Tart (11 page)

“Mmm. Let's hear,” I say, kicking off my clogs and heading for the fridge. This may seem like a lackluster response to such a monumental announcement, but you've got to understand that this, varied occasionally with the gushing description of her life-partner-of-the-week, is altogether routine.

“Claudia, I mean it. It's so absolutely
me
I can't believe I didn't think of it before.”

She pauses as I open my yogurt and nod at her. “Go on. I'm listening.”

“I'm going to manage a band. I know, I know, it's not loads of money coming in right away, but—”

“What band?”

“I don't know yet, I have to find one, but in the meantime I can cocktail at the Catalyst, because so many groups play there—and then I'll find, like, the absolute perfect band of my dreams that might be really hot but nobody's ever heard of them because they don't have any business sense (creative people usually don't) and I'll make them really awesome posters and book all their gigs and recruit homeless kids to hand out flyers (all these fifteen-year-olds on corners, they need work). And it'll just be so, so great. I know it will.” She chews a strand of hair, looking dreamily out the window. “Maybe once I get good at it, I'll take on more bands, start like this super-hip PR firm (for musicians only—and just good ones—I'd never touch sappy commercial shit, just the cool geniuses). Isn't it so perfect? I can't believe we never thought of it. Isn't it totally me?”

This is the delicate part: first response.

“Well, it does suit your personality,” I begin cautiously. “You're very charismatic.”

She nods solemnly. “It's true. When I was six, my mom caught me selling blueberry Popsicles to half of Portland.”

“You made blueberry Popsicles when you were—”

“Just blue food dye and water. But I convinced them. Music's like that.”

“Like blueberry pop…?” I begin, but she interrupts.

“The actual music's only about five percent of what makes a band hot—image is the other ninety-five. If owning a certain CD will make you feel more amplified, sexier, then you'll buy it. Music's an aphrodisiac—we use it to turn each other on.”

“Sounds right to me,” I say, having no idea, since music's never been a priority for me. I probably spend more on tin foil annually than I ever have on CDs. “And cocktailing at
the Catalyst's not a bad idea. You could walk to work and tips are probably decent. You'd meet cool people.”

“Guys, you mean.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn't seem to be a problem for you.” Since she moved in last month, she's been through four soul mates. Three of them lasted only forty-eight hours.

Rose cocks her head to the side and smiles at me quizzically. “You think I treat guys like shit, don't you?”

“No. You're very sincere, in the moment.”

“I am. I just can't seem to maintain the high. I love the buzz when you first meet someone. Too bad it wears off.”

“Mmm. Yes.”

“And it's like that with jobs—I'm so stoked and then…I don't know…I lose my steam.” She studies her split ends sadly, then suddenly drops the strand of hair and smiles at me brightly. “But not this time. This is definitely it. I can feel it in my bones.” She darts off to the bathroom. Rex looks at me for a moment, then turns and follows her, nearly tangling himself up in her long brown legs in his eagerness. He senses I'm not his biggest fan, and consequently avoids being alone with me.

Rose calls from the bathroom, over the sound of running water and apparently through toothpaste, “Should I go buy some more vodka to celebrate?”

More vodka? What happened to…? I go to the freezer and see that the big bottle of Absolut I bought on Monday is now down to a thin film coating the bottom. Either Rose is taking little medicinal nips from it almost hourly, or I'm a sleepwalking party animal.

“If you want, I'll cook,” she offers.

I
do
want. This is Rose's major bargaining chip, and she's playing it for all it's worth; I pay for the food, she transforms it into a gorgeous homage to California produce. She can do magic with fresh tomatoes and basil. My stomach growls just thinking of it.

After I've handed over sixty bucks and the flat is blissfully
empty, I drain the last of the Absolut and collapse in the patch of sunlight warming my futon. Medea slinks over and makes herself comfortable on my belly. How did this happen? Just a couple years ago I was a free-and-easy honorary Texan with a fabulous roommate (who paid his way—usually more—plus furnished endless espressos) and a little black book bursting at the seams with easy-to-access past-and-future one-night stands. Things were simple then. Now I'm a former fiancée (oh, the shame—can't believe I fell for it), a car thief and accidental arsonist, a celibate, crabby professor and the unwilling patron of a lovely but unstable neo deadhead in the midst of an enthusiastic, slightly overdue quarter-life crisis.

If this is what it means to grow up, I want a one-way ticket to never-never land.

The phone rings, and I gently shove Medea off to answer it. As I cross the room, I fantasize briefly that it's Clay, then remind myself that Clay is married, dishonest and—well, married and dishonest.

“Claudia. It's me, Mira.” When I was thirteen, around the time my dad got custody, out went the word “Mom” and in rushed “Mira.” She also changed her last name from Bloom to the rather eccentric invention, Ravenwing, though she ditched that as soon as she started marrying again. I think she was embarrassed by Ravenwing almost immediately; it was the kind of thing that only seemed cool for a very brief spell in the eighties.

“Hi.”

“You sound tired. Are you getting enough iron?”

“Yeah, I should think so. Rosemarie's been cooking me loads of spinach—doesn't that have iron in it?”

“You should get some supplements. Or eat more steak. Why is Rose still there? I thought you were making her get her own place.”

I sigh. “Well, she doesn't have a job yet.”

“Oh, Claudia…” I can hear her lighting a joint and taking a long toke. “Christ. That flake. Let me guess; she's got hundreds and hundreds of leads, but nothing ever turns into actual work. She cooks for you, and she's a great help, but she's showing no signs of paying rent or leaving.”

“How did you…?”

“Claudia, you've got to wise up to Lavelle women, okay? You know Aunt Jessie's just like that. There are family traits—” she lets out a long sigh, and I can almost smell her killer Humboldt weed through the phone “—most of which are inescapable.”

“Yeah, but you're a Lavelle and you're not like that.”

“Well,” she says. “I try.”

My mother's voice always contains a potent mixture of bitterness and amusement.

I suspect her reefer habit helps keep her amusement quota up, and perhaps the bitterness down. Unfortunately, it also wreaks havoc on her short-term memory. I've often thought it was lucky she became a stoner long after my infancy, or she would have left me in a grocery store. (“Let's see, I got the butter, milk, oranges…what
am
I missing?”) Probably stunting her awareness of the immediate past is precisely why she gets stoned every day, though; she was supposed to leave her husband Gary last spring when she discovered he was sleeping with the voluptuous landscaper, only somehow this item lost rank on her to-do list. I think bitterness is slowly winning out over amusement, except it's a deeply resigned sort of bitterness, the kind that makes you tired rather than motivated to seek revenge.

“I can't bring myself to give her the boot,” I tell her.

“Who?”

“Rose.” I say, exasperated. “She's so sweet and sincere and—”

“Broke.”

“Well, yeah,” I say, a touch defensively. “That's part of it. I don't want to see her on the street.”

“Right. Empathy is a Bloom trait—can't take credit for that. Your father was always too nice for his own good.”

This is true. My dad is the kind of guy who'll pick the runt of the litter, or even the saddest fruit on display, because he feels sorry for it. He's pathologically attached to the underdog. I suspect he wasn't very popular as a kid; nowadays, all the most picked-on creeps at Calistoga High flock to his shop classes in droves. He's like a beacon of hope for the pimply and the greasy-haired.

“Speaking of your father, I hear he has a girlfriend.”

“He what?” My dad hasn't seen anyone since Sandra the Dental Assistant left him ten years ago.

“You heard me.” She coughs a deep, rattling cough. “Margie Standish told me he's dating the new librarian at the high school. Word is she's anorexic with one foot in the grave. Sounds like your father's type.” I resist the urge to remind her that
she
was once his type; of course, that was before she divorced him and transformed herself so thoroughly I couldn't even call her Mom anymore. “You should go see him, by the way. I think he's hurt you haven't visited since you found a place.”

“Did Margie tell you that, too?” I wonder why she doesn't urge me to come visit
her;
we haven't even shared a meal together since I moved back to California.

“It's just a suggestion,” she says. “Anyway, I have to run. Emily's got to find an outfit for her big date tomorrow night.” Emily is my spoiled stepsister—a terminally cute teenager who owned more designer shoes at age ten than I ever will.

“Is she seeing someone?”

“Didn't I tell you? She's going out with—” and here she lowers her voice to mention a very prominent musician, someone so huge even I know who he is, though admittedly he was much bigger six or seven years ago.

“She
is?
How old is he?”

“I think he's thirty. Early thirties, anyway.”

“Emily's only sixteen.”

“Oh,” she sighs. “Yeah, I know. It does look a little suspect. But she's her own person. I mean we couldn't stop her from seeing him, right?”

“Why not?”

“Claudia.” She clucks her tongue at me reprovingly. “Haven't I taught you anything? Don't you know that we can't control other people? If it's her destiny to have her heart crushed by—” again, she lowers her voice to mention him by name, which is one of those absurd one-word stage names, making the impact even weirder “—then our interfering would only…interfere. Haven't you read
Romeo and Juliet?
”

It's my turn to sigh. “I think I've heard of it. Still—sixteen and thirtysomething?”

“She's got decent judgment,” my mother says, in an I-can't-be-bothered-with-this-right-now tone. “All right, Em, I'm coming!” she yells away from the phone. Em. She never had cute little nicknames like that for me.

After we hang up, I trudge back to my patch of sunlight and curl up, wanting chocolate and a thoroughly escapist book. I don't want to think about my mother or the explanation she offered when I asked why I shouldn't call her Mom. (“I've spent thirteen years being Mom, and now I'd like to be Mira Ravenwing for a change.”) I don't want to think about the cell-phone-wielding, perky-breasted Em and her rock star boyfriend. I want to melt into the soft release of bitter and sweet on my tongue. God, chocolate and sex would be nice, wouldn't it? Wonder what Clay's doing—

Bzzzzzzzzz.

Dammit. Who's that? Did Rose lock herself out again?

I open the door, prepared to tease her about her forgetfulness and pounce on any chocolate products she's bought, when I find myself face-to-face with a very broad-shoul
dered, hulking man with a vast bald patch in the midst of his crew cut, dressed in—oh, God, no—a police uniform.
Catch your breath, Claudia. Maybe Ziv has sent you one of those awful male strippers to cheer you up; he's going to produce a little boom box blaring “You Sexy Thing” and start unbuttoning any second now.
But he's got all these little ominously sheathed gadgets and—Jesus, a gun—strapped to his waist, and he's not, frankly, the type who would inspire lavish tips if he took off his clothes, because his skin is pretty pockmarked and he's got several layers of flab hovering near the gun and he doesn't look even remotely like a good time.

“I'm looking for Claudia Bloom,” he says. He's got a voice that is weirdly high and girlish, like he's been sucking on a helium tank, which disturbs me. Of course, I'm already disturbed, since I'm about to be dragged off, shrieking in terror, and thrown into solitary confinement for thirteen years, where I'll take my meals of lumpy gruel squirming with larvae through a tiny slot in the door, going slowly insane as I sit motionless in the pitch black, dreaming of Clay Parker. I wonder if they let you have a vibrator in solitary confinement? Probably not; you might use it to gouge a guard's eye out. “Ma'am? Are you Claudia Bloom?”

“Oh. Um…” I consider bolting, but even if he does have a voice like Little Orphan Annie, he's the one with the gun. “Yes.” I try a light, innocent laugh, but it comes out more like a hyena on crack.

“I'm Officer Cordell. I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

“Oh, sure,” I say casually, as if cops come to my door all the time, looking for conversation. “Come on in.”

As he follows me inside, I see my apartment through a stranger's eyes, and I feel a shiver of embarrassment at the sullen clutter of it. I still haven't got much in the way of furnishings. There's my futon in one corner, surrounded by books, stray socks, a lacy bra. In the other corner is Rosemarie's old Mexican wool blanket stretched out over a bare mattress. She's set up a small shrine with tiny fig
ures of pan-Asian gods and goddesses, feathers, crystals and even a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary, all cavorting together on a milk crate draped in velvet. Her backpack is propped against the wall, oozing underwear and tie-dyed skirts. Christ, this is not the sleek, hip flat of a bohemian scarf-wearing professor. This is the grotty little hideout of a car-thief arsonist and her messed-up drifter cousin.