I had to laugh. “Now what?”
The man shrugged. “Keep it. Consider it your Welcome to California gift.” He flashed a grin and made his way back into the kitchen.
I eyed the Frisbee uncertainly. It seemed a shame to stop the spin, but how long could I stand here like the Statue of Liberty, especially with a plate of food in my other hand?
“Neat trick,” said a woman beside me.
I turned to look at her and dropped the Frisbee, but caught it in midair. I hastily slid it into one of the many pockets of my leather pants. “Too bad I couldn’t keep it up.”
“Bet he could, though.” The woman gestured with her sharp chin in the Frisbee player’s direction. She was attractive with the anemic, alien good looks of a super model. In her rayon pink dress, pink leggings, and black Chinese slippers with embroidered roses, however, she looked like a little girl playing Cinderella. Her hips were slight, but her breasts held their own against an enormous metal necklace that might once have been part of a chain link fence.
“He certainly has energy to spare,” I said.
The woman examined me with huge, kohl-rimmed dark eyes and introduced herself as “Anna, Anna Mendez,” exhaling each time on the final “a” of her name as if she were doing abdominal crunches: “An-ah, An-ah!”
“I work with Karin and wanted to meet you, Jordan. Karin thinks the world of you,” Anna said in a voice so ragged and small that it wafted in my direction like a scrap of paper caught on a breeze.
“Are you a nurse with Karin at the hospital?”
“A nutritionist.”
Ah. Hence the death-by-starvation appearance. I’d seen more fat on a ribbon snake. “That must be interesting work,” I said.
Anna shrugged. “Not really. People are bent on killing themselves through excess in this country.”
I glanced down at the paper plate in my hand, which sagged in its greasy middle under the weight of artery-choking cheese, pastries, and chips. My leather pants squeaked and wheezed as I shifted my weight and slid the plate onto the tiny folding table beside me, where the fats could congeal in peace. I struggled to think of something to say. “So, how do you encourage people to change their habits?”
“She terrorizes them.” A man joined our conversation. “Our little Anna is a real Discipline Diva with a crop in her boot.”
The speaker was dressed like someone on the cover of a romance novel, in a billowy white cotton shirt, black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black scarf wound in a complicated way around his neck: testosterone on the hoof. He had a sturdy handlebar mustache and shoulders so broad that Karin must have turned him sideways to fit him through her bedroom door. I had no doubt that he’d been there. She would not have let this one go untouched.
Anna introduced us. “This is Ed,” she breathed.
Ed: a name meant to be stitched on a mechanic’s overalls. He had kind dark eyes, but looked too much like a cartoon villain to be truly appealing. Anna, however, devoured his beefcake proportions the way I’d go after a brownie.
“I do not ever terrorize anybody!” Anna was protesting, speaking in the lilting cadences of uncertain women. “You can’t scare anyone into anything? Not really, when it comes to changing their eating habits? Because people have to motivate themselves?”
I was glad that Anna wasn’t my nutritionist. I was also happy that nobody was standing behind us. My butt would look like a beach ball next to hers, which was as small and tight as two clenched fists.
Our conversation meandered. Anna, it turned out, was from Minnesota. “Horrible, horrible place,” she said. “Bleak skies, lots of snow, and nothing but white bread in the bakeries.”
“What about you?” I asked Ed. “How did you end up in San Francisco?”
Ed smiled handsomely. How else could he smile? “I’m an anomaly, a native San Franciscan. Third generation!” He pulled a wallet out of his pocket and displayed a photograph to prove it. A collection of at least two dozen people, all ages and sizes, smiled into the camera. Like Ed, they had strong chins, hairy forearms, and broad shoulders. Even the girls.
“That’s really something,” I said.
Anna looked stricken. “I always wanted to come from a large family. But I was an only child, the spackle on my parents’ marriage.”
Uh oh. Here it was: The California Confession. One thing I’d learned in my two days here was that Californians could bring out the big guns of personal pain on a moment’s notice. Just today, I’d been in the corner market buying party supplies when I overheard one woman emphatically tell another that she was learning to honor her clitoris after her divorce.
“Are your parents still together?” Ed asked, proving his true California colors by forging ahead fearlessly with the conversation.
Anna shook her head, her satiny black curtain of hair swinging around her elfin face. “They got divorced five years ago. That’s when my repressed memories of the emotional abuse first surfaced enough for me to own them,” she explained.
Ed folded Anna into his arms, then cupped her chin in one hand and tipped it towards him. “I want to say one word to you. Just one,” he said. “It’s a word I want you to repeat as you process your past and progress with your life’s work.”
Embarrassed but fascinated, I stepped closer, anxious to shoplift any soul-saving secrets I could use for myself.
Anna’s eyes brimmed. “What is it?”
“Forgiveness,” Ed murmured, stroking Anna’s hair the way you’d calm an anxious horse.
“That is so beautiful,” Anna told him.
That is so much hooey, I thought, as a commotion broke out behind us. Dancers were skipping to the left and right, the women climbing onto the sofa and chairs, the men spinning around, flapping red paper napkins.
“Look out! A rat!” a man cried.
It was a mouse, actually. The terrified rodent scooted between feet and furniture legs. A bearded man in a black t-shirt and black jeans stepped forward with a dish towel held in front of him like a fireman offering a net. “Jump up here, little guy!” he coaxed. “Jump!”
The mouse ignored this invitation and continued to zip around like a wind-up toy. Various people squealed and shrieked, including the bearded man.
Finally, Ed dropped to a crouch, scooped the mouse into one hand and flipped it into his shirt tail. He toted the mouse in this cozy shirt hammock down the back stairs.
A minute later he was back, not even breathing hard. “Dance?” he asked.
I looked for Anna, but she had disappeared in the stampeding herd of mouseophobes. “Maybe just one,” I agreed.
Three, five, then seven dances. I lost count after that. I would never wear leather pants again, I vowed, as sweat streamed down my thighs. Ed didn’t dance like anyone else I knew. He gyrated, strutted, twirled, and even took me in his arms for a number that left me upside down and seasick.
When we finally retreated to the kitchen for more beer, he told me about his family. Ed grew up on a houseboat in Marin with his two sisters, two brothers, artist mother and carpenter father. His father had died five years ago; Ed took his mother out every Sunday for dinner, wrote poetry for love, and made money by taking carpentry and modeling jobs.
“Remodeling?” I shouted over the music.
He shook his head, dark eyes dancing beneath the thick brows. “Modeling.”
“You mean for magazines? Department stores?”
He shook his head again. “Artist’s model.” He struck a manly pose: Atlas on one knee, holding up the world.
“Oh, no!” I laughed.
“No? Well, how about this, then?” Michelangelo’s David was next.
It was easy to imagine these poses in their unclothed entirety. I held the cold beer to my forehead. “Where do you model?”
Two art schools used him on a regular basis, Ed told me. Occasionally he did private sittings as well.
“But doesn’t your construction work interfere? What if you bash your thumb with a hammer or take a two-
by-four to the forehead? Do they still want to draw you when you’re all bruised and splintery?”
Ed grinned, teeth flashing beneath his mustache. Seeing Ed smile was like unwrapping a turkey sandwich when you’re hungry: its appeal was its simplicity. “You bet. The more bruises, bumps, tools, and dust I bring to my modeling jobs, the more they love me,” he said.
The imagery was taking me by storm. I closed my eyes and felt Ed’s breath on my face as he leaned close to kiss me. I let him, and it was better than just all right.
Karin chose to appear at that instant. “Oh good. I’m glad to see that you’re hooking up.” She patted my back pocket meaningfully, to remind me of the condoms she’d put there earlier, hard-rimmed tokens of good luck. A look of confusion crossed her face when she felt the Frisbee instead.
“I’m about to invite Jordan to my house, if you don’t mind the guest of honor leaving early,” Ed said.
“Mind?” Karin rubbed her hands gleefully. “Not a bit. As long as you both PROMISE not to do anything I wouldn’t.”
Ed shrugged. “That should be an easy promise to keep. What do you say, Jordan?”
What could I say, but yes? Here was my golden opportunity to act impulsively for a change, instead of planning my next move. That’s why I had come to San Francisco after all.
Ed drove a filthy Saab with a muffler problem that prohibited all conversation. His apartment was just south of Market and flaunted the same inattention to detail as his car. A couple of webbed lounge chairs stood on either side of the fireplace, a battered chunk of redwood served as a coffee table, the bookshelves were swaybacked wooden planks separated by cinder blocks, and a pair of ancient snowshoes hung on the wall.
“My father’s snowshoes,” Ed said, as reverently as if he were presenting a cremation urn.
In the kitchen, I began to doubt my own intentions as the beer wore off and reality set in. Was I ready for this? There had been a few other men before Peter. (I could still count my lovers on one hand, something that Karin found hilarious.) To varying degrees, I’d been in love with each one. But Peter was the only man who had ever seen the scar on my breast. I thought I’d keep my top on tonight, avoid the issue entirely, then remembered I was wearing a body suit beneath Karin’s leather pants. I’d have to convince Ed to turn off the lights if we got that far.
Stalling for time, I asked Ed to put a kettle on for tea. He lit the stove and plopped a couple of herbal tea bags into a pair of oversized pottery mugs. Tan linoleum curled beneath my boots and the speckled Formica table teetered on the crooked floor, its surface not quite leveled by a wad of newspaper. I could only hope that Ed’s carpentry skills, like Karin’s talents as an OR nurse, weren’t represented by what I saw in their apartments.
I sat down. The leather pants cut grooves into my thighs. My earrings, silver hardware also borrowed from Karin, angled into my neck. I might as well have worn a straight jacket and fish hooks.
I gazed into the mug when Ed put it in front of me. The tea bag puffed and floated like a jellyfish, yellow gradually seeping into the steaming water and sending the aroma of spring grass into the room. What was I doing here? I didn’t know this man. And I hated herbal tea. What was the point of a hot beverage without caffeine?
“So talk to me,” Ed said. His broad shoulders dwarfed the chair.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Do you want to go back to Karin’s?”
“I’m not sure.” I sighed. “I don’t even know what I’m doing in San Francisco, much less here in your apartment.” Ed was watching me closely, his eyes kind. Now that I saw him in good light, he looked older, closing in on forty. “I thought you were interested in Anna,” I confessed.
“I am interested in Anna.”
“So why didn’t you dance with her?”
“Because I’m not interested in Anna the way I’m interested in you.”
“She’s prettier.”
“Debatable.”
“Skinnier!”
“True. But skinny isn’t necessarily a good thing. Anna strikes me as someone who would be very high maintenance. Anyway, why are you trying to get me interested in Anna, when you’re the one sitting in my apartment?” Ed took my hands in his. My hands felt small, safely enveloped, warm. “Are you hoping I’ll ask you to leave? Let you off the hook, so you won’t have to hurt my feelings? Sorry. That’s not going to happen.”
I started to cry. A steady stream of tears rolled down my cheeks, as salty as the San Francisco fog. I sniffed, wiped my nose on a paper napkin and crumpled it. I tossed the ball into the trash basket near the window, banking it off the wall.
“Good shot,” Ed observed.
“Hours of playground basketball.”
“I bet you’re a great teacher.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I sniffed.
Ed’s gaze was steady. “Oh, but I do. You love to dance. You’re a terrific listener. You’re a good friend to Karin, who’s one of the dearest people in the world to me. Your left blue eye has a very interesting spot of brown. And you’ve got a luscious body.”
I blew my nose on another napkin and tossed that one, too. The shot went in again. “You’re right. I’m a good teacher. My fourth graders love me. The parents love me. Even the principal thinks I walk on water. But get me out of a classroom, out of those four walls where I can plan every minute on paper, and my life is a wreck. Karin told you, I guess, that I’m just out of a relationship? That I was engaged, but broke it off?”
Ed nodded. “I think what Karin said was, `Thank God she’s out of that one.’ But listen, Jordan, most people almost get married. A lot of us even go through with it. And then a lot of us get unmarried.”
“Have you ever?”
“Yep. You can’t get to my age and not be married at some point in your life.”
“Why, how old are you?”
“Forty-two.”
Pretty old to be a poet and a model, I thought, never mind scampering around on carpenter’s scaffolding like a monkey. In my circle of friends back home, the fortysomethings were lining their ducks in a row to put children through college.
“You don’t look that old,” I said.
“I don’t feel that old. But I’m that experienced.”
“Where’s your wife now?”
Ed ran a finger around the edge of his mug. “She found herself a house and a man to keep her in it, so she left me. We don’t talk any more.”
“How long ago did you get divorced?”
“Eight years.”
“What was she like?”
He smiled, playing some private reel in his head. “The tough kind of woman you never realize is soft and hurting until it’s too late.”
“Have you been in love with anyone since then?”
Ed laughed. “You ask the worst questions. You must be a relentless elementary school teacher. Yes, of course I have.” He cocked his head at me. “You know, just because you’re here doesn’t mean that we have to hook up. I can take you home. Or you can just spend the night with me and we’ll see how things go. Would you like that?”
“I don’t know.” I was shivering slightly.
Ed rose from the table, washed out the cups at the sink. “Stay with me tonight. I promise you won’t come to any harm or do anything against your will.”
“Have you got a couch?”
“Afraid not.” He led me into the living room. “Just the lawn chairs or the bed. You choose. Though I’ll tell you right now that the lawn chairs have been known to swallow my guests whole and spit them back out on the floor.”
Ed’s bed was inside a closet in the living room. The bed filled the entire closet, and it was a cozy place, covered in a red flannel quilt and lined with blue flannel pillows. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, coming up behind me and resting his hands on my hips. “Let me entertain you.”
“What do you mean?” I looked around for a TV, saw none.
He guided me onto the bed gently. “
Lean back against the pillows.”
“Mind if I take off my pants first?” I rubbed the leather seams along my thighs. “I feel like I’m sewn into a sausage casing.”
“You’re asking permission to remove your clothing?” Ed leaned against the closet door, grinning.
“Just my pants,” I warned.
“Sure. And anything else, if the mood should strike.”
I tugged off the leather an inch at a time while Ed pretended to busy himself with the stereo. My legs were creased and dented with the memory of every seam and metal rivet; the leotard had worked its way uphill in a most unattractive way. “Could I borrow a t-shirt? And maybe some boxers?” I asked. “And would you mind if I took a shower, too?”
“Yes, yes, and a most emphatic no.” Ed gathered things out of his bureau and showed me to the bathroom.
This room was clearly the showpiece of the apartment. The new tiles were red, and inside the shower a black bench ran the length of the wall. I turned on the water and perched on the bench to massage my feet, which still ached from Karin’s high-heeled boots.
It all felt so good that I found myself humming by the time I got out and examined myself in the mirror. Ed wouldn’t necessarily notice the scar on my breast if we did go to bed. I’d just keep the lights low. Or off, better yet. I pulled on his green V-neck t-shirt and a pair of plaid boxers, feeling almost relaxed.
Back in the bedroom/closet, Ed told me to get into bed. I propped myself up against the pillows and waited. He disappeared into the kitchen, put on slow reggae music, then began to dance for me.
He was a good dancer. No surprise there. But then Ed began to strip off his clothes, slowly, unwinding his scarf and draping it over the floor lamp before he undid the buttons of his shirt. The shirt fell to the floor and Ed moved about the room, wordlessly inviting me to admire his broad, smooth back and muscular carpenter’s shoulders.
Sleeping Tigers Page 3