The Sun in Your Eyes (7 page)

That one moment when Linda came on—
Hi, Jesse. Hi, Linda.
You could hear how coupled up they were at that time, inside a world of two, looking out. I said as much to Lee.

“I know. I kind of resent it. Their twoness. It reminds me I'm essentially back where I was at twenty-five, only now I'm ten years older.”

“I doubt that's true.”

“You're right. At twenty-five I had higher hopes. Basically the only thing I remember about the last guy I went out with was that he told me he liked to fantasize about Patricia Arquette.”

“
Lost Highway
Patricia Arquette ? Or
Medium
Patricia Arquette?”

“Both, I think.”

The more recent events of Lee's love life, or the photographic record of what looked like events, hadn't escaped me during the time that we'd been out of touch. Lee's level of celebrity didn't make her a target of tabloid gossip, but from time to time she would appear in the coverage of a party or a premiere, be snapped by a street photographer. I asked her if it was true that she'd been “linked” again to Jack Caprico, the actor who had managed to remain relevant and frequently cast twenty years after his breakout role as a Gen-Xer who read Beat poetry during his downtime on the McJob. She had been
seeing him before, and brought him to my wedding, but I'd heard they'd broken up. Rather, I'd read they'd broken up.

“Yes, we were linked,” she said. “Like breakfast sausage.”

“Sounds hot.”

“It was always pretty hot with him. That was never the problem.”

“So what happened?”

“We're friends now. Friends who don't talk much or see each other. But you know. I got kind of depressed when we were together this last time, and he said it reminded him of his mother and his sister and he couldn't deal.”

I expected her to change the subject, turn it to me, but she continued, as though a vein had been opened. Depression may not have been the clinical term for it, but she'd been low. She got herself to work, but the rest of the time she was too low to do little more than watch TV or lie in bed thinking about how much effort it would take to do anything but lie in bed. Low in a way that felt like a habit or an addiction; her lowness made her want more unstructured and unaccountable time in which to be low. Social engagements—any kind of
engagement
—encroached on that time and were therefore a source of resentment. The lowness was like an addiction, too, in that she was compelled to hide it. She would keep the remote in her hand, ready to turn off the TV as soon as she heard Jack's key in the front door. She would quickly get out of bed. “What are you doing?” he would ask. “Oh, just tidying up.” Along the depression spectrum, there must be a point at which one is no longer able to be furtive, when you're too depressed to care about appearances. She hadn't reached that point. But how many times can you center a pile of books on a night table? Stand over your coffee table looking slightly lost? Was paranoia part of it too? Jack could, if it occurred to him, determine whether the TV was warm and just-watched. He could detect the
recent impression of her body on the quilt and sheets, the indent in the pillow. Even the TV and the bed—her greatest comforts—were against her. She reached what she thought was a nadir at the supermarket when she found herself crying in the aisle to a soft-rock standard. She began to worry that she was disappearing, that she'd never really been there at all. (
Me too!
I half wanted to interject.
Can we run off and read Emily Dickinson poems to each other for the rest of our days?
) She woke once from a dream in which she could fly, and Jack said flying in dreams was good. Freedom, power. She said she was inside a big house, and she was flying from room to room. Well, more like floating. Floating speedily. So nobody would see her.
Like a ghost,
Jack said. How obvious. How sad. But what she didn't tell him, what she couldn't tell him, is that she had loved her ghostly advantages. Moving around undetected, the superiority of it, being slightly above everyone.

“These kind of dreams, they were pretty much the only color in my life. Anyway, it was Linda who finally made me see a therapist.”

“What does your therapist think of all this? What we're doing.”

“I haven't talked to her about it. Which is something I should talk to her about. She's great, really. It's, um, therapeutic to talk to her. But sometimes things will happen and I'll think, Viv's the person I want to talk to about that.”

She was often still the one I wanted to talk to, not simply out of habit, but because if she were listening, if she knew about it, whatever it was would be more interesting, more significant. I wavered between believing she felt the same way—how could she not?—and sensing that I was deceiving myself. If she'd really wanted or needed to talk to me, she would have. But it couldn't be that simple, I thought. Our relationship wasn't that simple. No, she must have wanted to talk to me but couldn't bring herself to do so precisely
because it wasn't that simple and she trusted me to understand that. Unless our relationship really
was
that simple for her? She had left me with a mystery I tried to solve with circuitous thinking. It was a way to keep her present. It pleased me no end to hear her confirm now that I hadn't merely invented the complexity between us and that I wasn't the only one still holding on to it.

“I know.”

“I know I'm the one who stopped returning your phone calls. It became hard for me to talk to you. But it was also hard not to talk to you.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

Say it. Tell her.

“Lee, I'm pregnant.”

“What?”

“You're the first person I've told.”

“What—oh. Oh my god. That's—that's wonderful!” she said, her pause giving the lie to her words, as though I had been there a minute ago and was now lost to a world of architecturally significant strollers and bamboo-fiber baby carriers. Lee had once told me that she worried she was never as excited as she was supposed to be when friends told her this news. To mask insensitivity, she said, and perhaps that lonely, quiet panic that the world is leaving you and your aging reproductive system behind, you learn to ask certain questions.
How far along are you?! How are you feeling?!
Legitimate questions, sincere ones even, but what did it mean if she asked them of me, now? “It's wonderful. I mean, it's good, right?”

“Yes, it's good. Andy and I were planning this. We're on the same page. When did I start saying things like
we're on the same page
?”

“I know. You hear yourself saying stuff and it's just—I used to think you could divide the world into things that were cool and things that you held in contempt. But as you get older, there's this other category of things that you value just because they're comforting and easy.”

“Like when you find yourself watching a commercial for chocolate—take a break and treat yourself right!—and you think yeah, I do need to take a break and treat myself.”

“Right. Women and chocolate. In the eighties it was all ‘Chocolate is like an orgasm!' Now it's like chocolate is a respite. Going to the spa without leaving your kitchen. It's ‘you time.' Which I guess means women used to want sexual satisfaction and now they just want a minute alone.”

“What was chocolate in the nineties?”

“Good question.” She thought about it. “How far along are you? How are you feeling?”

“About a month.”

“And I'm the only person who knows?”

“I haven't even been to the doctor. I mean, I called them and they said to come in a couple weeks, that if the home test confirmed it, that's a yes. I already have to pee all the time. But I haven't told Andy.”

“I thought you were on the same page.”

“We are. In general. As far as pages go.”

“Are you thinking you don't—”

“I don't know why I haven't told him. It's like I'm scared it will make it real. Even though it already is real. But it's not like I don't want it to be real. I do.”

A flicker, a darkening across Lee's eyes, led me to think she was on the verge of telling me something before she switched modes.

“You've got that glow.”

“You can see it?”

“Yes, like a phosphorescence.”

“Like I'm a glow stick.”

“I've missed you, Viv.”

“I've missed you, too.”

T
WO HOURS NORTH
of the city, at the end of a wooded, secluded drive, lay Charlie Flintwick's compound: two small, squat buildings, a sagging multicar garage, what looked like a camp cabin, and a dark brown A-frame house overlooking a pond. Bird trills and fallen brush underfoot were the only sounds as we walked from our parked car to the front porch, and then we heard faint strains of elevator jazz. A shriek, then another one, splashing, a dock creaking. Lee advanced around the corner of the house as if it didn't matter if we found a party or a crime scene. But then she stopped and we hung back, watching.

“Flintwick, you fat fuck, you've outdone yourself!” A guy in red swim shorts, lead-singer looks, shook a bag of kettle-cooked potato chips into a bowl.

“It's just a grilled cheese, man. But, hey, I'll take the hyperbole.”
Fat fuck,
I now saw, was a holdover from heftier times. Flintwick had the look of a picked-apart scarecrow. Lee had told me he maintained a blog about his recent gastric bypass surgery, with posts titled “Saggin'” and “New Pants.” But even in his shrunken state, his aura remained rotund and kingly. He could have been wearing an ermine-trimmed robe.

“But this cheese! Is it artisanal?”

“Yes. It was made by the artisans at a processing plant in Illinois.”

“Fucking delicious.” Without noticing us, he took his plate down a path to the Adirondack chairs by the water's edge, occupied by a tattooed lot, two men and a woman, who all looked to be around his tender age.

Flintwick then turned the music up via remote and stuck the corner of an unpackaged cheese slice on his tongue so the rest of it flapped against his chin. He proceeded to hoist it into his mouth while eyeing the group at the shore with contempt or lust or both. I read once that Flintwick wasn't his given name. He had changed it from something chewier, of eastern European extraction. But Flintwick, with its Dickensian and pervy echo, did him justice.

“Well, hello!” He turned. We advanced. “Miss Parrish, I presume. You've made it.”

“I hope we're not interrupting.”

“Please, I've been expecting you. This is just”—gesturing toward the whole scene—“this is business. They're using the studio.”

“Who are they?”

“The Episcopal School Experience. The Horse Fluffers. The Fuckwads. Something like that. I don't know. I forget. Would you like something to eat? She's fired up and ready to go.” Pointing to the charcoal grill, and then to me. “Sorry, I didn't catch your name.”

“This is my dear friend Viv.”
Dear friend
—the affected, beau monde construction we reserved for Elena Sterling Rappoport, socialite-businesswoman-matriarch, on THATH. Flintwick responded with a compressed bob and weave of his large head, as if to say,
So that's how you want to play it? Well, okay, we can save the vulgarities till we know each other a little better.

“Why don't we go inside to talk.” Flintwick grabbed a platter of grilled kabobs and slid open a glass door to a musty interior. “After you.” He motioned to a massive L-shaped sectional, upholstered in
black velvet, positioned around a squat jade table on which sat two heavy brass candelabra. On the wall behind him was a gun rack loaded with antique rifles and a bayonet. The fine layer of dust on the lamp shades and their ornate bases, resting on end tables, did little to dispel an actively carnal atmosphere. The room of a country squire who sidelined in pornography. It must have looked about the same the last time Jesse Parrish saw it.

“I used to think all this kept me young,” he said. “But now it's the opposite. I feel preserved. Jellied. The world is Dorian Gray and I'm its grotesque, aging portrait.” He took up a kabob in each hand, like antennae, pointing the skewers toward us. “What can I get you to drink?”

I was coming to understand that I was in the awkward stage of the first trimester, when, if you don't want to announce it, you need an excuse for not drinking socially. Antibiotics sounds like you've just come from a round of swab work at your ob/gyn. A polite refusal, much like fainting, only incites suspicion. If there was a tactful dodge, I didn't know it. I was relieved when Lee asked for a seltzer. Flintwick pulled back a lacquered door to a wet bar, fixed glasses for us, then sat down across from Lee, staring at her with pleasure and fondness.

“Forgive me. I'm ogling. I didn't anticipate how vividly you would resemble your parents. I can remember your father sitting in that very spot. It's like time stopped. Or folded back in on itself. Like my old abdomen.”

Lee laughed and then sank into the sofa, granting him the favor of looking at her. You could write Flintwick off as a buffoonish slob, but that would be to ignore the fact that he cultivated his buffoonery. Flintwick was like a land mass that had seen whole populations come and go. He had provided for certain tribes who
knew how to tend him. If you recognized his gifts, he would yield something.

“I'd like to help, but I don't know what I can tell you that I haven't said already, about that time or those recordings.”

“I thought if you could tell me about those last days in a new light maybe some detail would emerge. Or maybe I'd just get to know my father a little better.”

“Well, it's hard to know why certain people take hold of you. Jesse wasn't alone in what he did. He wasn't exactly a pioneer or one of a kind. Yet here we are. When you called me, I thought, Why not? Let's see how Jesse and Linda's girl turned out.”