Read Online Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dean Bakopoulos
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read— The Mill on the Floss , Vanity Fair, Pale Fire. It is next to this last book that he finds Everybody Wants Everything by Claire Lowry. He turns to look at her author photo, over a decade old, and thinks of her ass now, as she shimmied out of his pool, and he thinks, yes, I want to see her again.
3.
In the café downtown that morning, Claire sits in the corner, wolfing down a scone and coffee, suddenly aware of how badly she craves the sugar and caffeine. This is her “nice little Saturday,” a term Don took from a comedy he’d watched a million times, a movie about frat boys or something, with Will Ferrell. Or Seth Rogen. Or a Wilson brother. He liked to make a big deal of how Claire got Saturday mornings to herself, until ten thirty, sometimes eleven, to do whatever she wanted.
Two hours! All her own!
With this endless vast freedom, she would usually go to the only coffee shop in town and waste two hours on her computer while eating scones and drinking coffee, because she had no idea what else to do. Two hours, she’d always thought, was not enough time to do anything when you lived one hour away from even a decent midsize Midwestern city.
Don always said, “You should work on your novel!” which is something he had been saying for ten years, which really meant, of late—you should try to make some money.
She logs on to Gmail. She finds an e-mail from an old college housemate, Lonnie Wilson, announcing that a one-man show about growing up gay in rural Iowa, Queer as Corn , would premier in some hip Chicago venue the next weekend. She clicks on the link.
Claire’s been invited, along with sixteen hundred other friends of Lonnie’s, whose tiny thumbnail heads smile at her under the banner “Who’s Going?”
Back in the inbox, she begins to delete other things: a slew of marketing messages from companies she’d once shopped at online—Lands’ End, Audible, Athleta; a credit card account update (Re: URGENT—your account is now closed!); a note from an old college professor who is now at NYU, Tim Holiday (Re: My new book is now out from Milkweed!); something from a former college friend, Annabelle Sanderson-Maynard (Re: Sorry for the mass e-mail! Here’s my address in Paris!). Also banished from her inbox: a college pot-smoking pal, Will Molsen (Re: New job in DC!); Bank of America (An Important Notice: Action Required); and Hanna Andersson (60 percent off on select winter styles!).
And like that, all of the exclamation points and all caps and embedded imagery and links to dancing goats and ads for sports bras and Frye boots she cannot afford disappear into some other place, far, far from this outpost in the corn-choked, hog-tied center of Iowa.
“Can I suggest something? Just delete everything.”
“Pardon?” Claire says, turning toward the voice to see Charlie Gulliver grinning, wearing fitted khakis and a bright white T-shirt, freshly showered and shiny.
“That is what I did,” he says. “When I left Seattle. I deleted my whole online identity and threw my cell phone in the bay. It was liberating.”
“Why?”
“So,” he says, grabbing a chair and putting it next to her, rather than across from her. “I was playing Hamlet at Seattle Shakespeare last fall, and I was onstage, and I was killing it, we’d sold out every show, the reviews were good, Gwyneth Paltrow came to see me backstage and got tears in her eyes. She touched my elbow while patting her heart with the other hand. And I remember, on closing night, I was getting into the famous speech, I don’t even have to tell you which one, I’m sure.”
“ To be . . . ,” Claire says.
“Yep. The role every actor wants to land, wants to nail, and I amonstage, and I am nailing it. I’m doing ‘To be or not to be’ in a way, I think, that’s never been done before. It was my thing, my interpretation, almost jaunty and crazed instead of grave and tortured, you know? And I was fucking IN LOVE with Ophelia too, the woman who
3.
In the café downtown that morning, Claire sits in the corner, wolfing down a scone and coffee, suddenly aware of how badly she craves the sugar and caffeine. This is her “nice little Saturday,” a term Don took from a comedy he’d watched a million times, a movie about frat boys or something, with Will Ferrell. Or Seth Rogen. Or a Wilson brother. He liked to make a big deal of how Claire got Saturday mornings to herself, until ten thirty, sometimes eleven, to do whatever she wanted.
Two hours! All her own!
With this endless vast freedom, she would usually go to the only coffee shop in town and waste two hours on her computer while eating scones and drinking coffee, because she had no idea what else to do. Two hours, she’d always thought, was not enough time to do anything when you lived one hour away from even a decent midsize Midwestern city.
Don always said, “You should work on your novel!” which is something he had been saying for ten years, which really meant, of late—you should try to make some money.
She logs on to Gmail. She finds an e-mail from an old college housemate, Lonnie Wilson, announcing that a one-man show about growing up gay in rural Iowa, Queer as Corn , would premier in some hip Chicago venue the next weekend. She clicks on the link.
Claire’s been invited, along with sixteen hundred other friends of Lonnie’s, whose tiny thumbnail heads smile at her under the banner “Who’s Going?”
Back in the inbox, she begins to delete other things: a slew of marketing messages from companies she’d once shopped at online—Lands’ End, Audible, Athleta; a credit card account update (Re: URGENT—your account is now closed!); a note from an old college professor who is now at NYU, Tim Holiday (Re: My new book is now out from Milkweed!); something from a former college friend, Annabelle Sanderson-Maynard (Re: Sorry for the mass e-mail! Here’s my address in Paris!). Also banished from her inbox: a college pot-smoking pal, Will Molsen (Re: New job in DC!); Bank of America (An Important Notice: Action Required); and Hanna Andersson (60 percent off on select winter styles!).
And like that, all of the exclamation points and all caps and embedded imagery and links to dancing goats and ads for sports bras and Frye boots she cannot afford disappear into some other place, far, far from this outpost in the corn-choked, hog-tied center of Iowa.
“Can I suggest something? Just delete everything.”
“Pardon?” Claire says, turning toward the voice to see Charlie Gulliver grinning, wearing fitted khakis and a bright white T-shirt, freshly showered and shiny.
“That is what I did,” he says. “When I left Seattle. I deleted my whole online identity and threw my cell phone in the bay. It was liberating.”
“Why?”
“So,” he says, grabbing a chair and putting it next to her, rather than across from her. “I was playing Hamlet at Seattle Shakespeare last fall, and I was onstage, and I was killing it, we’d sold out every show, the reviews were good, Gwyneth Paltrow came to see me backstage and got tears in her eyes. She touched my elbow while patting her heart with the other hand. And I remember, on closing night, I was getting into the famous speech, I don’t even have to tell you which one, I’m sure.”
“ To be . . . ,” Claire says.
“Yep. The role every actor wants to land, wants to nail, and I amonstage, and I am nailing it. I’m doing ‘To be or not to be’ in a way, I think, that’s never been done before. It was my thing, my interpretation, almost jaunty and crazed instead of grave and tortured, you know? And I was fucking IN LOVE with Ophelia too, the woman who
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