The Sun in Your Eyes (11 page)

I imagined Linda there, in a taffeta dress and dyed-to-match heels, in the banquet hall at the end of the season. How many turns one life could take. We agreed it was odd that Linda, who “practically invented the overshare,” didn't talk to her daughter about that time, rarely discussed Flintwick, and had never once mentioned Hirschman's.

“She must have her reasons,” I said.

“I'm sure she does,” said Lee.

Y
ELLOW COUNTERPANES WITH
blue flowers, a crosshatch weave on the heavy drapes, a low ceiling you could palm when standing, as Lee was, on one of the double beds, pink tile in the bathroom: our room for the night.

“You know who lives around here? Besides Charlie Flintwick?” She flopped down on the lumpy mattress and rolled over next to me.

“Who?”

“Rodgers Colston.”

Rodgers Colston.
It was a name that should have made me stop and think
Who? Oh! I haven't thought of him in years.
But no. Like Lee showing up out of the blue, but not really out of the blue—some people are with you all along, even when they're not.

“Yeah?” I tried to modulate my voice, not to betray too much curiosity.

“He has a place up around here and an apartment in the city.”

I still thought of us, of my cohort, as being too young and not established enough to have more than one place of residence. I lagged behind the reality of my peer group.

“Let's call him and see what he's doing. I need a break from all this dad stuff.”

“You're in touch with him?”

“I see him around now and then. I went to his last opening.”

She said it so casually but I couldn't help hearing a cutting subtext:
There is a whole world you are not a part of.
When I first met Lee, I'm ashamed to say, I thought of her as “my famous friend,” that some social boundary had been made permeable and that I had been allowed to cross it. I wondered if I was merely an opportunist and Lee presented me with opportunities. Eventually that boundary disappeared and I hadn't recognized it again until now, hearing her talk about Rodgers. But it wasn't just that Lee was friendly with Rodgers. It was that they had been in touch when Lee and I weren't. I had wanted to believe she had dropped out of the world for a while, when apparently, she had just dropped me.

Rodgers Colston belonged to that lazy, golden summer when Lee and Andy and I first became friends. That summer of long afternoons and warm dreamlike nights. Time worked differently. It blurred. There was a party once, a show, a thing, and I don't know why but we decided to dress up. Lee fashioned herself an outfit involving a shiny bathing suit and a black slip she found at Savers. She stuck a few pieces of tinfoil in my hair and let me borrow a short purple shirt-dress that looked a bit like a uniform. Loose on her, the dress pulled at my chest and hips. I was still learning how to cultivate an appeal, figuring out what clothes to wear. Lee had introduced me to the subtle and transformative power of blush. That bright-eyed, Lizzy-Bennet-tramping-across-the-countryside
glow. That
I know my sister is prettier but with my radiant complexion am I not irresistibly spirited, Mr. Darcy?
effect you could get, even though we barely needed it then. I took Lee's word for it that I looked good. Andy wore a blue T-shirt with a large satin seahorse sewn on the front. We went to the old brick textile mill where Noah Stone and his friends lived, where silk-screening tables and a mountain of salvaged junk (bed springs, a washing machine, a carburetor, a pair of gigantic plush slippers in the shape of pigs) had been pushed to a wall to make room for a stage on which four guys in masks methodically generated discordant dance music. The smell of sweat and beer permeated the space.

Lee and I found ourselves in a room they called “the study,” where there were two torn-up sofas and shelves of mildewed books. I pulled down a pre-Fonda exercise manual featuring pictures of women in navy blue leotards demonstrating poses in a gauzily lit living room. I had opened to a page where a woman stretched her legs in a V, feet in the air.

“Maybe it's because she reminds me of my mother, but that one does it for me.” The voice came from over my shoulder. Male, with a mildly Southern lilt to it. I became aware of my back, my spine, my bare collarbone as areas that could be touched by whoever that voice belonged to. I turned to see him. Sharp features, dark hair. Heeled boots that made him Abraham Lincoln tall. Slim-fitting brown corduroys secured by a leather belt with an ornate buckle. He also had on a black blazer and under that a pink T-shirt, which said Camp Young Judea across the front. I wondered if there wasn't something vaguely anti-Semitic about him wearing this shirt, in the same way I'd puzzled, as a kid, over the bumper stickers that said “My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter.” It was at these times that I most felt my Jewishness, if only because I became aware of it as something to be
appropriated. I'd had a T-shirt just like that which I'd adorned with glitter paint one summer at a Jewish girls' camp where we sang easy-listening hits and used shampoos that smelled like apricot. Another art school student somewhere probably had my old shirt in rotation.

But if his outfit confused me, it also made me less self-conscious in my blushing-alien-stewardess get up, which might have been sexy on Lee. Andy had envied Noah Stone for all the girls who wanted him, but I began to wonder what kind of way Noah had with women. These guys, these boys, made me feel like the young woman I was, but also like an aging and impotent dandy. Their bodies amazed and frustrated me. Then this walking pastiche came along and made an inappropriate joke about his mother.

“R
ODGERS
C
OLSTON
,”
SAID
Lee, as though they had a history. I half expected her to add, “So we meet again.”

“In the fleisch,” he said. To distract from whatever was passing between them, Lee introduced me.

“This is Miss X.” Was she trying to make me seem mysterious? Was there some reason I shouldn't want Rodgers Colston to know my name?

“I like your tin foil, Miss X.”

“Thank you.”

“Miss X-Files.” He pronounced it X-falls, which sounded so much looser and better than the pinchy way I would say it: X-fiy-uls. I realized I was still holding the book of calisthenics. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. Topics of conversation popped up in my mind like Whac-A-Moles: David Duchovny, squat thrusts, the Civil War. Everything got the mallet. I wondered if he could somehow read my thoughts because he just stood there, stooped over
me, his mouth a little open and on the verge of a smile. Finally he said, “I'll see y'round.”

I turned to Lee but she had gone. Out in the main room I spotted Andy on the sidelines of a throng by the stage. He raised his arms and gave me a “please save me” look, and I felt a huge surge of affection for him for being pudgy and wearing an ill-fitting shirt with a big satin seahorse on it. The performance ended and the sound system came on; the music grew progressively dronier as the crowd thinned. Still no sign of Lee. Andy and I found a disgusting mattress in a back room, and I was so tired all I wanted to do was lie down on it. It was disgusting in a way that I romanticized as arty.

I didn't remember falling asleep, but a murmur woke me up. By then the place was silent. Lee knelt by Andy's head, her mouth close to his ear. What she was saying I couldn't make out, but something tender-seeming as her fingers brushed the side of his face. She kissed his temple, his forehead, and then she kissed him on the mouth. He sat up and pulled her closer, his hand in her hair. Through a triangle of space, my arm crossed over my face, I could watch without their knowing. Or so I thought. When Lee drew back for a moment, I shut my eyes but not before a flicker of contact had been made. She moaned a little, but the kissing continued until it was replaced by shifting and creaking. “Mmm,” I heard her say. “C'mon.” The springs in the mattress rose. Footsteps. I opened my eyes and they were gone.

I wanted so badly to be someone who didn't care. I wanted to go find Noah Stone or Rodgers Colston and sleep with one of them in a desultory way. I wanted to be someone who didn't think to use the word “desultory” in relation to sex. I wanted to be lost and to surrender the way Andy just had. But I took Lee's seduction of Andy personally, feeling somehow that she was making fun of me, of my
ability to draw lines and my inability to cross them. The worst part is that I just lay there, believing Andy would come back, that we'd log a few more hours of sleep and then go home.

But I was on my own. I tossed and turned, scratched at what I assumed were fleas, and waited for the sky to lighten to a deep blue. When it finally did, I headed out to a parking lot, a near-treeless vista of abandoned warehouses and disused railroad tracks. Vacancy. A quiet morning. The rush of highway traffic faintly audible. Lee likely would have known how to orient herself by the sun's low position in the eastern sky or something like that. Sometimes we would go to a park by the water—a strip of green between the interstate and the harbor—and sit on a bench in the sun, not doing much of anything beyond looking out and watching shore birds land on wooden pilings. Lee knew what the birds were—cormorants, great blue herons. It was incongruous. Who taught her these things? Was she one of those children who develops an interest and clandestinely pursues it? Had she kept a field guide under her bed and studied at night while Linda entertained in the hills above Los Angeles? Her ability to name a bird, or a tree, or a constellation, her knowledge of the natural world, conflicted with the idea she had of herself—as a bright enough but not particularly bookish girl who didn't fully merit whatever academic success she'd achieved. It wasn't her intelligence, she seemed to suggest, that had gotten her here, to the school that Andy and I had worked hard to get into. And maybe it wasn't. Still, she would have known what to do here, standing at the edge of this rusting postindustrial plain. The childish part of me said it didn't matter, that I might as well walk myself into a situation so terrible that Lee and Andy, but especially Lee, would feel, for the rest of their lives, the guilt of leaving me alone. Some other part of me, the underutilized, bootstrapping part, said,
Buck the fuck
up, you're on your own and the day is mild and you have a city at your feet, so just go.
I saw a Dunkin' Donuts in the distance. To each his own lodestar.

Two patrons sat at small tables and a third leaned against a counter by the window while an employee in an orange and pink smock attended to a tray of crullers behind the register. I took my coffee and glazed donut to my own little table and sat there, feeling existential. I hadn't noticed, until he'd moved and was standing over me, that the customer by the window was Rodgers Colston.

“Miss X.”

It sounded like Miss Sex. I tried hard not to drop the cup in my hand.

“Mister Colston.”

“Did you have a good time last night?”

“Yeah. It was great. Right?”

It didn't matter what the words were, only that we had established a rhythm and kept it going. He sat down and we said more basic things while his eyes flashed with something like wry amusement. I remember focusing mine on his upper lip and wondering what it would feel like against my neck, the back of my thigh. He caught me staring.

“I still don't know your name.”

“Viv. Vivian.”

“That suits you.”

“Does it?” Like a stylist. It reminded me of the hairdresser at the upscale salon my mother took me to when I was fifteen and going through a homely phase. He had thick swoopy hair, he could pull off a red buffalo plaid work shirt with white jeans, he was from Vermont, and I would have believed anything he said. I believed him when he told me I was pretty and that he was sure I'd
have a boyfriend soon, if I wanted one. That I didn't soon have a boyfriend, that I didn't even really like the haircut he gave me, somehow didn't make me question the first part of the statement. I never, for instance, wondered if my mother had tipped him to say such a thing, I just took heart in his compliment. It got me through sophomore year.

“I just mean it's a nice name.”

“I like Rodgers.”

“It's a family name.”

“Do people ever call you Rod?” I became very conscious of how I was swallowing my coffee.

“No.” Finally he full-on smiled. Crooked teeth. Pointy teeth. Back woods? Or so upper class as to be beyond orthodontia? “No one calls me Rod.”

We took our donuts and started walking past the deserted factories and down blocks of two-story houses with siding, beige, light blue, pale green, the main avenue of the city's Little Italy, where two or three bakeries were raising their gates. We walked across the highway overpass, past the old stone office buildings downtown, the bus hub, the new river promenade, up the hill toward campus. The quiet of the early morning still hung over the city. At some point I realized he was walking me home.

“I don't really see it,” said Rodgers, when Lee and Noah came up like celebrity gossip. “Why Noah?”

“Andy says it's because he has no intellectual remove.”

“Could be.” He shook his head at Andy and intellectual remove. “Andy, I mean, he's all right. He's that guy, you know that guy, that kind of sexually ambiguous guy who is basically dating the record store and, you know, if he could only meet someone who likes Bedhead as much as he does, everything would be fine.”

I nodded and told myself to find out who Bedhead was. Also,
Andy
was sexually ambiguous?

“You nod a lot,” he said.

“Do I?”

“You do.” Like he was noticing details about me. But also like everyone knew what that was good for. There was some buoyant thrill at being taken for a sexual object.

“But I know what Andy means,” I said. “Noah's so good-looking, and everything he does is just so
awesome
and so
rad.
”