Tart

by Jody Gehrman

  Back in September, I wondered how I’d make it through the year. Now that I’m more than halfway there, I’m beginning to wonder how I’ll manage to leave gracefully. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m starting to hope against hope that Westby will decide I’m worth keeping.

  Well, she could. Monica’s backed off some, since I haven’t molested her ex recently, and my student evals were fairly glowing—aside from Ralene Tippets’s contribution, anyway. They’re supposed to be anonymous, but even with the comments typed, I recognized Ralene’s signature bitchiness instantly:

  Professor Bloom (if you can even call her a professor) is consistently unprofessional and inappropriate. She frequently shows up late, clutching a muffin and looking frazzled, then tries to make it up to us by offering us bites. Please. She flirts with her pets while berating the rest of us. More than once I’ve caught her examining a Victoria’s Secret catalog while the students rehearsed. You call this an education, Ms. Bloom? I think not. Please buy your underwear on your own time.

  I was a little discouraged, I’ll admit, especially considering that none of Ralene’s allegations were bald-faced lies. I am late sometimes, I do frequently show up with a muffin, and yeah, I’ve been known to peruse Victoria’s Secret when things were slow. I’m not perfect, God knows, but I prefer to focus on my more encouraging evals, such as this two-word one: “Bloom rocks.”

  As I drive home, my mind drifts from teaching to my default setting: Clay Parker. So he’s planning a little anti-Valentine bash. My curiosity is definitely piqued by his sweet little flyer, but I remind myself to be cautious. He’s almost definitely in the throes of a post-relationship-give-me-the-antidote delirium, or the Big Swing, as Ziv used to call it. Practically everyone does it: you get out of a relationship with a neat freak, you find yourself crazy about a lice-infested grease monkey with fourteen rotting cars in his yard. After a week of gazing adoringly at his mountain of laundry, you come to your senses and flee. It’s the way we are. Clay is fresh off the Monica boat, so naturally he’ll find me irresistible. She’s a tightly wound, overachieving, expensively groomed and probably (deep down) tender brunette. I’m a disheveled mass of walking blond chaos with a battered little peach pit where there ought to be a heart.

  The all-too-predictable Big Swing forecast: Clay will binge on me for two weeks, become seriously nauseated, purge, and then begin his search for a healthy, normal relationship with a saucy little redhead who completely defies the whole Monica/Claudia dichotomy. Meanwhile, I’ll lose my job, my self-respect and my battered little peach-pit heart.

  No thanks.

  CHAPTER 21

  Rose didn’t get a job on my birthday, like she wanted, but she did find one in early January, and amazingly, she’s still at it more than a month later. Sure, the pay is scandalously low, but then she isn’t exactly orchestrating corporate mergers or finding the cure to cancer; she’s the gofer girl at Wabi Sabi Tattoo, although she prefers the more upwardly mobile if somewhat archaic title, apprentice. She’s determined to be a tattoo artist, and I figure this is as likely as anything else.

  Rose is better, lately. She hardly ever sneaks vodka anymore, she’s eating more carbohydrates, and she hasn’t hooked up with a soul mate for two solid weeks. Not that going without soul mates is a good thing, strictly speaking; it’s only that, in the case of Rose, soul mates have become an addiction, so cutting back is a sign of improved mental health.

  When we’re having breakfast on Valentine’s day—delicious strawberry crepes she threw together on a whim—she surprises me by announcing, “I don’t need a man, Claudia. I’ve decided I’m going to be more like you.”

  “Like me?” I sip my tea and wonder where this is going. “How so?”

  “I’m not going to get caught up in all that ‘is he The One?’ bullshit. It’s passé. Way too eighties.”

  “But, Rose, I thought you were looking for your soul mate.”

  She spears a strawberry and shrugs. “So? Maybe I was wrong. There’s probably no such thing.” I give her a look, and she cries, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like ‘poor Rose is delusional?’ I’m saying you’re right, I’m wrong. Hello!”

  “But,” I protest, “you’re so good at finding soul mates. As long as you limit yourself to one or two a month, who cares if they don’t last?” She just stares at me, mystified, and I try to gloss over the absurdity of what I just said with “Besides, you’ve got to have a certain constitution to be as jaded and unromantic as I am. You have to be hardhearted.”

  “Oh, please,” she scoffs. “You are not hardhearted.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Claudia, do you remember when we were eleven and you gave me not only your Walkman, but your Run DMC tape?” I smile, remembering. “They were your favorite band, and it was your only tape, but Mom and I were leaving for Mississippi, and you were scared I’d be bored. That is not a hardhearted girl.”

  “Maybe not,” I say, “but that was twenty years ago. A lot’s happened since then.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, unconvinced. “And look at you now. Putting me up without complaining. Staying up all night over casting decisions because you’re terrified of hurting your shittiest students’ feelings. Pining away for Clay Parker.”

  “I am not,” I shriek.

  “Oh, yeah? Then why haven’t you had sex in the past—what?—three months?”

  “Four,” I mumble, “and nineteen days. But who’s counting?”

  “See?” she laughs. “You’re pining.”

  “I’m just in a dry spell. And anyway, I thought you started off by saying I don’t need a man, and that’s what you like about me.”

  “Ahh,” she says. “The paradox.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t believe in soul mates, but your soul mate is tormenting you. I’ve always believed in The One, but I’m stuck with sordid flings. Well, not anymore. I’m changing. In fact, I’m going to try being a lesbian.”

  I practically spit out my tea. “Rose, I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you just try on.”

  “Why not?” she asks, all innocence.

  “You’re talking about your sexual orientation here, not a pair of shoes.”

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “How hard could it be? I already like women better. Now I just have to learn how to have sex with them.” She gives me a sly smile. “I’ve already picked someone out.”

  “Who?”

  “This girl who comes into the studio to get ink. She’s so great. And I think she’s sort of bi, like me.” She stares off into space, evidently dreaming of bi-girl.

  “So now you’re bi?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I could give up men completely,” she says solemnly. “I’m just not that disciplined. It’s like cigarettes. If you tell yourself you can never smoke another one forever and ever, you go crazy. You have to allow yourself a little treat now and then. It’s cosmic law.”

  “Right,” I mumble. “If you say so.”

  I can’t quite bring myself to tell Rose about the flyer at school, but I do manage to find out exactly where It’s Beach is, and to get us there around eleven o’clock on Saturday night. I figure showing up before then would just be asking for humiliation. After four months and nineteen days of celibacy, I have to take every precaution not to come across as sex-starved and hysterical.

  There’s already a pretty big crowd gathered. Santa Cruz may be a magnet for dreamers, but evidently the jaded population isn’t lacking, either. I’m glad. The crowd makes me feel anonymous and safe.

  I have additional insurance against being ferreted out, though. Earlier today, Rose and I were wandering through downtown aimlessly, drifting in and out of shops, making sarcastic remarks about the poor saps searching frantically for Valentine gifts, when we came across a glossy black wig in a novelty store. It was one of those smooth, chin-length bobs a la Pulp Fiction, and the second I saw
it I fell in love. “Try it on—try it,” Rose urged when she saw the gleam in my eye. I did, and it looked fantastic. Goodbye bone-white blond, hello Cleopatra. I shelled out the fifty bucks and I haven’t taken it off since.

  My new mantra: Let there be wigs.

  So here I am, incognito in a red Chinese silk shirt, black bell-bottoms, cherry-red lipstick, dark glasses and my cherished raven-black bob. I probably look like a lunatic, but I feel like La Femme Nikita.

  It’s a really stunning night, I have to admit, the sort of scene that could lure you into the romantics’ camp, if you’re not vigilant. There’s the thinnest sliver of moon suspended above the horizon, its reflection warping this way and that in the waves. The air smells like salt and reefer. Everything smells different under the stars, I think, and a weird nostalgia seizes me. How can I be homesick for someone I’ve probably spent a total of twenty hours with—several of which we wasted sleeping?

  Rose sees someone she knows from work and becomes engrossed in conversation with him. He looks like Jerry Garcia, minus a few teeth, and he’s wearing assless chaps; I’m hardly crushed when he ignores me after our introduction in favor of regaling Rose with a lovingly detailed description of his latest motorcycle accident. I catch a couple snippets of their conversation over the music: “sliced to the bone” and “intestines hanging out.” Tales of medical trauma have always riveted Rose, but I just get queasy.

  Just then I see Clay at the base of the cliffs, lit dimly by a wad of bulky Christmas lights, a few tiki torches and a red strobe. He’s half obscured by two turntables and multiple milk crates filled with records, fading out on “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and starting in on something frenetic by Deelite. A small group of barefooted dancers, many of them scantily clad in spite of the chill and most of them female, let out a squeal and shake their butts harder to the two and four.

  The man knows how to please women.

  I stand there watching him, toying with my options as I dig my bare feet into the cool, dry sand and feel it filling up the space between my toes. I didn’t exactly plan to come in disguise, it just sort of happened. Now that I’m unrecognizable—which I’m pretty sure I am, since two of my students just walked right by me without a second glance—I have no idea how to proceed. An awkward moment for 007.

  For now, I’m savoring watching him from afar, seeing his face emerge from the shadows and retreat into them again, his expression lined with concentration, his fingers tapping the air while the rhythm takes off, sometimes head-bobbing when it gets going really good. Once in a while he flips through the records with practiced speed—searching, finding. It never dawned on me before now, but a DJ’s omniscient; he’s a puppet master, yanking at the limbs, hips and heartstrings of his audience, pumping us into a frenzy, slowing us to a crawl, slamming us through the decades at dangerous speeds.

  Unfortunately for me, omniscience is way too sexy. Especially on Clay.

  One of the barely clothed dancers breaks from the writhing pod and saunters over to him. Her face is lit by the tiki torch she stands under. She’s very petite, with enviable bone structure and the same halogen-bright smile Rain’s got. In fact, she looks a lot like Rain, with dewy skin, silky black hair to her butt and a miniature body that makes me feel twenty pounds overweight just looking at her.

  She leans in close to Clay, balancing on her toes as he bends down obligingly, so that his ear nearly touches her lips. I see this all as if in slow motion, through a close-up lens: the tiki light illuminating her strong, sweat-glazed clavicle; her full, pink mouth whispering; his face, tense with listening at first, and then his eyes lighting up, his head nodding in fervent agreement to whatever she’s suggested. Now he sweeps her hair away with the familiar intimacy of a lover and says something into her ear for what feels like hours. Unable to look away, I watch with sick fascination as they both crack up, and he pulls her into a tight, laughing embrace.

  I turn away, nauseous in my bones. The crowd around me, which has thickened in the last ten minutes, suddenly fills me with an intense jolt of claustrophobia. The Thai food I had for dinner is threatening an encore, and I’m overcome by the need to escape the forest of swaying bodies all around me. Now, I think, now now now. Gogogogogogo!

  I’m halfway up the stairs that lead to the street when I remember Rose, and turn around to see if I can spot her. I scan the crowd and find her standing near Clay, right where the Rain-clone was three minutes ago. Just as my eyes land on them, Rose starts pointing and waving at me; so does Clay. In a mad panic, I turn back to the stairs, charging up them as quickly as my mules will allow.

  Just as I’ve reached the safety of the sidewalk, I hear Deelite fade out. When Greg Brown starts up, I stop dead. His rich, smoky voice tugs at me like an undertow. With your pretty dresses and your ragged underwear. I turn halfway around and look over the cliff at the partiers littering the beach, see the dancers puzzling over the DJ’s selection; there’s no driving beat to animate their hips, and I giggle a little as they flounder.

  I’ve just taken two steps toward the stairs when I see Rain’s doppelgänger grab Clay’s hand and spin him around with her so her scarlet skirt fans out like a flower. I remember her lush pink mouth hovering so close to Clay’s exquisite earlobe, and realize I just can’t get any closer to that.

  I turn back around and keep walking.

  I am not a jealous person. Sure, I’ve had my episodes, but I find the emotion so repugnant and lowbrow, I’ve managed to squelch it. Mostly. When I was fifteen, I did knock Chelsea Gibbon’s front tooth loose when I caught her heavy petting with Jason Pritchard, but that was in my hormone-addled youth. Since then, I’ve navigated mostly micro-flings, and in doing so I’ve never had time to work up much jealousy—at least not the terrible I-think-I’m-going-to-be-sick variety.

  Besides, jealousy is totally un-tart.

  Of course, when Jonathan was scrambling around the apartment his last afternoon in Austin, stuffing a paperback, some dirty socks and a Walkman into a plastic bag, having already packed the bulk of his belongings and now just furtively grabbing at the leftovers, I’ll admit that the sight of Rain’s gloriously dark hair in that taxi made me feel murderous and limp and murderous again in such rapid succession it was all I could do not to collapse.

  And all right, in the early years of my tart enthusiasm I got in over my head with the first and last bona fide cowboy I could scrounge up. His name was Clint Martin and he wore an actual Stetson, no kidding. I got a little too attached (I was nineteen, give me a break), and when I found him in the kitchen getting cozy with Ziv’s sister I pretty much lost my shit. There were broken plates and a sprained jaw involved (his)—nothing serious.

  So maybe I do have a tiny jealous streak—just a streak, mind you, not a vein or a bone, only a minuscule thread of the stuff lurking in my blood. Like most things I can’t control, I blame it on the Lavelle DNA. My mother can be a jealous fiend; when she found out that Dad was giving it to the dental hygienist she took a sledgehammer to his ’57 Chevy. It took him six months and several thousand dollars to get it cherry again. Jessie’s obviously got it in her, too. At least ninety percent of the times she fled any given town it was because her beau-of-the-month showed signs of straying. She hardly ever waited for the actual betrayal, since she was always much more preemptive than that. All it took for her was a feeling—the sense that a man was slipping from her grip—and she was out of there.

  When it comes to men, I’m more Jessie than Mira. I’m not as nomadic as my aunt geographically, but I have moved from bed to bed with a drifter’s agility, and I’ve adopted her leave-before-you’re-left stance in most cases. If only I’d followed through with Jonathan and dumped him when I got restless, I never would have felt that sickening rage and weakness, staring at Rain’s dark hair in that taxi.

  I’m almost home, now. I’ve walked a mile or so, and I can feel blisters welling up, one on each big toe. The air is cool, but I’ve worked up a sweat from the exertion, and my scalp itche
s under my wig. The whole disguise thing turned sour the second I saw Clay clutching his nubile little dancer. It started as a frisky adventure, but now it strikes me as a pathetic plea for attention, and I feel disgusted thinking of Clay seeing me like this. The only reason I haven’t yanked the offensive black bob from my head is because trudging home with a fistful of hair is the sort of thing that attracts all the derelicts and freaks within a ten-mile radius, and Santa Cruz is a gold mine of derelicts and freaks.

  Only a couple blocks from home, a bar called the Ghost Orchid catches my attention. It’s unusually festive tonight, with live blues pouring out through the front door, its plate glass windows rattling with bass. I can see people dancing on the blue-lit floor. The band’s playing “Mustang Sally,” and everyone’s really into it; they look drunk and happy. It makes me homesick now for Austin and my twenties, so recently deceased, and all the barhopping I used to do on a Saturday night such as this, back when I was confident and tart. Impulsively, I pay the somewhat extortionate cover charge and swagger in, trying to shake off the events of the evening and the haunting stigma of a woman at a bar alone on a Saturday night.

  It takes me a good ten minutes to catch the eye of the sassy blond bartender with the Buddha tattoo. She’s really adorable; she’s got on a lime-green, strappy tank, hip-hugger jeans and her cheekbones are sparkling with pink glitter. I swallow hard when it occurs to me that this town is filled to capacity with naturally beautiful twentysomething hipsters. Clay is now an official divorcée; after years of dragging around the ball and chain, can I blame him for wanting to sow his proverbial oats in this fertile oasis? Why would he look twice at a has-been like me with a bad dye job, weird wigs and more cellulite on my little finger than these betties have on their entire, taut little bodies?