Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

Linda catered to that customer, but only to a point, refusing to full-on frump it up. And Linda arrived there by a different path, signposts including the floating bias cuts of Madeleine Vionnet and the gauzy cover-ups for afternoons by a crystalline pool in L.A. No Virginia Woolf, no weekend matinees of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the American Repertory Theatre. My mother might have bought a Linda West dress and worn it to a wedding, but she wouldn’t have been caught dead in one at a wedding that Linda would attend.

The coppery shantung jacket she wore over a celadon sheath turned out to be a good choice, picking up the warm bronze of the brick walls, giving her a glow. Something Elena Sterling Rappoport might have in her wardrobe for a charity luncheon. But Linda was effortless and blasé in a slouchy cream silk top, wide-leg black trousers, and a black satin blazer. It made me think: Right, this is what one wears to a wedding in a foundry.

I had placed my mother in a humiliating position — the kind of quiet humiliation that might require a minute or two of deep breaths in a bathroom stall. The kind that had led to her concern about what one does and doesn’t do. I’d wanted her to be humiliated, just a little, because her bloom of anxiety reminded me of the perfecting impulse that overtook her whenever Lee had come to stay with us. That extra effort she made, the tajines and grapefruit-scented hand soap packaged to look as if it came from an apothecary, that only Lee occasioned. Linda came up to all of us and said, “What’s that you were saying about wild promise? Sounds like the name of the cheap perfume I used to douse myself in when I was a kid.” I caught a glimmer of embarrassment in my mother’s eye.

Linda took my mother’s hand and clasped it while performing a vaudevillian pantomime of disbelief: How did we get here? It seems like only yesterday I used to be a girl. Who knows where the time goes? Sunrise, sunset. Ah, life!

“Natalie,” she sighed.

“It’s lovely to see you, Linda.”

“Congratulations!” Another head shake. “ Right!? ” Linda gestured to me like an auto-show attendant presenting a much-anticipated new car model. She leaned in to kiss me and in an almost-whisper said, “Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.”

“Thank you. It’s Lee’s doing.”

“Yes, well, Lee’s very good with a makeup brush, but you can’t apply radiance like this.”

She had a way of telling you what you wanted to believe about yourself.

“Hello, Linda,” said my father, jumping out of whatever he’d been saying to Tim in order to jump in here. “You’re looking very dapper.”

Linda smiled. How silly he was — a well-meaning but confused man who never quite understood how to talk to women and certainly didn’t know anything about how they dressed.

But I think he knew exactly what he was saying. Linda’s outfit accentuated her femininity, but he made it seem as if she were a drag cabaret emcee or circus ringmaster. He had sensed my mother’s distress and come to her defense. They were comrades in arms. Strange that this should have surprised me. But it did. Like a secret passage — like what I had always taken for bookshelves was really a door to a room in our house where they would go. I could see them in there, after that Parents’ Weekend dinner, my mother reproaching my father for his Talmudic questions-begetting-questions act. My father saying he could do only so much to cover for her insecurities. They must have agreed on a strategy for the next time they would see Linda, the weekend Lee and I graduated from college. When the dinner plans fell through, when Linda had to fly out earlier than expected, I could tell they were relieved, though maybe a little disappointed, missing the opportunity to put some plan of theirs into action.

They would hash out certain terms in this room and then head back into the world, where all I saw was their adherence to those terms, not how they’d reached them. The adherence this evening: my mother attempting to mingle, my father lightly hugging Lee when he saw her, the first time since that Thanksgiving weekend, keeping a good two or three inches between their bodies but not a protesting-too-much distance. His coolness toward Linda. At the same time, he’d noticed what she was wearing, looked her over, taken her in.

“And you, Mr. Feld, do very nice things for that suit,” said Linda.

My mother was all patience. Linda was basically a glorified tailor, wasn’t she, and therefore qualified to make statements about the fit of garments.

“I love seeing all of us in our finery,” Linda added.

“You must be so used to it, though. Getting dressed up, going to galas and that kind of thing,” said my mother.

“Oh yeah, it’s all very run of the mill. I take absolutely no pleasure in it whatsoever.”

Neither of my parents had sharpened their wits quite enough to meet Linda’s sarcasm. My mother simply chuckled lightly, shifted the tone and said, “You must be Roy?” to the man who had been politely standing behind Linda. Edged out of the inner circle, like Nancy and Tim, who now looked a bit lost. They had expected to be the recipients of all the weird, rivalrous energy that my parents were directing toward Linda and in the absence of that, they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves.

I had met Roy a couple of times. Linda had started seeing him when Lee was still a child. Roy wasn’t the first boyfriend Linda had after Jesse, but Lee never got to know the others. One night when she was eight, she heard what sounded like muffled hyperventilation and, concerned, got out of bed. Out by the pool she found one of these men going down on her mother. She didn’t yet know what that meant, didn’t know those words for it, but she stood there long enough to grasp the mechanics of it, though not long enough for Linda or the man to see her. Lee encountered another man in the kitchen one morning who made her breakfast. “What, you don’t know? You gotta mix some butter in the syrup and then you dip that bacon in there! That’s how it’s done.” Then he looked at her and said, “Shit, you’re like a little Jesse, man. It’s like Jesse’s watching. I can’t do this.” Lee said, “Do what?” He said, “Keep fucking your mom.” Lee never saw him again. Roy was the only one who seemed at all capable of being a father figure. Lee never caught Roy and Linda in the act, and she decided this was due to Roy’s discretion and regard for her welfare because it couldn’t possibly be due to Linda’s.

Lee had told me that Roy was always costumed — suede jacket with arm fringe in back-in-the-day photos, mutton chops and Western wear around the time Linda met him; ponytail and desert boots for a while there in the nineties — never merely dressed. This evening he seemed to be going for International Architect just back from Berlin. Dark suit, dark shirt, no tie, angular glasses, close-cropped receding hair.

My parents exchanged introductions with Roy, neglecting to include Nancy and Tim, who stood there looking on, as though they had forgotten they didn’t have to stand there and be excluded.

“So, Roy, if memory serves, you’re a television producer?” my father asked.

“That’s right. I’m essentially retired now, though.”

“Would I have seen one of your shows?”

“Possibly,” said Roy. “Did you own a TV in the eighties and like poorly paced ensemble comedies?”

“Oh Roy, come on,” said Linda. “He practically transformed the medium.”

Roy hailed a server carrying a tray of seared tuna on sesame thins.

I didn’t know all that much about Linda and Roy’s relationship, but I imagine it’s emasculating to be the man who knows he can never be loved like Jesse and be willing to stick around nonetheless.