The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  Viv wondered aloud if one day the world would have changed so much that if they were to, say, dance around their kitchen to this song, it would have to be the equivalent of that “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” scene in The Big Chill. Lee wasn’t sure. If you turned into whatever the current equivalent would be of a self-satisfied yuppie who just couldn’t fight the rhythm, then that’s what you turned into and it didn’t matter what the music was. You were a joke. But the more she thought about it, the more she thought about her mother and grudgingly felt she had to give Linda credit. How Linda got over rock and roll early, got over those boys. All but one of them. Linda loved the music of her youth as much as anyone, but she never pushed it on you, as if her generation were the only one that had ever really been young and grown older. Maybe the best thing about the music of Lee’s youth was that it had already lost its innocence. So the nostalgia you felt when you heard it wasn’t for what you believed was a better time, just a different one.

  “So, when we get to the airport, is that it?” asked Viv. “I kind of feel like you’re sending me away, and it’s going to be years before I see you again.”

  “It’s not as dramatic as you’re making it sound.”

  “If I’m being dramatic, it’s because you fucking made me that way.” Viv shook her head. “Stop laughing. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m going to see Linda and hopefully get some answers, and then I’ll go back to New York and you’ll see me as much or as little as you want to. As much or as little as Andy wants you to.” Lee’s mind landed on something. “Remember that girl at that party, like, years ago, who thought we were a couple?”

  “Yeah!”

  Neither of them knew how to finish the thought.

  ELLEN SHELLEY HAD the air of someone continually carrying a clipboard. Her whole body hummed.

  “Lee-eeeee! What are you doing here? I mean, come in!” Ellen, at the door of Linda’s house, like a mad scientist steering Lee into a chamber where ordinary humans were subjected to abnormally high levels of energy. Lee almost expected to be given a jumpsuit to change into. “I thought you were in New York? I mean, I thought you were on vacation? I mean, fuck, you know what I mean. I wish you’d called and let us know you were coming. I would have prepared.”

  “What would you have prepared?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. A snack? I would have ordered something special. Made a goddamn reservation.”

  “A snack reservation?”

  “I don’t fucking know. Something, okay?”

  Ellen swore gratuitously, the way that actresses profiled in men’s magazines do. Lee recalled that Ellen used to go on auditions when Linda first hired her as a personal assistant seven years ago. Linda had had a number of assistants over the years, and while all of them performed more or less the same tasks, they each seemed to serve a different purpose for Linda. One or two were Linda manqués, also-rans of her scene who never burned as brightly and always needed money. Some of them were strivers, absolute Linda loyalists, never a bad word about the boss. A couple of them, by the end of their tenure, couldn’t hide their grumpiness, and Lee probably should have sympathized, though she never really did. She had only ever cared about one. Sally Andrada, who had worked for Linda while Lee was in high school. Sally looked and dressed the way Lee thought she ought to look in ten years. Long, not very neat, light brown hair with blond streaks, as if she surfed a lot when she wasn’t on the clock. T-shirts, jeans, boots. Sometimes skirts, long or short, but almost always with a pattern, textiles being her thing. Always as if she never tried too hard (though maybe she secretly did), and as if she knew you probably wanted to be her, but she wasn’t going to make a big deal about it, or even a small deal (which was usually worse, as these things go, than a big one). No reverse-snobbery: Look at you people and your money. But nothing of the sycophant about her. Just a conscientiousness: she wanted to do a good job, she wanted to move beyond where she came from (Sally from the Valley) and she understood how Linda could help her get there. Her talent had brought her under Linda’s tutelage, but she still couldn’t keep a note of protective sarcasm out of her voice when she referred to herself as a “textile artist.”

  “Don’t ever talk like that! Don’t deprecate yourself or your art that way,” Linda had admonished her. “Your art is your work.” Sally thanked her. Linda then allowed a little time to pass before asking Sally to book her an appointment for a wax.

  Lee cared what Sally thought of her. She imagined Sally had a boyfriend who wasn’t entirely worth her time, but still. Lee never wanted to do anything that would make Sally complain to this boyfriend. Can you believe that girl? But what do you expect? Sally left sometime when Lee was away at college. She could look her up, find out what had happened to her, but she preferred to just hope it was something good.

  “Is my mom around?”

  “She is, she is! Um, I think she’s out back. You want to wait here?”

  Ellen hustled her into the living room, sitting her down on the eraser-pink George Sherlock sofa, its cushions like giant hamburger buns. This wasn’t the house where Lee had grown up, but that sofa was like a floating home.

  “Hey, just so you know, Linda hasn’t exactly been herself the last few days. I don’t know what it is, but she’s been a little, like, withdrawn or something. She canceled a few meetings. There was this benefit dinner she bailed on last night. I don’t want you to be alarmed or anything, but. Just FYI.”

  “Okay, thanks for letting me know.”

  It didn’t matter that Lee hadn’t answered Ellen’s question about what she was doing here. Talking to Ellen was like being at a cocktail party or trying to have a conversation with someone looking after a toddler. Ellen spirited herself through a set of French doors and while Lee waited, she looked at her hands, at her father’s agate ring. As a girl, she had worn it on a thin chain around her neck and then at sixteen she had it resized for her finger. She rarely thought to take it off because it was so much a part of her. It had been a talisman of sorts, a silent marker of a special power granted to her. In the way that children play one parent off the other, the ring was a reminder to her mother: I come from someone else. But she had forgotten that Linda had given her the ring in the first place, after Jesse died.

  Ellen reappeared carrying a tray with two glasses, a pitcher of still water, and a small plate of cut-up lemon.

  “Linda’s coming in a sec. Um and she told me to go home early, so I’m gonna”—Ellen set the tray down on the wide coffee table and rotated her hands in front of her like turbines as she searched for the words she wanted—“head the fuck out!”

  “Okay. Have a good rest of the afternoon. Evening.”

  “Would you. Could you just. I mean, go easy on her, okay? Whatever it is. Like I said, she’s having a rough time.”

  Lee wondered when she’d developed a reputation for being a bitch. She had heard “standoffish” before but she didn’t think she’d been particularly known for nastiness. Though she’d never thought Linda needed coddling, either.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Linda approached just then, from around a corner. Looking very British Woman in Kenya in a rumpled white linen camp shirt tucked into wide-legged khaki pants and flat sandals. Big Mort’s pendant peeking out of a lapel.

  “Thank you, Ellen,” Linda said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She put her hands in her pockets, her Charlie Chaplin–slash–Marlene Dietrich–in–menswear move, and shuffled into the living room, looking at once apologetic, stern, and worried.

  “Hi,” she said. “Did you just get in?” She poured two glasses of water, released a lemon slice into each, and dropped into an armchair facing Lee.

  “Yes and no. I was with Viv, in Big Sur. I dropped her off at the airport and then came here.”

  “Big Sur, huh? You’ve been to see Marion, then.”

  Of course. Of course Linda would have known.

  “Yes.”

  “And what did she tell you?”


  “She told me what she remembers.”

  Linda’s face twitched preemptively into a kind of bullying expression Lee had last seen on Will, a half-English, half-French director of high-concept music videos. They had gone away together for a weekend to a Mediterranean villa, where he asked her to sleep with his good friend Max. A variety of motivations were supplied, chief among them that it would get Will off. He didn’t need to watch, just knowing it was happening would do.

  “I don’t think so,” she had said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  And he had said, “All right, look, if you don’t like this, if your delicate psyche can’t handle it, then don’t do it. But don’t make me feel like I’m exploiting you or I ought to be ashamed. Because I’m not.”

  “My psyche isn’t delicate. You’d just like it to be. It gives you a better speech.”

  Lee knew what to do with the you-and-your-delicate-psyche tack, how to turn it around, but Linda’s expression had already morphed into something else, something Lee was less familiar with.

  The only other time Linda had looked at her this way was when they took their golden retriever, Fred, to be put down. Lee, twelve, had acted surprised that Linda had decided to go at all, instead of sending Fred off with a staffer. Her mother indulged the act, she let Lee be superior and indignant. Linda cried but didn’t fall apart and Lee, bereft and angry, had understood, however dimly, that Linda’s show of strength was for her benefit, so that she could fall apart and have a mother who would be there to put her back together. And Linda did—for the rest of that day. Instead of going home, where everything would remind them of Fred, they went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel (no Chateau Marmont scuzziness at a time like this) where they put on robes and ordered room service and got into bed and watched All About Eve (Linda’s choice) and Meatballs (Lee’s). Lee never had another dog. She probably ought to get one now.

  “I’ve been waiting for you since your call,” said Linda. “After you saw Charlie Flintwick. Do you believe her? Whatever Marion told you?”

  “I don’t think she’s lying.”

  “You’ve always had good judgment. Your judgment is unerring. What gets you in trouble is that you don’t trust it. That’s probably my fault. I didn’t encourage you enough or something. I knew where this would lead, you going on this . . . quest. I knew it was only a matter of time. I’ve had thirty years to figure out what to tell you but I’m still not sure what to say. Marion isn’t lying. I don’t know that I would trust her memory entirely, but she isn’t lying.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  “Where would you like me to start?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The beginning?”

  Linda shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe she was about to do this, but also, surprisingly, as if she admired her daughter. Rather like the way Patti Driggs had looked at her. As if she hadn’t quite thought Lee had it in her. As if Linda saw some of herself in her child.

  i love you more than anything

  Linda, 1978

  At Hirschman’s there was a waiter named Robert Rothman. What she had liked about Robert was that he drove fast; they flew down roads in the dark in his Ford Galaxie. He had thick black hair, and he called her darlin’ in an already retro Elvis Presley kind of way. “Whoa, darlin’, where’d you learn that?” But he listened to folk music, like everyone else then, and also some soul records that spoke to a sensitive, anti-establishment streak in him. But not too strong a streak because in September, Robert would be off to Bucknell, pre-med. At sixteen, she might not have been able to articulate it, but she knew that Robert was challenging the values of a culture in the way a child challenges its parents—to make sure that at the end of the day they were still there, firmly rooted. The disdain that Linda was already developing for her own middle-class upbringing somehow felt more dangerous than Robert’s because it was more detached from any overarching, idealistic principle, more manipulative and self-serving.

  Sometimes Linda wondered about her scruples. How she could look down on her father. He would have done anything for her and somehow that wasn’t enough. Big Mort, in his extravagance, booked Linda and her older sister, Lori, their own large room at Hirschman’s, with two double beds they would sneak out of at night, Lori to see her swim instructor and Linda to the cabins behind the dining hall where Robert and the rest of the waitstaff lived. Big Mort. Never to his face, though. Always Daddy to his face. She let him down again and again, and he loved her unconditionally.

  She had been thinking about Robert Rothman and those summers at Hirschman’s while she drove from her parents’ house up to Flintwick’s studio to see Jesse. The thick-ankled women in costume jewelry and the Borscht Belt banquets of her adolescence. It startled her how at home she felt on these roads, like being in a dream, a place your mind conjured so you know the landscape and you know what comes next. All those winding country and mountain routes she’d taken in from the back seat of Big Mort’s Cadillac and then the front seat of Robert’s car. She felt girded by the advantage of being on home turf. She needed to be self-possessed when she saw Jesse, not desperate or angry or scared or sad. Or she would be all of those things but self-possessed enough not to show it. Certainly not in front of Marion. Marion made Linda feel old, worthless, and unseen. It was the first time in her life she had felt that way, and it shocked her.

  Jesse wasn’t expecting her, but she knew what he was going to say. Let’s settle this. Finalize it, formalize it, whatever his attorney was advising him to do. You’d think Linda would be the one with representation. If not a high-powered, corner-office-in-a-glass-tower lawyer, then some friend of the family, a Big Mort associate. But it was Jesse who saw to these things, whose sense of tidiness, propriety, and manners always lay beneath the careless rock-and-roll surface of his life. (Probably why he had so much trouble with drugs. They were an escape for him, a way to lose control and reorder his mind, whereas for Linda they remained recreational. Linda had dropped acid the way her mother played bridge. And speed had been lovely but then it got to seem like a lot of work. Cocaine, when it came along, was wonderful for parties. Heroin she just never ever touched.) It always surprised Linda that Jesse was neater than she was, that he cared about housework. That’s what Patti Driggs didn’t get in her hateful profile, painting Linda as the dazed yet doting wife. A foolish woman in a ridiculous scene of 1950s domesticity transplanted to 1970s post–sexual-revolution California. What Patti Driggs didn’t get, or didn’t care about, was that Linda wasn’t a good wife in that sense. Linda’s disheveled yet stylish look was an embodiment of the way she approached the world. She didn’t wear any old thing, she had a method, a vision, but she also never thought too hard about it.

  As she drove, she thought how Jesse was a better lover than Robert Rothman or any of the other men she’d been with. She loved him. He was sexier than any of those other men. God, he was sexy. He was so sexy that she still wanted him, even when he would unload the dishwasher (before they hired a housekeeper) in a fed-up, put-upon pedantic way. It’s not that hard, Linda, to stack the plates that match and put them in the cupboard. Could you try it just once? Patti Driggs had no clue about Jesse. Linda had said, “Fuck the dishes,” as she positioned herself on the countertop and pulled him to her. With Robert, nothing very emotional entered into it. It was undiluted fucking. They didn’t even have to speak. Their bodies completely took over. She had never lost herself this way with Jesse. She cared about what Jesse thought. Perhaps she was only being sentimental about those rides in the car with Robert in the hopes of feeling better about losing Jesse now.

  She wore the white peasant dress with the red embroidery that she’d bought in Mexico (would he remember?) and whiskey-colored boots. She looked airy, not nearly as nervous or doomed as she felt. This wasn’t like her, this suppressed panic at the impending end of things. She was usually already moving on.

  Big Mort hadn’t said, “I told you so.” Neither had Mom. So s
he had to hand it to them. Jesse might as well have been from another planet. When she announced her plans to marry Jesse, Big Mort said, “So he’s a good old boy, huh? A good old goy is more like it!” But he hadn’t forbidden the marriage or threatened to disown her. Was it any wonder he loved Fiddler on the Roof so much? Temperamentally, was there ever a character more like her father than Tevye? If Linda were the type who chose to settle for the butcher, stay in the village, and cling to tradition, would Big Mort have loved her as much? Lori had married a lawyer, moved two towns away into a four-bedroom split-level, and produced two precocious grandchildren who regularly came over for Friday night dinners. Her father loved Lori, but not as much as he loved Linda.

  “Life will go on,” Big Mort had said when he first heard about their separation. And hearing that had made Linda feel surprisingly better, albeit briefly. She still had her youth, sort of. She was (only?) thirty. Having Lee hadn’t destroyed her body. A few thin, translucent stretch marks on her hips. Breasts still in good shape. Lee. Had she really not thought of her until just then? And in this way? Terrible, terrible mother. She was going to be mature about this. For her daughter’s sake. She would let Jesse go, be a grown-up (but remind her, what was so great about being a grown-up?). Whatever they became to each other, she and Jesse would at least have to be two parents on good terms. Perhaps this would be what finally turned them into parents. Linda still hadn’t gotten entirely used to identifying herself as a “parent.” Sometimes she couldn’t believe she was allowed to be a mother. You needed to pass a test in order to drive a car, for God’s sake, but not to raise another human being.

  Life would go on, as Big Mort said, but not the life she wanted. So here she was, hoping to win Jesse back. To make him realize where he belonged. She could have picked up the phone first, but her impulsiveness and her immoderate heart had propelled her here instead. She hadn’t really understood about Marion, though. Hadn’t underestimated her so much as totally and mistakenly discounted her. She had assumed Marion was for Jesse what various men had been for her: a way to pass time. She hadn’t considered her a rival. Not until Marion came to the door when Linda arrived at Flintwick’s, flustering her. Gorgeous Marion. Linda expected to see her in one of those spaghetti-strapped terry-cloth jumpers, no bra. But no. She wore a trim button-down shirt tucked into jeans. Oh and wasn’t Marion so mature herself, welcoming Linda inside so calmly and cordially. Not putting on adult airs, but an honest-to-God adult, if such a thing existed anymore. Fuck maturity. Really now, couldn’t Jesse have answered the door himself? Couldn’t Marion have exiled herself from the house for this?