I was so relieved I’d only hugged him and rearranged his cowlicks. But Serra punched him in the chest.
“So where were you?” she asked. “Drug-muling in Mexico? Having a secret affair with Uma Thurman?”
“We didn’t bust you,” I said. “But skiing with the cashmere turtleneck posse? Please. I can’t believe they bought it.”
“Tell.” Serra tilted her Mr. Pibb can above his head until he ’fessed up.
“The Red Lion in San Diego. The big one near the theaters. I go there sometimes. It’s peaceful. And I wanted to rewatch all the Oscar movies.”
Serra and I had stared at him.
“Except The Player. I’ve already seen it three times.”
“We were worried sick, asshole,” said Serra.
“What she means is tell us next time, so we can help,” I said.
* * *
“I already tried that Red Lion in San Diego,” I said to Serra. “So if it’s a movie bender, he’s found a new hotel.”
“He’s fine. Let’s try not to stress.”
I stressed.
On the seventh day of no Eric, when I dialed his Gold Coast number planning to leave my umpteenth “Are you okay?” voice mail, my call went straight to reception. A silky voice informed me that Eric “was no longer with the company.”
I called Serra and she answered the way she always did, lately, when she saw it was me on the line: “I haven’t heard from him.”
“I’m picturing him on the street. Turning tricks, like River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho.”
“He’s probably sitting in a movie theater watching My Own Private Idaho. He’s a big boy. You have to stop rescuing him.”
“I know.”
“Don’t worry.”
I tried not to. If Gold Coast had fired him, well, he’d been expecting it for weeks. He’d known all those five-hour lunches sleeping or watching classic double features at the Wiltern Theatre would catch up with him. Or maybe he’d quit. Gone out with a bang, telling them they could get another flunky to scout tanning salons and schedule Suzi Gold’s “internships.”
Serra was right. He’d surface when he was ready. Any day I’d get a postcard. Greetings from the world’s largest ball of twine or the gas station made of petrified wood we’d always wanted to visit.
I threw myself into work.
At 10:00 a.m., Skip Theobald came over to lodge his daily grievance about the reader comments on the website. When Skip visited my cubicle waving printouts, I usually got an instant headache. But today I didn’t mind the distraction.
“Can’t you do anything about this?” he asked, eyes and veins bulging.
Skip’s Sunday tirade against the firefighter union had all his anonymous enemies posting on the newspaper’s website into the wee hours. I didn’t have to look at the sheet he was shaking at me because I’d memorized the comments. My favorite was from reliable AlGoreRhythm2000. “Libertarianism is a cult, and Skip Theobald is the sect’s nastier, less intelligent L. Ron Hubbard.”
Mild stuff, really. No death threats.
I swiveled my ergonomic chair toward Skip and nodded at his monologue. My mind drifted as he went off on me, waving his stack of copied-and-pasted comments. Had he trained his Microsoft Word spellcheck not to autocorrect Theobald to toehold like I had? The winding vein on his temple resembled a switchbacking section of the River Thames in London. The part they showed during the credits of EastEnders.
Skip ran on. “So these idiots can post whatever they want and I’m supposed to take it... Isn’t it your job to delete this crap?” An arc of saliva punctuated the end of his speech.
When Skip finally finished his rant, I kept my voice satiny and reasonable. “Skip, I can’t delete posts unless they violate the newspaper’s comment policy. That’s no threats, profanity, harassment, or intimidation.”
He humphed, but I continued. The expert mom at the playground, soothing a tantrummy child. “And I do delete that stuff. Every day. But people are allowed to say they disagree.”
The vein in Skip’s forehead throbbed at me, but he huffed away.
Alice, the sixty-year-old copy editor in the cubicle next to mine, peered over the gray wall we shared and nodded at my small victory.
I spent the rest of the day putting the Potpourri to bed. When my mind wandered to Eric, I yanked it back to Darla Talbert’s mock beef Stroganoff and a wildly popular new feature I’d launched—Grandchild Quote Corner.
If I was stuck being Paula, nothing less than global syndication would do.
I was typing up a funny quote about dentures from some four-year-old boy in Garden Grove when the phone rang.
“Becc.”
It was Eric. Thank God.
“What the hell? I did a Navigator search this morning on how to file a missing-persons report. I think I was serious.”
“Can you meet me?”
“Half an hour.”
It was four. I left my monitor on, draped my jacket on the back of my chair so it would look like I was still in the building if Skip came by in another snit, and drove to Newport.
When I got to Crystal Cove Eric wasn’t at our usual spot near the shacks. A deeply tanned couple slept on towels down the beach, but otherwise it was pretty deserted.
I took off my shoes and put them in my shoulder bag, rolled up my pants, and walked from the hot sand to the cold, packed surface close to the water. I dragged my toes in the foam, turning around every once in a while to look for Eric. After fifteen minutes sweat trickled down my back and I was starting to worry again.
I walked up to a tilting old shack with green trim. It was slightly apart from the other houses. A keep-out sign had been revised, via black spray paint, to read Fuck Off. The green cabin was boarded up like all the others, but one side window had most of its planks missing.
I crept closer and peeked in. Something hairy moved inside and I jumped, scraping the inside of my arm on the rough wood. An animal. A shaggy homeless dude, furious that I’d disturbed him?
No.
Eric. Unshaven, hair wild even for him. But he came to the window like it was a McDonald’s drive-up and in his goofy voice said, “Can I help you, ma’am?”
“Are you trying to kill me?” I leaned over, bracing my hands on my knees to slow my heart.
“Oh, sorry! You cut yourself?” Blood oozed down my forearm. “Grab my hand.”
My heart still racing, I scrambled through the window frame into the cottage. Sun slashed in through broken boards. Almost everything had been ransacked over the years. There were broken cupboards in the kitchen, but no sink. An oval mark on the hardwood floors, but no tub.
It must have been adorable once. Whoever had built it, some artist in the 1930s, had wanted to hear the beach from her bed. She hadn’t wanted to sell out, working at a job she hated to afford beachfront property. So she’d built this place illegally. Somebody had been happy here.
Now there were layers and layers of graffiti on the walls. Initials inside hearts and foul scrawls. Love and hate messages, nothing in between.
A stack of items was neatly arranged in one corner. A red sleeping bag, some water bottles, a roll of toilet paper, and a box of saltines.
“What is this, some documentary project? People are living in these shacks?”
Then I recognized the sleeping bag. It was Eric’s red mummy North Face.
“No,” I said.
A mound of trash filled another corner. Empty potato chip bags, beer bottles, some items best left unidentified. All courtesy of previous tenants. And next to the trash was a tree branch that Eric had apparently used as a broom. He’d swept up.
Eric grabbed the roll of toilet paper and unwound it, fashioning a compress for my bleeding arm. “Here... Sorry.”
“You haven’t been sleeping here.”
“If you say
so.”
“You’re telling me you spent the night here last night?”
“And the night before that. Well, the first night doesn’t count ’cause I slept in my truck for most of it.”
“No.”
“Yes. I couldn’t stand it at Simon’s.”
“So you’ve been playing homeless because your roommate has rowdy sex?”
“Nah. Well, the rowdy-sex part was the beginning. So I started looking for a new apartment, stayed with a guy from work for a couple nights.”
“Get to the part where you end up here.” I shivered and Eric took off his dirty sweatshirt, draped it over my shoulders. “Why didn’t you just crash at your mom’s?”
“I wanted to be alone for a little while.”
“So what have you been doing all day?”
“I walk on the beach. Read. There’s a Qwik-Mart up the highway. Good jerky.”
“Eric.” Pity overtook anger and I hugged him, trying not to get blood on the back of his Hitchcock T-shirt, even though it was so grimy the blood probably wouldn’t show. He smelled bad, like a week of camping mixed with stale sea salt. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is I’m ridiculous. The only homeless person I know with a $100 sleeping bag.”
“You’re not homeless. Come with me. Surf on my couch for a while.”
“I’m okay here. Just wanted to see you.”
We sat on the buckling floor together, back to back. He leaned up against me and I closed my eyes, tried to imagine sleeping there for even one night. Maybe the white noise of the crashing waves made it relaxing. Maybe Eric no longer smelled the years of baked-in urine.
I didn’t say anything. I’d let him talk when he was ready. I pressed on my cut until the bleeding wasn’t too bad.
Finally, he said, “I stopped going to Gold Coast.”
“I know, they told me you don’t work there anymore.”
“Really? I wasn’t sure they’d notice.”
“Sorry. Guess they noticed.”
“I was such a hard worker. How will the show go on without me?”
I laughed.
“Do you think I’m a lazy brat, Becc? Tell the truth.”
I thought for a minute. Eric wasn’t lazy, and he wasn’t a brat. He just cared more than he was supposed to. He didn’t want to wake up at fifty and realize he’d become his dad, stuck doing work that made him miserable. The misery trickling down to his family. “No. I’ve never thought that. For someone who’s supposedly good with words I was careless with that one.”
“Thank you.”
Resting our backs against each other, we listened to the waves.
“Can we stay here for a few minutes?” Eric said. “Before I go back to the world of résumés and paying my dues?”
“Sure, E.”
He handed me a stack of saltines over his shoulder, reached back to awkwardly drape his sleeping bag over my legs. It was getting cold. The regular pounding of the waves got louder. High tide. And there was no more weak golden light piercing the boards. Voices came near the shack, and Eric’s back tightened against mine as we both held our breath. It was probably only teenagers, debating on coming in to tryst, add their initials to the walls.
The voices receded.
When it was almost too dark to see, Eric said, “I’m ready to go now.”
* * *
An hour later, in my warm, locked, orange-shag-carpeted apartment, we lay on my $90 Goodwill sofa with greasy fingers, surrounded by empty In-N-Out Burger bags.
“I’ll try not to stink up your couch,” said Eric. “I’m too tired to shower.”
“And I’ll try not to wake you up when I leave in the morning, but you’d better be here when I get back. Promise you won’t disappear on me again?”
“Promise.”
I tucked him in so everything but his head was covered in red nylon. He looked like a swaddled newborn. “I’m sorry I called you a brat.”
“It wasn’t because of that,” he said. “Well, so much for my three-day career as a beach bum.”
“You had housing. Real beach bums don’t.”
“That guy in Gidget did. Moondoggie.”
“Not Moondoggie. You’re thinking of the other one. Kahuna.”
“That’s right, the Big Kahuna.” Eric smiled. “Who else but you would remember that? We should rent it this weekend. That and another movie with a beach theme, a good one.”
“Gidget’s good. Gidget rules. But it’s a plan.”
“I won’t stay past the weekend.” He touched my arm.
I bent down to kiss the top of his head. Quickly, but long enough to breathe in his Eric smell. Seawater and sweat couldn’t hide it.
“You can stay as long as you want.” I went in my bedroom and shut the door.
43
Curriculum Vitae
July 1998
WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | The newspaper
WHERE I WAS | On the couch with Eric
I cut out of work at 4:35. I’d worked through lunch, but I still took the long way around the office to the elevator so Skip Theobald wouldn’t see me leaving early and fume.
The shower was running when I got home. I curled up on the couch, my head on Eric’s rolled sleeping bag, and waited for him.
“Caught me.” He came down the hall, toweling his hair. “I only woke up an hour ago. And I used your razor. And borrowed your clothes. A little tight, but clean.” He looked better, his cheeks smooth, his eyes brighter. His shoulders strained at my women’s medium T-shirt from the Orange County MS Walkathon/10K. My blue Nike sweats were so tight on him he looked like he was wearing riding jodhpurs. But the length wasn’t bad. There were only four inches of leg below the hem.
“Borrow whatever. I’m just glad you’re here.”
“There’s pizza coming. Crispy bacon and anchovy.”
I pretended to gag.
“C’mon, bacon and anchovy is like a warm Caesar salad,” he said.
“That’s not selling it.”
“Kidding,” he said. “I got your nasty Hawaiian for you. My new landlord.”
We toasted with glasses of root beer (Eric) and Two-Buck Chuck cabernet from Trader Joe’s (me), devouring the pizza on the sofa. Eric peeled the pineapple rings off his slices and set them on mine.
After dinner, I scooched to the other side of the couch to face him, pressing the soles of my feet against the soles of his so we could do a push-me, pull-you bicycle motion with our legs.
“I’ll get my stuff together tomorrow while you’re at work,” he said. “And then I’ll move into my mom’s.”
“Stay here while you look for a new job. As long as you want.”
“I’m qualified to do nothing.”
“That’s outrageously untrue. Print your résumé tomorrow and we’ll look at it when I get home.”
Eric slept on the couch again that night. At 3:00 a.m., I tiptoed out to use the bathroom. He lay on the sofa, his rustle-y, red sleeping bag fallen to the floor. One long leg dangled onto the carpet and his mouth was wide-open. I pulled the sleeping bag up to his chin.
When I woke at seven he wasn’t there.
A panicked five minutes, then he clomped up the stairs with two coffees and a white bag in hand.
“Sweet or savory?” he asked in a British accent.
“Sweet.”
He handed me a chocolate croissant and took the ham and cheese for himself. We munched quietly and drank our coffees.
* * *
I ducked out early again. 4:41. Deb and the other bigwigs were in a meeting in the large conference room behind closed blinds, which was weird. Deb always held meetings in the morning, way before deadline. With open blinds.
Eric wasn’t there when I got home, but his sleeping bag was still on the sofa,
rolled up neatly in its mummy case.
He’d printed his résumé and left it for me on the kitchen table. At the top he’d written, “Went to get dinner. ‘Yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility.’”
The résumé wasn’t bad. He had the Brown University degree, 3.5 GPA, junior production assistant for an “innovative, unscripted cable series.”
Unscripted—what a sham. Eric said the show regularly paid people to appear as love interests. But the Gold Coast people were hardly likely to give him glowing recs. He’d have to say he had creative differences or something.
I turned the paper over to jot down possible wording. But the back wasn’t blank. Eric had printed another version of his résumé there.
Curriculum Vitae Secretus, it said at the top. His secret CV.
-Analyzed structure of All About Eve with apprentice film critic during ad hoc intensive media industry event.
A movie afternoon with me in San Francisco.
-Managed outdoor survival session as mental preparation for Gold Coast two-episode finale event.
A camping trip Eric and Serra and I had taken to Pinecrest last summer. He hadn’t told us he was supposed to be working that weekend.
-Presided over floating pool chair, with headrest and cup holder, within tight window of TV Guide conference hours.
That one I didn’t know.
There were a dozen more bullet points like that. I’d thought my occasional sneaky work exits were bad, but Eric had made a whole career out of fudging his Gold Coast schedule.
“Honey, I’m home.” He walked in with two crumpled brown bags and pulled out white boxes and chopsticks.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Thai.” He dealt out napkins and we ate straight from the boxes.
“Daily takeout is not in your budget. We’ll shop tomorrow.”
“I’ll bring the coupons.”
“Yes, you will,” I said. “So. I like this.” I held up his résumé and set it near the edge of the round table, away from the drippy pad thai noodles and chicken curry.
“The real one or the fake one?”
Summer Hours Page 25
