The Sun in Your Eyes (20 page)

PD:
What were you thinking?

ER:
I don't remember offhand, but I could go look in my overwrought diaries for you. It was scintillating, I'm sure. No, but really, Jesse was interested in me, as a person. Not like, what could he get out of me or what could I do for him. He always looked out for me. I remember we were at this party once—I'm not gonna name names here. I don't like trouble the way I used to. But this pretty famous musician was there, you can probably figure out who I'm talking about, and he comes up to me and he's doing his thing with his British accent and Jesse, kind of joking, was like, “Hey, slimeball.” And this guy was like, “At your service.” He
was
a slimy guy. He oozed. Jesse says, “Elise here sure is a knockout.” And Slimy goes, “Will she lay me out flat?” Jesse says, “I expect she'll lay you however she likes. Or not at all. She leads with her heart.” And the tone of it was like he was saying to this guy, “Know who you're dealing with, don't mess with her.” It wasn't territorial, it was protective.

PD:
In a way that you appreciated? It sounds pretty objectifying.

ER:
Oh, Patti, c'mon.

PD:
I think it's a fair question.

ER:
Well, look, I loved the scene I was in, but yeah, it could be pretty shitty, pretty frustrating as a woman. I didn't have the perspective I have on it now. But you know, I never burned my bra because I never wore one in the first place. For whatever that's worth. But with Jesse, at that party, I had this image of him kneeling down in front of me with a sword and swearing his loyalty to me, and I'm in one of those medieval dresses? Like he was my defender, but I was in charge.

PD:
Did you ever see another side to him, that wasn't so sweet?

ER:
Sure. I mean, he wasn't a cardboard cutout. He was an actual person. He could be a jerk. He could be a colossal asshole, too, don't get me wrong.

PD:
How so?

ER:
Well, like when he wanted Linda to get an abortion because he thought having a kid was going to fuck up his career. I mean, he didn't call it his “career.” That's only how people talk now. I could see how he might feel that way, but he didn't even go to Linda first to talk about it. He went to his manager. Like his manager was gonna tell Linda not to have the baby? Well, it got back to Linda, of
course. I think she was more angry about the manager thing than about anything else. I'm not suggesting she didn't want the baby, either. But I feel like she kind of dug in her heels after that?

PD:
Were you close with Linda?

ER:
Oh yes, I loved Linda. I loved her the way I loved young nuns in movies. That kind of sisterly adoration. She used to give me her clothes. We would be lounging on these sumptuous floor pillows—everything was so sumptuous—and all of a sudden she would get up and go to her closet and come back with the most exquisite scarf or some dynamite hat, a flowy white gown she had and she would tell me I had to have it.

PD:
The two of you would play dress up.

ER:
Patti, what do you want me to say? We would play dress up while the rest of the world was going to shit around us?

PD:
I'm just trying to get a picture here.

ER:
Well, it's not like this is all we did. But, yeah, this is how I remember her, us, then.

PD:
You were a sort of charity project for her?

ER:
No! She wasn't dumping her stuff on me. They were like treasures she was bestowing.

PD:
I see.

ER:
The thing is, everything was a treasure because it was hers. She was so real but also just beyond. She and Jesse both. They floored me. And I know I was starry-eyed and maybe I still am. But people say that like it's a bad thing, like the alternative is better? Give me the stars and their infinite sparkle! The stars and their star child.

PD:
What was Jesse like, as a father?

ER:
He was a wonderful father, despite everything. Once Lee was born, I mean, there was no question. He was in love.

PD:
No question.

ER:
Look, you can be ambivalent and still be in love. Story of my life, practically. But I went over there, pretty soon after they got back from the hospital and Jesse was holding Lee, kind of swaying with her. Really sweet, but also he looked a little like he'd just smuggled her in from someplace. Like he'd gotten away with something he couldn't quite believe. And he was letting me in on it. He couldn't take his eyes off her. And he said to me, “She's my girl. Dancing the moment she came out.”

Sometimes I think, if
I had a child,” Lee said to Viv, “it would be a quarter him. It would bring him back in a way.”

Lee put on
The Garden of Allah
because she wanted to hear her father's voice as she drove. Arresting as those Haseltine photos were, there was something removed and unknowable about them. She had seen pictures like that of herself, in a magazine or two—that was the art of it. No wonder a sociopath like Carnahan admired that quality. But there was nothing inaccessible in her father's voice. This album was the one she'd listened to the least. She hadn't wanted to hear her father losing it. But lately she'd come to understand why people—Andy—loved it so much. Andy had told her once that Jesse abandoned it before it was done and that Brian Reiger, the producer, had salvaged it, building and layering instruments and effects that balanced out Jesse at his most caustic and bitter. The production made it bearable. Still, it was painful.

“Yeah. I haven't really thought about it like that,” said Viv, distracted, as if she'd been caught daydreaming in class. “My child will be a quarter Jonathan and a quarter Natalie. But also a quarter Tim and a quarter Nancy. Do you think that means a quarter of the time
he or she will be emotionally distant and a quarter of the time ever so subtly making me feel like I'm not good enough for Andy?”

“I wouldn't underestimate heredity. Is Andy . . . when you talked to him . . . is everything okay?”

“I don't know. I think he understands. About trying to find Marion. The rest—I couldn't say on the phone.”

Viv was going to have a baby. The great divide. The great multiplication, then the great divide. Viv didn't follow up. She didn't ask if Lee really did want to have a child. She didn't invite Lee into her world. As though this was one place she could go without her, where Lee didn't belong, or at least a place that Viv had gotten to first. Which wasn't entirely true, though Lee thought better of enlightening her now. It would only be spiteful and what good would it do. How betrayed would Viv feel, to learn that she and Andy had shared that? But, then, they hadn't shared it because Andy never knew anything either, that she'd been pregnant. How different would life be if he had? Completely? Not much at all?

They say it won't last, that you're too fast, but they don't know, how you come and go.
It was “Hey, Linda.” A song, presumably, for her mother. How did she do it? Lee wondered. Linda and her robust, industrious verve had mystified Lee for so long. She had tried to understand it, escape it, succumb to it, match it. But she had never thought to doubt it. It had occurred to her only lately, murkily at Flintwick's and then more clearly coming into focus in the old widow's walk where Carnahan kept those pictures of her father, that Linda's relationship to her own past may not have been so tidy as it seemed. That her mother's full-bodied, full-tilt charge ahead might be a defensive stance. An obfuscation of her history—obfuscation, yes, Lee had taken a class or two in college. A diversion. Eyes over here! Nothing to see that way. Move it along.

Ahead on the highway, she saw a billboard for a furniture store, the same one she'd seen years before, driving up and down this artery as an undergrad. The mustached trio of owner-brothers, their sectionals and dinettes, hadn't changed. Soon enough, they were on local roads, the periphery of the campus, on the tree-lined street outside the university-owned Queen Anne where the dean of alumni relations and Linda's former publicist lived. They parked, turning off the car stereo just before “Yours” (the song written for her, the one unambiguously lovely song on this troubled record) would have come on.

“The dean might not remember me,” said Lee. Solely for effect, what you say, even when you know people always remember you. “But it's worth a shot. She'll probably recall Linda's generous donation in any case.”

A red door, a curving, decorative brass knocker, and then: “Lee Parrish! How
are
you? What are you
doing
here?” The dean, beckoning them into her parquet foyer, wearing a black dress and leopard-print heels, her dark hair smooth with a bouncy salon finish. Ready for a dinner-dance in Boston where she would deliver a version of the speech that almost always ended with her exhorting her audience to “Contribute!” Her catchphrase.

They had come at just the right time, the dean explained. A few days later and it would be graduation: “Absolute delirium!” They likely wouldn't have caught her nor would she have had the chance to listen to Lee's story about how they just happened to be in town (
old friends, road trip, girl time!
) and how Viv, a fellow alum and feverish workaholic, could really use access to the library while they were here. The dean thought nothing of making a phone call to grant them temporary entry cards. Even putting them up in a guest suite.

“Ladies, I've gotta run,” she said, putting on a jacket from Linda's
spring collection. “By the way, this pulls everything together. Your mother remains a genius.”

“That she does,” said Lee.

This place. It all came back to Lee quickly, though now it was like wandering through a life-size diorama. The brick buildings with slate shingled roofs, each lifted out of a period drama, the archways that opened onto the main green, gas lampposts, leafy trees dappling the spring sunlight. They passed a carriage house refashioned for academic offices and a classroom, where she recalled discussing (or rather, sitting silently and listening while other people discussed) Baudrillard. It had never occurred to her that
this
feeling is what
that
was about and she wondered whether she was always going to catch on fifteen years after the fact.

Their room for the night was in one of the newer dormitories, furnished with a sofa and club chairs upholstered in a dated gray, turquoise, and magenta fabric. It reminded Lee of a photo shoot in which she was told to hike up her pencil skirt, put one high-heeled foot on a similar chair, lean into the actor who sat there in a suit, and pull him toward her by his tie. The high-low tableau of beautiful people in expensive clothes on a set art-directed to look like an office park where you didn't come to work so much as have anonymous sex. Which was perhaps a form of work itself. She had given them a range of expressions: hungry, playful, mirthless, I-know-better-than-you, Do-I-know-better-than-you?, Pride-in-a-job-well-done, and Nice-tie. The end result looked a lot like I-am-very-hungry-and-I-would-like-to-eat-your-tie.

They dropped their bags and set out across campus for the humanities library. The white building with the 1960s punch-card façade hadn't changed much—the bike racks and the brickwork sidewalks, the wide steps where she had first encountered Viv. But
midcentury design had acquired a patina in the intervening years. Instead of seeming, as it once had, slightly dingy and outdated, it now seemed like a place with history. Which brought her own history back to her. It seemed to Lee as if she had watched the scene in a movie: two girls sitting out here one afternoon, one of them getting up and running away. Power-walking away. The way you can watch yourself in a dream. It was only a dreamlike logic that allowed her to make sense of the fact that she was standing here right now.

Across the street stood the tall, wrought iron gate that was opened twice a year, once for a snaking formation of nervous freshmen to pass through on their way to the main green for convocation and once for only slightly less self-conscious seniors to walk out of during commencement. In a few days, it would be time for that second ceremony. She had a vague memory of lining up to move through the gate as a freshman, meeting a group of friendly students who invited her to join them for a meal-plan dinner later. She did, and it was pleasant and they had a few laughs, but then they never saw much of one another after that. She didn't see some of them again until four years later, when Andy graduated and she and Viv still had a few semesters to go. They acknowledged each other on the green with minor smiles, as if to say, “That was you, right? Well. Good luck with the rest of your life!” Viv asked her in a politely lowered voice who those people were and she replied, “I never really knew.”

How arbitrary it could all be. If she had gone to a different school. If she had never met Viv. If she had never met Andy. New York, after she had been away from it, often conjured Viv for her: the sun in the summer and the way it could cast a quietness over the streets, the subway lines that took you above ground, over the river or out to the beach. This place now started to seem less of a simulation of itself and began to conjure Andy.

Sometimes when Lee thought about Andy, she thought of the way Linda and Jesse described meeting each other: an instant attraction in a kitchen at a party. With Andy it wasn't exactly attraction but something similar. He was so easy to talk to. He reminded her a little of Alex Garcia, who would skip sixth period in high school to go lie with her on the floor of her bedroom and look up at the ceiling, the stereo on, saying whatever came into their heads. That Alex turned out to be gay didn't really surprise her. Isn't that, in a way, what had probably drawn her to him? She wondered about Andy. He didn't express an immediate, sexual interest in girls, but he didn't express much of an interest in guys, and she initially figured it wasn't that he was gay but that he was so into music, to an extreme, maybe to the exclusion of sex, with anyone.

A week or so into college, she heard
Motel Television
coming from his room, like a flare in the distance:
over here.
She thought about turning back down the hall. If she knocked and went in right then, she would have to tell him. It would be weird not to. But who knew how that would change things? She had recently begun to think about her father, about being her father's daughter, the way she thought about her looks. For much of her childhood, she hadn't
thought
all that much about either, she had just accepted that her life contained certain facts: her late father was Jesse Parrish and she was pretty. Linda sent her to a progressive private school where a majority of her classmates were the sons and daughters of famous people. She never felt particularly exceptional in that respect. While she knew that the way she looked gave her certain advantages, she had taken it for granted. She hadn't tried to manage or manipulate her beauty until she became aware that it had an effect on other people. It compelled them and sometimes alienated them and sometimes confused them. It could do all of that to her, as well. Like with Roy, when she was fifteen, when her legs were still a
little too long for the rest of her body but her breasts were balancing it all out. Roy was what then? Linda's good friend, industry event date, and occasional lover? He was around a lot, in any case. And Lee, from the age of ten, when Linda first started seeing him, had liked him. He joked with her in a way that Linda never did, called her Robert E. or the General. General Store. General Vicinity. General Ization. And he lived on a ranch where he had chickens, horses, a llama or two, and even, briefly, a donkey he named Steven Bochco, after his one-time professional rival. She couldn't recall Linda ever being very involved with her school projects, but Roy knew what cuneiform script was and seemed genuinely interested in her report on ancient Sumer. He also once helped her construct, out of cardboard and cushioning balloons, a container that would protect an egg and keep it from cracking when dropped from a second-story window. All this changed the summer after she started high school. He still used those nicknames, but they had become clunky. Now they were reminders, souvenirs of an easier time, a time before she felt him looking at her and then quickly looking away when her eyes met his. Roy never made a pass at her, thankfully, but his restraint (never in doubt, yet never wholly without effort) left her self-conscious. She lost him, in a way, and she lost some remaining part of her innocence. There were, of course, other men who came into Linda's life without Roy's restraint. But by then she knew to expect it.

“Hey, can I come in?” she said.

“Yeah!” Andy said. “Get in here.”

“I know this song.”

“It's the perfect song,” said Andy. “The whole record is fucking great. You like Jesse Parrish?”

She took her residence hall ID card out of her bag and, almost contritely, showed it to Andy, anticipating his embarrassment.

“Wow. You're
that
Lee.”

“I'm that Lee.”

“I should have known. I mean, it makes sense. I know who you are. I mean, I don't mean it like that, like I
know who you are
or I know all about you or anything. But. Like. Right.”

He didn't tell her, just then, that he had read the biography Linda authorized and allowed herself to be interviewed for, as well as the other one, which she hadn't and which was less flattering though nevertheless obviously written by a Jesse Parrish enthusiast. Later, over time, he admitted that he'd watched various concert films and sent away to an address in Michigan for a compilation of fuzzy clips on VHS. He'd seen a picture of Lee as a toddler, curled up in her father's guitar case. Another one of her on Jesse's shoulders. But he'd seen images of Lee only as a child and he imagined she would be beautiful like Linda (and like Jesse) but not as troubling as her mother. He'd wondered whatever happened to that girl, who would be his age. And he'd even permitted himself to fantasize that if they ever had the chance to meet, they might get along. She might be the kind of person who would recognize something in him and might provide him the kind of understanding her father's music did. Far-fetched, all of this. Preposterous. But it's where his mind had gone on occasion, playing it out to a point where he might meet Linda West. Not that he was dying to meet her. He never quite grasped her appeal. Linda West had been all about sex, which he knew he was supposed to think was a good thing, those photographs of her in a sheer blouse with no bra, her nipples hard, but it also embarrassed him. He wasn't embarrassed, though, when he said this to Lee. Or maybe a little, but mostly, by that point, he was open, even brave with her, and she was the one who struggled to be as forthright and unashamed with him.