The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

  “Hey, Linda,” he had said. Like the song he’d written, “Hey, Linda,” only it came out sounding tired. Instead of playful and flirtatious (as it did in the first chorus) or beseeching and desirous (in the second). “Come on in. You look pretty.” Why did those words, which he’d said to her so many times before, and which were the truth (she did look pretty, she knew it) now leave her feeling humiliated? They seemed to strip her of her power.

  How easy it had been when they first met. She had been living with a boyfriend, another musician, a more famous one, they had thrown a party, and Jesse had cornered her in the kitchen. The next day he came back for her. Within a week she had moved in with him. Romance (if that was the word for it) had until then been easy for her. She hadn’t been one for long and messy goodbyes. She had always been the one who left. But she couldn’t leave Jesse. She believed they belonged to each other. She didn’t know how not to be with him. Their time apart had merely been a pause. Jesse, however, didn’t seem to know that he still belonged to her.

  Jesse and Marion were planning to go for a swim and there was something about this place, Flintwick’s libertine fantasies in the form of a house, that led Linda to think it was the most natural thing to join them. That’s what you do with your husband and your husband’s groupie at a place like this. Marion even had a swimsuit she could borrow. A blue maillot with red stripes. She changed and in the process, snagged her dress on the pendant that hung around her neck, Big Mort’s pendant, which he gave to her when she went to California. A gift that had made it seem less like she was running away and more like she was taking an extended field trip with her parents’ permission, but she wore it all the time. She tugged too hard to free her dress and the clasp broke, so she left the necklace in a little pile on a bedroom dresser.

  There was a photographer there, too. His very presence, there in that Adirondack chair, made Linda vain, to the point where she wondered how he could keep from turning his lens on her, how he wasn’t compelled by her beauty—not as a man but as an artist. Once he got his camera out, he didn’t seem at all interested in getting her in the frame. His focus was Jesse, which was fine, but it killed Linda when Jesse asked for Marion in some of the shots and this Haseltine guy didn’t see anything wrong with that. He was happy to oblige. She was expected to sit it out unnoticed. Not for her. She made her way over to the studio and that’s where Jesse found her, by the mixing board, looking through scraps of paper, lyrics, musical notations, in his handwriting.

  “Let’s talk, Linda,” he said. So up she went with him to the house, where he poured her a glass of expensive red from Flintwick’s wine cellar. Jeez, this place. The living room—draped in velvet, elk antlers on the wall—looked like a cross between an opium den and a hunting lodge. She had no doubt Flintwick had decorated it himself. They raised their glasses to their absent host. Marion made it easier on her by heading back down to the lake, betraying no insecurities whatsoever, as though safe in the knowledge that when she returned, it would all be over. The nerve.

  Linda and Jesse had married in Mexico. Jesse’d had a small part playing himself in a film being shot there, and they had stayed on for a few weeks afterward. Linda hadn’t invited her family because—could you imagine Big Mort and Mom and Lori turning up there? They were mutually exclusive, the Weinsteins and sleepy Mexican beach towns. She tried to be nonchalant and breezy about it (“Barely even a wedding, you didn’t miss much, there were no caterers”) but she knew that cowardice and avoidance were at the root of her behavior. Jesse knew this too, which was one of the reasons she had married him. He took her seriously enough to be perceptive about her. The absence of her family worried her, especially at the end of the ceremony, which was not at all Jewish and did not include the ritual breaking of the glass. In that moment a pang of fear struck her heart for the world she was choosing to live in and what lay ahead of her. Then Jesse swept her into his arms and whispered “I love you more than anything, Linda,” and the sound of the ocean evened everything out.

  But then, she got her broken glass after all, the shards on Flintwick’s floor like some sad, contorted echo of what she had missed on her wedding day. She hadn’t even wanted a wedding day, not like other girls did. But her love for Jesse had domesticated her.

  They had started talking, about his record and about Lee. Then she had asked him and then pleaded with him to come home and he said he couldn’t. “Home,” he said, as if it were a philosophical concept he’d struggled to comprehend and given up on, confused. As if he were playing dumb with a fucking interviewer. He wanted a divorce. So she threw her glass at him (she missed) and then she took two more from a liquor cabinet and hurled them at the stone fireplace. Jesse just stood there, infuriatingly unmoved. He didn’t even try to restrain her while she flailed against him, so that it might turn into an embrace. She had to embrace herself, slipping to the floor, pulling her knees to her chest, crying into her fists.

  “Linda, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “Fucking fuck this.” She stood up, disgusted, mostly with herself. She wiped her face, smoothed her hair, put her dress on (she was still in Marion’s one-piece), quietly got in her car and started driving. She looked in her rearview mirror to see if he was following her. Nobody was following her. What a fool she was. Patti Driggs was right after all. Patti Driggs was so smart. Patti Driggs was the smartest fucking person who ever fucking lived.

  From the road, she could see what looked like a welcoming place to stay the night. A ski lodge in the off-season, golden light emanating from its long glass windows. Like an Alpine chalet. Something out of a Swiss or Austrian holiday she had yet to take. She had envisioned, wrongly, it turned out, lots of blond, knotted wood. Like the movie version of Women in Love when the two couples go to Innsbruck. She hadn’t read the book (Jesse had) but she loved Alan Bates. She would see anything he was in. Alan Bates. She wondered why their paths hadn’t crossed yet. Isn’t that what happened when you moved in famous circles? If their paths did cross, if she could make them cross, she wondered what her chances would be with him. Fifty-fifty? Sixty-forty? Eighty-twenty, because of what you heard about him liking men? What was this kind of thinking? It was Big Mort and his gambling buddies turning life into probabilities.

  Her room at the Women in Love ski lodge, with its thin blue carpet and pink walls, didn’t look Austrian or Swiss. Less Alan Bates, more Norman Bates. It made her hesitant to take a shower. Water down the dark drain, Janet Leigh’s eye. Bernard Herrmann. Stab, stab, stab. But she had to wash this day off her. Pulling the Mexican dress over her head, she felt her bare neck. She’d left Big Mort’s pendant on the dresser at Flintwick’s. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn’t go back there. Not now. Jesse would think she’d left it on purpose. Quite frankly, she was surprised she hadn’t left it there on purpose. She would have to ask Jesse to send it to her. Or she would have to ask her lawyer to ask his lawyer to send it to her.

  She sat on the bed in her towel, combing her wet hair. She pulled a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from her travel bag. She realized how hungry she was. In the dining room of the lodge they had candles in little glass hurricane lamps on each table. Dark wooden chairs with spindled backs. White tablecloths. A large chandelier hanging from the center of the sloped ceiling. There was one family in there, on the other side of the room, a mother and father and a boy and girl. Her instinct wasn’t to nod to the adults, parent to parent, but to look to the children, as though she were a child herself. And she didn’t immediately comprehend why the waiter held her gaze for an extra beat. Had she done something wrong? Oh. Oh, that. Because she wasn’t a child, after all. She wasn’t going to sleep with him, but he had something, this waiter. Some freshness about him that reminded her of her past. She finished her steak, her peas and potatoes. She left a generous tip. Then she got in her car and drove to Hirschman’s.

  Nobody had removed the L-shaped arrow sign atop a stanchion that signaled the turn-off. The gothic lettering gave it a She
rwood Forest vibe. At the end of the road she reached a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate. It wasn’t too hard to climb over. Clearly people had done it before her, while carrying six packs. All of the old buildings still stood, though windows had been broken. Graffiti scrawled in places. She found the indoor pool, which had been so magnificent once. Titan-sized, glittering and aquamarine. Big Mort took a personal pride in the fact that he could take his family to a place with a pool like that. Linda could smirk at the activities, the talent shows, the fleshy women and the balding men, but she couldn’t deny her father the beauty of that pool. A moldering, empty ruin now.

  Linda walked around the grounds, back behind the bunks where the kitchen staff had stayed, up along a path to a small clearing among the pines where she would go to fool around with Robert. She sat down on a log that had been worn smooth by all the boys and girls who had fumbled with each other here, summer after summer. And then, when it started to rain and it was getting too dark to see, she headed back to her car. She stuck herself in the driver’s seat as the rain pelted down and she cried. She reached in her purse for the bottle of pills she had found in Flintwick’s medicine cabinet and taken with her. Just in case. But she didn’t have anything to wash them down with. She could cup enough rain in her hands, though, to take one of the pills. So why not. It would get her back to the lodge, where there was a glass and a sink and where she could easily swallow the rest.

  Only one road, if you didn’t count dirt lanes and old trails, would get you from Hirschman’s back to the Women in Love lodge. It ran through the tiny town where Flintwick lived, becoming a main drag for a few blocks, the length maybe of two football fields. The rain had let up, leaving behind a wet sheen on the Victorians and two-story brick buildings, a bar on the corner with a neon sign in the window. Next to the bar was a gravel parking lot overrun with weeds, and the two pickup trucks that had pulled in there made the green GTO all the more noticeable. Jesse’s car. Not his beloved 1967 silvery Corvette Stingray, still in their garage in California, but the one he’d been driving out here. She slowed when she saw the car. Maybe she should just go in and talk to Jesse, tell him she forgot her necklace at Flintwick’s (Though why did it matter, at this bottle-of-pills point, if she had it or not?). This was a public place and that would keep her calm; despite how she might seem, she wasn’t one for making a scene. Well, maybe in L.A., but not here, not now, not after the scene she’d already made in Flintwick’s living room. But would he think she was crazy, showing up as if she’d followed him? Didn’t he already think she was crazy?

  She sat in her idling car, so immobilized by her thoughts that it took her a moment to notice that two people had walked out of the bar and were standing on the otherwise empty sidewalk. Two lovers, from the way they stood, his arms around her waist. A mist had risen in the night air, making the picture all the more romantic. She watched them in a kind of trance, even as she realized the woman was Marion and that Marion was leaning into the man who Linda didn’t immediately recognize as her husband but rather as Jesse Parrish. They were leaning against the car in the parking lot when some instinct finally prompted Linda to step on the gas and disappear before they detected her.

  She drove unthinkingly because her thoughts belonged to another Linda who wasn’t even in this car but was somewhere else, maybe in Robert Rothman’s car. Or Big Mort’s. The streetlights of the town came to an end and the road turned back into the rural route that led to Flintwick’s and, beyond, the Women in Love lodge. Marion and Jesse must have been behind her on this dark, lonely road that she knew so well. Everything was different shades of darkness: the trees lining the ravine to her left, the rock face that rose on her right. She pulled over to what could barely pass for a shoulder, got out of her car, and walked onto the blacktop, a thin fog encircling her legs. Something held her in place. She couldn’t move and the headlights coming toward her grew brighter until they were blinding, the inverse of the pitch-black nights she had loved. All she could hear was the blaring of a horn, so much sound that it was almost no sound. The sensations were so extreme they became their opposites. It was that feeling of walking barefoot, as a child, on the asphalt driveway of the house in Mamaroneck, on the hottest day of summer; how it felt cold before it burned. She thought it would end this way. Hoped it would. But then the light vanished and the wailing stopped and she was still there in the road. No longer standing, though. She was down on the wet ground and pushed herself up. The guardrail that had been there a moment ago was torn away, and she stood in the empty space, looking out into the ravine, at what had once been a car. A marriage. A life.

  fine like hotels

  Lee, 2010

  Linda shut her eyes and dropped her head, as if in prayer. Nobody ever taught Lee how to pray. It was something she’d only seen actors do until Big Mort’s funeral. Her mother in black, standing and reciting words in Hebrew by rote. When Lee had asked her about it, Linda said it was the kaddish, as if everyone knew what it was. Like, leave me alone, my father is gone, and I don’t want to talk. Not until later that afternoon—maybe when it occurred to her that Lee’s father was gone, too—did Linda seek comfort in her daughter. At the house in Mamaroneck, she took Lee upstairs while the rest of the family gathered below, and they looked at photo albums. In the his-and-hers closets in the master bedroom they discovered a shoebox of yellowed newspaper clippings, ads that Big Mort had placed for his stores twenty and thirty years back. They seemed fairly generic to Lee, but they made Linda cry. How strange it was to see Linda supplicant. Stranger even than hearing Linda’s story now, which Lee had somehow known all along. She had known it from Marion. She had known it since Flintwick’s and that blooming that opened in her stomach and crept up the back of her neck when he told them how Linda showed up at his studio after Jesse died, how it felt like a theft. She had known it, felt it, ever since then, but probably long before. Probably her whole life.

  “And then what? They crashed and you just drove away?”

  “Yes. I got back in my car and I drove away. I was in shock. Do you understand? I don’t remember stopping at a pay phone, but I must have. The police received an anonymous call. All I remember is driving. I drove all the way back to Mamaroneck, to Big Mort and Bubbe’s house. You were sleeping in my old twin bed with the white headboard, and you were sleeping so soundly. I remember the room smelled different with you in it. It smelled like applesauce muffins. I lay down on the carpet, as close to the bed as I could get, and I just listened to you breathing. You were so peaceful and perfect. I remember looking up as the sky got lighter through those white nylon sheers. I was about to lose it. I went downstairs so I wouldn’t wake you. Big Mort never slept past five-thirty. He was sitting in his favorite chair in the den, and I came so close to telling him. He knew something was very wrong. I was shaking, and he held me and I told him I lost Jesse and I think he knew what happened, somehow. He must have put some version of it together when the police showed up that morning. They came to inform me of Jesse’s death. They asked me questions, but they never really interrogated me and my father told them I had come home earlier than I had, that I left the lodge and was back before he turned in for the night. They knew Jesse was drunk and those roads were dark, with the fog and all the deer . . .”

  Lee remembered that house, the room, those white nylon curtains like veils waiting for brides. Watching Big Mort and Bubbe play cards in their kitchen with the red countertop. Crazy Eights. Gin Rummy. Hearts. The crystal chandelier in the front hall. In the morning, when the sun came through, into the tear-shaped prisms and into your eyes. Dust beams slanting down. But the rest had always been hazy—what she and Linda were doing there. Where Linda went when it was just Lee and her grandparents. Big Mort’s bearish arms. His big white teeth, which she realized only years later were dentures. Hadn’t there been something formidable about him or something once-formidable that you could still detect, still feel in his presence? His power to make it go away, whatever it was, if it came to that. The g
ut feeling that Big Mort had covered for Linda in the way Lee instinctively knew that Linda would cover for her, if it came to that. An amoral protective gene. Linda the fixer.

  “All you had to do was take care of Marion, right?”

  “I went to see Marion in the hospital, yes, after the crash. But I went because I felt responsible, not because she was a loose end or whatever terrible thing you may be thinking. I sat by her bed every day and I told her everything I just told you. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know if she could hear me. It just spilled out. Once it was out of my system, I could straighten up, pull myself together, enough to get through the day, the week, the next week.”

  “Enough to buy Marion off and banish her.”

  “Banish? You’re overestimating me. Even if I ever had those thoughts, I’ve never had that kind of influence. And I’d hardly call Big Sur banishment.”

  “But you have had those kind of thoughts.”

  “It was an accident, Lee. My god, it was an accident!” The quake in Linda’s cry made Lee think of ancient pillars toppling. One summer, she had found a copy of the Bible at her grandparents’ house, an easy-to-read edition that one of her cousins must have brought home from Hebrew school. The stories were as vivid and indelible as fairy tales. She thought of Samson now. Delilah over his hair with a knife. Linda was both of them, rolled into one. “He was my life,” said Linda very quietly. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I wish I had those tapes, those stupid fucking tapes, because I wish I could give you something more of him. You didn’t get nearly enough.”