Two Weekends in September 2008

Two Weekends in September 2008 frames a pair of weekends as a contrast between insulated privilege and a world in crisis, then folds that contrast into the narrator’s unresolved memories of 1981. A lavish gathering at Hearst Castle and a near-empty stay in Palm Springs become more than separate episodes: the second weekend draws the narrator back to a secret involving Susan Reynolds, while the retrospective structure makes the past feel present again.

The Hearst Castle weekend

On Friday, September 12, the narrator drove from Los Angeles to San Simeon with a younger man he had met in West Hollywood, joining a dozen guests invited by Jay McInerney and Anne Hearst to spend the weekend at Hearst Castle. Once there, phone reception was nearly impossible, and the guests gradually stopped checking for it. The weekend passed in a secluded, opulent bubble, with swimming in the Roman Pool at sunset, Dom Pérignon, and beluga caviar.

The seclusion acquired a different meaning on Monday, September 15, as the narrator and his companion drove down the coast and learned that Lehman Brothers had officially gone bankrupt and financial markets around the world were collapsing. The contrast between the castle’s gilded isolation and the unfolding crisis became, for the narrator, a metaphor for his work as a writer: an image of the distance between a self-contained setting and a disordered world beyond it.

The empty Palm Springs hotel

The following weekend, a producer for whom the narrator was writing a screenplay put him up at the Parker in Palm Springs. The financial collapse had driven most guests away; only three or four remained, and the hotel was kept open despite its nearly deserted grounds. The narrator spent his days working with the producer at the producer’s home in the movie colony and his evenings in the empty dining room. The script was never made, and the narrator says the months spent on it had not been especially well paid, although he had been promised the opportunity to direct it.

The hotel’s emptiness sharpened the turn toward memory. During that weekend, the narrator could think only of an earlier occasion in the fall of his senior year when he had encountered Susan Reynolds at Las Casuelas, a Mexican restaurant on North Palm Canyon Drive. There, he had promised to keep a secret for her, something he could never tell Thom Wright. The 2008 recollection thus links professional disappointment and solitude to an older obligation of concealment, without disclosing the secret itself.

Memory and the divided timeline

The two weekends are joined thematically rather than by continuous action. The narrator explicitly understands the Hearst Castle weekend as metaphorical, while the Palm Springs weekend brings a concrete memory of Susan into focus. Their placement makes the movement from apparent escape to private recollection central: the castle’s disconnection from current events leads into a hotel emptied by those events, and that emptiness opens onto a secret from the narrator’s past.

That earlier memory belongs to a larger history of relationships and deferred futures. Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright had dated since their sophomore year and were among the most popular students at Buckley; for about two years they were in love, until one of them was no longer. The narrator, Susan’s close friend, had concealed his own love for her. He also recalls loving Thom, whose return from a summer in New York in 1979 had intensified the narrator’s attraction. These details place the Las Casuelas promise within a network of attachments that the narrator could not openly resolve.

Desire, secrecy, and the future

The account of Ryan Vaughn makes the limits on that future especially clear. In 1981, Ryan and the narrator recognized a shared attraction, but Ryan described a need for subterfuge. He planned to leave Los Angeles after high school, attend college far away, and reinvent himself; the narrator saw that plan as his own as well. Their September weekend together at the narrator’s empty Mulholland house felt, in retrospect, like the last weekend untouched by the past and an experience of desire and hope that the narrator would not have again in the same way.

Looking back, the narrator says he had often wondered whether he and Ryan might have made their relationship work after Buckley—in New York, Vermont, or San Francisco, where Ryan eventually moved. Ryan barely spoke to him for the rest of their senior year. At graduation in June 1982, they met by chance in the boys’ bathroom at the Pavilion, still wearing red robes and mortarboards; the narrator began to address him, but Ryan cut him off with a brief farewell and their shared comic expression. The later report that Ryan was an architect in San Francisco and living with a partner wounded the narrator, despite the decades since they had kissed. In this account, the two weekends of 2008 act as a frame for an older pattern: a world briefly sealed off from events, followed by the return of the relationships and futures that secrecy left unresolved.