Marilyn
August 1996
Nine days before junior year
WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | Serra’s
WHERE I WAS | Marilyn’s
To celebrate the end of summer, Cal booked us a house on Catalina for the weekend.
“It’s gorgeous, totally private,” he said. “You’ll love it.”
I called Serra to secure my alibi, asking her to pretend I was spending the weekend with her if my mom called.
“I knew you were seeing someone!” she cried. “You’ve blown me off all summer. But if it’s for love I forgive you. So spill.”
It’s not love, Serr. I’m not sure what it is.
I wanted to say this to her. I wanted to say, You won’t believe who it is. Promise you won’t hate me?
But if I told her who I was seeing, her voice would change. And even if she didn’t say, How could you do that to E? she’d think it.
“It’s this guy in the office. Stephen. Just graduated from USC Business School.” Who never smiles at my jokes and has had a serious boyfriend for three years.
“So has the momentous occasion already happened or is it this weekend?”
“This weekend.”
“Becc! I’m so happy for you.”
Serra had told me everything about her first time at seventeen. She’d done it with Tim Alton—a stocky, one-year-younger, vegetarian, theater guy—in the back of her car after dinner at the Infinite Salad. She’d told me everything, down to the CD they’d played. Sarah McMaudlin, she’d said. The second half of “Adia” and the first half of “Angel,” so we calculated that the entire act took, maximum, three minutes. Also, Tim had gone overboard on the Tuscan herb salad dressing. Serra had lost her virginity in a haze of oregano.
We’d made a pact: I’d promised to report every detail, as she had.
“He’s cute?” she said.
“Extremely.”
“How old is he?”
“Um, I think twenty-two or twenty-three. Around there.”
“Older man.”
“Hmm.” I squeezed the receiver.
“Are you nervous? Are you sure you’re ready? Because—”
“I’ll tell you everything, Serr, I promise. Soon. Thanks for covering.”
I drove a golf cart up to the Catalina house. He was to follow on foot from the boat half an hour later, to be safe. My idea, but since the sandal incident he’d gone along with my rules.
Drive uphill until you can’t go any higher, the map he sketched for me should have said. I felt like I was on a movie lot, driving the golf cart around. I took a wrong turn, confusing Vieullesaint Place for Vieullesaint Terrace, and hoped Cal wouldn’t get lost.
The front entrance, through a tunnel of trees, was private, a nest like our first trysting spot. I punched in the security code and shoved the heavy front door open—it was one expensive nest. Spanish Revival, views of the Pacific along two sides. Wrought-iron balconies inside and out. A design of the Hollywood “more is more” school.
I dropped my backpack on the red tile and trailed a hand against the cool stucco wall. I crossed the living room, opening French doors to the patio. A huge rectangular pool in the sun, and one almost as big that I discovered, after kicking off my sandals and dipping a toe, was hot. A grotto, and one of those slender pools that pummel you with artificial currents for exercise, and a pool that was half outdoors and half indoors, divided by a glass wall on tracks.
All of it intricately tiled and fountained: a high-class water park.
Back inside, I walked from room to room. Gym, screening room. Upstairs, a vast bedroom with a balcony facing the mainland.
“Rebecca?”
“Up here,” I yelled. “Master bedroom. I think.
“This place is unreal,” I said over my shoulder at the sound of his footsteps. “How’d you find it?” I looked back at the ocean. There was a ferry leaving, and a dive boat off Avalon Harbor, froggy shapes bobbing nearby.
He’d peeled off his shirt and tucked it into the side of his shorts during his uphill run. His chest was slick, leaving damp marks on the front of my blue sundress when he drew me close.
“You’re boiling, I thought you were going right for the pool,” I said. “Your Nestea plunge commercial.”
“Wanted to find you more, warm person. Undoll. Thinking, living, soft—”
“Shh.”
We nicknamed it the Marilyn house, because it would have been a perfect hideaway for her, post-stardom. It was like her, showy and trying too hard. But irresistible.
We didn’t leave the house all weekend. We didn’t need to.
I remember lying back in the grotto, dizzy and weak. And laughing, because sex in a pool is overrated on a number of levels. We finally gave up and moved to the lawn. Me on top, moving slowly, the way I’d just discovered felt incredible.
I’d been self-conscious the first time, doing it like that, but now I pinned his hands over his head, bending down to tease him with my hair or my breasts, then bending back. It felt impossibly deep, just this side of painful. He wanted to move harder, faster. He ran his hands up and down my waist, frantic, and I knew from his breathing, his tight clasp on my hips, that it was all he could do not to flip me over. I liked watching him when he shut his eyes.
Sunday afternoon, we sat on the balcony in the cool, humid air blowing up from the Pacific. He was reading the Wall Street Journal and I was typing my fall semester reading assignments into a WordPerfect document on the poky refurbished Compaq laptop my mom had given me for graduation. Trying to make up for the fact that I hadn’t cracked a book since my abandoned AP Stylebook.
In a little over a week I’d be back at school; it was hard to believe.
When I shut down, the computer shuddered and whirred and groaned as always. I liked its quirks, and even though it was slow, it was reliable. A girl down the hall had lost three term papers to her fancy new laptop.
“Technical difficulties?” Cal said. “Want me to take a look?” He’d been an EECS major at USC and was still proud that he knew his way around a computer.
“It’s just doing its thing. See? It’s done now.” I closed the laptop and set it on the balcony.
“I’ll get you a new computer. Or at least a new memory card, so you don’t have to rely on that dinosaur for your papers this year. What is that thing, on a 286 chip? How much RAM do you have?”
“I’ll get through the year just fine,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”
A pause. “I find that I don’t want summer to end,” he said. Laughing, as if surprised. His voice was light, and he flashed me his widest grin, the one I secretly called his “beach volleyball” smile.
“You’re sweet,” I said.
But he didn’t turn the pages of his Journal after that.
It had been a perfect, exhausting long weekend of playing house, every moment brighter because it was stolen.
And because it couldn’t last. I knew it couldn’t. I’d tried to imagine what would happen to us after Labor Day, but the screen just went black.
“Look at that color,” he said. “It’s the magic hour. The Impressionists thought they could only find that light on the Riviera, but it’s not true.”
But the light was already changing. The pinkish-gold darkening to red, his shadow elongating behind his lawn chair, distorting his body into an alien form.
“Someday we’ll go there together so you can see,” he said. “And before you say you’re sweet again, which I know perfectly well means you’re full of it, open this.”
He handed me a small white box. “I had some time to kill after my meeting in San Francisco last week. Found it at a little vintage jewelry place in Sausalito. You ever been there?”
I shook my head.
It was a necklace. Heavy, 1920s looking, a sleek arrangement of stepped copper and turquoise triangles on an aged, beaded copper chain. I held my hair up and he fastened it, then kissed me on the nape, lips brushing up and down my neck. “You have this downy line right here, it drives me crazy.”
I stood to catch my reflection in the sliding glass door, caressing the cold puzzle of metal on my chest. It wasn’t something I’d have ever picked out, but it was undeniably stunning. “It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever owned. Thank you.”
“It’s not the real gift.” He tugged my elbow until I tumbled onto his lap, then shook the necklace box so I could hear it rattle.
I lifted the square of cotton batting: a key.
“I found us a little place for this year, in Sausalito. Up the hill from the jewelry store, hidden in the trees. All the privacy you require, human.”
I took the key out, set the box on the table.
“I’ll be up next weekend, is it a date?” His smile gave way to a flicker of disappointment when I didn’t answer. “It’s a quick ferry ride from Berkeley.”
I examined the key in my hand: silver, unmarked, with an unexpected heft.
He was trying so hard to sound casual I felt a surge of tenderness for him, but my response surprised even me. “All our dates require a boat.”
“Aaah.” A mock-crestfallen look. “Maybe you like the boats better than me. This was just thrill seeking, wasn’t it? Like your roller coaster in San Diego? The Big Dipper.”
“The Giant Dipper.”
“I knew it.” He sighed heavily, lying back on his chaise and closing his eyes. “I’ll soon be replaced by an amusement park ride. I’m...incidental.”
“Of course you’re not.” I reached for his hand but he kept his fist clenched. I poked at it with the key until he relented, opening his hand so I could lace our fingers together, the key inside them. “You surprised me, that’s all.”
His eyes still closed, he said, “So you’re happy about the apartment? Swear?”
“I swear.” I leaned to kiss him, but he kept his lips pressed tight. I tickled them with my tongue, trying to tease them apart. “Cal. I swear I’m happy.”
“Solemnly swear?” One eye open.
“I solemnly swear,” I said. “We can call it...Marilyn Two.”
He opened the other eye.
“Marilyn North?” I said. “Winter Marilyn.”
He grinned and pulled me to his chest. Everything was still playful, as rosy gold as the late-summer light that had slanted onto the balcony just moments before.
The key was sweet.
The plan was thoughtful.
And the necklace was the prettiest thing I’d ever owned. But as I admired it, I was already plotting how to hide it from my mom, my roommates. It was expensive enough to require explanations.
As he murmured about Sausalito, its trees and hills, its charming shops and foghorns, I caught my mind wandering to how I would steal away to get there. I’d need to invent another boyfriend, or pretend I was crashing at the newspaper. It wouldn’t be hard, with a little planning. I’d found I had a knack for it.
He had surprised me. Shocked me, even. I’d been so sure that he and I would be over once I tore the August page from my blotter calendar. I had prepared for it; I knew who he was. What this was.
But I never considered handing back the key.
And he didn’t feel incidental. Not that night, after I dropped it back into the box to kiss him again, seriously this time. We lazed under the stars, entangled on the chaise, until it was dark.
His finger traced the triangles of my necklace as we talked about how we would extend our stolen summer into fall, winter, spring.
A different boat, a different latitude, a different hideaway.
But everything else the same.