He was trying so hard to sound casual I felt a surge of tenderness for him, but my response surprised even me. “All our dates require a boat.”
“Aaah.” A mock-crestfallen look. “Maybe you like the boats better than me. This was just thrill seeking, wasn’t it? Like your roller coaster in San Diego? The Big Dipper.”
“The Giant Dipper.”
“I knew it.” He sighed heavily, lying back on his chaise and closing his eyes. “I’ll soon be replaced by an amusement park ride. I’m...incidental.”
“Of course you’re not.” I reached for his hand but he kept his fist clenched. I poked at it with the key until he relented, opening his hand so I could lace our fingers together, the key inside them. “You surprised me, that’s all.”
His eyes still closed, he said, “So you’re happy about the apartment? Swear?”
“I swear.” I leaned to kiss him, but he kept his lips pressed tight. I tickled them with my tongue, trying to tease them apart. “Cal. I swear I’m happy.”
“Solemnly swear?” One eye open.
“I solemnly swear,” I said. “We can call it...Marilyn Two.”
He opened the other eye.
“Marilyn North?” I said. “Winter Marilyn.”
He grinned and pulled me to his chest. Everything was still playful, as rosy gold as the late-summer light that had slanted onto the balcony just moments before.
The key was sweet.
The plan was thoughtful.
And the necklace was the prettiest thing I’d ever owned. But as I admired it, I was already plotting how to hide it from my mom, my roommates. It was expensive enough to require explanations.
As he murmured about Sausalito, its trees and hills, its charming shops and foghorns, I caught my mind wandering to how I would steal away to get there. I’d need to invent another boyfriend, or pretend I was crashing at the newspaper. It wouldn’t be hard, with a little planning. I’d found I had a knack for it.
He had surprised me. Shocked me, even. I’d been so sure that he and I would be over once I tore the August page from my blotter calendar. I had prepared for it; I knew who he was. What this was.
But I never considered handing back the key.
And he didn’t feel incidental. Not that night, after I dropped it back into the box to kiss him again, seriously this time. We lazed under the stars, entangled on the chaise, until it was dark.
His finger traced the triangles of my necklace as we talked about how we would extend our stolen summer into fall, winter, spring.
A different boat, a different latitude, a different hideaway.
But everything else the same.
25
R-squared
September 3, 1996
“You’re so organized.” My mom came into my bedroom as I was zipping my duffel. “We should leave for the depot in five minutes. You have some junk mail.” She set the stack on the corner of my neatly made bed and bustled out. “I can only imagine the pile you’re going to have waiting for you by Thanksgiving!”
She was trying hard to be cheerful, though I knew she was sad that I was leaving. And that I’d spent so much time away from her this summer. Working.
I was taking the noon bus. By eight tonight I’d be up in my third-floor room unpacking with Maggie and Serra, joking around and catching up, lighting green-apple candles to combat the Plato House smells, singing along to KFOG.
Imagining the secret pied-à-terre that awaited me across the water.
I flipped through the mail. Two credit card offers addressed to Ms. Rebecca Reardon, both proclaiming that I was prequalified! And a yellow-and-black card with the slanted letters VFF and the slogan Membership Has Perks! Since my mom had cosigned for my prepaid $500 credit card, I was a popular girl.
Except VFF wasn’t another company trying to get me hooked on plastic; it was an ad for the Vancouver Film Festival. I could become a Back Lot Sponsor or Red Carpet Sponsor or Balcony Sponsor.
On the back was a collage of black-and-white movie stills, and one was from His Girl Friday. Rosalind Russell, the wisecracking, uncompromising newspaper reporter in her gigantic shoulder pads, writing in her notebook.
Eric and I had closet-screened it at least three times.
The first time we watched it together, freshman year of high school, I’d said I wasn’t in the mood for a classic. But it won me over.
We have the same initials, I’d said. We’re both R-squareds.
I think that’s a sign from the movie gods you’re on the right career path, Eric had said happily. It always thrilled him to convert someone to his favorite films.
He hadn’t signed the postcard, not even with an E.
But he’d sketched glasses on Rosalind Russell, in black ballpoint. The frames were delicate and slightly cat-eyed, like the ones I’d worn in high school.
What are you saying, Eric?
I’d sent him an email from my CommPlanet account the Monday after his mother’s party, back in late July. Not a rambling message desperate for forgiveness this time. A defiant one:
Great to see you in the OC. Say congrats!
He hadn’t answered. But maybe this was his response at last, to remind me how far I’d strayed from Rosalind.
Or was it an apology, an innocent bit of nostalgia? A reminder of all those hours in his closet on our mountain of pillows, joking around, bathed in flickering movie light? Not a nasty, judgmental reminder, but a sweet one.
Sweet hurt more.
26
Perfect Time
Summer after junior year
Letter No. 3
2341D Telegraph Avenue #3
Berkeley, CA 94450
Mrs. Francine Haggermaker
7 Old Grove Drive
Orange Park, CA 90667
June 13, 1997
Dear Mrs. Haggermaker,
Junior year was incredibly productive, and I finished with a 3.24 nearly 3.3 solid GPA. I even earned one A+ in badminton.
I had more opportunities to explore Northern California this year. I made a wonderful new friend from a small town across the Bay, and I often accompanied her on weekends when she took the ferry home to visit her parents.
Her name is
I stared out the round window of my Plato House bedroom at the green Berkeley hills. Biting my pen, I considered possible names for this dutiful daughter.
Calista? Callie?
It would be there in black Bic, a secret signed confession right under Mrs. Haggermaker’s aristocratic Roman nose.
All year, I’d walked out the door of shabby, noisy Plato House, grabbed a bus to the port, stepped onto the SF Bay Freedom, and after sixty-four minutes of staring at the heaving horizon behind its white railings, entered another world. Adult, refined, expensive.
It’s incredible, I’d said the first day I saw the apartment, admiring the floor-to-ceiling Bay views.
Isn’t it? Water, water everywhere, just like Catalina.
But inside it was not like Catalina. That was ochre and gold and excessive. This was white and cream and minimalist. Calculated blankness, punctuated by a handful of red accessories: a red line drawing, a stack of red antique books.
The kitchen was white marble, and on the wall, there was a vintage IBM office clock. Black hour and minute hands, red second hand, just like the ones at Orange Park High.
TIME IS PASSING. WILL YOU?
FOCUS!
How funny, I’d said, back in September, touching the glass dome. We had these clocks in high school.
They’re worth a fortune, or so the decorator persuaded me when I got the bill, he’d said, laughing.
Him overpaying for the clock became another of our jokes. But it kept perfect time; I checked it before running down the hill to the Bay Freedom, the ferry that connected my two lives.<
br />
By the end of September I knew the Bay Freedom’s schedule by heart.
By October the snack bar man had stopped asking for my order.
In the fall, we’d met once a week, sometimes more. Cal would call or email from the airport and a few hours later I’d slip out of a lecture early, my sturdy green JanSport backpack stuffed with books so I wouldn’t fall behind. Everything else was in Sausalito. I didn’t even have to pack a toothbrush.
To cover for our trysts I made up late study sessions, evenings crashing on the sofa at the newspaper after researching the graffiti story. But I hardly needed to. Serra worked at her studio late into the night. Maggie was dating the woman who lived in the room below us at Plato House, and slept there most of the time.
In Sausalito, Cal and I made love, we talked, we cooked. We walked along the quay at midnight, holding hands, when no one could see. He said someday, when I wasn’t worried about hiding, he’d take me to the little apartment he owned in San Francisco. Close to the Fairmont Hotel in Nob Hill, with a Juliet balcony and a sliver of a Bay view. “Just an investment property, these days. But I think you’d like it.”
“Sausalito suits me fine,” I said. Secrecy suited me fine, too.
* * *
For months I’d expected him to pull away, bored. If he had, I might have clung tighter. I was as perverse as any human.
But by February, while he was as attentive as ever, part of me missed my college life. My clean twenty-year-old’s life: blue books and flash cards, oversize sweatshirts and overstewed student union coffee. Walking to pizza with Serra and Maggie. Good-night kisses that didn’t lead to anything else.
Like temperature readings, my ferry return times revealed the cooling pattern of our affair:
February, 7:06
March, 6:07
April, 5:03
May, 4:06
But I didn’t suggest ending it. I was still holding on to our golden beginning. And there were times, in the dark with him, when he still made me feel happy, like the only person in the world. His effect on my body was the same. It was the before and after that had changed, and I couldn’t figure out why.
I began to lie to him. I made up study sessions, overdue papers, head colds.
I said that I had to enroll in the summer class at Berkeley, when I could’ve easily taken it down south. I pretended I was sad that we wouldn’t have another summer on Catalina, that my classes and my job up here would make it harder to meet.
I canceled a whole weekend in May, emailing at the last minute:
My English class is seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Shakespeare Fest. I have to go!! I’m so sorry. Xoxoxo.
I spent that weekend in the stacks, catching up on my reading.
Now I had two sets of lies to keep track of, one on each shore.
The last time I’d met him in Sausalito, ten days ago, I’d worn the necklace he’d given me, to prove things hadn’t changed. I tugged him into the bedroom within minutes of arriving—“Well, now,” he said, pleased—and it was as good as ever.
But while he slept soundly on my chest afterward, his lips parted like a child’s, I couldn’t sleep at all. I lay awake for hours, looking at him in the moonlight. The bright triangular pieces of my necklace entwined with his hair, like a broken crown.
I watched him sleeping, trying to figure out what to say, how to explain. Maybe we only made sense in the summer and had stretched our affair too thin, trying to extend it into other seasons.
The next morning I sat on the top deck of the ferry, where the lashing wind made it too cold to think.
* * *
In my shared room at Plato House, I stared at the letter to Mrs. Haggermaker.
I made a wonderful new friend from a small town across the Bay, and I often accompanied her on weekends when she took the ferry home to visit her parents.
Her name is
Callie was too much; I wasn’t that far gone.
When it came to me I wrote it slowly, with a flourish: a round M, a y flowing long as a mermaid’s tail:
Marilyn.
It was absolutely lovely to have a “home away from home” with Marilyn’s family. We spent most of our time studying but took occasional breaks to picnic or hike.
On every ferry crossing, as I returned from Marilyn’s, I thought of the inspiring Latin inscription on the plaque you gave me three years ago:
“To truly learn is to sail, anchorless yet unafraid, the vast oceans of the unknown, looking always at the horizon.”
They are wise words that perfectly capture my college experiences so far.
This summer I am staying in Berkeley for the first time, as are my roommates. Two mornings a week I’ll be taking a three-credit rhetoric course to free up my schedule for an honors seminar next fall.
I’ll also be editing the in-house publication at a respected San Francisco real estate firm; it’s a wonderful opportunity.
I’m enclosing four articles I wrote for the campus paper this year: a feature on a karaoke fund-raiser for our sister school in Japan and three on student union elections.
How thrilling to think that when I mail my next letter, I will be a college graduate, ready to voyage into the adult world. I can’t wait.
I am already looking at the horizon, unafraid.
With my deepest gratitude,
Rebecca Reardon
27
Surprise
June 15, 1997
The Sunday evening before my first day as newsletter editorial intern at Elliot & Healey, Industrial Realty, Serra and Maggie and I were hanging out in our bedroom. Apple candle flickering on our thrift-store dresser, cool evening wind puffing in from the round window by Maggie’s bed.
Serra paced our brown carpet, organizing pieces of an art project that involved her latest mania—a series of office-marker self-portraits drawn on overhead projector transparencies. She had the clear rectangles laid out in rows; we’d been jumping between them for weeks. It was like playing negative Twister.
“Are those for the invitational, Serr?” I asked. “Part of your triptych?” Yvonne Copeland, her mentor/professor/boss at the museum, was putting on a student show this summer.
“No, that’s too big to work on here,” she said. “This is to get my mind off my showpiece because I’m convinced it blows. Maybe I should bind these into a sort of flip book. You know? Like those early animations? But disturbing.”
“That sounds cool,” I said.
“I like it, make your public work a little.” Maggie aimed a gray plume of smoke out the window. She’d set her bed stack up there expressly for this purpose. With one leg dangling off the layers, she looked like she was melting down the side; Serra called it her Dali Floppy Watches look.
“What’d’you think, glue or three-hole punch? Never mind, I’ll test both.” Serra plugged in her hot glue gun.
“You’re not going down to Bonnie’s tonight, Mags?” I asked.
“It’s the third time this week she’s bailed on me. And even when we do hang out, all she talks about is her hobo markings.” Maggie gazed wistfully at the floor. Bonnie was writing her dissertation on the codes homeless men chalked onto buildings as warnings and advice during the Depression, things like Work Here and Dangerous Man. “Wanna hear how desperate I’ve become? I suggested we trace hobo signs on each other in bed. You know, sort of incorporate her thesis into our sex life.”
“That’s weirdly hot,” Serra said.
“Well, she didn’t think so,” Maggie said. “I’m out of ideas. Draw me a sign for Frustrated Woman, Serra.”
“You’re a thesis widow, Mags,” I said.
“Yep.” She blew a smoke ring at me. “But this is nice. The three of us haven’t hung out in ages.”
“It is nice,” I said. “I’ve missed you guys.”
“
We should—” The phone cut Serra off.
“I’ll get it,” I said, sliding off my bed. We kept our phone, a beige ’70s Trimline from Goodwill, on top of a cluttered bookcase by the door.
Cal. “Guess where I am, human.”
“Hey, Jess! Sure, let me check.” I grabbed my backpack off my bed, fished out a notebook, pretended to hunt through it. “Found them.”
“Give my regards to your roommates,” he said, laughing. “I’m on campus, changed my flight from SFO to Oakland. Thought I’d surprise you. I’m at some place on Bancroft Avenue, Caffè Strada. White awning out front, you know it?”
“No problem.”
“I’ve got a couple hours before I have to leave for the airport. Thought we could have a bite.”
“I hope you can read my handwriting!”
“I’ve got us a booth in back so you don’t need to worry. Unless you want to check into a hotel in Berkeley. You can stay after I go, take one of your baths. I can picture you as I sit through that endless due-diligence meeting tomorrow morning. All soapy and slippery, your hair wet...”
This wasn’t just dirty talk; baths were another of our inside jokes. At Plato House I didn’t have a tub, only shared access to a tepid, mildewy shower.
Cal had urged me to use the Sausalito place whenever I wanted, to make it my pied-à-terre. But I’d never gone alone, not even to take advantage of the pristine, jetted tub. I didn’t want to think of myself as a kept woman.
“Rebecca?” he said. “What do you think?”
“Let’s meet at the café.”
“See you in twenty?”
“Sounds good. Bye, Jess.”
I zipped my backpack, brushed my hair. The sounds were the same as before: the zither-y music of Serra rearranging her plastic pages, Maggie’s languid exhales. The thwack, thwack of Glenn, hacky sacking in the hall.
But now the silence seemed assertive.
“That was just this girl who wants to borrow my American lit notes for summer session,” I said. “Jess.”
Maggie coughed, but was it her usual lazy pot cough? And was Serra concentrating too hard on her transparencies? I was being paranoid. Secondhand effects of Maggie’s weed.
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