Summer Hours

by Amy Mason Doan

  Triptych: Grownups/Suspended Animation. Serra Indrijo. Urethane, plastics, and paper. $800

  I leave the museum and head down Bancroft, debating between affixing the placard to the triptych or slipping it inside Serra’s card. I’ll ask Eric which he thinks would be more fun for Serra.

  But when I spot him in the convertible I stop short.

  He’s shifted to his left to face the box, cupped his hand over his right ear to drown out the chatter and laughter on the sidewalk. People are lining up for the matinee of Picnic outside the museum’s attached movie theater.

  Not realizing that they’re disturbing Mr. Eric T. Logan’s important business call.

  Eric works for a consulting company that test screens movies and trailers. He’s good at his job, from what I’ve read, good at predicting which movies will have “big” opening weekends, and which are too “quiet” to get attention. He’s part of a vast number-crunching, hand-wringing, second-guessing enterprise that decides which films the studios will promote and which they’ll leave to flail. And drown.

  I can’t take my eyes off him.

  Eric and I watched Picnic in his closet once, and I can still see his face that afternoon: rapt, lit by the flickering screen. But today the pivot of his body says how annoyed he is with the high spirits of the matinee crowd interfering with his work call.

  As I get closer, he shouts into his phone, “We have to take the 30,000-foot view here, Ted.”

  And it’s too much. I can’t take the 30,000-foot view of Eric saying 30,000-foot view.

  A woman in my office says it in meetings all the time. Quinn Hartly, a Vitaminwater-guzzling client exec who has, despite middling numbers, survived two rounds of layoffs since last March.

  Let’s take the 30,000-foot view here, people. Every time she says it, I want to shove her veggie-cream-cheese-schmeared bagel in her face.

  Just breathe, Becc. He said he had to work.

  What did you expect? It’s not like you’re the same person you were ten years ago.

  Just get in the car and drive.

  I hurl the scone at Eric’s back and hurry down the street.

  * * *

  I sit on a bench in the front garden of the Berkeley Arms apartments, a block from the car. A cheap, U-shaped brick building, laughter and radio drifting down from upstairs windows holding Obama 2008 posters: Hope, with a rising sun in the O.

  Students are blasting KFOG and KITS as they pre-party. I remember so well that feeling of anticipation before a big Friday night out.

  I am feeling decidedly post-party. Deflated. All of my hope for what the weekend might bring has drained away.

  I wind the weeds growing through the bench slats around my fingers, trying to process the fact that I just threw a baked good at Eric.

  What comes next? He won’t stay, not now.

  And I’m not sure I want him to. I’ll drive him to the Oakland Airport so he can fly up while I continue in the car alone. Pay strangers to help lift the gift or guard it when I stop at restrooms along the way.

  He doesn’t want to be here. I’d hoped part of him did, that there was a little of the Eric I knew still left. Serra insists that there is. So does his mom.

  I pull my BlackBerry from my purse and fire it up. Fifteen voice mails. Fifty-eight new emails. I open one with the subject line Format Tweak. A proposal to embed advertising links within content.

  Newzly uses a search-engine-optimization algorithm to deliver “articles” based on what people type into search fields. We pay writers $7 a pop to write “How to Make a Chihuahua Darth Vader Costume” or “How to Find a Katy Perry Fan Club in Duluth, Minnesota.” It’s a journalism sweatshop, but advertisers love us. We’re shoveling the monetized 1s and 0s out there as fast as we can.

  For a long time, I bounced around at dailies and alt-weekly papers, but two years ago, Newzly recruited me to head their West Coast content team. I was flattered and broke and weary from never-ending rounds of newsroom layoffs. Seeing good people sniffling outside the HR office, constantly bracing for my turn. It was a way to take control. I needed the money and hoped Newzly would be a somewhat sheltered port in the storm. I’m not sure any company is safe now.

  But I know I’m absurdly lucky. My salary is $104,000 and my strike price is $7. We’re down to $12, as of yesterday’s closing market bell, but I’m forty percent vested, which is pretty good. If Newzly survives I’ll be one hundred percent vested in four years.

  Four years isn’t long; undergrad is four years and it flies by. As I remember.

  I told myself I’d write on the side.

  That it would only be for a year.

  I’ve tried not to look back.

  But if Eric saw me leading last week’s all-team meeting, reminding my staff that all pieces have to meet our under-four-hundred-words rule, he might feel the same wave of disappointment at who I’ve become.

  So who are you really mad at, Becc?

  * * *

  He’s found me, this stranger. Thick black hair tamed by an expensive haircut, pressed button-down shirt, linen shorts today.

  He approaches, wrapping up his call. “We’ll be checked in soon. I’ll catch you then. Yeah, Monday.”

  He detaches the phone from his face and greets me. “I gave the ticket guy at the theater twenty bucks to keep an eye on the gift.”

  “Thanks.”

  He looks up at the apartment windows behind me. “Are we meeting someone here? I thought the last part of the gift was up north.”

  “I just wanted to give you privacy. For your calls.”

  “Thanks. We bought CineTek for a song because it’s struggling, so now we’re officially the volume leader. In terms of cumulative box office.”

  “Wow. Congratulations. The highest cumulative box office volume service in the industry.”

  Once he would have known this was sarcasm. Once he’d have gone management-speak on me only to make me laugh.

  He brushes crumbs off his shoulder. “Can you believe one of those kids in the movie line threw a muffin at me?”

  Really? That’s awful. They were probably high. You know, Berkeley.

  I’m off the hook. I could continue up to the wedding with a pasted-on smile. Just get through Sunday, for Serra’s sake. Pretend I’m fine with this man and his you really went all out and his nonstop phone calls.

  “Scone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It was a chocolate-chip scone.”

  His eyes widen for a second, then he nods. Sits. Rubs his hands through his hair.

  He smells of the same orange-clove body wash I used in my hotel shower this morning. He’s real, warm, breathing. Sitting next to me, after ten years of existing only as a name in an internet article, a face on a company home page, a word my mom and Serra try to avoid saying in my presence: Eric.

  He’s right here, but I miss him more than I have in ten years.

  “It wasn’t my most mature moment,” I say quietly. “This is harder than I thought it’d be. I thought...”

  “What?”

  “I guess I thought it’d be kind of hard for you, too. Seeing me.”

  He sits still for a minute, then pulls his iPhone from his pocket, taps it to life.

  And I’m astonished by his cruelty.

  He’s going back to his stupid calls, his CineTek deal or whatever. He’s not even going to acknowledge my confession.

  Then he holds the phone up for me.

  I expect to see a string of numbers with power area codes—212, 650, 415, 408.

  But it’s an application called Date Insurance. The icon is a cartoon of a blond woman with red lips in a worried O, bugged-out blue eyes. I read about the beta software on Fortune.com; it lets you program times you want to be interrupted so you can cut a bad date short.

  “You’ve been pretending.
”

  “Yes. And I’m exhausted.” He smiles, embarrassed. “Hell. You have no idea how tiring it is to make up fake phone conversations all day.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Becc.”

  The first time he’s said my name. “You were horrified by the prospect of talking to me for three days. Sitting in the same car with me.”

  “Not horrified.”

  “So you just wanted to make me feel like an idiot...?”

  “That’s not why I did it,” he says. “It was...the only way I could let myself come. Pride. Or...insurance, I guess. Protection.”

  “Protection from me, Eric?”

  His phone rings, one of the scheduled interruptions he programmed to shield himself from our time together. He taps the screen, powers it down. “Becc. What did you expect? This isn’t easy for me, either.”

  It’s a crumb, a welcome one.

  24

  Marilyn

  August 1996

  Nine days before junior year

  WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | Serra’s

  WHERE I WAS | Marilyn’s

  To celebrate the end of summer, Cal booked us a house on Catalina for the weekend.

  “It’s gorgeous, totally private,” he said. “You’ll love it.”

  I called Serra to secure my alibi, asking her to pretend I was spending the weekend with her if my mom called.

  “I knew you were seeing someone!” she cried. “You’ve blown me off all summer. But if it’s for love I forgive you. So spill.”

  It’s not love, Serr. I’m not sure what it is.

  I wanted to say this to her. I wanted to say, You won’t believe who it is. Promise you won’t hate me?

  But if I told her who I was seeing, her voice would change. And even if she didn’t say, How could you do that to E? she’d think it.

  “It’s this guy in the office. Stephen. Just graduated from USC Business School.” Who never smiles at my jokes and has had a serious boyfriend for three years.

  “So has the momentous occasion already happened or is it this weekend?”

  “This weekend.”

  “Becc! I’m so happy for you.”

  Serra had told me everything about her first time at seventeen. She’d done it with Tim Alton—a stocky, one-year-younger, vegetarian, theater guy—in the back of her car after dinner at the Infinite Salad. She’d told me everything, down to the CD they’d played. Sarah McMaudlin, she’d said. The second half of “Adia” and the first half of “Angel,” so we calculated that the entire act took, maximum, three minutes. Also, Tim had gone overboard on the Tuscan herb salad dressing. Serra had lost her virginity in a haze of oregano.

  We’d made a pact: I’d promised to report every detail, as she had.

  “He’s cute?” she said.

  “Extremely.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Um, I think twenty-two or twenty-three. Around there.”

  “Older man.”

  “Hmm.” I squeezed the receiver.

  “Are you nervous? Are you sure you’re ready? Because—”

  “I’ll tell you everything, Serr, I promise. Soon. Thanks for covering.”

  * * *

  I drove a golf cart up to the Catalina house. He was to follow on foot from the boat half an hour later, to be safe. My idea, but since the sandal incident he’d gone along with my rules.

  Drive uphill until you can’t go any higher, the map he sketched for me should have said. I felt like I was on a movie lot, driving the golf cart around. I took a wrong turn, confusing Vieullesaint Place for Vieullesaint Terrace, and hoped Cal wouldn’t get lost.

  The front entrance, through a tunnel of trees, was private, a nest like our first trysting spot. I punched in the security code and shoved the heavy front door open—it was one expensive nest. Spanish Revival, views of the Pacific along two sides. Wrought-iron balconies inside and out. A design of the Hollywood “more is more” school.

  I dropped my backpack on the red tile and trailed a hand against the cool stucco wall. I crossed the living room, opening French doors to the patio. A huge rectangular pool in the sun, and one almost as big that I discovered, after kicking off my sandals and dipping a toe, was hot. A grotto, and one of those slender pools that pummel you with artificial currents for exercise, and a pool that was half outdoors and half indoors, divided by a glass wall on tracks.

  All of it intricately tiled and fountained: a high-class water park.

  Back inside, I walked from room to room. Gym, screening room. Upstairs, a vast bedroom with a balcony facing the mainland.

  “Rebecca?”

  “Up here,” I yelled. “Master bedroom. I think.

  “This place is unreal,” I said over my shoulder at the sound of his footsteps. “How’d you find it?” I looked back at the ocean. There was a ferry leaving, and a dive boat off Avalon Harbor, froggy shapes bobbing nearby.

  He’d peeled off his shirt and tucked it into the side of his shorts during his uphill run. His chest was slick, leaving damp marks on the front of my blue sundress when he drew me close.

  “You’re boiling, I thought you were going right for the pool,” I said. “Your Nestea plunge commercial.”

  “Wanted to find you more, warm person. Undoll. Thinking, living, soft—”

  “Shh.”

  * * *

  We nicknamed it the Marilyn house, because it would have been a perfect hideaway for her, post-stardom. It was like her, showy and trying too hard. But irresistible.

  We didn’t leave the house all weekend. We didn’t need to.

  I remember lying back in the grotto, dizzy and weak. And laughing, because sex in a pool is overrated on a number of levels. We finally gave up and moved to the lawn. Me on top, moving slowly, the way I’d just discovered felt incredible.

  I’d been self-conscious the first time, doing it like that, but now I pinned his hands over his head, bending down to tease him with my hair or my breasts, then bending back. It felt impossibly deep, just this side of painful. He wanted to move harder, faster. He ran his hands up and down my waist, frantic, and I knew from his breathing, his tight clasp on my hips, that it was all he could do not to flip me over. I liked watching him when he shut his eyes.

  Sunday afternoon, we sat on the balcony in the cool, humid air blowing up from the Pacific. He was reading the Wall Street Journal and I was typing my fall semester reading assignments into a WordPerfect document on the poky refurbished Compaq laptop my mom had given me for graduation. Trying to make up for the fact that I hadn’t cracked a book since my abandoned AP Stylebook.

  In a little over a week I’d be back at school; it was hard to believe.

  When I shut down, the computer shuddered and whirred and groaned as always. I liked its quirks, and even though it was slow, it was reliable. A girl down the hall had lost three term papers to her fancy new laptop.

  “Technical difficulties?” Cal said. “Want me to take a look?” He’d been an EECS major at USC and was still proud that he knew his way around a computer.

  “It’s just doing its thing. See? It’s done now.” I closed the laptop and set it on the balcony.

  “I’ll get you a new computer. Or at least a new memory card, so you don’t have to rely on that dinosaur for your papers this year. What is that thing, on a 286 chip? How much RAM do you have?”

  “I’ll get through the year just fine,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”

  A pause. “I find that I don’t want summer to end,” he said. Laughing, as if surprised. His voice was light, and he flashed me his widest grin, the one I secretly called his “beach volleyball” smile.

  “You’re sweet,” I said.

  But he didn’t turn the pages of his Journal after that.

  It had been a perfect, exhausting long weekend of
playing house, every moment brighter because it was stolen.

  And because it couldn’t last. I knew it couldn’t. I’d tried to imagine what would happen to us after Labor Day, but the screen just went black.

  “Look at that color,” he said. “It’s the magic hour. The Impressionists thought they could only find that light on the Riviera, but it’s not true.”

  But the light was already changing. The pinkish-gold darkening to red, his shadow elongating behind his lawn chair, distorting his body into an alien form.

  “Someday we’ll go there together so you can see,” he said. “And before you say you’re sweet again, which I know perfectly well means you’re full of it, open this.”

  He handed me a small white box. “I had some time to kill after my meeting in San Francisco last week. Found it at a little vintage jewelry place in Sausalito. You ever been there?”

  I shook my head.

  It was a necklace. Heavy, 1920s looking, a sleek arrangement of stepped copper and turquoise triangles on an aged, beaded copper chain. I held my hair up and he fastened it, then kissed me on the nape, lips brushing up and down my neck. “You have this downy line right here, it drives me crazy.”

  I stood to catch my reflection in the sliding glass door, caressing the cold puzzle of metal on my chest. It wasn’t something I’d have ever picked out, but it was undeniably stunning. “It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever owned. Thank you.”

  “It’s not the real gift.” He tugged my elbow until I tumbled onto his lap, then shook the necklace box so I could hear it rattle.

  I lifted the square of cotton batting: a key.

  “I found us a little place for this year, in Sausalito. Up the hill from the jewelry store, hidden in the trees. All the privacy you require, human.”

  I took the key out, set the box on the table.

  “I’ll be up next weekend, is it a date?” His smile gave way to a flicker of disappointment when I didn’t answer. “It’s a quick ferry ride from Berkeley.”

  I examined the key in my hand: silver, unmarked, with an unexpected heft.