The Sun in Your Eyes Read online

  I waited for Lee to say something to me about what happened for most of the day—how could she not have said anything the night before!—and she waited me out, with such unbearable patience that we made it all the way to the big meal without bringing it up. By then it was too late for her to leave. Choosing our places at the dining table had the kind of tortured, overdetermined suspense of THATH scenes: Elena Sterling, faced with a tangle of different colored wires, having to pick which ones to clip to prevent a bomb from exploding. Lee wound up between my parents’ friends the Manns and Genevieve, who was at the foot of the table. Aaron next to her, me between Aaron and my mother, my father at the head. I kept looking at my mother, but she revealed nothing. She seemed a little mystified that the rest of us let Genevieve dominate the evening’s talk. Genevieve asked us if we’d ever heard of Noam Chomsky, told us about her town-gown efforts to introduce local underprivileged children to manga, and, while pushing some sweet potato around her plate, enlightened us about the toll exacted by mainstream media on the female body image. Had Genevieve seen any of Lee’s ads? Maybe. But would she even cop to reading those magazines?

  “It’s true, it can be pretty vile,” said Lee gently, dipping a toe in Genevieve’s stream.

  Aaron said something under his breath. All I caught was “you” and “vile.” Genevieve didn’t hear it. She’d heard Lee, though. And she’d certainly heard Aaron the night before: You’re Lee fucking Parrish. Their smiles.

  “Why do you go along with it?” she asked.

  “Good question,” said Lee. Like if she had an answer for that, she’d be ready to take on poverty next and then war.

  Genevieve garbled Audre Lorde’s words about using the master’s tools to dismantle his house. And Lee started to say she understood when Aaron snapped.

  “Nobody gives a shit, Lee. Just shut up.” And she did, mutely looking to me, for help maybe, or forgiveness. I stared down at my plate.

  “Aaron!” cried my mother.

  “It’s fine,” said Lee.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Natalie,” said my father. “Let it go. Let’s try to enjoy the rest of this meal.”

  Aaron apologized, primarily to the Manns, while my mother gave my father a squinty-eyed grin that contained (just barely) embarrassment, irritation, and incredulity. Natalie and Jonathan. I had the sense of having walked in on someone else’s life in what I had thought was my home. My mother found that sheepskin coat in the closet, and it signified a whole world I knew nothing about, a whole secret history. It seemed to me that I was learning something about marriage, though I couldn’t have said what.

  We finished the meal. As soon as the Manns left, I took up the pie plates and shuttled them into the kitchen with my mother. In years past, the cleanup had always been a group effort, but this time everyone found a reason to scatter. My mother’s silence made me think she would have preferred me gone, too, but then, tearing foil for leftovers, she asked me to tell her about Ben Driggs Stern. There wasn’t all that much to tell, I said. She frowned.

  “I got started too late and gave it up too early,” she said.

  “It?”

  “Oh, you know. Sex. As a vital thing.” She sighed. No provocation in her voice, nor was she proud of herself for being frank. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. “I missed my chance, in a way. Men don’t look at me like that anymore and I don’t look at them, not like I used to.”

  My mother, looking at men. Men looking at her. Who was this woman? Not the woman who hadn’t changed her bob haircut since the birth of her son. She did regularly apply store-bought dark auburn dye to cover her gray, but it seemed more about maintaining the status quo than about her looks. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. This was the woman, after all, who had determined that I was ready at fifteen for a trip to a salon in the city instead of Kathy’s Fountain of Beauty in the shopping strip. So what was it? Better not to be seen in the first place than to be looked at and found wanting? Had that happened with my father? Had he looked at her and been disappointed or, worse and more likely, stopped looking? They had been blinkered horses, canting along together, pulling the load that was our family.

  “What men?”

  “No one. In the past, I . . . I had . . . thoughts . . . and maybe once or twice those thoughts were met with an opportunity. I never acted on it. Looking back, I don’t know if that was courageous or cowardly of me.”

  “What were these opportunities? I mean, who were they?”

  “Nobody you know. I wasn’t going to run away with another teacher or a neighbor or anything. It was such a long time ago. I would never leave your father. Not now. I don’t have it in me. That’s all I’m trying to say. I think at some point even your memories change. They become what you need them to be. Marriage is such a strange thing. Who you end up with. This person who, if you’re lucky, makes up so much of your life. In certain ways it seems fated and in other ways so completely arbitrary . . . Remind me not to give this speech at your wedding, will you?”

  My wedding. It surprised me how pleased I was to hear my mother, amid her sad talk, allude to my wedding as something inevitable. It had been an abstraction, but maybe I wanted one more than I knew or wanted the kind of relationship in which a wedding was even a possibility. I certainly didn’t have that with Ben Driggs Stern.

  “When your father told me what happened with Lee . . . I think about these things. About myself. About you. About Lee. I do think she could use a friend right now. But maybe that friend isn’t you.”

  Genevieve came into the kitchen then and was halfway to the sink before she saw us sitting in the breakfast nook, staring at her like a zoo gorilla. She belonged to a different species. Even in refilling a glass of water by the sink she acted with a shining confidence here in her boyfriend’s mother’s house. No one had ever turned her down or made her feel undeserving. It would be only a matter of time before she would be hurt and humbled, perhaps repeatedly, before the world stopped being a place of promise. Obnoxious as I found her to be, I wished for a moment that she could stay the way she was, unharmed and unknowing. It vanished when she summoned a smile for us, the kind of wan, blinking smile you see on someone actively suffering a fool.

  “Sweetie,” said my mother, “there’s a pitcher in the fridge that’s cold.”

  “Oh, thanks, but my body metabolizes room temp better.”

  “Of course. Whatever you like.”

  “Thank you, Natalie.”

  Ms. Feld. Call her Ms. Feld. Your shit stinks too, Genevieve. And could you maybe offer to wash a fucking pan or something?

  “Aaron is so young,” said my mother, when Genevieve left.

  “He’s always seemed old to me. I usually end up feeling immature around him.”

  “I think I know what you mean. But he’s still such a boy in certain ways. I’m not too worried about Genevieve, I’m more worried about whoever comes after her. Ben Driggs Stern. Do you always use his full name like that?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “Me? Or Ben Driggs Stern?”

  She laughed and for an instant, she became Natalie to me again, not my mom, and I wanted her to have run off with whoever it was who had presented her with an opportunity all those years ago.

  The security light by the kitchen door clicked on, and my mother stood to see who was knocking on the glass pane. Lee. She came in from the cold, huddled in her parka, her eyelashes wet, her eyes bloodshot.

  “Could I talk to you?” she asked my mother and then gave me a look I’d once seen on a wounded doe that had wandered from the local deer sanctuary into town. Animal Control eventually shot the bleeding creature in a parking lot behind a multiplex. My mother ushered Lee in and took her coat.

  I went up to my old room so I couldn’t even try to listen. There were now a few plastic storage containers stacked by the desk and at the foot of the bed. But above the dresser was still the Bikini Kill poster I had taped to the wall
, a postcard of Garfield eating lasagna, and a picture of Helena Bonham Carter I put up during my A Room with a View period. All of it was from a time before Lee, which didn’t quite compute. My life always already had her in it. Years later, I would experience the same disbelief, the same ontological whiplash with my son. The always already.

  The knock at my door came from Lee, who held her packed bag at her side. She had insisted on calling a cab to get her to the bus station, even though my mother had offered to drive. She was so sorry. She felt so alone and she missed me, but I had Ben now, and she understood that changed things. She didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t have Ben, not in any way that meant I no longer needed her. But the last thing I wanted just then was to need her.

  My mother later told me she had sat Lee down, fixed them each a cup of tea, and tried to get across that if she was upset, it wasn’t so much on her own behalf, but on behalf of her children. On behalf of Lee, too. Natalie, ever the anti-Linda. If it had been reversed, what would Linda have said to me? But it could never have been reversed.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a bright spot, but I have to admit to a certain satisfaction that nobody, including Aaron, ever told Genevieve what happened, though she saw the taxi pull up, saw Lee get in. We closed ranks because we still had loyalties and we still knew where they lay.

  Lee later apologized to me again, and I told her I forgave her. I really thought, at the time, that I had. That the moment with my father was, after all, a cry for help. But I never truly forgave her for damaging our friendship or for hurting me. I never let myself believe that’s what she’d done.

  A WELL-GROOMED MAN in a chambray shirt, dark jeans, and work boots greeted us at the door of the Carnahans’ house, which sat on a tiny peninsula jutting out into the sea.

  “He’s got servants,” I whispered to Lee.

  “Yes,” she replied, annoyed with my astonishment. “They’re not servants. They’re personal assistants.” I forgot they’d had various helpers when Lee was growing up.

  Carnahan appeared. “Let’s go have a look at dear old Dad, y’all,” he said.

  We followed the Carnahans through airy rooms, all glass and white walls, to a rickety back staircase they hadn’t yet gotten around to renovating and maybe never would.

  “It reminds me of a mental institution,” Kara said. “But in a good way. Know what I mean?”

  I nodded. Possibly Kara was alluding to the deep Freudian scratches in the wooden banister and dark paneling along the wall. It wouldn’t have surprised me to reach the top and find an old nursery covered in yellow wallpaper. Instead, below a skylight was a hallway freshly painted in a soft soothing gray, leading into a rectangular observatory. Wide windows opened onto the ocean and the sky, and a thin shade made of some UV filtering fiber cast the room in a shadowy light.

  A series of black-and-white portraits lined the wall. Most of the well-known photos of Jesse, the ones that had graced his albums and been reproduced many times over, had been taken by Linda, candids she snapped with her old Brownie. Their intimate home-movie feel welcomed you into a rarefied world: Jesse in the Chateau Marmont; out by his Corvette in the desert; leaning on a fence at a scrub-covered ranch in Topanga. David Haseltine’s images had intimacy too, but not one that extended to the viewer. In their ongoing interiority was a vivid psychology that bled through the surface of the image, but nobody else could be a part of it.

  In one image, against a backdrop of flocked, floral wallpaper, Jesse stared directly ahead, daring Haseltine to catch the combination of boyish sweetness and lock-up-your-daughters sexuality. This simultaneous vulnerability and confidence must have made it hard to say no to him. But the photograph also crystallized that look, formalized it, made it into a mask, behind which you could almost glimpse Jesse laughing, quietly and a little viciously, at all of it.

  Next was a shot of Marion looking at Jesse as Jesse cast his gaze down toward a dusty beam of light coming through the window of another room in Flintwick’s lake house. They looked so contemporary—Jesse in his cardigan and T-shirt and Marion in her white button-down and light blue trouser-like jeans. On a side table next to Marion I noticed a glass bottle of water and a china cup placed on a saucer. The small touch of finery surprised me, evoking a loose luxuriance. Was that saucer Marion’s doing? Or was it Jesse’s? His etiquette, his Southern ways. The stillness of the picture was appealing, though a little blank, until I saw the picture to the other side of it, the moment just after, as Jesse looked straight at the camera. It hummed with the tension of him not looking back at Marion. Marion was looking ahead at Haseltine’s lens too. Their expressions: Is this what you wanted? As though both Jesse and Marion knew in advance what Haseltine’s frame was going to reveal here: a couple that wouldn’t last.

  Transfixed by the photos, I almost forgot to be angry with Lee.

  “Wait,” said Lee, pointing to an object on the dresser Marion was leaning against. A chain with a pendant, a narrow silver bar about an inch long. The way the light caught it, I could make out the Hebrew letter shin engraved along the top. “That’s Big Mort’s.”

  “He gave it to Jesse?” I asked.

  “No, no, no. Big Mort gave it to my mom when she left New York for L.A.”

  “Maybe Jesse had it for a while?”

  “I don’t think so. Linda wears it all the time. I think she must have been there. These were taken the day he died?”

  Carnahan stepped forward and made a show of exhaling. “Yes,” he said. “Tangled web?” Kara gazed out at the undulating waves, going for a troubled Bergmanian gloom but reminding me of the blonde in ABBA. Neither of them seemed to understand that we had just awakened something dormant, something we had mistaken for the ground before it started to move beneath us.

  THE CLOSELY SET cottages, patchy grass, and power lines of what Carnahan had referred to as “America” came into view at the end of his circuitous private drive. In the car the giddy shiver of a narrow escape came over me. But Lee didn’t want to feel that thrill with me or talk about what had just happened. “I’ll take you to the train station now,” she said with cold focus.

  “Lee.”

  “What? You don’t want to be involved. I get it.”

  “But I am involved. So, what are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

  “I’m going to look for Marion Washington, for real.”

  She’d tried to find her months before, she explained, without success but also without much urgency. According to the Internet, Marion didn’t exist after 1978. She had never spoken publicly about those last days with Jesse. She didn’t remember any of it, is how the story went. Vilified and with a chunk of her life lost, she disappeared from the public eye.

  But maybe she did remember. Not what happened to the tapes but something else, such as what Linda was doing at Flintwick’s that day. We didn’t have enough leverage to make Linda talk, and clearly leverage was what was needed. There I was—using words like “leverage” and “we.”

  I wouldn’t be getting on that train.

  “Lee, let me help.”

  “I’ll probably have to hire a private investigator or something.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not.” We were twenty-five miles away from our alma mater and its extensive network of archives and databases. Twenty-five miles away, it dawned on me, from Patti Driggs.

  “Why would she want to talk to me? She hates Linda. Besides, what would she even know?”

  “Isn’t it possible she might have a clue as to Marion’s whereabouts?”

  “Won’t that be weird for you?”

  “Because I dated her son for a few months eight years ago? I never even met her.”

  Lee decided it was worth a shot.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said. As if there was no question. As if I didn’t then take out my phone and reread the message Andy had sent me, start to reply, and delete every inadequate attempt. I’d been doing that
with him, in one way or another, for months. Years, even. I couldn’t do it anymore.

  “Lee, I need you to pull over. I have to call Andy.”

  OUR WEDDING VOWS had mentioned responsibility. How it was inseparable from loss. It had a heaviness to it and this was its finest quality. If you didn’t feel its weight, you didn’t have enough to lose. But Andy and I hadn’t exactly written that part of our vows. We’d cribbed it from Frank, lines he’d written for the show that were unexpectedly beautiful. (“You distract them with campy hijinks and people think the poignancy comes out of nowhere,” Frank had said. “But it never comes out of nowhere.”) Was it a cop-out, I’d asked Andy? No, he didn’t think so. He didn’t think it was cheating. It was, he added, a nice way to honor Frank, even. To be honest, I don’t remember the wording of our vows, only that they made me feel giving and loved and expectant, that we were about to make our lives that much larger. That we would each take care of the other. I should have committed those words to memory. I should have known them still by heart.

  There was a lot I didn’t remember about our wedding. It came back to me in flashes and out-of-sequence moments. Andy and me, alone in a room just after the ceremony, Andy biting into an apple, a post-match victory snack, like orange slices at a junior-high soccer game. My father’s guiding hand on my back, his other hand in mine as we danced. The Hasidic frenzy of the hora, an injection of shtetl into our modern marriage. My brother’s elegance in raising his glass for a toast. Kirsten presenting a bare, highly toned upper arm to Frank, and Frank, in his deadest of deadpans, saying: “Cardiofunk?” Jack Caprico giving me a congratulatory kiss on the cheek by way of introduction. How it lingered because of the full, bristly beard he’d grown for his run as Trigorin in a production of The Seagull. Lingered, too, because it was stupefying. All I could think was: Jack Caprico touched me. Later I would see, out of the corner of my eye, Jack Caprico talking to a tall, clean-shaven man in a lowly lit alcove, Jack Caprico doing most of the work and Andy, the tall, clean-shaven man, graciously listening but not working for anything and it would make me so proud. I would also see Andy talking to Lee, the two of them out in the courtyard, and it occurred to me that the last time I had seen them together like that, paying that kind of attention to each other, was in college. The feeling it gave rise to was akin to jealousy, if jealousy was a comfort.