The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  “Not at all,” said Lee. “You’ve been very generous with your time.”

  “Would you like to have this?” Flintwick handed the photograph to her.

  “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Yes you could. I’m sure it’s worth more to you than it is to me. I insist. It does beat, you know, my schlub-aesthete heart. Why don’t you stay? Hear Sticker Shock. They rock the party that rocks the body.”

  “That’s a very tempting offer.”

  “I know.”

  “But I don’t want to impose. We should get going. Thank you for this,” she said, the picture in her hands. Her face didn’t have enough artifice to hide the emotions that had taken hold during Flintwick’s reminiscence. At least, I wanted to think she couldn’t hide it from me.

  “Please give Linda my best.” He’d started to walk us down a hall when a crash and some yelps from the lake demanded his attention. “I used to think of myself as a general of sorts, taking foot soldiers and turning them into samurai. Now I feel like a babysitter. Apologies. I’m afraid you’ll have to see yourselves out.”

  I MET LINDA for the first time when I went home with Lee for winter break my sophomore year of college. Her khaki-colored, paper-bag pants and tangerine hoodie over a tight black tank top were Charlie Chaplin’s tramp meets yoga instructor. But it was a look. She was one of those women who could make almost anything stylish, a gift she’d given her daughter. She had the same bangs and long hair she had in old pictures, only salt and pepper now, piled on her head. I didn’t have the vocabulary to define the clean yet eclectic way Linda had decorated her 1930s home in the Hollywood hills, I only understood she had an eye, a way of organizing her environment that was at once homey and sophisticated. Persian rugs. Actual paintings, not prints from museum gift shops, hanging on the wall. Vases of peonies and potted dark-leaved plants. Issues of French Vogue in an upstairs bathroom with slightly peeling wallpaper. She must have read the magazines, wrinkled and curled from steam, while bathing. The house, as Linda lived in it, was a play of light and shadow. And I was a child, walking past glass and crystal displays in a department store, my mother cautioning me not to touch anything. Linda’s house was part of a mysterious adult world to which I didn’t yet belong. I expected a wave of inadequacy to wash over me, but instead, it was privilege. Being let in on something special.

  THE NIGHT WE arrived, Lee went to bed early, jet-lagged, but I was too keyed up to sleep. Linda took me to the kitchen and brought out a half-eaten chocolate cake, setting it down on the counter. No plates, just forks, and we stood there digging in, as though it were a ritual we’d performed many times before. I never did this with my mother. We never just had a cake standing by, as if for this very purpose. Our forks were utensils, not shapely design objects. No fragrant breezes such as these came through an open window in our house.

  “What is that?”

  “Winter-blooming jasmine. I love that this is what passes for winter here. I still haven’t gotten over it.”

  “You grew up on the East Coast?”

  “Sure did. Linda Weinstein, nice Jewish girl from Mamaroneck. Right?”

  “Right,” I said, not sure where she was going with this, where I was supposed to go.

  “Well, that certainly wasn’t going to cut it. Weinstein? And Mamaroneck? Blech. So I decided, at the ripe old age of eighteen, to flee. I changed my name to Linda West. Because I was going West, young woman! Later, when I met Jesse, he asked me if it was West like Nathanael, and I had no idea who that was. He bought me The Day of the Locust and said, ‘Here you go, honey.’ I read it and I was horrified and I decided that I would be West like Nathanael. He would be my spiritual father. Because my real father? Mort Weinstein of Mort’s Discount Clothing Mart? Please. But deep down I was always Big Mort’s daughter. A New Yorker. Sharp. I had uncles who ran numbers. I wasn’t going to be that girl getting high all day and baking pies for my old man. Or I would be that, but I would have a secret self all the while.”

  “Weren’t you”—I didn’t want to finish the question, but she was waiting—“weren’t you scared? At all?”

  “Of course I was scared. I think that’s what drove me. But I look back on it now and I was also so cocky. And why shouldn’t I have been? I was hot shit, Viv. I had that beanpole look. It would have ruined me a decade earlier, but I was born at just the right time. So I came out here with my girlfriend Karen and I don’t think we had a plan other than let’s just go! Let’s go be where it’s at, right? I was barely eighteen and I was gonna sleep with whoever I wanted and write poems and take pictures and maybe get famous. We knew a bunch of people who’d come from New York and it was easy. I was a secretary for a few months and then I found modeling work and then I was just in it. In the scene or whatever. But I got tired of rock and roll early. Those boys.”

  It was the women who interested her. The girls and what they wore and what they meant by what they wore. A costume designer she knew asked her to outfit the ingénue in a movie—her “Edith Head moment” as she put it—and it led to more work of that sort. She took courses in pattern making, met with manufacturing contacts and other associates of Big Mort’s. In 1972, with a bank loan she could only secure with the co-signature of her husband or father, she opened a small shop on Sunset, the first Linda West boutique.

  “You know what the big cosmic joke is, though? Here I am, Mort Weinstein’s prodigal daughter, back in the schmatte business, after all.”

  She made it sound so easy. I filed away all of the names to look up later, names that might help me make sense of it all. Nathanael West, Edith Head, Mamaroneck.

  “So, what about you? Lee tells me she’s bringing a friend home and that’s pretty much it. She doesn’t say a word about how lovely you are.”

  I had been primed by Lee to see all of this as part of Linda’s shtick. But it didn’t matter. I was hers.

  The next evening Linda had guests for dinner, a movie director and his girlfriend, a British actress in a witchy black dress. We sat out on Linda’s redwood porch, under eucalyptus trees strung with lanterns, overlooking a dark blue tiled pool. To my surprise, I didn’t feel abandoned and clingy when Lee and the actress, who had hit it off to the point of giggles, went for a swim, leaving me with Linda and the director. Maybe it was the wine I had been drinking all night. Maybe it was that I kept telling myself that the director, whose last movie I had gone to see twice because it beguiled me even though I didn’t really get it, couldn’t possibly be looking at me like he wanted to keep looking at me, in a filmic way, because that just wouldn’t happen, but wasn’t he? And when I allowed myself to ask him something about the Jungian aspect of a scene in one of his movies, he looked charmed. “Viv here is pretty brilliant, isn’t she?” he said to Linda, and she winked at me and I wasn’t a precocious child they had decided to patronize and laugh about later. I was brilliant. Bewitched.

  The guests spent the night and in the morning, Linda told us all about the dream she’d had in which she slept with her father. Which sounds like the kind of thing you say to shock someone, but Linda spoke with unfiltered openness and a complete lack of self-consciousness. “The thing is,” she said, “it was really good!” I didn’t think she was aware of the effect it might have on her daughter. But that right there was Lee’s problem with her. Whether it was blithe lack of forethought or knowing disregard, it hurt. I was the only one who saw Lee’s face when Linda said that: like finding out a secret note of yours had fallen into the wrong hands. What must it have been like to have a father whom women recollected with yearning and faintly dirty smiles, a man whose seductive qualities never ever diminished? If he’s your father and yet you never knew him, really, does he seduce you, too?

  “Was it really your father or was it a stand-in?” the British actress asked.

  “It was really my father. He called me Lindy. He smelled like Aqua Velva and Chock Full O’Nuts.”

  Linda’s candor and freedom, the space she luxuriously floated in, amazed me. My
own parents seemed so contained in comparison. They had done such an excellent job of shielding from me their inner lives that I had naturally concluded they didn’t have very rich or complicated ones.

  Some months later, when Linda asked us all out to dinner one Parents’ Weekend, I excitedly anticipated introducing my mother and father to Linda. She would dazzle them, would make them see life didn’t have to be so small.

  Would the Felds—Jonathan, a dermatologist, and Natalie, a middle-school language arts teacher—have been able to command the most inviting table in the restaurant or would they have had to wait for two hours like everyone else only to be seated by the bathroom? When it came to appetizers, my mother ordered the simple mixed-greens salad while Linda ordered several plates of the “exquisite” zucchini blossoms she’d had here the last time she was in town, along with something involving fennel and a citrus drizzle.

  “The zucchini blossoms actually are really good here,” Lee said to my mother, as though apologizing.

  “They sound delicious,” said my mother, warming to Lee.

  “I’ve read about this place,” said my father. “People say it’s top notch. I’ve always meant to make a reservation.”

  “Really?” I said. My father either didn’t hear or pretended not to as he focused on the wine list, choosing a bottle that cost three times what he typically spent on the special occasions when he drank wine. When it arrived, he deferred to Linda, who raised her glass and said, “To our daughters, our incandescent girls.”

  “Hear! Hear!” said my father, and he clinked Linda’s glass first while my mother and Lee exchanged a look: yes, okay, sometimes Linda gets it right.

  The talk turned to what we’d done with our respective days. Linda and Lee had gone to lunch with an old friend of Linda’s who now happened to be the dean of alumni relations. “She used to handle PR for me when I was just starting out with the line,” said Linda. “And she was perfect because she thinks in sound bites. Half the time she made me feel like a rambling old loon, but that’s what I was paying her for.” My parents and I had been to a panel discussion, “Illness and Creativity,” led by Patricia Driggs, who had joined the faculty that semester and had just come out with her latest book, a memoir about living with fibromyalgia.

  “I thought she was remarkable,” said my mother. “So smart. And off the cuff like that—I’ve always admired how, in her writing, she can distill very complex ideas into such elegant sentences. But she speaks that way. You were talking about sound bites—it’s the opposite of that. The deep complement to that.”

  “Oh God, I’m sorry, but eeecch, Patti Driggs?”

  Prompted by their inquiring looks, Linda elaborated. Patti was her nemesis. They had come of age around the same time, in the same place, circling each other at parties in the canyons of Los Angeles, accepting dinner invitations from the same hosts, turning up at the same clubs. They were friendly and Linda even felt a bit sisterly toward Patti. Thin and birdlike Patti, her nerves as vibratory as a tuning fork. She once told Linda she often found herself compulsively counting headlights on cars at night. To not count them would open her up to an unnamable terror. And yet, Patti was steely. It was Patti who made the most acute, withering comments, or she would listen more intently than empathically, like an aural snare trap. Linda liked having tense and pitiless Patti around. Or so she thought.

  Patti was writing sharp essays and journalistic reports about life in Los Angeles that would eventually be compiled into a much-lauded, much-imitated volume. It was Linda who helped facilitate Patti’s profile of Jesse Parrish, persuading Jesse that Patti wouldn’t lazily paint him as the country boy who couldn’t resist the glittering temptations of the city. She might, as others had, contrast his sweetness with his swagger, describe his music in terms of purity and corruption. Write about how polite he was, as if that were exotic. But Linda convinced Jesse that Patti would somehow get it just right. Imagine Linda’s reaction, then, when she read Patti’s piece, which contained (blessedly, perhaps) only one reference to her: “His wife, a model from Mamaroneck, appears by the pool and asks if Jesse would like to wear the blue caftan this evening or the gold and if he wants the gold caftan, he should really wear the purple velvet pants, oh, but wait, the purple velvets are at the cleaners. She pauses, corrects herself: aubergine, not purple. The mood is very serious.”

  Patti went on to write novels (Dispatches from the End, which established her voice as that of a generation, followed by Managing by Walking Around) and two plays—one a “vital, scabrous take on sexual harassment in academia” and the other a “hilarious descent into the dark heart of a deteriorating marriage” according to the introductory leaflet I’d been handed at the lecture hall. She also wrote an indispensable book on photography.

  Linda never forgave Patti for the early betrayal. What rankled Linda most was Patti’s duplicity. Patti would be duplicitous even in her insanity. If Patti were to really lose it one day, as she feared she would, she would only go crazy enough to write about it in a bestselling fashion; she would literally be of two minds, never batshit enough not to be intelligible, shrewd, and marketable.

  “You’d like her to have a complete and total breakdown?” my mother asked.

  “I’m not wishing it on her. But it would finally be honest. I just get so tired of her moral authority. She writes a book called Dispatches from the End and everyone goes on about how significant it is, how powerful a portrait of anomie in our apocalyptic times. And I’m thinking, it sounds like a book about taking a shit. But even after all this time, it hasn’t changed. It’s not just that she made me look like an idiot all those years ago. She didn’t even really get Jesse, who, by the way, never owned a pair of purple velvet pants. Excuse me, aubergine. Patti loved him, no doubting that, and I’m not going to get catty, but it was like she wanted to instruct him on how to be a better person. He didn’t need her instruction. Other people criticized him for being out of it, for not being political enough, like he only cared about himself. But you know how young men write those songs and sometimes you can’t tell if they’re about a girl or Jesus or heroin? Well, Jesse would cover a protest song, and it would come out sounding like it was about love, about getting your heart broken. He had this vulnerability, this really aching feminine quality, which is just, my God, so sexy in a man. And it was all there when he sang. Right there. He’s with you, you’re with him. I think that’s what makes him timeless. What’s that T. S. Eliot line about news that stays news?”

  “Pound,” said my mother, who often grew doctrinaire in the face of social unease. “I believe it’s Ezra Pound. On literature.”

  God. You couldn’t have just let that go?

  “Oh, you’re right. Pound, Eliot. I’m always, like, whoever it was who didn’t like the Jews. But then, neither of them did? It gets confusing. That’s what Jesse wrote, though. News that stays news.”

  “I know I had his first record,” said my father. “But I’m afraid I never really delved into the Jesse Parrish oeuvre. I liked that first one, though. With that cow on the cover? I never understood what that cow was doing there.”

  “It was a field, Dad. The cow was just in the field.”

  “I know, but was there supposed to be some kind of significance to it?”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Some biblical allusion? Something about sacred cows? I’m free-associating here, but I wonder.”

  Stop free-associating. Stop wondering. Just stop.

  Linda jumped in. “Well, Jesse and I were staying at a place in the country and we went out walking and we walked and walked and we reached this pasture and there was this lonely cow just grazing and I always had my camera around my neck in those days and Jesse said, ‘Take a picture.’ So I did. It’s as simple as that. People have asked me about it for years, though, because if you look closely, it looks like the cow is kind of smiling.”

  “A bovine Mona Lisa,” said my father.

  “Yes! I got so lucky with that cow.�
��

  “Mom,” said Lee.

  “Mom? I got a ‘Mom’? I can’t remember the last time you called me Mom. It’s always Linda with you.”

  “Can we talk about something other than you getting lucky with a cow?”

  “Oh, my dear, sometimes I regret that I never went in for all that Emily Post stuff. I think I did us both a disservice.”

  “I know what you mean,” said my mother. “I wasn’t very good about making my kids write thank-you notes and it haunts us to this day.” A lie. I’d never witnessed my mother lie like that, and it threw me. Not just because she was lying (she was on me about thank-you notes as soon as I could properly hold a pen), but because the lie effectively did so much work, expressing sympathy for Linda but ultimately defending Lee, and at my expense. I couldn’t immediately name the feeling that crept up on me, but on reflection, it seemed a lot like jealousy. I wanted my mother’s affection for myself.

  “Lee is her father’s daughter,” said Linda. “She’s gonna do what she’s gonna do.” Ostensibly celebrating something irrepressible in Lee, Linda’s comment had an ugly undertone that seemed aimed at the table, a warning to all of us when it came to taking sides.

  “Yes,” said Lee, “and right now I’m gonna get that waiter back here and order another bottle of wine.”

  UNDER A CANOPY of trees the dirt lane from Flintwick’s compound led to a paved, sleepy road. We passed a barn and yellow and green fields that soon dipped down into a darker, cooler valley, shaded from the disappearing sun by the tall, dense pines of the Catskill preserve. Brown signs etched with yellow paint marked turnoffs for a campground, a waterfall, the trail head for a hike, until the forest cover thinned out again and we came to the two-lane route we’d taken in. Instead of turning right, which would take us back the way we came, Lee went left along the winding mountain road. Some scenic detour, I figured, to keep things going before we headed back to the city. She’d promised me a road trip, and I didn’t want to go home yet.