Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“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.