The Sun in Your Eyes (28 page)

“Okay. Have a good rest of the afternoon. Evening.”

“Would you. Could you just. I mean, go easy on her, okay? Whatever it is. Like I said, she's having a rough time.”

Lee wondered when she'd developed a reputation for being a bitch. She had heard “standoffish” before but she didn't think she'd been particularly known for nastiness. Though she'd never thought Linda needed coddling, either.

“I'll see what I can do.”

Linda approached just then, from around a corner. Looking very British Woman in Kenya in a rumpled white linen camp shirt tucked into wide-legged khaki pants and flat sandals. Big Mort's pendant peeking out of a lapel.

“Thank you, Ellen,” Linda said. “I'll see you tomorrow.” She put her hands in her pockets, her Charlie Chaplin–slash–Marlene Dietrich–in–menswear move, and shuffled into the living room, looking at once apologetic, stern, and worried.

“Hi,” she said. “Did you just get in?” She poured two glasses of water, released a lemon slice into each, and dropped into an armchair facing Lee.

“Yes and no. I was with Viv, in Big Sur. I dropped her off at the airport and then came here.”

“Big Sur, huh? You've been to see Marion, then.”

Of course. Of course Linda would have known.

“Yes.”

“And what did she tell you?”

“She told me what she remembers.”

Linda's face twitched preemptively into a kind of bullying expression Lee had last seen on Will, a half-English, half-French director of high-concept music videos. They had gone away together for a weekend to a Mediterranean villa, where he asked her to sleep with his good friend Max. A variety of motivations were supplied, chief among them that it would get Will off. He didn't need to watch, just knowing it was happening would do.

“I don't think so,” she had said.

“Really?”

“Yes,
really.
”

And he had said, “All right, look, if you don't like this, if your delicate psyche can't handle it, then don't do it. But don't make me feel like I'm exploiting you or I ought to be ashamed. Because I'm not.”

“My psyche isn't delicate. You'd just like it to be. It gives you a better speech.”

Lee knew what to do with the you-and-your-delicate-psyche tack, how to turn it around, but Linda's expression had already morphed into something else, something Lee was less familiar with.

The only other time Linda had looked at her this way was when they took their golden retriever, Fred, to be put down. Lee, twelve, had acted surprised that Linda had decided to go at all, instead of sending Fred off with a staffer. Her mother indulged the act, she let Lee be superior and indignant. Linda cried but didn't fall apart and Lee, bereft and angry, had understood, however dimly, that Linda's show of strength was for her benefit, so that she could fall apart and have a mother who would be there to put her back together. And
Linda did—for the rest of that day. Instead of going home, where everything would remind them of Fred, they went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel (no Chateau Marmont scuzziness at a time like this) where they put on robes and ordered room service and got into bed and watched
All About Eve
(Linda's choice) and
Meatballs
(Lee's). Lee never had another dog. She probably ought to get one now.

“I've been waiting for you since your call,” said Linda. “After you saw Charlie Flintwick. Do you believe her? Whatever Marion told you?”

“I don't think she's lying.”

“You've always had good judgment. Your judgment is unerring. What gets you in trouble is that you don't trust it. That's probably my fault. I didn't encourage you enough or something. I knew where this would lead, you going on this . . . quest. I knew it was only a matter of time. I've had thirty years to figure out what to tell you but I'm still not sure what to say. Marion isn't lying. I don't know that I would trust her memory entirely, but she isn't lying.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Where would you like me to start?”

“Oh, I don't know. The beginning?”

Linda shook her head, as if she couldn't believe she was about to do this, but also, surprisingly, as if she admired her daughter. Rather like the way Patti Driggs had looked at her. As if she hadn't quite thought Lee had it in her. As if Linda saw some of herself in her child.

At Hirschman's there was
a waiter named Robert Rothman. What she had liked about Robert was that he drove fast; they flew down roads in the dark in his Ford Galaxie. He had thick black hair, and he called her
darlin'
in an already retro Elvis Presley kind of way. “Whoa, darlin', where'd you learn
that
?” But he listened to folk music, like everyone else then, and also some soul records that spoke to a sensitive, anti-establishment streak in him. But not too strong a streak because in September, Robert would be off to Bucknell, pre-med. At sixteen, she might not have been able to articulate it, but she knew that Robert was challenging the values of a culture in the way a child challenges its parents—to make sure that at the end of the day they were still there, firmly rooted. The disdain that Linda was already developing for her own middle-class upbringing somehow felt more dangerous than Robert's because it was more detached from any overarching, idealistic principle, more manipulative and self-serving.

Sometimes Linda wondered about her scruples. How she could look down on her father. He would have done anything for her and somehow that wasn't enough. Big Mort, in his extravagance, booked Linda and her older sister, Lori, their own large room at Hirschman's,
with two double beds they would sneak out of at night, Lori to see her swim instructor and Linda to the cabins behind the dining hall where Robert and the rest of the waitstaff lived. Big Mort. Never to his face, though. Always Daddy to his face. She let him down again and again, and he loved her unconditionally.

She had been thinking about Robert Rothman and those summers at Hirschman's while she drove from her parents' house up to Flintwick's studio to see Jesse. The thick-ankled women in costume jewelry and the Borscht Belt banquets of her adolescence. It startled her how at home she felt on these roads, like being in a dream, a place your mind conjured so you know the landscape and you know what comes next. All those winding country and mountain routes she'd taken in from the back seat of Big Mort's Cadillac and then the front seat of Robert's car. She felt girded by the advantage of being on home turf. She needed to be self-possessed when she saw Jesse, not desperate or angry or scared or sad. Or she would be all of those things but self-possessed enough not to show it. Certainly not in front of Marion. Marion made Linda feel old, worthless, and unseen. It was the first time in her life she had felt that way, and it shocked her.

Jesse wasn't expecting her, but she knew what he was going to say. Let's settle this. Finalize it, formalize it, whatever his attorney was advising him to do. You'd think Linda would be the one with representation. If not a high-powered, corner-office-in-a-glass-tower lawyer, then some friend of the family, a Big Mort associate. But it was Jesse who saw to these things, whose sense of tidiness, propriety, and manners always lay beneath the careless rock-and-roll surface of his life. (Probably why he had so much trouble with drugs. They were an escape for him, a way to lose control and reorder his mind, whereas for Linda they remained recreational. Linda had dropped
acid the way her mother played bridge. And speed had been lovely but then it got to seem like a lot of work. Cocaine, when it came along, was wonderful for parties. Heroin she just never ever touched.) It always surprised Linda that Jesse was neater than she was, that he cared about housework. That's what Patti Driggs didn't get in her hateful profile, painting Linda as the dazed yet doting wife. A foolish woman in a ridiculous scene of 1950s domesticity transplanted to 1970s post–sexual-revolution California. What Patti Driggs didn't get, or didn't care about, was that Linda wasn't a good wife in that sense. Linda's disheveled yet stylish look was an embodiment of the way she approached the world. She didn't wear any old thing, she had a method, a vision, but she also never thought too hard about it.

As she drove, she thought how Jesse was a better lover than Robert Rothman or any of the other men she'd been with. She
loved
him. He was sexier than any of those other men. God, he was sexy. He was so sexy that she still wanted him, even when he would unload the dishwasher (before they hired a housekeeper) in a fed-up, put-upon pedantic way.
It's not that hard, Linda, to stack the plates that match and put them in the cupboard. Could you try it just once?
Patti Driggs had no clue about Jesse. Linda had said, “Fuck the dishes,” as she positioned herself on the countertop and pulled him to her. With Robert, nothing very emotional entered into it. It was undiluted fucking. They didn't even have to speak. Their bodies completely took over. She had never lost herself this way with Jesse. She cared about what Jesse thought. Perhaps she was only being sentimental about those rides in the car with Robert in the hopes of feeling better about losing Jesse now.

She wore the white peasant dress with the red embroidery that she'd bought in Mexico (would he remember?) and whiskey-colored boots. She looked airy, not nearly as nervous or doomed as she felt.
This wasn't like her, this suppressed panic at the impending end of things. She was usually already moving on.

Big Mort hadn't said, “I told you so.” Neither had Mom. So she had to hand it to them. Jesse might as well have been from another planet. When she announced her plans to marry Jesse, Big Mort said, “So he's a good old boy, huh? A good old goy is more like it!” But he hadn't forbidden the marriage or threatened to disown her. Was it any wonder he loved
Fiddler on the Roof
so much? Temperamentally, was there ever a character more like her father than Tevye? If Linda were the type who chose to settle for the butcher, stay in the village, and cling to tradition, would Big Mort have loved her as much? Lori had married a lawyer, moved two towns away into a four-bedroom split-level, and produced two precocious grandchildren who regularly came over for Friday night dinners. Her father loved Lori, but not as much as he loved Linda.

“Life will go on,” Big Mort had said when he first heard about their separation. And hearing that had made Linda feel surprisingly better, albeit briefly. She still had her youth, sort of. She was (only?) thirty. Having Lee hadn't destroyed her body. A few thin, translucent stretch marks on her hips. Breasts still in good shape. Lee. Had she really not thought of her until just then? And in this way? Terrible, terrible mother. She was going to be mature about this. For her daughter's sake. She would let Jesse go, be a grown-up (but remind her, what was so great about being a grown-up?). Whatever they became to each other, she and Jesse would at least have to be two parents on good terms. Perhaps this would be what finally turned them into parents. Linda still hadn't gotten entirely used to identifying herself as a “parent.” Sometimes she couldn't believe she was allowed to be a mother. You needed to pass a test in order to drive a car, for God's sake, but not to raise another human being.

Life would go on, as Big Mort said, but not the life she wanted. So here she was, hoping to win Jesse back. To make him realize where he belonged. She could have picked up the phone first, but her impulsiveness and her immoderate heart had propelled her here instead. She hadn't really understood about Marion, though. Hadn't underestimated her so much as totally and mistakenly discounted her. She had assumed Marion was for Jesse what various men had been for her: a way to pass time. She hadn't considered her a rival. Not until Marion came to the door when Linda arrived at Flintwick's, flustering her. Gorgeous Marion. Linda expected to see her in one of those spaghetti-strapped terry-cloth jumpers, no bra. But no. She wore a trim button-down shirt tucked into jeans. Oh and wasn't Marion so mature herself, welcoming Linda inside so calmly and cordially. Not putting on adult airs, but an honest-to-God adult, if such a thing existed anymore. Fuck maturity. Really now, couldn't Jesse have answered the door himself? Couldn't Marion have exiled herself from the house for this?

“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.