The Sun in Your Eyes

by Deborah Shapiro

“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.”

  TWO 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.”

  “Did you know my mother well?”

  “Everybody knew Linda. But I knew Linda from way back in New York. Before she’d even finished high school. Before she moved to L.A. and changed her name. I knew Linda Weinstein.”

  Flintwick had known the fast girl for whom New York was too slow. It gave you the impression that life was long, that one can have many incarnations. I found myself, for the first time, laying my hand on my lower abdomen. As inconspicuously as I could.

  “Back then,” Flintwick was saying, “I was something of an impresario. Promoting
parties, promoting bands, promoting myself. Linda was always hanging around in those days and, oddly, when I looked at her I didn’t see a girl who I could take to bed. I saw myself. I should have gone into business with her. She was all of eighteen. But I pitied the guys who just wanted her for sex because they had no idea what they were getting into. I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear these things about your mother. You came here to talk about your father, after all.”

  “He spent his last days here,” said Lee. “I thought I would feel his presence or something, being here.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “A lot of people have passed through here. If these walls could talk, they would probably say they’d like to take a shower.” He didn’t smile. “I’ve told those stories. It gets old. Look, people are people, and they don’t lose their personalities when they happen to be in a relatively debauched state. Jesse came here with a goal and he worked hard. He was very in control, and rather controlling, when we were in the studio. He didn’t want to just make music. He wanted to be a star, to be adored by people he didn’t know, but there’s a certain drive and pathological self-absorption that comes with that territory. I always felt Jesse looked at me with a mix of respect and scorn. He valued the function I served, but it was beneath him. He would never stoop to my level. See, we all hung out with some unsavory people—some of us still do—but it was a question of getting your hands dirty. Calculating how to capitalize on something or someone, how to profit from a situation, how to exploit—these weren’t virtues, not with that crowd. Jesse could have been strung out, sleeping with God knows who, disgracing himself in any number of more creative ways, but that wouldn’t have compromised him. He could quietly pull some old family strings to get out of going to Vietnam, and still, his hands would never have been dirty in the way that mine were. There was always something untouchable about him. Like he appreciated the low life, but he would never get that low. Put it this way: I was his Falstaff for a few months.”

  “You’re saying my father liked to slum it, but he was really a snob?”

  “Not a snob. Just different from me. Some part of him found me distasteful, and I wonder if that part didn’t feel similarly toward Linda, as taken with her as he was.”

  With this, Flintwick seemed less Falstaff, more Iago, sowing seeds of doubt. But Lee nodded, and I wondered if this was exactly what she’d wanted to hear. A way in which she was like her father and could identify with him, against her mother. She too found her mother distasteful.

  “When Jesse was here, he had some fun—Marion was on the scene then—but mostly he was very focused. Actually, Marion sang backup sometimes. He brought a bunch of people out to work with him. Chris Valenti. They always had that thing between them, when they played together, that rowdy partnership with homoerotic overtones. Valenti was an extraordinarily talented guy, more talented than Jesse for sure, but he didn’t have half the charisma. Wound up recording insects or some shit and died about ten years ago outside of Minneapolis. But I digress. Jesse was totally lucid about what he wanted in the studio. He was going in a really melodic direction, but playing around a lot with feedback. I can’t say it was super-innovative technically, but it was classic in an out-of-its-time way. He made some gorgeous noise. Think about what was going on then. You had your disco, your funk, your stadium rock. Your let-me-get-coked-up-so-I can-write-a-song-about-the-evils-of-coke genre and its Californian twin, the pass-me-a-bottle-of-Beaujolais-I wanna-get-mellow music. You had Songs in the Key of Life. You had Rumours. You had Iggy Pop over there in Berlin getting the Henry Higgins treatment from David Bowie. Remember, you had punk by then. The beginnings of hip-hop. New wave. Looking back, I don’t know quite where Jesse’s album would have fit in, but I would love to be able to listen to it now, give it the old retrospective spin. See if it would blow me away. Some of the tracks he was working on never got to be more than demos, but they were just dazzling. He had access to that rare combination of bravado and melancholy.”

  “Marion,” said Lee, interrupting Flintwick’s oration.

  “Was a distraction. A beautiful distraction,” he said. “But she was a kid, a child, and children need a lot of attention.”

  Lee may not have felt her father’s presence, but I could see him. In a corner of the room, spotlit, Jesse sitting in the wingchair, barefoot, right ankle resting on left knee, a bowl of fruit and a beer on the table in front of him. He plays his guitar, and Marion comes up from behind, placing her hands over his eyes.

  “Still,” Flintwick continued, “I think Linda was threatened by Marion. Maybe not Marion herself, but the fear that Jesse would leave her for good. That he would get back on his feet, become a real success again, and leave her behind.”

  “And me. He would leave me behind, too,” said Lee.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. But Linda was upset enough to come out here from California. I believe she went to Mamaroneck to see her family and she must have brought you because you were already here. You were both already out here in New York when the accident happened.”

  “That’s a blur for me. I remember being at my grandparents’ house with Linda, but I don’t know if that was then or if it was some other trip.”

  “Does Linda never talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Flintfuck!” A voice bellowed from outside. The frontman entered with a towel around his waist, pine needles clinging to his wet feet. “Who do we have here?”

  “Lee, Viv, this is Ethan Warren of the, uh—”

  “Of Sticker Shock.”

  “That’s right. Sticker Shock. Currently taking a certain corner of the Internet by storm.”

  Ethan shook our hands and I couldn’t tell whether he was embarrassed or proud.

  “Lee’s parents and I are old friends,” said Flintwick.

  “That’s rad. You guys should come down to the lake to chill. I just came up to get more beer.”

  Lee gave him her easygoing smile. I felt tired, old, and slightly above it all. I imagine Lee did, too, but she was so used to giving that easy smile. Like a mask she’d forgotten to take off.

  “Oh hey, man, do you have any more of those figs-in-blankets?”

  “No. Your fucking vegan drummer ate all of them.”

  “Shit. Those things were tasty.”

  Flintwick met Ethan’s open simplemindedness with a blank stare, daring him to disappear. Which he did, heading back down to the water.

  “Where were we? The accident. Perhaps I should just say the crash. There was the typical collective mourning. The rush to judge poor Marion. Some of them—the fans, the critics—wanted to crucify her. There was always something foul about the way they would refer to her as his ‘black’ girlfriend. Then, of course, there were the missing tapes. I was out of town for a couple of days when it happened, but I came back as soon as I heard. I was here when your mother came to sort through your father’s things. She was still his wife. She came alone and she looked terrible. It was just the two of us—everyone else had cleared out—and I insisted she stay the night. I didn’t have any ulterior motives. Well, I always had an ulterior motive, but I wasn’t going to act on it. Like I said, I didn’t see Linda that way. I could have convinced myself to see her that way, it wouldn’t have been too hard, and I was getting the unmistakable vibe that she wanted me to see her that way. I chalked it up to her vulnerable emotional state. She wanted to go for a swim so we went down to the lake and she undressed and stood there like she wanted me to judge her. If she’d slept with me, it would have been out of disgust and normally, hey, I’d be all for that. But she was clearly wrapped up in something and I was outside of it. I remember she just said ‘fine’ and walked into the water. Kind of spooky. She started swimming out past the dock, and I thought, Well, shit, I better go in after her now ’cause if she drowns? I huffed and puffed and eventually caught up to her and we’re both naked and treading water and she thanked me for going after
her. After that we just swam, in figure eights, like some weird synchronized routine. Nothing like my Esther Williams fantasies, though. She got all sentimental and reflective and started telling me how strange it was for her to be back here in the Catskills, near Hirschman’s.

  “Hirschman’s?” asked Lee.

  “The resort. Her family spent summers there. It’s just a few miles away, abandoned now. Used to be a jewel of the Borscht Belt. Very Dirty Dancing. Nobody puts Linda in a corner! She was experiencing some kind of freaky frisson, the Then overlapping with the Now. She was a spooky, spooky chick that night. But she was gone by the time I woke up, and I couldn’t shake the distinct impression that I’d been had.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. I still don’t. It was just a feeling. She’d cleaned the place of any trace of Jesse. Her right, of course. But it felt like a theft.”

  “You think she took the tapes?” Lee asked. “She didn’t want them out in the world for some reason?”

  “There’s not much I would put past Linda,” he said. “Hold on”—he rose like a judge and exited the room, leaving us with that troubling implication.

  “I’ve asked Linda before, you know,” Lee said to me. “She’s always said she has no clue.” We sat in silence, listening to the hooting sounds down by the lake. Flintwick came back holding a cardboard sleeve from which he pulled a photograph: Jesse on a stool in the studio, a hank of hair over his face but his laconic smile still visible.

  “There was one thing Linda didn’t get a hold of. A box of negatives and contact sheets from a photographer I’d brought here to shoot your father the day he died. Talk about spooky. I held on to them for a long time but sold them all to a collector in the city a couple of years ago. Cash-flow problems, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Can I contact him? The photographer?”

  “He’s no longer with us either. David Haseltine. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Relatively obscure and relatively impoverished until he passed away relatively young. Had to die to make a living, that old story. But you could talk to the collector. Bill Carnahan. He’s a thoroughgoing prick though. I think I’ve been a complete dead end, huh?”