The Sun in Your Eyes (22 page)

She would come home sometimes and hear, in the hall by the front door, the sound of Viv and Andy watching a movie, talking or laughing. It surprised her that her instinct wasn't to insert herself between them, to claim one of them as her own. Instead, she would head back down the stairs and find another place to be. It got easier later that year, when Andy started seeing the awful Lisette. (Who probably wasn't even that awful, in retrospect.) With Lisette came a certain alleviation, and then Andy graduated, and then it was just Lee and Viv.

Though she kept things from Viv, she never felt she had to hide from her friend. To pretend she wasn't, on a good day, moody, and on a bad day, sometimes panicky. What Viv was able to do was take Lee out of herself. She provided a focus. Viv's surprising self-absorption came as a relief to Lee—because the absorption extended beyond Viv's self. Lee once described their college relationship to Barbara, her therapist, in terms of paper towel commercials. Lee was the blue liquid that tore through weaker sheets and Viv was the strong, fibrous brand that could soak up big spills. Barbara laughed and asked if ads for bladder control garments weren't perhaps even more on point, cementing Lee's respect for her.

I
NSIDE THE LIBRARY
,
Lee and Viv sat down at a computer station to see what, if anything, they might find on Marion before they visited Patti Driggs during her office hours the next morning.
Viv assumed the air of a focused secretary. Her keystrokes were like heels down a corridor. Lee loved how seriously Viv was taking this, using words like “cross-reference” as she called up various public records, searching for any scrap of information on the whereabouts of Marion Washington. A number of Marion Washingtons popped up but, upon further digging, each of them turned out to be wrong.

“Remember microfiche?” said Viv.

“No, not really.”

“You never used it?”

“Nope.”

“Did you ever even write a paper? I don't think I ever remember you writing a paper.”

“I wrote papers. I even took exams.”

“What did you major in? I can't remember that either.”

“American Civilization.”

“What is that, really?”

“An oxymoron. Just kidding. God bless the USA.”

“I'm sorry. Of course you wrote papers.”

“Well, I was never the most diligent student. I didn't have the best models. Linda never went to college. She just took some business classes. Jesse dropped out of undergrad after a semester.”

Viv nodded, half-listening while she focused on the screen in front of them and opened up several digital archives of old newspapers and periodicals.

“You should have finished your Ph.D.”

At this, Viv stopped typing.

“Why do you say that?”

“You're, like, in your element here.”

“The library is my element?”

“I just mean, you've always been kind of scholastic. You're really into researching stuff.”

“Well, sure, and if that's all a Ph.D. was, then maybe I would have gotten one. But it also involves a lot of bullshit political maneuvering that I didn't want to engage in. And I think I've been much happier writing for THATH. But thank you for making me feel like Edward Casaubon.”

Lee didn't know who that was. But she knew saying as much would only further the opposition here: Lee as breezy hedonist, Viv as studious pedant.

“I wasn't aware it was still a sore spot, Viv. Sorry.”

“I wasn't aware it was either. It's being back at a place like this, I guess.”

“It makes me glad that we're not here anymore, that we're not twenty-one or whatever. That it's a long time ago already. But I also can't understand where it all went.”

“I know.”

Lee couldn't quite bring herself to tell Viv that the other day, in the car, driving to see Flintwick, when she told Viv that the low point of the past few years was standing in the supermarket aisle, stirred to tears by an MOR evergreen—that that was the kind of sad and pathetic story you share precisely because it doesn't reveal much beyond an awareness of your ordinary inability to resist the near-universal sentimentality of pop music. Who isn't sad and pathetic in that way? She'd told Viv a little bit about her depression, about what she might have inherited from her father, the sketchy relationship the Parrishes historically had with mental health. But she had described this as a concern, not a comfort, when really it was both. She had noticed, living in Los Angeles and driving more, that she sometimes found herself in a fog at the wheel. She was operating at
a deficit. Her inclination wasn't to pull over and collect herself, but to just drive on through and let whatever might happen happen. She'd wondered if her father had ever experienced something similar, something that may have been taken, romantically, for recklessness. Maybe recklessness was just a passionless disregard for yourself and others. In New York, where she didn't have a car, this fuzziness had sometimes led to poor decision-making with men. It resulted in a couple of qualified performance reviews at her nonprofit office job. But once she left for modeling in Paris, where she understood about sixty-five percent of what people said to her, her slightly erratic, distracted behavior was rewarded, if not encouraged. There are contexts where liabilities become assets. Her father had known this. Flintwick had called it pathological, his need to be a star, but what else was Jesse supposed to do with his excess of charisma?

French people loved Lee. She always showed up for work and she could be counted on, but she wasn't all there, suggesting she was absorbed in something fascinating beyond what was in front of her. She gave in to her absentmindedness instead of trying to focus and make sense of what was happening around her. She was told this came through in her photographs.

Toward the end of a shoot once, a producer stepped forward and said, in English: “Okay, that's all, fucks!” And Lee, brought back to attention, had said,
“What?”

“Porky Pig! Looney Tunes?”

“Oh. Oh! That's all,
folks.
I thought you said something else.”

“I did!”

Lee erupted as though something much funnier had just occurred, and the photographer took a few more pictures before pronouncing her “so wonderful.” From then on, “That's all, fucks” became an expression she often said to herself.

There was a point, however, at which she couldn't easily be pulled out of her not-there-ness. A point at which it could become less than charming. She never reached this point in Paris, but she'd been there before, in college, and she was there again.

Had it been the same way for her father? Was
The Garden of Allah
what that sounded like? Or did it sound like whatever was on the tapes that had gone missing? Finding the tapes might provide an answer but what did she really think that answer would do for her? What was really sad and pathetic, so much so that she couldn't even bring herself to tell her therapist, was this search for something she knew she wasn't going to find. Because it was all in the past. And everything everyone has ever said about that:
You can't go home again. Don't look back. Getty over it.
Searching for these tapes, as if they would reveal something to her about herself. What could they possibly reveal other than her own delusion? Once, against her better judgment, she had attended a Jesse Parrish tribute concert to benefit a cause she no longer remembered. She did remember encountering backstage two old rock crones in leather jackets. Garish hair. Pendants resting atop puckering cleavage. Heavy rings on their fingers. There was something who-gives-a-fuck fabulous about them, which they must have known. But you would never, ever want to be them, which they also must have known. Like the shrine she and Viv had visited in upstate New York. Anything can become a caricature of itself.

Using her father as a reason to pull Viv back into her life, or push herself into Viv's, was sad and pathetic. She had gotten as far as admitting to Barbara, in that contemplatively lit office high up in a residential tower on the Upper East Side, water towers in the distance, that she missed the way Viv had idealized her. It used to make her feel possessed of some lasting, captivating power. Viv must have
seen
something
in her.
The way Viv attached herself to me, as though she might really start going places now that she had me as a friend, as though her life might begin and it was almost like I kept waiting for her to realize she bet on the wrong horse.
Barbara said: I think it's interesting that Viv, as you've described her, never seemed all that envious of you, of all that you had or had been given. And Lee thought,
No, Viv didn't really seem envious, more like pleased to have been let in on it. The more I gave her, the more I got—I fed off her adherence to me.
Barbara said: You tend to talk about your relationship as if you're somehow the bad one, as if you're bad for Viv. Lee: You don't think that's the case? Barbara: I'd like to hear why
you
think that's the case.

Lee didn't tell Viv about any of this.

Viv found various accounts of Marion's relationship with Jesse and the accident but nothing about what had happened to her since. One article by a conspiracy theorist proposed that while there was a crash, there was never any accident, that Marion and Linda had plotted to kill Jesse and carried the whole thing out together,
Diabolique
-style. The writer presented it as a given that the wife and the mistress wanted to do away with Jesse mostly because they were women and women did things like this. It made Lee sick and uneasy—not the accusation itself, but the tone of psychotic familiarity. Along with the caveat: “Full disclosure: I've never met Linda or Marion. I don't know what they're like, personally.” As though he very well could meet them, and it wasn't an issue of access but of timing or disinterest on his part. As if he were too busy doing so many other important things. As if Linda, Jesse, and Marion weren't his betters.

They wrapped it up and went for fried egg sandwiches and spinach pie smothered in red sauce at the coffee shop they used to go to all the time, after Andy graduated and she and Viv latched on to
each other. Still the old striped awning, maybe a fresher coat of green paint on the woodwork around the front windows. How often had they sat here, at the laminate-topped tables? They must have usually been part of a group because this is where everyone in their set ended up, but in Lee's mind, they didn't have a set. It was just the two of them, sitting at the counter. The owner's daughter would let them turn the radio to the state school station, which in Lee's memory was forever playing
Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To.
Moments from so many late nights spliced themselves together.

Viv: “My grandmother thinks my voice is sexy.”

Or: “I felt weird bringing popcorn into a documentary about Herbert Marcuse. Nobody else was eating anything.”

Or: “It was a good thing I stayed in. I got to see that episode of
Melrose Place
where Kimberly checks Peter into the hospital to give him a lobotomy.”

Or: “He told me he was glad I was editing his article because I'm kind, patient, and gentle.”

“Those are good things to be,” Lee had said. She couldn't remember who the “he” in question was. Someone who worked on the same school publication as Viv? Someone who was sort of a dick but who Viv sort of had a crush on?

“Yeah, but there was something so condescending about
him
saying it or else it was the way he said it. It made me want to say,
Shut the fuck up, you pompous fuck. Like I'm only here to balance you out with my docility.
I didn't say it, though. I just kind of raised my eyebrows then smiled. All kind, patient, and gentle.”

And: “Why can't I talk to him? Why do I turn into a big, boring piece of rubber? He's smart and he's nice and he looks so smoochable.”

“Everyone here is smart and more or less nice and more or less
smoochable. It's something else, something you can't measure in those terms.”

Lee couldn't articulate what else
it
was. She knew only that it felt a lot like this: sitting with someone and wanting to keep sitting with them, to keep hearing what they said.

She half expected to see people they knew here now, which was irrational. The people they did see looked so very, very young. The owner had passed away, the owner's daughter was out, her son said, as he handed them menus. She and Viv really had to stop this reunion tour of greasy spoons. Though the food was fine, same as ever, the whole experience was like using the little toilet at an elementary school: familiar, workable, but mostly uncomfortable. Lee had thought that while they were here in Providence, they might visit their old house, the footbridge over the highway, the park by the water where they used to sit and look out. But on further consideration, it seemed wiser to spare themselves all of that.

They paid their check and walked outside. From up the street came laughter and voices out of the dark. A guy shouting “Booooom!” and a girl going “Aaaahhh, fuck you, Kevin. You scared the fuck out of me, dude.” Lee tried to remember, from her own experience, why teenagers liked to be loud on street corners. Nothing occurred to her. But as she and Viv went back to their room, she was glad for the noise, for all the space the loudness occupied. She didn't feel like talking anymore tonight.

“Y
ES
,
COME IN
.”
Tiny Patti Driggs sat at a big desk in a room that might once have belonged to a couple of maids when the arts building, with its marble entrance hall and grand staircase, had been a stately home. Lee could almost see them, two girls looking out of
the leaded window, beyond the terraced garden, down at the small city below. Thinking of bigger cities they could run off to. Patti had lived in those cities and now she was here. She took her eyes off what she had been reading, removed her glasses, and blinked up at them. “Do I know you?”