Tart (5 page)

F
or several days I use my father's house as the base of operations while I continuously flip-flop between wild bursts
of effort to get my life together and bouts of total despondency, during which I lie flat on my back in the guest room, stuffing my face with Pringles and watching cheesy Hugh Grant videos. This manic-depressive stretch hardly fulfills my hopes of returning triumphantly to California and emerging like a phoenix from my troubled past.

I grew up here, in Calistoga, and coming home is like facing a firing squad of ghosts. I know loads of people are carrying around childhoods more miserable than mine—hell, most of my friends' horror stories make my family look like the Cleavers—but all the same, I get restless here, enmeshed in the world that formed me.

Luckily, my father doesn't live in the house I spent my first decade in anymore. Most of my worst associations are stuck there, in the idyllic little Victorian on Swan Street where we lived before my parents divorced. That house is where my parents fought their worst battles, almost always silent ones that went on for weeks at a time. They were both very good at refusing to speak to each other. I often felt like a modern-day sitcom character who finds herself in the midst of a silent film. The easiest way to explain their marriage is by cutting to the chase: they didn't love each other. Not in the days I can remember, anyway. And though my mother was in every cosmetic way the ideal housewife, she maintained an air of aloofness, an icy edge that, paired with my father's lack of communication skills, made my growing up years chilly and lonely.

Calistoga isn't a bad place to grow up, though it's pretty small and confining when you're a hormone-crazed teen. It's wedged between two smallish mountain ranges, one of several little tourist towns in Napa Valley that's beautiful and pristine and increasingly saddled with this “wine country” label, which attracts the most anal-retentive blue bloods in the country. Unlike a lot of other towns around here, Calistoga always maintains a kind of redneck Riviera not-quite-thereness, though, which I'm secretly glad about. The
tourists who settle for our town are the ones who can't quite afford our posher neighbors, though we do our best to keep up appearances. We've got these natural hot springs and more spas than citizens; people flock here from Des Moines and Denver and God Knows Where to sit around in huge tubs of “volcanic ash” and scalding water, imagining that all the toxins they've been stuffing themselves with for fifty years will magically evaporate and they'll emerge like radiant infants. Truth is, half of the time the volcanic ash is really just garden-variety dirt, and once I even witnessed the use of cement.

I know more than I care to about the Calistoga spas—I've worked in just about all of them, though in the ten years I've been gone they've probably shuffled around a bit. When I was fourteen I started raking mud and fetching cucumber water for the needy, red-faced tourists. Within a few years I got some training and moved up to massage therapist; at seventeen I was the only girl I knew making twenty bucks an hour plus tips. It was a good enough gig. People treated you like a cross between a doctor and a prostitute, which I always found amusing.

Even though I was making good money there, Calistoga was destined to spit me out. When I was eighteen I started sleeping with a guy who owned a winery, two restaurants and a spa. Of course, he was married. Actually, his wife owned a winery, two restaurants and a spa, since he was a fading Calvin Klein underwear model who'd long since pissed away any money of his own on fast cars and coke. Anyway, we got caught up in this torrid affair and the whole town knew about it, since we had a terrible habit of driving around in his convertible Fiat, dismally shit-faced and out of sorts, yelling whatever popped into our heads at people on the streets and generally behaving in the most obnoxious and juvenile fashion possible. He should have known better, since he was twice my age, but then again I should have known better, too. My parents were too caught
up in their own soap opera to offer me much guidance, which only inspired more recklessness on my part. I guess I thought if I really fucked up, they'd have to act like parents for once. It ended with his wife dragging him through a very brutal and highly public divorce, citing me as the major body of evidence against him. The town was electric with stone-throwing glee; I couldn't walk down the street without twelve-year-old girls whispering behind their fingers and smug, middle-aged mothers peering over their spectacles at me while their husbands leered. Scarlet Letter city. It was enough to drive a girl to Texas.

Why Texas, you're wondering? I had vague notions of cowboys and sweet tea and big skies that could shelter me from everyone I'd ever known. When you grow up in a pretentious tourist town you get tired of all the lattes and the carrot juice and the organic aromatherapy candles. Texas seemed like the antithesis of all that. So I drove to Austin, got a job at another spa, moved in with a gay law student I immediately fell in love with, and started taking acting classes at the community college. Before long, I was a full-fledged Texan. The only thing I really missed from back home was the ocean, which was a long, winding drive from Calistoga, anyway, so I told myself there was nothing that could draw me back.

Funny, how home works on a person, though. It stays in you, dormant for periods but still living, like a song you thought you'd forgotten until it springs from your radio one afternoon and fills you with a longing you never even knew was yours.

I'm not saying I've come back to California out of homesickness. My life is more random than that. I just found myself depressed and bored and jilted, eating way too many pints of Häagen-Dazs in the brutal Texas heat; I was ready for a change. A friend of a friend told me about a last-minute opening at UC Santa Cruz. I applied, and after a brief phone interview, they took me sight unseen, emphasizing that it was
a one-year deal with only the remotest possibility of moving into tenure track. A salary was mentioned; I'd make in one year what I'd lived on for three in grad school. Like most of the things I've accomplished thus far, it happened without much effort, almost by accident. And now here I am, about to teach at a university with the giddy, giggle-suppressing nerves of someone who's been admitted to a private country club using a false ID.

The truth is, no university would have hired me with a paltry M.F.A. in directing (from the University of Texas, no less) if it weren't for one lucky break that's been haunting me for years. It was a lark, really. Ziv and I, up late one night and high on his espresso, made a movie. He was a recovering film major, and he still had some really expensive equipment. We just made up a character, Zelda Klein, and I improvised a nervous breakdown in our kitchen while baking a lemon meringue pie. We called it
Meringue, Meringue.
There's actually this really great part where I try to shove about twenty pairs of spiked heels down the garbage disposal. (You're wondering why in God's name I had twenty pairs of spiked heels on hand? Art project my friend Maxine did; she glued hundreds of spiked heels to this huge wooden cross. Afterward she gave me all the seven and a halfs, though none of them was comfortable enough to wear). We shot it all in black and white, which gave it this pseudodocumentary, grainy touch that accidentally made it really arty and vogue. Like we knew what we were doing.

But the real magic of
Meringue, Meringue
was this one sequence we shot right at the end, just as the sun was coming up. It was March and there was this storm starting up—a wild, warm Texas storm with wind that made you want to do something you'd later regret. Caught up in the moment, I ran outside, and Ziv followed, dragging his expensive camera equipment awkwardly. I stood on our porch, staring up at the swaying tree branches tinged with gray dawn; the wind caught hold of my cotton nightgown,
pressing it flat against one leg and whipping it wildly away from the other, like a flag. There was a clothesline in the neighbor's yard with sheets and T-shirts flapping this way and that. It was the last moment of the film, and I have to admit it was beautiful. We couldn't have planned it; it was just the right light and the right wind and the right nightgown, the right laundry in the background. It was just—well—right. Sometimes you get lucky.

So I edited the film and added credits and sent it to Sundance—more on a whim than from any serious aspirations. Goddamn if it didn't win second place in the short-film category. Ziv and I were blown away. For years after I enjoyed this unspoken Girl Genius status at UT, and it was more than obvious to me that's why I got hired at UC Santa Cruz.
Meringue, Meringue
was an accidental coup, but it earned me more career points than anything I'd ever labored at.

But I digress. Today, I'm congratulating myself on actually having accomplished number one on my to-do list: buy car. Well, okay, it's not necessarily sexy, dependable or movie-star quality, and it did cost closer to seven than three, but it seems to run and there are no flames just yet, so I'm feeling fairly smug. Beaming behind the wheel of my very own 1964 acid-green Volvo, I imagine I look very retro and Euro-chic. I bought it off a Swedish architect who had to leave the U.S. abruptly for a new job in Singapore. He also unloaded an ancient laptop, four ferns and a stainless-steel teakettle in the process. Frankly, the whole transaction was highway robbery on my part, but I figured maybe the gods were trying to make up for my first two days back in California. Conflagration, calamari and sizzling sexual exploits aside, my return to California's been pretty brutal, so far.

But today is promising. The air is unseasonably cool, having been moistened by morning fog. I've got a mocha in a paper cup perched precariously between my thighs, and I'm heading south on Highway 1, letting the wind whip my hair into a hectic bird's nest. I feel good.

There's just one little problem with my buoyant mood: it's making me cocky. As I get closer and closer to Santa Cruz, I can't keep my slutty, disobedient brain from making a beeline for Clay Parker. I feel his teeth closing around my bottom lip, hear my sharp intake of breath. I can taste the sweet dribble of peach juice I licked from his thumb at the farmer's market, smell the incense and hear the insistent racket of hippies playing bongos.

And now is not the time to be thinking of Clay Parker. Now is starting-new-job-in-six-days-better-get-ass-in-gearand-find-apartment time. Nay, starting new
career
in six days. Oh, Jesus. Can you order lesson plans from Amazon?

I turn up the radio louder (okay, there's no car radio, but I've commandeered my father's petite yet powerful boom box, which is now riding shotgun and blasting Ani Di-Franco—the momentary rebellion of some pierced DJ, no doubt, so sick of the prescribed playlist she's gone mad). This is when I love California: the sun is too low yet to be treacherous, the sky is a delicate blue, and twists of fog are nestling in the creases between hills. On my right, the ocean is undulating; her vast green expanse sparkles with gold specks, and the waves hit the beige stretches of beach in fits of white foam. The blond grass that covers every surface is giving off a wet, wheaty smell and a bad-girl bisexual has commandeered the airwaves.

Maybe I really have come home.

 

Day six of grueling apartment hunting yields results: I find a place I can unapologetically refer to as a flat. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a total Anglophile; I long to say “bloody hell” and “knickers” and “sod it” with all the cool reserve of Helen Bonham Carter, but of course each of these phrases sounds stilted and absurd in my American accent. I have managed, on occasion, to pull off “shag.” It's one of my favorites, so I just can't resist. It sounds so much hipper than our American options: “screw” is so pedestrian,
“bang” is way too aggressive, “hump” is for fourth-graders. God knows, I'd never use the gooey mess of a phrase “make love” without feeling like a cheesy seventies tune. I mean “fuck” has its own poetry, since it's all hard angles and no backing down, but it has no warmth, and could never have the cozy yet unsentimental, offbeat appeal of “shag.”

Anyway, the little studio I just put a deposit on is definitely a flat, and so this gives me an excuse to become one syllable more British. The rent is almost reasonable—okay,
not
under five hundred (forgive me, to-do list), but I had to be flexible and double it. I suspect the landlord is fortunately unaware of just how slick and trendy the place is. It's an upstairs unit in an old brick building downtown. It's above a hair salon, and the smell of perms
does
seep through the floorboards, but not in a terribly noxious way. Speaking of floorboards, that was a major selling point: after all the hideous brown shag and orange linoleum I'd looked at for four days, these hardwood floors, freshly buffed and sweetly golden, took my breath away. In short, it is precisely the right place for a bohemian, scarf-wearing professor to dwell. As soon as I become that bohemian, scarf-wearing professor, it'll be perfect for me.

T
hursday afternoon I move my precious possessions into my lovely little flat and survey the results. I tell myself the effect is wonderfully spare and chic, with that glam-Zen minimalism so many urban hair salons strive for. I don't quite buy this, but I tell myself I do.

As the sun starts to glow orange in my western windows,
I make up my mind to go for a walk. For a week now I've been so completely consumed with the hunt for a car and a home that I haven't had much time to stroll around aimlessly. It feels good to get the sidewalk moving beneath me and to breathe in the greasy perfume drifting inland from the burger joint down the street. The heat of the afternoon is giving way to the cool evening chill sliding off the Pacific. A wayward branch from an apple tree is hanging over the sidewalk; I look around, pluck a nice green one and munch as I stroll.

I meander past the shops on Pacific Avenue, peering into each window: a bookstore, used clothing, a surf shop. And God—oh, Jesus, a music store:
Viva Vinyl.
The glass door is propped into a wide-open position. It's held in place with a terra-cotta pot filled with cement, sprouting a tall, iron-stemmed LP with the words Come In splashed recklessly across the glossy black surface in red paint.

Come in.

Don't. Go. In.

Maybe I should go home and change. Except I haven't got anything to change into, and I won't until my next paycheck.

It might not be his—I mean, come on, what are the chances?

He said his store was downtown. He specializes in vinyl.

Yeah, but this is Santa Cruz—college town, hipsterville. There must a record store on every block.

Do. Not. Enter.

My feet are real fuckups. They operate independently, like little rogue states, and yet it's the rest of me who's got to face the consequences.

The store is deserted. It's filled with a dusty, warm attic smell. There's a wall of decorative vintage guitars on display toward the back; I scoot past the rows of records and CDs to stare up at them. They remind me of dead butterflies pinned under glass: beautiful, perfectly preserved, but eerie when they're so still.

“Can I help you find something?”

I spin around and there he is, barely two feet from me. His question reverbs off the walls of my mind. Can he help me find something? What am I looking for?

Of course I've thought about this moment. In a town the size of Santa Cruz, running into him was inevitable—I knew that. I'd planned a cold shoulder: aloof, busy, pleasantly cruel. I wasn't going to get caught up. Now I bite my lip shyly and say, “I'm just looking, thanks,” with all the coolness of a starry-eyed groupie dying for an autograph.

“Claudia Bloom,” he half whispers. I see him swallow, and he folds his arms across his chest, pins his hands in his armpits. We stand there, staring at each other for a dizzy five seconds, until an astonishingly fat woman and her three kids come barreling through the door in search of
The Little Mermaid
soundtrack. I gnaw on my apple and flip through the bluegrass section aimlessly, trying not to be nervous.

Why am
I
nervous? He's the one with the wife. I flash on a memory of myself digging frantically under his covers, trying to locate my panties amid the tangle of sheets and watching the door for his gun-toting wife at the same time.

After they leave, a thick silence falls over the store like snow.

“I was just about to close,” he says finally.

“Oh, okay—sorry I'll get—”

“No.” He laughs. “I mean, you know. Do you mind if I lock the door?”

“With me on this side of it?”

“Exactly. If you don't mind.” Oh, God. He's just so damn
attractive.
There's some sort of heat coming off him, I swear. An image of our bodies braiding together and tumbling to the floor flashes through my mind. Brain, do not
think
like that. He's waiting for an answer. Scoot out the door. Plan of cold, disinterested shoulder is not happening. Abort. Abort.

“Okay. I mean, sure,” I say.

I watch as he walks to the door (that butt—it slays me), moves the flowerpot inside and turns the key in the lock. “So,” he says, coming back to the bluegrass section, where I'm nervously teething on my apple (the thought of actually eating it now seems repugnant, but the tough skin is comforting between my teeth). “I wasn't sure I'd see you again.”

I force myself to stop gnawing on the apple and shrug. “Small town, I guess.”

He nods. We both start to say something at once; we stop, laugh, start again, interrupting each other once more. “Go ahead,” he says. “I didn't mean to—”

“Nothing—no, I was…” I've totally forgotten what I was going to say. “G-go ahead,” I stammer. “You go first.”
Claudia, you've got a terminal degree, for Christ's sake—can't you do better than this? This is thirteen-year-old girl waiting for an invitation to ice cream social, okay? This is not scarf-wearing queen of intellect.
That reminds me: must buy scarf.

“Um…I'm just really embarrassed,” he says. “About what happened last week. You know? It looked really bad and everyone was put in an awkward spot and I just…I'd like a chance to explain.”

“Okay…”

“Well, do you want to talk here or…are you hungry?” He nods at the apple. “Is that your dinner?”

I smile. “Sort of. Yeah, well, I've been pretty busy—I guess I am a little bit hungry. Except…” I glance down at the too-tight Goodwill shorts I've been wearing for days and my father's ancient, grease-spotted Calistoga High T-shirt. Did I even comb my hair today? “It can't be anyplace even remotely nice.”

“Why—what do you mean?”

“Look at me, Clay. I'm a mess.”

He lets his eyes wander on a long, slow trip down my body; I start to blush furiously. By the time he's looking at
my face again, I feel like an overheated tomato. “You look great,” he says, an impish glee in his eyes.

“Well, whatever,” I reply. “Maybe there's a taco joint or something?”

“Mmm, there's a great place just a few blocks from here. Best carne asada you ever had in your life.”

We get five minutes into Operation Chance to Explain and things are going all right, even if I am more shy pubescent than icy sophisticate. He's messing with the cash register and gathering up his things and every move he makes telegraphs that he's infected with precisely the same prom-night jitters I've got. Bizarre. Here we are, full-grown adults (how old is he, anyway? Twenty-seven? Thirty-seven? I have no idea), and we're bumping into things and forming incomplete sentences at the prospect of going out for tacos.

Then the phone rings. He gives it a blank stare. It continues its soft electronic bleating twice before he says, “Let's let the answering machine get it,” and reaches for his coat. On the fourth ring the machine picks up and something deep in the pit of my stomach knows who it'll be.

“Hi, Clay? You there? Pick up, okay? It's Monica.” Long, poisonous pause. Clay hovers near the phone but does not touch it. “I need to talk to you.” There's a quick sniffle. “Clay, please. I really need to talk.”

Clay snaps the phone up. “Hi,” he says softly. “What's up?” I walk away from him, feeling strangely numb. Seconds ago, I was struggling against the heat in my blood just looking at him, and now there's ice water in my veins. I try the door, but it's locked. I lean my forehead against the glass and will myself not to listen, but his words float across the small shop to my ears. “I know…it's not easy for me—don't say it's…I just mean I've had my rough days, too, you know? Okay…no, I was just closing up.”

After he puts the phone down he stands there a couple of seconds; I stay perfectly still, waiting for a cue, wishing
the door was unlocked so I could just slip outside and let the air clear my head.

“That was Monica,” he says, and his voice seems very far away. “My, um, wife. Except she's not really—we're not really…anyway, she's having a rough day. It happens.”

“Of course,” I whisper, still not turning around.

“What?”

I turn and face him. “Yes. Okay.”

“Claudia…” He takes a couple of steps in my direction, but I stop him with my voice.

“Obviously, you're busy—”

“I wanted to see you. I wanted to explain—”

I laugh, but it's not a pleasant sound. “I don't think there's anything to explain.”

“The situation's complicated, okay? I'm not trying to lie to anyone.”

“Married is married,” I say. “Divorced is divorced.” Finally, my voice has all the icy conviction I'd dreamed it might. Where's this moral fervor coming from? How many times have I slept with married men—guys I didn't even care about? “I think this whole thing is just—” the word is slow in coming, because it's not one I ever use “—wrong.”

I try the door again, ruining my little speech with a futile shove. “Can you please unlock this?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I want to explain to you where I'm coming from.”

I lean my forehead against the glass, suddenly tired, and say, “Please. Just unlock it, okay?”

He crosses the room and I give him plenty of space. Proximity is dangerous right now. Already I can feel the sick emptiness brought on by the phone call giving way to an urgent need to smell his skin. Once he's got the door unlocked, he turns to me again. “I wish I could just tell you how hard this is,” he begins, but he interrupts himself in alarm. “God, your face is
white
—are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say tersely. “I'm fine.”

“Do you feel sick? You're really pale.” He moves closer, and I back up.

“Look, don't worry about me, okay? You've got a wife who obviously wants you back. I just don't understand why you had to drag me—a total stranger—into your little domestic mess.” My voice rises on the last two words and my lower lip trembles slightly; I need to get the hell out while I can. One problem: he's in front of the door.

He's staring at me with a stunned expression, and then he gets a hold of himself and steps out of my way. “You're right. I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I mumble, and bolt.

 

That night, lying on my Pine-Sol-scented futon, watching as the occasional headlight sweeps ghostly shapes across my cracked ceiling, I think about Clay Parker. I think about his hands and the almost imperceptible half-moon scar on his left cheek. I immerse myself in elaborate recollections of his tongue sweeping across my clavicle; I play that moment over and over, like I used to do with my
Saturday Night Fever
45, never tiring of the repetition.

I'm so paralyzed. I can't pursue the guy with his desperate, grieving wife trailing after us all the time. And yet I can't stop thinking about him: his gentle laughter, his easy way with cats, the dad who hit him and the mom who loves him more than anyone.

I think of our Freaks and Treats Tour, how exhilarated and young I felt. The roller coaster at the Boardwalk made my stomach drop in the same delicious, terrifying way it does now when I replay his tongue on my clavicle.

Infatuation. What a country.

It's not just that he's married. That's part of it, yes, but there's something else I can't quite put my finger on.

God knows I've had affairs with married men. It never
really bothered me before—at least, I told myself it didn't. There was the fading underwear model in Calistoga, then Roger, a fellow massage slut at Lake Austin Spa. He kept trying to “release my tantric energy,” which meant I had to lie there forever while he performed the worst cunnilingus I've ever experienced. There was Jerry Moss, the professor with the Tom Waits voice. That one nagged at my conscience, not because he was married, but because it was the only time I'd ever cheated on someone myself.

That was how I rationalized it: in all but one case, they were the ones breaking their vows, not me. Cheating on Jonathan with Jerry was the only time in my vast decade of tartery that I actually betrayed someone's trust. I have a peculiar moral code, yes, but I do have one. I told myself that the institution of marriage was, in itself, a scam, so it's hard to get sentimentally attached to other people's vows. It's like asking a Marxist to give a shit when a capitalist goes bankrupt.

This time, with Clay, everything's different. It's quite sickening, really. I think about the moments before his wife burst through the door with all that sunlight behind her, when he and Medea and Sandy and I were all lying there peacefully, listening to crows cawing outside, watching dawn turn the windows and the skylight an electric blue. I wanted that moment. I wanted to keep it, live inside it again and again. And now I see somebody's gotten there first.

I guess when you don't really want the whole person, when you just want to borrow him for an illicit afternoon or two, an affair is easy. You never meet the woman you've borrowed him from and you forget about him soon enough, caught up in the next fleeting pleasure.

But when you really want him—or at least a chance to try him out—things change. You find yourself stammering incoherent, guilt-tainted speeches in record stores and shoving at doors you know are locked.

You find yourself studying the shadows on your ceiling, wishing he was studying them with you.