Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

I want to compare it to a broken bone, what happened with Rodgers and coming clean with Andy. There had been a fracture and then I made the break complete. It could be fixed, it would heal, but we would have to immobilize it, work around it, learn to use other parts of our bodies in new ways. We would be able to walk again, and eventually there might not even be a limp. But still. There was a night, the end of a night, when I heard him come home to our apartment. I didn’t know where he’d been. He must have sat in the dark, in the living room, for an hour before he came into our room, just as it was getting light out. I wasn’t showing yet but I was already rounder, fuller. There was more of me in the bed. He lay down and put his body against mine, as if to make a seal between us. I wrapped his arms around me. There wasn’t one moment: I forgive you now. I had hurt him, hurt us, and that never went away. It took root, but it didn’t — allow me to switch metaphors — overrun or edge out everything else that could flourish between us.

Soon after we settled in to a home in Highland Park, Linda got in touch and invited me to lunch. I considered saying no out of loyalty to Lee and respect for her feelings. But I didn’t know what Lee’s feelings were — she was gone from my life again. What surprised me was how infrequently I thought about her. It wasn’t an even exchange, Leo taking Lee’s place in a trio. I only registered the similarity of their names months after Leo was born. If Andy did, he didn’t say anything — we’d named him for Andy’s grandfather. But Leo’s presence demagnetized me to Lee’s old pull, which isn’t to say I didn’t welcome the temporary quiet now, the shutting of the door, being left with Lee’s letter. It’s just to say I didn’t miss her. Not like I used to. When I did things, I didn’t wonder what Lee would think, whether she would approve. I went to see Linda not because she was a link to Lee, not because they were made out of the same stardust and I wanted to be in a haze of it once more. I decided to see Linda because while I had been so naïve so often, I knew what knowing Linda West could do for me out here. That long-ago night — the redwood deck, the pool, the movie director.

“Oh, Viv!” she gasped, clutching my shoulders, hands like hen claws. “You look won derful!”

“Breastfeeding,” I exclaimed, matching her excitement. “It’s the best diet ever.”

“Yes, I have a dim memory of that.” She pulled me in for a hug while the host, whom she called by name, patiently gave us a moment before leading us to our table — a slab of salvaged wood by a window of reclaimed glass. “You know, I did nurse Lee. For a little while anyway. Not that I’d ever get any credit for it.” She raised her hands, palms toward me, as though surrendering to a judgment, a move I’d never seen her make. “So how is motherhood treating you?”

It was won derful, I said. Then she gave me her “Okay, for real, tell me, girlfriend” face. I quickly confessed to her how hard it had been, how unrelenting, especially at first. Sobbing in the shower, wondering how I would ever manage to leave the house again but not in an active, purposeful way, more in a mystified way: I used to leave the house? It was cold outside, a dirty New York winter. My body hurt. I wanted to convalesce. I had heard people say things like, “Parenthood is brutal but totally worth it.” They made it sound like a particularly challenging workout and not like you had plunged to the bottom of a lake and grown gills and that the world beyond the watery light of the surface was no longer yours.

My maternity leave began just a few weeks before THATH’s cancellation came down, so I had no work to return to, no old, familiar structure. I read a lot of essays written by women who hated playgrounds. I worried that my love was not unconditional. I worried that I worried. But then my heart would leap as I watched my son sleeping. It would somersault when I sat him in my lap and patted his back to burp him, which he met with a calm but alert look, like a curious sightseer, with his arms out and folded over each other like a genie. He broke my heart when he rested his little hand on my waist as I nursed him and when his cry grew faint, exhausted and trembling. Sometimes he looked like a turtle. Once, squinting and full-cheeked, he looked like Wallace Shawn. And when he smiled at me as if I lit up his whole world, it lit up mine.

I thought I had read enough baby-preparation books and seen enough diaper commercials to know what to expect: joy, aggravation, aggravated joy, joyous aggravation, lots of complaining about never having sex but not really caring because you were so tired and all you really wanted to do with that time was order takeout and watch TV. I expected to be changed in profound ways, though I didn’t know what that would necessarily involve because these changes seemed to be so profound they rendered language inadequate. But I thought they would have to do with me and the baby, not me and Andy. If anything, they would exclude Andy and that’s why we would have to remember to “prioritize our relationship” and I would have to remind myself that I was “not just a mom, but a woman!”

I hadn’t expected mystery. Andy and I became mysterious to each other in a way I don’t think we’d been since that very first time I’d heard his voice on the phone when I called about the room. I would watch him standing by the window holding our son and think of him as someone I wanted to get to know. I would wonder about him. A wonder that led to a want that lifted a spell. As though part of me had been asleep.

Somehow there was more space with three of us. It’s too simple to say that this new space we found was where Lee used to be. But her absence could be as defining as her presence. It reminded me of that day I ran into Kirsten, on my own. How sure of herself she was with Lee out of the picture, this girl who had called us a planet and herself an ant. It also made me think of the way Frank had once swiftly absolved a character of insidious actions by attributing them to a brain tumor that merely had to be removed. Lee wasn’t a brain tumor and I couldn’t blame her for my being unfaithful to Andy. Nor could I simply excise the infidelity by not contacting Rodgers again. For a while, he became a kind of fantasy. I thought about him too much. I didn’t go places he was bound to be, but on occasions where there might be some chance, however slight, of running into him, I made sure I looked good. On days when I just happened to look particularly good (pregnancy worked for me), days when Andy would compliment me, I regretted that I never ran into Rodgers. I didn’t even try to reach out to Lee to talk about it. Instead I confided in new friends, women who had told me about similar confusions in their own lives and had trusted me to react sympathetically. Who understood fallibility. It wasn’t Lee’s fault. But she was a big part of it. Just as she had been a part of something for Andy that excluded me. Their attachment didn’t involve me, and then it did, and I had to be there in order to be left out. I could get lost in the paradoxes. But maybe it wasn’t that complicated. The old triangle fell apart. Andy and I created a new one.

I didn’t tell Linda about the mystery, the wonder, the want. I took out my phone to show her a recent video of Leo, just under a year old then, laughing, and I could see her trying not to look bored. So I changed the subject.

We talked about her work. She had pulled back from the business and was considering selling the brand to a French conglomerate. We talked about L.A. “This is where you need to be!” She was excited for me, eager to help. This is how Linda enchanted you. How Lee did, too, in a quieter, steadier way. Their encouragement, their belief in you. It meant that you were unique, as special as they were, and you mattered. Linda had always treated me this way, and it felt generous, never strained. Until now. Now that she knew that I knew what she’d done. And what might I do with that knowledge? Obviously I’d done nothing with it yet. So what could she do for me to keep it that way? She didn’t say this; she didn’t have to. I suppose I could finally read between the lines. And maybe there had been something in it for her all along, an advantage in being kind to me.