It was after 11 when the phone rang. Was that unusual? Not entirely. It was April in my second year of college. Sometimes people had things they wanted to tell me late at night.
“Hi. Do you have a new girlfriend?”
It was Lana. We had broken up more that a year before that, then got back together for a couple of months in late summer and early fall. We were seeing each other every now and then, but I hadn’t heard from her in a month or so.
“No,” I answered. It was true. There were a couple of girls I’d been taking to concerts or movies and going to bed with every now and then. No one special, though. But I wasn’t going to explain all that to her.
“So come over and fuck me tomorrow night.”
That was not how she usually spoke. At least, not to me. I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t say anything.
“What, you don’t want to fuck?”
“I want to fuck,” I said. “I was just a little, uh, surprised.”
“I decided just to come out and say what I want. Annette gave me the keys to her boyfriend’s apartment on the beach. He’s out of town. So I’m going to drive to your place tomorrow after work, then you’ll follow me back here. I’ll pick you up at six.”
That was insane. She worked at the Bank of America in Malibu. Why would she drive ten miles out to the Valley just to have me follow her back?
“Why don’t you just give me directions?”
“Because if I gave you directions, you might not be able to find it, and then you’d just go home and I’d be sitting there waiting for you, and then I’d call you at eight, and you’d say ‘I couldn’t find it’ and you’d ruin my plan.”
“Plan?”
“For this date. This fuck date.”
She knew me pretty well. She was right. That’s what would’ve happened. I would’ve ruined her plan.
“OK. I’ll be here at six. How are you, anyway?”
“This isn’t a talk date. This is a fuck date. If you want to talk, you can call me and make a talk date. But this is my date. I called you. So it’s a fuck date.”
“OK. Bye.”
She said goodbye and hung up. I fell asleep, partially flattered, but mostly apprehensive.
---
Lana was my first girlfriend. I’d met her at a friend’s house when I was 14 and she was 15. She sat down at the piano and played the riff from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” She had pretty eyes, a round face, long brown hair and a super-curvy body with D-cup breasts and great legs. We got to be friends over the next couple of years. She got a job at Bank of America when she graduated from high school. I was still in my senior year. We started spending more and more time together, going out to dinner and movies and concerts. I told her I loved her, and it was true. One night when my parents were out, we had sex. It was my first time. She was really beautiful naked.
---
She knocked on my door the next night at six to pick me up for our fuck date. I was ready.
“So you’ll follow me?” she asked.
“Like we agreed.”
I hopped in my Fiat sedan and followed her Barracuda. We sped through Malibu Canyon under a cloud-covered twilight. The mountains were still green from the winter rains.
---
After we’d made love that first night, we spent most of our time together. I got to know her parents because we were hanging out at her house on Calabasas Lake a lot. Her dad owned the local butcher shop. “He has such soft hands,” she told me. Later she realized it was because they were soaked in blood all day.
Her mother had been a problem drinker when Lana was young – they had to get in the car and drive through the neighborhood chasing her when she’d run from the house late in the night, wearing only her nightgown, racked with some sort of alcohol-fueled anguish. Apparently she’d gained control of her emotions and was still able to have a couple of glasses of wine every now and then. She’d become loving and tearful instead of despairing and pained.
Her dad knew I was a music student. He gave me a little bit of a hard time about it.
“When you’re young, art and music and books are great, they’re fun, they’re interesting,” he told me one night in his kitchen. “But when you get older, it’s all about the job and making money, and art and music and books become less and less a part of your life.”
I knew he was right in his way, but I thought that was a shitty way of looking at things.
It was his second marriage. He’d met her mom after his first divorce, when he was working as a bartender at a nightclub on Catalina Island. She was a singer there, performing with Xavier Cugat. They got married and had the two kids, Randy, the scientist, and Lana.
We were planning on moving to Monterey or Sonoma and going to college together.
“Take care of her,” her mother told me one night after a couple of drinks. “She’s my baby.”
“Get out of here, mom,” Lana told her. Her mom left.
“But that was nice of her,” I said later. “She cares about you. She loves you.”
“She’s drunk.”
Before we started getting ready to set up a new life together, we took a cross-country drive to move her brother and his girlfriend Cindy from Berkeley to Boston, where Randy would be going to grad school at MIT.
It was a horrible trip. We all got on each other’s nerves. Randy and Cindy had wanted to speed across the U.S., but we’d all agreed we could take it a little easy across the Western half, stopping at Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore and taking some detours across scenic routes to see the Grand Tetons and the Badlands.
I had misinterpreted that agreement, however. They still wanted to make the maximum amount of miles every day and they wanted to make the sightseeing stops as short as possible. I’d been hoping to enjoy the journey, but it was a grueling experience. I was constantly asking myself why I was doing it when I could’ve had a better time staying home. After the third day, none of us were on our best behavior anymore, no one was trying to make a good impression, the conversation was dull to non-existent. The road was as monotonous and painful as the whir of a dentist’s drill.
In a foul mood at a camp-site in Utah as the trip was turning into a nightmare, I decided to switch my major from music to journalism. I’d left my enrollment packet for my dad to drop off at college on the first day of registration, and I called him from the campground pay phone and told him which classes to sign me up for.
Finally, we got to Boston. But it was so hot and humid that the only relief I could find was playing with an ice cube, sliding it around the back of my neck and across my forehead and up and down my arms. We had little inclination to do anything except go to movies – mostly for the air-conditioning. We got out of Boston as fast as we could.
We drove back through Canada, crossing at Niagara Falls. Although I didn’t realize it, Lana was sick of me by then.
---
I followed Lana’s Barracuda as it turned right onto Pacific Coast Highway. She turned left into Latigo Shore Drive and stopped at the security gate. The guard waved us both through. The road ran in front a row of white townhouses with blue trim that were right on the ocean. We parked and went inside.
“Nice place,” I said. “How long do you have it for?”
“Oh, as long as I want.”
“Not forever.”
“Of course not. I don’t want it forever.”
“I would. What does this guy do?”
“He’s a contractor. He’s out of town on some big project.”
I was having a look around the living room.
There was a couch facing a TV. On the wall behind the TV was a large portrait of a bearded man holding his three-year-old son. It was surrounded by about about twenty five-by-seven photographs of the man with the boy.
“This him?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I was struck by what I thought was outrageous vanity. I mean, would you put twenty photos of yourself up on a wall over your TV set?
“How long has Annette been going out with him?”
“Well, it’s not like they’re really going out.”
Lana had said it was Annette’s boyfriend townhouse. But it turned out that was an oversimplification.
“Annette met him at the bar of Moonshadows after work one day,” she explained. “He had a dozen keys on his key ring, and he gave her one. He said he was hardly ever here and he gives the key to his place to all his girlfriends. So I guess that makes her his girlfriend, right? Anyway, Annette’s going out with this other guy, she didn’t want to bring him here, so I asked if I could have the key and she said yes.”
“So he could walk in here and find us? Wouldn’t he wonder who we are and what we’re doing here?”
She laughed.
“No, I took care of that. He’s out of town. Annette made sure.”
“OK, but that key ring – all his girlfriends have these keys. One of them might walk in, right?”
“No, I guess he does ask his ‘girlfriends’ to get permission to use the place. We’re OK. Don’t worry.”
I shrugged.
---
Toward the end of our trip across Canada, passing through Banff National Park in Alberta, we drove above a river that was used to transport lumber. Logs were floating downstream on the smooth water and were gathered in an inlet off to the side.
The river was pretty wide, and there were dozens, maybe a hundred logs there below us. Above us, we were surrounded by mountains covered with bright green pines. The sky was clear blue and the sun made the river sparkle. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
I don’t know what happened that day, that moment. I don’t know if I said something that annoyed Lana or if it was because I wasn’t saying anything. We weren’t the same nervous wrecks that we’d been on the trip across the U.S., because we weren’t trying to make time. When we got tired of the road every day, we’d stop, get a hotel room and explore the environment, go bowling or just lay in bed together. I didn’t think it was going all that badly.
But for some reason, above the river full of logs and under the pine-covered mountains, she snapped at me. I don’t remember over what.
She was driving. I was in the passenger seat. I climbed into the back section of the station wagon and curled up in the fetal position and tried to fall asleep or do anything to forget how bad she was making me feel.
“Get back up here,” she ordered me. “Why?” I asked myself. “So you can dish out more abuse?” I didn’t respond.
“Get back up here now,” she demanded. I didn’t move.
She pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out.
I sat up to see what she was doing. She ran down the shoulder of the road and started stomping her feet and swinging her arms like a five-year-old having a temper tantrum. I could hear her screaming and I could see her sobbing.
I got out of the car and ran over to her. I put my arm around her and walked back up the road.
“Shhh, it’s OK. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you that angry. I’ll stop. I won’t be an asshole anymore. I promise. It’ll be OK. I won’t do that again. I won’t do anything like that again, ever.”
I had no idea how miserable I’d been making her.
We got back into the car and drove off across British Columbia, making a stop for a day in Vancouver, then powering through Washington and Oregon before sightseeing in Monterey.
It was after a lunch at a quaint bistro in Carmel that she told me it was over. We wouldn’t be moving up north together. We wouldn’t be going to college together. We wouldn’t be getting married. It was over.
“This is just not what I want,” she said.
I cried and asked her to leave me alone in the car for a few minutes. She took a walk around the block.
I was devastated. But I was relieved, too.
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