Page 79 of Golden Girl
Vivi tells Savannah that she has a beach date on Sunday with a cute guy she met at work, and Savannah is both excited and jealous. “I never meet men at work,” she says. “The perils of working at a needlepoint shop. I should have gotten a job on a fishing boat or at the golf course. What’s this guy’s name?”
“JP Quinboro,” Vivi says. “You’ll never guess what JP stands for.”
Savannah groans. “Jackie Paper.”
“Wait,” Vivi says. “You know him?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” she says. “Since forever.”
“Did you date him?”
“God, no.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Vivi says.
“I’ll let you find that out for yourself,” Savannah says.
Is Vivi deflated that JP is, apparently, flawed in some way? No—Savannah has unrealistic expectations when it comes to men, whereas Vivi is just fine with a mere mortal.
JP picks Vivi up in the Blazer. He’s wearing only board shorts, flip-flops, and a visor, so Vivi gets a good look at his smooth tan torso. She’s wearing a yellow sundress over a yellow bikini. JP asks the appropriate first questions—how long has Vivi been here, where did she come from—and Vivi says that she was Savannah Hamilton’s roommate at Duke and that Savannah invited her to Nantucket for the summer without asking her parents, and the parents kicked Vivi out after a week, so she had to cobble together a summer on her own.
“You went to Duke with Savannah?” JP says. “I’ve known her forever. She’s great.”
“That’s exactly what she told me about you!” Vivi says with a grin.
Vivi thinks maybe JP will take her to Surfside or Nobadeer or Madequecham, which is where people their age hang out, but instead he drives her down a long sandy road to a beach that is completely deserted. It feels like a secret.
“Is this where you bring all of your unsuspecting victims?” Vivi says, because it would be easy enough for JP to kill her here and send her floating out to sea. (She wonders if this would make a compelling short story, something in the vein of Joyce Carol Oates’s darker work. “Beach Date,” she could call it.)
JP says, “My friends hang out at Nobadeer but I wanted to come here because it’s quiet and we can talk.”
JP plants an umbrella in the sand with great seriousness and intention while Vivi admires the rippling muscles in his arms and back. She slips her sundress over her head and feels JP’s eyes lingering on her body. His gaze is so intense, it’s as if he’s resting his hands on her waist.
It’s like they’re in a Harlequin romance novel, she thinks. Except it’s real.
JP asks if she wants to go for a walk and when she says yes, he reaches for her hand. It’s the first time he’s touched her and it’s…electric. There’s chemistry. Vivi hasn’t held hands with a boy since Brett Caspian in high school, but she doesn’t want to think about Brett right now.
She asks JP about himself. He grew up with his mother and grandparents in Manhattan, went to the Trinity School and then to Bucknell, where he majored in fraternity. (When Vivi laughs, he says, “No, really, I was president of DKE and it took upallmy time.”) He, like Vivi, just graduated and needs to figure out what to do with his life—but before he worries about that, he wants to squeeze every last drop of juice out of the summer.
“I’d rather be in Nantucket than anywhere else,” he says. “And I’m aware that real life does not take a break for the summer, so this is probably my last chance to be free and irresponsible.”
“Couldn’t you just stay here?” Vivi asks.
JP laughs. “Spoken like someone who has never seen this island in the middle of January.”
Vivi would like to see Nantucket in January—quiet and blanketed in snow or even gray with a howling wind. She doesn’t care. She loves it and that love is starting to feel unconditional. She can easily see working at the dry cleaner’s year-round and maybe finding a nicer rental. There would be lots of time to write. “What about your dad?” Vivi asks. “Are your parents divorced?”
“He was killed in a Chinook crash in Vietnam while my mother was pregnant with me,” JP says. “So I never knew him.”
Vivi envies the insouciance with which JP announces this. He could have been telling her he grew up on the ninth floor of his apartment building. “I’m so sorry.”
“Can’t miss what you never had,” JP says, and this time Vivi detects a hint of bravado. It couldn’t have been easy for him to grow up without a father.
Vivi shocks herself by saying, “My father is dead too.” She knows JP’s next question will beWhat happened?and she nearly heads him off by telling him what she always tells people when they ask, which iscar accident.But instead, she says, “He killed himself in the garage. Carbon monoxide poisoning.” Her voice sounds calm and emotionless, and for the first time in her life, Vivi feels like an adult. Since she left Parma, she has kept the truth about her father private from everyone except Savannah. She feels ashamed because of both how her father died and the fact that he’s dead. In a world where people are meant to have two parents, she feels lopsided, defective.
JP squeezes her hand. “Were you close to your dad?”
“Yes.”
