Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“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 LINDAfor 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.

THE NIGHT WEarrived, 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.

“What is that?”

“Winter-blooming jasmine. I love that this is what passes for winter here. I still haven’t gotten over it.”

“You grew up on the East Coast?”

“Sure did. Linda Weinstein, nice Jewish girl from Mamaroneck. Right?”

“Right,” I said, not sure where she was going with this, where I was supposed to go.

“Well, that certainly wasn’t going to cut it. Weinstein? And Mamaroneck? Blech. So I decided, at the ripe old age of eighteen, to flee. I changed my name to Linda West. Because I was going West, young woman! Later, when I met Jesse, he asked me if it was West like Nathanael, and I had no idea who that was. He bought me The Day of the Locust and said, ‘Here you go, honey.’ I read it and I was horrified and I decided that I would be West like Nathanael. He would be my spiritual father. Because my real father? Mort Weinstein of Mort’s Discount Clothing Mart? Please. But deep down I was always Big Mort’s daughter. A New Yorker. Sharp. I had uncles who ran numbers. I wasn’t going to be that girl getting high all day and baking pies for my old man. Or I would be that, but I would have a secret self all the while.”

“Weren’t you”—I didn’t want to finish the question, but she was waiting—“weren’t you scared? At all?”

“Of course I was scared. I think that’s what drove me. But I look back on it now and I was also so cocky. And why shouldn’t I have been? I was hot shit, Viv. I had that beanpole look. It would have ruined me a decade earlier, but I was born at just the right time. So I came out here with my girlfriend Karen and I don’t think we had a plan other than let’s just go! Let’s go be where it’s at, right? I was barely eighteen and I was gonna sleep with whoever I wanted and write poems and take pictures and maybe get famous. We knew a bunch of people who’d come from New York and it was easy. I was a secretary for a few months and then I found modeling work and then I was just in it. In the scene or whatever. But I got tired of rock and roll early. Those boys.”

It was the women who interested her. The girls and what they wore and what they meant by what they wore. A costume designer she knew asked her to outfit the ingénue in a movie — her “Edith Head moment” as she put it — and it led to more work of that sort. She took courses in pattern making, met with manufacturing contacts and other associates of Big Mort’s. In 1972, with a bank loan she could only secure with the co-signature of her husband or father, she opened a small shop on Sunset, the first Linda West boutique.

“You know what the big cosmic joke is, though? Here I am, Mort Weinstein’s prodigal daughter, back in the schmatte business, after all.”

She made it sound so easy. I filed away all of the names to look up later, names that might help me make sense of it all. Nathanael West, Edith Head, Mamaroneck.

“So, what about you? Lee tells me she’s bringing a friend home and that’s pretty much it. She doesn’t say a word about how lovely you are.”

I had been primed by Lee to see all of this as part of Linda’s shtick. But it didn’t matter. I was hers.

The next evening Linda had guests for dinner, a movie director and his girlfriend, a British actress in a witchy black dress. We sat out on Linda’s redwood porch, under eucalyptus trees strung with lanterns, overlooking a dark blue tiled pool. To my surprise, I didn’t feel abandoned and clingy when Lee and the actress, who had hit it off to the point of giggles, went for a swim, leaving me with Linda and the director. Maybe it was the wine I had been drinking all night. Maybe it was that I kept telling myself that the director, whose last movie I had gone to see twice because it beguiled me even though I didn’t really get it, couldn’t possibly be looking at me like he wanted to keep looking at me, in a filmic way, because that just wouldn’t happen, but wasn’t he? And when I allowed myself to ask him something about the Jungian aspect of a scene in one of his movies, he looked charmed. “Viv here is pretty brilliant, isn’t she?” he said to Linda, and she winked at me and I wasn’t a precocious child they had decided to patronize and laugh about later. I was brilliant. Bewitched.