Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“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 NORTHof 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.”