friend. How unknowable people were when they slept, how unreadable, especially the ones most familiar to you, who made up so much of your life. Lee could have touched Viv’s shoulder and roused her from her private world. But she didn’t want to. She contemplated Viv’s face, the half-closed hand resting on the pillow, the steady breathing, the slightly open mouth. She thought that Andy, at times, must have looked at Viv from the same vantage. Andy would continue to do so, while this would soon become only a memory for her. Not quite so distant as Alex Garcia, but a memory nonetheless.

IN THE MORNINGshe woke to an empty bed. The more things change, she thought. Viv was already up and dressed, as was Marion, sitting at the dining table drinking coffee that Lee could smell from across the room.

“You lose something,” she heard Viv saying, “when you find that one person. Other people fall away. Even if they don’t go anywhere. You miss them and you miss who you were with them.”

“It is a loss,” said Marion. “And you may need to mourn, despite everything you may have gained.”

How strange, if flattering, to be mourned when you were still right there in the next room. But was Andy really the one person in Viv’s life? If he hadn’t entirely been when they left — if Viv’s decision to come with her on this trip was rooted in a struggle against that — then that struggle had now been resolved. Time for Viv to go home. She knew what this trip was for Viv, just as she had known what that trip had been for Alex Garcia. So, was that manipulative on her part? Or was everybody, ultimately, just getting what they wanted? Viv got to have one more adventure, the kind she couldn’t quite admit she’d outgrown. And Lee got to be the person who could give her that. She got to feel needed. Unlike with Andy, who’d also made her feel necessary once, but whose needs she could never properly meet. But in a way, now she was giving him what he required of her too — what he needed more than another apology or the whole truth. She’d first had the realization that she was on the outside looking in at Andy and Viv’s wedding. Letting go of Viv now was letting go of Andy, finally. She wanted to tell him this so that he wouldn’t hate her, but there wasn’t really a way to tell him. She had to hope that if he thought about it, he would somehow know. The boy who had loved her would have thought about it. If that boy was long gone, then she was only trying to reach a ghost.

“Oh, Lee, I hope we didn’t wake you. Viv said you were up for a while last night. I hope you slept all right, considering.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Come sit down. I’ll make us all some breakfast.”

Lee watched Marion move about the kitchen, slicing up the rest of the PDC and soaking the bread in an egg and vanilla batter. Heating a skillet. Preparing a fruit salad. She read the expression on Marion’s face as satisfied purposefulness. What if she just stayed here? What if Marion went off to work and Lee cleaned up, picked flowers, gathered wood for the fireplace, and had dinner ready for Marion’s return? What if that was her life from now on? She recognized Marion’s satisfaction because it reminded her of the fulfillment she was so surprised she felt when working with Linda. Most of Lee’s prior notions of business had come from eighties movies. Power suits and big mahogany desks and gold paperweights in the shape of ducks. She had grown up around Linda West, Inc., but she hadn’t grown up in it. She didn’t know Linda the Executive — the strategic thinker, the creative mentor. But when Lee was foundering professionally (and in other ways too), Linda had taken her under her wing and put her to work. She rotated Lee through several departments in the company, a process of accelerated rope learning, and then made her a vice president, overseeing talent acquisition in New York. Yes, Linda said, it helped to have Lee as one of the more public faces of the company, but first and foremost, Lee was an excellent judge of character, an asset in this role.

Linda had foreseen this, had recognized what her daughter most needed at the time and tried to help her attain it. Like a mother would. Lee hadn’t known Executive Linda very well, but she was even less familiar with Maternal Linda. For most of her life, it seemed as if Linda made a mess and then either didn’t recognize it as a mess or simply excused herself from the disarray. Lee had been left to sort it out. But work was an arena where Linda looked after her. This is what she would miss. She couldn’t go back to it now if what Marion had told her turned out to be true.

IN THE REARVIEWmirror Lee could see Marion standing by the door of her cottage, waving them off. Marion would head inside and eventually make her way back to the guest bedroom where she would find the photograph of Jesse that Lee had left for her.

“Are you sure you want to go see Linda alone?” Viv asked when they were back on the coastal highway.

“I think I have to. Besides, if you don’t get back, you’re going to get fired and I need to know what’s going to happen to Romola and Peyton.”

“You don’t even watch.”

“I’m going to start.”

“You better do it soon. THATH has a rich history but not much of a future.”

“What will you do if it goes off the air?”

“I don’t know. I’m like an iceman. Or a maker of mouse pads. I wonder if I could go work for Carnahan. He’s got that thing for appropriating obsolescence. He’s got his butler waiting on him in vintage factory wear and small batch denim. Maybe I could dress up like a town crier and be their in-house storyteller. Kara Carnahan loves THATH. I could keep it going for her.”

“You could be her Scheherazade.”

“Oh my God, could you imagine putting the Carnahans to bed every night?”

“Yeah, like, here’s a glass of warm milk to go with your bucket of raw meat. Sleep tight!”

At a gas station they stopped for coffee and on the cardboard sleeve of Lee’s cup was an ad for a neo-caper movie that Jack had a supporting role in. More than a month ago she’d received a text from her ex: Thinking about you. Getting hard. She hadn’t replied. Was there an expiration date on these things? The message was still on her phone. What would she even write back at this point? You still there? Still hard?

Back in the car, Viv took over the driving. She was so ten-and-two. Lee had always loved that about Viv: how Viv, despite wanting not to be, was so ten-and-two. She didn’t even realize she’d been staring until Viv said, “What?”

“Nothing,” said Lee. She busied herself with finding a playlist Jack had made for her. It was a great playlist. And she didn’t mind being reminded of him. He’d never yelled at her, never spat at her or threw a plate at her. Of all the relationships she’d been in, all of her encounters with men, theirs was one of the least demeaning. She scrolled to a song that made you want to go out and have one last really fucking great night. When you played it loud, and you had to play it loud, it reminded you of your whole entire life and then made you forget about everything for one pure moment.

Viv wondered aloud if one day the world would have changed so much that if they were to, say, dance around their kitchen to this song, it would have to be the equivalent of that “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” scene in The Big Chill. Lee wasn’t sure. If you turned into whatever the current equivalent would be of a self-satisfied yuppie who just couldn’t fight the rhythm, then that’s what you turned into and it didn’t matter what the music was. You were a joke. But the more she thought about it, the more she thought about her mother and grudgingly felt she had to give Linda credit. How Linda got over rock and roll early, got over those boys. All but one of them. Linda loved the music of her youth as much as anyone, but she never pushed it on you, as if her generation were the only one that had ever really been young and grown older. Maybe the best thing about the music of Lee’s youth was that it had already lost its innocence. So the nostalgia you felt when you heard it wasn’t for what you believed was a better time, just a different one.