The Sun in Your Eyes (25 page)

M
ARION LIVED IN
a redwood cottage built into a hillside at the end of an unpaved road. The sun shone in one direction and shadows crossed the other so that grasses, succulents, purple wildflowers, and a lemon tree grew out front, while in back a creek ran below a leafy canopy. No wind chimes. No stained glass sun catchers in the windows. No New Age tchotchkes. None of that. She came to the door, a slim woman of average height in a white shirt, chinos, and red espadrille flats, a few thin silver bangles at her wrist, her hair cut in a short Afro. The Marion in Lee's memory wore silk dresses, huge sunglasses, platform shoes. Her fluffy hair fell over her shoulders.

“You really do look just like both of them,” said Marion as they introduced themselves. “It's astonishing.”

“Genetics,” said Lee, not knowing what else to say just then, immediately regretting how it made Marion's remark sound obvious and left little room for expansion, which hadn't been her goal at all. It was like something she would say to Linda to shut her down.
God.

“I can't get over how beautiful it is,” said Viv, relieving them all of the silence. “You get to live here.” She started them on a course of conversation by which they learned that Marion had moved here more than twenty years ago and lived by herself for the most part. She had never married. Morris was her mother's maiden name and she had adopted it after the accident.

Marion lead them into an open room where the sun streamed in through the windows onto a Mexican rug covering a rustic floor
made of thick pine planks. White walls and a white, acrylic-topped dining table offset the woodsiness, as did an arcing chrome lamp in the corner. The furniture could have been recently purchased or could have been decades old and in good shape because it saw so little wear and tear, since it was so often just Marion here, alone. She had art on the walls, a hanging textile, a couple of deeply saturated abstract paintings and a few drawings. A framed postcard—or maybe a headshot—of an older man in a suit, an inscription inked across the top, but Lee couldn't make out what it said or who it was. No pictures of family or friends, though perhaps she kept those in a different room.

Lee recognized someone or something in Marion's manner, how she was both guarded and open, as though one was a corrective to the other. Almost as though they were paint colors that she was mixing every so often. It took Lee a minute to realize it was herself she recognized.

Marion brought out a tea tray and a cutting board with wedges of cheese, a jar of jam, and a loaf of bread. A pain de campagne. Lee knew Linda would call it a PDC.
Oh, this PDC is to die for!
Rather,
this PDC is TDF!

Marion poured the tea into cups on saucers. She asked about their trip, where they'd been before coming here. They told her about Flintwick (“Charlie had no use for me,” Marion said. “He thought I was a distraction and a nuisance. But he always had a strange relationship with women in general”) and about the Carnahans (“The trouble with late capitalism,” she said). They told her about Patti Driggs, who had led them here. (“Patti would have eviscerated me if I'd talked to her. Even if that wasn't her intention, it would have been the result.”) Lee held off mentioning the Haseltine photos, Big Mort's pendant on the dresser.

“So you remember Charlie Flintwick,” Lee said, “from back then?”

“Right. There's that small matter of my coma. My memory loss.” A little deprecatory: comas and amnesia—so melodramatic. “Look, people hated me back then,” she said. Public opinion had never been kind to Marion. In the instances where she was treated as more than a footnote, she was characterized as self-interested, careless, and parasitic. She was only nineteen. At that age, independence is intertwined with self-interest, freedom with carelessness. It's tempting to grab on to people you shouldn't. Viv at nineteen, when Lee met her.

“People still hate me. Still! I do own a computer. You can't help but read things. But these are people who didn't know me and didn't know Jesse. That not-knowingness leads to a purer hatred. It's an innocent hatred, untouched by reality. And maybe more dangerous, in a way. It's hard to know how to react to that kind of hatred. All I knew is that after the crash I didn't want to talk to journalists or anybody, and it was easy when I had nothing to say on the subject. That coma was the best excuse I ever had.”

“I write for a soap,” said Viv, “and when we get stuck on a plot point my boss likes to say, ‘I hear a coma a'callin'!”

Marion laughed. Quiet. On the sly side. Marion would never clap her hands together in theatrical delight, never chortle or guffaw the way Linda sometimes did. Lee must have known what Marion was going to say next, must have been expecting it. Why else, really, would she have come here?

“My memory came back a few weeks after I woke up. I remember the time I was with your father. I remember taking care of you when you were just a little slip of a thing. We drove up here with you once and I had been dreading it. I didn't think I was a kid person. But you were a great kid. I was essentially a kid myself.” Marion's eyes filled and Lee felt herself tearing up too. This always happened to her, not
when she saw someone crying but when she saw someone fighting it and failing. “I remember going to New York, to Flintwick's, and I remember Jesse in the studio. I have no idea what happened to the tapes, though. They would certainly be worth finding. There was one song, in particular, that I so loved. It was called ‘Winter.' I'll still hear a fragment of it in my head from time to time, but I can't get the whole thing. I would love to hear it again.”

“You remember everything?” Lee asked.

“Not everything. But a lot of it. Yes.”

“Do you remember a photographer named David Haseltine?”

“Of course. He came to Flintwick's. He was a lovely man. Very unassuming, understated. Not one of those sexy-sexy photographers. He was kind. I wasn't used to that. Kindness for its own sake. But I'm sure he had his own motives, too. Maybe that's how he got good pictures. I never saw the shots he took of Jesse and me. For all I know they're with the tapes.”

“Carnahan has them.”

“Carnahan does? He gets to look at Jesse and me? Oh, that makes me shiver a little. Has he got us hanging on the wall?”

“Yeah. He's got them in a special climate-controlled room. He says they inspire him. Does that make you feel better or worse?”

“I'm not sure.”

“I saw something in one of them. This silver chain and pendant that belonged to my mother. Belongs, I should say.”

Marion poured more tea for herself and cupped her hands around it a little ceremoniously. She looked down into it and then back up at Lee. As if to signal a beginning.

“Does your mother know you're here?”

“No.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“She doesn't want to talk to me. But I was hoping maybe you could tell me what she was doing there? Because she must have been there that day.”

“She was. She came out from California to get Jesse back. It sounds very high school, doesn't it? Or like your soap, Viv. But I wasn't too far out of high school when I met Jesse, so there you go.”

She stopped, collected her thoughts. Viv reached for more bread and jam, like popcorn at a movie. Viv would probably be mortified to know that Lee had always noticed that, if food was placed in front of her, Viv rarely refused. Lee suspected that if she someday did something unpardonable to Viv, more unpardonable than anything she'd done before, she just might be able to win her back with passed appetizers.

“Do you know what it feels like to be a phase?” Marion asked. “My father loved Nat King Cole. ‘When I Fall in Love.' ‘Unforgettable.' I would never have admitted it growing up, but I thought love should be like those songs. There were moments like that with Jesse. I know he was attached to me. I believe that. But we didn't have that grand sweep, that nobody-else-in-the-world feeling. There was always someone else. Linda. Still, when Jesse died . . . I
still
miss him sometimes. Actively, physically miss him. I wonder how that can be when my own body feels so different. How could my
body
still miss him? That was Jesse, though. I could understand why your mother had come out to get him back. I'm telling you this because you're not a child anymore. You haven't been a child for a long time. And you've come to me.”

Lee nodded. Viv put down her food.

“Linda showed up at Flintwick's the same day that David Haseltine came. She just turned up unannounced. It was all very civilized at first. People came and went, the guys Jesse was recording with,
like Chris Valenti. But that afternoon it was just the three of us. It sounds absurd, but we had lunch together and then we went for a swim. Linda borrowed one of my bathing suits! It wasn't like we all stripped down and went for a dip in the lake. Jesse and his women or something like that. It was more like, here we are and it's a gorgeous day and why shouldn't we make the most of it. I think we all thought that was how adults in the seventies were supposed to behave. We were trying to be very mature about things. Haseltine arrived, but I don't recall him shooting at that point. That was later in the afternoon and then he left. He went back to the city. But I think it upset Linda terribly. The idea was to get pictures of Jesse for the album he was making. But Jesse wanted me in some of the shots. Me and not Linda. It was kind of awful. Charming as Jesse was, he couldn't outcharm the awfulness of what he was doing. Using me to provoke Linda. And I did it, too. I'm sure I wanted to provoke her. I'm sure I didn't know any better.”

Marion had placed the heel of her right hand on her knee and as she spoke she kept extending her fingers toward Lee, as if she were touching her without making contact.

“It worked, of course. Linda and Jesse started fighting when Haseltine packed up. I went back down to the lake. I didn't want to hear it, though I could still make out their voices from the water. I don't even know how long I was in there for, only that it got cooler. The sun sank behind the trees and then it was quiet. I wrapped myself in a towel and went back inside and I found Jesse in that room, that bordello of a room that Flintwick had. Linda was gone. He was drinking and he warned me not to walk in there with my bare feet. There was broken glass all over the place.

“‘We're getting a divorce,' he said. And I thought it should have pleased me to hear that, but there was something about him sitting
there in that sordid room, getting drunk, that made me very uncomfortable. At the same time, there was this charge from him choosing me over Linda. I went to wash up and get dressed and I kept wondering if he would get up and come be with me and I wanted him to, but I was also scared that he would. I no longer knew what he was capable of or what I was capable of. But he didn't come to me. He was picking up the glass when I came back, and he'd cut his hand. It wasn't deep, but he looked so helpless all of a sudden. So I pulled him up. I literally pulled him up from the floor and led him to the little sink by the bar and cleaned off the blood, bandaged his finger. It was as if I only had to touch him to set everything in motion. One thing led to another. He took me to bed, or I took him, and the next thing you know—”

Viv stood up.

“I'm so sorry—I have to—like all the time now—sorry.” Marion pointed her to the bathroom. Marion looked at Lee as if trying to gauge her thoughts. Could she tell that Lee was imagining what the sex must have been like? Was there a meanness to it? An electricity that hadn't been there before? A violence? Lee had been in a situation once that was similar enough, with a husband and wife about ten years older than she was—triangulated in the same way—and she had felt powerful, as if she had never been so in control of someone else's desire, and at the same time, never been so used. She'd been in just about every situation over the years, hadn't she? Except for married, with a kid. Apparently she had a special knack for triangulation, though. Viv, Andy, herself.

“You should stop me,” said Marion, “if you don't want to hear this. I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but I'd like to give you the full story.”

“No, please. Go on.”

“Why don't we make ourselves more at home then.” Marion settled into a corner of the saddle-brown leather sofa, taking her feet up and placing a throw pillow in her lap. Lee took the other corner and let Viv have the recliner.

“Sorry for the interruption,” said Viv.

“Not at all. So where were we? I wanted to go out. To get out of that house. So we went into town for dinner. Only one place was open at that hour, a bar where they had tables and served some food. I had a chicken sandwich and French fries and I'm sure it was mediocre, but I couldn't eat it fast enough. Jesse was looking at me, like,
Who
are
you?
I guess he'd never seen me eat like that. He was drinking. More than he was eating. I should have taken the keys. I should have driven us home but he was so possessive when it came to his car. He'd let me drive it before but I could tell he didn't like it so I had it in my head that he was
the driver.
I remember walking to the car and he had his arm around me and I had my hand in the back pocket of his jeans and he walked me to the passenger side door, a gentleman, and we were leaning against the window, kissing. I loved the way he felt up against me. It was my weakness. I don't know if he ever knew that. But that was my weakness.”

Marion was both there and not there. When she shifted her gaze from an empty space on the wall, she looked almost surprised to find that Lee and Viv were listening to her.

“So we got in the car and Jesse was driving. He liked to drive fast, of course. It didn't matter that the roads were dark and slick and there was a fog. We were the only ones out there on the mountain road that led back to Flintwick's place. Then there was a turn and out of nowhere there were headlights up ahead, off to the side, and someone was just standing there in the middle of the road. Standing there and not moving. Jesse swerved and we went over.”