Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Pound,” said my mother, who often grew doctrinaire in the face of social unease. “I believe it’s Ezra Pound. On literature.”

God. You couldn’t have just let that go?

“Oh, you’re right. Pound, Eliot. I’m always, like, whoever it was who didn’t like the Jews. But then, neither of them did? It gets confusing. That’s what Jesse wrote, though. News that stays news.”

“I know I had his first record,” said my father. “But I’m afraid I never really delved into the Jesse Parrish oeuvre. I liked that first one, though. With that cow on the cover? I never understood what that cow was doing there.”

“It was a field, Dad. The cow was just in the field.”

“I know, but was there supposed to be some kind of significance to it?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Some biblical allusion? Something about sacred cows? I’m free-associating here, but I wonder.”

Stop free-associating. Stop wondering. Just stop.

Linda jumped in. “Well, Jesse and I were staying at a place in the country and we went out walking and we walked and walked and we reached this pasture and there was this lonely cow just grazing and I always had my camera around my neck in those days and Jesse said, ‘Take a picture.’ So I did. It’s as simple as that. People have asked me about it for years, though, because if you look closely, it looks like the cow is kind of smiling.”

“A bovine Mona Lisa,” said my father.

“Yes! I got so lucky with that cow.”

“Mom,” said Lee.

“Mom? I got a ‘Mom’? I can’t remember the last time you called me Mom. It’s always Linda with you.”

“Can we talk about something other than you getting lucky with a cow?”

“Oh, my dear, sometimes I regret that I never went in for all that Emily Post stuff. I think I did us both a disservice.”

“I know what you mean,” said my mother. “I wasn’t very good about making my kids write thank-you notes and it haunts us to this day.” A lie. I’d never witnessed my mother lie like that, and it threw me. Not just because she was lying (she was on me about thank-you notes as soon as I could properly hold a pen), but because the lie effectively did so much work, expressing sympathy for Linda but ultimately defending Lee, and at my expense. I couldn’t immediately name the feeling that crept up on me, but on reflection, it seemed a lot like jealousy. I wanted my mother’s affection for myself.

“Lee is her father’s daughter,” said Linda. “She’s gonna do what she’s gonna do.” Ostensibly celebrating something irrepressible in Lee, Linda’s comment had an ugly undertone that seemed aimed at the table, a warning to all of us when it came to taking sides.

“Yes,” said Lee, “and right now I’m gonna get that waiter back here and order another bottle of wine.”

UNDER A CANOPYof trees the dirt lane from Flintwick’s compound led to a paved, sleepy road. We passed a barn and yellow and green fields that soon dipped down into a darker, cooler valley, shaded from the disappearing sun by the tall, dense pines of the Catskill preserve. Brown signs etched with yellow paint marked turnoffs for a campground, a waterfall, the trail head for a hike, until the forest cover thinned out again and we came to the two-lane route we’d taken in. Instead of turning right, which would take us back the way we came, Lee went left along the winding mountain road. Some scenic detour, I figured, to keep things going before we headed back to the city. She’d promised me a road trip, and I didn’t want to go home yet.

In the passenger seat, I leafed through a scrapbook Lee had been given by her aunt Delia, whom she’d gone to see in North Carolina a few months earlier on a fact-finding mission. Press clippings from a local paper and a copy of a page from his 1965 high-school yearbook picturing Jesse perched on a stool with his guitar, clean-cut in permanent-press pants and a crisp-collared, button-down shirt under a sport coat, his hair still short enough to be corralled into a stiff side sweep off his forehead. The caption beneath the photo: Jesse Parrish never fails to entertain!

“Delia told me that in his first band at boarding school, they played a dance at the girls’ academy nearby. His guitar went missing afterward and the headmistress found it a week later in one of the girl’s beds. He drove her to theft.”

“But he stole her heart.”

“It’s possible Delia made that story up. She’s sort of lucid and sort of bonkers. But I don’t know. Have you read the letter yet?”

Tucked in there was an envelope postmarked Los Angeles, May 27, 1970, containing this:

Dear Sis,

I hope this finds you as well as can be. I won’t go on with a thousand apologies for being out of touch, because you know how it goes. You’re as bad as I am. But I wanted to let you know that Linda and I got married. No society page announcements. A few of us on a beach down in Mexico. Tumbling surf and a light breeze and all that. Do you know it was the first time I’ve ever seen Linda nervous? Not that she said so. It was in her eyes. Just a flicker of a flash. I probably should have been nervous, too. It’s only right to be nervous in the face of something so cosmic. I can see you making a face, but it’s no joke. With Linda, it’s completely cosmic. It just fucking is.

When we got back to L.A., my wife (mah wife, yessir) set this writer friend of hers on me. I talked a whole lot to this lady and now I think I’m going to regret it. She reminds me of a matchstick. A twig, flat, flat, flat, and then up there at the top is her ignitable mind. I liked her intensity at first. Sort of clarifying, the appeal of someone who has your number. But then it got exhausting. She’s going to make a fool of me. She’s got this bright disdain. That’s her lens, and Linda and I are soft and ridiculous through it. Well, fine. We are soft and ridiculous. But not where it counts. I know where it counts. Here’s what I wonder. Does Patti Driggs ever feel anything when she listens to music? Anything other than a drive to explain it away? I don’t think she needs music to show her who she is. I don’t think she needs it to get through. I don’t think, for her, it’s like fucking, or even like a fucking cigarette. Gosh, you know there’s this health-nut drug dealer my manager is pals with and he’s always on me to quit smoking. He’ll come over with a loaf of yeast-free bread, some bottle of weird juice, and a bag of psilocybin mushrooms. But oh, those cigarettes have got to go, man! All right, now you can make your face.

Please take it easy, Del. Call or write when you can.

Yrs for yrs,

Jesse

I had never seen a letter of Jesse’s and I didn’t know why but out of all of it — the description of his wedding to Linda, his acute, knowing read of Patti Driggs — it was that “Gosh” of his that really brought him to life for me.

“Oh, I know,” said Lee. “You should hear Aunt Delia talk. It’s all ‘Gosh!’ and ‘Golly!’ It’s like no matter how fucked up things got, she never stopped being a well-mannered Southern belle. Maybe that’s what’s fucked up about her.”

“How is she fucked up, exactly?”

“Pretty much like the rest of the Parrishes were. In and out of places since she was seventeen. Substance abuse. Depression. Manic depression. They were all alcoholics, you know, on Jesse’s mother’s side. It’s kind of unbelievable. Like it’s almost too on the nose or something. I knew my father’s father shot himself when my dad was a kid. But I didn’t know how Southern Gothic it all was. Do you know what the family did? They had a party. Every year his mother’s mother threw herself a lavish birthday celebration at their home. But by home I mean mansion. This big white house on a lake among the pine trees. They would put up a tent for the evening — all elegant. So my grandfather kills himself and my great-grandmother just goes ahead and has her party as planned. Jesse and Delia were out there in their finest, watching everyone, their mother included, get progressively more hammered, until one of the servants came to take them inside to get ready for bed. Delia told me she and my dad didn’t know it was suicide until they were grown. Hunting accident, they were told. Delia is the only one left now. I never met any of the others. It doesn’t even seem real to me. But sometimes my father barely seems real to me. Which I guess is the whole point of this, right?”