The Sun in Your Eyes Page 8

  In the passenger seat, I leafed through a scrapbook Lee had been given by her aunt Delia, whom she’d gone to see in North Carolina a few months earlier on a fact-finding mission. Press clippings from a local paper and a copy of a page from his 1965 high-school yearbook picturing Jesse perched on a stool with his guitar, clean-cut in permanent-press pants and a crisp-collared, button-down shirt under a sport coat, his hair still short enough to be corralled into a stiff side sweep off his forehead. The caption beneath the photo: Jesse Parrish never fails to entertain!

  “Delia told me that in his first band at boarding school, they played a dance at the girls’ academy nearby. His guitar went missing afterward and the headmistress found it a week later in one of the girl’s beds. He drove her to theft.”

  “But he stole her heart.”

  “It’s possible Delia made that story up. She’s sort of lucid and sort of bonkers. But I don’t know. Have you read the letter yet?”

  Tucked in there was an envelope postmarked Los Angeles, May 27, 1970, containing this:

  Dear Sis,

  I hope this finds you as well as can be. I won’t go on with a thousand apologies for being out of touch, because you know how it goes. You’re as bad as I am. But I wanted to let you know that Linda and I got married. No society page announcements. A few of us on a beach down in Mexico. Tumbling surf and a light breeze and all that. Do you know it was the first time I’ve ever seen Linda nervous? Not that she said so. It was in her eyes. Just a flicker of a flash. I probably should have been nervous, too. It’s only right to be nervous in the face of something so cosmic. I can see you making a face, but it’s no joke. With Linda, it’s completely cosmic. It just fucking is.

  When we got back to L.A., my wife (mah wife, yessir) set this writer friend of hers on me. I talked a whole lot to this lady and now I think I’m going to regret it. She reminds me of a matchstick. A twig, flat, flat, flat, and then up there at the top is her ignitable mind. I liked her intensity at first. Sort of clarifying, the appeal of someone who has your number. But then it got exhausting. She’s going to make a fool of me. She’s got this bright disdain. That’s her lens, and Linda and I are soft and ridiculous through it. Well, fine. We are soft and ridiculous. But not where it counts. I know where it counts. Here’s what I wonder. Does Patti Driggs ever feel anything when she listens to music? Anything other than a drive to explain it away? I don’t think she needs music to show her who she is. I don’t think she needs it to get through. I don’t think, for her, it’s like fucking, or even like a fucking cigarette. Gosh, you know there’s this health-nut drug dealer my manager is pals with and he’s always on me to quit smoking. He’ll come over with a loaf of yeast-free bread, some bottle of weird juice, and a bag of psilocybin mushrooms. But oh, those cigarettes have got to go, man! All right, now you can make your face.

  Please take it easy, Del. Call or write when you can.

  Yrs for yrs,

  Jesse

  I had never seen a letter of Jesse’s and I didn’t know why but out of all of it—the description of his wedding to Linda, his acute, knowing read of Patti Driggs—it was that “Gosh” of his that really brought him to life for me.

  “Oh, I know,” said Lee. “You should hear Aunt Delia talk. It’s all ‘Gosh!’ and ‘Golly!’ It’s like no matter how fucked up things got, she never stopped being a well-mannered Southern belle. Maybe that’s what’s fucked up about her.”

  “How is she fucked up, exactly?”

  “Pretty much like the rest of the Parrishes were. In and out of places since she was seventeen. Substance abuse. Depression. Manic depression. They were all alcoholics, you know, on Jesse’s mother’s side. It’s kind of unbelievable. Like it’s almost too on the nose or something. I knew my father’s father shot himself when my dad was a kid. But I didn’t know how Southern Gothic it all was. Do you know what the family did? They had a party. Every year his mother’s mother threw herself a lavish birthday celebration at their home. But by home I mean mansion. This big white house on a lake among the pine trees. They would put up a tent for the evening—all elegant. So my grandfather kills himself and my great-grandmother just goes ahead and has her party as planned. Jesse and Delia were out there in their finest, watching everyone, their mother included, get progressively more hammered, until one of the servants came to take them inside to get ready for bed. Delia told me she and my dad didn’t know it was suicide until they were grown. Hunting accident, they were told. Delia is the only one left now. I never met any of the others. It doesn’t even seem real to me. But sometimes my father barely seems real to me. Which I guess is the whole point of this, right?”

  She pulled over and though no official signage marked the spot where we’d stopped, it was obvious where we were.

  “How did you know where this was?” I asked.

  “Educated guess.”

  The shoulder began again after dropping off precipitously. To the right, the road bordered a high wall of blasted rock. To the left and behind us, a guardrail curved along a steep ravine above the stream into which Jesse Parrish’s car had fallen. Over the years his fans had consecrated the site with flowers and plaques and a bulletin board erected between two trees on which were affixed poems, letters, and laminated drawings. Among the least weather-beaten additions were an original sketch of Jesse ascending to heaven on a rainbow, and a charcoal drawing of Jesse snuggling two kittens, signed “with love from Angie,” a passport-size picture of the artist attached. Angie looked to be about forty-five.

  The shrine was both touching and embarrassing. People had loved him so much, and still did, but it was an adolescent love, narcissistic and showy. It was hard not think that the love reduced and diminished its object, and the object of worship wasn’t magnificent enough to withstand kittens and middle age.

  “I’ve seen this place in pictures and I never thought I’d care to see it in person,” said Lee. “In Paris once, I was walking through the Montparnasse cemetery, just to walk through it, and I saw Serge Gainsbourg’s grave. It had all these metro tickets on it and packs of Gitanes that people brought. A couple of heads of cabbage because of that song he wrote. It was kind of lively, celebratory. But this place always just seemed mawkish. Why do people do this? Maybe it’s because my dad doesn’t have a grave. But people go out to the desert, too, where Linda scattered his ashes. It’s strange. I feel like there’s this character Linda West, and then there’s my mother, the real person I know. As real as you can get. With my father, though, I have only what everyone else has. These people, Angie or whoever, these people know him better than I do.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I have a few memories. I have ‘Yours.’ But even that’s not really mine.” The waltz-like song Jesse had written for Lee had become a commonplace father-daughter dance at a certain kind of wedding—the wedding that didn’t want to be a wedding but was a wedding nonetheless. I always figured Lee had her own interpretation of the lyrics “you and the sun and the sun in your eyes.” But here it was, represented rather literally—a big sun in place of a pupil in a folkarty painting embellished with glitter glue and coated in shellac. Craning for a closer look, I lost my balance and started to slip down the incline before scrambling up. The patch of ground was precarious, falling off sharply, a testament of devotion on the part of the memorial pilgrims.

  Lee saw me stumble and quickly moved to help me to my feet. We stood there, gazing down. There’s no good ravine to accidentally take a header into, but this one was especially dicey and unforgiving. If you were looking for an out, it would likely get the job done. Lee had never told me what she thought about the crash, if she believed it was an accident or if she thought her father had purposefully pulled the steering wheel hard to the left and accelerated. Like his father, in spirit, before him. In any case, there was no question he was intoxicated.

  Maybe we were thinking the same thing.

  “I do have his genes, though. It’s encoded in me.”

  “Y
ou can’t think that way. You aren’t your father.”

  “I’m not saying I’m going to kill myself, Viv. If that’s even what he did. The tapes are like a big hole. I don’t know what they would fill in, but something. In all the shit you can read about my dad, they talk about his breakdown like it was this isolated thing. They never really talk about him struggling with an undiagnosed illness. But you can’t meet Delia and come away thinking he was fine, fine, fine, then lost it one day, and then was fine again. I don’t want to romanticize it, but I want to feel closer to his experience of it, to know if my experience is anything like his. Because those tendencies certainly don’t come from Linda. I doubt she’s ever been down—like, really down—a day in her life.”

  “You’re okay now though, right?”

  “I can fucking get up in the morning. But then I wonder what I’m doing with my life. It sucks when you’ve aged out of the time when it’s still socially acceptable not to have things figured out.”

  “And you haven’t yet reached the age when it’s socially acceptable that whatever you thought you had figured out starts to unravel.” I thought I should have at least another ten years before it was time for a midlife crisis, though it seemed to me that “midlife” and “crisis” were increasingly slippery terms.

  “I just have this sense that I’ve squandered my legacy. That I should have been a lot more than I am. But what was my inheritance? Beauty? Sex appeal? That doesn’t promise much. Maybe my dad had it right. Like, burning out is better than fading away or whatever.”

  “Lee.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think those are the only options.”

  “Maybe not,” she trailed off, laced her fingers together on the crown of her head, her elbows wide, as if to survey her domain, and then picked up again. “Don’t get grossed out.”

  “About?”

  “I had this dream once. One of those strange, long-finish dreams that cast a shadow on the whole day when you wake up. I was at a house by a lake and there were people there that I seemed to know. I walked down this carpeted hall and there was this row of doors made of plywood and I opened one to a room with a bed. It was all pink and gold. This young guy, in jeans and one of those three-quarter-length baseball shirts, hair like my father, came in and I knew something was going to happen and I was excited but I also had a sense of doom. I wanted something from him. I wanted him to be interested in me. We were on the bed and our actions started to look like a slow series of photographs. I held his head in my hands. He lifted my shirt and pressed his face to my stomach. Then like a slide show our position would change. I felt so close to him. He said he had to tell me something, and I knew what it was, and also that it didn’t matter, that I wanted to stay in that room with him. So yeah, I woke up and I was like, fuck, I’m just like Linda, dreaming about my father.”

  “I guess everyone has dreams like that.”

  “Have you?”

  “Well, no, not with my own dad.” Lee ground her gaze into a leaf pile and I tried to keep myself from fully registering the awkwardness of the moment. “But I once had a dream about Michael Landon. As Pa from Little House on the Prairie. Does that count?”

  “Yes, I’ll accept it.” She sighed. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where do you want to go? With this.” Gesturing down at the ravine.

  She wanted to find a place for the night, talk to Bill Carnahan in the morning. But she didn’t want me to feel obligated to help, in my condition and all. I told her it wasn’t much of a condition yet. Then I texted Andy: Here for the night. Will check back soon. No immediate response. Was he away from his phone? Or was it a calculated silence? What was the calculation?

  In the car, in search of a motel, we passed the rusted but still-standing L-shaped sign heralding, in a pointy, peaked font, Hirschman’s. The deteriorating resort of Linda’s youth. Lee pulled off the road again and onto an overgrown drive that met with a high chain-link fence through which we could see the falling-in red roofs of three large buildings, the vestiges of an extinct way of vacationing.

  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.

  YELLOW 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 wo
man 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.

  “RODGERS COLSTON,” 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?