The Sun in Your Eyes (23 page)

Before Lee spoke, Patti stood, instantly energized, a spider scuttling across its web. All in black, she appeared ready to take the stage with a mime troupe. Her bob was serious. She smelled clean and citrusy. Her wine-colored lipstick feathering into the little lines around her mouth was the only hint of weakness about her. Linda could have recommended a good product to keep the color in place, and Lee could just glimpse such an exchange happening: the détente between two old enemies whose former allegiances no longer meant anything because their sides no longer existed, but whose shared singular history made them, in effect, comrades.

“I
do
know you.”

“I'm Lee. Lee Parrish.”

“Yes, you are. I've seen your picture. Pictures.”

Lee wasn't sure what to make of this. But then, Patti Driggs had written a book about photography. Copies of it lined a shelf on a wall full of other books. Photographic prints, one of which had the meticulous formal qualities Lee recognized as David Haseltine's, covered the other wall.

Patti waited for Lee to say something.

“If this isn't a good time—”

“Have a seat. It's a fine time. I think. Though that may depend on why you're here.”

Lee and Viv took the pair of dark wood spindle chairs facing Patti.

“I didn't mean to surprise you,” Lee started, “but I wasn't sure if
you'd be willing to see me, and I was hoping to ask you about something . . . Excuse me, this is my friend, Vivian. Feld.”

“Vivian Feld. Why do I know
that
name?”

“Small world? I knew your son,” ventured Viv. “Briefly.”

“Yes, well, women tend to know Ben briefly.”

Viv stifled a laugh. Patti wasn't laughing. Because she wasn't terribly outspoken or performative, Viv could give the impression of being quiet or shy. But she wasn't. She was more socially skilled than she gave herself credit for. She could keep people talking. She seemed to be collecting material she continually collated into an ever-evolving manual for how to live. “It was a long time ago,” Viv continued. “But he's married now, isn't he? I saw the announcement in the
Times.
”

“That announcement is going to outlive the marriage. They used to call that sort of thing fishwrap. Now everything lives on forever, doesn't it?”

It sometimes seemed to Lee that they were all engaged in a kind of generational cold war. It was clear who would win (had already won) but what a hollow victory. Is that what their parents had wanted? For their children to live in their shadow? It would seem that Patti had only vanquished herself. Once appealingly tart, she had completely soured.

“Listen to me.” Patti softened a bit. “It's not even ten-thirty and I'm in full hypercritical bloom. Let's blame it on end-of-semester stress. Tell me, what can I do for you?”

“It's a long story. But I would really like to find Marion Washington. I haven't had much luck tracking her down. We happened to be close to campus and I thought, I don't know, maybe you might know something, having been a part of that world.”

“That world, yes. What do you want with Marion?”

“I'd just like to talk to her about my father and their time together, whatever she remembers of it.”

Patti inhaled through her nose, her mouth a thin, imperfect line. In her eyes that quick inner spider nimbly went to work.

“I never quite got Marion. But then I never quite got Jesse either, much as I wanted to. Much as people thought I did. Linda, though, I understood. Every now and then, I think, if I'd been just a little more imaginative at the time, a little less convinced of my own perspective,
she's
the one I should have written about. The more interesting subject. Though I'm sure, in retrospect, she's more than happy I gave her short shrift. I didn't paint the most flattering portrait of your parents. I did a very good job of using them, though. Maybe you hold that against me. Maybe this is what it feels like when one's chickens come home to roost. Though maybe I'm projecting, and that bad blood seems like ancient history to you.”

“My mother still thinks of you as her nemesis.”

“Nemesis! That's a little strong. I didn't realize I was anyone's nemesis. I should be honored anyone cares that much.” Lee couldn't help but think that Patti knew exactly how much Linda cared.

“But I've always been partial to that Faulkner line,” Patti continued. “‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.' I'll admit my first thought, on seeing you standing in front of me, after the instant it took me to realize who you were, is that you'd come seeking revenge on Linda's behalf. Or even your own.”

Revenge? Lee had read Patti's much-lauded essay about Jesse, with its brief, condescending inclusion of Linda, but she hadn't thought it was all that riveting or all that revealing or all that
anything,
really. Not enough to warrant vengeance. Like Linda, she didn't quite get why everyone thought Patti was so great.

“I'm the first to grant that it was damning, that piece I did on
Jesse. But that was a defense mechanism, me trying to hide my infatuation with him. If you read it again, you might find it to be one of the most fawning profiles ever committed to the page. I have my regrets. But it's a time capsule now. Linda has lived a lot of life since then. As have I. Marion, too, I'm sure.

“I had the same impulse as you, some years ago, to find Marion. Mine may have been more journalistic, more essayistic, though maybe that's just what I told myself. There had to be some more valid reason to legitimize my lingering interest in Jesse. It couldn't just be an obsessive schoolgirl crush on a dead man. I also thought a profile on Marion might truly be fascinating. Marion and Linda and the other women in Jesse's life. I'd just finished writing my second novel, and I was tired of being in my own head. Ready to get back to something more reportorial. It was about a dozen years after the crash. The world was already a different place, and Marion wasn't in it much from what I could tell. But I did some digging, connected some dots, and I found her. She wasn't going by Marion Washington anymore. She had changed her name to Marion Morris and was living in Big Sur. She became a psychologist. I called her up at her practice in Carmel, and she was cordial enough but she didn't want to talk to me. Can I ask you what it is you'd like to know? What do you hope to get out of talking to Marion?”

Lee's guard went up. “What did
you
hope to get out of talking to her?” Lee challenged. Patti seemed mildly amused to have the tables turned on her.

“I wanted a story. I also wanted a little bit more of Jesse.”

“That's what I want, too. A little more of my father.”

Patti softened for a moment, in her eyes, her posture. The gaze she'd directed at Lee became more searching, less critical. As if she'd
initially been looking at Lee to find exactly what she expected and now she wasn't sure what that was.

“I hope you have more luck with Marion than I did.”

“Thank you for the information.”

“You're welcome.” Patti, to judge from her writing, had never been much for sentimentality. To feel strongly about things in a negative, critical way was all right in Patti's world, but to express the positive was to make yourself susceptible. Patti checked herself. “Speaking of fishwrap, I read an article recently about Linda and her company, her wildly successful move into e-tailing, or whatever you call it. She's done very, very well for herself. I always knew she would. I should consider myself lucky she still harbors such strong feelings about me. It doesn't seem right to ask you to say hello to her for me, though.” Patti eyed her one more time then turned to Viv.

“What about you, Vivian? Shall I give Ben your regards?”

“W
ELL
,
THAT
WAS
something,” said Viv. “I almost want to call up Ben Driggs Stern now and ask him how I can help. Do you know, when we were dating, he showed her a short story I'd written and she told him it reminded her of her own work, when she was starting out. I thought she was dismissing it as derivative, but he said, no, that was high praise coming from her. That she was always looking for her own reflection but she didn't often find it.”

They were outside on a bench below Patti Driggs's office. Though Lee wanted to run with what Patti had just told them, what she wanted more was to sit there for a moment and let the sun warm her face and her bare arms.

“Why don't you write anymore?”

“I do. I write all the time.”

“I don't mean for THATH.”

“I don't know. At a certain point you have to grow up and let these things go.”

“What's so grown up about letting it go?”

“There's only so much time in a day. There are certain realities in life you have to accept, you know? Maybe you don't know.”

“I understand realities, Viv.”

“I know you do. I'm sorry. I'm just being defensive about it.”

“I wish you didn't have to be. You have something that engages you.”

“Maybe if I go with you to find Marion in Big Sur it'll inspire me. Bring out my inner Henry Miller.”

An image came to Lee—nano-sized Henry Millers inside of everyone. Like that movie where Dennis Quaid was a miniaturized Air Force lieutenant injected into Martin Short's blood stream and zaniness ensued. Had she spent her whole childhood watching TV and movies on TV? Or did her mind just always go there and, if so, what did that say about her mind?

“Would you really come with me to Big Sur?”

She had wondered how to ask this of Viv. That is, she knew
how
to ask—the same way, more or less, she'd asked anything of Viv, including, from the very beginning, asking her to join a cult. It was like whatever she asked was always directly in line with Viv's id. Even when they first met on those library steps. Her one and only Reach Out! Viv had fled, but not very far. The question now wasn't
how
but
why
? Why ask Viv to come with her? Why had she encouraged Viv to come with her in the first place? And put Viv in that kind of position with Andy. And called Rodgers Colston. And
when she saw where it was going with Rodgers, why didn't she do anything to stop it? Barbara had asked why she thought she was the bad one.
Because look at what I do. I don't know how to let someone know I need them and I don't know how to say goodbye.

Viv would go back to her life with Andy and she would tell him she was pregnant and she wouldn't tell him about Rodgers, or she would, but it wouldn't tear through them; they would give with it, like the reasonable people they were together. The reasonable duo they had formed. Viv may have romanticized a certain destructive urge in others, Lee above all, but when it came to her own life she was too level-headed and honestly too lazy to behave like that herself. Andy was the same way.

W
HEN
V
IV
CALLED
her after that snowstorm, it had all seemed obvious and inevitable. Lee expected she would go through the motions of feeling happy for her two friends at their wedding. That's what you did at weddings. She didn't expect that she
would
feel happy—not just happy for them but for herself. As if Viv and Andy were actually beaming love. Transmitting it to her. She'd experienced a similar surprising sense of belonging a few days earlier, doing a practice run styling Viv's hair. When she'd first read Kirsten's tutorial on “loose, romantic waves,” she'd thought,
What the
fuck?
This was Kirsten's life now? This was Viv's?
But then she couldn't stop paging through all of Kirsten's posts on brow pencils and “splurgy pjs.” The girlishness of it, which initially put Lee off, drew her in. It wasn't something that excluded her, but something she and Viv could share.

She found herself gently squeezing Jack's hand when Viv and Andy said their vows. And Jack, who'd been through a bitter divorce
and custody battle over his young daughter, squeezed back. Viv's parents had walked their daughter down the aisle and, in what had always struck Lee as a bit of regressive parlance, given her away. But Lee felt that she too had given Viv away that evening. By the time Viv and Andy got married, Lee had been back in L.A. for almost a year and it was so much easier to be far from the place where Viv and Andy had made a home together. She hadn't exactly left because of them but, after that snowstorm, she'd had an inkling that time was about to be up.

Her fizzy happiness boosted by champagne carried her along through the toasts—she kept hers simple, spoke of hearing their laughter through the door, left out the part about turning away from it—through the buffet dinner and on to the dancing. She hadn't known Jack was such a good dancer and then she remembered that years ago he'd been in that Hitler youth/swing dancing movie where his character had fallen in love at the dancehall with a sure-footed Jewish girl. She couldn't remember if big band music saved either of them in the end. But Jack must have learned from the choreographer on set how to move his body in a conscious, muscular way that looked, and felt, effortless, light as watercolor. She was aware that people were looking at them while trying to appear that they weren't looking at them. Which she had experienced before, and it was amplified here because of Jack, who had reached that level of fame where even if everyone didn't know exactly who he was, they knew he was
someone.
Even with his Chekhov beard.

All her life Lee had heard about the great love her parents had. A tumultuous love of such elemental force that it bound them to each other always even when it couldn't keep them together. She had wondered if she would ever have anything that compared. Maybe falling in love was effortless and light, but love itself was something
else. Maybe she'd had that something else and hadn't recognized it. With Andy. With Viv, too, in a way. Maybe she wouldn't have what Linda and Jesse had but here, dancing with Jack, she was outside the realm of comparison. So far outside that she didn't dwell on the unsettled expression she happened to catch on Linda's face in between songs—an expression that quickly hid itself behind a standard teary-eyed smile.