Tart

“Hi,” I say.

She looks at me in the mirror and smiles, revealing the expected set of gleaming white teeth, then she bursts into sobs.

“Oh, no,” I say. “What is it?”

“I—” She can barely get the words out. “I hate—”

“Yes? You hate…?”

“Guys,” she finally spits out.

By now, there’s snot dripping from one of her pretty little nostrils, so I duck into the stall she just left and get her a wad of toilet paper. “There you go,” I say, patting her shoulder gently. “It’s all going to be okay.”

She blows her nose loudly several times, then composes herself quite rapidly, considering the extremity of the breakdown. “Oh, my God,” she says, checking her reflection for mascara damage. “I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be. If you have a quarter or a tampon, I’m never telling anyone. Deal?”

She’s got a pink beach bag slung over her shoulder, and now she paws through it, pulling out a half-eaten Snickers bar, a bottle of aspirin, three lipsticks and a cell phone before finally producing the coveted Tampax. She hands it to me. Its paper wrapper is smooth and delicate from so much toting around.

“Oh, God, thank you,” I sigh. “You’re an angel of mercy.”

She hiccups daintily and smoothes her already perfect hair with one hand. “Our little secret, right?”

“Lips are sealed,” I say, disappearing into the stall.

When I emerge, my tragic little Beach Barbie is gone. As is usually the case, the blood damage was much less extensive than I’d feared—hardly more than a spot—so I’m feeling refreshed and eager to return to my drink. Clay is still stroking Medea. He appears to be engrossed in a conversation with her, as well. Her puffiness has completely disappeared and she is stretched out happily in his lap, soaking up the affection. She’s always had excellent taste.

“…terrible motorcycle ride,” he’s telling her, as I sit down. “But you’re okay. Bet you always land on your feet.”

“Thanks,” I say.

He looks up. “For what?”

“Oh, I don’t know…calming her down. Bringing us here. Saving us from a fiery death.”

“I hardly saved you.” He wraps a hand around his beer and rotates it slowly before taking a swig. “You two don’t look like the kind of girls who need saving.”

“Anyway,” I say, eager to change the subject, “what’s your story? What do you do?”

“For a living?”

“Okay, sure. What do you do for a living?”

He shrugs. “I’ve got a record store.”

“Here in town?” I ask.

He nods.

“That’s cool. So you’re into music. You play anything?”

“Not really. I DJ on the side, but it’s slow going. The gigs I make money at are mostly weddings, which generally suck.”

“Oh, man,” I say. “I hate weddings.”

“Jesus, if I have to play ‘You Are So Beautiful’ one more time I’m going postal.”

“I think our generation’s way too jaded for marriage. It should seriously be outlawed. Forget the whole same-sex marriage debate.” I lean into the table. “Let’s do away with the whole institution.”

He looks amused. “Now, that’s something I can drink to,” he says, raising his beer bottle. We toast, and a vision of his mouth on the nape of my neck makes me feel suddenly much drunker than half a vodka tonic can account for, even on an empty stomach.

“So what are you doing in Santa Cruz, anyway?” he asks.

He keeps turning the conversation back to me. He’s probably a serial killer. People who murder for a living tend to be rather private. One more reason not to go home with him.

“How do you know I’m not from here?” I ask, twirling my straw in my drink and looking coy in spite of myself. Stop. Flirting. Stop. Flirting.

“I had the dubious pleasure of growing up in this vortex. I can spot an outsider by now. Besides, your license plate said Texas.”

He’s an undercover cop. Oh, God. I can already feel the cold steel of the cuffs against my wrist bones.

“You okay?” He reaches across the table and gently touches the very hand I’m busy morbidly encasing in restraints. Please, Jesus, don’t let him be a serial killer undercover cop.

“Sure. Why?”

“Every once in a while you get this wild gleam in your eye—”

“Wild gleam?”

“The same look Medea shot me when I unstrapped her from my bike.”

I laugh, though even to me it sounds strangled. “Yeah, well, I’m a little off today. I don’t routinely rise at four in the morning, drive six hundred miles, then blow up my stolen vehicle to unwind in the afternoon.” Listing the events of the day makes me feel the wild gleam coming back, so I try to steer us toward safer topics. “Um, let’s see, what was your question?”

“Santa Cruz—what brings you here?”

“Right. I’ve got this university gig teaching theater.”

“Wow.” He looks impressed, and maybe a little bit skeptical, which only confirms my suspicion that I am not professor material.

“Yeah, well, they were hard up,” I explain. “Some guy faked his credentials so they had to fire him. I’m the only person they could drag here at the last minute. They made it clear that I’m just a stand-in—you know, one year and then, unless I turn out to be the next Stanislavski, I’m on the street.” The combination of my nerves, three days on the road alone and this dreamy vodka tonic are making me babble, but I hardly care. It feels good to talk to somebody other than a pissed-off, stoned cat. “I’m a total perennial student— I fell in love with the endless adolescence of college—so I figured a university’s the only place I stand a chance. Except I’m not so sure about the professor thing. I suspect I haven’t got the wardrobe for it.”

He waves a hand at me dismissively. “At UC Santa Cruz? You could walk on campus in a garbage bag and by the end of the day you’d have a following. Lack of fashion is a fashion here.”

“Yeah. Well, good.” There’s an awkward pause; we end up looking at each other for too long, and this makes me so edgy I blurt out, “Christ. I can’t believe I actually stole my ex’s bus.” He looks a little unsure about how to respond, and I realize I’m starting to monologue in a dangerously unchecked fashion. “Sorry. Very long day, as I mentioned.”

“Sounds like you could use another drink,” he says, rising. Very carefully, like one parent transferring a sleeping child into the lap of the other, he hands me Medea. “More of the same?”

I suddenly realize I’ve been gnawing nervously at the wedge of lime from my drink; even the peel is now littered with teeth marks. I toss it back into the glass, which I hand to him sheepishly. “Yes, please. Oh, but here—let me get this round.” I reach for my money, still tucked inside my bra, but he shakes his head.

“Don’t worry about it. Consider me the welcoming committee.” He turns and walks toward the bar. Watching him makes me bite the inside of my cheek. Has there ever been an icon steamier than that subtle sag of a man’s barely there butt in faded Levi’s?

I lean back against the vinyl of the booth and close my eyes, running one hand absently over Medea’s soft fur again and again. The tart taste of lime still lingers on my tongue. Claudia. Please. For once in your life, resist. Resist. Resist.

CHAPTER 4

Tart is my favorite word. I love how it tastes in your mouth—sour, tangy, just sweet enough to keep your lips from puckering around it in distaste. I love what it stirs in the mind—the synesthesia of flavor mixing with colors: buxom women in reds, oranges and apple-greens, gleaming with cheap temptation, like Jolly Ranchers. It’s been a central goal of my twenties to live a tart life; I want everything I do to have that sharpness, that edge of almost-too-out-there to be tasty, but not quite.

Until I met Jonathan, living tartly meant, for starters, never saying I love you. Which was easy, since apart from my cat, my gay roommate and my vibrator, I didn’t really love much of anything or anyone. I’m not even sure I loved Jonathan. I think our relationship was rooted in blind panic, and that, combined with great affection for him, was exactly the brand of love I’d heard about in pop songs since puberty. Being with Jonathan was terrifying, sometimes tender and studded with misery. These are the central ingredients of love, according to Top Forty tunes throughout the ages, so I figured I must be on the right track.

Before Jonathan and the Great Blind Panic, I used to think monogamy was every woman’s enemy, and that promiscuity (a central element of every tart’s lifestyle) was synonymous with freedom. It’s probably generational—lots of girls I went to college with admired strippers and porn stars the way our mothers admired starlets. It’s that fuck-you to middle-class values that inspires awe in us. We find the sex industry and all of its incumbent seediness sort of glamorous. And tart.

But being a tart can be exhausting, and after a while its rewards start to seem a little tawdry. Now that I’m rounding the corner toward my thirties, the fervor of my tart philosophy has faded some with wear. Frankly, my right to be wild, cheap and promiscuous has started to bore me.

I guess that’s part of why Jonathan and I got so serious so quickly. We met when I was twenty-eight. I could see right into my thirties from there, and beyond. I knew a change was in order. I started cringing every time I spotted some woman in her late thirties haunting the junior racks at Ross Dress for Less, sporting deeply ingrained crow’s feet and hair that’s been dyed so many times it looks like cheap faux fur. I’m not sure why self-respecting tartery requires a wrinkle-free face and body, but it does. That’s no doubt really messed up, but it feels like a force of nature too momentous to challenge.

It was in this twenty-eight-year-old climate of anxiety and pending doom that I met Jonathan. He was creative, suitably unconventional and so crazy about me that I could feel a palpable confusion coming off him anytime we were in the same room. I was directing his play, Molotov Cocktail, a farce about morticians in training, and whenever we discussed his rewrites over coffee he took every opportunity to touch me in ways that could be construed as friendly or accidental: his elbow nestled fleetingly against mine, his knee bumped against my thigh under the table. I was flattered but not overcome. I told myself he wasn’t my type—too skinny, his hands too pale, his eyes too furtive and searching, so unlike the muscular, vaguely bovine types I was used to going home with.

But Jonathan was nothing if not persistent; he rooted himself beside me and sent exploratory tendrils into my psyche with the strength and tenacity of kudzu. I started to crave the way his black hair looked in the morning light as he rolled himself a cigarette with agile fingers. I became addicted to his smell: Irish soap, cigarette smoke, Tide. He was so solicitous, as only someone with a heart that deflates between relationships can be. Jonathan loved being in love. He was lost without someone to brew coffee for, or share his favorite scripts with, or sing to sleep with funny, black-humored lullabies he made up as he went along.

He convinced me to move in with him three weeks after we first slept together. It did make some sense, since my roommate, Ziv, was involved at the time with this German guy, Gunter, who had three habits Ziv found adorable and I found repulsive: he covered the entire bathroom with a thick dusting of tiny black hairs each time he shaved; his favorite time to practice his cello was postcoital, which usually meant 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.; and he continually, despite my protests, consumed any chocolate products we smuggled into the house, including the special Belgian hazelnut bar I hid in my underwear drawer. So Gunter was driving me away, and Jonathan had this beautiful place—the upstairs of a lovely old-fashioned Texas-style minimansion with French doors, hardwood floors and a claw-foot tub I spent most of that year floating in. A warm, stable relationship and a cool new apartment to boot made cohabitation seem catalog-perfect—a Pottery Barn fairytale.

But old habits die hard. Monogamy was quite a shock to my system, both physically and philosophically. Toward the end of that summer, when we’d been living together a little over five months, I became overwhelmingly itchy for Something Else. When you’re addicted to the pursuit of all things tart, Friday night with a video and Chinese takeout is a little foreign. I’d pace the living room and blurt out nasty jabs, like a junky trying to kick.

I had lived for twenty-eight years just fine, following my sexually nomadic heart, stretching out my elastic adolescence for as long as it would last, and now suddenly half my instincts were urging me to make a nest, while the other half screamed “Flee!” Just because I’d decided to try the nesting thing didn’t mean I had the slightest idea how to pull it off.

And so I did what most people do in lieu of a solution; I denied there was a problem until I could arrange for a full-on disaster. In the fall of my last year in grad school, seven months into my experiment in cozy living with Jonathan, I had a flash-in-the-pan affair with my Set Design professor. He was in his forties, with distinguished graying temples and a gruff, Tom Waits-style lecturing voice. He was nothing to me; I had no illusions that we were doing anything except blowing off steam. The guy wasn’t even very good in bed; he was married, and felt terrible about me, so his rushed, guilt-driven exertions were never very satisfying. After two seedy sessions in a dank hotel, I called it off. He sighed with relief and gave me an A in the class, even though my final project looked like a kindergartener’s shoe-box diorama.

Of course, I had to tell Jonathan. I may not be your classic stickler for integrity, but I do have my own idiosyncratic moral code, and honesty is a central tenet, right behind tartery. Besides, half the reason I had the affair was to loosen the stranglehold my life with Jonathan exerted; telling him was key to this loosening. I’d needed a little tart back, and I’d taken it by force, but now it was necessary to fess up.

I sat him down on a cold Saturday in December. Christmas was just a week away. I summarized with my eyes averted, peeling the label from a bottle of Corona. His reaction fell short of violence, but he did dash into the john to throw up, and afterward he stared at me with the sort of expression a baby might use on his mother as she shoves his finger in an electrical outlet. At that point I felt more than a little sick, myself.

I might be saying this just to soften the sting of him leaving me months later for Rain, but in retrospect I see our relationship from that cold Saturday on as filled with him calculating his revenge. Even proposing was just one more form of payback; he knew my promise to marry him meant I’d publicly renounced all tartness, and so when he left, he took with him not only my future, but my past.

CHAPTER 5

It’s six o’clock, I’ve got three vodka tonics in my bloodstream, and I’m in love.

Okay, that’s probably not it. It’s probably just culture shock. I haven’t been home to California in three years. Obviously, the ocean air is salt-rotting my brain. That’s why I feel so reckless and giddy, like a thirteen-year-old at a slumber party.

“Where are we going?” I ask as Clay leads me out of the Owl Club and into the startling sunlight.

“We’ve got to get Medea someplace cat-friendly,” he says.

“You’re right,” I say. “Let’s strap her back onto your bike.” I giggle at my stupid joke.

Clay steers me gently east and picks up the pace. “My friend Nick lives right around the corner,” he says. “She’ll like him. He’s a spaz around people, but he’s a genius with cats.”

“What sort of spaz?”

“He’s got a mild case of Tourette’s.”

“No,” I say. “Seriously?”

“Mostly around customers. Unfortunately, he works for me at the record store. One time he called this sweet little old lady a ‘rug-eater cunt.’ You should have seen her face.”

“Oh, my God,” I say, laughing. “Isn’t that a little hard on sales?”

“Yeah, well, she wasn’t a return customer.”

As we walk the two blocks to Nick’s, my eyes keep straying to the half-moon scar near Clay’s ear. I can’t stop thinking about kissing it.

“Everything okay?” he asks, shooting me a sideways glance.

“Mmm-hmm. Why do you ask?”

“I think you might be getting that gleam in your eye again.”

I laugh. “Different gleam. You’ll have to learn the difference.”

“Right. Well, here we are,” he says, striding through a little wire gate and up the steps of a run-down house. The tilting porch is covered in thick strands of ivy and nasturtiums. “Chez Nick.” He pushes open the front door and hollers, “Nick! I brought you some kitten for dinner.”

A short guy with a receding hairline and a too-tight Ramones T-shirt appears in the living room doorway. “No need to yell.” He’s eating a doughnut, and when he sees me a big blob of jelly slips out of it and lands on the R.

“Fucking-shit-whore,” he blurts out.

Clay looks from him to me and back again. “What? She makes you nervous?”

“Sorry,” Nick says, swallowing the doughnut without chewing. He starts to choke, and Clay whacks him on the back a couple of times.

“Maybe you should wait outside.” Clay nods toward the door I’ve barely stepped through. “I’ll be there in a second.”

“Um. Okay.” I shuffle back out to the sidewalk. “Nice to meet you.”

In a couple of minutes, Clay reappears, sans Medea. He’s shaking his head.

“All righty,” he says, slapping his palms together happily. “Now we’ve officially begun the tour.”

“The tour?”

“Yes.”

“What tour, exactly?”

“The Santa Cruz Freaks and Tasty Treats Tour.”

I look over his shoulder at Nick’s dubious house. The windows are draped with purple, rust-streaked sheets, and there’s a strange sculpture made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans dangling from a tree. “Are you sure she’ll be okay in there?”

“Positive. Like I said, he’s a disaster with women, but with cats, he really shines.”

He starts to guide me away, but still I hesitate. “I may not be a model pet owner,” I say, digging in my heels, “but I do worry. She’s sort of all I have at this point.”

With both hands on my shoulders, he looks into my eyes. “Claudia. I swear, she’ll be happy as a clam. Trust me.”

I bite my lip, studying his face. I’ve known him all of four hours and am shocked to realize I do trust him. “If you say so.”

“I promise. Now, right this way, madam, and I’ll introduce you to what Santa Cruz excels at.”

“Freaks and Treats?” I ask.

“Precisely.”

Clay Parker’s Freaks and Treats Tour:

1) Nick and his jelly doughnut. Freak with treat. I’m skeptical, but willing to proceed.

2) Fancy place downtown with white linen tablecloths and waitress with sparkly red thong peeking out of black slacks: wolf down a dozen oysters on the half shell and beer in frosty cold mugs. Clay confesses he’s having the best day he’s had all summer. I blush. I hardly ever blush.

3) En route to destination, we spy our second freak: long-hair on unicycle playing a plastic recorder. Due to high speed of vehicle, can’t be sure, but suspect he’s playing “Little Red Corvette.”

4) Gold mine. Downtown farmer’s market. Peaches, fried samosas, free samples of calamari. Too many freaks to name: mullet guys, drag queens, belly dancers, skate punks, goth girls, rasta drummers. Clay points out Dad in a Sierra Club baseball cap scolding toddler for not recycling apple juice bottle. At first we laugh, but when kid cries, start to feel depressed.

5) Manage to discreetly disappear into Rite Aid for tampons. Inside, more freaks: three betties in 80’s neon and teased bangs, filling cart with jumbo Junior Mints and Pall Malls.

6) Dessert at the Saturn Café. Sullen waitress with pink Afro. Clay orders us Chocolate Madness and a side of chocolate chip cookie dough. We feed each other the mess until we’re groaning in pain.

7) Insist on the Boardwalk. Remember visiting a hundred years ago, am seized with uncharacteristic nostalgia. Clay grudgingly admits Boardwalk is chock-full of freaks and therefore justifiable addition to itinerary. Ancient roller coaster nearly forces oysters, calamari, peaches, samosas, cookie dough and Chocolate Madness back up. Discover Clay has adorable, girlish scream when terrified.

8) Nightcap at Blue Lagoon. Lots of beefy guys in leather. Want to kiss Clay so desperately can taste it.

CHAPTER 6

Clay Parker lives in a yurt. Before tonight, I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s round and wooden and is shaped like a circus tent. It’s more homey than I’d imagined. In fact, it has solid wooden floors, glass windows, running water and electricity. It’s the sort of place a hobbit might live in, if he was born and raised in Northern California.

You’re wondering what I’m doing here. So am I. But things are much more innocent than they sound—really—in fact, Clay’s insisted he’s going to lend me his bed while he spends the night at the smallish cottage down the road, where Friend lives. So far, the gender of Friend is a mystery my gentle probing has failed to pierce. Here’s the paltry sum of clues I’ve managed to procure:

1) Cottage has a couch, which he’s indicated he occasionally sleeps on.

2) Friend is “an old friend.” Assuming this refers to years of acquaintance, rather than somewhat comforting possibility that Friend, regardless of gender, is ninety and incontinent.

3) Friend will not mind the late hour (is now 1:00 a.m.), lack of prior notice or burden of making extra coffee come morning.

4) Friend makes great coffee.

Nancy Drew I am not. Even after nine hours of drinking, gorging and drinking again with this man, I am steadfastly incapable of asking about his romantic or (God forbid) marital status. It’s one of those sick dances we do: tell ourselves if we don’t ask, magically no obstacles will interfere. Equally sick is the assumption that, because sleeping-with candidate has not asked our status, said candidate wants what we want.

Ugh. Cannot believe I’m embroiling myself in this brand of mess yet again. But Clay Parker is absolutely bristling with sex appeal. His eyes are wise and knowing, his face all the more appealing for its minor irregularities. He’s got that endearing tiny half-moon scar near his left ear and a bicuspid with a minuscule chip missing. His left eye squints just a little more than the right, especially when he’s smiling. And then there’s the nose: that swerve toward the top, so subtle it makes you think you’ve imagined it, until you see it from a new angle and notice it again. Somewhere between the oysters and the peaches, I asked him about it. He blushed crimson.

“Whoa,” I said. “Don’t tell me—does it involve bondage and thigh-high boots?” He chuckled, but there was something wrong, and I instantly regretted asking. “You know what? It’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s fine. You can ask me anything.” Except, I thought, are you currently doing anyone? “It’s just—my dad. He was a little rough on me when I was a kid.”

“Oh. I see.” There was an awkward silence, followed by me blurting out, “He hit you?”

“A couple times.” We watched a tiny slip of a woman struggling to control her Great Dane as they crossed the street. He shrugged. “I guess nobody’s perfect.”

“Where is he now?”

“Dead.” He swallowed and held my gaze. I felt that weird surge of maternal warmth that always freaks me out—the impulse to stroke the stray wisp of hair back from a man’s forehead.

“What about your mother?”

He laughed, and though I was relieved to see him smiling again, there was something a touch hardened in the sound he made. “Oh, she’s still kicking. That old girl will outlive me, no doubt.”

“Do you like her?” Pop psychy as it is, I cling to my theory that boys who like their mothers are more satisfying in every way.

He thought about it a couple of seconds, which seemed like a bad sign, but when he answered I could tell it was just because he took the question seriously. “I do like her. I mean, we’d never hang out if she wasn’t my mother, but she’s feisty and she loves me more than anyone. That’s always irresistible.”