Read Online Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos - Free Book Online Page B

played her, I should say, and I was thinking to myself as I was onstage—well, she’s married, I can’t have her, and then I realized so much of my life is wanting things I can’t have, like certain women, or a lake house, or whatever, and my whole career has been auditioning for things I usually can’t have, but then I get one of those things, like the role of Hamlet, and I start to think all my self-worth is tied up in that role, and it becomes me. I fall in love with Ophelia, for fuck’s sake, right? Her husband is the managing director of the theater.”
    “Did you have an affair? Is that why you left?”
    “Does that matter?”
    The barista calls out a name—Stanley!—to suggest a mocha is ready.
    Claire clears her throat. “I don’t know. I think it would matter?”
    “I had an affair.”
    “You thought she’d leave him?”
    “No. No, it always starts out that I think I’m going to love somebody. But then I realize what I am really doing is seeing if she loved me.”
    “Did she?”
    “She did.”
    “That’s why you left?”
    “No. Not exactly. I’m checking out.”
    “Of what?” Claire asks.
    “Striving. Trying to get what I want?”
    “Love.”
    “Laid,” he says.
    Claire widens her eyes.
    “Kidding,” Charlie says. “I mean, I am checking out of anything that prevents me from enjoying each day. And e-mail and all of thatshit actually prevents me from living in the moment. I’m done; no more. Expectation, anticipation, fear of change. Good-bye to all that! To desire things one can have or can’t have or whatever—all desire leads to the same thing.”
    “What if you need to communicate with the outside world? E-mail is practically a necessity,” Claire says.
    “This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not.”
    She looks at him with a smile, a kind of smile she hasn’t smiled in years. It even feels different in her cheeks and lips, a tingling, a buzz.
    He seems to notice. “Most of our relationships with people are fleeting. All relationships are, essentially, disposable. When they’re done, they’re done,” he says. “Shit like Facebook keeps everything alive way too long.”
    He lowers his voice and points to a tab on her screen. “Click there and you’re free of all of these fuckers.”
    “Here?” she says and then she does it.
    A warmth begins to flood her body. She’s flushed.
    “Yep. And then there,” he points to another button, his hand grazing hers.
    “Type your password and then click okay,” he says. His hand touches the small of her back.
    The computer asks her if she’s sure.
    “You can never be sure,” Charlie says. “That’s why I played Hamlet. But you have to act.”
    He is leaning in as if they are studying, together, something on the screen, and she catches his smell, he’s so close, bourbon, chlorine, coffee, and the scent of overpowering soap, like the little harsh bars you get at cheap motels.
    “Ha!” she says and then clicks I Am Sure on the screen in frontof her. A box of coded letters appears and she has to decipher them and type them into a box. The box disappears, replaced by You have deleted your Gmail account .
    “You really did it!” he says. “Good for you.”
    She’s all heat now, and a dampness at her center feels like it’s spreading out inside her body.
    Her calf touches his. He exudes a kind of tangible aura, a palpable heat, as if the air between them is solidifying. If they were in darkness, she imagines that his skin would glow and the air between them would be phosphorescent with a strange solid light.
    “You use Facebook?” he asks. “Log in.”
    “Yes, I go on it every morning and keep refreshing it, hoping for justification for logging on in the first place.”
    She logs on, then turns and looks at him expectantly. “What do I do with