Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

Big Mort hadn’t said, “I told you so.” Neither had Mom. So she had to hand it to them. Jesse might as well have been from another planet. When she announced her plans to marry Jesse, Big Mort said, “So he’s a good old boy, huh? A good old goy is more like it!” But he hadn’t forbidden the marriage or threatened to disown her. Was it any wonder he loved Fiddler on the Roof so much? Temperamentally, was there ever a character more like her father than Tevye? If Linda were the type who chose to settle for the butcher, stay in the village, and cling to tradition, would Big Mort have loved her as much? Lori had married a lawyer, moved two towns away into a four-bedroom split-level, and produced two precocious grandchildren who regularly came over for Friday night dinners. Her father loved Lori, but not as much as he loved Linda.

“Life will go on,” Big Mort had said when he first heard about their separation. And hearing that had made Linda feel surprisingly better, albeit briefly. She still had her youth, sort of. She was (only?) thirty. Having Lee hadn’t destroyed her body. A few thin, translucent stretch marks on her hips. Breasts still in good shape. Lee. Had she really not thought of her until just then? And in this way? Terrible, terrible mother. She was going to be mature about this. For her daughter’s sake. She would let Jesse go, be a grown-up (but remind her, what was so great about being a grown-up?). Whatever they became to each other, she and Jesse would at least have to be two parents on good terms. Perhaps this would be what finally turned them into parents. Linda still hadn’t gotten entirely used to identifying herself as a “parent.” Sometimes she couldn’t believe she was allowed to be a mother. You needed to pass a test in order to drive a car, for God’s sake, but not to raise another human being.

Life would go on, as Big Mort said, but not the life she wanted. So here she was, hoping to win Jesse back. To make him realize where he belonged. She could have picked up the phone first, but her impulsiveness and her immoderate heart had propelled her here instead. She hadn’t really understood about Marion, though. Hadn’t underestimated her so much as totally and mistakenly discounted her. She had assumed Marion was for Jesse what various men had been for her: a way to pass time. She hadn’t considered her a rival. Not until Marion came to the door when Linda arrived at Flintwick’s, flustering her. Gorgeous Marion. Linda expected to see her in one of those spaghetti-strapped terry-cloth jumpers, no bra. But no. She wore a trim button-down shirt tucked into jeans. Oh and wasn’t Marion so mature herself, welcoming Linda inside so calmly and cordially. Not putting on adult airs, but an honest-to-God adult, if such a thing existed anymore. Fuck maturity. Really now, couldn’t Jesse have answered the door himself? Couldn’t Marion have exiled herself from the house for this?

“Hey, Linda,” he had said. Like the song he’d written, “Hey, Linda,” only it came out sounding tired. Instead of playful and flirtatious (as it did in the first chorus) or beseeching and desirous (in the second). “Come on in. You look pretty.” Why did those words, which he’d said to her so many times before, and which were the truth (she did look pretty, she knew it) now leave her feeling humiliated? They seemed to strip her of her power.

How easy it had been when they first met. She had been living with a boyfriend, another musician, a more famous one, they had thrown a party, and Jesse had cornered her in the kitchen. The next day he came back for her. Within a week she had moved in with him. Romance (if that was the word for it) had until then been easy for her. She hadn’t been one for long and messy goodbyes. She had always been the one who left. But she couldn’t leave Jesse. She believed they belonged to each other. She didn’t know how not to be with him. Their time apart had merely been a pause. Jesse, however, didn’t seem to know that he still belonged to her.

Jesse and Marion were planning to go for a swim and there was something about this place, Flintwick’s libertine fantasies in the form of a house, that led Linda to think it was the most natural thing to join them. That’s what you do with your husband and your husband’s groupie at a place like this. Marion even had a swimsuit she could borrow. A blue maillot with red stripes. She changed and in the process, snagged her dress on the pendant that hung around her neck, Big Mort’s pendant, which he gave to her when she went to California. A gift that had made it seem less like she was running away and more like she was taking an extended field trip with her parents’ permission, but she wore it all the time. She tugged too hard to free her dress and the clasp broke, so she left the necklace in a little pile on a bedroom dresser.

There was a photographer there, too. His very presence, there in that Adirondack chair, made Linda vain, to the point where she wondered how he could keep from turning his lens on her, how he wasn’t compelled by her beauty — not as a man but as an artist. Once he got his camera out, he didn’t seem at all interested in getting her in the frame. His focus was Jesse, which was fine, but it killed Linda when Jesse asked for Marion in some of the shots and this Haseltine guy didn’t see anything wrong with that. He was happy to oblige. She was expected to sit it out unnoticed. Not for her. She made her way over to the studio and that’s where Jesse found her, by the mixing board, looking through scraps of paper, lyrics, musical notations, in his handwriting.

“Let’s talk, Linda,” he said. So up she went with him to the house, where he poured her a glass of expensive red from Flintwick’s wine cellar. Jeez, this place. The living room — draped in velvet, elk antlers on the wall — looked like a cross between an opium den and a hunting lodge. She had no doubt Flintwick had decorated it himself. They raised their glasses to their absent host. Marion made it easier on her by heading back down to the lake, betraying no insecurities whatsoever, as though safe in the knowledge that when she returned, it would all be over. The nerve.

Linda and Jesse had married in Mexico. Jesse’d had a small part playing himself in a film being shot there, and they had stayed on for a few weeks afterward. Linda hadn’t invited her family because — could you imagine Big Mort and Mom and Lori turning up there? They were mutually exclusive, the Weinsteins and sleepy Mexican beach towns. She tried to be nonchalant and breezy about it (“Barely even a wedding, you didn’t miss much, there were no caterers”) but she knew that cowardice and avoidance were at the root of her behavior. Jesse knew this too, which was one of the reasons she had married him. He took her seriously enough to be perceptive about her. The absence of her family worried her, especially at the end of the ceremony, which was not at all Jewish and did not include the ritual breaking of the glass. In that moment a pang of fear struck her heart for the world she was choosing to live in and what lay ahead of her. Then Jesse swept her into his arms and whispered “I love you more than anything, Linda,” and the sound of the ocean evened everything out.

But then, she got her broken glass after all, the shards on Flintwick’s floor like some sad, contorted echo of what she had missed on her wedding day. She hadn’t even wanted a wedding day, not like other girls did. But her love for Jesse had domesticated her.

They had started talking, about his record and about Lee. Then she had asked him and then pleaded with him to come home and he said he couldn’t. “Home,” he said, as if it were a philosophical concept he’d struggled to comprehend and given up on, confused. As if he were playing dumb with a fucking interviewer. He wanted a divorce. So she threw her glass at him (she missed) and then she took two more from a liquor cabinet and hurled them at the stone fireplace. Jesse just stood there, infuriatingly unmoved. He didn’t even try to restrain her while she flailed against him, so that it might turn into an embrace. She had to embrace herself, slipping to the floor, pulling her knees to her chest, crying into her fists.