The Sun in Your Eyes (29 page)

Her room at the
Women in Love
ski lodge, with its thin blue carpet and pink walls, didn't look Austrian or Swiss. Less Alan Bates, more Norman Bates. It made her hesitant to take a shower. Water down the dark drain, Janet Leigh's eye. Bernard Herrmann. Stab, stab, stab. But she had to wash this day off her. Pulling the Mexican dress over her head, she felt her bare neck. She'd left Big Mort's pendant on the dresser at Flintwick's. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn't go back there. Not now. Jesse would think she'd left it on purpose. Quite frankly, she was surprised she
hadn't
left it there on purpose. She would have to ask Jesse to send it to her. Or she would have to ask her lawyer to ask his lawyer to send it to her.

She sat on the bed in her towel, combing her wet hair. She pulled a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from her travel bag. She realized how hungry she was. In the dining room of the lodge they had candles in little glass hurricane lamps on each table. Dark wooden chairs with spindled backs. White tablecloths. A large chandelier hanging from the center of the sloped ceiling. There was one family in there, on the other side of the room, a mother and father and a boy and girl. Her instinct wasn't to nod to the adults, parent to parent, but to look to the children, as though she were a child herself. And she didn't immediately comprehend why the waiter held her gaze for an extra beat. Had she done something wrong? Oh. Oh,
that.
Because she wasn't a child, after all. She wasn't going to sleep with him, but he had something, this waiter. Some freshness about him that reminded her of her past. She finished her steak, her peas and potatoes. She left a generous tip. Then she got in her car and drove to Hirschman's.

Nobody had removed the L-shaped arrow sign atop a stanchion that signaled the turn-off. The gothic lettering gave it a Sherwood Forest vibe. At the end of the road she reached a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate. It wasn't too hard to climb over. Clearly people had done it before her, while carrying six packs. All of the old buildings still stood, though windows had been broken. Graffiti scrawled in places. She found the indoor pool, which had been so magnificent once. Titan-sized, glittering and aquamarine. Big Mort took a personal pride in the fact that he could take his family to a place with a pool like that. Linda could smirk at the activities, the talent shows, the fleshy women and the balding men, but she couldn't deny her father the beauty of that pool. A moldering, empty ruin now.

Linda walked around the grounds, back behind the bunks where the kitchen staff had stayed, up along a path to a small clearing among the pines where she would go to fool around with Robert. She sat down on a log that had been worn smooth by all the boys and girls who had fumbled with each other here, summer after summer. And then, when it started to rain and it was getting too dark to see, she headed back to her car. She stuck herself in the driver's seat as the rain pelted down and she cried. She reached in her purse for the bottle of pills she had found in Flintwick's medicine cabinet and taken with her.
Just in case.
But she didn't have anything to wash them down with. She could cup enough rain in her hands, though, to take one of the pills. So why not. It would get her back to the lodge, where there was a glass and a sink and where she could easily swallow the rest.

Only one road, if you didn't count dirt lanes and old trails, would get you from Hirschman's back to the
Women in Love
lodge. It ran through the tiny town where Flintwick lived, becoming a main drag for a few blocks, the length maybe of two football fields. The
rain had let up, leaving behind a wet sheen on the Victorians and two-story brick buildings, a bar on the corner with a neon sign in the window. Next to the bar was a gravel parking lot overrun with weeds, and the two pickup trucks that had pulled in there made the green GTO all the more noticeable. Jesse's car. Not his beloved 1967 silvery Corvette Stingray, still in their garage in California, but the one he'd been driving out here. She slowed when she saw the car. Maybe she should just go in and talk to Jesse, tell him she forgot her necklace at Flintwick's (Though why did it matter, at this bottle-of-pills point, if she had it or not?). This was a public place and that would keep her calm; despite how she might seem, she wasn't one for making a scene. Well, maybe in L.A., but not here, not now, not after the scene she'd already made in Flintwick's living room. But would he think she was crazy, showing up as if she'd followed him? Didn't he already think she was crazy?

She sat in her idling car, so immobilized by her thoughts that it took her a moment to notice that two people had walked out of the bar and were standing on the otherwise empty sidewalk. Two lovers, from the way they stood, his arms around her waist. A mist had risen in the night air, making the picture all the more romantic. She watched them in a kind of trance, even as she realized the woman was Marion and that Marion was leaning into the man who Linda didn't immediately recognize as her husband but rather as Jesse Parrish. They were leaning against the car in the parking lot when some instinct finally prompted Linda to step on the gas and disappear before they detected her.

She drove unthinkingly because her thoughts belonged to another Linda who wasn't even in this car but was somewhere else, maybe in Robert Rothman's car. Or Big Mort's. The streetlights of the town came to an end and the road turned back into the rural route that
led to Flintwick's and, beyond, the
Women in Love
lodge. Marion and Jesse must have been behind her on this dark, lonely road that she knew so well. Everything was different shades of darkness: the trees lining the ravine to her left, the rock face that rose on her right. She pulled over to what could barely pass for a shoulder, got out of her car, and walked onto the blacktop, a thin fog encircling her legs. Something held her in place. She couldn't move and the headlights coming toward her grew brighter until they were blinding, the inverse of the pitch-black nights she had loved. All she could hear was the blaring of a horn, so much sound that it was almost no sound. The sensations were so extreme they became their opposites. It was that feeling of walking barefoot, as a child, on the asphalt driveway of the house in Mamaroneck, on the hottest day of summer; how it felt cold before it burned. She thought it would end this way. Hoped it would. But then the light vanished and the wailing stopped and she was still there in the road. No longer standing, though. She was down on the wet ground and pushed herself up. The guardrail that had been there a moment ago was torn away, and she stood in the empty space, looking out into the ravine, at what had once been a car. A marriage. A life.

Linda shut her eyes
and dropped her head, as if in prayer. Nobody ever taught Lee how to pray. It was something she'd only seen actors do until Big Mort's funeral. Her mother in black, standing and reciting words in Hebrew by rote. When Lee had asked her about it, Linda said it was the kaddish, as if everyone knew what it was. Like,
leave me alone, my father is gone, and I don't want to talk.
Not until later that afternoon—maybe when it occurred to her that Lee's father was gone, too—did Linda seek comfort in her daughter. At the house in Mamaroneck, she took Lee upstairs while the rest of the family gathered below, and they looked at photo albums. In the his-and-hers closets in the master bedroom they discovered a shoebox of yellowed newspaper clippings, ads that Big Mort had placed for his stores twenty and thirty years back. They seemed fairly generic to Lee, but they made Linda cry. How strange it was to see Linda supplicant. Stranger even than hearing Linda's story now, which Lee had somehow known all along. She had known it from Marion. She had known it since Flintwick's and that blooming that opened in her stomach and crept up the back of her neck when he told them how Linda showed up at his studio after Jesse died, how it felt like a theft.
She had known it, felt it, ever since then, but probably long before. Probably her whole life.

“And then what? They crashed and you just drove away?”

“Yes. I got back in my car and I drove away. I was in shock. Do you understand? I don't remember stopping at a pay phone, but I must have. The police received an anonymous call. All I remember is driving. I drove all the way back to Mamaroneck, to Big Mort and Bubbe's house. You were sleeping in my old twin bed with the white headboard, and you were sleeping so soundly. I remember the room smelled different with you in it. It smelled like applesauce muffins. I lay down on the carpet, as close to the bed as I could get, and I just listened to you breathing. You were so peaceful and perfect. I remember looking up as the sky got lighter through those white nylon sheers. I was about to lose it. I went downstairs so I wouldn't wake you. Big Mort never slept past five-thirty. He was sitting in his favorite chair in the den, and I came so close to telling him. He knew something was very wrong. I was shaking, and he held me and I told him I lost Jesse and I think he knew what happened, somehow. He must have put some version of it together when the police showed up that morning. They came to inform me of Jesse's death. They asked me questions, but they never really interrogated me and my father told them I had come home earlier than I had, that I left the lodge and was back before he turned in for the night. They knew Jesse was drunk and those roads were dark, with the fog and all the deer . . .”

Lee remembered that house, the room, those white nylon curtains like veils waiting for brides. Watching Big Mort and Bubbe play cards in their kitchen with the red countertop. Crazy Eights. Gin Rummy. Hearts. The crystal chandelier in the front hall. In the morning, when the sun came through, into the tear-shaped prisms
and into your eyes. Dust beams slanting down. But the rest had always been hazy—what she and Linda were doing there. Where Linda went when it was just Lee and her grandparents. Big Mort's bearish arms. His big white teeth, which she realized only years later were dentures. Hadn't there been something formidable about him or something once-formidable that you could still detect, still feel in his presence? His power to make it go away, whatever
it
was, if it came to that. The gut feeling that Big Mort had covered for Linda in the way Lee instinctively knew that Linda would cover for her, if it came to that. An amoral protective gene. Linda the fixer.

“All you had to do was take care of Marion, right?”

“I went to see Marion in the hospital, yes, after the crash. But I went because I felt responsible, not because she was a loose end or whatever terrible thing you may be thinking. I sat by her bed every day and I told her everything I just told you. I couldn't help myself. I didn't know if she could hear me. It just spilled out. Once it was out of my system, I could straighten up, pull myself together, enough to get through the day, the week, the next week.”

“Enough to buy Marion off and banish her.”

“Banish? You're overestimating me. Even if I ever had those thoughts, I've never had that kind of influence. And I'd hardly call Big Sur banishment.”

“But you
have
had those kind of thoughts.”

“It was an accident, Lee. My god, it was an accident!” The quake in Linda's cry made Lee think of ancient pillars toppling. One summer, she had found a copy of the Bible at her grandparents' house, an easy-to-read edition that one of her cousins must have brought home from Hebrew school. The stories were as vivid and indelible as fairy tales. She thought of Samson now. Delilah over his hair with a knife. Linda was both of them, rolled into one. “He was my life,” said Linda
very quietly. “I'm so sorry. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I wish I had those tapes, those stupid fucking tapes, because I wish I could give you something more of him. You didn't get nearly enough.”

But that was just it. Linda couldn't give her anything more of him. As though she were taking an inventory, Lee noticed something missing here among all the detail and revelation—the satisfaction, however small, however adulterated, that you might expect from someone asking your forgiveness. Linda was truly broken up. She was sorry for Lee. She just wasn't exactly guilty about it. Linda failed to ask for her daughter's forgiveness, Lee thought, not out of defiance or denial, but because Lee wasn't the one she needed forgiveness from. Only Jesse. It was always, ultimately, between Linda and Jesse. That impenetrability they had.
Hi, Jesse. Hi, Linda.
Linda had been living with her boyfriend, and Jesse cornered her in the kitchen and that was that.
I love you more than anything.
It didn't end, even when it was over. Even when Marion pulled him up off the floor at Flintwick's and took him upstairs, and Linda found herself with a bottle of pills at a deserted resort, and Lee was in her pajamas, in a small bedroom at the house in Mamaroneck, Bubbe and Big Mort reading her a story before kissing her good night. Lee could blame her mother for taking her father away from her, but she suspected deep down that Jesse wasn't hers to be taken, she never had the claim on him that Linda did. That maybe this is why it felt so sad and pathetic to be looking for some piece of him. It made her a misguided, humiliated Electra. And Jesse wasn't an innocent victim in all of this. If it had gone the other way, if Jesse hadn't swerved off the road, if he had hit Linda, if he had killed her, it would have been something he signed on for, part of the deal, their destructive dance. Marion was collateral damage, as was Lee. Was it any wonder
she had felt so at home with Marion? Marion's familiar and relaxing loneliness, like a long bath.

Linda worked her fingers along the gold-hemmed edge of a colorful throw she'd picked up on a trip to India and reproduced for last fall's Linda West Home line. The look would be “exotic but fresh,” as someone in Marketing put it. How Lee could have used someone in Marketing right about now, not to make sense of this situation but to package it, using words that no longer meant anything in order to sell it to her.

Lee drank her water down though it did little to wet her throat. How could it be possible—she gauged her own astonishment—that she felt for Linda's loss? Maybe it meant that her mother, not just her father, was something of a stranger, and Lee could swim in currents of sadness for strangers: people she watched on talk shows, people who posted pleading photocopied signs for their lost pets. So she felt for this woman she didn't know. But in a snap, as if a change in barometric pressure thinned the air around her, the cruelty inside pushed outward with greater force.

“It wasn't an accident, though. You walked out into the road.”

“I didn't know what I was doing.”

“You always know what you're doing.” One of Linda's best and worst qualities, one that required, as Ellen Shelley might put it, a shit-ton of compartmentalization. Lee hadn't inherited that ability to hold herself together by splitting herself apart. But clearly she was good at keeping her own secrets.

Lee had the urge to fling her empty glass across the room, followed by the pitcher and the tray, to upturn the coffee table, but she only stood and took her glass to the kitchen sink where she rinsed it, dried it, and put it away.

“Lee,” Linda called from the living room. “What are you doing?”

“I have to go,” she said. She stood in the hall, under the arch.

“Go where?”

That was the question. She thought of Viv, in a taxi back from JFK, in her fluorescent-lit lobby, taking the paint-coated elevator up to her graciously proportioned prewar apartment, slipping off her shoes and walking quietly down the hallway, pulling back the duvet and getting into bed with Andy, kissing the back of his neck, holding him close to her. Lee caught sight of the pink sofa and wondered why it had never occurred to her to buy one for her own place. When she'd moved back to New York, she thought her small one-bedroom in Gramercy might be temporary. But a designer she was friendly with, a French woman who wore only a limited color palette of black, white, and gray, offered to set up Lee's place. She said it would be “sophisticated” and “classic” but still “lived in”—messy stacks of the right photography books—“and a little bit rocker.” Lee said that sounded fine. And it was fine. Fine like a trendy, upscale hotel.

“I don't know where I'm going to go,” said Lee. “I can't be here.”

Bony hands, sunken, fragile, swimming eyes. Linda was no longer the woman she had been even moments ago. The one who had, more or less, sat down and said, “Let me tell you how it is, little girl.” This woman couldn't tell her anything. This woman couldn't help her. This woman could only look on anxiously as her daughter walked out the door.

H
E WAS TELLING
her a story he would later recount on a late night talk show, involving his six-year-old daughter and a canoe. This is why she had come here, because it was like watching TV. Hypnotic. She knew the sex with him would be the same way and it
was. She hadn't had to think or talk much, only smile when he told her how he missed the curve of her belly, grow wistful when he said he still thought about her all the time.

“When was the last time you saw your daughter?” she asked.

“A couple of months ago,” said Jack.

“You should go see her.”

“I know, but she's in school, in New York, and I'm here right now. I'll see her this summer.”

“Yeah, but you should go sooner. Because you never know.”

He didn't do anything as obvious as wince, but she could see she was depressing him. Reminding him of other depressing women again—neither of them wanted that.

“Sorry,” she said. A deflated plastic lounge chair lay by the side of the pool at the house he had rented. Behind it rose a hedge wall of shiny deep green leaves. Hollyleaf cherry, she almost said aloud. The way she used to name the birds, sitting by the water with Viv and Andy. Instead, she pointed to the drooping lounger. “Hey, can you blow this up?”

“Sure. I'll blow, you watch.”

It was a line from a movie he'd been in, delivered by an actress making the transition from child star to adult roles. She'd accomplished this rather successfully, too, the actress. So it was possible. But you almost always had to say things like that. Jack had been about ten years younger then, his face fuller, rosier, but he was aging well, looking weathered, leaner, more interesting, less like a puppy dog. What would his daughter think someday, maybe years from now, when she went back and watched his old movies? Would she think,
My dad was so beautiful once
?