Swim Read Free Page A

the model-slash-receptionist. “I got your back,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he pushed the heavy glass door open and we race-walked into the sunshine of the parking lot. “Head down, head down!” he whispered, opening his car’s door and hustling me inside. “If anyone sees us...”
    “It’s curtains?” I said, getting into the spirit.
    “Nah,” he said as the car rumbled to life. “They’d just want pie, too.”
    We moved into a shared office a week later and worked together for the next six months, bouncing ideas off each other, reading dialogue across the table, even acting out the parts. Rob kept balled-up athletic socks in his desk, and he’d shove them down the front of his T-shirt to impersonate Cara, the most improbably endowed of the quartet, who was played by a twenty-four-year-old named Taryn Montaine. Rob swore he recognized her from a softcore porno that still aired late at night on Showtime. “I know it’s her,” he’d said after forty fruitless minutes scouring the Internet for a picture that would prove it. “She just got a new fake name to go with her new fake tits.” When he got bored with searching for pictures of a pre-implant Taryn, he’d look at me with a lazy smile.“You know what you need?” he’d ask. He always did know, whether it was a burrito for lunch or a bag of chips or a butter rum LifeSaver, or a drive to Santa Monica. (Once he rented Rollerblades, and I sat on a bench and laughed at him stumbling around for half an hour.)
    We were together for ten hours a day on normal days, something closer to twenty on the Thursday nights when we’d tape. I still didn’t know much about his personal life, but I knew every T-shirt he had in his wardrobe. I knew that his cleaning ladies came on Tuesdays and that he had a poker game every other Friday, that his father had died of emphysema and his mother lived in Arizona. I knew how he looked first thing in the morning (rumpled, tired), and how he looked late at night (more rumpled, more tired, with more stubble). He called me Lemon Meringue, and once or twice he’d actually introduced me as his work wife, making my heart beat like a little girl who’s gotten just what she wanted for her birthday.
    I tugged my goggles back down, flipped over again, and kicked toward the end of the pool, forcing my aching arms high over my head, then knifing them into the water. Five months after we’d written it, the first episode Rob and I had collaborated on was scheduled to air on a Thursday night. My grandmother, who’d been as charmed by Rob as I was, decided a party was in order. She’d invited a bunch of her extra friends over to our apartment, and spent two days making brisket and borscht and potato-and-onion pierogies, covering the dark wood of our dining room table and sideboard with lace doilies, then loading them with platters of food. “A feast fit for a czar,” I’d told her, straightening the plates, filling the ice bucket, too nervous to sit or eat a bite as her senior-citizen friends, with their canes and walkers and snap-brim hats, filed into the living room.
    I’d perched on the edge of one of the dining room chairs, in a pretty pale-green sundress I’d bought for the occasion,counting down the minutes on the VCR’s clock. Rob never showed. I left him three messages—two casual-cool, one desperate. I forced myself to watch the episode; then I’d hidden in my bedroom until the last of the extras, bearing Tupperware containers full of beet soup and sour cream, had gone home. I was under the covers in my sundress and my sandals when my grandmother crept into the room.
    “You came home pretty late last night, Ruthie.”
    I groaned and opened my eyes. She was standing beside me, still dressed for the party in a vintage cocktail caftan, with diamanté hair clips and rhinestone-buckled shoes that clattered on the terra-cotta floors. “Did you sleep with him?” she asked.
    I could hear Boston in her voice,