Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

Transfixed by the photos, I almost forgot to be angry with Lee.

“Wait,” said Lee, pointing to an object on the dresser Marion was leaning against. A chain with a pendant, a narrow silver bar about an inch long. The way the light caught it, I could make out the Hebrew letter shin engraved along the top. “That’s Big Mort’s.”

“He gave it to Jesse?” I asked.

“No, no, no. Big Mort gave it to my mom when she left New York for L.A.”

“Maybe Jesse had it for a while?”

“I don’t think so. Linda wears it all the time. I think she must have been there. These were taken the day he died?”

Carnahan stepped forward and made a show of exhaling. “Yes,” he said. “Tangled web?” Kara gazed out at the undulating waves, going for a troubled Bergmanian gloom but reminding me of the blonde in ABBA. Neither of them seemed to understand that we had just awakened something dormant, something we had mistaken for the ground before it started to move beneath us.

THE CLOSELY SETcottages, patchy grass, and power lines of what Carnahan had referred to as “America” came into view at the end of his circuitous private drive. In the car the giddy shiver of a narrow escape came over me. But Lee didn’t want to feel that thrill with me or talk about what had just happened. “I’ll take you to the train station now,” she said with cold focus.

“Lee.”

“What? You don’t want to be involved. I get it.”

“But I am involved. So, what are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

“I’m going to look for Marion Washington, for real.”

She’d tried to find her months before, she explained, without success but also without much urgency. According to the Internet, Marion didn’t exist after 1978. She had never spoken publicly about those last days with Jesse. She didn’t remember any of it, is how the story went. Vilified and with a chunk of her life lost, she disappeared from the public eye.

But maybe she did remember. Not what happened to the tapes but something else, such as what Linda was doing at Flintwick’s that day. We didn’t have enough leverage to make Linda talk, and clearly leverage was what was needed. There I was — using words like “leverage” and “we.”

I wouldn’t be getting on that train.

“Lee, let me help.”

“I’ll probably have to hire a private investigator or something.”

“Maybe. But maybe not.” We were twenty-five miles away from our alma mater and its extensive network of archives and databases. Twenty-five miles away, it dawned on me, from Patti Driggs.

“Why would she want to talk to me? She hates Linda. Besides, what would she even know?”

“Isn’t it possible she might have a clue as to Marion’s whereabouts?”

“Won’t that be weird for you?”

“Because I dated her son for a few months eight years ago? I never even met her.”

Lee decided it was worth a shot.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. As if there was no question. As if I didn’t then take out my phone and reread the message Andy had sent me, start to reply, and delete every inadequate attempt. I’d been doing that with him, in one way or another, for months. Years, even. I couldn’t do it anymore.

“Lee, I need you to pull over. I have to call Andy.”

OUR WEDDING VOWShad mentioned responsibility. How it was inseparable from loss. It had a heaviness to it and this was its finest quality. If you didn’t feel its weight, you didn’t have enough to lose. But Andy and I hadn’t exactly written that part of our vows. We’d cribbed it from Frank, lines he’d written for the show that were unexpectedly beautiful. (“You distract them with campy hijinks and people think the poignancy comes out of nowhere,” Frank had said. “But it never comes out of nowhere.”) Was it a cop-out, I’d asked Andy? No, he didn’t think so. He didn’t think it was cheating. It was, he added, a nice way to honor Frank, even. To be honest, I don’t remember the wording of our vows, only that they made me feel giving and loved and expectant, that we were about to make our lives that much larger. That we would each take care of the other. I should have committed those words to memory. I should have known them still by heart.

There was a lot I didn’t remember about our wedding. It came back to me in flashes and out-of-sequence moments. Andy and me, alone in a room just after the ceremony, Andy biting into an apple, a post-match victory snack, like orange slices at a junior-high soccer game. My father’s guiding hand on my back, his other hand in mine as we danced. The Hasidic frenzy of the hora, an injection of shtetl into our modern marriage. My brother’s elegance in raising his glass for a toast. Kirsten presenting a bare, highly toned upper arm to Frank, and Frank, in his deadest of deadpans, saying: “Cardiofunk?” Jack Caprico giving me a congratulatory kiss on the cheek by way of introduction. How it lingered because of the full, bristly beard he’d grown for his run as Trigorin in a production of The Seagull. Lingered, too, because it was stupefying. All I could think was: Jack Caprico touched me. Later I would see, out of the corner of my eye, Jack Caprico talking to a tall, clean-shaven man in a lowly lit alcove, Jack Caprico doing most of the work and Andy, the tall, clean-shaven man, graciously listening but not working for anything and it would make me so proud. I would also see Andy talking to Lee, the two of them out in the courtyard, and it occurred to me that the last time I had seen them together like that, paying that kind of attention to each other, was in college. The feeling it gave rise to was akin to jealousy, if jealousy was a comfort.

My parents were talking with Nancy and Tim Elliott, Andy’s mother and father. Admitting to each other how excited but nervous they had each been. My mother confessed to breathing easier now that she could see how beautifully it was coming off. She’d had her doubts earlier, as their town car crossed the East River on the way to the venue.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the view of Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in all its wild promise. But I’m afraid what you see when you head in the other direction is, well, not quite so promising.”

Nancy nodded and smiled considerately, either at a loss as to how to follow up or because she was too kind to acknowledge my mother’s stiff pretensions. Small talk had never been my mother’s strong suit, and she often left it to my father. You could say that she was too introverted for it, that she found it uncomfortable and wasn’t a very good fake with people she didn’t know particularly well. You could also say this made her socially demanding, that she failed to understand how accommodating and how generous conversational inconsequentiality could be. That sometimes, especially if you had a sparkling drink in your hand, you could talk about traffic or even a feat of urban engineering without referencing its literary pedigree.

She had steadily, strangely pecked away at our wedding plans ever since Andy and I had started making them. “What does one wear to a wedding in a foundry in Queens?” she had asked. I hadn’t wanted to dignify her remark with a response, to explain that the foundry was an impeccably renovated nineteenth-century industrial space now used for parties. That we weren’t trying to be aggressively unconventional or challenging in our choice, that many people had hosted lovely events here before. But what does one wear to a wedding in an old Long Island City foundry if most of one’s clothes converge along a Cambridge-Wellfleet-Tanglewood axis? That bohemian school-marm look of dressy shawls and velvet in the winter, linen sacks in the summer, shoes with sensible soles. A way of dressing much influenced by the designs of Linda West, come to think of it.