The Sun in Your Eyes Read online

  “Why do you think I would like it?”

  “It’s just a really good group of people, trying to live better. Figuring out how to live better, together.”

  “Why me? I mean, why out of everyone here, why single me out?” Hostility rose in my tone. “Do you know this is the third time someone like you has come up to me?”

  “Someone like me?”

  “I’m sure the Sentries of Perception stand at the gateway to a wonderful world of peace and happiness and freedom from the shackles of consumerism. I’m happy that you have a belief system and you have dinners, but I just don’t feel like being brainwashed today.”

  Students on the steps turned toward our commotion or deliberately looked the other way, embarrassed for me.

  “I just thought you looked friendly, and yeah, to be honest, a little sad. That’s all. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Whisking my book into my bag, I walked quickly away, hoping to God I wouldn’t trip, and when I’d made it around the corner, out of sight, a sob escaped. Just one sob, then I caught my breath and thought about the complexity of breathing.

  After that, nothing much happened for the duration of my freshman year, except for the diminishment of my expectations. I busied myself with schoolwork. Somewhere in that time, I had applied for and received a research assistantship with a comparative literature professor writing a book on sentimentalism from Clarissa to E.T. Landing the position and the small stipend attached to it was the type of goal I knew how to achieve through hard work and conscientiousness—fine abilities to have, except they didn’t help me do the thing I most longed to do, which was fall in love. My unimaginative plan to stay in the dorms over the summer started to seem like a bad haircut, an unnecessary handicap. When I saw the flyer—Roommate needed to share apt. with one M and one F (not a couple). Own large room, close to campus. $250/month. Call Andy/Lee—I made myself call. It was tacked to the wall in the coffee shop that I would hesitate to go into if I wasn’t dressed right. There was another coffee shop nearby, fine for coffee, where nobody cared how you were dressed, but there was no point in sitting in that one. Nothing interesting was going to happen to you there.

  In the three hours between phoning, speaking to Andy, and showing up, some fantasy had already taken shape in my mind. The slight halting in his voice conveyed an intensity that made it hard for him to speak smoothly, and though he might initially think of me as a little sister, the sexual tension between us would be too strong to deny, possibly leading to some complications with Lee, but we would cross that bridge when we got there. When he came to the door of the drooping Victorian, I silently scolded myself for being disappointed.

  My first impression: Andy had a friendly face and a soft body. He wore clothes meant for a more effete, leaner man and they fit him snugly. In a vintage bowling shirt with the name Tom embroidered on it, he looked a bit like Tom, the suburban recreationalist who self-medicated with muffins, whose butt cheeks had grooved the vinyl driver’s seat of his ’86 Cutlass Ciera into a cradle. I detected no sexual tension between us as he led me up the narrowing stairs to the third floor. My disappointment set me at ease. I didn’t have to be afraid of saying something stupid, I only had to judge whether he said the wrong thing or decide to be generous and suspend judgment altogether. Only he wasn’t saying the wrong things; he was saying straightforward and sociable things (“I’m Andy”; “Nice to meet you”; “How’s it going?”) that betrayed no subtext whatsoever. My self-assurance withered into humility (He doesn’t find me attractive enough for subtext?), which then briefly descended into desperation (Why doesn’t he find me attractive?), which then picked itself up, dusted itself off, and morphed into resentment (Who is he not to find me attractive?) and a renewed superiority (If I wanted to, I could make this happen . . . if I wanted to). Did I say there was no sexual tension?

  “Sometimes I wish we had a stair lift,” he said.

  “Sometimes I want a motorized scooter,” I said.

  He looked back and smiled. For a moment, on the landing, I forgot there was a third person in this equation. Then Andy opened the door onto a few feet of hallway and a living room where a girl in a red shirt sat on a white sofa. Light slanted on her from a bay window, and it made me think of when you face the sun and close your eyes.

  I thought, at first glance, that this girl had no use for enthusiasm. But that was how she was so disarming. She simply smiled, getting up and putting out her hand, saying “Hi.” She seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place her.

  There was no incense in their apartment, not a tapestry in sight and no dorm-room door dry-erase boards. Instead there were drawings tacked to the wall, piles of books, Salvation Army furniture covered in bed sheets. A vase of flowers on the mantle of a disused fireplace. I never thought to bother with flowers. To buy them would have been an extravagance, but I wouldn’t have even considered picking flowers like these purple and yellow ones that grew in untended curb grass; probably because my mother never bothered with flowers. She preferred hearty plants: ficus trees, decorative yet practical arrangements of branches or an earthy bowl of pinecones. My mother would have said that flowers were lovely but ultimately frivolous. She wouldn’t have considered them lovely because they were frivolous.

  Aligned in their attitudes, my parents had instructed me to be noncommittal when looking for an apartment, even a summer sublet. Weigh your options, do your homework, don’t fall in love with anything, as though you could choose not to fall in love. But I had been doing my homework my whole life. How bad a mistake could I make here, on these wide floorboards in the room they led me to, under this sloping ceiling with the maple tree outside the dormer window?

  In the kitchen—wood-paneled walls, linoleum—drinking beer that Andy bought legally, I learned a few more particulars. Andy had a job at the computer science center. Lee was taking summer classes. Andy would be a senior come September and Lee would have been except she’d taken time off. She didn’t go into detail, which made it so mysterious.

  It hit me, then, where I recognized Lee from. Not because she looked the same as she had that day on the library steps—her hair, now a dull blue-black, fell in a jagged bob—but because I had the same feeling I did the first time I’d encountered her: standing in the ocean, close enough to shore to resist a riptide, but wanting, deep down, to see where the pull would take me.

  “I DON’T KNOW if you remember this,” I said, “but I think you once tried to talk to me about something having to do with the Sentries of Perception.”

  Her laugh was throaty and layered. It reminded me of a science museum exhibit that charted sound as waves of light along a dark wall.

  “Oh! Holy shit.” She began to chew one of her nails then drew her hand away from her mouth. “You were my first and last Reach Out. That’s what Bruce called them.”

  “Who’s Bruce?”

  “Who isn’t Bruce?” Andy interrupted, his voice increasingly booming. “He’s a seeker and a prophet. A desert bloom! A brave soul caught between the astral plane and the check-out lane.”

  “Bruce was an adjunct anthropology professor,” Lee said, a little irritated. “But now he works at the Stop and Shop and heads up a local chapter of Mind Faith. This spiritual community? They have these intensive workshops and their own vocabulary. It’s a lot of reconstituted Castaneda and Huxley.”

  I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about.

  “They also have potlucks,” Andy added.

  “I met Bruce about a year ago. I was troubled. He was really good-looking. It was a low point in my life. Blah, blah, blah. I put you on the spot, didn’t I?”

  “I just felt like I had a sign on me or something that said ‘loser.’ I’m sorry I ran off.”

  “Actually, you power-walked off. I remember thinking you needed, like, a fanny pack.” Andy laughed. I laughed too, as if it didn’t sting. “I’m sorry. I’m just pretty embarrassed by the whole thing now. It was getting so skeevy. You were right to run off. I was
glad you yelled at me that day. I must have seemed predatory and weird.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, I’m totally done with it, so please don’t let that worry you about moving in here. If you think you want to?”

  My dad’s voice in my head said, “Tell them you’ll give it some thought and be in touch.” I wondered if Andy and Lee consulted their fathers before moving into this place. Did they even have fathers? They seemed beyond parents. At least, Lee did. They were only two years older than me but I felt exponentially younger. The house was no more than a ten-minute walk from the main campus, but I had never come this way.

  Three days later I moved in.

  I quickly grasped the existing dynamic of my new household: Andy had feelings for Lee and Lee knew it and they both went about being sibling-like to each other.

  If it wasn’t my first night there, it was my second or third that Lee went to meet up with Noah Stone.

  “As in chiseled from,” she said.

  “Just like the Mount Rushmore presidents,” said Andy, saliva flying out of his mouth.

  Lee wiped her face.

  “Sorry,” said Andy.

  “It’s okay, I liked it.” She gave him a lewd look and the lovelorn part of him no doubt wished she were serious. “Bye, Viv. Hey, are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”

  I noticed that she didn’t “get ready” to see Noah Stone, she just wore what she’d been wearing the whole day, black cutoffs and a gray T-shirt, an outfit that seemed to be the result of a) feminist principles, b) laziness, c) self-assurance, or d) all of the above.

  “I don’t want to intrude on your date.”

  “It’s not a date date. There are always like ten other people over at Noah’s. Always.”

  “Thanks, really, but I don’t have a bike.”

  “Okay. See you guys later, then.” Before she left she fixed me with her eyes, transmitting a message: Fair enough. But we’re going to work on this. We’ll get you a bike or whatever it is you need not to make excuses. You’ve gotten this far, don’t back down now. It’s going to be great. You’ll see.

  From folding aluminum lawn chairs on a little porch off the kitchen, Andy and I watched her ride away for the evening. There was a gallantry about her.

  “You don’t like Noah Stone?” I asked Andy.

  “I like him. Everybody likes him. He’s perfect. He’s like a ten-year-old. How can you not like a ten-year-old? He’s pre-analytical. He’s so fucking full of childlike wonder. You know what it is? He’s so literal about everything more cerebral types have covered in layers of abstraction and meaning that he seems, in his simplicity, like a revelation. Like, he would maybe make a giant cigar out of Hamburger Helper and everybody would clamor to find all the meaning in it and they’d ask him and he’d just say something like ‘I don’t know, I was wondering how much Hamburger Helper it would take to make a ten-foot-long cigar.’ People eat that shit up. There’s no intellectual remove for Noah. That’s what gets him laid. I’m sure that’s what’ll make him successful.”

  “It’s your intellectual remove that keeps you from getting laid?”

  “It must be. I mean, I think girls look at me and they’re like, damn, I want a piece of that fine man-flesh, and I’m like, okay, take it easy, there’s plenty to go around, and then, you know, things progress, as they will, and I’m about to get with her and she’s like, Andy, I don’t just want your supremely hot body I want your mind but I can sense this, like, intellectual remove or something—what’s that about?”

  He had taken my hand and placed it against his chest to demonstrate what the girls were like with his man-flesh. He let it drop. When he let go, I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

  “Noah’s artsy without being pretentious. Which makes it hard to despise him. So, I get it. I can see why Lee is into that. He’s guileless. Like, I’m sure Noah has no idea who her father is and she likes that.”

  “Who’s her father?”

  “Jesse Parrish.”

  I knew enough about Jesse Parrish to know I should be impressed by this but nothing else. You know who knew about Jesse Parrish? The boy who loved the willowy cross-country runner. He’d put on a Jesse Parrish record that afternoon in his room but I couldn’t get past the fact that it was the same one my parents had in their meager collection, alongside their Anne Murray and the soundtrack to A Star Is Born. I suppose I was afraid, if one thing led to another musically, I would have had to admit to liking it when my parents turned up the hi-fi and swayed in each other’s arms to “Could I Have This Dance?”

  A lot of people owned that album, according to Andy. The one with the cow on the back cover. Motel Television, his first solo record. It should have established him as one of the major talents of his era. Only it didn’t. To own Jesse Parrish records now, especially his subsequent ones, required curiosity and effort, knowledge of a secret handshake.

  I followed Andy into his room, where he pulled out several records from a crate and proceeded to play “Always Lately,” the first track on Motel Television. Melancholy strumming of an acoustic guitar and a voice: boyish and bell-like but one that easily slipped into a gritty, growling lower register, occasionally within the same phrasing. The song, about the empty space between two lovers, made you feel you were somewhere just off the highway on a rainy morning, after driving most of the night, with nothing to do but contemplate the flat landscape outside your motel room window. The last line, “Remember this?” seemed less of a question than a request made by someone who had already come to a decision, who was already gone. The stripped-down opener gave way to a string arrangement and an echo-y second track; it sounded romantic and sweeping but the lyrics were about ice buckets, vending machines, and a lie.

  The album’s sleeve, when opened flat, showed Jesse standing alone in a field one misty dawn, looking downright foxy, his mouth slightly open, about to break into a rakish smile, and to the right of the fold, in the distance, the random Holstein.

  “Brian Reiger produced it,” Andy was saying, “and he was just—you hear the guitar? How it just rings? You don’t hear that on the CD or other versions of the album. You have to listen to the first pressing, which is what this is, and then you really understand how great of a role Reiger played in the sound. He could hear things nobody else could, which eventually drove him crazy. Like, certifiably. Jesse never went that far off the deep end, but he kind of had his own breakdown. This is what it sounded like.”

  Andy put on The Garden of Allah, underappreciated and even alienating when it came out in 1974, he said, but now hailed as a masterpiece. The first song was harder, struttier. The yearning melodic voice had a raw, sarcastic leer in it. For a song or two. Then the sound was all over the place, berserk, plunking piano, sloppy vocals, a gospel choir at one point. Courtly strings, orchestral arrangements, a celestial Mellotron, steel drums, and bongos. A glockenspiel. At the end of the LP’s closer, you can hear Jesse snarl, “Stick a fork in me.”

  “Basically he got loaded on Quaaludes, went into the studio, recorded some stuff, and then abandoned it in disgust. But there was enough there for Reiger to come in at the end and work his magic.”

  “Was it like a Cat Stevens thing?”

  “No, the Garden of Allah was the home of a silent film star. Alla Nazimova. She built this lavish place in Hollywood with a pool supposedly shaped like the Black Sea, and when she ran out of money, she turned the estate into a hotel. A lot of actors would stay there. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for a while. A lot of legendary debauchery went on and then it got kind of seedy, but not high-end seedy. Eventually all the famous people started staying across the street at the Chateau Marmont. So it was torn down and turned into a bank. Jesse Parrish knew his history.”

  As did Andy.

  Jesse’s label dropped him. He got fat. He got strung out. He got thin. At some point Lee was born. He left Linda or did Linda leave him? He took up with a groupie. He wrote songs other people made famous. He was g
oing back to the studio. He died. Lee was four.

  It all seemed removed from the girl who had just biked away. But it also explained her, and my instant fascination with her. People obsessed over Jesse Parrish, worked his life into legend, and Lee was part of that. She was part of a level of society I was only beginning to see. I’d never met anyone famous, unless you counted Michael Dukakis, with whom I shook hands once in sixth grade on a class trip to the State House. The affluence I’d grown up around had exposed me, at its upper boundary, to remodeled kitchens and glitzy Bar Mitzvahs. Lee’s father’s fame was not the most lucrative kind—it generated more cultural capital than actual capital. But, as I learned from Andy, Jesse came from a family whose mini-empire of supermarkets had been dismantled and dissolved. But not before certain trusts had been established and, in Lee’s case, well-maintained, thanks to her mother. On top of that, Linda West, former model, muse, and party girl, had turned out to be a remarkably savvy businesswoman.

  The more I looked at Jesse’s picture, the more I saw the resemblance to Lee. The sleepy, wide deep-blue eyes that darkened to violet at the edges, the fullness of her mouth, softening the sharpness and structure of her other features. They had faces—made for cameras and stages, made to be looked at. Lee shared with her father (and her mother, I would come to find out) a powerful, preoccupying magnetism. So that, in a group photograph, you’re always drawn to them first. When you can’t look at them anymore because you know you’ll never get to the bottom of them, then you start seeing the other people in the frame and wondering where the picture was taken.

  “Does Lee talk about him at all?”

  “Sometimes. Yeah. Last year some guy was writing part of a dissertation on him and wanted to talk to Lee. She agreed to, but in the end it just weirded her out. Like he was projecting all this stuff onto her father. But I think what really upset her is that she didn’t know if it was a projection or not. I mean, she never really knew her father.”