The Sun in Your Eyes (27 page)

“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.

I
N 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.

I
N 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 to 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.

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.

E
LLEN
S
HELLEY 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!”