Judith Krantz (32 page)

“Hooked on you?
I hate you, Gabe
. I hate you for what you did to me when I was a twenty-year-old kid, too young to know that no one should ever believe one word that came out of your mouth.
It was so desperately cruel
. What kind of contemptible bastard is capable of getting a girl to say she’ll marry him, against her better judgment, and then disappearing at the very last minute, leaving nothing behind except a shit-eating letter of shit-eating, trumped-up, so-called explanation? You couldn’t even find the little bit of guts you needed to tell me face-to-face.”

Jazz turned away from him and stalked over to the window, shaking with the adrenaline of her pent-up fury. Gabe got up and followed her, and when she heard his footsteps behind her she turned a frightening face on him.

“You left Paris in the one way that had to hurt me the most. I’d turned over my life to you. It was your idea to get married, not mine, God knows. I never tried to tie you down, you did it to yourself and then—
then
you tried to put the blame on me. Somehow what you did became my fault! It was so cheap, Gabe, cheap beyond cheapness, so utterly unfair.
You disgust me.”

“I’ve disgusted myself ever since. Good God, Jazz, don’t you think there isn’t one thing you’ve said that I haven’t said to myself a thousand times, night after night—and ten times worse? Every word of that letter was the cold, hard truth, but that doesn’t excuse it. Nothing can excuse my gutlessness.
But you’re still hooked on me, Jazz
, no matter what you think of my character.”

“That’s sick!”
she cried. “Really sick! I know what kind of vile coward you are, I know how cruel you can be, but I didn’t think you were egomaniacal enough to think I couldn’t get over you.”

“You wouldn’t be so determined to avoid any contact with me if I were just a bad memory. You wouldn’t still be so defensive, Jazz, if you’d really forgotten me.”

“I honestly think you believe that revolting crap,” Jazz taunted him. “I hear you talking yourself into it. You’ve actually convinced yourself.” Her voice was corrosive, jeering.

“You’re not over me, Jazz.” Gabe’s lean, dark face was insistent and certain of his words.

“It’s been years and years since I wasted a minute thinking of you,” she said contemptuously.

“Prove it,” Gabe challenged her.

“I don’t have to prove anything to you!”

“Then prove it to yourself. If you don’t, you’ll never really trust yourself again.”

“I trust myself plenty,” Jazz said coolly, in control of herself again. “Get out of here, Gabe, I want you out of my house. You make it stink.”

Gabe grabbed Jazz roughly, pulled her into his arms and kissed her with all the immoderate passion
that he’d felt since he came into the room and saw her again, so much more beautiful than he remembered. Jazz punched him in the face with her fist, as hard as she could.

“I knew it!” he cried. “You’d never bother to hit me if you didn’t give a damn!” Gabe held her arms pinioned to her sides and kissed Jazz again, over and over. He stopped for a minute, released his grip and gave her a clean chance to beat him up in any way she chose.

“Obstinate bitch,” he said, when she didn’t move, or change her stony expression. He held her unyielding body close again and bent to her cold lips once more, his whole being concentrated on making her acknowledge his mouth. Finally he felt her lips responding, just the merest flicker of a response, a tiny quiver, a faint pressure, a warming, a hint of a yearning, which grew and grew until it became a kiss that met his kiss.

They stood in front of the window by the ocean, clasped in each other’s arms, kissing silently, tentatively, each unwilling to make a sound or say a word that might break the unexpected magic of this isolated moment in which the past and the present met and all the joy of their years together was distilled and all the pain of the ending forgotten. But when Jazz felt Gabe pressing against her so tightly that she couldn’t ignore how aroused he was, she pushed him away and stood apart, tall and proud and defiant.

“Oh no. Definitely no, not that,” Jazz said in a strong, clear voice. “You’ve proved your point, Gabe. I’m not physically indifferent to you. There’s still something there, I’m only human. But it’s just an unimportant something, a bit of the past that somehow
 … survived
what you did to me.”

She shook her head sadly and reflectively. “Whatever it is, it’s not strong enough so that I’ll let you make love to me, Gabe. Oh, I admit that I want to, Gabe, don’t think that I’ve forgotten the way it used to be when the lights of the
bateaux mouches
lit our window and we lay in bed, invisible, listening to
the dance music on the river, with you so deep inside me that I knew absolutely and forever that nothing in the world had ever been that marvelous for anyone else but us.”

Jazz put her hands on his shoulders and spoke gently, the light of her eyes so incandescent with memory that he couldn’t meet her gaze.

“They say that there’s nothing to beat an Auld Lang Syne fuck, Gabe, and you were the best, the very best lover I’ve ever had. Not just because you were the first—I’ve had a chance to compare.” Jazz cocked her head and gave a complex, unconsciously infuriating smile, full of memories that Gabe suddenly knew had nothing to do with him. “The problem is I can’t trust you. And I won’t make love to a man I don’t trust.”

“Can’t you believe that in nine years I could have changed?” he said in anguish. “That I
must
have changed? That you can trust me?”

Jazz laughed abruptly at his words. “ Trust’? Trust
you
? Trust is out of the question. Even you must know that. But I don’t care anymore if Phoebe reps you. In fact, you can rent the space too. You’ve just proved something to me that you didn’t intend to prove. You don’t have power over me anymore, poor Gabe.”

She patted him on the cheek and he started to speak. Jazz raised a finger in a way that stopped him cold.
“Don’t say it!
Don’t make me hate you again by saying that if I were truly sure that you didn’t have power over me, I’d let you make love to me. No, Gabe, no, you can’t use that frat-house argument all night. It would be unworthy, even of a Hungarian. You’ve got what you came over here to get. And a little extra. Be satisfied.”

Gabe looked at Jazz speechlessly. Christ, he’d really done himself in this time. Fucked himself up good and proper. He’d thought he was over her, mostly anyway. He must have been completely insane. It hadn’t been an acceptable risk to so much as shake hands with this incomparable girl. He’d taken
it, and now he was stuck with the consequences. Stuck for good, stuck forever, if he knew anything about it. She’d always been the only one.

“So I guess we’ve missed Ted Koppel,” Gabe managed to say.

“Chances are.” Jazz gave him an amiable and impersonal smile. “Want to watch Jay Leno?”

“No, I’ve got to go. Thanks, Jazz, see you around,” he said, and fled.

She was going to be late for class, Jazz thought in a panic. On top of everything else that was revolting about the prospect of Traffic School, there was no place to park near the building in which the school was located.
Late for class
. She could feel anxiety sweat bursting out all over her neck and forehead. Late. For. Class. The mere sound of the words brought with them all the feeling of a particular kind of nightmare.

Jazz had reluctantly investigated the options available in Traffic School after she had received her speeding ticket. Obviously she wasn’t the only automotive offender in town, since there were dozens of different schools, a California cottage industry, as thick on the ground as meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in Beverly Hills. Some schools advertised that they were especially for singles, others promised pizza for lunch; schools lured customers with magic tricks and Disney movies, and many billed themselves as comedy schools. The only school located not too far from her apartment was called “Fabulous Comedians Entertain U.”

Gritting her teeth at wasting a Saturday, Jazz had called and signed up at Fabulous Comedians to expiate her ticket. When she arrived, thinking that she was in good time, she found that the parking lot behind the building was closed on Saturday and the streets around the school were all filled with cars parked next to meters. “Teacher’s pets,” she snarled out loud, feeling the sweat begin to trickle down her sides as she sought a space in growing alarm.

Eventually, three blocks from the school, she wedged her car into the last space available and ran back as fast as she could to the unprepossessing two-story building on Pico Boulevard. There was no one in the halls or on the staircase, and when she crashed into the room in which the class was held, a round of mocking catcalls and applause greeted her.

“You’re two minutes late,” the instructor said, locking the door behind her. “Another second and it would have been too late.”

“Thanks,” Jazz gasped, and looked around for a seat. Only one chair was empty, on the aisle in the front row, obviously right under the nose of the instructor, and the last place anyone would want to sit, if schoolday memories were any guide. She slunk down the aisle and sat down next to a messily dressed man with an enormous black handlebar mustache. He had a grubby crew hat pulled down over his hair, and he wore dark glasses.

The tiny chair was even harder and smaller than she had expected. Jazz looked straight in front of her, pulling her streaky ripples of hair over her eyes in an attempt to create a private space. She should have postponed coming to Traffic School as long as possible, she realized, now that she was actually there. Not that it would have been any better later in the allotted period of two months, but she had been feeling unusually down since the night, a week ago, when Gabe had shown up at her apartment. She had no wellspring of energy during the day, although she managed to function more or less normally in the studio. She’d caught Toby and Melissa exchanging concerned glances, although neither of them had actually mentioned anything. She’d turned down dates in order to go to bed early, and then she’d slept badly, with unpleasant dreams, although she couldn’t remember what it was about them that made her feel bad.

In the morning Jazz felt more weary, more bruised, than when she went to bed. She felt obscurely damaged in some way, as if she’d gone through a far more brutal experience than the actual meeting with
Gabe had been. She felt older than twenty-nine, unpleasantly streetwise, and totally cynical. Every time she read a newspaper or watched the television news, she wondered why she’d even bothered to drag herself out of bed. It all seemed so … hopeless, so endlessly hopeless. If this were depression—although she couldn’t think why she should be depressed—how could she get rid of it?

Whatever was causing her to feel this way, it couldn’t be Gabe, Jazz was certain. She finally put that ghost to rest. She’d seen him again, she’d kissed him again, and she’d found out that she was over him. She’d had a chance to confront him with some of the accusations she’d been storing up for eight years, and he’d had to admit that she was right. He’d been reduced to nothing more than what he was, a part of her past, a part that had been far more good than it had been bad, in spite of its traumatic ending.

To be logical, Jazz ruminated, to put things in the correct balance, it was only fair to admit that Gabe had taught her an enormous amount just by his example. Her ability to shoot straight from the gut under any circumstances, and her methods of manipulating any subject, could only have been learned from a photojournalist. She should be grateful to him.

She
was
grateful. Their years together had been a time of invaluable experience. Of course, there had been a price to pay for that education. No realistic woman could have expected anything else. She couldn’t go back and relive her life, that was for sure, and meanwhile there was Traffic School to survive, in an airless room that was jammed with people. Jazz surveyed the perimeter of what she could see through the protective wings of hair she had pulled together so that they almost met at her nose.

Her scruffy neighbor was a tall man with long arms that invaded her space, but because of the way in which the chairs were crammed together, he couldn’t move in any direction to give her more room. Thank God, on one side there was the narrow aisle,
although she couldn’t move her chair because it was bolted to the floor. Jazz pressed her lips together in useless disgust, but she was careful not to look at the man on her right. There must be absolutely no eye contact between them, as if they were in the New York subway. It was the only way to maintain any psychic distance between herself and someone to whom she was destined to be all but chained for the next eight hours. The slob was three times too big for his chair. He came into direct body contact with her, all the way from his shoulder to his knee. She’d worn her jeans and work shirt from her Girl Friday days, but now she wished she had worn something with spikes on it, to fend off his hideously unwelcome closeness.

The man who had locked the door mounted the podium and began to speak.

“I am LAPD Officer Muffet, your instructor for today. You are here for eight full hours. Any attempt to cheat me of your attention before your four hundred and eighty minutes are up will be regarded with grave prejudice. Do not even
try
to ask me if you can leave early; that will be construed as a bribe.” The instructor, a middle-aged man, looked as pale and tough as a prison guard, Jazz thought. Where were the fabulous comedians? Why was this room filled with hulking, ugly men and only one other woman?

“This class is subject to monitoring by the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Muffet continued. “If you come back late from lunch, you will find the door locked and you will have to repeat the class. There will be one fifteen-minute break in the morning and one in the afternoon so that you can feed the meters. These breaks will
not
—repeat, will not—be deducted from your four hundred and eighty minutes of Traffic School. The door will be locked as soon as the break is over.”