The Sun in Your Eyes (18 page)

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a bright spot, but I have to admit to a certain satisfaction that nobody, including Aaron, ever told Genevieve what happened, though she saw the taxi pull up, saw Lee get in. We closed ranks because we still had loyalties and we still knew where they lay.

Lee later apologized to me again, and I told her I forgave her. I really thought, at the time, that I had. That the moment with my father was, after all, a cry for help. But I never truly forgave her for damaging our friendship or for hurting me. I never let myself believe that's what she'd done.

A
WELL
-
GROOMED MAN
in a chambray shirt, dark jeans, and work boots greeted us at the door of the Carnahans' house, which sat on a tiny peninsula jutting out into the sea.

“He's got servants,” I whispered to Lee.

“Yes,” she replied, annoyed with my astonishment. “They're not servants. They're personal assistants.” I forgot they'd had various helpers when Lee was growing up.

Carnahan appeared. “Let's go have a look at dear old Dad, y'all,” he said.

We followed the Carnahans through airy rooms, all glass and
white walls, to a rickety back staircase they hadn't yet gotten around to renovating and maybe never would.

“It reminds me of a mental institution,” Kara said. “But in a good way. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. Possibly Kara was alluding to the deep Freudian scratches in the wooden banister and dark paneling along the wall. It wouldn't have surprised me to reach the top and find an old nursery covered in yellow wallpaper. Instead, below a skylight was a hallway freshly painted in a soft soothing gray, leading into a rectangular observatory. Wide windows opened onto the ocean and the sky, and a thin shade made of some UV filtering fiber cast the room in a shadowy light.

A series of black-and-white portraits lined the wall. Most of the well-known photos of Jesse, the ones that had graced his albums and been reproduced many times over, had been taken by Linda, candids she snapped with her old Brownie. Their intimate home-movie feel welcomed you into a rarefied world: Jesse in the Chateau Marmont; out by his Corvette in the desert; leaning on a fence at a scrub-covered ranch in Topanga. David Haseltine's images had intimacy too, but not one that extended to the viewer. In their ongoing interiority was a vivid psychology that bled through the surface of the image, but nobody else could be a part of it.

In one image, against a backdrop of flocked, floral wallpaper, Jesse stared directly ahead, daring Haseltine to catch the combination of boyish sweetness and lock-up-your-daughters sexuality. This simultaneous vulnerability and confidence must have made it hard to say no to him. But the photograph also crystallized that look, formalized it, made it into a mask, behind which you could almost glimpse Jesse laughing, quietly and a little viciously, at all of it.

Next was a shot of Marion looking at Jesse as Jesse cast his
gaze down toward a dusty beam of light coming through the window of another room in Flintwick's lake house. They looked so contemporary—Jesse in his cardigan and T-shirt and Marion in her white button-down and light blue trouser-like jeans. On a side table next to Marion I noticed a glass bottle of water and a china cup placed on a saucer. The small touch of finery surprised me, evoking a loose luxuriance. Was that saucer Marion's doing? Or was it Jesse's? His etiquette, his Southern ways. The stillness of the picture was appealing, though a little blank, until I saw the picture to the other side of it, the moment just after, as Jesse looked straight at the camera. It hummed with the tension of him not looking back at Marion. Marion was looking ahead at Haseltine's lens too. Their expressions:
Is this what you wanted?
As though both Jesse and Marion knew in advance what Haseltine's frame was going to reveal here: a couple that wouldn't last.

Transfixed by the photos, I almost forgot to be angry with Lee.

“Wait,” said Lee, pointing to an object on the dresser Marion was leaning against. A chain with a pendant, a narrow silver bar about an inch long. The way the light caught it, I could make out the Hebrew letter
shin
engraved along the top. “That's Big Mort's.”

“He gave it to Jesse?” I asked.

“No, no, no. Big Mort gave it to my mom when she left New York for L.A.”

“Maybe Jesse had it for a while?”

“I don't think so. Linda wears it all the time. I think she must have been there. These were taken the day he died?”

Carnahan stepped forward and made a show of exhaling. “Yes,” he said. “Tangled web?” Kara gazed out at the undulating waves, going for a troubled Bergmanian gloom but reminding me of the blonde in ABBA. Neither of them seemed to understand that we had just
awakened something dormant, something we had mistaken for the ground before it started to move beneath us.

T
HE CLOSELY SET
cottages, patchy grass, and power lines of what Carnahan had referred to as “America” came into view at the end of his circuitous private drive. In the car the giddy shiver of a narrow escape came over me. But Lee didn't want to feel that thrill with me or talk about what had just happened. “I'll take you to the train station now,” she said with cold focus.

“Lee.”

“What? You don't want to be involved. I get it.”

“But I am involved. So, what are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

“I'm going to look for Marion Washington, for real.”

She'd tried to find her months before, she explained, without success but also without much urgency. According to the Internet, Marion didn't exist after 1978. She had never spoken publicly about those last days with Jesse. She didn't remember any of it, is how the story went. Vilified and with a chunk of her life lost, she disappeared from the public eye.

But maybe she did remember. Not what happened to the tapes but something else, such as what Linda was doing at Flintwick's that day. We didn't have enough leverage to make Linda talk, and clearly leverage was what was needed. There I was—using words like “leverage” and “we.”

I wouldn't be getting on that train.

“Lee, let me help.”

“I'll probably have to hire a private investigator or something.”

“Maybe. But maybe not.” We were twenty-five miles away from
our alma mater and its extensive network of archives and databases. Twenty-five miles away, it dawned on me, from Patti Driggs.

“Why would she want to talk to me? She hates Linda. Besides, what would she even know?”

“Isn't it possible she might have a clue as to Marion's whereabouts?”

“Won't that be weird for you?”

“Because I dated her son for a few months eight years ago? I never even met her.”

Lee decided it was worth a shot.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. As if there was no question. As if I didn't then take out my phone and reread the message Andy had sent me, start to reply, and delete every inadequate attempt. I'd been doing that with him, in one way or another, for months. Years, even. I couldn't do it anymore.

“Lee, I need you to pull over. I have to call Andy.”

O
UR WEDDING VOWS
had mentioned responsibility. How it was inseparable from loss. It had a heaviness to it and this was its finest quality. If you didn't feel its weight, you didn't have enough to lose. But Andy and I hadn't exactly written that part of our vows. We'd cribbed it from Frank, lines he'd written for the show that were unexpectedly beautiful. (“You distract them with campy hijinks and people think the poignancy comes out of nowhere,” Frank had said. “But it never comes out of nowhere.”) Was it a cop-out, I'd asked Andy? No, he didn't think so. He didn't think it was cheating. It was, he added, a nice way to honor Frank, even. To be honest, I don't remember the wording of our vows, only that they made me feel giving
and loved and expectant, that we were about to make our lives that much larger. That we would each take care of the other. I should have committed those words to memory. I should have known them still by heart.

There was a lot I didn't remember about our wedding. It came back to me in flashes and out-of-sequence moments. Andy and me, alone in a room just after the ceremony, Andy biting into an apple, a post-match victory snack, like orange slices at a junior-high soccer game. My father's guiding hand on my back, his other hand in mine as we danced. The Hasidic frenzy of the hora, an injection of shtetl into our modern marriage. My brother's elegance in raising his glass for a toast. Kirsten presenting a bare, highly toned upper arm to Frank, and Frank, in his deadest of deadpans, saying: “Cardiofunk?” Jack Caprico giving me a congratulatory kiss on the cheek by way of introduction. How it lingered because of the full, bristly beard he'd grown for his run as Trigorin in a production of
The Seagull.
Lingered, too, because it was stupefying. All I could think was: Jack Caprico touched me. Later I would see, out of the corner of my eye, Jack Caprico talking to a tall, clean-shaven man in a lowly lit alcove, Jack Caprico doing most of the work and Andy, the tall, clean-shaven man, graciously listening but not working for anything and it would make me so proud. I would also see Andy talking to Lee, the two of them out in the courtyard, and it occurred to me that the last time I had seen them together like that, paying that kind of attention to each other, was in college. The feeling it gave rise to was akin to jealousy, if jealousy was a comfort.

My parents were talking with Nancy and Tim Elliott, Andy's mother and father. Admitting to each other how excited but nervous they had each been. My mother confessed to breathing easier now that she could see how beautifully it was coming off. She'd had her doubts earlier, as their town car crossed the East River on the way to the venue.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the view of Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in all its wild promise. But I'm afraid what you see when you head in the other direction is, well, not quite so promising.”

Nancy nodded and smiled considerately, either at a loss as to how to follow up or because she was too kind to acknowledge my mother's stiff pretensions. Small talk had never been my mother's strong suit, and she often left it to my father. You could say that she was too introverted for it, that she found it uncomfortable and wasn't a very good fake with people she didn't know particularly well. You could also say this made her socially demanding, that she failed to understand how accommodating and how generous conversational inconsequentiality could be. That sometimes, especially if you had a sparkling drink in your hand, you could talk about traffic or even a feat of urban engineering without referencing its literary pedigree.

She had steadily, strangely pecked away at our wedding plans ever since Andy and I had started making them. “What does one wear to a wedding in a foundry in Queens?” she had asked. I hadn't wanted to dignify her remark with a response, to explain that the foundry was an impeccably renovated nineteenth-century industrial space now used for parties. That we weren't trying to be aggressively unconventional or challenging in our choice, that many people had hosted lovely events here before. But what
does
one wear to a wedding in an old Long Island City foundry if most of one's clothes converge along a Cambridge-Wellfleet-Tanglewood axis? That bohemian school-marm look of dressy shawls and velvet in the winter, linen sacks in the summer, shoes with sensible soles. A way of dressing much influenced by the designs of Linda West, come to think of it.

Linda catered to that customer, but only to a point, refusing to full-on frump it up. And Linda arrived there by a different path,
signposts including the floating bias cuts of Madeleine Vionnet and the gauzy cover-ups for afternoons by a crystalline pool in L.A. No Virginia Woolf, no weekend matinees of
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
at the American Repertory Theatre. My mother might have bought a Linda West dress and worn it to a wedding, but she wouldn't have been caught dead in one at a wedding that Linda would attend.

The coppery shantung jacket she wore over a celadon sheath turned out to be a good choice, picking up the warm bronze of the brick walls, giving her a glow. Something Elena Sterling Rappoport might have in her wardrobe for a charity luncheon. But Linda was effortless and blasé in a slouchy cream silk top, wide-leg black trousers, and a black satin blazer. It made me think:
Right, this is what one wears to a wedding in a foundry.

I had placed my mother in a humiliating position—the kind of quiet humiliation that might require a minute or two of deep breaths in a bathroom stall. The kind that had led to her concern about what one does and doesn't do. I'd wanted her to be humiliated, just a little, because her bloom of anxiety reminded me of the perfecting impulse that overtook her whenever Lee had come to stay with us. That extra effort she made, the tajines and grapefruit-scented hand soap packaged to look as if it came from an apothecary, that only Lee occasioned. Linda came up to all of us and said, “What's that you were saying about wild promise? Sounds like the name of the cheap perfume I used to douse myself in when I was a kid.” I caught a glimmer of embarrassment in my mother's eye.

Linda took my mother's hand and clasped it while performing a vaudevillian pantomime of disbelief:
How did we get here? It seems like only yesterday I used to be a girl. Who knows where the time goes? Sunrise, sunset. Ah, life!

“Natalie,” she sighed.

“It's lovely to see you, Linda.”

“Congratulations!” Another head shake. “
Right!?
” Linda gestured to me like an auto-show attendant presenting a much-anticipated new car model. She leaned in to kiss me and in an almost-whisper said, “Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.”

“Thank you. It's Lee's doing.”