into which Jesse Parrishâs car had fallen. Over the years his fans had consecrated the site with flowers and plaques and a bulletin board erected between two trees on which were affixed poems, letters, and laminated drawings. Among the least weather-beaten additions were an original sketch of Jesse ascending to heaven on a rainbow, and a charcoal drawing of Jesse snuggling two kittens, signed âwith love from Angie,â a passport-size picture of the artist attached. Angie looked to be about forty-five.
The shrine was both touching and embarrassing. People had loved him so much, and still did, but it was an adolescent love, narcissistic and showy. It was hard not think that the love reduced and diminished its object, and the object of worship wasnât magnificent enough to withstand kittens and middle age.
âIâve seen this place in pictures and I never thought Iâd care to see it in person,â said Lee. âIn Paris once, I was walking through the Montparnasse cemetery, just to walk through it, and I saw Serge Gainsbourgâs grave. It had all these metro tickets on it and packs of Gitanes that people brought. A couple of heads of cabbage because of that song he wrote. It was kind of lively, celebratory. But this place always just seemed mawkish. Why do people do this? Maybe itâs because my dad doesnât have a grave. But people go out to the desert, too, where Linda scattered his ashes. Itâs strange. I feel like thereâs this character Linda West, and then thereâs my mother, thereal person I know. As real as you can get. With my father, though, I have only what everyone else has. These people, Angie or whoever, these people know him better than I do.â
âThatâs not true.â
âI have a few memories. I have âYours.â But even thatâs not really mine.â The waltz-like song Jesse had written for Lee had become a commonplace father-daughter dance at a certain kind of weddingâthe wedding that didnât want to be a wedding but was a wedding nonetheless. I always figured Lee had her own interpretation of the lyrics âyou and the sun and the sun in your eyes.â But here it was, represented rather literallyâa big sun in place of a pupil in a folkarty painting embellished with glitter glue and coated in shellac. Craning for a closer look, I lost my balance and started to slip down the incline before scrambling up. The patch of ground was precarious, falling off sharply, a testament of devotion on the part of the memorial pilgrims.
Lee saw me stumble and quickly moved to help me to my feet. We stood there, gazing down. Thereâs no good ravine to accidentally take a header into, but this one was especially dicey and unforgiving. If you were looking for an out, it would likely get the job done. Lee had never told me what she thought about the crash, if she believed it was an accident or if she thought her father had purposefully pulled the steering wheel hard to the left and accelerated. Like his father, in spirit, before him. In any case, there was no question he was intoxicated.
Maybe we were thinking the same thing.
âI do have his genes, though. Itâs encoded in me.â
âYou canât think that way. You arenât your father.â
âIâm not saying Iâm going to kill myself, Viv. If thatâs even what he did. The tapes are like a big hole. I donât know what they wouldfill in, but something. In all the shit you can read about my dad, they talk about his breakdown like it was this isolated thing. They never really talk about him struggling with an undiagnosed illness. But you canât meet Delia and come away thinking he was fine, fine, fine, then lost it one day, and then was fine again. I donât want to romanticize it, but I want to feel closer to his experience of it, to know if my experience is anything like his. Because those tendencies certainly donât come
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