The Sun in Your Eyes (19 page)

“Yes, well, Lee's very good with a makeup brush, but you can't
apply
radiance like this.”

She had a way of telling you what you wanted to believe about yourself.

“Hello, Linda,” said my father, jumping out of whatever he'd been saying to Tim in order to jump in here. “You're looking very dapper.”

Linda smiled. How silly he was—a well-meaning but confused man who never quite understood how to talk to women and certainly didn't know anything about how they dressed.

But I think he knew exactly what he was saying. Linda's outfit accentuated her femininity, but he made it seem as if she were a drag cabaret emcee or circus ringmaster. He had sensed my mother's distress and come to her defense. They were comrades in arms. Strange that this should have surprised me. But it did. Like a secret passage—like what I had always taken for bookshelves was really a door to a room in our house where they would go. I could see them in there, after that Parents' Weekend dinner, my mother reproaching my father for his Talmudic questions-begetting-questions act. My father saying he could do only so much to cover for her insecurities. They must have agreed on a strategy for the next time they would see Linda, the weekend Lee and I graduated from college. When the dinner plans fell through, when Linda had to fly out earlier than expected, I could tell they were relieved, though maybe
a little disappointed, missing the opportunity to put some plan of theirs into action.

They would hash out certain terms in this room and then head back into the world, where all I saw was their adherence to those terms, not how they'd reached them. The adherence this evening: my mother attempting to mingle, my father lightly hugging Lee when he saw her, the first time since that Thanksgiving weekend, keeping a good two or three inches between their bodies but not a protesting-too-much distance. His coolness toward Linda. At the same time, he'd noticed what she was wearing, looked her over, taken her in.

“And you, Mr. Feld, do very nice things for that suit,” said Linda.

My mother was all patience. Linda was basically a glorified tailor, wasn't she, and therefore qualified to make statements about the fit of garments.

“I love seeing all of us in our finery,” Linda added.

“You must be so used to it, though. Getting dressed up, going to galas and that kind of thing,” said my mother.

“Oh yeah, it's all very run of the mill. I take absolutely no pleasure in it whatsoever.”

Neither of my parents had sharpened their wits quite enough to meet Linda's sarcasm. My mother simply chuckled lightly, shifted the tone and said, “You must be Roy?” to the man who had been politely standing behind Linda. Edged out of the inner circle, like Nancy and Tim, who now looked a bit lost. They had expected to be the recipients of all the weird, rivalrous energy that my parents were directing toward Linda and in the absence of that, they didn't quite know what to do with themselves.

I had met Roy a couple of times. Linda had started seeing him when Lee was still a child. Roy wasn't the first boyfriend Linda had
after Jesse, but Lee never got to know the others. One night when she was eight, she heard what sounded like muffled hyperventilation and, concerned, got out of bed. Out by the pool she found one of these men going down on her mother. She didn't yet know what that meant, didn't know those words for it, but she stood there long enough to grasp the mechanics of it, though not long enough for Linda or the man to see her. Lee encountered another man in the kitchen one morning who made her breakfast. “What, you don't
know?
You gotta mix some butter in the syrup and
then
you dip that bacon in there!
That's
how it's done.” Then he looked at her and said, “Shit, you're like a little Jesse, man. It's like Jesse's watching. I can't do this.” Lee said, “Do what?” He said, “Keep fucking your mom.” Lee never saw him again. Roy was the only one who seemed at all capable of being a father figure. Lee never caught Roy and Linda in the act, and she decided this was due to Roy's discretion and regard for her welfare because it couldn't possibly be due to Linda's.

Lee had told me that Roy was always costumed—suede jacket with arm fringe in back-in-the-day photos, mutton chops and Western wear around the time Linda met him; ponytail and desert boots for a while there in the nineties—never merely dressed. This evening he seemed to be going for International Architect just back from Berlin. Dark suit, dark shirt, no tie, angular glasses, close-cropped receding hair.

My parents exchanged introductions with Roy, neglecting to include Nancy and Tim, who stood there looking on, as though they had forgotten they didn't have to stand there and be excluded.

“So, Roy, if memory serves, you're a television producer?” my father asked.

“That's right. I'm essentially retired now, though.”

“Would I have seen one of your shows?”

“Possibly,” said Roy. “Did you own a TV in the eighties and like poorly paced ensemble comedies?”

“Oh Roy, come on,” said Linda. “He practically transformed the medium.”

Roy hailed a server carrying a tray of seared tuna on sesame thins.

I didn't know all that much about Linda and Roy's relationship, but I imagine it's emasculating to be the man who knows he can never be loved like Jesse and be willing to stick around nonetheless.

I just remember catching Andy's eye then and thinking:
We won't treat each other like that. I would never treat you like that. I won't be Linda and you won't be Roy.

I
MADE
L
EE
pull into the next rest stop and I found privacy and cell reception at the edge of a wooded area, behind a tractor-trailer.

“I'm so sorry,” I said.

“For what?” said Andy.

Upon hearing his voice, I convulsed and then involuntarily started rocking back and forth. I must have looked like those men I'd seen praying at synagogue on High Holidays when I was a child. I didn't know where to begin. I could no longer distinguish between the symptoms and the causes of what was wrong. I hadn't, until just then, conceived of what I'd done with Rodgers as a betrayal, not really. I'd been thinking it had very little to do with Andy, but
that
was where the betrayal lay.

“For everything.” I sat down on the ground to control my strange swaying. “For leaving things weird between us. For not calling sooner.”

“Where are you?”

“We're heading to Providence.”

“You're not coming home?”

I thought I had the shaking under control, but really it just got diverted into a kind of whimpering moan. A pained sound, an animal one. I couldn't help myself. My body was taking over.

“Viv?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“No. I mean, yes, I'm fine. I don't mean to make you worry. And I really want to come home. I really do, but there's something to this now. I can't leave Lee now.”

“You've found something?”

“Yeah. I'm not sure what, exactly, but I think it's important, and I need to help her see it through. It's like I thought this trip was about one thing and now it's about something else. I don't mean to be cryptic, but do you know what I mean?”

“You mean it's not just about you being bored with me and your life?”

I hadn't realized how hard I'd been pressing the phone into my ear until I let it go just then, almost dropping it. I never thought I'd had the desire to jump out of a plane, to freefall, to want that release that exists only because you risk not coming back. But that's what I'd done and when Andy asked that question, it was like a parachute opening. I could catch my breath, look around, locate myself, and think:
Holy fucking shit.

“It wasn't boredom. It's not boredom. I can't explain it very well. I wish I could, but I feel like I'm only just figuring it out in any way that makes any sense.”

“Well, whatever it is, it makes me feel like shit, Viv.”

“I'm so, so sorry.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because I am.”

“Yeah, I get that. I just. I don't know. I have to say I liked it better when Lee was out of our lives.”

“Was she ever really, though?”

“She was out of mine, yes.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“So there's no part of you that wishes it were you here with her, that she'd asked you to come with her instead? No part of you that thinks your life wouldn't be better if you were with her instead of me?”

The questions I had never asked, but that had been there all along, now tumbled out. Why did Lee choose me over Andy? Because it had seemed that she had, and sometimes, ever since, I found myself trying to suppress the thought that I was a substitute. That Lee had substituted me for Andy. And not just that, but that Andy had substituted me for Lee.

I wished I could see his face.

“I got over her a long time ago.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. I did. And I kind of feel like I've been waiting for you to catch up. I thought this trip might help.”

Andy, out there, ahead of me, waiting for me to catch up to him. Despite all of our plans, all of our commitments, I don't think I had ever thought of him quite that way. As the future. If only I had.

“I want to come home. I do. And I'm going to, as soon as I can. But I don't think I
can
until I help Lee now, because it's bigger, it seems like it could be bigger than just finding the old tapes. She's going to need someone to be there with her for whatever this turns into, I think. And right now, that person is me. What I mean is, this isn't about me or you. It's about her.”

I expected an angry
It's always about her.
At least that's how I would have written it in a THATH scene.

“All right,” he said.

“Okay.”

“But when you get back, do we need to, like, start taking a cooking class together or get some drugs or whatever people do to spice things up?”

“No, we don't need to take a class. Or get drugs.”

“Because we could. We could take a drug class.”

“We don't need to take a drug class.”

“You sure?”

“I love you.”

“Viv?”

“What?”

“It sounded like you were going to tell me something else and then you stopped.”

“No. I'll be back so soon. I promise.”

I didn't say, “Please wait for me” or “There is more and I will find a way to tell you about it.”
About something that happens all the time but that I didn't think would happen to me. And something else that also happens all the time so you almost forget how astounding a prospect it is, just even on a biological level. I think you and I can do this together. Ambivalence about it feels ungrateful, like asking for too much. I'm asking for too much. But that's what I'm asking for.

I wiped my tears away and waited for my face to dry before getting back in the car with Lee.

A
round 1990, I thought I might revisit the Jesse Parrish profile I wrote. It had been twelve years since his death and more than eighteen years since I had published what now strikes me as a prickly and perhaps ungenerous, though not inaccurate, portrait. That piece ended with these words about Jesse and his wife, Linda West:

I can't tell if I'm bringing too much irony to bear on him or not enough. They are both performing something when it comes to their identities. Her Jewishness? His Southernness? By which I mean they are able to turn it on and off. I want to see this as fluid and liberating rather than a con. But I don't know how. Theirs is a language I can't quite speak, whose grammar I haven't mastered. Then again, I have never owned a caftan or purple velvet pants, never known the disappointment of their being at the cleaners.

For the new piece I had in mind, I wanted to hear more from the women who had been in Jesse's life. There were a number of them. They came across as accessories, in both senses of the word. Supporting players. And yet they each, in their own way, were greater than. I wanted to explore that. I went so far as to track down the reclusive Marion Washington, Jesse's girlfriend, who survived the car crash that killed him. She wouldn't speak with me, and ultimately I never followed through with this story. I did, however, conduct some preliminary interviews, including this conversation with Elise Robin, a friend and admirer of Jesse and Linda, a self-described “rock-and-roll muse” and author of the widely read memoir
Free Lunch: The Life and Times of a Rock and Roll Muse.

Patti Driggs:
When did you first meet Jesse?

Elise Robin:
I should remember. I should have the exact moment crystalized in my mind. But it's more like he was just there, always. And then he wasn't.

PD:
Is this still hard for you?

ER:
It is. I think it's always going to be hard. He was just such so special. Even our relationship, I don't know how to describe it, it didn't fit into any common category. It was platonic—he's like the one guy I
didn't
screw—and I guess you could say he was like a brother, but it was romantic. Everything about him was so romantic.

PD:
What set him apart for you, why wasn't he like all the other guys?

ER:
What set Jesse apart was his sweetness. He was just a real sweetheart, like a gentleman, like Cary fucking Grant. Like if Cary Grant were thirty years younger and magic and showed up at your door with powdered donuts and a big bag full of grass and took you to the last place on earth, or California, that had waitresses on roller skates. And he would talk to you like he had to know what you were thinking, no matter how far out it was.