Spur of the Moment

by Theresa Alan

  “Thank you. I’ve always loved her work. It’s so visceral and haunting.” Frida spoke quietly, in a serious breathy voice devoid of humor, as if every word she uttered was chock-full of intellectual importance. Frida paused to read the sign pinned to Marin’s dress. “Ah, you can never run out of material to poke fun at the fallacy of the myth of happily ever after.” The woman smiled slightly. Ana pegged her as a graduate student. She probably worked with Ramiro at the bookstore. He was always bringing home these brainy types who talked like old school professors reflecting on the good old days when calculators didn’t exist and students were required to take Latin and read Chaucer in its original Middle English. Frida eyed Ana. “What inspired your ensemble?”

  “I’m part Norwegian and I enjoy celebrating my heritage of raping and pillaging and eating rotting shark meat.”

  The slight smile Frida had been wearing disappeared and was replaced with a jaw-muscle-clenched frown and stony gaze.

  “I’m Norwegian. The Vikings didn’t do anything other races didn’t do to survive,” she snapped.

  What had just happened here? Ana had been trying to crack a joke, and she’d managed to completely offend a perfect stranger.

  “Of course they didn’t,” Marin swooped in. “The Vikings are widely known for dramatically changing Europe. They brought cultures and traditions from one country to the next and their fast ships improved transportation by sea dramatically.” Marin had such a gift for always saying exactly the right thing. Ana, on the other hand, was always doing this, sticking her foot so far in her mouth that her toenails scraped up her esophagus. She realized, however, that you never could tell what things people could laugh at about themselves and what things triggered self-esteem code blues.

  “Indeed,” Frida said. No really, she said, “indeed.” It was hard to tell her age because of her costume, but Ana didn’t think the woman could have been much older than thirty and certainly in no way old enough to say “indeed” without being ironic about it. “Anyway, I believe you’re confusing the Icelandic tradition of eating rotted shark meat—a tradition born out of necessity to survive the long winters, mind you—with the Norwegian lutefisk.”

  Ana nodded, eyes wide with fear at being in such close proximity to an evident psychopath. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  “I left my friend over there,” Frida nodded vaguely. “I’d better be on my way.”

  Ana and Marin smiled pleasantly until she was out of earshot.

  “Hello, I was kidding.”

  “I’m surprised she has ‘a’ friend. Holy bitch, Batman.”

  Their attention was diverted by the sound of what they initially mistook for a cat being shredded by a blender but was in fact Scott, dancing on Nick’s very expensive dining room table and singing “She’s a Brick House” at the top of his lungs.

  “Oh good Lord in heaven,” Ana said. “How much punch has that boy had?” Marin shook her head.

  Ana, Marin, Jason, and Ramiro jumped into action. “Hey, Scott, come on down,” Ana said in the kind of gentle, dumbed-down voice one would use with a suicidal person on a ledge.

  But Scott just kept dancing comically. The party-goers were roaring with laughter at his antics.

  Ana reached up to help him down. Instead, he yelled, “Dance with me, Ana,” and pulled her up on the table with him.

  “Aaah!” She screamed as he twirled her around. He spun her around doing the West Coast swing. Ana did her best just to stay upright. Scott kept singing and swinging her around until he misjudged the end of the table, and Ana slipped off, taking him with her. He landed on top of her.

  “God, sorry, are you all right?” Scott’s face was only an inch or so from hers.

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  She looked into his eyes. All the laughter and noise around her seemed to disappear. She could feel his warm breath on her neck. She was stunned to feel a splinter of desire for him. And that wasn’t . . . it couldn’t possibly be an erection that she felt against her leg?

  No no, she couldn’t possibly be feeling lust for him. It was just that it had been so long since she’d been close to a man. She wanted sex, not Scott.

  “You should probably get off me before you crush me,” she said.

  “Oh yeah, right.”

  He stood and helped her up. Ana struggled to get her heartbeat back to normal.

  27

  Forgive Me, Trainer, for I Have Sinned

  It was the Friday night before the show. Tee-minus 45 hours till showtime.

  Bartender Tony said he was closing the upstairs bar early and that they’d have to go downstairs to procure their beers, which they dutifully did.

  Scott and Marin happened upon a large corner table just as the group that was sitting there was leaving and snapped it up.

  Ana went up to the bar to get the first round of drinks. Their orders rarely varied: a light for Chelsey, who got tipsy halfway through her first beer, a stout for Ramiro, and ambers for the rest of them.

  Ana waited for the bartender to finish filling an order for a waitress. She was debating about whether she should have any beer. She’d already eaten her maintenance calories for the day, and this would put her over by at least two hundred calories. On the other hand, she’d been doing so good and working out so hard, surely an itty bitty two hundred calories couldn’t hurt.

  “Hey! I saw you perform tonight. You were really wonderful,” a guy standing next to her said.

  “Thanks.” Ana turned to look at him. He had pale blue eyes, dark hair cut very short, and a jagged scar across one cheek. He might have been just okay looking, except for his smile, which was so welcoming and genuinely cheery, it made him striking. The contrast of the warm smile and ferocious-looking scar was captivating.

  “Let me get this round,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m buying for everybody.” She waved to the rest of the gang sitting at the table.

  “No worries. A beer for everybody. Man, I nearly fell off my chair in that scene with the flashlight . . .” He was referring to a game called “Radio” where all four players got on stage and asked for a musical style and a thing. The room would be completely dark, and then the emcee would randomly flash a flashlight on one of the players, who would have to come up with a verse in his/her music style on the subject of whatever thing the audience suggested, and the emcee would jump to another player, as if he were flipping the stations on a radio. Ana’s style had been rap and her thing had been a toilet seat. “Your song about your homies and your heinie . . . oh man, I nearly died.”

  Ana smiled. It was never a particular challenge to win the audience’s affection with scatological humor, but Ana had done a particularly good job of rhyming tonight. It was always terrifying rhyming sentences on the spot, with no rhyming dictionary to consult, but it had come out well, and Ana glowed under the man’s praise.

  “Thanks. Hey, let me order the beer because performers get drinks for a dollar.”

  “A dollar! Right on.” He gave Ana a ten. Ana ordered the beers, including one for herself.

  “Thanks for the beer,” she said.

  “Do you mind if I sit down with you?”

  “Yeah. I mean no. I mean yes you can sit down, no I don’t mind.”

  Ana brought the drinks to the table and slid into the last open seat in the booth. “Hey everyone, this is some guy whose name I don’t know but he liked the show and bought us a round in admiration for our comic genius.”

  “Hey, I’m Kieran,” he said, waving and pulling up a chair next to Ana at the already crowded table.

  “Hey, Kieran!” Everyone called in unison.

  “Well, thanks for the beer,” Ana said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. How could she get on stage and pull entire scenes and story lines out of her ass, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to talk about with a stranger?

  “No problem. It looks like what you do up there is so much fun. How did you get started?”

  “It was
a fluke, really. I just saw a sign for auditions my freshman year, and they were willing to train, which was a good thing, because I didn’t have any experience with acting at all. My mom was pretty worried about my grades in high school, so she never wanted me to participate in extracurricular activities. When I got to college, I just sort of went nuts. I wanted to try new things, so I tried this. I was terrible, I mean miserable, for the first several months. I was just embarrassingly bad, but for some reason, I kept coming back for more. I guess because I liked the people and I liked how free I felt on stage. Four other people were asked to join the team at the same time I did, and two dropped out after just a couple months.” She’d only had three sips of beer, but she was already pouring her heart out. She took a long, large gulp of her beer, then another.

  She really wanted to know where he’d gotten that scar. Maybe he had been defending a woman from a would-be assailant or he worked in the FBI or the special forces or something. But she thought it was a little forward of her to ask him about the scar straight away, so she asked him instead what he did for a living.

  “I work in insurance.”

  “Health or home and auto?”

  “Home and auto.”

  Blech. How boring. But maybe he’d taken the straight and narrow after doing whatever he’d done to get that scar. A knife fight at a bar had made him take a good, hard look at his life, and he’d turned his life around. Or maybe he was one of the people who verified that insurance claims were valid, and he got in a knife fight with a mobster trying to defraud the system.

  “Is this your full-time job?” he asked.

  “I wish. Right now we each get a cut of the profits from however many people show up each night, which basically pays for our beer each month. We’re trying to get more corporate performances because those pay a lot better. We can do team-building activities, perform at parties, that kind of thing. We’re having a hard time right now because everybody is cutting back with this economy.” So. Conversation. Think, Ana, think. “Um, so, where did you go to college?”

  “I took some classes at the community college, but didn’t finish.”

  Nuts. That blew a whole line of conversation starters like what did you study, what was the craziest thing you did as a freshman, did you know so and so, and so on.

  “So, are you from Colorado?” she asked.

  “Yeah. From a small town outside of Durango.”

  “Oh! I love Durango. That’s one of my favorite towns in Colorado.” They nodded at each other.

  “Want another beer?” he asked.

  “What?” she looked at her glass. Ooh, she would be going way over her calorie limit with another. She said yes.

  When he left to get more beer, Chelsey leaned over to Ana. “He’s cute. Got that bad-boy thing going for him. Very sexy.”

  “He works in insurance.”

  “Hmm, less sexy.” Just then, Rob kissed Chelsey’s neck. She giggled and turned to face him and kissed him in a full-on mouth-crushing, tongue-halfway-down-each-other’s-esophagus kind of kiss that went on for about an hour. They were in that all-over-each-other stage of the relationship where they had to be touching constantly. Right now they were so close to each other that Chelsey’s leg was draped over his—she was practically in his lap.

  Ana eyed them enviously. She wanted to be crazy in lust with somebody. It had been too damn long. Ana missed that feeling of excitement. She missed getting aroused just from a look or a casual touch. She felt like part of her emotions were hibernating, and she was ready for them to wake up already.

  Kieran came back with the beers.

  “Thanks.” Ana took a sip and strained to think of something to say. “Um, so where did you get that scar?”

  “I was bitten by a dog as a kid.”

  Oh. Boring. “Aah. So do you like to travel?”

  “I’ve never been out of Colorado.”

  “Oh. Would you like to travel?”

  “Uh, sure. Maybe.”

  Why was having a conversation with him so hard? She kept sending out conversational volleys that he just let slam to the floor. She would just have to keep the conversation going all by herself. “I love traveling. I wish I could do it more. This summer Chelsey, Marin, and me went to Chicago and we had the greatest time ever. I mean we were total dorks and got lost about a zillion times, but it was so much fun, even the debacles we had on an hourly basis were hilarious. Like this one time, we were on the el, and Chelsey and Marin got off, and just as I was about to step through the doors, they closed! I couldn’t believe it. I looked at Chelsey and Marin through the glass and they looked back at me and we were all bug-eyed and freaked, and all, ‘Oh my god! What are we gonna do?’ We didn’t have cell phones, and of course we didn’t have a clue where anything was in the city. I mean Chelsey grew up in a suburb of Chicago, but it wasn’t like she knew the city very well. Anyway, I got off at the next stop, which was in an unbelievably terrifying neighborhood. I mean in Denver, the worst you ever have to deal with is a drunk peeing in the street and maybe a little graffiti. Chicago has actual ghettos, actual places where you’re traipsing through sidewalks littered with used needles and ducking gunfire every three seconds, and this is the neighborhood I found myself in. So I just followed the train tracks the best I could back to the last stop. It was only a ten-minute walk, but it was the scariest ten minutes of my life. The whole time I imagined myself like I was in an enemy jungle and I was some Green Beret specialist, except for the part about how I didn’t have an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons, I didn’t actually know any martial arts—still don’t, actually—and it turned out nobody even gave me a second glance, so my terror was all just a product of my imagination. As soon as I met up with Chelsey and Marin again, everything was fine and we thought the whole thing was hilarious and we promptly began exaggerating the story to make it more exciting and funny.” She sipped her beer, and she and Kieran nodded at each other some more. “Then, just two hours later, it started to rain and we didn’t want to miss the bus, it was just up ahead and we were racing along to catch it and of course Chelsey, little miss personal trainer, is way ahead of me and Marin, and she turns around to tell us that she thinks we’re going to make it, but she failed to take into account that she’d just gone over a curb, so when she turned to tell us and started running toward us, her foot got caught on the curb and her leg went flying out from under her. She was airborne, just flying.”

  Ana stood and demonstrated what Chelsey had looked like when she was taking the nose dive.

  “Thank god she wasn’t hurt. All three of us just collapsed onto the sidewalk and roared with laughter. I mean right there, in the middle of the insanely busy sidewalks with homeless people swiveling their heads to watch us like they were at a tennis game.”

  “You’re telling him about Chicago, right?” Chelsey piped in.

  “Every time we did this”—Marin stood and assumed the flying-through-the-air pose with her arms frozen like a runner’s, her one foot flying behind her—“for the rest of the week we just broke down in hysterics.”

  “Did you tell him about the time . . .”

  The six actors, plus occasionally Rob and Nick, kept interrupting each other, piling one story onto another, their voices getting louder and louder so they could be heard over the din. And they kept it up for several hours, well after the bar was officially closed, and after the bar staff had mopped the floor and put up the chairs and wiped down the counters. The glowering stares of the bar staff were the last thing Ana remembered.

  When Ana woke up, the first thing she thought was, Oh Christ, my head. Then a split second later, Oh god, I’m going to have to confess to Chelsey about last night. She probably thought I stuck to one—she was too absorbed in Rob’s gaze to know fully how nuts I went, but when we go over my food diary—and my fat ass—I’ll have to tell all. Ana tried to remember how many beers she’d consumed the night before. She’d had such good intentions of stopping after one, but then she’d had that secon
d one, and after that, all her critical thinking skills evaporated into a blurry haze, and imbibing numerous beers seemed like the best idea she’d ever had. Another? Hell yes!

  Ana slapped her forehead with her palm, as if that would clear her hazy memory. Four? Five? Oh, then there was that one I finished for Marin. Six maybe. Oh lord, that was 1,200 calories on top of the 1,700 she’d already had yesterday. That was bad. That was very, very bad. Her appointment with Chelsey was tomorrow. What was she going to tell her? Forgive me, trainer, for I have sinned. I had six beers Saturday night, I didn’t work out all weekend, and I am a bloated squealing pig. Chelsey would give her a penance of two hundred squats, three Hail Marys, and an hour on the elliptical rider.

  Oh god, the show was tonight. She could not perform looking like a tired, hungover drunk. A fat girl with huge circles under her bloodshot eyes. Yeah, she’d be whisked away to Hollywood looking like this.

  There was so much to do for the show tonight, but the most urgent thing was for her to get some beauty rest. So she closed her eyes and went back to sleep, her exhaustion from drinking too much depleting her of all ambition.

  When she woke up two hours later, she felt better but was still tired. She staggered downstairs to drink orange juice and take handfuls of vitamins.

  Marin was reading the paper when Ana got downstairs.

  “Morning, sunshine. How ya feeling?”

  “Like I’ve been run over by an eighteen wheeler.”

  “Are you excited about your date?”

  “What date?”

  “With that guy from last night.”

  “But I didn’t even like that guy from last night.”

  “You agreed to get drinks with him after the show.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great. Like I don’t have enough to be stressed out about tonight without having to go on a first date I don’t want to go on.”

  “You kissed him.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did. You were making out like horny teenagers.”