The Beach Club (13 page)

“I won’t be here for breakfast,” Mr. G said. “I’m only staying overnight. I have an extremely important meeting tomorrow in Washington.”

“Just overnight?” Jem said. “At least you have a nice day for it.” It was true: the sun was shining, the ocean a glorious blue. Jem walked along the boardwalk, then up the three steps to the deck of room 6, and paused for a minute, searching his pocket for the key. He couldn’t believe he was about to unlock a door for Mr. G.

Mr. G cleared his throat and Jem fumbled with the keys.
Get the door open, you idiot!
he thought.
This is Mr. G!
Jem opened the door. “Here you go,” he said. He waited until Mr. G stepped in and put down his briefcase. “My name is Jeremy Crandall. Just let me know if you need anything.”

“I’d like a wake-up call for six-fifteen.” Mr. G said. “And I need you to show me how this phone works.”

Jem picked up the receiver of the phone. “The phone works just like a regular phone, sir,” Jem said. Did this sound snide? He needed to get a grip. “Except you have to dial nine to get an outside line. If you want the front desk, you dial zero.” He set the receiver down, then moved quickly to the alarm clock. “Is there anything else?”

Mr. G smiled. Jem smiled back. He and Mr. G were smiling at each other.

“No,” Mr. G said. “Thanks for your help.” He reached into his pocket but all he brought out were a few pennies and a dime. “I’ll get you later.”

Jem waved his hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’s a pleasure to help and meeting you. I mean it was nice meeting you. Exciting.” Jem backed out of the room onto the deck. He waved to Mr. G. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Mack wasn’t in the office, but through the crack in the door, Jem saw Bill reading at his desk. Bill was a poetry buff, and half the time he sat in his office he wasn’t even working; he was reading poems, then closing his eyes and trying to recite them from memory. It amazed Jem that Bill didn’t seem at all flustered by Mr. G’s arrival. Perhaps he didn’t even know.

Jem tapped on Bill’s door. “Bill? I just wanted to let you know Mr. G—is here and I’ve shown him to his room.”

Bill knit his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks for the update.”

Love came into the office. “He’s been on the phone since he got here,” she whispered. Her cheeks were pink. Love was always talking about the big shots she saw in Aspen—Ed Bradley, Sean Connery, Elle McPherson. But even Love was impressed by Mr. G. She put her hands on her hips. “This doesn’t seem like much of a vacation,” she said. “He’s here for the afternoon, dinner with friends, and then he leaves first thing tomorrow, poor thing.” Love was returning to her normal self, acting like everybody’s aunt. “I wonder if he brought his bathing suit. That’s something I’d like to see. Mr. G—in a pair of trunks.”

The fax machine beeped and churned out a few pages. Love checked it. “For Mr. G, naturally,” she said. She wrote the fax information in her notebook then handed the pages to Jem. “Care to do the honors?”

Jem walked to room 6, the fax pages fluttering in his hands. He wondered what would happen if he let the pages go. What if he were responsible for tossing Mr. G’s fax to the wind? It was torturous to consider. He wanted to read the fax, but it was good discipline to respect the man’s privacy, to resist peeking at the masthead.

Jem knocked on the door. “Jeremy Crandall here,” he said in a strong voice.

The door opened. Mr. G had the phone to his ear; he was still in his suit. He looked at Jem quizzically, and Jem held out the fax pages. Mr. G took the fax, glanced at it, and reached into his pants pocket. He pulled out the same few coins then shook his head, and handed the coins to Jem.

“Thanks,” Jem said. When he returned to the lobby, he checked in his pocket. Mr. G had given him thirteen cents.

That night, Jem ate three peanut butter sandwiches and drank two cans of warm Sprite, and he wrote his first letter home to his parents. Jem’s father was a famous man in Falls Church. The owner of the Locked Tower, a member of Rotary, and Kiwanis. A model citizen. Jem could have this kind of fame too. But, he was ashamed to say, he wanted something bigger. He was cursed with aspirations.

“My job is going well,” Jem wrote, “and guess who checked into the hotel today? Mr. G!” Jem wanted to show his parents that he could live away from home, hold a job, use good judgment. “He tipped me thirteen cents.” If Jem gave his father news to share at the Tower—and surely Mr. G was news—maybe his parents wouldn’t object quite so much when he brought up California. Lacey Gardner told Jem to disregard what his parents thought, and though he found this extreme, one thing was true: he was going to California whether his parents liked it or not.

Then Jem thought of his sister, Gwennie. She ate his mother’s baked chicken, grilled steaks, chocolate cake, and then after dinner she disappeared into the upstairs bathroom or outside—no matter how closely Jem’s parents watched her—and she puked it all up. And Gwennie had reinvented the laws of perpetual motion. When she was on the phone with her girlfriends, she paced the house. She went jogging in the middle of the night while their parents slept. She ate standing up, and if she had to eat sitting down, she scissored her legs back and forth under the table. Just thinking about it made Jem exhausted, and sad.

“All in all, I’m doing well,” he wrote. “I think this summer is going to be quite a learning experience.” His mother would appreciate that. “I miss you! Love, Jem.”

Jem mailed the letter on his way to work the next morning. He still had the thirteen cents in his pocket. He might just carry that thirteen cents all summer, for luck. As Jem approached the Club, he saw Mr. G standing on the front steps of the lobby. Jem checked his watch. It was five of eight. Mack stood next to Mr. G, holding a carton of doughnuts.

“Jem!” Mack called out.

Jem ran to the front porch of the lobby. But something wasn’t right. Both Mack and Mr. G looked upset.

“Did you set the alarm clock for Mr. G—yesterday afternoon?” Mack asked.

Jem’s mind swam through murky water to yesterday afternoon. He had set it, hadn’t he? Oh, God, his life was over. But he distinctly remembered sitting on the side of the bed and pressing the plastic buttons. Setting the alarm for six-fifteen. Mr. G had said six-fifteen, hadn’t he?

“It didn’t go off,” Mr. G said quietly. He looked up into the sky. “Needless to say I had to call and cancel with the president.”

The president? Of the United States? Jem clenched his stomach. “Oh, sir,” Jem said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry, of course, doesn’t put me on my plane an hour ago,” Mr. G said. “Sorry doesn’t make it up to the president.”

A cab pulled up to the front of the hotel. Jem reached for Mr. G’s Samsonite, but Mack snapped it up first. “I’ve got it,” Mack said. “Go wait for me in my office.”

A few minutes later, Jem shuffled through the sand, following Mack to room 6.

“I asked you in the interview if you could set an alarm clock,” Mack said. “And you assured me that you could. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Jem said glumly. He thought of the letter to his parents and wished he hadn’t sent it. Jem imagined his mother at the Giant, pushing her cart through the produce section, telling everyone she knew that Jem had met Mr. G. What she wouldn’t know was that Jem had screwed up royally, that Jem had single-handedly fouled up Mr. G’s meeting with the president of the United States.

In room 6, Mack checked the alarm clock.

“It’s set for six-fifteen,” Mack said, and for a second Jem felt the sweet wash of vindication. Then Mack said, “Six-fifteen in the evening. See this P.M. thing here, P.M. means—”

“I know what it means,” Jem said.

“The alarm must have gone off while Mr. G—was at dinner.”

“I’ll write a letter of apology,” Jem said. “I’ll sit down and write it now.”

“Don’t write a letter,” Mack said. “I don’t want you to waste any more of that man’s time. Okay, Jem? But see if you can use your head. See if you can make me feel like less an idiot for hiring you. Now, go do your job.”

Jem sat on a bench outside the Stop & Shop eating half a roasted chicken. It was Monday, his day off, and he’d had another miserable weekend. The incident with Mr. G depressed him so much that he didn’t feel like going out. It was the fifteenth of June and Jem hadn’t seen the inside of a bar since he and Vance had shot pool at the Chicken Box back in May, before the hotel opened. He supposed if he went out he would meet some girls at least, but he was shy about going to the bars alone. His father always said that a person who goes into a bar alone goes to drink,
and you know what that means.

Was that any different from sitting outside the grocery store alone, eating chicken alone, or going to the beach alone, which was where Jem was headed next? He felt like a loser—he kept messing up at his simple job, and after five weeks on the island, he still had no friends. If this was what happened to him on Nantucket, what the hell would California be like?

The Stop & Shop parking lot was jam-packed: cars lined up at the entrance, snaking onto Pleasant Street. These were the Summer People, Jem supposed, coming to refill their cupboards with watermelons, hamburger buns, Popsicles.

Jem gnawed on a chicken leg and watched a woman roll a shopping cart with about fifty shopping bags and a baby girl up to her Isuzu Trooper. She loaded in her groceries, which probably cost as much money as Jem made in a week. The shopping cart with the baby rolled backward just as a couple of college chicks in a red Cherokee rounded the corner. Jem ran out in front of the Cherokee. The car jerked to a stop. Jem pushed the shopping cart closer to the Isuzu, although he was chagrined to see the cart hadn’t really been in the way.

“Watch where you’re going,” he said to the girls. “And slow down.”

The girl driving said, “For your information, I was watching where I was going. I wasn’t even close to hitting it.”

The baby’s mother turned and saw Jem holding the cart.

“I’m sorry?” she said. Her eyes locked on Jem’s fingers gripping the handle of the cart. Jem started to sweat. It was about a hundred degrees out and his face and hands were shiny with chicken grease. He pictured a scenario where he grabbed the shopping cart and it slipped from his greasy grasp and rolled right in front of the Cherokee, making him not a baby snatcher but a baby murderer. He needed to be more aware. Awareness, how did one acquire it?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Those girls almost hit your cart. Your baby.”

The woman looked at him blankly and Jem experienced the uncomfortable feeling he got when he was waiting for a tip from one of the hotel guests. He walked away.

Jem returned to his bench and found Maribel sitting next to his messy pile of napkins and chicken bones.

“Busy saving the world?” she asked.

“Wait a minute,” Jem said. This was exactly what he meant about being more aware. Where had Maribel come from? “You saw that?”

“Brave and valiant. This damsel’s impressed.” She shifted a backpack at her feet. “So, what are you doing here?”

“It’s my day off,” Jem said. “I’m headed for the beach.”

“Me too,” Maribel said. “The library is closed on Mondays.”

Maribel was in a pair of jeans shorts and a yellow flowered bikini top. Her blond hair was in a bun. Jem saw faint yellow hairs on the tops of her thighs.

“Do you act?” he asked. “Sing? Dance? Juggle?”

Maribel laughed. “No, why? Do you only sit on benches with people if they have special talent?”

“I just thought you could be my first client,” Jem said. “You know, I thought maybe you needed an agent.”

“I’m a librarian,” Maribel said. “In fact, I’m not even a librarian. I’m not brainy or organized enough to be a librarian. I’m a fund-raiser. I ask people for money, and when I get the money I think of ways to spend it. Now, do I need an agent? Yes, I do. A beach agent.”

“I’m actually a very good beach agent,” Jem said.

“Meaning you can guarantee me a fun time while I’m there?” Maribel asked. “What’s your cut?”

“Fifty percent,” Jem said. “Of the fun time.”

“Okay,” Maribel said, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Maribel drove a Jeep Wrangler just like Mack’s, but newer. It was black and the inside was roasting hot. Jem’s legs stuck to the vinyl seats.

Maribel pulled out of the parking lot, and said, “So, do I dare ask? How’s work?”

“It’s great,” Jem said, trying to sound upbeat. Usually Jem felt comfortable with women, but with Maribel he was going to have to watch what he said. Talking to her was as good as talking to Mack.

“You like Bill and Therese?” Maribel asked.

“I almost never see them,” Jem said. “Bill sits in his office reading and Therese is busy chasing the chambermaids around. She rides those girls hard.”

“Therese is a renowned slave driver,” Maribel said. “I suppose you’ve heard she hates me.”

“No,” Jem said, “I hadn’t heard.”

“Things used to be okay between us, but ever since Cecily got to high school—Cecily’s their daughter, you know—Therese has been dead set on pushing Cecily and Mack together. An he’s twelve years older than she is! It’s ridiculous.”