“I should.”
We smiled at each other for a minute. The breeze had picked up and we listened to the lazy tings of the wind chimes over the porch stairs. My breathing had relaxed and the bitterness was gone, replaced by simple relief that his eyes were still kind, still such a soft shade of brown.
I’m sorry, he mouthed, his eyes fixed on mine. Beautiful eyes: wide set, dark lashed, large as a fawn’s. I’d missed them. I’d missed him, more than I’d have thought possible.
He was holding his breath. Waiting for me to decide if I’d take him back.
“I guess the dimensions of your room are punishment enough.”
* * *
Eric surveyed the front room of the co-op. Plywood covered broken stained glass, purple paint flaked off the high ceilings, and the moldings were battered. The living room furniture consisted of a brown vinyl beanbag chair, its gashes repaired by a network of silver duct tape, and multiple futons that had been left behind over the years. On one futon, a guy I didn’t recognize slept on his back, a half-eaten plate of nachos riding up and down his chest.
“Can I reconsider the Alcatraz cell?” Eric asked.
“Be nice. You’re still on probation.”
I led him up two sets of creaking stairs and we stashed his duffel in his closet-size room. Eric shuddered at the crib mattress but said gamely, “Maybe I can sleep with my legs in the hall. Show me your room? Or do you still need to run to your class?”
“I can skip.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What happened to Miss Perfect Attendance?”
“She’s long gone. I’d win the Imperfect Attendance award now, easy.”
Eric paused by the mural on the bathroom door. It was supposed to be Abbie Hoffman in his American flag shirt. Serra and Maggie and I had gotten excited the day we moved in, touching the thirty-year-old paint. It was an awful mural, and something about the way the artist had exaggerated his cleft chin and botched his hair made Abbie look more like John Travolta. But still, it was so perfectly Berkeley in the ’60s. Someone should have unhinged the door long before and put it in a museum.
“Did Serra paint that?”
“No, but wait’ll you see her new stuff. She’s gotten really good. We’re down here.”
I showed him our little bedroom, tucked under the eaves at the other end of the hall from his. Eric looked around, appraising, so I did, too, as if I didn’t know every split in the plaster walls by heart. Serra’s Miró and Klimt prints, Maggie’s Sleater-Kinney and Breeders posters, and my marked-up campus map and newspaper clippings covered the biggest cracks.
Eric touched the slanting ceiling, traced the round frame of our window. It was so small that the room was dark except for one precious hour a day.
We sat on my bed in a warm oval of sunlight, a few feet apart. I looked down at Eric’s black jeans, the ones he’d snagged helping my mom trim the jacaranda tree in our backyard six years ago. When we’d packed them after graduation, the damaged part had been a fuzzy rectangle the width of a postage stamp, barely noticeable. Now his skin was starting to show through.
I pointed at the loose webbing of threads over his left knee. “You’ve been fidgeting with that. You need a patch like Raggedy Andy.”
“I’m bringing back the ’80s look. Distressed denim.” Eric picked up my pillow and studied it as if the plain white cotton was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. Then he placed it back carefully at the head of my bed and nodded at my Haggermaker plaque on the bookcase. “How’s the Franster?”
“I write to her but she doesn’t write to me. And please don’t call her that.”
He toyed with his jeans, running his index finger around the perimeter of the damaged part and plucking at the loosening threads. His nervous energy, in high school a whole-body thing, had apparently been transferred to that small patch of denim.
“Hey,” he said. I was close enough to hear the small hitch in his breathing that made the word two syllables.
“Hey.”
“It’s extremely good to see you,” he said.
“You, too.”
“Sorry things have been so weird.”
“Me, too. I’m sorry about how I was at your mom’s. It was...childish.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Someone called me that once. A pouty child.”
“Who would be that mean?”
“She was right. I was being a pouty child about a lot of things. Including my parents. I just came from there. A real visit, six days.”
“How are they?”
“My dad’s the same. I thought maybe he’d take me to a Dodgers game and Disneyland and buy me a sundae. You know, like divorced dads in movies? But we went to Roy’s Steakhouse and it wasn’t too weird.”
“That’s great.”
What about your mom? It was the natural next question. But I didn’t trust my voice.
“My mom and I had a real talk, though. I told her how much I’d hated her, for being with Cal. And I told her it wasn’t exactly fair of me. After being with my dad, she had a right to someone different. Someone... I don’t know. Lighter.”
I willed myself not to react. No blushing, no change in my breathing.
I was better at that now. How strange that back when I had nothing to blush about, I couldn’t stop it, but now it was easy. The trick was to force yourself to think about something else. Avoidance coping, a term Maggie had introduced to our conversation after Psych 1.
I made a mental list of places to show Eric this summer.
The room where they kept dinosaur fossils in the clock tower.
Blondie’s pizza.
The Greek Theatre.
“You probably got to know him,” he said. “When you were working at SnoozeNews or whatever it’s called.”
“Not really.”
“She says he’s a compulsive flirt who never grew up,” he said. “That I was right, that she needed someone fun and easygoing to break from my dad, but in the end there wasn’t a lot of there there. Her exact words.”
We could go to San Francisco, brave the tourists at Pier 39. Do Chinatown. Ride cable cars.
“Notice how I use his real name now?” Eric continued. “No nicknames? Impressive, huh? Cal. Cal. Cal, my pal. Wait, scratch that last part, it’s a hard habit to break. I’ll use his full name. Mr. Devin McCallister.”
I stood and crossed the room, pretended to root through the clothes in my closet. Avoidance coping had its limits. “So is your mom dating that short man from her pool party?” I yanked a sweatshirt from the bottom of a neat pile, tossed it on top.
“No, that’s over, too. She said she’s okay being alone for now. But she says it’s going to be hard to trust anyone ever again. She thought Cal really liked her, but I guess he was sleeping with other women on his boat the whole time they were together.”
I wondered if this was true about him, or just a mean rumor, someone trying to make Donna feel bad. I wished I could shut the door, burrow into the soft piles of clothing and let myself process this information. For a month. I didn’t want to imagine him seeing other women when he saw me. Though it would make me feel less guilty about breaking up with him, it would hurt.
And I wasn’t sure I believed it.
“That’s awful.”
“You know what I spray-painted on that boat back in high school?”
I cleared my throat. “What?”
He laughed. “Fraud. Not one of my finer moments, but pretty accurate, it turns out. At least as far as my mom’s concerned. Did you ever see him hitting on women at the office?”
One more deep breath. I came out of the closet, tying my biggest blue Berkeley sweatshirt around my waist. “He was hardly there. He was just a... What do they call it? Paper investor.”
Eric tilted his head, scanning me with familiar, worried eyes. His chin, off cen
ter like that, said, I don’t buy it.
“I was pretty mad at you for working there,” he said.
“I know.”
“Did you do it to get back at me? For not emailing. Leaving how I did?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. Why did you leave the way you did?”
“I needed time away from everything. My parents. The whole scene in Orange County, the gates and the cars and having three plastic surgeons on my block. You know.”
“Yes.”
“And...”
“What?”
“I was sure I’d ruined the only part that was real. The one thing in that town worth anything to me. I guess I needed time to deal with that, too.”
“You didn’t ruin it,” I said softly.
He looked down at the hole in his jeans, then flashed me a slight, relieved smile. “Any way we can call it even? Be surprisingly mature and start fresh?”
Oh, E.
Because he was still E, with his good smell, root beer, and aloe shaving cream. His long pianist’s fingers plucking at his torn jeans. His broad, honest forehead under his black, every-which-way hair. His wrong-way eyebrow that I always wanted to brush back.
His jokes that tugged at my heart, because they came from caring too much instead of not enough. A kind of purity I hadn’t recognized before.
We still had our own unspoken language, a river of shared memories running under our words.
I could tell him, right now.
But he sat next to me with such hope in his eyes, such certainty that he still knew me.
“I’d like that,” I said.
We didn’t talk about me working for CommPlanet again. I knew what Eric thought. That I sensed or even witnessed something ugly there. Cal and some attractive partner in a supply closet, maybe.
I let him think this.
And, over time, because part of me wished it were true, it became the version of events I almost believed.
* * *
We wandered from North Gate toward Sproul Plaza to meet Serra after her class. I pointed out the distant stadium and the Greek Theatre. I saw a Fe|Co and sloppy elongated cat painted on a retaining wall (a poor rendering, not my favorite) and didn’t say anything, but Eric noticed it.
“Whatever happened to that story you emailed me about, freshman year?”
“Oh... I’m still working on it.” Serra could decide whether or not to tell him. “So you did read my long emails, huh?”
“Every word. I decided the graffiti was probably by someone named Felicia Colpepper. That or Fergus Cogswaddle.”
“Intriguing theory.”
“Someone at Brown writes E. E. Cummings poems in restroom stalls. No animal drawings, but maybe Fergus Cogswaddle is bicoastal.”
“You can be my East Coast correspondent.”
“Sign me up. So this is protest central, huh?”
The Sproul Plaza clipboard patrol was out in force.
“Some are protesters. Some are selling phone plans and credit cards.”
I’d perfected the decisive head shake that meant, “No, thanks, not gonna sign up for anything right now so leave me the hell alone,” but Eric kept getting embroiled in apologetic conversations.
I pulled him by the elbow. “This is Dwinelle Hall. Allen Ginsberg and a bunch of beat writers had a poetry-in here in ’64. Serra should be out any minute.”
“How is she?”
“Loving her art classes.”
“Dating anyone?”
“She had a few dates with this pre-law guy who worshipped her, but she ended it. She said she wanted to focus on her art, but he was a good guy. Everybody liked him.”
“What about you?”
“I liked him, too.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Dating, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh...nothing serious. You?” I tried to sound casual, sure he was going to mention that he and his Vancouver lady were going strong. I deserved it. I deserved worse.
“Same.”
A warm wave of relief, so intense it surprised me.
But if he’d said his girlfriend was flying out for a visit, I’d have worked overtime showing I was thrilled for him. Offered to trade rooms so they could have a bigger bed.
* * *
“No. Way!” Serra spotted Eric and ran to us, a blur of denim and shiny black hair. She nearly knocked him down throwing her arms around him. Then she took a step back so she could shove him. “Asshole. We thought we’d lost you to the preppy New Englanders forever.”
“Ow! Becc’s forgiven me so you have to, too. That’s how it works.”
“Is it, Becc?”
“He seems repentant.”
Serra pulled him in for another hug. “Don’t abandon us again.”
We showed Eric everything. Bowles Hall, the Gothic, ivy-covered male-only residence on the hill. The Greek Theatre. The steps above Sproul Plaza, where Abbie Hoffman changed the world with his megaphone in the ’60s. Serra’s studio, where she pointed to the canvas sheet covering the triptych but wouldn’t give us a peek.
As we walked home the clock tower began the noon carillon concert, and we stopped under the wide, green-patina’d arch of Sather Gate to listen.
I loved how one person, hidden up high, could cast a spell over the sprawling, chaotic campus. The protesters and credit card marketing minions with their clipboards, the pigeon scavenging in the pizza box on the ground, the pear-shaped, greasy-haired guy hurrying to class in front of us, his frayed purple JanSport backpack strap repaired with safety pins.
I closed my eyes. Even if I was late for a lecture, I always stopped and focused on the tunes falling magically from the sky.
After the last golden note had sifted down, I opened my eyes to find Eric watching me. He was unsmiling, his eyes intent and serious. But when I grinned at him, he grinned back.
My E.
34
A Little Crazy
When the three of us returned to the co-op after Eric’s campus tour, Maggie was lolling on a futon in the front room, her head on Bonnie’s lap. They were back on now that Bonnie had turned in her thesis, and Maggie hadn’t slept in her own bed for weeks.
Maggie looked him up and down. “So this is the famous Eric. You know, you really hurt their feelings.”
“I know,” he said.
“How long are you here?”
“Two months. I sublet Glenn Fisher’s room.”
“How tall are you?”
“Six-two.”
“Are you flexible?”
“I’ve seen the room. I’ll deal.”
“You planning to bolt again?”
“No.” He looked at me and Serra, a promise in his eyes, a private smile. “No.”
Maggie stretched the silence out, making him wait. Then she grinned. “Okay, I guess I approve. You can have my bed tonight.”
The three of us stayed up talking until four. I told Eric about my favorite classes in the English department, and the ones I audited at the journalism grad school. I described my ups and downs at the paper, my condescending bow-tied editor. My dear, seventy-three-year-old English adviser who knew Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Serra filled Eric in on her museum volunteer job, her terror over the invitational.
She told him about Yvonne Copeland and how generous and encouraging she was, but didn’t mention Yvonne’s after-hours “hobby,” or how it intersected with mine via lines of spray paint.
In the dark, her too-casual tone warned me not to, either.
Yawning on Maggie’s mattress stack under the open, round window, Eric described friends in New York and Boston, how he’d started therapy and swimming laps an hour every morning. Then dropped the therapy and doubled the swimming.
“Why’d you drop it?” I
asked.
“The guy kept offering these over-the-top pet theories. Like, remember how my dad froze my driver’s license?”
How could we not? It summed up Mr. Logan so perfectly. Absent and disinterested for months, then swooping in for some bizarre attempt at “strong” parenting.
Eric had passed his first driving test with thirty-six out of forty on the written exam. But that wasn’t good enough for Mr. Logan. So he’d put Eric’s license in a Ziploc, submerged it in a Tupperware of water, and stored it in the freezer. He got the idea from some article on credit card debt—you were supposed to freeze your credit cards so they wouldn’t tempt you. Mr. Logan wouldn’t let Eric defrost the card until he took another test at home, with Mr. Logan proctoring, and got a perfect score. It took five tries.
“I remember that,” I said softly. I’d only got a thirty-five on my driver’s test, and my mom had made me a special mocha ice-cream cake that night, decorated with a car made out of licorice whips she’d cut up.
“Okay, so the therapist was positive that my dad froze the license because on some level he really wanted to keep me a little boy. That that’s why I was so desperate to get away. When, really, my dad’s just a dickish control freak. And an unhappy drunk. So I started going to Al-Anon meetings. They help way more than the therapist ever did.”
I was glad to hear that his voice didn’t veer from bitterness to false levity anymore when he described his family’s problems. It stayed even and direct. Almost accepting.
We talked about his major, his roommates. The differences between the coasts.
Serra quizzed him on his love life at Brown and he admitted that he’d lost his virginity to a girl in his freshman film survey class, then slept with another girl in another film class two weeks later. Then “others.”
He didn’t elaborate but it sounded like a lot.
I felt Serra looking at me across the dark room. But after what I’d done, Eric could sleep with half of Rhode Island. He was back, and that was enough.
Summer Hours Page 20
