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
