Tart

by Jody Gehrman

  My eyes wander down the screen dreamily; when I notice the numbers there, they set off a screeching siren of alarm in my brain. Oh, my God. Ten forty-three? How? How did that—?

  Happen. Jesus. Okay, breathe. Where is class? Grab roster, paper, pen (teachers always have paper and pen, right?). No—wait. Grab snazzy fake-leather binder with notepad given to self at new-faculty orientation. There. Much better. Now: bag, pencil, coffee cup, um…should have syllabus, but no one really has those on the first day, do they? Think, Claudia, think: will create effortless and convincing excuse about missing syllabus, or better yet, not mention at all and let them think this is How We Do Things in College. Lipstick? No time. Will get all over teeth. Hair poofing out in back? Hell, it is. Oh, well, just don’t turn around. Never want students looking at ass, anyway.

  I sprint down the hall and turn a corner at breakneck speed. Looking for room 812…let’s see…690…692…turn another corner, still running, and whack. Sudden impact: coffee explodes, snazzy fake-leather binder propels across hall, scattering rosters in all directions. Looking up, I see a small, dark-haired woman recovering her balance, and I realize I’ve fallen flat on my ass. Get up, Claudia. Christ. I scramble to my feet and a burst of ridiculous, self-conscious laughter erupts from my throat; when I see the look on the woman’s face I ineptly disguise my nervous giggles as a coughing fit. She’s got a handkerchief out now and she’s violently jabbing at the fist-size splotch of coffee spread amoebalike across the breast of her snow-white blouse.

  “I am so sorry—I didn’t even see you,” I stammer, hovering awkwardly as she continues to scowl and scrub at the stain. “Can I help? Do you need some water or something?”

  “It’s not coming out—I think I’m burned.”

  “Burned. Ohhh. I’m such an idiot. Listen, let me help—do you need some ice?”

  “Forget it,” she says. “Just—forget it.” She stands there in her crisp, formerly perfect outfit: navy blue skirt, neutral stockings, suede pumps, freshly ironed blouse, her dark hair impeccably smooth and silky; the stain looks so out of place, it has the same childishly comic effect as a mustache drawn on a supermodel. I stifle another giggle.

  She studies me for a moment. Surprise, recognition, and then—what? Irritation? Rage? They all register in her eyes in rapid succession. She strides away from me abruptly, as if it’s my face, not my coffee, that’s burned her.

  Weird, I think. Well, shit, she can hardly hate me just for bumping into her, whoever she is. Hopefully she’s a traveling book rep and I’ll never see her again. I look at my watch. Aargh—10:50. I’ll be fired.

  Please, please, God—I’ll never ask for anything again—just let me get through this day.

  Striding into the black-box theater, I force my face into a semblance of confidence. The chattering gives way to a deafening silence, and I feel fifty eyes on me, inducing a powerful sense of vertigo.

  “Hello, class. My name’s Claudia Bloom. Any questions?” Delete. Delete. You’re supposed to actually teach something before you ask for—wait. Someone’s got a hand up. Okay, here we go; this is easy. A girl sporting a wild tuft of indigo hair is looking at me with cranky indolence. “Yes?”

  “Wasn’t this class supposed to start, like, half an hour ago?”

  “Every day but the first day.” Twenty-five bewildered faces look at one another skeptically. “Acting is all about waiting. Timing. Patience tempered by instinct. It’s about grueling hours spent hovering between worlds. You people—you’re the ones who stuck it out. I like to know who my hard-core actors are, right from the get-go. I can really only focus on a select few.”

  “Half the class left already,” a boy in overalls offers. “Some of them went to Westby’s office.”

  “You see. You think they’re going to make it? Huh? If they can’t stand a measly twenty-something minutes waiting for their instructor, you think they’re going to tough it out when their agent hasn’t called in months? You think they’ll have the stamina for those long hours of nervous fidgeting when they’ve got a couple lines in act one, scene one, and they don’t have their big deathbed soliloquy until act three, scene four? If they have to go running to the dean’s office whenever things don’t go precisely as planned, you think they’ll tolerate the wild, passionate life of the thespian and all of its incumbent bull—”

  “Oh, Claudia.” I spin around and Ruth Westby, the department chair, is watching me from the doorway. “You are here.”

  “Yes. Of course I am,” I answer innocently.

  A bony, middle-aged woman in enormous pink glasses files in with a handful of disgruntled others in tow. “Well, she wasn’t here,” the woman tells Ruth. “She must have just—”

  “It’s fine, Ruth,” I say. “It’s an exercise I like to do on the first day. Nothing to worry about.”

  She hesitates for a second; her dark eyes linger on my face, and I feel my stomach knotting up painfully. Then she nods and smiles pleasantly. “Happy first day, then.”

  She disappears. And suddenly it’s just me. And them. With no lesson plan. The woman in pink glasses is staring me down like a babysitter who just watched her ward tell a bald-faced lie to the clueless mother. “All right, then. Let’s see. Why don’t we start by learning each other’s names?”

  “Where’s the syllabus?” Pink Glasses asks.

  “Syllabus?”

  “Yeah. You know. Piece of paper. Says what we can expect, how to get an A, all that. Frankly, I’m just shopping around.”

  “I see.” There’s an awkward moment of silence. I clear my throat. “Well, frankly, I don’t offer a syllabus until after the first week. So, as I was saying—”

  “Why not?” Pink Glasses again. She reminds me of a praying mantis, folded at hard angles into the too-small chair. Her real eyebrows have been completely plucked, and she’s painted new ones into high arches above the rims of her glasses, Wicked Witch style; she would be terrifying if she weren’t so annoying.

  “Tell me your name, please,” I say in my coolest, most collegiate tone.

  “Ralene Tippets.”

  “Well, Ralene, I don’t want to call this an audition, precisely, but I need to know who’s serious before I commit. You understand? Once I know who’s staying, I’ll hand out a syllabus.”

  “That’s not even legal,” she says. “You can’t discriminate.”

  “I’m talking about a series of exercises, Ralene. A get to know you week, during which we will determine who is serious and who is not. You’re shopping around for classes. I’m shopping around for students. I think that’s fair, don’t you?”

  “It might be fair, but it’s not legal,” she scoffs, looking around her for support. The others are noncommittal; they study their fingernails or keep their eyes on me obediently.

  “Okay,” I say agreeably. “So phone the police.”

  Her spidery eyebrows arch halfway to her hairline, but she shuts up.

  “Now then,” I say. “Anyone care to review what we’ve covered so far?”

  Tuft of Indigo raises her hand. “Yes?” I smile. “Go ahead.”

  “You were just telling us how the losers who went running to Westby were never going to make it.”

  By four o’clock I’ve got a screaming headache. I know I should go to the health club I picked out in the yellow pages and get a membership, then swim laps and end the day deliciously sweating to death in the steam room, but any activity involving human interaction sounds positively impossible. I can’t bear the thought of nodding politely while some beefy guy in spandex shows me how the treadmill works. Medea’s the only living creature I can deal with right now. I’m so sick of smiling and saying, “Nice to meet you,” and forgetting everyone’s names and standing in front of rooms filled with hot, grumpy, sticky people. Oh, man. I just want silence and the cool, fizzy comfort of a vodka tonic.

  All day I’ve gotten the distinct impression that I’m the straggly little mutt among purebred poodles. Most of the other professors are app
roximately twice my age and are making gallant attempts to take me seriously. I think most of them were fighting the urge to pat my head. My students, it would seem, are undergoing a more delicate process of suspicion tempered by a desire to please. I’ll need to perfect a few clever teacherly tricks to get through the week—like learning to dash off cryptic, alarmingly intelligent phrases on the blackboard, or how to lean casually against the podium without sending it smashing to the floor like I did today.

  On my way home, I drive past the Owl Club, and there’s Clay’s bike parked at the curb. No, Claudia. Do not…

  I pull over to the curb, park and, taking a deep breath, head for the bar, where Clay is seated.

  “Hi,” I say, climbing up on the stool beside him. “Didn’t know you were a regular.”

  He smiles. God, that yummy, crooked grin. If only I could capture that look in a bottle, dab a little behind my knees when I need a pick-me-up. “Don’t go spreading that around town.” He checks to make sure the bartender’s not listening, then leans in closer. “The regulars here spend holidays on the psych ward.”

  “Then I’m in good company,” I say. “After today, electric shock sounds soothing.”

  “That’s right. First day at school, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” I’m a little surprised. “How did you know?”

  He shrugs, downs a swig of beer. “I just do,” he says. Weird. “I bet you blew them all away. If I’d had teachers like you, I never would have dropped out.”

  “Ha.”

  “What does that mean?” He catches the bartender’s eye. “Mikey, can we have a vodka tonic over here? Actually, make that a double Absolut tonic with extra lime. And another Heineken.” He turns back to me. “Seriously, I bet you’re fantastic in the classroom.”

  “You want to know a secret?” He nods. I drop to a whisper. “Dude. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.”

  He laughs. It’s a big, full-bodied laugh that puts me at ease with its generosity. It’s the kind of laugh you want to hear every day. “You see? Any prof who’s willing to admit that is already a thousand times cooler than most.”

  It’s 3:00 a.m. and Clay Parker is branding the pale, smooth skin of my inner thighs with a crisscrossing trail of kisses. His lips are hot, and I imagine, a little drunkenly, that I’ll awake with tiny, mouth-shaped burns in the morning. Everything before this moment is a blur: C. BLOOM on my office door, the stick-insect woman in pink glasses, me balancing precariously on a stool at the Owl Club, drinking Absolut from a lipstick-smudged highball. It all dissolves like swirls of smoke, leaving only Clay’s hands pressing my knees wide, his head bending again and again with each kiss in a series of slow, reverent bows, like a holy man in the midst of prayer.

  The room spins slightly as headlights slice through the blinds and dance across the walls in a dizzy web of moving shadows. I’d like to stay here forever, trapped in the heat of our bodies, encased in this dark room, the occasional rumble of a passing car our only reminder that we’re not the last human beings on earth. Clay hovers over me, tastes my mouth like he’s sampling a rare, exotic fruit. Every kiss, every touch, is infused with the concentration of a blind man. He’s studying me. His hands are mapping out my curves, his fingers memorizing the places where my bones jut out, where little dips form shadows, where the flesh is swollen and ripe.

  “Please,” I say into his ear, cupping his hips and pulling him toward me. “I want you inside me.” But he hesitates, lingering, denying us both. Then he works his way back down my body, and I lose myself in the moist world he opens with his tongue: a shuddering explosion of water-muted colors, like fireworks set off on the ocean floor.

  CHAPTER 12

  Once, when I was very altered on Texas slammers and Mexican weed, I wrote the Tart Manifesto. I was twenty-two and in love with myself which, apart from being intensely obnoxious for others, isn’t a bad state. I didn’t save it; the three pages of largely illegible, drool-stained rantings were way too incriminating. But I do remember the first line: The dedicated Tart always seizes the day: never put off sex or dessert.

  Not exactly something I’d silkscreen on a T-shirt, but at the time it seemed profound.

  This philosophy started taking shape back in high school, when it seemed the rest of the world was in on a secret I’d been excluded from. At sixteen, I was tired of go-nowhere make-out sessions and decided to trade in my virginity for something of real value: experience. My cousin Rosemarie was almost two years younger than me, but she’d had sex twice already in the back of her boyfriend’s rusty old Cadillac, so I was in a hurry to catch up. She said it wasn’t anything like the movies made it out to be—there was no slow-mo, no searing-hot sound track. According to her, it was all propaganda. “Once you do it, you’ll wonder what the big deal is,” she’d said. “I was still waiting for it to get good, and then it was over.”

  Rosemarie was right about most things, but I needed to find out for myself. I checked out candidates for months. I wanted someone who’d know what he was doing, but would also be discreet, and not go bragging about it to the Neanderthals in the locker room. Not that I minded people knowing, necessarily; I just wanted to do the telling. I hated the thought of unworthy punks taking my rite of passage and turning it into their poorly scripted jerk-off fantasies.

  I decided on Enzo Belluomini, the Italian exchange student. His skin was a little pockmarked with acne, but other than that he was a lovely candidate. He had espresso-dark eyes, wore the most fantastic, Euro-chic sweaters, and when he was tired he often slipped into Italian, as if his brain were a radio station picking up a distant frequency. I chose him because I wasn’t in the slightest danger of falling in love, and he was grateful without being sloppy or sentimental. It worked out well; he did, as luck would have it, know quite a lot about sex—at least the mechanics of it. He’d been seduced by his sister-in-law back in Rome, and they’d been indulging themselves while his brother was away on business for several years. That was why his parents were so eager to send him abroad; if the brother ever found out, it was likely there’d be bloodshed. This story excited me more than a little, and I’d have him narrate the whole tale again, in Italian, while we made it in my father’s basement. Even now, hearing Italian or finding myself in the dank, cement-and-boxes smell of someone’s basement gets me aroused.

  But in general, Rose was right—sex wasn’t the all-powerful, magical drug we’d imagined. It was, like anything else, something you had to get good at. You had to learn what made your pulse quicken, and then you had to figure out a way to communicate that, usually without words, so you didn’t insult the guy or kill the mood, or come off as pushy. It was a complicated, subtle language, and even after fourteen years of practice, I wasn’t sure of my fluency.

  Except with Clay, sex is something else. It’s not about guarding his pride, or mine, or sending secret messages. I don’t lie there wondering how my body measures up to the airbrushed porn of his fantasies. The two nights I’ve spent with him have taught me more than all my years of one-night stands combined. With Clay Parker, I don’t have anything to prove; it’s not an audition, or a performance. It’s effortless. I feel his hands on me, his mouth searching my body, and then I’m far above the earth, looking down at the small, remote world, and it’s not vertigo that makes me gasp, but joy.

  Monday, week two: I’m having a bout of morning confidence. The caffeine buzz is coming along nicely, and I’m wearing my new sky-blue skirt with a cute T-shirt and adorable patent-leather shoes. Over the weekend I broke out the credit card long enough to score a couple of passably decent outfits. I usually avoid credit cards—the massive debt of my early twenties saddled me with a real phobia—but I’ve got a grown-up job now, so I deserve a little indulgence.

  Turning the corner toward my office, clutching a Java House mocha in one hand and half a bagel in the other, I see something that makes me stop so abruptly a splash of mocha leaps right through the tiny hole in the plastic lid and onto my white T-shirt. I sti
fle the “shit” that springs to my lips and scurry back around the corner. Leaning my back against the wall, I fight the urge to hyperventilate.

  It’s okay, I tell myself. He hasn’t seen you.

  I peek around the corner with all the stealth I can manage, considering that I’m also scrubbing at the spot on my T-shirt with a napkin while balancing the bagel on top of my mocha. There he is: navy-blue uniform, billy club dangling ominously from a holster, scary crew cut with Nazi origins.

  I close my eyes and the bus explodes again. The taste of hot gasoline fills my mouth.

  Oh, Jesus, let him go away. What’s Westby going to think if she walks down the hall right now and sees an officer of the law pounding on my door? Surely she’d politely inquire if she can be of assistance? Surely he’d reply that he’s looking for C. Bloom, car thief, arsonist and cat abuser?

  Why am I worrying about Westby? Forget about my job or reputation, we’re talking about my freedom to shower without ten mustached lady cons sizing up my tits.

  Maybe I should turn myself in. Don’t they lessen the sentence? I’ll march down the hallway, dissolve into tears and confess all. Maybe if I offer him a blow job he’ll tell his superiors I’m dead.

  I nearly drop my coffee when a staticky squawking sound fills the hallway. I peek again and see Scary Cop is gripping his walkie-talkie thingamajigger and striding quickly in my direction. Jesus! Heart racing, I shove against the nearest door and pull it shut behind me. I’m so intent on concealment I turn and trip over a desk, sending my bagel in an arcing trajectory through the air. It lands, cream cheese down, at the foot of a podium.

  My relief at having escaped the strong arm of the law is so intense that only when I hear the laughter do I realize I’m standing in a large lecture hall. My eyes dart furtively from the sea of faces to the podium to the person behind it: Ruth Westby.