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?”
“Both. But I meant the fake one. Your anti-résumé, or whatever it is.”
“Know something scary? I could have made it five pages longer. I had more to print about the secret stuff than the not-secret stuff.”
“We all have that.”
“I have a theory.”
“You always have a theory.”
“You and I were extreme rule abiders in high school, right?”
I finished my mouthful of noodles. “After Serra and I got our responsible hooks in you. We established that a long time ago,” I said.
“That’s why we take extra pleasure in ditching our responsibilities now.”
“Recovering goody-goodies. I like it.”
“But I’m going to get my act together. Find a job I don’t want to skip out on, like you.”
“That’s the trick.”
That night we brushed our teeth at the same time. Eric had gone to the laundromat so he was wearing his own clothes again. Clean gray shorts and his Hitchcock shirt. I had on my ratty Beck T-shirt, the one Maggie had given me for my twenty-first, and the Nike sweats he’d washed for me.
He spat out white foam, then met my eyes in the mirror.
“Hey, roomie,” he said.
“Hey.”
I lay in bed thinking for a long time. About how right it felt with Eric.
And not just because of our shared history.
But because Eric thought he would find something new in a movie he’d already watched ten times. He was so sure there was still much to discover in the world, and I loved that about him.
For all the heat between us in bed, Cal had been passionless.
And now here were both kinds of passion on my beat-up sofa, ten feet away. Waiting for me, right there.
I don’t know how many hours of sleep Eric got that night, out on his couch.
But even though I had the AC on and the alley below my window was quieter than usual, I only got about three.