“Hey,” she said.
“Hi-eeee!” That extra syllable of mine should have squealed itself into a hug. I almost got up, she almost leaned in, but we settled instead for uncertain smiles. She sat and didn’t say much and though I didn’t want to be the one to keep talking, on I went. What a beautiful morning it was. How good she looked. How long had it been? I knew very well how long it had been.
“I’m sorry I was so out of touch,” she said.
I had reminded myself on the way here that I had a spine and that I should straighten it. Don’t be so conciliatory, don’t jump on the first apology.
“A lot can happen in three years.”
Lee nodded but didn’t ask me to elaborate, the assumption being that while a lot could happen in three years, not all that much probably had. It irked me, mostly because it felt true. I’d been anticipating this moment ever since I opened the email she’d sent two weeks earlier (to an account now primarily collecting shipping notifications and offers to connect with local Christians). I had often wondered about Lee. There were women who looked like her from the back, on the subway, on the street, tall and slender, with her long hair, her self-possession, but none of them was ever her. I believed that if something momentous or terrible had happened to her, I would have felt it telepathically somehow. There would have been a sign—a stopped clock, a big black bird falling to the sidewalk right in front of me. Nothing like this ever happened, though. She had moved back to New York, she wrote, from Los Angeles, and was working, if I could believe it, for her mother. She would love to see me.
“I brought you something.” She handed me a Linda West gift bag. “For the summer. Totally shapeless but kind of exactly what you want to wear when the air is sticking to you.”
“Not very body con.”
“No, body uncon.”
She seemed to be waiting for a clever rejoinder, a quickness we used to have. I wasn’t coming up with anything though. I was out of practice. Would I earn a laugh? Why did I have to earn anything? I just thanked her.
Linda West, Lee’s mother, designed expensive, loose-fitting, expertly draped separates for women in search of some strategic coverage, a category of clothing that once belonged to my future and increasingly to my now. Linda West had a flagship in each major metropolis, and in any quaint town populated by sometime-city-dwellers who placed a premium on homemade jam, there was always a shop, often run by a woman in hammered silver jewelry, that carried the Linda West line.
“If I ask you how you feel about gauchos, we can expense this.”
“How is Linda? Do you like working for her?”
“Linda would say I’m not working for her, I’m working for myself. But you know, she also likes to trot out the idle hands are the devil’s workshop line and tell you how she basically lived in the devil’s workshop one summer in the south of France and if you’ve seen one orgy you’ve seen them all.”
“Sure.”
“But, honestly, I do like working for her. Odd as it sounds. I’ve got a head for business apparently.”
Our waitress appeared and took our omelet orders. I thought about getting French toast, a bowl of borscht—something that said: You can’t disappear, stop getting back to me, then turn up and expect everything to be exactly the same. The thing is, I wanted an omelet.
“I’ve got some time off, actually,” Lee continued. “I’m planning on taking a road trip. I’m going upstate for a few days.”
“Sounds nice.”
She picked up the little tin pitcher of milk on our table but didn’t pour any into her coffee.
“Would you want to come with me?”
“Just like that?” My voice rose an octave and I hated it. “Like I can just pick up and go. Like I’ve just been sitting around waiting for you to drop back into my utterly uneventful life.” Her gaze fell to her scalloped paper placemat, perhaps to hide the question in her eyes: Haven’t you? I’d been thinking she must have had some news to tell me. I hadn’t expected this invitation and I wanted to be someone who was more angry than curious. Someone who wasn’t simply flattered to be asked. Not someone who saw that Haven’t you? and mostly thought Yes. But when Lee looked up, that question had vanished, if it had been there at all. In its place was regret.
“No, not just like that. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.” She paused. “I’m going upstate because Charlie Flintwick lives there. I got in touch with him because I’m trying to find the tapes. I was hoping you would help me.”
The tapes. The last, lost tapes of Jesse Parrish. One of the mysteries attendant to her father’s puzzling and premature death, only enhancing his cult status. The legend that illuminated Lee and enshrouded her. It was one of the first things you knew about her, because someone always whispered, That’s Jesse Parrish’s daughter. Lee’s father had been only thirty-one years old—four years younger than Lee now—when he was killed in a car crash. Already at that age he’d been famous, then washed up, then on the verge of new success. Every few years, the publication of a Jesse Parrish biography, the release of a documentary, a tribute album, or, most recently, a remastered box set with a bonus live performance disc caused renewed speculation about the fate of his final recording sessions. A number of theories had been put forth over the years. Maybe the tapes had been in the trunk and were destroyed, perhaps intentionally, along with the totaled car. Maybe his girlfriend—Marion Washington, generally painted as the fucked-up groupie who did nothing to stop his deterioration—was furious with Jesse over something trivial and had trashed the tapes. Maybe Marion told him this while they were arguing in the car just before he drove them both off the road, leaving her in a three-week coma and with no memory of the accident. Maybe the tapes, secure in their cases, were simply swiped from the recording studio—but by whom? If the recordings had survived, they should have surfaced by now.
“I know,” Lee continued. “It probably sounds very Harriet the Spy or something. But I’ve been thinking about my father a lot lately. Listening to all his old stuff. And I want more, to have more of his voice, to hear something I’ve never heard. I started tracking down some people, got in touch with Flintwick, and he said he would be happy to see me if I thought he could be useful. It may be a total fool’s errand, but I don’t really want to do it alone and you’re the only person who would understand. Andy, too—maybe Andy the most, in a way, but . . .”
She couldn’t ask Andy. Because that would have been too weird, to ask that of your friend’s husband, especially when you had a history with him. She twisted the ring on her right hand, working it over her knuckle then slipping it back.
“How is Andy?” she asked.
“He’s good. He’s really good.”
“That’s good.”
It was right after Andy and I got married that Lee really pulled away. Weeks would pass before she would return my call and then she would somehow always reach me when I couldn’t pick up, leaving a short message. We had been drifting for a while. She had already left New York at that point, and I could guess at the reason for her distance, though she never explicitly told me. A long time ago, before either of them met me, Andy had been Lee’s more-than-a-friend friend, in that he had feelings for her. I turned the configuration into something of a triangle, and then I chose Andy over Lee. That was one version of the story. Another version, one that I never much liked to think about, is that the triangle wasn’t a stable one, that its sides shifted, and while it might seem like that’s where all the action was, the movement only distracted you from the base, the line connecting the two original points, Lee and Andy, a line that remained fixed and unbroken.
Andy and I had taken the subway together that morning and said goodbye on the corner of Forty-Seventh Street.
“How is it that you, we, always owe her something?” he asked. “What do we owe her for? At this point.”
I could think of many things, but I also didn’t see it as debt. I did my best to hide my hope that she wanted something, anything, from me.
<
br /> “We’re just catching up,” I said. “Not that big a deal.” But if it was nothing, then why had he gotten off the train with me when it wasn’t his stop and he would only have to get back on? I looked at him on my way down the block. Was he standing there watching me walk away or waiting to catch a glimpse of Lee?
“So, Charlie Flintwick.”
“He still has his studio up in Ulster County.”
I mostly knew Flintwick, the long-time producer, as the deep-voiced issuer of grandiose and louche statements in documentaries about Lee’s father. “We’ll be forever touched by the influence of Jesse Parrish. Now, where we’ll be touched, and how, I will leave to your imagination. The question is, how pliant are you? Hmmmm?” He was disgusting and yet charming; it wasn’t quite a put-on, nor was it straight-faced.
Put it this way: I couldn’t actually imagine Charlie Flintwick having sex with anyone, I could only envision him sprawled on his side, naked and Rubenesque, suspending a bunch of grapes over his own head.
“He wasn’t gross,” Lee insisted. “Just open to meeting me. I think he sees me like a daughter.”
“That’s supposed to be reassuring?”
“Well, I’m going to talk to him and see where it goes. I have to at least try before it’s too late. He’s had two heart attacks already.”
She picked up the little pitcher again and this time added milk to her coffee, completing thoughts out of sequence.
“It’s funny—not funny—but it’s like I think I’m supposed to have moved beyond it. But if anything, at this point in my life, the older I get, the more strongly I feel it—that loss of my father. I still don’t even really know what it was I lost. What was going on with him in that time, before he died? What was he thinking? Feeling? It would be there, wouldn’t it, in the record he was making?”
If it were possible to have an ongoing conversation with a dam, it might have been a little like talking to Lee. She could be almost opaque and unbreachable in her circumspection and then she would let out a sluice of talk. She barely noticed when our meals arrived. Then she was on to her mother and Linda’s immunity to the past.
“Linda can dine out on the same old stories for years but it’s just dinner party talk. Interview patter. She’s not nostalgic for much of anything. She’s surprisingly forward-looking in a lot of ways. I was in this meeting the other day with her and a couple of our designers. And one of them had this mood board with a picture of Talitha Getty on it?”
I shook my head; the name didn’t register.
“Socialite–actress–drug addict in swinging sixties London. She also had a home in Marrakesh. She OD’d and died and then became a style icon for the aristo-boho set.”
“I see.”
“So Linda goes, ‘If I hear one more word about Talitha Getty and Moroccan fucking chic—Talitha fucking Getty! You know what you need to do? You need to Getty a new idea!’ If I told her what I wanted, where I was going—and I haven’t told her anything—I’m sure she’d tell me it’s time to Getty over it.”
I laughed, finally, and so did Lee.
“I’M NOT SAYING that she’s that callous. Though maybe I am. It’s just that almost everything I know about my father has come through Linda. Not that she’s been keeping something from me or denying me something, but these recordings would be something that hasn’t been filtered through her. Through anybody. One thing of his that was never public.”
She was nervous. It was new.
“So. What do you think? Will you come with me? To see Flintwick?”
It did seem kid-detective, Lee lighting out on a well-worn trail that had never led anywhere, as far as I knew. But she was also the femme fatale—the one who shows up with a story full of holes and you, the cynic and the sap, still follow her. And the old friend whose powers of persuasion still held sway because those powers had once persuaded you of so, so much. I thought of a time a couple of years out of college when we’d sat at these exact spots. I was coming from a grad school workshop where something I’d written was met with a resounding “eh.” Nobody in the class could pinpoint what was wrong with it, they simply didn’t find it all that compelling. And instead of getting angrily energized, developing a thicker skin, it was like I had no skin at all. On the subway afterward I stood looking at my reflection in the dark window of the doors as the train car tunneled along, thinking, There’s nothing really wrong with you, you’re just not all that compelling. I got off, walked to this restaurant, and there was Lee. Whatever we talked about wasn’t that important. But it was like listening to a radio, having been stuck on static and then finding a channel that came through strong and played songs you loved. It was always like that with Lee. Sometimes it seemed we were tuned to a phantom frequency, something only we could hear. I won’t belabor the metaphor. Lee said she would read the story and mark it up, double underlining everything she liked. She gave it back to me with pages full of railroad tracks.
My doubts were never much of a match for my tendency to say yes to her. If I thought that had changed, my difficulty in meeting her gaze now proved otherwise. She had this look—You have to. You have to or you’ll be missing out on a real adventure. I’m giving you this chance and all you have to do is take it.
“Work is super busy at the moment, you know? There’s a lot going on there. Jason and Justine—Jastine—are finally going to get married, only to honeymoon in a newly unstable island country. They’ve survived cancer, kidnapping, and Count Andre, but it remains to be seen if they can they survive a coup.”
“Who is Count Andre?”
“The Slavic financier who almost split them up. I guess you’re not watching the show.”
“Oh. Well, no. I wasn’t sure you were still writing for it.”
“I am. And I don’t think I can take off right now.”
“Sure. I understand.”
“But I don’t know. Maybe I could get away?”
I suggested she come over to our apartment for dinner that night to discuss further. I hoped Andy being there, between us, would help me get my priorities straight. I also wouldn’t have minded Lee seeing Andy and me in our cozy home. We could make her a meal, tend to her for a couple of hours, then send her on her way, maybe a little jealous of our life together.
Dinner would be great, she said, but she’d already made a plan to see another friend of hers tonight.
“What other friend?” I asked.
ANDY AND I once mused about one of the unexpected benefits of our marriage: how it made flirting with other people easier. Because flirting became less a means to an end and more of an end in itself. Taking someone to that slightly charged but relatively innocent level of desire and not needing it to lead to anything more. Paradoxically, this works only if you have a relationship typically characterized as “good”—a solid foundation from which to venture forth and to which you can return, emboldened but never really shaken. Though Andy and I never said it, we smugly assumed that having this very conversation spoke to what a good relationship we had.
Going off with Lee for a while wasn’t flirting. It was something more, though I tried to make it look to Andy as if it weren’t. At breakfast the next morning I read the junk mail, the catalogs featuring adult-sized footed pajamas designed for a demographic that a marketing service had determined I now belonged to. From the windows in our front room, I could see the 7 train snaking above Queens Boulevard. Before we moved here, all I had known of Sunnyside was that Richard Yates referenced the neighborhood in a short story about an out-of-step World War II veteran, confounded by the fifties and his own masculinity. Now it was home to pockets of Irish immigrants, Eastern Europeans, Colombians, and the young professionals whose presence justified a Times article every six months or so declaring this borough the “next frontier.” Andy had found us a topfloor apartment with a distant view of the Empire State Building. A Versailles sitting room met cut-rate nursing home in the powder blue lobby with its complicated molding, oxidized mirrors, and fluorescent tube l
ighting. It was more space than I’d ever had in the city. The muffled rumble on the elevated tracks had become a sound I didn’t hear anymore, until the silence of this morning. Finally I spoke:
“It’s just a few days.”
“A few days can feel like an eternity.” I think he was quoting an early-results home pregnancy test commercial. It would have been an opportune time to tell him that I had, three days ago, taken one of those tests and that it had been positive. Instead I let the moment pass and sat there trying not to look conflicted.
“You want to go. That’s fine. I just hope you know what to expect.”
“I don’t know what to expect. I don’t think Lee knows what to expect.”
“Lee and her spontaneity.”
“She wants one last thing of her father’s.”
“She wants attention.”
“I can give her attention. I have enough to go around. And I’ll be back before you even miss me.”
I didn’t register the false cheer in my voice until Andy spoke again.
“I’ve been missing you.”
He leveled his gaze at me, but I couldn’t meet it for more than a second or two, which incited him to keep going. “It’s like you haven’t been here for a while. So, really, what’s the difference? You should go.”
Andy had tried to fight with me about how I didn’t know how to fight. I could argue, meet logic with logic. I could write fights for the show, fangs out, one bitchy line after the next, but that was a circus act. It was engagement with a performance, not with another person. I had wanted to improve, to engage with Andy, for him, and I had gotten incrementally better. Still, I tended to meet confrontation with a full system shutdown.
“You don’t have anything to say?”
“I don’t know. You’re right?”
“That’s just it. It’s not about me being right or wrong. Or you being right or wrong. It’s what the fuck are you feeling and why can’t you talk to me about it?”
The Sun in Your Eyes Page 2