Tart

by Jody Gehrman

  By the time Miss Sassy gets around to me, I’m so depressed I order two shots of Jack Daniel’s and down them both. Then I plow my way out onto the dance floor and get to work.

  Let me just say: I’m a very good dancer.

  There aren’t too many skills I can list on my résumé without feeling a bit like a spin doctor, but this is one I can bullet with absolute confidence. When the music is pulsing in my veins and I’ve got a fresh buzz on, I’m practically spectacular. I’m not saying I go out there to Saturday Night Fever it—people don’t stand back and gasp—but my body takes on a personality that transcends the regular, fumbling Claudia Bloom. I become something more graceful, less earth-bound. I forget about what my ass looks like or what my hair’s doing and I turn into the snap of the snare drum, the quivering throb of bass.

  If I don’t look as good as I feel, I don’t want to know. Dancing, bathing and sex are my few opportunities to lose myself in something vast. I’d hate to sully any of them with my usual neuroses.

  I must look okay, because after I’ve been dancing alone for three or four songs, this Hugh Grant look-alike wades through the sea of anorexic surfer chicks and asks in a charming British accent if I’ll dance with him. No kidding. I just nod, and suddenly my night takes a turn for the sexier. Not only is he ridiculously cute, but he’s got the whole dance-floor seduction thing down to an art. He starts off with distant, take-all-the-space-you-need floor sharing, moving into let-me-just-enjoy-your-beautiful-erotic-hips-by-occasionally-cupping-them-with-absolute-reverence. Then he progresses to more advanced partner stuff (which hardly any guys know, and those who do know are often pushy, so someone who just pulls this out at the last minute casually, like, “By the way, want to tango?” is scoring huge points), during which more intimate, body-pressing maneuvers are welcome and pulled off with tremendous flair. By the time the band plays their last number, I’m glossy with sweat and feeling like I own the place. Even the sassy little bartender with her Buddha tattoo is giving me turf defending looks. Goodbye, aging jealous wench in wig. Hello, goddess of Tart.

  As the band packs up, we’ve only got a few minutes before last call, so we scramble to get ourselves cocktails and to find out who we’ve been dancing with for the past couple hours.

  “I’m Merrit,” he says, holding his hand out. “And you’re…?”

  It’s quite bizarre exchanging niceties after you’ve been pressing your sweaty pelvic bones together and gyrating so intimately you could probably draw pictures of each other’s anatomy.

  He smiles winningly. “You do have a name?”

  I start to introduce myself, and then I remember my disguise and change my mind. “Cleo,” I say, “Cleo—” I scan the room madly and blurt out the first thing I see “—Coors.”

  “C’ours,” he says, adding something elegant to my ridiculous christening. “Is that French?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m impressed. Most people think it’s a beer.”

  For this I earn a hearty chuckle. My God, he even laughs with a British accent.

  In the ten minutes before Sassy Buddha kicks us out, I learn he’s a writer with an arts grant, working on something set in Santa Cruz. He’s here from London to soak in the atmosphere and to finish a first draft. I tell him I sell lingerie at the mall. Why not? It’s the sort of thing Cleo Coors would do.

  I’m both intrigued and repelled by the writer part of his intro. I want to believe I learned something from Jonathan: namely, writers suck. At the same time, Merrit’s incredibly cute and we’re both arty, after all, which should at least justify further investigation.

  In the end, I take his phone number and chalk it up to a maybe.

  Walking home, I have to admit this isn’t like me. The old Claudia Bloom would be at his place by now, shedding her clothes and shucking off his, eager to get back in the saddle. I mean, what? I haven’t had sex in like (give me a minute) 3,407 hours. The guy lubes me up with hot dancing, has a gorgeous British accent, looks like Hugh Grant and is obviously gagging for it himself (to borrow a fave Brit phrase), but I’m walking home to my grungy little flat that reeks of Big, Braided Dog?

  The only explanation, as much as I loathe it, is I’ve been Clay Parkered. Big-time.

  Fucking tragic.

  CHAPTER 22

  Three days before Heirloom opens, just as I’m breaking out in hives and enduring the worst case of tech-week insomnia ever, my mother shows up on my doorstep in tears, insisting that Gary has ruined her life. I want to say, “And you’re just figuring this out now?” but I’m so floored that she’s actually turning to me in a crisis, I pull her into my kitchen, make her a cup of tea and watch in awe as the floodgates open.

  “He’s having an affair,” she says, and an avalanche of mascara rivulets breaks free from her lower lids, making her look like tabloid material.

  “I thought we knew this.” I try to make my voice as warm and caring as possible. “With the Aussie landscaper, right?”

  “A different affair,” she wails. “With a girl.” Visions of Rain’s nineteen-year-old butt dance in my head for a couple of seconds before I banish them.

  “Who?”

  She shrugs. “Some aerobics instructor. Did you know he’s doing aerobics? He says the ‘youthful energy cleanses his aura.’ Youthful energy. Twenty-two-year-old piece of ass, more like it.”

  “Twenty-two?” I gasp.

  She clenches her jaw and for a moment I sincerely fear she’ll kill him. “He’s scum. I’d like his balls in a vice.”

  “Just leave him, Mom—Mira.” We both pretend not to notice my slip. “Revenge isn’t worth it. Sue him for adultery and take him to the cleaners, if it’ll make you feel better, but don’t stay.”

  More tears run down her cheeks, streaking her face with fresh black rivers. “I would,” she says, “I would have left him when I found out about the gardener-slut. But…”

  “But what?”

  “It’s Em,” she says, so softly I can barely hear her. “I can’t leave Em. And if I leave him, he’ll keep her from me.” She stares into her tea.

  I wonder if she knows how much this hurts me. Does it occur to someone like Mira that abandoning your real daughter at thirteen, then enduring hell to keep mothering a stepdaughter is a little…odd? Does it cross her mind that this makes me feel like hopelessly damaged goods replaced by New and Improved?

  She looks at me, and for a wobbly, weird moment our eyes lock. It feels like it does on stage when someone goes up on a line and the world is all unscripted silence; seconds last for years.

  She breaks the moment by asking for a tissue. I get up and, finding no Kleenex anywhere, return with a roll of toilet paper. Mira takes it in stride. She and Gary may live in an oasis of immaculate pan-Asian tastefulness, but she’s not big on rigorous hygiene, if left to her own devices, so she doesn’t judge people who neglect to purchase facial tissue.

  I guess that’s one thing she’s got going for her.

  When she’s successfully cleaned her face of most the mascara, she pulls herself together a bit, even takes a small compact from her purse and applies a layer of mauve lipstick.

  “Em is six months pregnant, you know.” She studies her reflection wearily, then snaps the compact closed.

  “Yeah. I was there when she announced it.”

  “I don’t care if Gary is a fuck-head—I just can’t disrupt her life right now.”

  “Uh-huh.” I’m afraid the bitter taste in my mouth will seep into my words, so I don’t trust myself beyond these two syllables.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” she says, in a tone that is classic Mira: brusque, subject-changing, recklessly disregarding the need for a segue.

  “Oh?”

  “I talked to Jessie. She told me she wrote to you.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I haven’t written her back, yet. I feel kind of guilty ab—”

  “What did she tell you?” she interrupts. “What did she say in her letter?” There’s an edge to her voi
ce that I don’t quite recognize.

  “Not much, really. She asked me to look out for Rose, mostly.”

  She searches my face with an intense scrutiny that’s unsettling. My mother never pays this much attention to me.

  “Why do you ask?”

  She shoves the compact back into her enormous leather satchel and tries a tentative smile. “Just curious. Listen, Jessie’s not well. You know that?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Claudia—she’s an alcoholic, she’s depressed—”

  “She’s incarcerated,” I say, wanting to defend her, for some reason. “It’s depressing.”

  “Okay, fair enough. My point is, if she writes you again, and she tells you anything…bizarre? Just know that she might be a little confused right now. Do you see what I mean?”

  I don’t, really, in fact I can’t for the life of me figure out why my mother is saying all of this, but I just nod because interrogating her at the moment seems less than compassionate, and I don’t want to screw up this incredibly rare opportunity to be my mother’s confidante.

  “Good. I knew you would,” she says. “How are things with you?”

  “Um, okay.”

  I think of telling her about Clay, while we’re on this little heart-to-heart jag. I’ve got to start sharing stuff with her, right? If I don’t try telling her things, how will we ever get close?

  “I’ve been sort of interested in this guy.”

  She reaches into her bag and pulls out her cell phone, checks the screen. “Yeah? What sort of guy?”

  “He’s really great. But when I met him he was married.”

  She stuffs her phone back in her bag. “Claudia,” she says, her tone full of reproach.

  “He’s not now. They’re divorced.”

  “Don’t be a rebound girl.”

  “I know. I don’t want to be stupid,” I say, suddenly really sorry I brought it up.

  “Then don’t be,” she says. “It’s as simple as that.” Then she gets up, and I follow her to the door.

  She puts her hand on the knob, then turns back to me. Briefly she wraps her arms around me, but it’s over so quickly I don’t even have time to return the embrace, if you can call it that. “Thanks for the tea.”

  “Anytime,” I say, swallowing down the thickness in my throat.

  “Oh, by the way, I just got this wonderful new grass—you want a little?” She reaches into her bag, pulls out a film canister, pops it open and hands me a healthy joint, meticulously rolled.

  “Sure,” I say, smiling. “Thanks.”

  And then she’s out the door, leaving me with the fragrant spliff.

  I can’t resist the urge to go and watch her from the window, my eyes following the smooth lines of her convertible Saab in retreat, until the brake lights flash a glowing red goodbye. Then she turns left and disappears.

  It’s the view I remember most of my mother: the back of her head, leaving me for someplace better.

  There’s a neighborhood in hell devoted just to directors; it’s called Technical Difficulties, and there, well-intentioned theater artists tear their hair out and gnash their teeth, raging against the machine.

  It is not a good place.

  I am there now.

  Deep in the bowels of a parallel hell (though his agony must be less—it’s not his debut, and he’s got tenure, for Christ’s sake) is Sam Bogue, the five-foot-one, grumpy, recently divorced, chain-smoking tech guy. We’re the oddly paired duo in this fight against the apparatus, and I fear we’re losing the battle.

  The problem: we open in five hours, and our light board is defunct.

  Not just faltering, not just finicky, but totally, irrevocably, dead.

  My rash is spreading. Yesterday, it was an isolated island of tortured pink just to the left of my belly button. Now it’s a hideous, scaly continent that spans the better part of my torso.

  I set my coffee cup down on a nearby stool and rub my stinging, sleep-deprived eyes. “Okay, Sam. Let’s just go through this again. We have two options, right?”

  “Right. We could try to get a new light board—”

  “Which is virtually impossible, at this point?”

  He nods. “Pretty much. Or we could move to another venue…”

  “Which means leaving our set behind. Totally unthinkable. I mean, all the work Matt and Lisa put into—”

  “I know,” he agrees mournfully. “I know.” He fingers the pack of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket.

  “Plus, the atmosphere will be shot.”

  “And I’m not even sure we could get another venue, at this point,” he says, taking the pack out and tucking a cigarette behind his ear. “There are so many student projects.”

  We sit in gloomy silence for a long minute, staring at the dead light board, willing it to resuscitate itself magically. It doesn’t. All my ambitious hopes for this play—that it’ll grant me instant genius status on campus, eclipse the ugly rumors about me and Ben, undo all the damage I incurred hooking up with Clay—are stamped out by this huge, ugly, lifeless hunk of knobs, levels and toggle switches. A powerful urge to kick it makes my leg twitch.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, feeling a distant lightbulb clicking on. “What if we used the board in the black-box theater, and ran wires from there to here?”

  “But how would I work my cues? I have to see the actors.”

  “We’d have you on headset, of course—”

  “But even so—”

  “We could hook up a video monitor, so you could see everything,” I say, warming up to the idea. “It’ll be fine. We’ll have Josh in here giving you cues, in case anything goes wrong.”

  He looks at me, and a slow smile creeps over his terminally scowling features. I hardly recognize him. “That’s a possibility…” he says. “We’ll have to round up some serious extension cords, but I can swing that.”

  “You think it’ll really work?” I’m so giddy with relief I bounce on my toes and clap my hands together.

  “If it does,” he says, “I’ll be the first to buy you a beer.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Heirloom is glorious. No, I mean seriously—it kicks ass. Sarah nearly scratched Seth’s eyes out when he tried to cop a feel backstage, and Ben puked into a garbage can just before his entrance, but I learn all of this after the curtain call, so throughout the actual performance I sit blissfully ignorant in my red velvet seat, lost in the world of Olivia Speer and her beautifully fucked-up family.

  It’s often struck me that everything we love in drama we despise in life, and vice versa. I guess we’ll pay to watch a miserable, repressed sixteen-year-old girl murder her hypocritical father because it thrills us to see others suffering more than us. Sick but true. I can tell the audience is into it. The house is three-quarters full, and they’re a perfect mix of what I call hyenas and hummers. The hyenas scream with laughter at Miranda’s rich, dark humor, and the hummers make soft, perceptive “hmm” sounds that fill up all the right pauses.

  Sitting with Miranda on one side and Rosemarie on the other, I feel a deep, thrumming satisfaction. Miranda’s squirming in her seat, thumping one foot on her skateboard when things are going well, and Rose keeps squeezing my hand when the audience reacts, a tiny pulse of congratulations that makes me love her with fresh enthusiasm. At intermission, the three of us sneak out the side door and smoke Miranda’s clove cigarettes; they taste vile, but it’s fun, anyway.

  When the show’s over, we go backstage and hug everyone in the cast. They’re chattering a mile a minute, still high off the standing ovation. You can almost smell the peculiar brand of stage adrenaline coursing through their veins. Even Sam Bogue is giggly with relief; our light board plan worked seamlessly, and he keeps slapping me on the back, saying, “I just can’t believe we pulled that off, Bloom. I really can’t believe it.”

  Afterward, Rosemarie, Miranda and I go to Café Pergolessi to sit outside under the March stars and share two celebratory slices of m
ocha mud pie, Rose’s treat. I shovel a forkful of the dark concoction into my mouth, savoring the bittersweet fattiness of it. There’s a glow you get after an opening night that reminds me of the postcoital kind. It’s like you’ve been holding your breath for weeks and all at once you get to breathe a special, oxygen-enriched air that gives everything a soft, luminous sheen.

  Rose is acting a little funny. She’s been gushing nonstop since the curtain fell, which isn’t entirely out of character, but I should think she would have eased up by now, since it’s been almost two hours. She keeps tucking her hair behind her ear, and doing this cute little pouty thing with her mouth when she’s not talking. In short, she’s acting exactly as she would around a devastatingly attractive man, so I keep craning my neck to see which table her future soul mate is eyeing us from, but there’s no one but balding ponytail types and pimply students.

  “Oh, my God,” Miranda cries, staring at Rose with her blue eyes wide; she looks more like Betty Boop with a bone in her nose than ever. “I know where I’ve seen you.”

  “You do?” Rose asks coyly, tucking her hair behind her ear for the fiftieth time.

  “Wabi Sabi Tattoo, right? Don’t you like work there or something?”

  Rose nods and does the pouty thing with her lips again. Oh, Jesus—not…? Is Rose flirting with Miranda?

  “I’m in there whenever I have money,” Miranda tells her, so excited she’s bouncing on the edge of her seat. “Ian is such a genius.”

  “Oh, he’s good,” Rose purrs. “He does the most amazing work.”

  Miranda unhooks the leopard-spotted cape she donned for the occasion and yanks at the neckline of her T-shirt. She exposes most of her left breast to show Rose the neon-green-and-magenta gecko tattooed there. It is a pretty one, I have to say—the gecko, I mean, not the breast. Although, as breasts go, I suppose it’s fine. Oh, God, now I’m assessing my student’s left breast. I really should not be here.