His tips went into a mason jar, marked with a sign that said Greece or Bust.
48
Road Trip
August 1998
A week after I got the letter from Francine Haggermaker
WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | Writing a Paula’s Potpourri caption about a shih tzu beauty pageant in Laguna Niguel
WHERE ERIC WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | tumtum restaurant
WHERE WE WERE | Heaven-Of-The-Sea
I got another letter from Francine. This time it was waiting in my apartment mailbox.
Rebecca, please do call me as soon as possible. It’s quite important.
No reading material attached.
I stared at it, tore it, and sent it down the disposal.
“Are you okay?” Eric asked that night, as we were watching Friends.
“I realized I forgot to write to Francine Haggermaker. I feel awful.”
“How is the Franster?”
“I write to her. She doesn’t write to me. But I’m sure she’s fine.”
“I have a theory about why you’re so hostile toward her, why you’re so intimidated. Want to hear it?”
“I’m not intimidated. But you’ll tell me your theory anyway, so go ahead.”
“You’ve seen The Great Gatsby. Mia Farrow, Robert Redford, not—”
“They recently made it into a book, too.”
“She’s your billboard.”
“My what?”
“Your what’s-his-name. The guy on the billboard over the road. Looking down on you as you travel through life, seeing all.”
“The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s an interesting theory, E.”
“But you’re the most upright person I know. So what do you have to feel guilty about?”
* * *
I woke Eric at five. “I’m kidnapping you. Get someone to cover your shifts.”
“Whuddabowgreesfun,” he mumbled into his pillow.
“The Greece fund can spare a hundred. We’re going on a road trip.”
We sped up Pacific Coast Highway, pushing Wag Dos to its limit. Eric slept curled up against the window and I drove, feeling better with each mile.
I’d been drawn to the ocean with the vague idea that proximity to it would wash away my worries. A bright sweep of blue to my left, putting everything in perspective.
As the miles passed I imagined the shreds of paper floating up from the blue Liberty recycling bin. Slow-motion, like the halting, self-conscious special effects in an old Disney movie. I pictured them gliding out the window, west into the Pacific. The words from Francine’s letter and the damning articles were drifting far from each other. So that they could never be matched up again, not by the FBI or Eric or anyone.
Francine Haggermaker.
earliest convenience
lecturer Derrek Schwinn III
Yvonne Copeland
Iron and Cobalt
deeply concerned.
Mutual acquaintance.
Popular theories
do call
cryptic signature.
The cat knows.
By Rebecca Reardon
quite important.
* * *
By Santa Barbara I could picture the pieces floating on the water behind me, words swelling into nothing as the ink blurred and spread.
By Monterey the scraps were pulp, disintegrating into fragments. Fish food. Not even fish food.
Eric woke, yawned. “Where are we going?” His voice was husky from sleep.
“Do you care?”
“Not particularly.” He smiled slowly. “You and me and the open road.”
* * *
I drove us five hours to an unpretentious notch of beach south of San Francisco. Alice had told me about this place where you could get a room for $56 if you didn’t mind sharing a bathroom. Right across the highway from the beach, at an old wood-shingled YWCA camp that had been turned into a hotel. Cielo-del-mar, it was called. A made-up word meaning Heaven-Of-The-Sea.
It was too early to check in, so we walked along the dunes, holding hands. We picnicked on peanut butter and cheese cracker packets and root beers from 7-Eleven that I’d picked up on the way.
“Gourmet,” said Eric, brushing neon orange crumbs off his hands. “Wish I could treat you to one of those restaurants right on the water, and order only stuff that says Market Price on the menu. Lobster, Market Price. Sole, Market Price.”
“I don’t care about that. Anyway, 7-Eleven is a market.”
“Market Price, seventy-nine cents,” he said. “You have crumbs here.” He wiped the corner of my mouth, then kissed me, his hand tucked into the right leg of my shorts. He was impatient for the hotel room, probably thinking this might be the night. “Think we can check in yet?”
“We should give it another half hour, I think.”
We watched the surfers, four shining brown torsos bobbing way out in the water. The waves were poor. Instead of good, rolling sets they had to wait forever for the occasional decent wave. But they looked content out there, straddling their boards and scanning the horizon for something epic.
I lay back on the beach, not caring that it would take days to wash the sand out of my hair. In my rush to get on the freeway I’d forgotten beach towels. Eric reclined next to me, held a windbreaker over our faces for shade.
“I wish we were going to Greece tomorrow,” I said.
“Soon,” he said into my neck. He tickled me with his vibrating lips, trying to make me laugh.
We twined our bodies together in the sand under my windbreaker, listening to the surf. He ran his hand up and down the side of my waist under my T-shirt, from the top of my shorts to my underarm. I clasped his hand, then ran a finger up and down along the valleys between his fingers.
“I’m crazy about you,” he said.
“I’m crazy about you.”
“Why did it take us so long?”
“I really don’t know.”
* * *
Eric napped in the room while I wandered the hotel grounds, jumpy.
We’d kissed, peeled our sandy clothes off down to our underwear, locked together on the creaking bed. It felt so good I wanted to let it happen, let it obliterate everything.
I was touching him down the elastic waistband of his shorts, my hand around him for the first time. Then I’d looked at his face, dearer to me than anything, and I couldn’t do it.
“Wait. Eric, let’s not yet. I’m not ready yet.”
He’d rolled off me, stared at the ceiling.
“Soon, okay?” I said.
He nodded, breathing hard, trying to make sense of why I’d ripped us away from bliss. I watched him, my body pressed against his from shoulder to toe on the narrow bed. Nuzzling his arm until he relaxed and fell asleep.
I’d tiptoed out to the lobby, flipped through the little local newspaper, the Breeze. But I was on almost no sleep and the words blurred. I wandered to the vending machine, thinking I’d get a Coke.
There was a woman working the ice hopper, filling a clinical-looking rubber pouch. I picked up a stray piece of ice that had skated across the red tile floor, tossing it into the bin.
“Thank you, sweetheart. Are you and your husband having a good trip?”
She and her husband had checked in right behind us. I wondered if I’d get a sweetheart if she knew Eric wasn’t my husband.
If she knew anything about me.
“Yes, it’s beautiful here.”
She was halfway out the humming vestibule when she turned, pulling a parchment-colored envelope from her purse. “Can you use this by any chance, sweetheart? It’s a gift certificate to some fancy-pants Chinese restaurant. We won it at Pier 39 yesterday on some gizmo, this wheel lik
e Vanna White.”
“The Whirling Win Wheel.”
“Yes, that’s it. It was so exciting! But we’ve decided to stay in tonight. My husband’s knee is acting up and I never cared much for egg rolls and such anyway.”
“Are you sure? You could use it another time.”
“We won’t be back for years. You take it and go with that cute husband of yours.”
I was tempted to let this slide; I really wanted the gift certificate.
“Actually, he’s not my husband.”
“Fiancé?”
“A good friend. Boyfriend, I guess. I’m not quite sure.”
As I overshared, she tightened the lid on her ice bag and looked confused, and I thought Eric and I had lost the free dinner.
But the soft, pink-powdered flesh around her right eye contracted in a wink. “Well, then. You and your friend go and see what the night holds.”
* * *
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty, wake up. I scored us some free food.”
I sat on the edge of the bed next to Eric and tugged the paper from the envelope. It was stamped with grimacing tiki statues. Dinner buffet for two, plus two premium drinks, at the Tonga Room. Polynesian, not Chinese.
“Sweet, I’ve always wanted to check it out,” he said, sitting up and pulling me onto his chest.
Everyone had heard of the Tonga Room.
It was inside the Fairmont Hotel.
49
Storm
August 23, 1998
We drove up to the Fairmont, but my excitement had drained away, replaced by sadness, because even this little surprise had Cal’s shadow over it. Or my heart did; it couldn’t seem to outrun him.
The Fairmont was in the Nob Hill neighborhood, where he’d once wanted to take me to show me his little place with the Juliet balcony, his investment property. But where I’d refused to go for fear of being seen.
He’d sold his apartment, but I didn’t want to go anywhere near Snob Hill. Derrek Schwinn’s gargoyles were there, too.
“Maybe we should bail, traffic’ll be awful,” I said. “Let’s have more cheese crackers on the beach. My treat.”
“Are you kidding? I need to see a synthetic thunderstorm. You think people put newspapers over their heads, like at Rocky Horror?”
“It’ll be valet. That’ll probably cost as much as we save on food. And we’ll have to wait forever to get the car after, I hate that.”
“So we’ll park on the street. In half an hour we’ll be drinking lime from coconuts. Like the song.” He glanced at me. “What gives? You’re the one who scored the free meal. Always sweet-talking senior citizens in ice rooms. Why aren’t you into it anymore?”
“I am into it. It’s just I didn’t realize how far the restaurant was and we have to wake up so early to drive back, that’s all.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that going to Nob Hill with Eric was trespassing. That the scowly tiki faces on the gift certificate were trying to warn me away.
Eric smiled at me. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead. Don’t go getting practical on me now.”
Our trip had been nearly perfect until now. Reckless, sandy, tiring, but just what we needed. It would be foolish to let the wispiest of threads connected to my time with Cal spoil it.
It wasn’t like we were driving to Sausalito for dinner. So the Tonga happened to be inside the Fairmont. Tons of restaurants happened to be inside hotels. Cal and I had never even gone there. He was in LA, hundreds of miles away.
I reached for Eric’s hand. “Do you think we’ll get to keep the coconuts?”
50
Night Life
2008
Saturday, a little before 1:00 a.m.
For months I’d told myself this was about Serra.
I could finally make things up to her, keep her from worrying about me and Eric.
With his mom’s fiftieth birthday party on the fourteenth and Serra’s wedding on the twentieth, and the stops spread up the coast like points on a line graph, ending at the wedding, it had seemed completely logical.
But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
And Eric had known all along.
From the very first email he’d seen what I hadn’t—that this was not about Serra at all, but about me. Going through a midlife crisis, wanting an excuse to be with him again. To try to undo the past. To go back to a better time.
But he’d gone along anyway, saying what a nice gift it was, how much Serra would love it.
Because he felt sorry for me.
It’s 1:00 a.m., and I’ve been lying on my bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. Against the blank white canvas, all I can picture is Eric’s concerned brown eyes.
I need a new view, so I take the elevator down to the lobby, buttoning my warm navy peacoat over my leggings and T-shirt.
As I exit the hotel I see that the night doorman is the same.
Unbelievable, that he’s the same from ten years ago, but I’m sure of it. That wide smile, wide brown eyes, that reassuring air of seen-it-all unflappability. He was certainly unflappable that night a decade ago.
“Do you need a cab, ma’am?” the kind doorman asks.
I’m sure I look like hell. Hair unbrushed, eye makeup smeared, wandering onto Nob Hill in the middle of the night.
“No, thanks,” I say. “I’m just going for a walk.”
I walk aimlessly. Past the spire of Grace Cathedral, the elegant homes and shopfronts of Pacific Heights, across bright, still-bustling Japantown. Through the Tenderloin, Gough, Divisadero, downtown.
San Francisco is forty-nine square miles, and I’d walk every one of them if it meant I could outrun the memory of that night.
And of tonight. Of Eric indulging me.
I was really sorry to hear about it...
My mom told me you’ve been having a rough time since...
Every time I picture Eric saying this on the roof garden, his kind face glowing gold from the lights of the city, another hot wave of embarrassment hits.
He said it so gently. The way you talk to someone mid-breakdown.
The whole time we were repacking the gift after returning from the roof—as he asked what time I thought we should get up tomorrow, how I’d found the collector who has the last panel—I was aware of his pity.
A third, unwelcome guest in the room.
It was in the warmth of his voice and the way his thick-lashed brown eyes sought out mine from the other side of the luggage trolleys. The care with which his long fingers smoothed out the duct tape on the edge of the box.
So Donna had urged Eric to come with me. Of course she did.
I walk fast, pulling my coat close against the fog. On Eddy Street I pass a rowdy group of twentysomethings piling into a cab after last call, then a man sleeping over a subway grate. I give him $20. The people out at this hour are the young and lucky and the old and forgotten. There’s no in-between at 2:00 a.m.
I know I’m one of the lucky. My calendar is full—I have brunch with my mom on Sundays. I work, I let friends set me up on dates, I run every morning before my commute, I attend panel discussions at the First Amendment Association. I keep busy, trying to fill my time, to schedule over the longing.
I’m thirty-two, and yet I feel so locked into my life.
And I’m scared I’m running out of time to change it.
I walk past a flower mart, the sweet perfume so strong I stop to breathe it in, head to the Embarcadero, the ferry building, the misty piers.
We won’t be like them, Eric and I promised each other.
There’s no gate around my home. But I feel trapped all the same.
I sit on a damp concrete pier and watch people fish until the fog turns violet, and then orange. I only stand when light spills over the Berkeley hills, melting like butterscotch across the Bay.
51
Enchanting
August 23, 1998
We left Wag Dos at the base of Mason Street and shivered in the fog that had crept in off the Bay.
“San Francisco in the summer.” Eric laughed, pulling me close for warmth as we trudged up the steep hill.
The Fairmont emerged from the fog all at once.
We stood across the street with the rest of the photo-snapping tourists and took it in: bisque-colored and balconied, like a building in Paris. A large, curvy black awning over the entry. Flags from dozens of countries flapping across the front. It took up the whole block.
“It’s a castle,” I said, stepping into the road, my eyes on the flags.
Eric grabbed my elbow at the same time I heard the tring, tring: a cable car’s jolly warning. I retreated to the curb to let it pass, a slow, boxy boat of gleaming wood and brass, the passengers half delighted, half self-conscious to be on display. The knot of tourists surrounding us went nuts with their cameras, trying to frame the perfect shot of the cable car with the Fairmont behind it.
“We’re in a Rice-A-Roni commercial,” Eric said.
“Stop it, it’s beautiful.”
“It is beautiful. But speaking of rice, dinner’s waiting.”
A bellman in a navy-and-gold uniform swung the hotel door open. I’d decided that dark could approximate dressy, so I was in navy sweats, black flip-flops, and my black Beck T-shirt, turned inside out and backward. With earrings and extra lipstick, I didn’t feel too scruffy. Eric, with fewer options, had fared worse: ripped khaki shorts and frayed green Vans.
But the doorman smiled and tipped his cap. “Enjoy your stay!”
“He has to know we’re not staying here,” I whispered.
“But we will someday,” Eric said. “Fanciest suite in the place.”
“I’ll take the Cielo. The rooms here are probably nothing special.”
“Sure, I’ll bet they’re total dumps.”
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