The Sun in Your Eyes (8 page)

“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?”

“Not at all,” said Lee. “You've been very generous with your time.”

“Would you like to have this?” Flintwick handed the photograph to her.

“Oh, I couldn't.”

“Yes you could. I'm sure it's worth more to you than it is to me. I insist. It does beat, you know, my schlub-aesthete heart. Why don't you stay? Hear Sticker Shock. They rock the party that rocks the body.”

“That's a very tempting offer.”

“I know.”

“But I don't want to impose. We should get going. Thank you for this,” she said, the picture in her hands. Her face didn't have
enough artifice to hide the emotions that had taken hold during Flintwick's reminiscence. At least, I wanted to think she couldn't hide it from me.

“Please give Linda my best.” He'd started to walk us down a hall when a crash and some yelps from the lake demanded his attention. “I used to think of myself as a general of sorts, taking foot soldiers and turning them into samurai. Now I feel like a babysitter. Apologies. I'm afraid you'll have to see yourselves out.”

I
MET
L
INDA
for the first time when I went home with Lee for winter break my sophomore year of college. Her khaki-colored, paper-bag pants and tangerine hoodie over a tight black tank top were Charlie Chaplin's tramp meets yoga instructor. But it was a look. She was one of those women who could make almost anything stylish, a gift she'd given her daughter. She had the same bangs and long hair she had in old pictures, only salt and pepper now, piled on her head. I didn't have the vocabulary to define the clean yet eclectic way Linda had decorated her 1930s home in the Hollywood hills, I only understood she had an eye, a way of organizing her environment that was at once homey and sophisticated. Persian rugs. Actual paintings, not prints from museum gift shops, hanging on the wall. Vases of peonies and potted dark-leaved plants. Issues of French
Vogue
in an upstairs bathroom with slightly peeling wallpaper. She must have read the magazines, wrinkled and curled from steam, while bathing. The house, as Linda lived in it, was a play of light and shadow. And I was a child, walking past glass and crystal displays in a department store, my mother cautioning me not to touch anything. Linda's house was part of a mysterious adult world to which I didn't yet belong. I expected a wave of inadequacy to
wash over me, but instead, it was privilege. Being let in on something special.

T
HE NIGHT WE
arrived, Lee went to bed early, jet-lagged, but I was too keyed up to sleep. Linda took me to the kitchen and brought out a half-eaten chocolate cake, setting it down on the counter. No plates, just forks, and we stood there digging in, as though it were a ritual we'd performed many times before. I never did this with my mother. We never just had a cake standing by, as if for this very purpose. Our forks were utensils, not shapely design objects. No fragrant breezes such as these came through an open window in our house.