Free The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro Page A

grilled kabobs and slid open a glass door to a musty interior. “After you.” He motioned to a massive L-shaped sectional, upholstered inblack velvet, positioned around a squat jade table on which sat two heavy brass candelabra. On the wall behind him was a gun rack loaded with antique rifles and a bayonet. The fine layer of dust on the lamp shades and their ornate bases, resting on end tables, did little to dispel an actively carnal atmosphere. The room of a country squire who sidelined in pornography. It must have looked about the same the last time Jesse Parrish saw it.
    â€œI used to think all this kept me young,” he said. “But now it’s the opposite. I feel preserved. Jellied. The world is Dorian Gray and I’m its grotesque, aging portrait.” He took up a kabob in each hand, like antennae, pointing the skewers toward us. “What can I get you to drink?”
    I was coming to understand that I was in the awkward stage of the first trimester, when, if you don’t want to announce it, you need an excuse for not drinking socially. Antibiotics sounds like you’ve just come from a round of swab work at your ob/gyn. A polite refusal, much like fainting, only incites suspicion. If there was a tactful dodge, I didn’t know it. I was relieved when Lee asked for a seltzer. Flintwick pulled back a lacquered door to a wet bar, fixed glasses for us, then sat down across from Lee, staring at her with pleasure and fondness.
    â€œForgive me. I’m ogling. I didn’t anticipate how vividly you would resemble your parents. I can remember your father sitting in that very spot. It’s like time stopped. Or folded back in on itself. Like my old abdomen.”
    Lee laughed and then sank into the sofa, granting him the favor of looking at her. You could write Flintwick off as a buffoonish slob, but that would be to ignore the fact that he cultivated his buffoonery. Flintwick was like a land mass that had seen whole populations come and go. He had provided for certain tribes whoknew how to tend him. If you recognized his gifts, he would yield something.
    â€œI’d like to help, but I don’t know what I can tell you that I haven’t said already, about that time or those recordings.”
    â€œI thought if you could tell me about those last days in a new light maybe some detail would emerge. Or maybe I’d just get to know my father a little better.”
    â€œWell, it’s hard to know why certain people take hold of you. Jesse wasn’t alone in what he did. He wasn’t exactly a pioneer or one of a kind. Yet here we are. When you called me, I thought, Why not? Let’s see how Jesse and Linda’s girl turned out.”
    â€œDid you know my mother well?”
    â€œEverybody knew Linda. But I knew Linda from way back in New York. Before she’d even finished high school. Before she moved to L.A. and changed her name. I knew Linda Weinstein.”
    Flintwick had known the fast girl for whom New York was too slow. It gave you the impression that life was long, that one can have many incarnations. I found myself, for the first time, laying my hand on my lower abdomen. As inconspicuously as I could.
    â€œBack then,” Flintwick was saying, “I was something of an impresario. Promoting parties, promoting bands, promoting myself. Linda was always hanging around in those days and, oddly, when I looked at her I didn’t see a girl who I could take to bed. I saw myself. I should have gone into business with her. She was all of eighteen. But I pitied the guys who just wanted her for sex because they had no idea what they were getting into. I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear these things about your mother. You came here to talk about your father, after all.”
    â€œHe spent his last days here,” said Lee. “I thought I would feel his presence or something, being here.”
    â€œAnd you don’t?”
    â€œI don’t