Tainted Love

by Melody Mayer

  Kiley figured Roger had done that intro-wink-thing a zillion times. Personally she found it beyond cheesy, but she noticed that Bruce had a huge grin on his face, as did the two friends he'd talked into joining him for scuba class. The guy was named Jerry—he proudly explained that he'd been named for the counterculture leader Jerry Rubin, whom his father idolized both in his hippie and capitalist periods. He had incredibly bushy hair and an enviable soul patch. The girl was named Sedah, and rolled her eyes when she explained that it was Hades spelled backward. Tall, model thin, and with skin the color of café crème, Sedah was the offspring of an aging British rock star who'd gone through more career transformations than Rod Stewart yet still managed to escape unscathed. He'd married a fashion model from Gabon, and Sedah was their only child. She looked great in a white bikini strewn liberally with real pearls.

  “Okay,” Roger went on, flipping through some permission slips on his clipboard. “Let me call roll, make sure no one's been eaten by the sharks in the pool.”

  Sedah laughed and batted her eyes at Roger. Conquest number one, Kiley thought as Roger called out the names on his list. His flirtations really didn't interest her, though learning scuba did. It was a crucial step toward her brilliant career as an oceanographer or marine biologist.

  The night before, after the concert/picnic, she'd had the most vivid dream of her life. She was on a dive boat off some exotic island in the Seychelles. Tom was with her. They jumped off the dive boat hand in hand, and found themselves in an underwater wonderland. There was a sunken vessel on the ocean floor, but it wasn't a wreck—more like a life-sized version of the boats she used to float in her bathtub when she was a kid back in Wisconsin.

  All around them, fish cavorted, and then two larger-than-life sea horses swam in their direction. Kiley knew what they had to do, which was to climb on the backs of these sea horses and go for an underwater pony express ride wherever the sea horses took them. That's exactly what they did, the fish following them in two long columns that finally merged into one.

  The dream hadn't ended until Kiley's alarm clock sounded. Most of the time, Kiley staggered around the guesthouse like a zombie early in the morning because she'd never gotten used to the colonel's penchant for a pre-seven virtual reveille. Today, though, rising had been a pleasure. She'd been full of confidence. Maybe that dream had been her subconscious telling her that she and Tom were supposed to be together. Even before she'd had her first cup of coffee, she resolved to talk to Jorge very soon, to tell him they should stay friends, but no more. Anything else would be unfair. Thank God they'd parted last night with just a chaste kiss.

  Once roll call had been completed, Roger asked all the students to get into the water and swim four laps in the Olympicsized pool without touching the sides. Any stroke would be fine—he just wanted to check their endurance. Swimming was the only sport Kiley had ever really enjoyed. She passed this test easily. In fact, she was the first one done.

  “You're a swimmer, I see,” Roger commented as she climbed out of the pool and brushed water from her thighs and arms.

  “A little.”

  Roger rubbed his abs again. “Then you'll love this.”

  Kiley wasn't sure if he meant his six-pack or scuba. Whatever. She had zero interest in him.

  The other students all passed the swim test, too. When everyone had dried off, Roger showed an instructional video on a monitor that had been set up in a shady area just east of the pool. After the glitzy introductory beginning that Kiley thought looked quite a bit like some elements of her underwater dream, the class got a run-through of the equipment they'd be using. There were the oxygen tanks that would hold her air; the regulators that would deliver a specific amount of air with each breath she'd take; her mask; a snorkel so that she could breathe at the surface without lifting her head; plus weight belt, flippers, and more.

  There was a lot to take in, but Kiley was tracking everything with a clarity of purpose she'd rarely felt before. From time to time Roger would stop the video, do some extra explaining, and then make eye contact to make sure that his students understood what they were watching.

  Jerry's hand shot into the air.

  “So yo, check it out,” he began. “My mom is all freaked because she says this is like dangerous.”

  Roger brushed his own abs again. They were still there. “Actually it's an exceptionally safe sport. Way safer than, say, snowmobiling or skling. Does your mom freak when you do those sports?”

  “Oh yeah. But that's just how she is. She's already stressing about driver's ed.”

  “Well, tell your mom that the biggest issue with scuba diving is probably sunburn,” Roger said.

  “She slathers on the SPF five hundred,” Jerry quipped.

  The group chuckled, and Roger waited for the laughter to die down. “You're all going to be really well trained,” he promised. “When you're forty feet down and you run into a problem, you need to keep your wits about you. Last time I checked, human lungs don't mix well with inhaled water.”

  Sedah laughed as if that was the funniest thing she ever heard, and swept her magnificent hair off her face in an obvious effort to get Roger's attention. It worked. He gave her a wink of her very own.

  “Okay. Sedah and everyone else. You guys ready to get started?”

  The class moved to the far end of the pool, where Roger had the equipment stashed in piles for each of his students.

  “First we're all going to suit up. Just like in the video. I'll come around and help everyone. Don't be shocked by how heavy your tank is. Once you're in the water, it'll feel weightless. When you're suited up, please sit on the edge of the pool.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the entire group had their gear on. Bruce and Jerry helped each other while Kiley and Sedah did the same. Meanwhile, Roger checked everyone's tank and equipment, spending a little extra time with Sedah. Then he slipped into the pool, wading into water up to his waist.

  “This end of the pool ramps down toward deep water, obviously,” he began. “One at a time, I want each of you to come in and walk toward the deep end. Put on your masks, but you don't need your flippers just yet. Put the regulator in your mouth, but don't turn it on. This is just for practice. Then, when I give you this signal, I want you to duck underwater like this.” He made a downward motion with his palm, and then slipped underwater. A second or two later, he popped up again.

  “Come on, man,” Bruce exclaimed. “That's too easy. Let's get to the real stuff!”

  “Tell you what, Bruce, when you want to be an instructor you can try to convince the certification board that you have a better way to teach,” Roger suggested.

  “Also known as: my way or the highway, Bruce baby,” Jerry boomed, and everyone laughed again.

  Bruce scowled. Roger pointed to him. “Okay, hotshot. You want to be first?”

  “Definitely!” Bruce stood unsteadily under the heavy tank but made his way to the near end of the pool.

  “Put the mouthpiece in,” Roger counseled as Bruce stepped into the water. It reached his knees, his waist, and finally his chest. Roger motioned him down, and he slid underwater and popped up three seconds later.

  He spit out his mouthpiece. “That's amazing. The tank doesn't weigh anything underwater.”

  Roger smiled. “Thanks for trusting me. Kiley, you and Sedah next. Side by side.”

  Kiley stood easily and then gave a hand to Bruce's friend to help her up.

  “Mouthpieces in,” she told the girl, feeling utterly confident. She couldn't wait until they got through this silly exercise and started to actually breathe air from the tank. She couldn't wait for her first real dive, outside the confines of this pool. There would be so much to see. Fish, porpoises, coral, lost wrecks from bygone eras—an entire universe. Her universe.

  The water reached Kiley's knees, then her waist, and then the top of her tank suit. She saw Roger give her the okay sign. This was the moment Kiley had been waiting for her whole life. The beginning of something mag
ic, something she had wished for and dreamed about. She had the hugest grin on her face when she ducked her head under the surface water.

  The feeling came over her in waves: dizzy and woozy, then nauseated. The pool was whirling, her head buzzed, her heart pounded. She couldn't—couldn't breathe. She felt her knees buckle. …

  “Kiley! Kiley!”

  Her name was being called from far away. She opened her eyes. She was prone on the concrete next to the pool. Roger was looking down at her with concern in his eyes; the rest of the class formed a ring around them.

  “Wha-what happened?”

  “You blacked out,” Roger told her, checking her pulse. “You feeling okay?”

  Blacked out? How was that possible?

  “I'm okay …I think.” She saw Bruce and his friends just behind Roger and managed to wave at him in what she hoped was a reassuring gesture.

  “You taking any medicine? Under a doctor's care? Eat anything strange?”

  Kiley shook her head. “No, nothing. Bruce had the same thing I did for breakfast. Juice, cereal …”

  “Man, if you tell my mom about this my ass is grass,” Jerry quipped. Kiley laughed weakly, which helped to break the tension.

  “Well, your pulse is okay, Kiley,” Roger announced, “that's good news.” He turned to the other students. “Let's take fifteen, you guys. Out of the tanks, go get some water.” He checked his Casio dive watch. “Back here at twelve-forty-five. Kiley, you rest right there.”

  The instructor waited for the class to scatter before he spoke to her again. “How are you feeling now?”

  “Fine.” Kiley sat up.

  “Ever fainted before?”

  Kiley shook her head. “Nope. I have no idea …I feel great. Normal.”

  “Good. Because I'm going to walk you back into the water, and we're going to do it again. Just you and me. Forget about what happened before. Could be as simple as the temperature difference on your skin between the cold water and the sun shocking your system. So, you ready?”

  Kiley nodded and stood. She was utterly baffled about what had just happened to her and was utterly determined to do it right this time.

  She and Roger walked to the near end of the pool, and started down its gentle slope toward the deep water. The cool water reached her knees, her waist, and again the top of her swimsuit.

  “You good?” Roger asked.

  “I'm fine.”

  “Okay then, mask on.”

  Kiley put her mask on. So did Roger.

  “Regulators in.”

  They put in their mouthpieces. Once Roger saw that Kiley's was securely in her mouth, he made the same downward motion with his arm. Kiley sank beneath the water.

  Oh God.

  It happened again. She was dizzy and nauseated. She couldn't breathe. She felt as if she was going crazy, or dying. Her heart pounded. It was horrible, the worst thing she had ever experienced in her life. It took all her will to push up so that her head was out of the water before she passed out again.

  She ripped off her face mask, panting, gulping for air, trying hard not to cry. “I—I don't—”

  Roger put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Kiley, have you ever heard of panic disorder?”

  No, it couldn't be. Please God, don't let me have it.

  “Kiley?” Roger prompted.

  “My mother.” Kiley's voice was flat. “She gets panic attacks.”

  Roger nodded. “Maybe there's some genetic basis for it. Something in your family.”

  “I can't have it. My mother is … she's afraid of everything and I'm …I swim all the time. I swim underwater. Why should I get an attack when I've got the gear on, and not when I don't have it on?”

  “When you're swimming underwater you know you can surface at any time. In your gear, you might be fifty feet down. Or sixty. Or deeper. So even though you weren't deep now, psychologically … maybe you were.”

  Kiley realized she was crying, salty tears mixing with the chlorinated water on her face. She fisted them away. How could she hope to study the ocean if she couldn't submerge in scuba gear? What a joke. She looked up. Bruce and his friends had gathered at the edge of the pool and were staring at her with concern. Or maybe it was pity—the same pity that she had felt for her own mother so many times.

  “Talk to your doctor,” Roger recommended. “You're not the first person to discover it the hard way. And better here in the pool than out on the ocean.”

  “Thanks. I guess I'm done for the day, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  She trudged out of the pool with the gear she feared she might never wear again, wondering whether she was not just done for the day, but done for life.

  “Good evening, and welcome to my humble abode.”

  Beverly Baylor bowed low with a theatrical flourish, and then enveloped Esme in a bear hug as if they were long-lost friends, instead of two people who'd crossed paths at the Craft Services tent on a movie set a few days before. Esme suffered through the embrace. Where she had grown up, there were friends and there were strangers. Beverly was definitely a stranger.

  The soap opera business had been good to the movie star. She lived in a white, ultramodern house on Tenth Street in Santa Monica that she currently had up for sale. Esme had tarried at the For Sale sign on her way to the front door, and extracted a one-page dossier about the house. It was a knockdown property built in the mid-1990s, which meant that Beverly had purchased a previous house on this same plot of land and knocked it down to build this one. With five bedrooms, high ceilings, windows that soared toward the roof, and a backyard spa and patio, Beverly was asking a cool 3.4 million dollars. Beverly herself was bathed in the soft yellow light of her entryway. She wore a lavender silk peasant shirt, tiny purple shorts, and leather lavender-beaded sandals. It was an outfit that would have been appropriate on a woman half Beverly's age, even if the star did have the surgically adjusted body to make it work.

  Esme had been surprised when Beverly had called her the morning after her visit to the movie set and begged for a tattoo appointment even before the Chinese one was lasered into oblivion. The actress explained that she wanted cowboy-style body art on her inner thigh, since the current love of her life was rodeo champ Maverick Saturn. They had been dating for three months. Beverly had confided details of startling intimacy, such as when and where they had first had sex (third date, in the stables at Will Rogers State Park). Why the inner thigh? Beverly wanted to mark the spot that her cowboy loved to kiss the most. When Esme pointed out that Maverick might not be thrilled by the idea of smooching his own image, Beverly giggled and suggested that would not be a problem for this particular Wyoming cowboy.

  Way too much information.

  Esme had invited Jonathan to join her, but just as he had been all week, he was shooting back in Topanga Canyon. She'd left the twins with Tarshea; they were screening Bruce Almighty for the zillionth time in Steven and Diane's home theater. At least she could breathe easy now that Ann Marie and Tarshea had hit it off nicely at the club. Tarshea had called to set up the interview, in fact. Surely she'd get the job. She was a great girl, and was going to make Ann Marie a fabulous nanny.

  Beverly ushered Esme inside. The front entryway opened to an enormous family room that Beverly bragged had just been redone in a southwestern motif. A brown leather sofa with an elk skin thrown over the back dominated the room, along with camel chairs in the shape of riding saddles. There was a free-standing twenty-foot stone fireplace. Above it was a rack of antique firearms and a mounted elk's head that presumably once belonged to the creature whose skin was currently adorning the sofa. Cowboy art and photographs from the Old West covered the walls, including an enormous depiction of the Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona. Esme got close enough to read one of the epitaphs on a headstone. “Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a .44—no Les, no more.”

  “I redecorated for Maverick,” Beverly gushed, “and I just adore, adore, adore it. It's so earthy. He shot the elk. Lo
ok at this picture.”

  She pointed to the far wall, where there was yet another oversized framed photograph. This one was of a rangy blond guy in a cowboy hat, chaps, and vest, along with the actress herself. Beverly was entwined around him, as naked as Maverick was clothed. He looked to be about twenty-five.

  “Isn't he delicious? He's going to do a guest run on my soap in the fall, as a mysterious cowboy who comes to town and steals my heart because I have amnesia and don't remember my husband and three children. So, come meet the girls. Girls!”

  The actress called toward the kitchen, and two women approximately her age marched out into the family room.

  “The artist!” a very blond woman cried, clapping her hands. She was even skinnier than Beverly, and wore a tight black miniskirt, white tank top, and thigh-high boots with Lucite stiletto heels.

  Beverly did a quick introduction. The blond was Kirsti and proudly announced that her husband was a full partner at Endeavor. The redhead was Elena, a regular on another ABC soap. She was another size nothing, with wavy, glossy hair and cheekbones that could cut glass. On her left ring finger was a diamond the size of a golf ball. She waved it in Esme's direction. “We've heard so much about you.”

  Beverly motioned toward her two friends. “Oh darling, you're going to do everybody. That's what makes it so fun.”

  “Botox parties are so last year!” Kirsti laughed.

  Now Esme understood. This was to be a tattoo party, though no one had bothered to inform her. She did some quick arithmetic. If she did all three women, it could take four or five hours. Maybe longer. At the rates that Jonathan had quoted, she could leave with … well, a shitload of money.

  Still, she felt a professional obligation to set them straight before she got down to work. “It takes at least a couple of hours to do a really good tattoo. Longer, if you want me to do it freehand.”

  “Oh poo, that doesn't matter. We've got all night.” Kirsti grinned and then reached for a bowl of shelled macadamia nuts on Beverly's coffee table. She brought a fistful of nuts nearly to her mouth, and then smacked her right hand with her left hand. “Bad hand. Very bad. No nuts for you!”