Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Who is Count Andre?”

“The Slavic financier who almost split them up. I guess you’re not watching the show.”

“Oh. Well, no. I wasn’t sure you were still writing for it.”

“I am. And I don’t think I can take off right now.”

“Sure. I understand.”

“But I don’t know. Maybe I could get away?”

I suggested she come over to our apartment for dinner that night to discuss further. I hoped Andy being there, between us, would help me get my priorities straight. I also wouldn’t have minded Lee seeing Andy and me in our cozy home. We could make her a meal, tend to her for a couple of hours, then send her on her way, maybe a little jealous of our life together.

Dinner would be great, she said, but she’d already made a plan to see another friend of hers tonight.

“What other friend?” I asked.

ANDY AND Ionce mused about one of the unexpected benefits of our marriage: how it made flirting with other people easier. Because flirting became less a means to an end and more of an end in itself. Taking someone to that slightly charged but relatively innocent level of desire and not needing it to lead to anything more. Paradoxically, this works only if you have a relationship typically characterized as “good”—a solid foundation from which to venture forth and to which you can return, emboldened but never really shaken. Though Andy and I never said it, we smugly assumed that having this very conversation spoke to what a good relationship we had.

Going off with Lee for a while wasn’t flirting. It was something more, though I tried to make it look to Andy as if it weren’t. At breakfast the next morning I read the junk mail, the catalogs featuring adult-sized footed pajamas designed for a demographic that a marketing service had determined I now belonged to. From the windows in our front room, I could see the 7 train snaking above Queens Boulevard. Before we moved here, all I had known of Sunnyside was that Richard Yates referenced the neighborhood in a short story about an out-of-step World War II veteran, confounded by the fifties and his own masculinity. Now it was home to pockets of Irish immigrants, Eastern Europeans, Colombians, and the young professionals whose presence justified a Times article every six months or so declaring this borough the “next frontier.” Andy had found us a topfloor apartment with a distant view of the Empire State Building. A Versailles sitting room met cut-rate nursing home in the powder blue lobby with its complicated molding, oxidized mirrors, and fluorescent tube lighting. It was more space than I’d ever had in the city. The muffled rumble on the elevated tracks had become a sound I didn’t hear anymore, until the silence of this morning. Finally I spoke:

“It’s just a few days.”

“A few days can feel like an eternity.” I think he was quoting an early-results home pregnancy test commercial. It would have been an opportune time to tell him that I had, three days ago, taken one of those tests and that it had been positive. Instead I let the moment pass and sat there trying not to look conflicted.

“You want to go. That’s fine. I just hope you know what to expect.”

“I don’t know what to expect. I don’t think Lee knows what to expect.”

“Lee and her spontaneity.”

“She wants one last thing of her father’s.”

“She wants attention.”

“I can give her attention. I have enough to go around. And I’ll be back before you even miss me.”

I didn’t register the false cheer in my voice until Andy spoke again.

“I’ve been missing you.”

He leveled his gaze at me, but I couldn’t meet it for more than a second or two, which incited him to keep going. “It’s like you haven’t been here for a while. So, really, what’s the difference? You should go.”

Andy had tried to fight with me about how I didn’t know how to fight. I could argue, meet logic with logic. I could write fights for the show, fangs out, one bitchy line after the next, but that was a circus act. It was engagement with a performance, not with another person. I had wanted to improve, to engage with Andy, for him, and I had gotten incrementally better. Still, I tended to meet confrontation with a full system shutdown.

“You don’t have anything to say?”

“I don’t know. You’re right?”

“That’s just it. It’s not about me being right or wrong. Or you being right or wrong. It’s what the fuck are you feeling and why can’t you talk to me about it?”

“Okay, I guess I’m feeling angry at you right now for telling me what it is and isn’t about.”

“You guess? Be angry then. But don’t act like there’s nothing going on and like you just want to help out a friend. Or whatever Lee is.”

It wasn’t acting, though. Acting suggests you can turn it on and off. This was a reflex — a turtle going into its shell. And I was only beginning to see this as a problem. My problem. One that was related to but distinct from a more generalized marital malaise. I wanted the malaise to be generalized, part of some matrimonial bargain you strike that involves using phrases like “date night.” I had willed myself to believe that over time two people simply reach a point where they harness the electrical current between them for something like the smooth functioning of an efficient refrigerator — this is just what happens and maybe this even meant it was time to have a child. I told myself the closeness we had, a brain-centered intimacy, more than compensated for what I missed. But what was the closeness if we weren’t close enough to talk about what was missing? If I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it? I didn’t know how to tell him that the choices I’d made with him — to get married, to go off the pill — had started to make me feel that I no longer knew who I was and that I wasn’t ready to become someone new.

Lee, who didn’t need me to be someone new, had appeared at just the right time. I wasn’t entirely sure why she had come back when she did, but I knew that what propelled her was longing — an almost physical tug.

I’d like to think I would have gathered some courage, looked up, and tried to get all of this across to Andy if he’d stayed at the table for one minute more instead of going to the kitchen sink and wordlessly rinsing his dishes before getting in the shower.

Luxelovah, Massachusetts:I heart Jastine! I haaaaated Jason when he was with Lillian. They were the most boring couple ever (lol!). Justine brings out his fun, verbal side. But don’t tell me Justine is carrying Count Andre’s baby.

Debbysmom, Michigan:Why did they kill off Liza if there just gonna bring her back??!! I hurt she lost weight but shes not even pretty. She looks like a wrinkled raisin!

CaseyP, Florida:If I wanted left-wing politics, I’d watch network news. Enough with the Afghanistan veteran story line. NOT. BUYING. IT. Writers, you are running the show into the ground. Hel-LO? You are driving away your fan base!!

I had seen CaseyP before, though I hadn’t noticed until now that she (he?) had a black-and-white image of Ayn Rand for an online icon. Debbysmom had a kitten, Luxelovah a hot-pink handbag. CaseyP vented with a prune-consuming regularity and I had tried to stop taking the remarks personally because it only led to a reflexive antipathy ( Who takes the time to write these things? ) that turned in on itself ( Who takes the time to read these things? ). The dignified reaction was to see this as proof that viewers still cared enough about To Have and to Hold to get worked up and post in forums. Proof that we still had viewers, despite the constant, dispiriting reports of dwindling ratings. To Have and to Hold (THATH to its devoted audience) belonged to a dying breed: daytime, English-language soap operas. And its few surviving New York kin had decamped to Los Angeles to cut costs.