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,
