Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Was it like a Cat Stevens thing?”

“No, the Garden of Allah was the home of a silent film star. Alla Nazimova. She built this lavish place in Hollywood with a pool supposedly shaped like the Black Sea, and when she ran out of money, she turned the estate into a hotel. A lot of actors would stay there. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for a while. A lot of legendary debauchery went on and then it got kind of seedy, but not high-end seedy. Eventually all the famous people started staying across the street at the Chateau Marmont. So it was torn down and turned into a bank. Jesse Parrish knew his history.”

As did Andy.

Jesse’s label dropped him. He got fat. He got strung out. He got thin. At some point Lee was born. He left Linda or did Linda leave him? He took up with a groupie. He wrote songs other people made famous. He was going back to the studio. He died. Lee was four.

It all seemed removed from the girl who had just biked away. But it also explained her, and my instant fascination with her. People obsessed over Jesse Parrish, worked his life into legend, and Lee was part of that. She was part of a level of society I was only beginning to see. I’d never met anyone famous, unless you counted Michael Dukakis, with whom I shook hands once in sixth grade on a class trip to the State House. The affluence I’d grown up around had exposed me, at its upper boundary, to remodeled kitchens and glitzy Bar Mitzvahs. Lee’s father’s fame was not the most lucrative kind — it generated more cultural capital than actual capital. But, as I learned from Andy, Jesse came from a family whose mini-empire of supermarkets had been dismantled and dissolved. But not before certain trusts had been established and, in Lee’s case, well-maintained, thanks to her mother. On top of that, Linda West, former model, muse, and party girl, had turned out to be a remarkably savvy businesswoman.

The more I looked at Jesse’s picture, the more I saw the resemblance to Lee. The sleepy, wide deep-blue eyes that darkened to violet at the edges, the fullness of her mouth, softening the sharpness and structure of her other features. They had faces— made for cameras and stages, made to be looked at. Lee shared with her father (and her mother, I would come to find out) a powerful, preoccupying magnetism. So that, in a group photograph, you’re always drawn to them first. When you can’t look at them anymore because you know you’ll never get to the bottom of them, then you start seeing the other people in the frame and wondering where the picture was taken.

“Does Lee talk about him at all?”

“Sometimes. Yeah. Last year some guy was writing part of a dissertation on him and wanted to talk to Lee. She agreed to, but in the end it just weirded her out. Like he was projecting all this stuff onto her father. But I think what really upset her is that she didn’t know if it was a projection or not. I mean, she never really knew her father.”

I hardly knew Lee then, but I already wanted to protect her. I was at the beginning of something, something I didn’t want to disappear.

THERE WAS Agirl we knew in college named Kirsten. She and Lee could both be impetuous and headlong. Kirsten was ultimately more successful at it, I think because she was more shallow. She treated our women’s studies class to a graphic video of her girlfriend in bed and then got married not two years out of school to a guy she met while knitting in Prospect Park. We understood sexuality could be fluid. But we barely recognized her at the wedding without her dark eye makeup and bulky boots. What threw us was the realization that that had merely been a look in the same way that the letterpress place cards, the tea lights twinkling in the trees, the greenery in mason jars, her reworked vintage bridal gown, was all a look. Her ardor for performance seemed to exceed rather than express a passion for her groom. As though she were getting married largely for the pictures and a license to throw dinner parties. Lee and I scoffed. But it also made us insecure about who we were and what we should want.

“I envy her tolerance for being embarrassed,” I said to Lee. We were sitting on a stone bench on the grounds of an old estate, drinking champagne, not too far from the guests on the patio but out of earshot. “No, but I do. She doesn’t care. She’s not cowed by self-consciousness.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is shameless,” said Lee.

“Yeah, but we say that like it’s a bad thing. Where does shame ever get us?”

“Kirsten’s a nutbag, okay? She throws a nice party though.”

Late into that night, music continued to drift out of the open French doors of a ballroom to the sloping lawn where a group of revelers kept going. In the early but still dark hour when dew starts to settle over everything, Lee and Kirsten and I found ourselves alone down by a boathouse. In my mind’s eye we are sleepily draped across various surfaces, women in a pre-Raphaelite painting.

“I’m knitting him a pair of socks,” said Kirsten, apropos of nothing but the digressive course of the conversation we’d been having. We nodded in an indication of listening.

“No, like, I’m knitting my husband a fucking pair of fucking socks . I have the yarn and the needles and everything all packed up in my bag for our fucking honeymoon .”

We murmured some indistinct acknowledgments.

“God. You two. You guys are like a fucking planet together. You make me feel like a little ant or something. Do you know I almost didn’t invite either of you? But I wanted to be generous. I wanted you to share this with me. But you know what? You don’t really share anything with anyone but each other. So, like, fuck that!” She laughed and took another drag on the joint between her fingers. I looked to Lee, but she wouldn’t return my gaze. She just stared up at the rafters, as though what Kirsten said was, for once, well-reasoned and true, and it disturbed her.

Within a year, Kirsten left her husband, moved across the country, and became an apprentice to a marketing guru. She was forecasting trends on daytime talk shows, wearing wrap dresses and stilettos, discussing happiness as it related to various colors. She and the guru renovated a San Francisco townhouse. They spoke of their love, for their home and for each other, in the pages of a shelter magazine. It wasn’t Kirsten’s fault that the guru soon began an affair with his new assistant, but hadn’t I turned on the TV one morning and heard her say, “You are your choices”? It was back to New York, where she lived with an advertising executive — turned — rooftop farmer, incorporated antlers into the design of several downtown hotels, and acquired a new wardrobe of structurally challenging clothes you may have at first suspected weren’t particularly flattering before concluding that your eye simply wasn’t avant-garde enough to appreciate them. Kirsten moved through life in a series of clean breaks. Perhaps, in some parallel reality, a landfill of her past messes grew more and more massive. But unless this world collided with that one, she’d never contend with the garbage heap of her existence. I could try to heave myself up onto a ledge of superiority, tell myself that Kirsten didn’t really know herself. But was knowing yourself worth more than all the life she had lived? How well did I know myself anyway?

About a year ago, I happened to be downtown for a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the afternoon and I ran into her. She was leaving a showroom and looked like a celebrity dressed to avoid the paparazzi: sunglasses, flats, leather jacket, of-the-moment bag.

“Viv fucking Feld!” She insisted we go get a coffee right then. Sometimes I felt I alone had maintained a life that left room for unscheduled coffees and it was like being the last house standing on an otherwise razed block. Where had everybody gone? But here was Kirsten, and though I knew her impromptu availability wasn’t the same as mine, I couldn’t say no. I hadn’t seen her since Andy and I got married.