The Sun in Your Eyes

The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro Page B

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Authors: Deborah Shapiro
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into which Jesse Parrish’s 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 “with love from Angie,” 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 wasn’t magnificent enough to withstand kittens and middle age.
    â€œI’ve seen this place in pictures and I never thought I’d care to see it in person,” said Lee. “In Paris once, I was walking through the Montparnasse cemetery, just to walk through it, and I saw Serge Gainsbourg’s 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 it’s because my dad doesn’t have a grave. But people go out to the desert, too, where Linda scattered his ashes. It’s strange. I feel like there’s this character Linda West, and then there’s 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€œThat’s not true.”
    â€œI have a few memories. I have ‘Yours.’ But even that’s not really mine.” The waltz-like song Jesse had written for Lee had become a commonplace father-daughter dance at a certain kind of wedding—the wedding that didn’t want to be a wedding but was a wedding nonetheless. I always figured Lee had her own interpretation of the lyrics “you and the sun and the sun in your eyes.” But here it was, represented rather literally—a 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. There’s 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.
    â€œI do have his genes, though. It’s encoded in me.”
    â€œYou can’t think that way. You aren’t your father.”
    â€œI’m not saying I’m going to kill myself, Viv. If that’s even what he did. The tapes are like a big hole. I don’t 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 can’t meet Delia and come away thinking he was fine, fine, fine, then lost it one day, and then was fine again. I don’t 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 don’t come

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