Tart (3 page)

T
art
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, ac
cording 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 lit
tle 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.

I
t'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:

C
lay 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:

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.”

I just smiled, wondering if there's anyone who loves me more than anyone.

Now that we're here in his yurt, I'm a little daunted by the intimacy of it. I find myself standing in one big round room, lit by several candles and a brass lamp. I look around at the kitchen sink and the rustic, homemade-looking armoire and the (oh, God) king-size, quilt-covered bed all right there in plain view. We've been wandering for hours from one indulgence to the next, the ocean breeze messing with our hair, and now suddenly we're encased by his bookshelves and his record player and his barbells on a thick wool rug. His dog, an old mutt the color of caramel that answers to Sandy, pants and wags her tail in a frenzy of joy as her master runs his hands all over her paunchy body.

“You surf?” I ask, noticing a large surfboard, yellowed like a smoker's teeth, propped up next to the armoire and another, bright turquoise, near the door.

“Yeah.”

I nod. Usually, I find surfers to be a bit of a turn-off; California clichés generally make me want to heave. In this case, I can't even work up to a sarcastic remark. Even surfing seems cool on him. “It's a sweet place,” I say, stuffing my hands into my pockets.

“Oh, yeah? You sound surprised.”

“Well…” I shrug. “I'd never heard of a yurt. The way you described it—I mean, its Mongolian origins and all—I was picturing some yak skins stretched across a driftwood frame.”

He laughs. I like his laugh very much. It's throaty and resonant, sexy as hell. Is it my imagination, or is it tinged now with just a shade of nerves?

“Here.” He hands me Medea, who is back in her box, probably puffed up again and pissed off. At least we did her the favor of leaving the motorcycle at Nick's and getting him to drive us out here. She couldn't reasonably be asked to put up with another death-defying ride, especially after all the drinks we've had. It was ten miles, easily, and though they were spouting off names at me—“Empire Grade” and “Bonny Doon”—I've no idea where we are. You'd think I might be wary, given my habitual fixation on mass murderers, but nine hours of continual conversation have allayed those fears. If Clay Parker is in any way homicidal or rape-inclined, then my instincts are so terrible I deserve to be strangled and cannibalized.

“I'll put Sandy out so we can let Medea get her bearings.”

“Are you sure? It's her—” I struggle to remember its name “—yurt, after all.”

“Oh, she's dying to get out. It's no problem.” He slips out the door with her. The yurt walls are canvas-thin, so I can hear him saying soft, reassuring doggy things to her as they crunch around in the grass.

I coax Medea out of her big-haired, frantic state again, though she can't stop smashing her nose against all the canine-scented furniture with a mad, panicked expression. “Yes,” I murmur, trying to make my voice as warm and reassuring as Clay's. “We're in dog territory, babe. Don't worry—they don't all bite.”

The weird thing—I mean the really weird thing—is that this afternoon-into-night-into-wee-hours with Clay has got me pursuing lines of logic I've never dared pursue before. Not even with Jonathan. Studying Clay's face in the dim, reddish glow of the Saturn Café, I found myself wondering what a baby would look like with his eyes and my mouth. God, is this my baby clock talking? I spent a whole semester of Fem. Theory my sophomore year writing papers on the topic: how the patriarchy created the baby clock mythology to con women into surrendering to mommyism. At the time I was twenty-one, giddy with the right to get drunk in seedy bars and swivel my hips against this boy and that to frantic techno rhythms. What did I know about biology, except that beer gets you drunk and sex makes you—momentarily at least—something like happy? Now, eight years later, I find myself contemplating how a stranger's eyes would look in my theoretical baby's face over a plate of Chocolate Madness.

What do we know about each other? Hardly anything. I know he's an atheist, owns a record store, graduated from Berkeley and was a drummer in a punk-rock band called Poe when he was fifteen. He knows I love theater, directing more than acting, that I grew up in Calistoga and went to Austin in search of cowboys. Hardly enough résumé fodder has been revealed to warrant the swapping of spit, let alone genetic material. So how can I explain these freakishly domestic fantasies streaking though my psyche like shooting stars?

“You two okay?” Both Medea and I spin round at the sound of his voice. “Still a little skittish, huh?”

“Who, her or me?”

“Both.” He's standing in the doorway, keeping Sandy from entering by gently nudging her away now and then with one leg. “Come out here, will you? I want you to see something.”

For a fraction of a second I hesitate—
Dismembered Arm and Paw Found in Remote Woods
—but then I remember Clay's story about adopting a baby raccoon when he was eight. He named it Zorro and fed it with a bottle, for Christ's sake. Would a guy like that dismember a girl like me? I extricate Medea from my lap carefully and follow him outside.

He leads me down a short path in the dark, mumbling, “Watch your step.” When we get to the middle of a broad, grassy meadow that smells of yarrow and pine, he looks up and I follow his gaze. Oh, my God. Above us, the stars stretch out in luxurious multitudes, crowding the sky with a million pinpricks of light. I feel suddenly minuscule and happy. I think briefly of Jonathan's bus packed with all my belongings, reduced now to a charred pile of ash sweeping off on the night breeze. Out here, it doesn't seem like a big deal. I'll figure it out. Dwarfed by the enormous carpet of stars, I take a deep breath for the first time in days.

“Smells so good out here,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think it's the stars, myself.”

I squint at him in the dark, wanting my eyes to adjust so I can study his eyes. “The stars have a smell?”

“Yeah, I think so. Don't you?”

I look back up at the layers and layers of them, so vast they surprise me all over again. “Never occurred to me.”

“I think everything's different in the presence of stars. Food tastes different—”

“Different, how?”

“Saltier, I guess. And sweeter. Music's different, too—more dreamy, and lonelier. More—” he pauses, and I can see his silhouette clearly now; his face is tilted upward “—more longing in it. And everything takes on this particular scent. You smell it, don't you?”

“Mmm-hmm,” I say, thinking he'd make a damn fine Romeo if he were ten years younger—he's got that dreamy-melancholy thing going.

“Wait a second,” he says, and sprints back the way we came. In a minute I hear music floating on the warm September air: acoustic guitar and a melody I've never heard, but it's like I already know it and love it. Some things are like that; sushi tasted totally familiar the first time I put it in my mouth. My parents were choking on the wasabi and I just went on chewing with the gentle smile of someone coming home.

The man singing has one of those resonant, ragged, sexy voices that comes from someplace deep and cavernous in his smoke-filled lungs.

With your measured abandon and your farmer's walk, with your “let's go” smile and your bawdy talk.

Clay returns, and he stands so close to me that our arms touch.

“You see? Sounds different under the stars, right?” he asks.

“I haven't heard it any other way,” I say. “How can I be sure?”

“You're not a Greg Brown fan?”

With your mother's burden and your father's stare, with your pretty dresses and your ragged underwear…

“I could be converted,” I say, smiling. “I've just never heard him before.”

“Never heard of—my God. Talk about deprived.”

The skin of his arm feels very warm against mine. Hot, in fact. I lean slightly toward him so that more of my skin touches more of his.

“It's good you're not set in your ways,” he says. “If there's one thing I'm evangelical about, it's music.” It's a good thing I refuse to analyze this; if I did, I'd hear the whispered implication that he plans to evangelize me.

“This song's been haunting me all day,” he says. “I think
it might be about you. Tell me the truth, Greg Brown's in love with you, right?”

“Can't get anything past you,” I say, but now I want to shut up so I can hear the song and find out what Clay thinks of me. I can only catch certain lines now and then, though, between the crickets and the breeze playfully tousling the pines.

With your pledge of allegiance and your ringless hand, with your young woman's terror and your old woman's plans…

“Uh-oh. I just realized,” Clay says. “I'm doing it again.”

“Hmm?” I'm still straining to hear the song.
Will your children look at you and wonder, about this woman made of lightning bugs and thunder…take in what you can't help but show with your name that is half yes, half no.

“I'm being a DJ.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I do this when I'm nervous—try to talk through music. Not even
my
music. Pathetic.”

“I don't think it's pathetic,” I say. “I think it's sweet.”

He turns slightly, and so do I, and our arm contact becomes my breasts fitting warmly against his chest, and now the sound of his breathing is so close it blends with everything else: the shimmery pine needles and the cricket-frog chorus and the lyrics I can't quite follow anymore.

He bends down slightly, the shadow of his face moving toward mine, but instead of the expected searching lips, I feel his teeth biting down gently on my lower lip. I suck in my breath.

“I wanted to do that for hours,” he says, his voice thick in his throat.

“Bite me?”

“Mmm. Taste you.”

This guy's not normal, I think, and a montage of our day unfurls inside my brain with the frenetic pace of time-lapse photography: the bus exploding into ribbons of orange and yellow, the kaleidoscope of the pool balls at the Owl Club,
Nick and his jelly-smudged Ramones shirt, Clay feeding me calamari with his fingers. His mouth closes on mine now, and I can taste the day there, the effervescent weirdness of it, the unshakable sensation that I'm being marked by every minute.