The Dirty Book Club Read online

  Pressing a sheet against her naked body, M.J. padded onto the deck and took in the view: blooms of colorful beach umbrellas, cliffs that jutted like buckteeth over the curving coastline, and the blue-green ocean that really did sparkle. Maybe unemployment wasn’t so bad. After months of memorized airline schedules and long weekend visits that never felt long enough, their Sunday wouldn’t end with a tearful curbside good-bye at LAX. Sand had finally stopped slipping through the hourglass. It stood still now and stretched on for miles, theirs to be strolled in barefoot and enjoyed.

  M.J. checked her watch; a 1974 Timex with an olive-green strap. “How did you let me sleep until three?”

  Dan removed his mirrored aviators, greeted her with smiling eyes. “Is that still on East Coast time?”

  “It’s not East Coast time. It’s August Stark time. My dad was wearing it the day he was murdered, and I want it to stay exactly the way—”

  “Hold on a minute—” Dan tossed his magazine. It landed with a smack. “Your dad—”

  “Stop! I don’t want another lecture on the difference between murder and manslaughter. I already know. But intent or not, someone took his life and—”

  “No.” Dan chuckled. “I didn’t know Augie was short for August.”

  M.J. plucked a loose thread from the strap. She envied the old watch. How it ticked merrily along as if nothing ever happened.

  “So your mom was January, your dad was August, your sister was April, and you’re May-June?”

  “We were named after our birth months,” she said, a proud member of this exclusive club. “I was born at midnight on May 31, so they gave me June, too.” M.J. sat on the edge of the cushion. “Now I have a question for you: where did you get this chair?”

  Dan hitched his thumb toward the bungalow on their right.

  “They just gave it to you?”

  “Not exactly. I’m kind of borrowing it until we get our own. Curtis said they’re on a cruise and won’t be back for another week or two.”

  “Who’s Curtis?”

  “The UPS guy.”

  “You know his name?”

  “Of course.”

  M.J. had lived in the same building for almost three years and didn’t know the daytime doorman’s name. She didn’t remember the names of the couple in #5F who wanted to buy her apartment and never bothered to read a single barista’s tag. But now? Her schedule was wide-open. She could make room for pleasantries. Meet the people in her neighborhood. Sprinkle them with glee.

  Dan invited M.J. to sit with a pat-pat on his cushion. “I still can’t believe you live here,” he said, as she settled onto his warm chest and found her reflection in his sunglasses. It was amazing how one week without computers, deadlines, and Ambien could brighten one’s face. What was once pigeon gray was now bronzed and vibrant, as if her electricity had been restored after months of unpaid bills.

  “It’s so-real,” Dan said.

  “You mean, sur-real?”

  “Whatever.”

  There was that dismissive tone of his. The one that said, I am a man of science and medicine. Words are not, and need not, be my thing. When’s the last time you set a broken bone? Yeah, thought so.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “When you talk in typos? I’d say mildly charmed at best.”

  Dan slid his hands under M.J.’s sheet and playfully squeezed her ass. “I’m talking about you being here. Are you happy?”

  “I don’t know, Dr. Hartwell. What are the symptoms of happiness?”

  He folded his hands behind his head and lifted his chin toward the endless stretch of blue sky. “Sleeping until noon, dressing in bedsheets, tying me to a bed and having your way with me.”

  “You liked that didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. Until you played the girl-on-girl porn.”

  M.J. blushed at the memory of her previous night’s blunder. “Most guys love that shit.”

  “Most guys don’t have lesbian mothers and four younger sisters!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I forgot,” M.J. said, cheeks burning. “Hey, we should go up to San Francisco tomorrow. I’d love to meet this family of yours.”

  “I can’t.” Dan indicated the unfurnished cottage, where boxes and bulging suitcases seemed to whimper like neglected puppies. “I’m scouting locations for my new clinic tomorrow and I don’t even know where my shoes are.”

  “Right. Well, leave the unpacking to me,” she chirped.

  Like the birds that now woke her in the morning, M.J. would whistle while she worked. She would flit joyfully about in a state of meditative mindfulness as she discovered the pleasures of living a simple life. Molt her city skin and start fresh. Smell roses, smile at strangers, walk the beach five mornings a week, get a wax.

  She kissed the top of Dan’s head. His hair was hot from the sun.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To look for your shoes.”

  Dan flashed a dubious smirk. “You’re really going to unpack?”

  “Indeed I am.”

  “Not a team of professionals or exploited interns?” he asked. “You?”

  “Corrrrect.”

  “And when that’s done? Then what?”

  M.J. yanked the sliding glass door that opened into the living room. “I’ll start decorating,” she said, then stepped boldly inside to embrace her wondrous future.

  * * *

  “WHAT ARE YOU looking at?” M.J. asked, weeks later.

  “A faded tan, bloody cuticles, and the same bathrobe you’ve been wearing for the past two weeks,” her opponent would have answered. But it was a cardboard box. So M.J. kicked it.

  Twice.

  Once for being rude and then a second time for signifying the end. Because after this last box was unpacked, they’d all be gone. M.J. would be an empty nester. And then what? More naps? More googling Liz Evans? More silence?

  There would definitely be more silence.

  Except for that damn ocean. It never shut up.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  Pearl Beach, California

  Friday, May 20

  Full Moon

  IT WAS FOUR o’clock in New York. The weekly editorial pitch meeting at City was probably wrapping up. Within the hour, Liz would be sending an e-mail with her favorite ideas, and M.J., who was still on the distribution list, could read (and judge) them all.

  With an open laptop balancing on her thighs and a glass of bubbly in her hand, she leaned against the propped-up pillows on her bed and watched her in-box, waiting for the starting gun’s ding.

  “You’re writing!” Dan said, from the open doorway.

  M.J. snapped her laptop shut. “What are you doing home?”

  “I thought I’d take you to lunch.”

  His skin color seemed more espresso than cappuccino when he wore his black T-shirt, his hazel eyes more green.

  “You’re handsome.”

  “And you’re still in that bathrobe.”

  “Ugh! You sound like that stupid box.”

  “What box?”

  “The one in the living room.”

  “It talks?”

  “Only when I’m bored.” M.J. kicked off the sheets. “Forget it.”

  “Like hell I will!” Dan cracked his knuckles, then dashed off to confront her corrugated bully; his heroic gesture only to be undermined by the sissy slaps of his flip-flops.

  “I had no idea this was here!” he called, too busy ferreting through landfill amounts of San Francisco Giants mugs, socks, plaques, pendants, trading cards, and ticket stubs to notice that M.J. had traded her bathrobe for a sleeveless silk dress. “So much awesomeness.”

  She knew Dan rooted for the Giants, but had no idea his devotion ran so deep, or that he said awesomeness. It made M.J. wonder what else she didn’t know. Was he a Disneyland lover? A tax evader? An Adam Sandler fan? What if he drank milk with sushi?

  “My parents must have slipped this into the U-Haul when I wasn’t looking. Th
ey couldn’t stand the team’s colors.” Then, in a high-pitched attempt to impersonate his mothers, he said, “Orange and black is a putrid combination, Danny. If Halloween happened more than once a year, trust us, Pantone would intervene.” Sitting cross-legged with a scrapbook of yellowed newspaper articles, Dan looked as he must have when he was cutting and pasting these clippings for the first time. “I lived for those games with Uncle Ollie.” He placed a child-sized Giants cap on his head. He looked like Elmer Fudd.

  “Uncle Ollie, your Moms’ best friend?”

  “Yep.”

  “They met freshman year at Stanford, right?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Sperm donor Uncle Ollie? First Sara . . . Then Marni . . . Then Sara. . . Then Marni . . . Then Sara? That Uncle Ollie?”

  “Yes, that Uncle Ollie,” Dan snipped, clearly frustrated that she was missing the point. But it was he who missed the point. Not only had M.J. recalled the name of the Hartwells’ sperm donor, but to whom his donations were allocated, and in which order. Take that insecurities! “Did your sisters go, too?”

  “No,” he said with a scoff.

  “Not into sports?”

  “The opposite. They were hard core. Joan played softball. Margaret was a black belt, Serena was a track star, and Norma dated two quarterbacks. But no one seemed to notice that stuff. It was always: Take care of your mothers, Danny. Protect those beautiful sisters of yours, Danny. You’re the man in the family, Danny. Be the man, Danny. It was this constant—” He stiffened his fingers into an arthritic claw.

  “Pressure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No wonder you loved those games so much.”

  Dan looked up at M.J., eyes wide and ready to receive.

  “No one to take care of,” she clarified.

  He considered this. “Probably.”

  M.J. sat. Her knee joints cracked on the way down. They needed a couch. “I’m surprised you became a doctor. You know, since taking care of people is kind of the whole point.”

  Dan snickered, as if just clueing into the irony. “Maybe it was that earthquake.”

  “What earthquake?”

  “October 17, 1989,” he said. “It was the third game of the World Series, Giants versus the Oakland A’s. Twenty minutes before the game started I felt this shaking . . . I thought it was nerves, or maybe too much soda, until everyone started screaming, ‘Earthquake!’ Popcorn was flying, people were slamming into one another . . . it was intense. Uncle Ollie was dragging me toward the exit, pulling my shirt so hard I could barely breathe. And I was crying my goddamn eyes out.”

  “I’m sure,” M.J. reached for his hand. “You must have been terrified.”

  “Only that we were going to miss the game.”

  “They played?”

  “No.” Dan grinned at the memory of his younger self. “It was chaos. It took us six hours to get home. Of course my family thought I was dead and I thought they were dead but everyone was fine. They were all . . . fine. And something about that—”

  “Set you free,” M.J. said flatly, without judgment, the way Dr. Cohn would have.

  Dan’s eye lit on her.

  “They didn’t need you to save them. They were fine and that pressure was lifted.”

  “Exactly!”

  M.J. sat taller. Is this how psychologists felt? Part God, part psychic and pure genius? She kept going, “But there were people out there who needed to be saved for real. Not because they were born female, but because they were wounded and sick. Because their traumas were legitimate, not borne from hypothetical conjecture or male chauvinism. And that’s what made you want to become a doctor, right?”

  “No,” Dan said. “It was the surgeon who gave us a ride home because we couldn’t get to Ollie’s car. He had this tricked-out Mercedes with a surfboard strapped to the roof and a smokin’-hot girlfriend, and I said to myself, I want to be this guy.”

  “What?” M.J. gave him a playful smack on the arm.

  Dan grinned. “And maybe a bit of what you said, too.” He kissed her softly above the right eye in deference to the day they met. “I’m a sucker for a hot mess.”

  M.J. giggled at the memory.

  She was in Pearl Beach for a corporate retreat at the five-star Majestic Resort and Spa. Enjoying some downtime, M.J. was lounging poolside and marking up a piece about a communal living trend in Queens. Her chest was starting to burn. She sat up, reached for her aerosol body-mist sunscreen, shook the can, and—thwack!—pegged herself right above the eye.

  When she came to, there was a hazel-eyed doctor with caramel sea-salted skin holding an ice pack to her eyebrow. He had been at the outdoor bar, meeting with a potential partner for his clinic, and saw the whole thing. Potential Partner was ready to respond, but Hazel-Eyed Doctor insisted he stand down. He had been watching Hot Loner all afternoon. This one was his.

  A petite blond with a sticky southern accent said they made a beautiful couple. M.J. corrected her, saying they had just met. The blond insisted that it didn’t matter, they were destined to be together. She knew this because she was the resort’s Liaison of Love. A professional expert on amour. And as it turned out, she was.

  Dr. Dan Hartwell took M.J. to dinner that night so he could monitor the wound. Though it was healing well, he quickly learned that M.J.’s pain went far deeper than an accidental blow to her supraorbital foramen. And he’d been trying to save her ever since.

  “Do you pity me?” M.J. asked, while returning his souvenirs to the box soon-to-be marked GARAGE.

  Dan stood. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because I’m fucked up.”

  “Everyone is fucked up.” He handed her a white paper bag. “Happy Friday.”

  She peered inside. Three regional magazines, a black Moleskine journal, and a pencil peered back. “What is this?”

  “It’s me not pitying you.” He cupped her shoulders, and with a sympathetic bedside-manner sigh, said, “It’s time for you to get out of the house.”

  “I’m acclimating.”

  “I know. And I know you’re crushed and scared and pissed off. But arguing with boxes and drinking in bed?” He tucked her hair behind her ear. “You’re losing your fight, M.J. Burn the bathrobe. Write. Think about your next job.”

  Job.

  There was that word again, M.J. thought as she sat out on the deck later that afternoon and flipped through the pages of Pearl Beach Living—which were tragically similar to those in Orange County Today and West Coast magazine. She didn’t want a job. She wanted a career that doubled as a lifestyle. She wanted a bottomless pit of culture and innovation with a glut of keen writers who could find compelling angles, then sharpen them to a cutting edge. She wanted what she had at City, and Pearl Beach was not the place to find it. Here the pit was more like a puddle dedicated to restaurant reviews, medical spa openings, and socialites who were heavy on social and lite on style. All those cruise- ship corals and purplish blues. No credible magazine would allow that. And as long as they did, fetal was the only position M.J. would take.

  Beyond the wood railing, children squealed with joy as the breaking white water chased them up the beach. The briny smell of the Pacific Ocean seasoned the breeze. A hummingbird zipped by. M.J., suddenly exhausted, laid back, and remembered a time when she was inspired by things like that.

  * * *

  “AH-HA!” SOMEONE CALLED.

  M.J. woke with a jolt to find a chic older woman glaring at her from the deck next door; a deck that suddenly seemed uncomfortably close to her own, now that it was occupied. Wide-legged linen pants and an ivory blouse billowed around the woman’s narrow frame. An old-fashioned key lay flat against her clavicle. Big and tarnished, it was probably a gift from a grandchild—something only a relative could love.

  “Gotcha!” she said, with a mosquito-killing kind of clap.

  M.J. sat up and shielded her eyes from the late-afternoon glare.

  “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

&nbs
p; “No, but I see you’ve acquainted yourself with my patio furniture.”

  “Your what?”

  The woman pointed a manicured finger at the chaise longue.

  “Oh my God!” M.J. jumped to stand as if the yellow-and-white-striped cushions had sprouted fangs. “I’m so sorry. Dan took them, I mean, he borrowed them. He should have asked first, I know, but you were out of town so he figured—”

  “And Dan lives . . .” She indicated the cottage.

  “Just moved in.”

  “And you?”

  “New York.” M.J. shook her head, “I mean, here, I guess I live here now. With Dan.”

  “And he is your . . .”

  “Boyfriend.”

  “So you just threw your boyfriend under the bus?”

  M.J.’s cheeks burned. “I think so.”

  “Smart.” The stranger winked, then offered her hand. “I’m Gloria Golden.”

  “M.J. Stark.”

  A warm, spicy blend of amber and powder perfumed the air as they shook. It smelled like a hug.

  “Are you wearing Coco Chanel?”

  Gloria flashed a row of white teeth as well preserved as the rest of her. “You too?”

  “My mom did. But only on special occasions.”

  “Honey, every day we’re alive is a special occasion,” she said as her gaze drifted to M.J.’s pile of discarded magazines.

  “I had a little downtime.”

  “That’s what friends, martinis, and stalking your adult children on Facebook are for, right?” Gloria exhumed a dented pack of American Spirits from a potted plant, struck her lighter, and shakily connected its flame to her cigarette.

  “You smoke?”

  “No.” Gloria inhaled. “They’re my husband’s. His cardiologist says his arteries need Liquid Drano, so he pretended to quit and I pretend I don’t know about his hiding spot.” She exhaled. “Every now and then I indulge.”