Cal surveyed the unused orange work spaces surrounding mine like an empty honeycomb. “Sorry I haven’t checked in on you until now. How about a quick bite tomorrow? If they can spare you...” He flashed a smile at me and the shallow laugh lines flaring from his eyes deepened, reminding me that we were in on the joke about the incubator.
“I’d love that.”
He drummed with his hands, a casual rat-a-tat on my orange cubicle wall. “Let’s say one?”
* * *
“You look happy. Was it an exciting day at the News Planet?” my mom asked cheerfully on the way home from the bus stop.
My commute to LA was ridiculously long, so most nights the bus didn’t pull into Orange Park until well after six. But she was a good sport about it, picking me up in her AC-less white Civic.
She was just glad I was spending my summer productively. In other words, in a manner that would prove to Francine Haggermaker that she’d backed the right horse.
“NoozeButton,” I corrected her for the hundredth time, not addressing the dorky the she always added before each bungled attempt at the name. “CommPlanet is the incubator, the bigger company, and NoozeButton is one of its babies. The littlest one.”
“Of course. I’ll get it eventually. When can I read some of your writing?”
“Oh. Soon. Things are still, you know. Gearing up.”
So far my “writing” was a single, three-inch-square article for the mock-up of a NoozeButton Southern California website: “LA’s Top Five Pet Spas!” It was going to appear on a marketing slide. I’d gotten this hard-hitting assignment only because I’d begged Stephen Liu, the fresh USC MBA who was vaguely in charge of me, to let me help.
I’d told my mom and Serra that Les, my old boss at the Courier, had arranged the job for me, and that I’d only found out later that a certain neighbor up the street was an investor.
I’d also told them that I’d never see Cal, and I hadn’t.
Until today.
That night after my mom went to sleep I ironed my dark purple linen dress. Someone told me once that my eyes looked extra green when I wore purple.
I set my alarm to buzz half an hour earlier than usual so I’d have time to blow-dry my hair. I arranged equipment out on my small bathroom counter—fresh contacts, my lipstick brush, the tiny wire eyelash comb I’d used only for grad pictures. A perfume oil I’d found in Berkeley called Rain.
I hadn’t done any of this for Les at the Courier.
The next day
WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | My well-appointed cubicle
WHERE I WAS | Feeding a lion
I started checking the time on my computer monitor at ten. To make the hours pass faster I opened the Wall Street Journal as I did every day, trying to figure out exactly what NoozeButton was. My coworkers seemed nonplussed by the fact that if you extended the alarm-clock metaphor, it implied that their “content,” which nobody seemed to care about, was a big old snooze-fest.
Nooze would never be news; I wasn’t that naive. I knew it was going to somehow customize ads, and a sprinkling of real articles, based on people’s search histories. I pretended I was an embedded journalist, there on assignment to observe the inner workings and report back. Not a real part of the company.
But though I’d tried to get more answers from Stephen on how NoozeButton would work, he only tossed back words like secret sauce and scaffolded back-end data.
Someday I would find the elusive article that would explain secret-sauce scaffolding, but not today; I was too jumpy.
At eleven I visited the ladies’ room to check my hair, my eye makeup.
At noon I scattered papers from the recycling bin on my desk so I’d look busy when Cal came.
At 12:30 I started listening for the whoosh-thunk of the elevator doors.
And at 1:04 he appeared, hanging over my cubicle wall right where he’d issued the invitation.
“Oh, hi.” I looked up from my fake work.
“Still a good time?” he asked, as if I was the busy one.
“Perfect.”
In the elevator, both of us were quiet, smiling into the middle distance. Until he pressed P instead of L.
“We’re driving?” I’d assumed we were grabbing lunch nearby.
“There’s a great café on Spring Street.”
In the cool underground parking lot he opened his passenger door for me, and there I was, in the blue convertible I’d watched from my room so often. I clipped on an old-fashioned seat belt, like on an airplane, and ran my hand on the burnished wood dashboard.
“I like this font,” I said about the svelte, tilting numbers on the clock. A random conversational opener, though it was true. I noticed fonts.
“Me, too. They should have it in Microsoft Word and call it ’63 Roadster.”
“This is a ’63?”
“Year I was born.” He grinned, turning the ignition. “Vain, right? Who does that?”
“No. I wasn’t thinking that.” I was thinking that you’re thirty-two.
We drove through downtown. The streets were still cool, shaded by skyscrapers, but they’d be baking soon enough.
He clearly enjoyed his old car, with its dials in glass globes, its long chrome gearshift jutting from the steering wheel. It required all kinds of special ministrations and adjustments, and his forearm tensed and softened as it moved back and forth between the steering wheel and gearshift.
When we stopped at a light I said, looking not at him but at the funhouse version of my face reflected in the chrome glove compartment handle—“Thank you again for finding me the job.”
“It’s working out?”
“Yes. It’s been great.”
“Great.”
* * *
The restaurant was called Poppy. We faced each other across a small wooden table in the courtyard, next to a trickling wall fountain of a lion’s head.
“I do like this place,” I said, my neck bent, elbows pulled close to my body. My shy bird pose, Serra once called it. “It feels kind of hidden and European.”
I looked around at the ivy on the walls, the water bubbling from the lion’s mouth into a pond, the gold-trimmed votive candleholder on our table. Anything but his face. The ease that had come over me unexpectedly in the study, by The Orange Tree, was long gone.
I felt sure he knew I’d spent hours thinking about what for him was only a casual, courtesy bite.
“I had a feeling you’d appreciate it. So, NoozeButton,” he said. He pronounced it mockingly, giving ton a French twang. “People treating you well?”
“Everyone’s been great. Really great, thank you.”
I reached for other adjectives, came up empty. The fountain’s great. This is great iced coffee. My English major was really paying off.
“Do you need to get back soon?” I blurted. We’d been seated all of ten minutes. Our salads hadn’t come, our drinks had only dipped an inch.
He shook his head and smiled.
But instead of laughing at my distress he found a project for us. He reached into his pocket and set a dime and a nickel on the table. “Gotta do it,” he said, sliding the dime to me, flicking his eyes at the lion’s head fountain on the wall. “House rules, must feed the lion.”
I clutched the dime for a second and wished the only thing I ever did. Not let me stop making an ass of myself. My standard fountain wish was simple. One word that encompassed these thoughts, and the unnamed ones on the fringes. Happiness. I held the word in my mind for a second and tossed the coin in.
He threw his into the rings from mine, and we listened to the second, neat plunk.
“I heard once you should only make a wish in calm water, while looking at your reflection,” he said.
“Really? That invalidates every wish I’ve ever made.”
“Sorry.”
�
�I read that the Trevi Fountain in Rome gets more than a million dollars in coins a year. Or whatever that is in lira. They give it to charity.”
“How much do you think this one gets a year? Should we do an audit?”
We leaned over to inspect the fountain.
“About a dollar?” he said.
“There’s a lot of silver in the back. So I guess...a dollar sixty-three.”
“Can’t you be more specific?” he asked, tilting his head, his blue eyes flashing amusement.
The waiter came with our blackened-salmon Caesars. “Here you go, doll,” he said as he set mine down. The guy was fiftysomething, probably one of the many waiter-slash-actors that staffed LA restaurants, and he said it sweetly. But I must have flinched. Doll made me feel like a little girl. Or like a toy, like I should have two perfect circles of rouge on my cheeks.
“Remind me never to call you doll,” Cal said when he left.
“You can tell that bugged me? It’s just...we don’t call men...train set. Or football. Here’s your salad, football.”
He laughed. “I’ll call you...human.”
I smiled. And muscle by muscle, I eased out of shy bird pose into alert bird pose.
Cal seemed oblivious to the fact that in addition to our waiter, two other customers in the courtyard—a girl my age and a man slightly older—were checking him out. He leaned close. “So how’s college?”
I told him about my roommates and my favorite classes, how I audited courses in the journalism grad school. About being relegated to the custodial beat on the paper, and how I feared I was facing another year of riding around with Albert Crenley, noting graffiti on a clipboard.
“I like Albert, though, he’s a character,” I said.
“In what way?”
“Oh...like there’s this one spray paint tag, this cat with a slogan under it. The cat knows. It’s from T. S. Eliot: the cat himself knows and will never confess. From ‘The Naming of Cats’?”
“Mysterious.”
“Right? My editor thinks it’s lame but I’m kind of obsessed. I keep a map over my bed where I mark my sightings, and a list on my computer. Location, date. I named the file Hiss.”
He laughed appreciatively. “It’s probably a guerilla marketing campaign for a pet food company.”
“I hope it’s more interesting than that. Anyway, the custodians have a theory that Kappa Alpha Tau fraternity’s behind it. So whenever we see a new cat, Albert pretends he’s going to drive the cart to their house up on the row and make them clean it up.”
“Go Albert. He should.”
“He calls them frat punks. Were you in one?”
“I was a GDI. Do they still say that?”
I nodded. GDI meant Goddamned Independent.
He asked where I wanted to live after college (anywhere a newspaper would hire me), whether I’d been to Europe or got my fountain factoids from books (the latter, but I hoped to swing a semester abroad).
“You should do it,” he said. “Do what makes you happy.”
“How is your happy place?” I asked. “Have you sailed there a lot this summer?”
“Happy place?” he said, confused.
Silly to think he’d held on as tightly as I had to this scrap from our year-old conversation. I stared down at the fountain wall by my knee, the green fur on wet stone. “Catalina.”
“Oh, of course. I go there too much. Way too much.”
“Do you mean you’re getting bored with it?”
“The opposite. I’ve let other things slide.” He grinned, and leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs. “I’m afraid it’s a problem.”
Did he mean his investments, or his relationship, or his triathlons, or all of the above? It wasn’t clear.
And though he said he was afraid it was a problem, he couldn’t look less troubled, tipping his chair back in the sun next to the bubbling fountain, the hair on his forearms bright as the gold paint on the stone lion’s mane.
He had floated over the adult problems waiting for me and found them amusing. I smiled back.
12
Impressions
The next day, every time the elevator whoosh-thunked, I sat up straight, waiting for him to pay another visit over my cubicle wall. But he didn’t.
He didn’t appear the next day, or the next week. And though I knew it was unreasonable, I felt strangely hurt by his absence.
I didn’t see his car pass through the gate, though I watched for it, and I didn’t bump into Donna Logan in town, though I hoped to. I wanted to see if she still looked happy.
I wondered, more than once, if all was not well at 26 Jacaranda Heights.
I tried to keep busy, hanging out in the one lively corner of the office—the web cataloging room, where a bunch of recent college grads did nothing but record the addresses of new websites all day for $20 an hour. They’d nicknamed their office Sears and made an archway around their door from ripped-out pages from catalogs—guys posing in tighty-whities, pool decor, garden gnomes.
The catalogers found a lot of porn and competed to find the weirdest sites, shouting, “We have a new front-runner!” across the room. No URL was off-limits. I wasn’t approved to catalog, but I fetched coffee for them, and they were always welcoming.
When I wasn’t lurking in Sears I read the Journal and the FT, cleaned my keyboard with a nifty can of compressed air. I persuaded Stephen to let me help him prepare for what he called a boondoggle, a big off-site marketing meeting coming up in San Diego.
Stephen grudgingly let me collate PowerPoints on the rosewood table in the conference room. The sheets about NoozeButton, still warm and fragrant from the Xerox, all had violent words on them: slice and grab and push.
“These make me feel a little sorry for NoozeButton’s future readers,” I said.
Stephen didn’t break a smile. “Not readers, Rebecca. Impressions. Once it gears up, it’s going to be bigger than HotWired or Salon.”
“But what is it?”
“A proprietary algorithm that mines search terms for demographic data, then scaffolds it,” he said, dealing copies of a colorful bar graph facedown around the table.
“So scaffolding is like giving readers—”
“Impressions.”
“Giving impressions more stories they’ll like based on their age or gender or whatever?”
A tolerant, inward smile. “You’re thinking way too front end. We’re going to optimize utility on the back end. It’s totally robust, totally scalable. Data scaffolding’s only a conduit to ad partnership opportunities.”
“Got it. Partnerships with...?”
“Netscape, ideally.”
I was pretty sure he had no idea what he was talking about.
Stephen disappeared and I had nothing to do, so I checked my Hotmail account.
The week I’d started, I’d confessed to Eric that I was working for one of the companies Cal had invested in.
I’d said that the opportunity just came up, that I’d gone mad, drifting around Orange Park alone. That Cal was hardly involved.
I’d read over it obsessively, each time wincing a bit more. It was such a transparent plea for absolution—
This is the strangest place, E. Empty and full of itself at the same time...
I’m sort of helping my sort-of boss get ready for a marketing “boondoggle” in San Diego. (The word boondoggle reminds me of Moondoggie, that surfer in Gidget. Remember?)
But mostly, I take coffee orders. I pocket free granola bars from the breakroom, ask people if they need me to copy anything (they rarely do), and wait like a good girl for five o’clock...
Be honest, E. Am I paying my dues or selling out? I can’t tell the difference.
He still hadn’t answered.
But Serra and Maggie and I had a summer-long chain of messag
es going.
Today Maggie had emailed about a blowout Midsummer Night’s Dream/Jell-O-shot party at Plato House, this ratty co-op where she was rooming for the summer. The cops shut the party down but nobody got in trouble.
Serra shared funny stories from babysitting in Tahoe and cryptic hints about her triptych project. I’m obsessed, she said. I’m lost in it. I’m only sleeping three hours a night, but I’ve never had more energy. The only frustrating part is figuring out how to connect the three pieces. There’s this metal artist in Berkeley who might be able to make what I want, but do you think that would be cheating? The triptych was apparently so big that Yvonne, Serra’s teacher/boss/idol, was renting Serra a truck to transport it back to campus before fall semester.
I told Serra it didn’t sound like cheating and I couldn’t wait to see it. I told them about my job, Sears, and my orange cubicle, avoiding any mention of my friendly lunch with Eric’s enemy. I described the beater car I had my eye on, at the used lot in Santa Ana. $750, a 1971 silver Volvo diesel wagon.
I can call it Wag Dos, I wrote, and hit Send.
I was about to wander to the breakroom for another granola bar when it popped up:
New message from [email protected]
Three and a half weeks after I sent my email to him. It would serve him right if I trashed it, unread.
My hand hesitated on my beige plastic mouse. But I clicked it open—
Congrats!
I gripped the mouse tight, swirling the cursor around the screen of my spanking-new Dell.
Congrats! I’d poured my heart out in 907 words. In return I got one, with a bullshit exclamation point.
Congrats! As if a stranger had hijacked his keyboard. Congrats! As if I was a stranger.
I caressed the mouse, dancing the cursor around and around Eric’s reply.
And clicked Delete.
13
Friends
2008
Thursday, 12:10 p.m.
Santa Barbara
Harborside Restaurant parking lot
I walk over to his side but he’s lost in phone world, oblivious to the fact that we’ve stopped. Head down, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, like whatever he’s sending is as urgent as Morse code from the Titanic. He glances up and I get a polite smile, a lifted index finger.
Summer Hours Page 8