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  “Can I help you find something?”

  I spin around and there he is, barely two feet from me. His question reverbs off the walls of my mind. Can he help me find something? What am I looking for?

  Of course I’ve thought about this moment. In a town the size of Santa Cruz, running into him was inevitable—I knew that. I’d planned a cold shoulder: aloof, busy, pleasantly cruel. I wasn’t going to get caught up. Now I bite my lip shyly and say, “I’m just looking, thanks,” with all the coolness of a starry-eyed groupie dying for an autograph.

  “Claudia Bloom,” he half whispers. I see him swallow, and he folds his arms across his chest, pins his hands in his armpits. We stand there, staring at each other for a dizzy five seconds, until an astonishingly fat woman and her three kids come barreling through the door in search of The Little Mermaid soundtrack. I gnaw on my apple and flip through the bluegrass section aimlessly, trying not to be nervous.

  Why am I nervous? He’s the one with the wife. I flash on a memory of myself digging frantically under his covers, trying to locate my panties amid the tangle of sheets and watching the door for his gun-toting wife at the same time.

  After they leave, a thick silence falls over the store like snow.

  “I was just about to close,” he says finally.

  “Oh, okay—sorry I’ll get—”

  “No.” He laughs. “I mean, you know. Do you mind if I lock the door?”

  “With me on this side of it?”

  “Exactly. If you don’t mind.” Oh, God. He’s just so damn attractive. There’s some sort of heat coming off him, I swear. An image of our bodies braiding together and tumbling to the floor flashes through my mind. Brain, do not think like that. He’s waiting for an answer. Scoot out the door. Plan of cold, disinterested shoulder is not happening. Abort. Abort.

  “Okay. I mean, sure,” I say.

  I watch as he walks to the door (that butt—it slays me), moves the flowerpot inside and turns the key in the lock. “So,” he says, coming back to the bluegrass section, where I’m nervously teething on my apple (the thought of actually eating it now seems repugnant, but the tough skin is comforting between my teeth). “I wasn’t sure I’d see you again.”

  I force myself to stop gnawing on the apple and shrug. “Small town, I guess.”

  He nods. We both start to say something at once; we stop, laugh, start again, interrupting each other once more. “Go ahead,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Nothing—no, I was…” I’ve totally forgotten what I was going to say. “G-go ahead,” I stammer. “You go first.” Claudia, you’ve got a terminal degree, for Christ’s sake—can’t you do better than this? This is thirteen-year-old girl waiting for an invitation to ice cream social, okay? This is not scarf-wearing queen of intellect. That reminds me: must buy scarf.

  “Um…I’m just really embarrassed,” he says. “About what happened last week. You know? It looked really bad and everyone was put in an awkward spot and I just…I’d like a chance to explain.”

  “Okay…”

  “Well, do you want to talk here or…are you hungry?” He nods at the apple. “Is that your dinner?”

  I smile. “Sort of. Yeah, well, I’ve been pretty busy—I guess I am a little bit hungry. Except…” I glance down at the too-tight Goodwill shorts I’ve been wearing for days and my father’s ancient, grease-spotted Calistoga High T-shirt. Did I even comb my hair today? “It can’t be anyplace even remotely nice.”

  “Why—what do you mean?”

  “Look at me, Clay. I’m a mess.”

  He lets his eyes wander on a long, slow trip down my body; I start to blush furiously. By the time he’s looking at my face again, I feel like an overheated tomato. “You look great,” he says, an impish glee in his eyes.

  “Well, whatever,” I reply. “Maybe there’s a taco joint or something?”

  “Mmm, there’s a great place just a few blocks from here. Best carne asada you ever had in your life.”

  We get five minutes into Operation Chance to Explain and things are going all right, even if I am more shy pubescent than icy sophisticate. He’s messing with the cash register and gathering up his things and every move he makes telegraphs that he’s infected with precisely the same prom-night jitters I’ve got. Bizarre. Here we are, full-grown adults (how old is he, anyway? Twenty-seven? Thirty-seven? I have no idea), and we’re bumping into things and forming incomplete sentences at the prospect of going out for tacos.

  Then the phone rings. He gives it a blank stare. It continues its soft electronic bleating twice before he says, “Let’s let the answering machine get it,” and reaches for his coat. On the fourth ring the machine picks up and something deep in the pit of my stomach knows who it’ll be.

  “Hi, Clay? You there? Pick up, okay? It’s Monica.” Long, poisonous pause. Clay hovers near the phone but does not touch it. “I need to talk to you.” There’s a quick sniffle. “Clay, please. I really need to talk.”

  Clay snaps the phone up. “Hi,” he says softly. “What’s up?” I walk away from him, feeling strangely numb. Seconds ago, I was struggling against the heat in my blood just looking at him, and now there’s ice water in my veins. I try the door, but it’s locked. I lean my forehead against the glass and will myself not to listen, but his words float across the small shop to my ears. “I know…it’s not easy for me—don’t say it’s…I just mean I’ve had my rough days, too, you know? Okay…no, I was just closing up.”

  After he puts the phone down he stands there a couple of seconds; I stay perfectly still, waiting for a cue, wishing the door was unlocked so I could just slip outside and let the air clear my head.

  “That was Monica,” he says, and his voice seems very far away. “My, um, wife. Except she’s not really—we’re not really…anyway, she’s having a rough day. It happens.”

  “Of course,” I whisper, still not turning around.

  “What?”

  I turn and face him. “Yes. Okay.”

  “Claudia…” He takes a couple of steps in my direction, but I stop him with my voice.

  “Obviously, you’re busy—”

  “I wanted to see you. I wanted to explain—”

  I laugh, but it’s not a pleasant sound. “I don’t think there’s anything to explain.”

  “The situation’s complicated, okay? I’m not trying to lie to anyone.”

  “Married is married,” I say. “Divorced is divorced.” Finally, my voice has all the icy conviction I’d dreamed it might. Where’s this moral fervor coming from? How many times have I slept with married men—guys I didn’t even care about? “I think this whole thing is just—” the word is slow in coming, because it’s not one I ever use “—wrong.”

  I try the door again, ruining my little speech with a futile shove. “Can you please unlock this?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I want to explain to you where I’m coming from.”

  I lean my forehead against the glass, suddenly tired, and say, “Please. Just unlock it, okay?”

  He crosses the room and I give him plenty of space. Proximity is dangerous right now. Already I can feel the sick emptiness brought on by the phone call giving way to an urgent need to smell his skin. Once he’s got the door unlocked, he turns to me again. “I wish I could just tell you how hard this is,” he begins, but he interrupts himself in alarm. “God, your face is white—are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say tersely. “I’m fine.”

  “Do you feel sick? You’re really pale.” He moves closer, and I back up.

  “Look, don’t worry about me, okay? You’ve got a wife who obviously wants you back. I just don’t understand why you had to drag me—a total stranger—into your little domestic mess.” My voice rises on the last two words and my lower lip trembles slightly; I need to get the hell out while I can. One problem: he’s in front of the door.

  He’s staring at me with a stunned expression, and then he gets a hold of himself an
d steps out of my way. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” I mumble, and bolt.

  That night, lying on my Pine-Sol-scented futon, watching as the occasional headlight sweeps ghostly shapes across my cracked ceiling, I think about Clay Parker. I think about his hands and the almost imperceptible half-moon scar on his left cheek. I immerse myself in elaborate recollections of his tongue sweeping across my clavicle; I play that moment over and over, like I used to do with my Saturday Night Fever 45, never tiring of the repetition.

  I’m so paralyzed. I can’t pursue the guy with his desperate, grieving wife trailing after us all the time. And yet I can’t stop thinking about him: his gentle laughter, his easy way with cats, the dad who hit him and the mom who loves him more than anyone.

  I think of our Freaks and Treats Tour, how exhilarated and young I felt. The roller coaster at the Boardwalk made my stomach drop in the same delicious, terrifying way it does now when I replay his tongue on my clavicle.

  Infatuation. What a country.

  It’s not just that he’s married. That’s part of it, yes, but there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on.

  God knows I’ve had affairs with married men. It never really bothered me before—at least, I told myself it didn’t. There was the fading underwear model in Calistoga, then Roger, a fellow massage slut at Lake Austin Spa. He kept trying to “release my tantric energy,” which meant I had to lie there forever while he performed the worst cunnilingus I’ve ever experienced. There was Jerry Moss, the professor with the Tom Waits voice. That one nagged at my conscience, not because he was married, but because it was the only time I’d ever cheated on someone myself.

  That was how I rationalized it: in all but one case, they were the ones breaking their vows, not me. Cheating on Jonathan with Jerry was the only time in my vast decade of tartery that I actually betrayed someone’s trust. I have a peculiar moral code, yes, but I do have one. I told myself that the institution of marriage was, in itself, a scam, so it’s hard to get sentimentally attached to other people’s vows. It’s like asking a Marxist to give a shit when a capitalist goes bankrupt.

  This time, with Clay, everything’s different. It’s quite sickening, really. I think about the moments before his wife burst through the door with all that sunlight behind her, when he and Medea and Sandy and I were all lying there peacefully, listening to crows cawing outside, watching dawn turn the windows and the skylight an electric blue. I wanted that moment. I wanted to keep it, live inside it again and again. And now I see somebody’s gotten there first.

  I guess when you don’t really want the whole person, when you just want to borrow him for an illicit afternoon or two, an affair is easy. You never meet the woman you’ve borrowed him from and you forget about him soon enough, caught up in the next fleeting pleasure.

  But when you really want him—or at least a chance to try him out—things change. You find yourself stammering incoherent, guilt-tainted speeches in record stores and shoving at doors you know are locked.

  You find yourself studying the shadows on your ceiling, wishing he was studying them with you.

  Oh. Bourgeois coupling crap. Good God, what have I gotten myself into?

  CHAPTER 11

  The first day of school should be outlawed. It’s late September, the peak of a California Indian summer, and the earth is about to crack open, it’s so parched and overheated. Of course, Texas wasn’t exactly a mild climate, either, but at least there I was a student and, since students are granted permanent adolescent status, was therefore expected to show up in tattered cutoffs and slinky tank tops or tiny sundresses that left vast expanses of skin exposed—uniforms that eased the discomfort of stuffy confinement in idea-filled rooms. God, I miss being a student. Today it takes me well over an hour to get dressed, despite the fact that my wardrobe contains exactly six frantically purchased items to choose from. By the time I walk out the door, I’ve spent so much time with an old, melted eyeliner trying to add sophistication to my ill-fitting secondhand skirt-and-blouse ensemble that I look like a cross between Mary Poppins and Courtney Love.

  Approaching my office, keys in hand, the crisis in confidence brought on by my sucky outfit gives way to a moment of speechless awe. There, printed in block letters across the glass panel on my office door is something I hadn’t anticipated: C. BLOOM. Right there, in plain sight. I’ve officially become official. I no longer skulk about in the hallways or set up camp in library nooks like all the nomadic students wandering here and there, looking lost and abandoned. No. My ship has a port, my port a name, and that name is C. BLOOM, Theater Arts Professor.

  I stand there for a long moment, gazing at the letters. Then I reach out and trace the C with one finger, half afraid that it will smudge away under my touch.

  “It’s a trip, huh?”

  I turn to see a woman with dark hair and medieval eyes watching me. She looks about forty; she’s wearing a red wraparound skirt and a black T-shirt that says Runs with Scissors on it. “You must be Claudia,” she says, reaching out to shake hands.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Mare Marquez. I teach dance. First time I saw my name on a door I couldn’t decide whether to cry with happiness or run the other way.”

  I smile. I like this chick. She’s got turquoise rings on every finger and she looks like she’s never worn lipstick in her life. Her cheekbones are high, and her skin is the color of summer spent on beaches eating fresh fruit with brown fingers. “So which did you do?” I ask.

  She laughs. “Neither. I just got out my keys and acted like I was born with my name on doors.”

  “Good advice,” I say, and try my key. Miraculously, I choose the right one and it slides right in. “Hey. So far so good.”

  “My office is down the hall, if you need anything,” she says. “Welcome.”

  “Thanks.”

  I slip inside and look around at the bare bookcases, the beige phone, the corkboard sprouting an assortment of brightly colored pushpins. I pull up the blinds and sunlight floods my wood-veneer desk and the sleek black computer. “So far so good,” I repeat in a whisper.

  I pull out my roster and look at the names for my first class: Beginning Acting. Looks like an okay group. Couple of Brittanys, a Miranda, one Misty Waters (yikes), a handful of Waspy-sounding boys. Let’s see…class doesn’t start until ten-thirty. I’ve still got twenty minutes—plenty of time to figure out a lesson plan. I’ll just quickly check my e-mail, then get right to it.

  TO: Claudia Bloom

  FROM: Ziv Ackerman

  SUBJECT: ccccclllllaaaaauuuuuddddddiiiiiaaaaa.

  Oh, my God, dollface, I’m lost without you. Can’t believe stupid X (refuse to record despicable name here) forced you back to California—I blame everything on that prick. Now my apartment is barren, my outlook manic on good days, Kafkaesque otherwise. The refrigerator is so horrifyingly bachelory; none of your precious little curries or Trader Joe treats in there.

  To top it off, new roomie moves in tomorrow, and he’s one hundred percent testosterone. I swear he eats boys like me for breakfast, washes us down with a swill of battery acid. He’s Transylvanian; his accent sends chills down my spine. Okay, okay, you know me too well—yes, he does look a little like Jude Law (okay, he’s a dead ringer—yum), but that doesn’t mean I’m going to put up with little hairs on the bathroom sink. It’ll either be a total nightmare or a dream come true. Any predictions, my Bloomie?

  How I miss you. Tell me California’s crumbling into the sea, and you’re on your way back home to our little Texas nest. Mr. Transylvanian Jude Law is so out of here, I swear.

  Ciao, my Chica,

  Ziv

  Ah, Ziv. A soft, weepy sigh escapes me before I can stop it. Remember how I told you about the law student I moved in with and subsequently fell for when I got to Texas? That’s Ziv. He’s very sexy in a Johnny Depp, pierced-nipple, can talk about Nabokov until three in the morning sort of way. Lucky for me, he hasn’t slept w
ith a girl since prom night back in Chattanooga, and so we became best friends. After Jonathan moved to New York with Rain, I limped back to my old room at Ziv’s—a drafty little hovel I hadn’t lived in for years. I only stayed there about four months, but it was precisely the right place to nurse my torn heart and battered ego. Ziv can dish on enemies with an almost pathological fervor; he also doesn’t tolerate moping beyond a set statute of limitations (about four minutes). At that point he scoops you up, pours his rich, velvety espresso down your throat and then he drags you off to glamorous bars where he magically convinces the hunkiest men on the premises to flirt with you until you feel you can go on.

  Staring at the screen, I feel a distinct pang of homesickness, thinking of the quirky little apartment we shared on and off during my decade in Austin. I remember the sound of the train from my window, the glass-and-marble shower, the wicked, bitter tricks he and I planned to play on Jonathan—pranks we’d never really try, but oh how we savored our plots. Once we spent two hours detailing how we’d humiliate him at the premiere of his new play: we dreamed up everything from Ex-Lax in his cocktails to announcements over the loudspeaker of his most intimate measurements. Everything about life with Ziv suddenly seems golden: the sound of his espresso machine whirring to life in the morning, his appearance on the edge of my bed, serving me delicate little eggshell-size cups full of deep, dark magic, his eyes already gleaming with the buzz from his first double of the day.

  I hit Reply and let my fingers fly across the keyboard.

  TO: Ziv Ackerman

  FROM: Claudia Bloom

  SUBJECT: Man, you don’t even know…

  …how much I miss you. So far I’ve managed to incinerate X’s bus, become hopelessly entangled with a yurt-dwelling sex machine (married—help—murderous wife still attached at the hip) and am on the verge of losing my job as we speak due to hopelessly frumpy fashion funk. Ziiiiiv. Where is my life? Now am desperately trying to pull off teacher thing and have zero idea how to proceed. Please advise.