Summer Hours

by Amy Mason Doan

  But instead I was acutely aware of how thin my blouse fabric was. It was called a “shell,” not a real shirt. I’d never intended to wear it around work people without the jacket.

  “Yes. A long time ago.”

  “They show it here every night, I read. In every room.”

  Perfectly harmless words, on their face. But he was married, I knew from the article. And his eyes were still inches too low. I felt pinned and only managed a quiet, “How cool.”

  We were at the door now, him a little in front of me, holding up the family behind us. But he seemed in no hurry to leave.

  I wanted to be in my Wag Dos, miles up the freeway. Breathing in exhaust fumes in bumper-to-bumper traffic, my thighs sticking to the torn upholstery—it would be heaven, if it could get me away from this man and his roaming, shameless mole eyes.

  But I couldn’t cut in front of him. He’d been on the cover of Forbes.

  “There you are!”

  Cal. Behind me, beaming.

  “So you’ve met? Rebecca, Derrek Schwinn. Derrek, this is Rebecca Reardon, one of our best summer analysts. On the media side. She goes to Berkeley.”

  I extended a hand and Derrek Schwinn shook it.

  When he spoke again it was to my face, not my blouse, and his voice no longer hinted an invitation to watch Some Like It Hot in his suite.

  The sorting king had moved me into another category. “Very nice to meet you, Rebecca. I’m a visiting lecturer at Berkeley, in the biz department. Beautiful campus.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got to make an appearance at that bocce whatever-it-is, Derrek, or people will lose their jobs.”

  Schwinn laughed. “We can’t have that.”

  Cal clapped an arm around him and led him toward the door.

  He threw me a quick glance over his shoulder, rolling his eyes.

  15

  The Person Who Says Yes

  August 25

  WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | My well-appointed cubicle

  WHERE I WAS | The Summer Hours

  After the boondoggle in San Diego, the success of my workday depended on if I saw him or not. If he came in more often than he used to or not, if he talked to me more than necessary or not, if it seemed his eyes lingered on mine, or on my lips or legs, a second longer than the last time.

  I tried to ignore the countdown of weeks until I had to return to Berkeley. I stared at myself in my bedroom mirror, replaying our conversations, trying to determine what he thought of me. I tried to look pretty for him. I calculated and fantasized.

  I knew my interest in this person was only a naughty game I was playing in my head. Like the job, it was ridiculous. Only a way to pass the time until fall.

  But the last Friday before school, I returned from lunch to a blinking amber light on my phone. The beginning of the voice mail was broken up and crackly.

  “...having a little thing on the boat and I forgot...marketing brochure I promised...the blue glossy one from the off-site, if the office can spare you, I’d love it if you could bring a few...convenient.”

  The end of his message was clear, as if he’d held the phone closer to his mouth and stopped walking around for that part. “...but, hell, it’s a beautiful day out here, you can have a long lunch. Balboa Marina, slip 19. Call me on the cell if you have trouble finding it. This is Cal, by the way.”

  I imagined him sitting on the boat deck in rolled-up white pants. Whipping wind and seagulls.

  I punched 1. “...having a little thing on the boat and I forgot...marketing brochure I promised...the blue glossy one from the off-site, if the office can spare you, I’d love it if you could bring a few...convenient. But, hell, it’s a beautiful day out here, you can have a long lunch. Balboa Marina, slip 19. Call me on the cell if you have trouble finding it.

  “This is Cal, by the way.”

  He had no reason to ask me to fetch brochures. The office spent a fortune on messengers.

  I looked around the deserted office. Everyone was across the street at Little Green, filling plastic containers with overpriced arugula and cherry tomatoes, or else in San Francisco for some funding meeting.

  I grabbed the brochures from the dark storeroom and drove to Balboa Marina, parking on PCH. I tilted the rearview mirror down but couldn’t read the expression in my own eyes. Fear and excitement battling to form something I hadn’t seen before.

  * * *

  My pumps had horrible kitten heels that felt like they’d been placed for maximum instability, even though the saleswoman at Macy’s had talked them up as a comfortable alternative to real heels. A total lie.

  I had to mince down the bouncing network of wooden ramps, passing boats with witty names painted onto their expensive rears. Aquaholic. Mark and Rita Ville. Good Moorning.

  Then, when I was about to turn back, the one I was looking for, way at the end. Summer Hours. I stepped carefully onto the deck, setting my shoes on the elegant towel provided, next to expensive-looking loafers and heels. Laughter and jazz floated from the other end, and a caterer in a black skirt and white button-down nodded to me as she ducked down into the cabin with a tray.

  I’d been so sure he’d made up the “thing on the boat.” That the slick blue brochures I clutched were only a pretext, and I’d be the only guest. But it was too late to leave. I’d been spotted.

  It felt like the boat was packed, because everyone was so sharply dressed and confident and loud, although later I’d count only nine people. Cal held court in the center, in a blue dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, as always.

  “This is Rebecca Reardon,” he said, accepting the brochures. “She’s interning for that thing I was telling you about and they need her. So don’t anybody be hiring her away.”

  He pressed my arm. “Please stay.”

  I ordered white wine from the makeshift bar and the bartender gave me more choices—dry, sweet? Dry sounded more sophisticated. The glass he handed me was shaped like a wineglass, but it was plastic. Real boat people were serious about keeping glass off the deck, Eric had told me once.

  Eric. I pictured him in New York in a dark warehouse, sorting through dusty film canisters.

  Look at you, Becc, with your hair up and your glasses off and your straight skirt and your sale-bought heels sharing a towel with all that designer leather.

  What did you do with my friend?

  Cal wouldn’t have invited me in midday sunlight, in front of a bunch of professional contacts, male and female, if he was thinking anything close to the things I was thinking. My fantasy was the result of too much time alone and too little time with anyone my age. I’d gulp my wine and jump ship.

  And next summer I’d finally get a journalism internship somewhere. Or even a nanny gig with Serra in Tahoe, or fly to Maine with Maggie and take phone orders at L.L. Bean.

  A heavy guy in a pink shirt introduced himself, pumping my hand, but I immediately forgot his name. You were supposed to repeat names out loud immediately, then come up with a mnemonic device. Like, picture a person named Sam eating green eggs and ham.

  The pink shirt man asked how “the kids” were watching movies these days. “Do you still go to video stores, Rebecca?”

  “I do, but I may be the exception.”

  “So what are you going to do after graduation?”

  “Work at a newspaper.”

  The word newspaper was so beneath consideration that it got magically transformed between my lips and his eardrums.

  “Online news, brilliant. If I were your age, I’d move straight to Silicon Valley. Go north, young woman.” He said this last bit in a shaking old-man voice, waggling a finger. “Pick the right startup, get a piece of it, then hold on like a dog with a bone until you’re vested.”

  Vested. I’d heard it at the office. It didn’t seem apparel related; I’d look it up.
<
br />   Everyone on the boat made an effort with me, and because it was easier, and I feared my foolish daydreams about our host were obvious to them all, I let myself become their project.

  There was a bald minor producer. “Know that famous Robert Evans line? Everywhere you go there are a hundred people who can say no and only one person who can say yes? So the idea is you’re supposed to find that one person who can say yes? But he was wrong.”

  Dramatic pause as he ate a big piece of salmon sushi. He wiped wasabi off his lips with a napkin.

  “The trick is to become the person who says yes. Right? Don’t you want to become that person?”

  “Yes.”

  But I didn’t know if I wanted to become that person. Or join the internet gold rush, or hold on to my piece of the startup pie like a dog.

  All the opportunity in the world. Scrimped-for ballet and clarinet lessons and three pairs of $80 running shoes a year, the Francine Haggermaker Scholar, and I was wasting it, resisting everyone’s advice. Maybe I was just being stubborn, frittering away my brain with my dreams of working in a dying medium.

  At least when I wasn’t busy flirting with my thirty-two-year-old pretty-boy neighbor.

  I slipped downstairs and opened a sliding door, looking for somewhere to hide out.

  I found myself in a bedroom. The main one, from the looks of it. The bathroom tucked inside had a cunning little wood-paneled medicine cabinet above the sink.

  I splashed my face and smoothed my hair. Patted my face dry and folded the towel back into thirds, threading it carefully into the wall holder.

  Knowing the whole time that I would open the medicine cabinet.

  Inch by inch I slid it down the groove.

  He used Crest and Right Guard and Tylenol. Disappointing. But his shaving cream was a good find. Imported, retro English hard cream in an enamel mug, with a brush. It went with his car—no boring can of modern foam for him. It smelled, faintly, of vanilla. I replaced everything where it had been, re-splaying the hairs on the shaving brush, and slid the panel closed.

  I touched the bed. There was something spongy and boat-specific about the mattress, and I sat on the edge to test it.

  I leaned back against the pillows, and one minute turned to five. If he caught me, I’d say I had a headache. I closed my eyes.

  Catch me.

  * * *

  I woke to the sound of footsteps outside the door, and my first instinct was to pretend I was still sleeping, to stretch my limbs into some alluring, elegant grown-up pose. But at the sound of the door gliding open I couldn’t do it, and when he came in I was scrambling up, hair pasted across my cheek. Far from elegant.

  Cal laughed. “Were you napping?”

  “Sorry. I had a... I should get back to work.”

  “Nonsense. It’s what, 4:30? Join me on the deck for a drink. Everyone’s gone.”

  * * *

  “Sorry I can’t offer you an egg cream,” he said, pouring two club sodas, adding an inch of scotch to his.

  “I’ll have some of that, actually.”

  He hesitated, amused. But he uncapped the bottle and sloshed a bit into my cup, enough to tint it gold.

  We sat on the stern, facing the open ocean, watching the boats coming and going. The breeze had picked up and there was a good-natured humming from the restaurant down the water. Once in a while a woman’s voice separated itself, rising in a burst of merriment.

  “Who were your guests?”

  “Hmm. Two guys I did a deal with a couple of years ago, and the rest... Oh, I don’t know. Former deals or future deals, former partners or future partners. Mostly former, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re not as excited about your investments as you used to be?”

  “Observant girl.”

  “They all had good advice for me.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m supposed to go to Silicon Valley and become the person who says yes and hold on like a dog with a bone.” I sipped my drink. “Not necessarily in that order. Don’t you think that’s good advice?”

  “Say it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me what you really thought. Of the advice. The party. I’m two drinks beyond being insulted.”

  “Doesn’t it usually work the other way?”

  “Not with me. I’m less touchy the more I drink. Shoot.”

  “Everyone was nice. Generous. Just so...sure of everything.”

  “I’ll let you in on a state secret.” He turned to me, his face grave. “Everyone’s pretending.”

  “Even you?”

  “Especially me. What a hideous sunset.” He crinkled his eyes at me because it was, in fact, gorgeous on the harbor, the water tinged pink, the sky streaked orange and violet.

  We watched the sun’s accelerating fall to the horizon. Any minute it would touch water. White triangles, big and small, were heading out toward a low mass of land.

  A speedboat swerved past one of the sailboats. Carelessly close, blasting music, seemingly oblivious to the near miss.

  “Everyone goes a little crazy the last week of summer,” he said, shaking his head. “I should call the Coast Guard on them.”

  “Are they all heading to Catalina?”

  “Most are cocktail charters, they’ll only do a two-hour loop. Listen. That’s the Sea Nymph II. It plays the same damn song at the beginning of every cruise.”

  It was “Sailing.”

  “I like that song.”

  “Wait’ll you hear it every sunset for two months. Next is ‘Southern Cross’...” He froze with his drink aloft as the dreamy melody faded out and the emphatic guitar chords of the new song reverberated across the waves. “Another perfectly good tune ruined by Captain Gary of the Sea Nymph.”

  I leaned against the thin silver rail, straining to hear the lyrics. Something about survival, and being vested... “I keep hearing that word. Vested.”

  “It’s bested,” he said. “Vested relates to stock options.”

  “Oh—”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Now listen. When they get to the line about Avalon they’ll scream, because Avalon’s the capital of Catalina,” he said. “Wait for it...”

  Sure enough, the drunken voices on the Sea Nymph rose up, ecstatic at this coincidence.

  He smiled, raised his cup in a sarcastic toast to the receding charter boat.

  “I think you’re too hard on Captain Gary,” I said. “It’s not his fault if there aren’t many decent sailing songs.”

  “Or that he’s surrounded by men who suddenly find themselves without proper Southern California lodging, and have to sleep on a boat.”

  “I didn’t... I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s been almost two months now. We parted as friends, as they say.” He drained his drink and set it on the seat. He hung his arms over the guardrail, resting his chin on the shining silver cord. “And boat living has grown on me.”

  A wake from the Sea Nymph reached us, heaving the boat up and down. “That’s nice,” I said. “Like a cradle.”

  “Are you implying that recently broken-up men like yours truly revert to babyhood when they come here? That we’ve got a little regression situation?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He laughed. “But there’s probably a brilliant business in there somewhere.”

  “Do you see potential startups everywhere?”

  “No.” He shifted to face me, hooking his arm over the rail, his cheek on the top wire. His wide charmer’s grin relaxed into a real one. “I’m talking nonsense. I think you make me a little nervous.”

  It wasn’t too late to leave. To pretend he’d meant something else. I looked past him, at the small white triangle of the Sea Nymph. “I have a theory about why people carry lattes around. They’re like sipp
y cups for grownups,” I said. “Is that a business?”

  I dared a glance, confirmed that his blue eyes were still watching me. I looked away, scanning the ocean, but I’d lost the Sea Nymph. “No? Well, I think it is. It’s scalable, right? It’s all about scalability, I’ve learned. Scalability and scaffolding and partnership synergy.”

  If I said goodbye and left right then, we could still act like he hadn’t said it.

  But I didn’t say goodbye. And I didn’t go.

  I breathed deep. “You make me nervous, too.”

  Slowly, biting his lip in thought, he pulled his body from the guardrail. Took my cup and set it carefully next to his on the deck.

  It was still light out. There were people on half the boats, starting their weekends.

  But he slipped one warm hand under my knee and one under my jaw, tipping my chin up. He kissed me, a shallow kiss with the sweet, smoky kick of scotch, pulling back a degree until our lips were barely nuzzling, then pressing close again, his right hand venturing lower on my neck each time. His left hand circled the hollow behind my knee. The rocking of the boat, the undulating voices from the restaurant, the hard-then-soft rhythm of his hands and mouth, felt like part of one thing.

  But when I opened my lips and crept my hand up to his shoulder, he pulled away. “Sorry.”

  Triple losses: warmth gone from my lips, behind my knee, my neck.

  “Should we go downstairs?” I asked softly.

  He shook his head. “That was a mistake. You’re a nice girl, Rebecca. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  Only about a thousand times.

  I made my voice light and teasing, brushed a hand on his knee. “I’m not that nice.”

  He removed my hand, squeezed it. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Pretend you’re someone you’re not.”

  I busied myself with my purse so he wouldn’t see the tears gathering.

  “Rebecca.”

  I stood. “I should get back. I have a ton of packing.”