L.A. Woman

by Cathy Yardley

  Judith kept nodding. She felt like one of those bobblehead dolls that people put in cars. She didn’t trust herself to say anything.

  “Just like David’s hit it lucky with you! Eh? Eh?” He winked at her, then glanced at his watch. “Well, I’m sure Marta’s cleaned the place out. Better go find her before she goes wandering. Tell David I said hello?”

  “Um, sure.” And explain what I’m doing at the Century City Mall on a weeknight? Oh, certainly. That could happen. She let Dean Matthews give her a polite half-hug. Then he stopped, glancing at the lapel of her almost-new black blazer.

  “That’s a very pretty rosebud.”

  “Thanks.” Judith was surprised at how cool she kept her voice. “I’m trying to spruce up the old image.”

  She didn’t know if he bought her explanation as he walked away. What if he told David? What if he told Marta, and she told everyone else, and David found out? What if…

  “Judith?”

  A nasal twang jolted her out of her thoughts. She turned.

  Roger.

  He was just as amazingly handsome as he appeared in his picture. He had a rose in one hand. The flower was exotic looking—orange with scarlet at the edges. His tiny grin was impossibly sexy.

  “Roger?” she whispered.

  “In the flesh, as it were.”

  She winced.

  That can’t be his real voice.

  And yet it seemed to be. It kept going, relentlessly. “I waited until you were finished talking to that gentleman…didn’t want to walk into anything, y’know.”

  “Gentleman” came out sounding like gintlemihn. Worse, it had a painfully high pitch…almost girlish, with a slight whine.

  She stared at his face instead—that strong, chiseled jaw, those deep, intelligent eyes.

  “Did you, er, want some food?”

  Don’t speak. Please, please don’t speak.

  She shook her head, staring at him. “No, I’m not talking…I mean, I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He gestured to a table. Numb, she sat down.

  They sat there for a moment, blessedly silent. Then he cleared his throat.

  “It’s so good to see you.” His gaze was soulful. “I’ve been wondering what you’d be like, you know, in the flesh.”

  “Uh-huh.” If only there were some way to type this to him!

  “I’m a little nervous.”

  “I’m a little married,” she said, a little more curtly than she’d intended. “This is hardly a meditation session for me.”

  He was silent then, and she felt guilty about it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “This is…I don’t know. I don’t know how I thought this was going to pan out. Maybe like in the movies—something like The English Patient, where the lovers just can’t help being in love. Deep, tortured looks.”

  A more manly voice, she thought uncharitably.

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I know that this isn’t quite the way I pictured it, either.” He took a deep breath.

  She frowned. “It isn’t?”

  “Well…it’s just different over the Net, that’s all. I don’t…I mean, I can’t…” He ran his fingers through his hair, looking for all the world like a Guess model. She could overlook the voice for a face like that.

  But could she overlook marriage?

  “Different how?” she said instead.

  “I don’t know. You were just so lost and unhappy when you started writing to me, and I thought…hell, I still think I could help you. I don’t know. Save you, or something.”

  “Save me?” Judith didn’t know why she bristled at that, but she did.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I thought I’d come here, and we’d kiss, and then I’d sweep you home to Atlanta with me. But from the look of you, that’s not a workable plan.” He took a deep breath. “And from talking to you…”

  There was a long, painful pause. “You’ve only talked to me for a minute, Roger,” she pointed out. He couldn’t possibly have a problem with her voice, could he? God, the irony here was thick enough to cut with a knife. “What’s the problem?”

  “You’re—well, cold.”

  Her eyes flew wide-open at the blunt words. To further her shock, he actually blushed.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” he drawled in his squeaky voice. “Honest. It’s just—you’re so much more vulnerable…on Instant Message.”

  She blinked. She seemed more vulnerable through baud rate and bandwidth? “And how do I strike you now?”

  “Like if I get too close to you, you’ll hit me.”

  She sighed.

  “This isn’t working, is it?” she said sadly.

  He shook his head. “We could try taking it easy. I’m here for a week…on a little vacation. I’ve got a friend out here that I’m staying with. We could just talk on the phone…maybe jumping from the Internet straight to a face-to-face conversation was more than we could handle…”

  “No, I don’t think that would work.” Okay, she knew that a few hours’ conversation with that voice would not work. His voice, God help her, already grated on her nerves like a rasp. “Maybe…maybe we should stick to the Internet.”

  “Maybe.” He scooted his chair closer to her. “I really thought I loved you, Judith. After all those things you told me, I thought we loved each other.” He stroked her face, and before she could help it she shied away. “I don’t really know you, do I? Not the real you.”

  She shook her head slowly. “If it’s any comfort, neither did I.”

  He sighed, and the sadness of it would have broken her heart if it hadn’t sounded as if it had come from Minnie Mouse. “Well. Maybe we shouldn’t talk for a while, then.”

  She shrugged, but she felt a pang. He was her closest friend at this point—she wasn’t sure if she was ready to lose that.

  “I won’t vanish,” he assured her, in off-key tones. “But…this is weird. I’ll just need a little space.”

  She nodded.

  “I think I’d better get going.”

  She nodded again.

  To her surprise, he leaned in, kissing her softly, full on the lips. It made her tingle, ever so slightly.

  “It really is a shame,” he said, close to her ear, making her spine twitch more uncomfortably, like nails on a chalkboard.

  “You have no idea,” she murmured.

  She watched him walk away…watched other women give him appreciative glances. Watched him disappear into the crowd.

  So what was this really all about?

  She thought she’d found a grand passion—the English Patient variety. What she’d wound up with was a complete farce. Something funny, ironic, ridiculous.

  She’d wanted romance, and gotten none.

  She still did, she realized. She wanted more from her life.

  This wasn’t about Roger, she realized.

  This was about David.

  She stood up, taking her rosebud off of her lapel and leaving it on the cold metal table.

  More importantly, this was about her.

  Martika sat on the couch with her hand absently on her stomach. Her belly was slightly poochy, she noticed. Of course, it had been slightly poochy. To be honest, it had hardly been a washboard since she’d turned twenty-four or so. She was now thirty, so the bump of her stomach was probably fat, not baby—yet. She had no right to be sitting here on the couch, watching TV, patting her stomach like some bad TV-movie-of-the-week expectant mother.

  But you are an expectant mother.

  She’d told Taylor, naturally, and he was aghast, just as she supposed she should have been. Hell, she was. She prided herself on being unflappable, but this—she was completely flapped. She credited her hormones for the roller coaster of emotions raging inside her—she really ought to go though with the abortion, and chalk it up to a really, really bad experience. And naturally, she’d be more careful in the future. No more random fucks, for one thing. That was hardly a sacrifice. She’d be more c
areful. She’d have a relationship. Maybe she’d even find “the one.”

  But her hand continued to rest where it was.

  Wonder if it’s a boy or a girl? By this point, there would be no way to tell. But it was weird. She’d only thought of babies in relative terms—other people’s, to be specific. Kids hardly fit into a clubbing lifestyle, frankly, and her life as it was now was her own. Kids represented responsibilities. Permanence. PTA meetings and day care. Getting no sleep. There was also that weird thing they did when they were two and turned into little monsters. She’d seen enough of them on TV to know.

  But it still didn’t stop her from wondering. This wasn’t just a kid. This was her kid. She could feel its presence in her body like some alien taking up residence, but not in the bad, X-files sort of way. She thought that all that stuff in movies about “feeling” the baby, especially in this early stage, was just bullshit, but the beginning tenderness in her breasts and the nausea were all accumulating with amazing rapidity.

  As much as she loved him, Taylor didn’t understand about this. She needed to talk to a woman about this.

  That meant Sarah.

  She hadn’t been exactly cordial to Sarah, but still, this was an emergency. She felt sure Sarah would understand.

  She heard Sarah’s key in the dead bolt, and her hand twitched reflexively. She supposed she looked like Al Bundy, sitting on the couch with her hand on her stomach. She moved it to the couch, fighting the urge to put it back on her abdomen.

  “Hi, Sarah,” she called before Sarah even walked down the hallway. “Got a minute?”

  “Today has been from hell,” Sarah said. “I’ve just been fired. And, worse, the guy I was planning on sleeping with turned out to be a complete asshole. Don’t even get me started on his wife.” She groaned and plunked down in the love seat. “I want to go out to a club and get drunk until I don’t remember my own name or how I got home.”

  This wasn’t exactly how Martika had planned on sharing her story. Obviously, Sarah needed to vent a little. She hoped it wouldn’t be too long—she really didn’t have the perspective for this.

  “So, I guess you’ll be looking for another job, then?”

  Sarah glared at her. “You think?”

  “No need to get bitchy.” Martika’s voice was sharp. She definitely didn’t need to hear this twenty-five-year-old’s woes when she was sitting here pregnant. “I just had a problem that I wanted to talk about, that’s all.”

  Sarah’s eyebrows jumped to her hairline. “Oh, for…of course, Martika. Tell me about your problems.”

  Martika’s eyebrow quirked at her. Oh, nuh-uh. “Excuse me. Tone.”

  “Don’t you get sick of the mother bit?”

  Martika made a little gasp-noise, genuinely shocked. “What?”

  “You put the mother in smother, I think is the term. You do it with me and Taylor and anybody else you get close to—for as long as they can stay close to you. I swear! You tell me not to pay attention to my job, to get a fuck-a-thon-life, and I do, and here’s where I wind up! I’m miserable!”

  “And that’s somehow my fault?” Martika yelled. She was pissed off. She definitely did not need this. “Because you’ve got some strange mother obsession and you think I’m smothering you?”

  “You do!” Sarah jumped up and started pacing, her Prada mules making dents in the carpet with her hard stomps. “God. It’s always about you. You know what’s right. You always know what’s right! And you’re always telling me what’s right and what I ought to do! And when it doesn’t work out, you won’t let me complain about it! Why? Because your problems are so much more important than mine. Because it’s all about you!”

  “In this case, listening to a twenty-five-year-old whine because she doesn’t have the perfect life really doesn’t sound all that fatal to me,” Martika said coldly. “When I met you, you were so whipped by that prick you called a fiancé, you practically rolled over when he fucking whistled. You did the same thing with your jobs, Sarah…everything but ‘fetch!’ Jesus, you should thank me.”

  “Thank you? Thank you?” Sarah’s eyes blazed.

  Martika hadn’t seen her like this before.

  “Why should I? Everything I had before made sense! I knew what I wanted!”

  “You wanted to be some little wife, with no life of your own, just because it was something to do,” Martika spat out. “You want to hear about problems? Let me tell you about…”

  “No, you won’t,” Sarah said, surprising Martika again with the vehemence in her voice. “You’ll listen to me. You’re not as cool as you think you are. You’re not hip, you’re not edgy, and you’re not in your twenties.”

  That, Martika wasn’t expecting. “What the fuck are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, there’s nothing wrong with being thirty,” Sarah said, deliberately using a sweet tone. “Unless you’re trying to be eighteen. Then, it’s fucking tragic.”

  The shot hit Martika right in the chest, and she felt tears well up. She’d taught Sarah how to do that, was all she could think. She’d taught her to be this bitchy, to get a spine, and it had up and bit her on the ass.

  And I think I want a kid?

  The pain redoubled.

  “Martika, you’re a relic. You took a hick girl from Fairfield and took her to some B-and C-list clubs and told her that fucking was fun and jobs were stupid, and she believed you. Well, I see the way you really are now. You’re just an insecure, prematurely middle-aged woman who hates herself so virulently that she’s got something to prove to everyone she comes into contact with. You’re not the woman you think you are, Martika.”

  “Jesus.” Martika said hollowly. “I had to talk to you. I thought of you as a friend. But if I’m going to get told off in my own living room…”

  “It’s in my name,” Sarah said coldly.

  Martika got up, grabbed her purse, cell phone and bag. “Keep the goddamn apartment. I’ll be out of here in a week.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened at that. She took a few deep breaths. “We’re both… I’m sorry, Martika. It’s just been a really shitty day, and I just…I guess I’ve been a little pissed off…”

  “No, you said what’s really on your mind,” Martika said coldly. “So it’s time I said what’s on mine. Maybe I am a thirty-year-old woman who’s an Oprah victim, who needs to learn to love herself and get a bunch of therapy and stop fucking every guy she comes into contact with. Maybe I’ve got issues. But if you honestly think that you had it made before you met me, then you’re deluding yourself. You don’t want to figure out how to live your life! You want somebody to tell you how to do it, since you obviously don’t trust yourself to do it right!”

  “Well,” Sarah said softly, “I’ve decided it’s not going to be you anymore.”

  Martika looked at her, feeling the crying jag starting and biting her lip hard. “Fuck you, Sarah.” Then she turned on her heel and walked out.

  “This is one of the worst days of my life,” Sarah said disconsolately.

  “Where’s your mentor?” Taylor asked, sitting on the opposite couch, next to Pink. Pink wasn’t paying attention. Rather, she was paying attention to a cute guy on the dance floor.

  “That’s part of the problem. We got in this huge fight.”

  Taylor chuckled. “Don’t worry. Her mads last maybe forty-eight hours.”

  “This has been building up.” Sarah put her drink down on the table next to her. “I mean, she’s been pissy ever since I got that invitation to the big publishing party.”

  Taylor’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned over. Pink used the opportunity to approach the guy on the dance floor. “So what exactly did you argue about?”

  “Well, she was telling me that I shouldn’t worry about losing my job, again, that I’d find another one, and that I just had to get drunk and party and forget about it.”

  Taylor’s eyebrow curved up. “And you said?”

  Sarah sighed, glancing away for a second. The place seemed as it alwa
ys was, with its flashing lights, and music pounding hard enough to shake the seats they were sitting on. She’d been using this spot for months as a sort of installment-piece art therapy. Hopefully it’d work tonight, too. “I said…well, I said that it hadn’t seemed to help her any.”

  Taylor let out a short, barking laugh. “Shit. Bet that went over like a house on fire.”

  “And I sort of told her she was smothering me.”

  Taylor’s eyes widened. “You didn’t.”

  “Well, she’s this compulsive mother to all of us,” Sarah muttered, taking another sip of her drink. They were making the gin and tonics strong tonight—Tommy had to be out. He normally monitored that sort of thing. “You’ve got to admit she chafes on you sometimes, too…”

  “Well, of course, but I don’t admit that to her!” Taylor let out another snort of amusement. “Sarah, we are Martika’s family. Instead of going crazy like we do, or breaking down, she spends her energy telling us how to live our lives. That’s just the way she is. She is uber-mom of Santa Monica Boulevard.” He shook his head. “So what happened then?”

  “She stormed out. I didn’t feel like apologizing, so I came here.”

  Taylor sighed, then glanced up. “Hell-oo. Cute guy at the bar.”

  Sarah turned, listlessly. She noticed she had a buzz going. Early. That probably wasn’t good. The club wasn’t too far from home, but if she got really hammered she could always call a cab, she reasoned. So she finished the rest of her drink in a swallow.

  Taylor straightened up, and was staring at her. “Oh my. He’s checking me out,” he said, very much like a high school girl trying to play it cool. “I think it’s time for me to get a drink. Do you need a refill?”

  She glanced down. “Um, better not. Without Martika here…” She clamped down on the words. She didn’t need a keeper, dammit! “Sure. Why don’t you get me another?”

  “Right-oh.”