The summer before last

The summer before last marks two sharply different journeys: Dom Corvaisis’s movement into a more self-directed life, and Jorja Monatella’s effort to preserve a marriage that was already failing. Recalled later in connection with Dom’s sleepwalking and Jorja’s changed prospects, the period joins personal transformation to disappointment without making the two characters’ experiences part of the same story.

A period recalled from later crises

The summer before last is not presented as a single continuous episode. It becomes legible through later recollection: Dom’s sleepwalking prompts Parker Faine to connect the problem with a dramatic change Dom underwent during a trip to Mountainview, Utah, while Jorja remembers a three-week road vacation intended to repair her marriage. These memories give the period a double shape—one person looking back on a difficult but beneficial break with the past, another on a failed attempt to keep a shared life intact.

Dom’s break with his former life

During the summer before last, Dom abandoned his job at Mountainview College. The change was dramatic and inexplicable to him, but he understood its outcome as positive: at thirty-three, he felt he had taken hold of his life and entered unfamiliar territory. He liked the person he had become, and feared returning to the dreary existence he had left behind.

That transformation acquires a more uncertain meaning when Dom later begins sleepwalking. Parker suspects the nocturnal episodes may be connected to the changes of that summer and wants Dom to stay with him while they explore the connection. Dom doubts that the relationship is mysterious or complex; he considers that sleepwalking might offer a way to retreat from the challenges and excitement of his new life. His explanation does not settle the cause, but it shows how strongly he associates the summer’s change with a hard-won refusal to go back.

Jorja’s attempted reconciliation

Jorja’s summer journey had a different purpose. With her marriage to Alan Rykoff already rocky, she persuaded him to take a carefully planned three-week car trip with her and their daughter, Marcie. They worked as a baccarat dealer and a cocktail waitress in different hotels, often on separate shifts and sleeping schedules; Jorja hoped that time together on the road might repair the distance between them.

The plan failed. After returning to Las Vegas, Alan became more promiscuous, and his one-night stands took on what Jorja remembered as a manic, desperate quality. Three months later, in October, he left Jorja and Marcie. In retrospect, the vacation stands as an effort that did not restore the marriage and may, in Jorja’s view, have preceded its worsening, though the account does not establish that the trip caused Alan’s behavior.

A brief encounter with lasting consequences

The trip also brought Jorja into contact with Ginger Weiss, a young doctor driving cross-country from Stanford to Boston on what she described as her first vacation. Their meeting lasted little more than an hour, but Jorja remembered Ginger as self-assured and competent despite her youth and appearance. After Alan left, Jorja recalled that impression and began to reconsider her own assumption that she was suited only to cocktail-waitressing. Ginger’s example helped prompt her to seek a more challenging life.

The summer therefore leaves different legacies in the two recollections. For Dom, it is the point when he chose a new direction and later feared losing it; for Jorja, it is both the setting of a failed reconciliation and the occasion of an encounter that helped her imagine a future beyond her marriage.