“It was Raymond Chandler,” mumbled Viv. “The line about empty pools.”
“Is that right?” asked Marion.
“The Long Goodbye.”
“Oh,” said Marion.
So her father and Viv had read the same books. Lee wasn’t sure what to make of that. What pushed its way into her consciousness just then was the moment, as she had kissed Jonathan Feld, when his hand had moved to her breast for a long second. And the look on his face when he finally pulled away. Rueful and confused but with an intensity she’d never seen from him before.
“Okay,” said Lee. “Hirschman’s. Where Linda apparently had the time of her life.”
Marion didn’t seem to get the reference, though she seemed saddened by Lee’s cynicism.
“I’m sorry,” said Marion.
“Don’t be. I’m sorry. I mean, this is why we came here. Please. Keep going.”
“That’s about it, of what I remember Linda telling me. How she knew the area, how she knew those roads.”
“You think it was her in the road,” Lee said.
Marion pulled into herself, closing her left hand around her right wrist and folding her arms to her chest.
“I don’t know. I have no proof that it was her. All I know is I woke up with a scrambled mind and a gut feeling. Linda came to see me one more time in the hospital after I regained consciousness. I told her I knew she had come to visit me the weeks before, that I had heard her, and she said, ‘Heard what?’ She said they must have had me on some really good shit.” That quiet laugh again. “Maybe they did. Maybe I imagined it all. I asked her what she wanted with me. I was in a lot of pain and I didn’t have the strength, the inner resources, to challenge Linda. She was so . . . who she is. And I was so very young. She told me she wanted to give me half. Jesse had a will and he hadn’t updated it, so his estate was hers. She was going to keep half of it for you and give the rest to me. I didn’t know what she was trying to do. Buy my silence? Assuage her guilt? I told her I didn’t want the money and she sighed, as if I was being naïve.” Marion’s voice caught. “She was wearing that pendant of her father’s. ‘It’s done’ she said. Just like that. She never came to see me again. She was right, though. About me needing the money, of course. The hospital bills were astronomical. But it was also as if she knew I would need to start again. As if she couldn’t, but I could. And she was giving me that chance.”
It seemed Marion had been over and over this in her mind and still hadn’t quite figured Linda out. She had turned it into a vexing case study, establishing a professional distance so as not to be personally destroyed.
“I changed my look. I cut my hair, dressed differently. I went to college. Then graduate school. Sometimes my ego would get the better of me and I’d wonder if people recognized me. But people rarely did. I realized Jesse was the context in which people had known me. You couldn’t have ‘Jesse Parrish’s black girlfriend’ if you didn’t have Jesse Parrish. In time, I became someone else. I probably would have become someone else regardless. I always knew I would lose him somehow.”
“Maybe. But not like that,” said Lee. There was something lovely about Marion’s self-sufficiency and endurance, but also something remarkably sad. Her solitary life in a fairy-tale cottage in the forest. If there wasn’t a prince, there ought to have been a woodsman, at least, or some dwarves.
“You never heard from Linda again?”
“No, we don’t send each other Christmas cards.” A bitterness crept into Marion’s voice. “I went into one of her shops in San Francisco once, out of curiosity. I even tried on a tunic. It had a very nice drape. I have to give that to Linda: a sense of proportion in clothes, if not in life.”
It seemed to Lee that she ought to be shocked by what she’d just heard, by all the implications of it, and maybe that would come later. Or maybe this is what shock felt like: having the dream where you discover an extra room in your house, only waking up to find that room really is there.
Lee felt herself on the verge of tears, coupled with a stubborn urge to keep it all in. As though she didn’t want to give someone the satisfaction. But who? Marion hadn’t hidden her feelings. And if Viv wasn’t overcome with emotion, she at least looked like someone who was trying to be concerned for the sake of a friend, while also spreading one last schmear of soft cheese on a piece of bread. She moved slowly, as if she knew she shouldn’t be thinking about hors d’oeuvres at this moment, but nevertheless going for the hors d’oeuvre. It broke the tension.
“I have more where that came from,” said Marion, noticing the time on her watch and turning on a floor lamp. “We could have dinner if you like. Where are you staying?”
“Nowhere yet,” Lee said. “We’ll probably go to Carmel or Monterey, find a hotel for the night.” Linda would stay at a posh inn just down the road from here when she used to come for spa weekends with Roy or Stephen or Monty. A cabin at Deetjen’s the couple of times she tried the great outdoors family thing with Lee. She couldn’t have known Marion had been so close all this time.
“Why don’t you just stay here?”
Lee shook her head. “Oh, no. Thank you, but that’s okay.”
“It’s no trouble. I would like it. I go into the guestroom and I can practically feel it accusing me of neglect. Please. Stay.”
Lee didn’t need a lot of convincing. She had been going, going, going, all to get to this and now that they were here, she let fatigue overtake her. She wanted someone to take care of her, and Marion would do that. She didn’t have to think about what came next, only had to go out to the car and bring in her bag for the night. It was a piece of luggage that Linda swore by for travel. As usual, Linda was right about these things. It held all she had needed this whole time and there had still been room, a deep inner pocket, in which to keep safe the Haseltine photo that Flintwick had given her. She pulled it out of its rigid cardboard case. Days ago (Had it really been just days?) when Flintwick first showed it to her, she had seen a complacent man, one who maybe knew that complacency didn’t play well so he should disingenuously try to appear a little more troubled. But now she saw it the other way around—Jesse tightening a valve on his worry after he’d let a little of it leak out. It was of a piece with the entire Haseltine series. It had that quality that captivated Carnahan: involving-but-uninvolved. Like the waves and the rocks and the towering trees around here. You could observe the terrain, you could wander in it, it could move you, it could hurt you, but it had no need for you. No need at all.
Marion’s face came alive when Lee showed her the photograph. Bewilderment, scrutiny, avidity. Marion was looking at a code she had once been able to decipher easily by virtue of daily practice. She was rusty now, but give her a minute. She would get it. It would come back to her.
“You know what I haven’t thought of in years?” she said. “How Jesse used to call me Maid Marion sometimes, like Robin Hood. I never told Jesse that I’d only ever seen the Mr. Magoo version. I didn’t want to spoil the romance.”
“I know it’s not so simple, but he must have loved you a lot,” said Lee.
“He did,” said Marion. “In his way.”
“You should have this,” Lee said.
“Oh. No. No, I couldn’t. You keep it. It’s yours.”
Lee didn’t argue when Marion handed it back to her, but she didn’t really believe what Marion had said. Yes, she could keep it, but it wasn’t hers.
IN THE DARK, in the cool, soft sheets of a queen bed, under the white matelassé cover, neither Lee nor Viv was asleep.
“If it’s true, she’s a monster,” said Lee.
“Lee, if it’s true, she was out of her mind. She didn’t know what she was doing. Other than trying to kill herself.”
“By stepping in front of his car? So either they went or she went? So he’s either dead or he gets to live with her death on his hands for the rest of his life?”
“But that’s what she’s had to live with. His death on her hands. If it’s true.”
“How do you find her so defensible? You always have. I’m asking for real. I’d love to know how it’s possible because just for once I’d like to stop hating her.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“No, she’s not.”
“We all do things we can’t take back.”
“Yeah, we all do things. Believe me, I know that. But not manslaughter. I know you’re feeling guilty about sleeping with Rodgers, but it’s not the same. It’s hardly the same thing. I should never have called him. I should never have started that whole thing.”
“I do feel guilty. I feel terrible. But it’s also like I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty enough. Maybe that’s what it is, what makes me sympathetic to Linda. I’m not trying to excuse what she did or explain it away. I can just feel for her, that’s all.”
“When are you going to tell Andy that you’re pregnant?”
“As soon as we get back.”
“You should go home, then.”
“Now?”
“We got what we came here for. I should go see Linda on my own, anyway.”
“And the tapes?” Viv suppressed a yawn.
“Who knows. Maybe Linda has them after all, locked away somewhere.”
“You make them sound like Rochester’s wife.”
Linda was never a big reader, not like Jesse, but she liked the Brontë sisters. When Lee was reading Wuthering Heights in high school, Linda said she liked their anger, ate a pecan sandy, and then walked out of the kitchen where Lee sat at the table with her book. Lee didn’t immediately understand what she felt at that moment in Linda’s wake—admiration for her mother. She hadn’t registered any anger on the part of the Brontë sisters before Linda mentioned it. But once she did, she began to burn through the book, whose first few chapters she’d found a slog. Then she read Jane Eyre when it wasn’t even assigned. She’d loved how dark and gusty it was, and she loved Jane with her stormy feelings and her sense of right and wrong. Jane was a bundle of contradictions, but was she ever hypocritical? Lee let the thought drift as she and Viv lay there silently in Marion’s guest bed.
A light salty breeze came through an open window. It was different from the beachy, smoggy air of the Southern California coast, of her childhood. It was more rugged and moodier up here. Linda, as best Lee could remember, always took her (and the boyfriends) north. Never south, to La Jolla or to Mexico, never east, to the desert that Jesse had loved, where his ashes had been scattered. So when Lee went to the desert for the first time, it wasn’t with her mother but with Alex Garcia, who had his license a year before she did. Alex with his long skateboarder shorts and his smooth, tan skin. He thought the trip to Joshua Tree was all about his coming out to her, and she pretended it was, for his sake. Alex Garcia was paunchy now but still had the same clear complexion and dark, razor-straight hair. Living in Oakland. Working for a start-up that sold eyeglasses online. He wore a Buddy Holly pair himself. That she gleaned from the social network she had belonged to for about two seconds. He had written in her yearbook that he didn’t know what he would do without her. But he’d figured it out pretty quickly.
“Viv,” said Lee. No answer. She turned, propped herself up on her arm, and looked at her friend. How unknowable people were when they slept, how unreadable, especially the ones most familiar to you, who made up so much of your life. Lee could have touched Viv’s shoulder and roused her from her private world. But she didn’t want to. She contemplated Viv’s face, the half-closed hand resting on the pillow, the steady breathing, the slightly open mouth. She thought that Andy, at times, must have looked at Viv from the same vantage. Andy would continue to do so, while this would soon become only a memory for her. Not quite so distant as Alex Garcia, but a memory nonetheless.
IN THE MORNING she woke to an empty bed. The more things change, she thought. Viv was already up and dressed, as was Marion, sitting at the dining table drinking coffee that Lee could smell from across the room.
“You lose something,” she heard Viv saying, “when you find that one person. Other people fall away. Even if they don’t go anywhere. You miss them and you miss who you were with them.”
“It is a loss,” said Marion. “And you may need to mourn, despite everything you may have gained.”
How strange, if flattering, to be mourned when you were still right there in the next room. But was Andy really the one person in Viv’s life? If he hadn’t entirely been when they left—if Viv’s decision to come with her on this trip was rooted in a struggle against that—then that struggle had now been resolved. Time for Viv to go home. She knew what this trip was for Viv, just as she had known what that trip had been for Alex Garcia. So, was that manipulative on her part? Or was everybody, ultimately, just getting what they wanted? Viv got to have one more adventure, the kind she couldn’t quite admit she’d outgrown. And Lee got to be the person who could give her that. She got to feel needed. Unlike with Andy, who’d also made her feel necessary once, but whose needs she could never properly meet. But in a way, now she was giving him what he required of her too—what he needed more than another apology or the whole truth. She’d first had the realization that she was on the outside looking in at Andy and Viv’s wedding. Letting go of Viv now was letting go of Andy, finally. She wanted to tell him this so that he wouldn’t hate her, but there wasn’t really a way to tell him. She had to hope that if he thought about it, he would somehow know. The boy who had loved her would have thought about it. If that boy was long gone, then she was only trying to reach a ghost.
“Oh, Lee, I hope we didn’t wake you. Viv said you were up for a while last night. I hope you slept all right, considering.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Come sit down. I’ll make us all some breakfast.”
Lee watched Marion move about the kitchen, slicing up the rest of the PDC and soaking the bread in an egg and vanilla batter. Heating a skillet. Preparing a fruit salad. She read the expression on Marion’s face as satisfied purposefulness. What if she just stayed here? What if Marion went off to work and Lee cleaned up, picked flowers, gathered wood for the fireplace, and had dinner ready for Marion’s return? What if that was her life from now on? She recognized Marion’s satisfaction because it reminded her of the fulfillment she was so surprised she felt when working with Linda. Most of Lee’s prior notions of business had come from eighties movies. Power suits and big mahogany desks and gold paperweights in the shape of ducks. She had grown up around Linda West, Inc., but she hadn’t grown up in it. She didn’t know Linda the Executive—the strategic thinker, the creative mentor. But when Lee was foundering professionally (and in other ways too), Linda had taken her under her wing and put her to work. She rotated Lee through several departments in the company, a process of accelerated rope learning, and then made her a vice president, overseeing talent acquisition in New York. Yes, Linda said, it helped to have Lee as one of the more public faces of the company, but first and foremost, Lee was an excellent judge of character, an asset in this role.
Linda had foreseen this, had recognized what her daughter most needed at the time and tried to help her attain it. Like a mother would. Lee hadn’t known Executive Linda very well, but she was even less familiar with Maternal Linda. For most of her life, it seemed as if Linda made a mess and then either didn’t recognize it as a mess or simply excused herself from the disarray. Lee had been left to sort it out. But work was an arena where Linda looked after her. This is what she would miss. She couldn’t go back to it now if what Marion had told her turned out to be true.
IN THE REARVIEW mirror Lee could see Marion standing by the door of her cottage, waving them off. Marion would head inside and eventually make her way back to the guest bedroom where she would find the photograph of Jesse that Lee had left for her.
“Are you sure you want to go see Linda alone?” Viv asked when they were back on the coastal highway.
“I think I have to. Besides, if you don’t get back, you’re going to get fired and I need t
o know what’s going to happen to Romola and Peyton.”
“You don’t even watch.”
“I’m going to start.”
“You better do it soon. THATH has a rich history but not much of a future.”
“What will you do if it goes off the air?”
“I don’t know. I’m like an iceman. Or a maker of mouse pads. I wonder if I could go work for Carnahan. He’s got that thing for appropriating obsolescence. He’s got his butler waiting on him in vintage factory wear and small batch denim. Maybe I could dress up like a town crier and be their in-house storyteller. Kara Carnahan loves THATH. I could keep it going for her.”
“You could be her Scheherazade.”
“Oh my God, could you imagine putting the Carnahans to bed every night?”
“Yeah, like, here’s a glass of warm milk to go with your bucket of raw meat. Sleep tight!”
At a gas station they stopped for coffee and on the cardboard sleeve of Lee’s cup was an ad for a neo-caper movie that Jack had a supporting role in. More than a month ago she’d received a text from her ex: Thinking about you. Getting hard. She hadn’t replied. Was there an expiration date on these things? The message was still on her phone. What would she even write back at this point? You still there? Still hard?
Back in the car, Viv took over the driving. She was so ten-and-two. Lee had always loved that about Viv: how Viv, despite wanting not to be, was so ten-and-two. She didn’t even realize she’d been staring until Viv said, “What?”
“Nothing,” said Lee. She busied herself with finding a playlist Jack had made for her. It was a great playlist. And she didn’t mind being reminded of him. He’d never yelled at her, never spat at her or threw a plate at her. Of all the relationships she’d been in, all of her encounters with men, theirs was one of the least demeaning. She scrolled to a song that made you want to go out and have one last really fucking great night. When you played it loud, and you had to play it loud, it reminded you of your whole entire life and then made you forget about everything for one pure moment.
The Sun in Your Eyes Page 21