Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

There are so many places I could begin, but I’ll start here: a message from her, after three years of no contact, suggesting we get together at a diner just off Broadway that occupied the first floor of a shabby hotel whose art deco exterior shrank into the blinking spectacle of Times Square. It had, at one time, been our meet-in-the-middle spot. Cream-colored walls with ornate white and gold scrollwork rose to a high, chandeliered ceiling, a baroque confection interrupted — bluntly, commercially — by the movable-letter menu board and mirrored panels above the Formica counter. This place had never been legendary enough to be haunted. The effect of being there was less akin to stirring up a ghost than discovering a likable layer of old wallpaper. Safe to say the food was the culinary equivalent of that wallpaper. So why had we kept coming here even after we moved to different neighborhoods and got new jobs? It was a remnant of another, long-gone New York. We never wondered who we might see or want to impress, never worried whether we were getting the best of the best. We knew we weren’t.

I showed up first, of course. Sitting in a booth, staring at my phone as if it had important things to tell me. But I was much more interested in the door. Then, through slanting May sunlight, I caught her before she could see me. First thought: You can duck down and hide, there’s still time! Second thought: She looks good, objectively, as always, better than you, but you know, she doesn’t look that much better than you. God, this really is like meeting an old lover. And then she saw me and there was nothing to do but wave.

She wore a black T-shirt and jeans, her light brown hair pulled up in a pile, a few lanky pieces framing her face. No makeup, no jewelry except for that agate slice ring of her father’s, which she never took off. Faint circles around her eyes alluded to light vices like coffee and cigarettes. Or no, nicotine gum. From the distance of a few yards, there might be nothing distinctive about Lee Parrish, nothing you could put your finger on, and yet, if she were to walk into a room, you would notice her. And if you were with her, I’d always thought, you could walk into any room.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi-eeee!” That extra syllable of mine should have squealed itself into a hug. I almost got up, she almost leaned in, but we settled instead for uncertain smiles. She sat and didn’t say much and though I didn’t want to be the one to keep talking, on I went. What a beautiful morning it was. How good she looked. How long had it been? I knew very well how long it had been.

“I’m sorry I was so out of touch,” she said.

I had reminded myself on the way here that I had a spine and that I should straighten it. Don’t be so conciliatory, don’t jump on the first apology.

“A lot can happen in three years.”

Lee nodded but didn’t ask me to elaborate, the assumption being that while a lot could happen in three years, not all that much probably had. It irked me, mostly because it felt true. I’d been anticipating this moment ever since I opened the email she’d sent two weeks earlier (to an account now primarily collecting shipping notifications and offers to connect with local Christians). I had often wondered about Lee. There were women who looked like her from the back, on the subway, on the street, tall and slender, with her long hair, her self-possession, but none of them was ever her. I believed that if something momentous or terrible had happened to her, I would have felt it telepathically somehow. There would have been a sign — a stopped clock, a big black bird falling to the sidewalk right in front of me. Nothing like this ever happened, though. She had moved back to New York, she wrote, from Los Angeles, and was working, if I could believe it, for her mother. She would love to see me.

“I brought you something.” She handed me a Linda West gift bag. “For the summer. Totally shapeless but kind of exactly what you want to wear when the air is sticking to you.”

“Not very body con.”

“No, body uncon.”

She seemed to be waiting for a clever rejoinder, a quickness we used to have. I wasn’t coming up with anything though. I was out of practice. Would I earn a laugh? Why did I have to earn anything? I just thanked her.

Linda West, Lee’s mother, designed expensive, loose-fitting, expertly draped separates for women in search of some strategic coverage, a category of clothing that once belonged to my future and increasingly to my now. Linda West had a flagship in each major metropolis, and in any quaint town populated by sometime-city-dwellers who placed a premium on homemade jam, there was always a shop, often run by a woman in hammered silver jewelry, that carried the Linda West line.

“If I ask you how you feel about gauchos, we can expense this.”

“How is Linda? Do you like working for her?”

“Linda would say I’m not working for her, I’m working for myself. But you know, she also likes to trot out the idle hands are the devil’s workshop line and tell you how she basically lived in the devil’s workshop one summer in the south of France and if you’ve seen one orgy you’ve seen them all.”

“Sure.”

“But, honestly, I do like working for her. Odd as it sounds. I’ve got a head for business apparently.”

Our waitress appeared and took our omelet orders. I thought about getting French toast, a bowl of borscht — something that said: You can’t disappear, stop getting back to me, then turn up and expect everything to be exactly the same. The thing is, I wanted an omelet.

“I’ve got some time off, actually,” Lee continued. “I’m planning on taking a road trip. I’m going upstate for a few days.”

“Sounds nice.”

She picked up the little tin pitcher of milk on our table but didn’t pour any into her coffee.

“Would you want to come with me?”

“Just like that?” My voice rose an octave and I hated it. “Like I can just pick up and go. Like I’ve just been sitting around waiting for you to drop back into my utterly uneventful life.” Her gaze fell to her scalloped paper placemat, perhaps to hide the question in her eyes: Haven’t you? I’d been thinking she must have had some news to tell me. I hadn’t expected this invitation and I wanted to be someone who was more angry than curious. Someone who wasn’t simply flattered to be asked. Not someone who saw that Haven’t you? and mostly thought Yes. But when Lee looked up, that question had vanished, if it had been there at all. In its place was regret.

“No, not just like that. I didn’t mean — I’m sorry.” She paused. “I’m going upstate because Charlie Flintwick lives there. I got in touch with him because I’m trying to find the tapes. I was hoping you would help me.”

The tapes. The last, lost tapes of Jesse Parrish. One of the mysteries attendant to her father’s puzzling and premature death, only enhancing his cult status. The legend that illuminated Lee and enshrouded her. It was one of the first things you knew about her, because someone always whispered, That’s Jesse Parrish’s daughter. Lee’s father had been only thirty-one years old — four years younger than Lee now — when he was killed in a car crash. Already at that age he’d been famous, then washed up, then on the verge of new success. Every few years, the publication of a Jesse Parrish biography, the release of a documentary, a tribute album, or, most recently, a remastered box set with a bonus live performance disc caused renewed speculation about the fate of his final recording sessions. A number of theories had been put forth over the years. Maybe the tapes had been in the trunk and were destroyed, perhaps intentionally, along with the totaled car. Maybe his girlfriend — Marion Washington, generally painted as the fucked-up groupie who did nothing to stop his deterioration — was furious with Jesse over something trivial and had trashed the tapes. Maybe Marion told him this while they were arguing in the car just before he drove them both off the road, leaving her in a three-week coma and with no memory of the accident. Maybe the tapes, secure in their cases, were simply swiped from the recording studio — but by whom? If the recordings had survived, they should have surfaced by now.