Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Linda, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Fuck you,” she said. “Fucking fuck this.” She stood up, disgusted, mostly with herself. She wiped her face, smoothed her hair, put her dress on (she was still in Marion’s one-piece), quietly got in her car and started driving. She looked in her rearview mirror to see if he was following her. Nobody was following her. What a fool she was. Patti Driggs was right after all. Patti Driggs was so smart. Patti Driggs was the smartest fucking person who ever fucking lived.

From the road, she could see what looked like a welcoming place to stay the night. A ski lodge in the off-season, golden light emanating from its long glass windows. Like an Alpine chalet. Something out of a Swiss or Austrian holiday she had yet to take. She had envisioned, wrongly, it turned out, lots of blond, knotted wood. Like the movie version of Women in Love when the two couples go to Innsbruck. She hadn’t read the book (Jesse had) but she loved Alan Bates. She would see anything he was in. Alan Bates. She wondered why their paths hadn’t crossed yet. Isn’t that what happened when you moved in famous circles? If their paths did cross, if she could make them cross, she wondered what her chances would be with him. Fifty-fifty? Sixty-forty? Eighty-twenty, because of what you heard about him liking men? What was this kind of thinking? It was Big Mort and his gambling buddies turning life into probabilities.

Her room at the Women in Love ski lodge, with its thin blue carpet and pink walls, didn’t look Austrian or Swiss. Less Alan Bates, more Norman Bates. It made her hesitant to take a shower. Water down the dark drain, Janet Leigh’s eye. Bernard Herrmann. Stab, stab, stab. But she had to wash this day off her. Pulling the Mexican dress over her head, she felt her bare neck. She’d left Big Mort’s pendant on the dresser at Flintwick’s. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn’t go back there. Not now. Jesse would think she’d left it on purpose. Quite frankly, she was surprised she hadn’t left it there on purpose. She would have to ask Jesse to send it to her. Or she would have to ask her lawyer to ask his lawyer to send it to her.

She sat on the bed in her towel, combing her wet hair. She pulled a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from her travel bag. She realized how hungry she was. In the dining room of the lodge they had candles in little glass hurricane lamps on each table. Dark wooden chairs with spindled backs. White tablecloths. A large chandelier hanging from the center of the sloped ceiling. There was one family in there, on the other side of the room, a mother and father and a boy and girl. Her instinct wasn’t to nod to the adults, parent to parent, but to look to the children, as though she were a child herself. And she didn’t immediately comprehend why the waiter held her gaze for an extra beat. Had she done something wrong? Oh. Oh, that. Because she wasn’t a child, after all. She wasn’t going to sleep with him, but he had something, this waiter. Some freshness about him that reminded her of her past. She finished her steak, her peas and potatoes. She left a generous tip. Then she got in her car and drove to Hirschman’s.

Nobody had removed the L-shaped arrow sign atop a stanchion that signaled the turn-off. The gothic lettering gave it a Sherwood Forest vibe. At the end of the road she reached a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate. It wasn’t too hard to climb over. Clearly people had done it before her, while carrying six packs. All of the old buildings still stood, though windows had been broken. Graffiti scrawled in places. She found the indoor pool, which had been so magnificent once. Titan-sized, glittering and aquamarine. Big Mort took a personal pride in the fact that he could take his family to a place with a pool like that. Linda could smirk at the activities, the talent shows, the fleshy women and the balding men, but she couldn’t deny her father the beauty of that pool. A moldering, empty ruin now.

Linda walked around the grounds, back behind the bunks where the kitchen staff had stayed, up along a path to a small clearing among the pines where she would go to fool around with Robert. She sat down on a log that had been worn smooth by all the boys and girls who had fumbled with each other here, summer after summer. And then, when it started to rain and it was getting too dark to see, she headed back to her car. She stuck herself in the driver’s seat as the rain pelted down and she cried. She reached in her purse for the bottle of pills she had found in Flintwick’s medicine cabinet and taken with her. Just in case. But she didn’t have anything to wash them down with. She could cup enough rain in her hands, though, to take one of the pills. So why not. It would get her back to the lodge, where there was a glass and a sink and where she could easily swallow the rest.

Only one road, if you didn’t count dirt lanes and old trails, would get you from Hirschman’s back to the Women in Love lodge. It ran through the tiny town where Flintwick lived, becoming a main drag for a few blocks, the length maybe of two football fields. The rain had let up, leaving behind a wet sheen on the Victorians and two-story brick buildings, a bar on the corner with a neon sign in the window. Next to the bar was a gravel parking lot overrun with weeds, and the two pickup trucks that had pulled in there made the green GTO all the more noticeable. Jesse’s car. Not his beloved 1967 silvery Corvette Stingray, still in their garage in California, but the one he’d been driving out here. She slowed when she saw the car. Maybe she should just go in and talk to Jesse, tell him she forgot her necklace at Flintwick’s (Though why did it matter, at this bottle-of-pills point, if she had it or not?). This was a public place and that would keep her calm; despite how she might seem, she wasn’t one for making a scene. Well, maybe in L.A., but not here, not now, not after the scene she’d already made in Flintwick’s living room. But would he think she was crazy, showing up as if she’d followed him? Didn’t he already think she was crazy?

She sat in her idling car, so immobilized by her thoughts that it took her a moment to notice that two people had walked out of the bar and were standing on the otherwise empty sidewalk. Two lovers, from the way they stood, his arms around her waist. A mist had risen in the night air, making the picture all the more romantic. She watched them in a kind of trance, even as she realized the woman was Marion and that Marion was leaning into the man who Linda didn’t immediately recognize as her husband but rather as Jesse Parrish. They were leaning against the car in the parking lot when some instinct finally prompted Linda to step on the gas and disappear before they detected her.

She drove unthinkingly because her thoughts belonged to another Linda who wasn’t even in this car but was somewhere else, maybe in Robert Rothman’s car. Or Big Mort’s. The streetlights of the town came to an end and the road turned back into the rural route that led to Flintwick’s and, beyond, the Women in Love lodge. Marion and Jesse must have been behind her on this dark, lonely road that she knew so well. Everything was different shades of darkness: the trees lining the ravine to her left, the rock face that rose on her right. She pulled over to what could barely pass for a shoulder, got out of her car, and walked onto the blacktop, a thin fog encircling her legs. Something held her in place. She couldn’t move and the headlights coming toward her grew brighter until they were blinding, the inverse of the pitch-black nights she had loved. All she could hear was the blaring of a horn, so much sound that it was almost no sound. The sensations were so extreme they became their opposites. It was that feeling of walking barefoot, as a child, on the asphalt driveway of the house in Mamaroneck, on the hottest day of summer; how it felt cold before it burned. She thought it would end this way. Hoped it would. But then the light vanished and the wailing stopped and she was still there in the road. No longer standing, though. She was down on the wet ground and pushed herself up. The guardrail that had been there a moment ago was torn away, and she stood in the empty space, looking out into the ravine, at what had once been a car. A marriage. A life.