Читать книгу Tart - Jody Gehrman - Страница 18

Things I presently own:

1) Adorable 1964 Volvo. Green.

2) One laptop computer from Swede. Very sleek, but have not yet managed to turn it on.

3) Hand-me-down futon from Dad. Smells like Pine-Sol.

4) One pair of shorts from Goodwill. A little tight. Discard after first paycheck.

5) Three T-shirts borrowed from Dad. Burn horrifying Nascar shirt after first paycheck.

6) Four Swedish ferns. Dying.

7) One stainless-steel teakettle. Perfect.

Thursday 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.

Oh. Bourgeois coupling crap. Good God, what have I gotten myself into?