“I wasn’t aware it was still a sore spot, Viv. Sorry.”
“I wasn’t aware it was either. It’s being back at a place like this, I guess.”
“It makes me glad that we’re not here anymore, that we’re not twenty-one or whatever. That it’s a long time ago already. But I also can’t understand where it all went.”
“I know.”
Lee couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Viv that the other day, in the car, driving to see Flintwick, when she told Viv that the low point of the past few years was standing in the supermarket aisle, stirred to tears by an MOR evergreen—that that was the kind of sad and pathetic story you share precisely because it doesn’t reveal much beyond an awareness of your ordinary inability to resist the near-universal sentimentality of pop music. Who isn’t sad and pathetic in that way? She’d told Viv a little bit about her depression, about what she might have inherited from her father, the sketchy relationship the Parrishes historically had with mental health. But she had described this as a concern, not a comfort, when really it was both. She had noticed, living in Los Angeles and driving more, that she sometimes found herself in a fog at the wheel. She was operating at a deficit. Her inclination wasn’t to pull over and collect herself, but to just drive on through and let whatever might happen happen. She’d wondered if her father had ever experienced something similar, something that may have been taken, romantically, for recklessness. Maybe recklessness was just a passionless disregard for yourself and others. In New York, where she didn’t have a car, this fuzziness had sometimes led to poor decision-making with men. It resulted in a couple of qualified performance reviews at her nonprofit office job. But once she left for modeling in Paris, where she understood about sixty-five percent of what people said to her, her slightly erratic, distracted behavior was rewarded, if not encouraged. There are contexts where liabilities become assets. Her father had known this. Flintwick had called it pathological, his need to be a star, but what else was Jesse supposed to do with his excess of charisma?
French people loved Lee. She always showed up for work and she could be counted on, but she wasn’t all there, suggesting she was absorbed in something fascinating beyond what was in front of her. She gave in to her absentmindedness instead of trying to focus and make sense of what was happening around her. She was told this came through in her photographs.
Toward the end of a shoot once, a producer stepped forward and said, in English: “Okay, that’s all, fucks!” And Lee, brought back to attention, had said, “What?”
“Porky Pig! Looney Tunes?”
“Oh. Oh! That’s all, folks. I thought you said something else.”
“I did!”
Lee erupted as though something much funnier had just occurred, and the photographer took a few more pictures before pronouncing her “so wonderful.” From then on, “That’s all, fucks” became an expression she often said to herself.
There was a point, however, at which she couldn’t easily be pulled out of her not-there-ness. A point at which it could become less than charming. She never reached this point in Paris, but she’d been there before, in college, and she was there again.
Had it been the same way for her father? Was The Garden of Allah what that sounded like? Or did it sound like whatever was on the tapes that had gone missing? Finding the tapes might provide an answer but what did she really think that answer would do for her? What was really sad and pathetic, so much so that she couldn’t even bring herself to tell her therapist, was this search for something she knew she wasn’t going to find. Because it was all in the past. And everything everyone has ever said about that: You can’t go home again. Don’t look back. Getty over it. Searching for these tapes, as if they would reveal something to her about herself. What could they possibly reveal other than her own delusion? Once, against her better judgment, she had attended a Jesse Parrish tribute concert to benefit a cause she no longer remembered. She did remember encountering backstage two old rock crones in leather jackets. Garish hair. Pendants resting atop puckering cleavage. Heavy rings on their fingers. There was something who-gives-a-fuck fabulous about them, which they must have known. But you would never, ever want to be them, which they also must have known. Like the shrine she and Viv had visited in upstate New York. Anything can become a caricature of itself.
Using her father as a reason to pull Viv back into her life, or push herself into Viv’s, was sad and pathetic. She had gotten as far as admitting to Barbara, in that contemplatively lit office high up in a residential tower on the Upper East Side, water towers in the distance, that she missed the way Viv had idealized her. It used to make her feel possessed of some lasting, captivating power. Viv must have seen something in her. The way Viv attached herself to me, as though she might really start going places now that she had me as a friend, as though her life might begin and it was almost like I kept waiting for her to realize she bet on the wrong horse. Barbara said: I think it’s interesting that Viv, as you’ve described her, never seemed all that envious of you, of all that you had or had been given. And Lee thought, No, Viv didn’t really seem envious, more like pleased to have been let in on it. The more I gave her, the more I got—I fed off her adherence to me. Barbara said: You tend to talk about your relationship as if you’re somehow the bad one, as if you’re bad for Viv. Lee: You don’t think that’s the case? Barbara: I’d like to hear why you think that’s the case.
Lee didn’t tell Viv about any of this.
Viv found various accounts of Marion’s relationship with Jesse and the accident but nothing about what had happened to her since. One article by a conspiracy theorist proposed that while there was a crash, there was never any accident, that Marion and Linda had plotted to kill Jesse and carried the whole thing out together, Diabolique-style. The writer presented it as a given that the wife and the mistress wanted to do away with Jesse mostly because they were women and women did things like this. It made Lee sick and uneasy—not the accusation itself, but the tone of psychotic familiarity. Along with the caveat: “Full disclosure: I’ve never met Linda or Marion. I don’t know what they’re like, personally.” As though he very well could meet them, and it wasn’t an issue of access but of timing or disinterest on his part. As if he were too busy doing so many other important things. As if Linda, Jesse, and Marion weren’t his betters.
They wrapped it up and went for fried egg sandwiches and spinach pie smothered in red sauce at the coffee shop they used to go to all the time, after Andy graduated and she and Viv latched on to each other. Still the old striped awning, maybe a fresher coat of green paint on the woodwork around the front windows. How often had they sat here, at the laminate-topped tables? They must have usually been part of a group because this is where everyone in their set ended up, but in Lee’s mind, they didn’t have a set. It was just the two of them, sitting at the counter. The owner’s daughter would let them turn the radio to the state school station, which in Lee’s memory was forever playing Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. Moments from so many late nights spliced themselves together.
Viv: “My grandmother thinks my voice is sexy.”
Or: “I felt weird bringing popcorn into a documentary about Herbert Marcuse. Nobody else was eating anything.”
Or: “It was a good thing I stayed in. I got to see that episode of Melrose Place where Kimberly checks Peter into the hospital to give him a lobotomy.”
Or: “He told me he was glad I was editing his article because I’m kind, patient, and gentle.”
“Those are good things to be,” Lee had said. She couldn’t remember who the “he” in question was. Someone who worked on the same school publication as Viv? Someone who was sort of a dick but who Viv sort of had a crush on?
“Yeah, but there was something so condescending about him saying it or else it was the way he said it. It made me want to say, Shut the fuck up, you pompous fuck. Like I’m only here to balance you out with my docility. I didn’t say it, though. I just kind of raised my eyebrows
then smiled. All kind, patient, and gentle.”
And: “Why can’t I talk to him? Why do I turn into a big, boring piece of rubber? He’s smart and he’s nice and he looks so smoochable.”
“Everyone here is smart and more or less nice and more or less smoochable. It’s something else, something you can’t measure in those terms.”
Lee couldn’t articulate what else it was. She knew only that it felt a lot like this: sitting with someone and wanting to keep sitting with them, to keep hearing what they said.
She half expected to see people they knew here now, which was irrational. The people they did see looked so very, very young. The owner had passed away, the owner’s daughter was out, her son said, as he handed them menus. She and Viv really had to stop this reunion tour of greasy spoons. Though the food was fine, same as ever, the whole experience was like using the little toilet at an elementary school: familiar, workable, but mostly uncomfortable. Lee had thought that while they were here in Providence, they might visit their old house, the footbridge over the highway, the park by the water where they used to sit and look out. But on further consideration, it seemed wiser to spare themselves all of that.
They paid their check and walked outside. From up the street came laughter and voices out of the dark. A guy shouting “Booooom!” and a girl going “Aaaahhh, fuck you, Kevin. You scared the fuck out of me, dude.” Lee tried to remember, from her own experience, why teenagers liked to be loud on street corners. Nothing occurred to her. But as she and Viv went back to their room, she was glad for the noise, for all the space the loudness occupied. She didn’t feel like talking anymore tonight.
“YES, COME IN.” Tiny Patti Driggs sat at a big desk in a room that might once have belonged to a couple of maids when the arts building, with its marble entrance hall and grand staircase, had been a stately home. Lee could almost see them, two girls looking out of the leaded window, beyond the terraced garden, down at the small city below. Thinking of bigger cities they could run off to. Patti had lived in those cities and now she was here. She took her eyes off what she had been reading, removed her glasses, and blinked up at them. “Do I know you?”
Before Lee spoke, Patti stood, instantly energized, a spider scuttling across its web. All in black, she appeared ready to take the stage with a mime troupe. Her bob was serious. She smelled clean and citrusy. Her wine-colored lipstick feathering into the little lines around her mouth was the only hint of weakness about her. Linda could have recommended a good product to keep the color in place, and Lee could just glimpse such an exchange happening: the détente between two old enemies whose former allegiances no longer meant anything because their sides no longer existed, but whose shared singular history made them, in effect, comrades.
“I do know you.”
“I’m Lee. Lee Parrish.”
“Yes, you are. I’ve seen your picture. Pictures.”
Lee wasn’t sure what to make of this. But then, Patti Driggs had written a book about photography. Copies of it lined a shelf on a wall full of other books. Photographic prints, one of which had the meticulous formal qualities Lee recognized as David Haseltine’s, covered the other wall.
Patti waited for Lee to say something.
“If this isn’t a good time—”
“Have a seat. It’s a fine time. I think. Though that may depend on why you’re here.”
Lee and Viv took the pair of dark wood spindle chairs facing Patti.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” Lee started, “but I wasn’t sure if you’d be willing to see me, and I was hoping to ask you about something . . . Excuse me, this is my friend, Vivian. Feld.”
“Vivian Feld. Why do I know that name?”
“Small world? I knew your son,” ventured Viv. “Briefly.”
“Yes, well, women tend to know Ben briefly.”
Viv stifled a laugh. Patti wasn’t laughing. Because she wasn’t terribly outspoken or performative, Viv could give the impression of being quiet or shy. But she wasn’t. She was more socially skilled than she gave herself credit for. She could keep people talking. She seemed to be collecting material she continually collated into an ever-evolving manual for how to live. “It was a long time ago,” Viv continued. “But he’s married now, isn’t he? I saw the announcement in the Times.”
“That announcement is going to outlive the marriage. They used to call that sort of thing fishwrap. Now everything lives on forever, doesn’t it?”
It sometimes seemed to Lee that they were all engaged in a kind of generational cold war. It was clear who would win (had already won) but what a hollow victory. Is that what their parents had wanted? For their children to live in their shadow? It would seem that Patti had only vanquished herself. Once appealingly tart, she had completely soured.
“Listen to me.” Patti softened a bit. “It’s not even ten-thirty and I’m in full hypercritical bloom. Let’s blame it on end-of-semester stress. Tell me, what can I do for you?”
“It’s a long story. But I would really like to find Marion Washington. I haven’t had much luck tracking her down. We happened to be close to campus and I thought, I don’t know, maybe you might know something, having been a part of that world.”
“That world, yes. What do you want with Marion?”
“I’d just like to talk to her about my father and their time together, whatever she remembers of it.”
Patti inhaled through her nose, her mouth a thin, imperfect line. In her eyes that quick inner spider nimbly went to work.
“I never quite got Marion. But then I never quite got Jesse either, much as I wanted to. Much as people thought I did. Linda, though, I understood. Every now and then, I think, if I’d been just a little more imaginative at the time, a little less convinced of my own perspective, she’s the one I should have written about. The more interesting subject. Though I’m sure, in retrospect, she’s more than happy I gave her short shrift. I didn’t paint the most flattering portrait of your parents. I did a very good job of using them, though. Maybe you hold that against me. Maybe this is what it feels like when one’s chickens come home to roost. Though maybe I’m projecting, and that bad blood seems like ancient history to you.”
“My mother still thinks of you as her nemesis.”
“Nemesis! That’s a little strong. I didn’t realize I was anyone’s nemesis. I should be honored anyone cares that much.” Lee couldn’t help but think that Patti knew exactly how much Linda cared.
“But I’ve always been partial to that Faulkner line,” Patti continued. “‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ I’ll admit my first thought, on seeing you standing in front of me, after the instant it took me to realize who you were, is that you’d come seeking revenge on Linda’s behalf. Or even your own.”
Revenge? Lee had read Patti’s much-lauded essay about Jesse, with its brief, condescending inclusion of Linda, but she hadn’t thought it was all that riveting or all that revealing or all that anything, really. Not enough to warrant vengeance. Like Linda, she didn’t quite get why everyone thought Patti was so great.
“I’m the first to grant that it was damning, that piece I did on Jesse. But that was a defense mechanism, me trying to hide my infatuation with him. If you read it again, you might find it to be one of the most fawning profiles ever committed to the page. I have my regrets. But it’s a time capsule now. Linda has lived a lot of life since then. As have I. Marion, too, I’m sure.
“I had the same impulse as you, some years ago, to find Marion. Mine may have been more journalistic, more essayistic, though maybe that’s just what I told myself. There had to be some more valid reason to legitimize my lingering interest in Jesse. It couldn’t just be an obsessive schoolgirl crush on a dead man. I also thought a profile on Marion might truly be fascinating. Marion and Linda and the other women in Jesse’s life. I’d just finished writing my second novel, and I was tired of being in my own head. Ready to get back to something more reportorial. It was about a dozen years after the crash. The w
orld was already a different place, and Marion wasn’t in it much from what I could tell. But I did some digging, connected some dots, and I found her. She wasn’t going by Marion Washington anymore. She had changed her name to Marion Morris and was living in Big Sur. She became a psychologist. I called her up at her practice in Carmel, and she was cordial enough but she didn’t want to talk to me. Can I ask you what it is you’d like to know? What do you hope to get out of talking to Marion?”
Lee’s guard went up. “What did you hope to get out of talking to her?” Lee challenged. Patti seemed mildly amused to have the tables turned on her.
“I wanted a story. I also wanted a little bit more of Jesse.”
“That’s what I want, too. A little more of my father.”
Patti softened for a moment, in her eyes, her posture. The gaze she’d directed at Lee became more searching, less critical. As if she’d initially been looking at Lee to find exactly what she expected and now she wasn’t sure what that was.
“I hope you have more luck with Marion than I did.”
“Thank you for the information.”
“You’re welcome.” Patti, to judge from her writing, had never been much for sentimentality. To feel strongly about things in a negative, critical way was all right in Patti’s world, but to express the positive was to make yourself susceptible. Patti checked herself. “Speaking of fishwrap, I read an article recently about Linda and her company, her wildly successful move into e-tailing, or whatever you call it. She’s done very, very well for herself. I always knew she would. I should consider myself lucky she still harbors such strong feelings about me. It doesn’t seem right to ask you to say hello to her for me, though.” Patti eyed her one more time then turned to Viv.
“What about you, Vivian? Shall I give Ben your regards?”
“WELL, THAT WAS something,” said Viv. “I almost want to call up Ben Driggs Stern now and ask him how I can help. Do you know, when we were dating, he showed her a short story I’d written and she told him it reminded her of her own work, when she was starting out. I thought she was dismissing it as derivative, but he said, no, that was high praise coming from her. That she was always looking for her own reflection but she didn’t often find it.”
The Sun in Your Eyes Page 18