Chapter 32 — The Timeshare

The offer came from friends who had already paid for something they couldn't use. They had a week at the Olympic Village Inn at Squaw Valley and, for reasons Focus Man never completely understood, weren't going to be there. The week would otherwise sit empty. Would he and Claire like it?

There were offers that required careful consideration, and there were offers involving a free week in the mountains. They said yes.

At the time, neither of them thought of the trip as anything more important than a vacation. Their lives in the Bay Area were busy, but nearly everyone's lives seemed busy. They both worked and commuted, and they had learned the daily arithmetic of traffic: which freeway to avoid at which hour, how much earlier one had to leave on Tuesday than Friday, and how a fifteen-minute delay leaving work could become forty-five minutes somewhere between the office and home. None of this seemed remarkable because everyone around them was doing some version of the same thing.

They left on a weekend morning with the car packed for considerably more adventure than they were likely to encounter. Focus Man believed in being prepared. Claire believed he occasionally confused preparation with relocating the contents of their home.

“You know we're coming back,” she said as he found room for one more bag.

“That's the plan.”

“I just wanted to make sure.”

They drove east, leaving the Bay Area behind and eventually climbing into the Sierra. The road changed first, then the air, and finally the scale of everything around them. Pines replaced the suburbs, and the traffic that normally occupied so much of Focus Man's attention thinned until he could drive for long stretches without watching the cars ahead. He noticed the absence of brake lights before he paid much attention to the mountains. An open road still made him feel he ought to be taking advantage of it somehow.

Claire lowered her window a little. Cooler air moved through the car.

“This is nice,” she said.

He looked at the road ahead and agreed. They rode for a while with the window open.

The Olympic Village Inn gave them something neither had experienced very often in recent years: days without much structure. There were no appointments, no work waiting at the end of a commute, and no household project ready to consume a Saturday. On the first morning, Focus Man woke at approximately the hour he usually woke for work. He lay still for several seconds, trying to remember what he was late for, then got up quietly so Claire could sleep.

By the time she appeared, he had made coffee and spread the information they had collected about the area across the table. He had found several possibilities for the day and put them in an order that seemed sensible.

Claire poured herself coffee and picked up the paper nearest her. “You've made a list.”

“Not really.”

“You numbered it.”

“That doesn't make it a list.”

She looked at him over the page. He took a drink of coffee and conceded that it was a list.

They went to Lake Tahoe. Focus Man had seen photographs, but they had made the lake familiar without preparing him for its size. The road offered a glimpse through the trees, hid it again, and then opened onto water that seemed to occupy everything beyond the shore. He pulled over, and they got out.

The lake was intensely blue beneath the mountains, but what he remembered later was the distance. At home, buildings and freeways and houses continually interrupted his view. Here his eyes could travel across the water until the far shore rose to meet them. Claire stood beside him, and for a while they said nothing. When they finally returned to the car, she was the one who suggested driving farther along the lake.

Over the next several days they discovered more of the country around them. They followed the Truckee River, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because it happened to be traveling in roughly the same direction they were. It appeared between trees, ran beside the road for a stretch, and disappeared again. They stopped to walk along its banks, finding places where the water moved quietly and others where it broke over rocks. They watched people fishing. Once they found a place to sit and remained there long after they had finished eating the sandwiches they had brought.

Focus Man had spent years learning to use time efficiently. At work that was considered a virtue; during a commute it was often a necessity. Sitting beside the river gave him nothing to show for the afternoon, and at first he kept looking upstream, wondering whether a trail led to a better view. Claire seemed content where they were. She watched the water while he studied the opposite bank, then the bend beyond it.

“You're planning again,” she said.

“No.”

“You have that look.”

“What look?”

“The one where you're somewhere else.”

He considered denying it, but there was supposed to be a trail farther up, and he admitted he would like to see it. Claire smiled, finished her sandwich, and came with him. They found the trail. Later, on the way back, they stopped at the same place beside the river, and this time Focus Man sat down without checking his watch.

One day they rode the chairlift at Squaw Valley. In winter it served an obvious purpose, carrying skiers uphill so they could come back down. In summer, carrying two people up a mountain to look around and eventually ride back down seemed wonderfully inefficient. Focus Man bought the tickets.

As the chair moved away from the station, the ground dropped beneath them. There was the hum of the cable, an occasional movement in the chair, and the village growing smaller below. Claire warned him not to drop anything. He checked his pockets, which gave her a reason to point out that he had checked them only after she spoke. He told her he was confirming that he had no intention of dropping anything. She let him have that explanation.

Higher up, the trees that had seemed tall from the ground became part of a broader landscape. The roads below narrowed to pale lines between them. Focus Man tried to follow one until it vanished around a ridge, then found himself thinking about the roads they had left several hours west. He could picture the turn toward his office, the place where traffic often began to slow, the exit Claire took on her way to work. He knew the trip from home to work to within a few minutes on a good day, though a good day was becoming difficult to define.

Beside him, Claire had grown quiet. She was looking out toward the mountains, and he left her to it. The chair carried them higher.

At the top they walked until they found a place to look across the valleys. Ridges rose beyond other ridges, their colors fading with the distance. Focus Man pointed out what he thought might be a road, and Claire caught him trying to work out where it went.

“You can't help yourself, can you?”

“I like knowing where things go.”

“Why?”

She had asked lightly, but he didn't have a ready answer. He could have told her where he thought the road went. He could have made a reasonable guess about the next town. Instead he said, “I don't know,” and stayed beside her at the overlook.

Their life in the Bay Area was a good one. They had jobs they had worked hard to earn, a home they liked returning to, friends, favorite restaurants and places that had become familiar through use. Focus Man thought about all of that as they stood on the mountain. He had no complaint to bring to Claire, and she had brought none to him. When she reached for his hand, he took it. After a while they rode the chairlift down.

The rest of the week passed without any great revelation. They ate too much, drove around the lake, returned to places they liked, and skipped some of the destinations on Focus Man's original list. At some point the list disappeared among the brochures and receipts on the table. He noticed it was gone and didn't make another.

On their last morning, Claire packed while he carried things to the car. The bags seemed to have multiplied during the week, though Claire disputed his account of how this had happened.

“You bought things,” he said.

“So did you.”

“I bought a map.”

“You bought three maps.”

“They're different.”

“Of course they are.”

Everything fit, though Focus Man had to rearrange the trunk twice. They drove west through the mountains, stopping once for coffee and once to look back from a turnout before the road carried them lower. Towns became larger and closer together. The lanes widened. At first the additional cars were easy to overlook, but Focus Man found himself watching the gaps between them. He changed lanes to pass a slower group, changed back a few miles later, and checked the time without having anywhere he needed to be that afternoon.

Claire noticed. She didn't say anything until traffic thickened near home and the brake lights ahead began to flash. Focus Man eased off the accelerator. They moved for half a mile, slowed again, and stopped. He looked toward the next interchange, considering whether another route might be faster, though he knew the drivers around him were probably considering the same thing.

“We do this every day,” Claire said.

He turned to her. She was looking ahead through the windshield, past the line of stopped cars.

“Yes,” he said.

Traffic started moving before either of them spoke again. He followed the car ahead and caught himself estimating how much time they might lose before reaching their exit. They had spent a week going wherever they pleased, often by a longer route simply because they wanted to see what was there. Now, with their own house waiting for them, he was measuring the last part of the drive in minutes.

By the time they reached home, the mountains seemed farther away than the miles suggested. They carried in the bags, sorted the laundry, and put away the food that had traveled back with them. Claire went upstairs to start a load of washing while Focus Man emptied the last bag at the dining table. One of the maps was folded inside. He opened it to find the road they had taken along the river, tracing it past the place where he thought they had stopped for sandwiches.

Claire came down and found him leaning over it.

“Planning another trip?”

“No.”

She came to the table anyway. He showed her the stretch of road he remembered, and she pointed to a bend farther along where she thought they had turned back. They tried to settle it for a minute, then left the question open. Their coffee cups from that morning were still in the sink, and Claire picked them up on her way into the kitchen.

“You know,” she said, “we've never really talked about how much time we spend commuting.”

Focus Man looked at the map, with its narrow roads crossing the mountains. “No,” he said. “We haven't.”

They didn't try to settle that question either. Claire started the dishwasher, and he folded the map, taking care to match its old creases. Monday morning they got up, dressed, drank coffee, and left for work as usual. On the freeway, traffic slowed near the place he had expected it to. Focus Man glanced at the clock, then at the line of cars ahead. He could still picture the river from the turnout where they had stopped, though he hadn't found that place on the map.