We decamped from the carnage at Foxen, leaving Susan an outrageously generous tip, and headed north in the direction of Paso Robles, meandering along the serpentine two-lane Foxen Canyon Road. The prevailing afternoon winds had sprung up and the local raptors were out tracing black, foreboding circles in the sky. More vineyards in full bloom fled past us like film through a sprocketless projector that would not turn off. In the rearview mirror I could make out the royal blue Toyota FJ Cruiser, Laura and Carmen aboard, right on our tail. It hadn’t been much of a decision for them. We were all high on wine and once I convinced them that they’d have no trouble making their midnight flight out of LAX the next day, they were up for more adventure.
In a low voice so my mother and Joy couldn’t hear, I told Jack about going down on Laura in the vineyard and her nearly coming just at the moment my mother careered down the hill. Jack laughed so hard tears reddened his eyes.
“How was she?” he asked.
“Fucking hot.” I lowered my voice even more. “She’s got hair all down the inside of her thighs. Positively animalian.” I raised my voice again. “Plus, she knows a lot about film and literature. Superbright chick.”
“There you go,” Jack said.
“Yeah, but she lives in Spain.”
“You like Spain. Maybe after this trip you should move there, shack up with her, and write that next book you’re all brain-crippled about.”
“I told her I wanted to come. But I didn’t tell her about my flying issues. How am I going to get there? That’s a fourteen-hour sustained panic attack.”
“I’ll fly with you, dude.”
“How about you and Carmen? Is there a spark there?”
“I think the chick wants me,” Jack said, a self-satisfied grin archly planted on his face. He patted his stomach. “Despite the belly.”
“She wants Jake.”
“Jake. Jack. Who gives a shit? What’s your line: ‘sometimes reality is more fiction than fiction’?”
“Yeah.” I motored down my window. The air was warm, and fragrant with the odors of the indigenous flora. I shot a backward glance and found my mother with her head cocked to one side, fast asleep, lightly snoring, the wine having served as anesthesia. Joy sat dutifully next to her, her eyes trained out the window, enraptured by the passing countryside. Snapper lay in the shape of a comma on the rubber-matted floor, napping by his food bowl.
“Why don’t we pull over?” Jack suggested. “Laura can ride with you and I’ll ride with Carmen.”
“Better if my mother doesn’t know they’re coming with us to Paso.”
“Dude, she already knows. She may only be firing on three cylinders, but half an engine still puts her in the upper twentieth percentile.”
“I don’t want you pulling over and hitting tasting rooms and doing Carmen on some country road and then losing the trail.”
“I know where we’re going,” Jack, pussy on the brain, argued. “And I’m not going to do her in the car. What do you think this is? A frat party?”
“It’s only a few hours to Paso. Let’s just mellow out until we get there.”
Jack produced two plastic cups, defiantly poured them half-full out of the bottle he had cadged from Foxen and handed one to me. It tasted divine. And I desperately needed divinity after my mother’s headlong plunge toward oblivion. I could just see the headline: “Author’s Mother Perishes in Freak Wheelchair Vineyard Accident—Wine Involved.”
“Don’t let my mom see it,” I whispered to Jack.
“No problem, short horn.”
Jack glanced out the rear window. “Chicks are right on our tail.”
“Did you think they were going to ditch us?”
“It’s happened.”
We wended our way back to the 101 past an apparent infinitude of lush green vineyards and rollercoastering rangeland. There was something so pacific in these untrammeled vistas that an unaccustomed serenity fell over me.
We finally reached the freeway. I exhorted a grumpy Jack to cork the Foxen and stow the sippy cups under the seat. We peeled off on the north onramp and sped in the direction of Paso Robles, Laura and Carmen right behind us, as if their Toyota were on an umbilical cord connected to our Rampvan. God, I thought, a little Pinot in the mid-afternoon, a woman who is a vision of pulchritude and desires me, blue skies, nowhere to be, no clock to punch, no baleful employer, my best friend in the world next to me cracking me up and laughing again as if he—we!—had no cares in the world . . . why wasn’t I happy?
“This celebrity thing is weird,” I muttered to Jack, growing philosophical.
He turned and looked at me. “How so?”
“Well, I was nowhere, nearly homeless, as you know, and suddenly one book, one movie, and I’m hoisted to some ethereal plane where everything seems sort of Barmecidal.”
“What the fuck? Jesus, Miles, you should have to go one week and only use words with less than three syllables.”
“Fewer. But don’t tell me you don’t know the meaning of Barmecidal?”
“Bar, definitely. Homicidal. I’m getting there!”
I laughed. “Anyway, means the illusion of abundance. Barmecide was a nobleman in The Arabian Nights who served an imaginary feast to a beggar.”
“Why?”
“To mess with his head. Same reason rich people do most of the shit they do.”
“Asshole!” Jack snarled.
“Anyway, I’m just worried I’m at that illusory feast and soon I’m going to be that indigent beggar. I’m already dreaming about it. My unconscious is fatalistically conditioning me for The Fall!”
“Just go with it, Miles. Try to enjoy the moment and not get all tangled up in your fucking intellectual psychoanalyses.”
“I’m trying to. But I’m wondering if I’m getting away from my true self. I mean it’s sort of an out-of-the-body experience to go into these tasting rooms that the movie, instigated by me, made famous, and see all these amateur wine enthusiasts with my book, crammed together swilling like they’re on the eve of the Apocalypse. Then doing all kinds of crazy shit like that guy back at Foxen.” I shook my head to myself. “Then you meet some pretty girl and a half an hour later you’re licking her pussy in a vineyard. It’s like something you would make up to impress your friends at a party or something and no one would believe you.”
“Well, believe it,” Jack said. “Because it’s all happening right now.”
“But we both know it’s fleeting. Look at you. Seven years ago you were a hot TV director, and now look . . .” I cut myself off, not wanting Jack, who was feeling momentarily liberated from the onuses of his life, to sink into a miasmic depression.
“I’m a loser now, is that what you’re saying?” Jack countered in a voice tinged with hurt.
“No. You’re the same Jack, but your circumstances have obviously dramatically changed. And mine will, too. This won’t last forever. You know that.”
“Well, you can choose to enjoy it while it does last, or just let all this fun pass you by and then five years from now regret that you didn’t partake.”
“Yeah, but my overriding question is: am I losing the person who created all this celebrity in the first place? You know my famous adage: what you’re doing is what you’re becoming . . .”
“. . . And what you’ve done is what you’ve become. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boo-hoo.”
“Yeah, but tell me, am I becoming just some wine whore? Propped up to promote a product? You think it’s enviable—and I suppose in some ways it is: the women, the hard-to-find artisanal wines suddenly there when you want them—but I’m afraid the ground is foundering under me. And I’m afraid that I’m medicating myself with wine to numb myself to all these concerns. I mean, I should be back in Santa Monica writing right now.”
“Miles. Look in the rearview mirror.” He adjusted it for me. “What do you see?”
I could make out LAU-ra and Carmen laughing and bouncing up and down to music we couldn’t hear. “Happy girls.”
“Hap-py girls! Ex-actly! Fun, Miles.” He closed his hand into a fist and rubbed it against my unshaven cheek. “Have you forgotten our little conversation the other night?”
“The live-for-the-moment lecture?”
“That’s right, dude. Live for the moment. Because all your brilliant Jungian insight isn’t going to mean shit when that blood clot rockets to your brain.”
I nodded, unconvinced.
Jack tacked. “And this trip isn’t without purpose. You’re doing a very humanitarian thing. You’re taking your poor mom to live with her sister.”
“My poor mom who didn’t even want to have kids,” I reminded him.
“Whatever. She needs you now. And you’re coming through, man. I wouldn’t want to be in that place where she was living. That’s no life. You’re fucking saving her from a fate worse than death.”
“I guess,” I said, the wine starting to wear off and a low-grade depression burrowing into me like a pernicious corn weevil. “But all the women. I mean, I could be sleeping with a different woman every night.”
“Why don’t you?” Jack said.
“Because that’s not what I’m looking for. It takes a lot of effort. Plus, I’m worried I’ll get jaded. I sometimes wonder if I’m only going to be able to get off if I start doing some really kinky shit to them like that famous actor whose name we won’t mention who could only get off by peeing on them in showers and then masturbating on their faces.”
“Who was that?” Jack asked.
“Sorry, Jackson. I can’t really divulge the name because it would compromise the woman who was the recipient of his kinky fantasy.”
“I don’t really want to know anyway.” He looked at me and mused, “How the hell did we get to golden showers?”
We rode in silence for a while. I glanced back several times at my mother and Joy. My mother was still snoring in her chair. Snapper, in tune with my mother’s wine-induced slumber, slept at her feet. When she had been released from the hospital after her stroke and returned to her condo, her dog had kept her company in the desolate stretches when she was all alone. In the process she had so anthropomorphized the little monster she was practically married to him.
“How’re you doing, Joy?” I asked in a voice low enough not to wake my mother, who would immediately clamor for a pit stop.
Joy turned and looked at me. “I’m fine.”
“Are you having fun?”
She pointed out the window with one of her diminutive fingers and said, nodding, “Beautiful scenery.”
“Central California. Yeah, it’s very beautiful. Still somewhat undiscovered. I bet you could find work up here easily. You’re really good at what you do. And I appreciate your patience with my mom.” I pointed a finger at her in mock reproof: “But you’ve got to be a bit more vigilant with that little devil there.” I shifted my gesticulation to Snapper, whose ears suddenly straightened and his eyes popped open—as if he heard and understood me!
“I will,” she said. “I promise.”
In the tiny town of Templeton, just south of Paso Robles, following our trusty GPS, we took the Las Tablas Road turnoff, rode a few miles, then hung a right on Vineyard Drive, a winding stretch of ten miles that coursed tortuously through beautiful, opulent vineyards and towering trees, until we came to Justin Winery, a beautiful tract of wine property. A lot of money had been poured into the place by the owners, who I was informed were out of town. Their palatial estate stood sentinel on the highest knoll. All it was lacking was a moat and guards patrolling with automatic weapons and they could have weathered a natural disaster, swilling the finest wines and guffawing at the chaos the world had been plunged into. My kind of life!
Jack and I tumbled out of the Rampvan. Joy roused my mother, who spluttered awake, and then wheeled her out after Jack and I had dutifully extended the ramp from the van’s undercarriage. Behind us, Laura and Carmen braked to a halt, climbed out of their rental and stretched their hands, fingers splayed, to the sky. Their armpits were shaded with hair. I glimpsed wild boar stampeding in their dark eyes.
Laura came up to me. “It’s so beautiful here, Miles.”
“Not as beautiful as you . . . LAU-ra.” I raked a hand through her lustrous dark hair. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
She smiled. It was beautiful. All you could hear was the sonorousness of birdsong emanating from the wooded surroundings. The atmosphere was a hothouse of redolent plant smells and the hum of an ungoverned insectary. It was a sweltering afternoon, but I could already begin to feel the cooling air rushing in from San Simeon, streaming off the chilly Pacific. I felt refreshed, rejuvenated, invigorated. God, it felt good to be out of LA.
“Mom, this is Laura—whom you met—and her friend Carmen. They’ve come up to see me speak tonight,” I properly introduced the lovely Spanish pair.
My mother, still groggy from the wine at Foxen, shook their hands and fortunately didn’t say, in her unrepressed way, anything that would alienate them. Since her stroke, she had a disconcerting habit of expressing exactly what was on her mind, uncensored, unbowdlerized. After shaking their hands, she looked all around her and drank in the beauty of Justin’s property. She pointed that gnarled finger of hers at the sky, as she was wont to, and rhapsodized, “Oh, this is to die for, Miles. Why can’t I move here?”
“Because you’re going to live with your sister in Wisconsin.”
“Oh, that’s right,” she said obliviously, as if she truly had just awakened to the point of the trip.
“Besides, you’d be drunk on wine all day. Because that’s all they have here, Mom, is wine and more wine.”
“Oh, don’t make fun of me. You drink, too.”
“I drink. You drink. We all drink for ice cream.” Everyone laughed, giddy with the exhilaration of having landed in a new place.
“Oh, stop it,” my mother said. “You’re being silly now.”
I looked up and noticed that Joy had drifted off and was facing toward some topiary shrubs. She took a few blasts off a joint, snuffed it out in her little Altoids tin, then returned to where we were milling around, smoke curling wispily out her nostrils, a smile tucked on her face, the mood adjustment having been effected.
“Feeling better, Joy?”
She smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
A few minutes later, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a sparse beard that seemed to only flourish around his chin came out to greet us. An amiable-seeming mixed-breed dog trailed him. Snapper, now on a leash, barked like crazy, growing defensive at the sight of the much bigger animal.
The man affably introduced himself as the director of sales and marketing and said his name was Mike. He pumped my hand. “I’m so honored to meet you, Miles.”
“Nice to meet you, Mike.”
I introduced our motley crew, including Laura and Carmen. As Snapper and Mike’s dog continued to yelp and sniff each other’s privates I pulled Mike aside and said, “I know you only have four rooms in your bed & breakfast and I realize my publicist only booked two. But there’s been a little change in the configuration of our party between Bien Nacido and here. Is there any chance that one of the others is unoccupied?” I leaned close to him and said in an undertone: “When my friend has sex he’s so loud I can’t concentrate.”
Mike chuckled as he glanced at Laura and Carmen. “As a matter of fact, we kept all four for you so you would have complete privacy.”
“Great,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Are there a lot of people coming to the event tonight?”
“It’s sold out.”
“No shit. I haven’t prepared anything. Now I’m nervous.”
“Just be yourself.”
“Easy for you to say. If I’m just myself it could end in pouring spit buckets over my face.”
“Yeah, I saw that on YouTube,” he laughed.
Chagrined, I wiped a hand across my face.
Mike patted me on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”
I broke away from Mike and approached Carmen and Laura, standing off to the side, puffing Gitanes. “You’re in,” I said.
“Is it expensive?” Laura asked.
“It’s all comped,” I said. “Won’t cost you a peseta. And dinner’s on me. Wine’s free. All you can drink. So, put your traveler’s checks in your money belts; they aren’t good here.” The girls looked at each other and shrugged. God, it felt good to wax munificent instead of sneaking Ben Franklins, back when there were any to sneak, from my mother’s upstairs safe.
I went over to where Mike was chatting up Jack. They bore the same bearish features and each possessed an easy sense of humor, laughing frequently.
“Hey, Mike, I think we’d like to get settled in, take a power nap, maybe have an early dinner because my mom probably will be put to bed before the show.”
“No problem,” Mike said. “Let me show you your suites.”
Being special guests for the event, we didn’t have to bother checking in. Mike called an assistant who came and helped us with our luggage. Carmen and Laura had the clothes on their backs—and not for long, as Jack, lips pressed to my ear, wolfishly reminded me.
The Just Inn, as it’s known, consists of a block of two structures with four guest suites. They’re gray, wood-shingled buildings engirded by dense vineyards that, now it was the middle of late July, were leafed out in a profusion of variegated shades of green. My mother was in heaven. I could see it in the glow of her face and it made me happy.
“Pretty nice here, Mom, isn’t it?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, as Joy continued to push her in the direction Mike was taking us.
“See, all that money you loaned me when I was broke didn’t go to waste, did it?”
“Oh, no. I always knew you were going to hit the big time.”
I laughed. I was in a good mood myself. Jack was in a good mood. Laura and Carmen thought they had stumbled onto Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.
Mike led my mother and Joy to the Tuscany Suite, a 600-square-foot room done up in kind of a European style with tapestried curtains and a marble bathroom. Laura and Carmen were given the Provence suite, beautifully appointed with leather-upholstered chairs, marble-tiled bathroom and a sisal rug half-covering a gleaming hardwood floor. And Jack and I commandeered the much larger Sussex suite. It was a little frou-frou for me with its canopied bed and Provençal upholstery, but I wasn’t complaining. All the rooms featured beautiful stone fireplaces. And even though it was the summer and stiflingly hot in the hills, I fantasized an image of a crackling fire, a glass of Justin’s finest and Laura snuggled next to me on the couch.
I let Jack carry the luggage into our suite while I accompanied my mother and Joy into theirs to make sure everything was okay. My mother would never have stayed in a place like this when she vacationed. The height of her travel accommodations would have been a Marriott—or worse. When she saw her sun-dappled room she broke into tears.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
She had trouble voicing her answer. The tears choked her words. “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“Okay, Mom, the restaurant opens at six-thirty, and I know you like to eat early so you can get your wine . . .”
“Oh, yes,” she chimed in.
“So, Joy,” I said, turning to her. “Get her bathed and ready by then, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Are you all right?” I asked. I was constantly concerned about Joy. This trip was a big undertaking, a huge risk for me, and I couldn’t afford to lose her due to apathy, or worse. But the money I was paying her was ten times what she would be making at Las Villas de Muerte, so I had that to counterweight my worries. I leaned in close to her and whispered so my mother couldn’t hear. “I’m going to try to make more pit stops so you can . . .”—I brought two fingers to my lips to pantomime smoking.
She giggled. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Come here,” I said. She didn’t move, so I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her and murmured in her ear, “I know it’s hard taking care of my mother. I know she can be a real bitch at times. Just ignore her. She’s had a massive stroke and she doesn’t mean most of what she says. She’s very needy. This is a long trip, but we’re going to get there, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“So, we’ll come get you around six-thirty. All right?”
“All right,” she said.
Raising my voice, I directed it toward my mother. “We’ll see you in a few hours, Mom. They have a terrific restaurant here with a lot of tasty Chardonnays.”
“I can’t wait,” she said, as she stared out the window at the vineyards.
I left the room and went over to the Sussex where Jack and I were bivouacked. In the capacious suite I found Jack sprawled listlessly in one of the mahogany leather armchairs. He had already opened a bottle of the complimentary wine. I must have been a special guest because the complimentary bottle was Justin’s signature wine, the Isosceles, a Bordeaux style, a gold medal winner at some wine festival, with an impressively high score of ninety-four from some wine magazine. I poured myself a glass, kicked off my shoes and slumped onto the couch across from Jack who looked at me, grinning, nodding, his face already florid.
“You’re living the life, Miles,” he said. “You are living the life.”
I sipped the wine. It was massive, still young, with a walnut mouthfeel of tannins, but had a softness to it from the addition of Merlot and Cabernet Franc that made it satiny, velvety. A beautiful wine. And although Pinot was the grape variety I was hopelessly in love with, this was a wonderful palate change.
“You know,” I said, “I wondered why they invited me to speak because Justin doesn’t make a Pinot.”
“You’re the wine dude, man,” Jack said. “All wine sales, except Merlot, are going through the roof. These people owe you. You’re good publicity for them.”
“This is quite a setting, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful,” Jack concurred. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to go back to LA and my shitty one-bedroom in Silver Lake.” He shook his head to himself at the deplorable image that had suddenly blossomed in his imagination. In an effort to efface it, he drained and immediately refilled his glass.
“So, Laura’s going to be staying here with me. And you’ll be down with Carmen.”
“I will be down with Carmen.”
“Laura confided to me that Carmen hasn’t had a man in her life since her divorce, so I’d go light on the grape if I were you. You don’t want to disappoint her.”
“Speaking of which,” he said, setting his glass down. “Do you have any more of those Vs?”
I set my wineglass down, went over to my suitcase, rooted around in my toiletries kit, found the vial of Viagra, shook out three, then walked over to Jack and slipped them into his open palm. “These are a hundred mikes, dude. You’re still young. I suggest only taking a half.”
Jack dropped the three blue, football-shaped pills into his shirt pocket and said, “Okay.”
I returned to the couch and my Isosceles and rummaged for my cell in my pants pocket. There were four messages. One was my publishing agent in New York beseeching me to come up with a one-sheet (synopsis) proposal for my next novel. It would be too late to call her back in New York. Besides, I still didn’t know whether there was going to even be a next novel! The second call was from the indefatigable Marcie, wondering whether I’d made it to Paso Robles “in one piece”—knowing my penchant for getting derailed at tasting rooms and canceling events last minute she had worked hard to set up. The third call was from my older brother. He was pretty lit up, slurring badly, and would never remember that he’d made the call. The fourth was—and I leaned forward when I heard her voice—from my ex-wife, Victoria. She was just checking up on me, seeing how I was doing, wanting to know how I was “holding up.” Relations had normalized between us. I had e-mailed her about the proposed trip. She thought it was pretty crazy, but since she was no longer controlling my life and colonizing my unconscious, she ended with “whatever.” Now she was checking up on me! Worried no doubt that I had gotten into another one of my wine-fueled adventures that was sure to end in disaster.
I returned Marcie’s call. She answered on the first ring. “Hey, Marcie, it’s Miles.”
“Miles. Did you make it to Paso?”
“I made it to Paso. I go on in four hours.”
“Good,” she said, sounding reassured. “How’s it going with your mom?”
“Everything’s going great. There was a little mishap at Foxen Winery earlier today, but—”
“What?” she said, cutting me off.
“I don’t want to go into it, Marcie. Everything’s fine. I’ll make the IPNC, don’t worry.”
“What about the Amex black cardholders’ dinner at Per Se in New York?”
“I don’t know. I know it would be good promotion for me to hobnob with billionaires, but . . . but the Silverseas Cruise thing with me as the enrichment lecturer, keep that one on hold. After this trip I may need to get on a cruise ship for two weeks.”
“Okay,” she said. “Knock ’em dead.”
“I always do, don’t I?”
“And don’t drink from the spit bucket. You don’t need that kind of publicity.”
“I hear you, Marcie. No antics. Take it easy.” And I hung up.
When I looked up Jack had disappeared. I heard the shower running. Jack was lustily belting out a tune I didn’t recognize. I took a sip of wine, then straightened to my feet and drifted over to the picture window. The immaculately manicured vineyards stared back at me, nonpareil in their beauty. The pre-twilight sky was streaked with cotton candy-like clouds colored orange by the fading light of the sun.
I left the Sussex suite and sauntered out into the vineyards, wineglass in hand. When I was far away from everything I sat down cross-legged in the dirt. The ripening grapes were drooping pendulously on the vines. I picked a grape from one of the clusters and bit down on it. Sour; they would need more ripening, of course, before they were ready to be harvested. Wine is so complex, I mused. Thousands of experts and hundreds of thousands of amateur experts would rhapsodize or vilify the vinification of these seemingly simple bunches of grapes. But in the end, it was just these innocuous clusters, photosynthesis, rain or no rain, cool ocean breezes, alluvial soils, that produced these epiphanies in the bottle hundreds and thousands of miles away.
I studied the wine in my glass. Held it up to the descending sun. It was garnet-colored in the glass. My thoughts drifted to Joy’s foot and what it must have been like to wake in a hospital and have a doctor inform her that it might have to be amputated. I felt sorry for her, and it changed how I felt about her all of a sudden. Next my thoughts strayed to Jack. His life had changed so dramatically in the last five years. He had journeyed as far as he could go to the other side since his marriage ended and sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t slowly killing himself on purpose. I had trouble thinking about my mother. It was true what I said at Foxen that we had never been close. I realized suddenly that I didn’t really know her. And though her stroke had hobbled her speech, her ability to ambulate, her memory, she was still a human being and maybe there was a reason she had survived the congestive heart failure, even though at the time I had chastised myself for having called 911 and summoning the paramedics to come in and save her life.
Reflection provided me no answers to these complicated life questions, so I hoisted myself to my feet, clapped the dirt off my pants and shirt, and walked slowly back to the huddle of suites. The fading light of the sun painted them in a golden hue, drawing me toward them like a fairy-tale realm.
When I entered the Sussex suite, Laura and Carmen, looking refreshed—lipstick, makeup, wet hair—half-filled wineglasses in hand, were there yakking away with Jack.
“Miles, where were you?” Jack asked in his now booming voice, fueled by a second bottle of Isosceles which he had uncorked in my absence.
“Oh, I just took a little walk. Trying to come up with something original to say tonight.”
“Here, let me refresh your glass,” he said.
I came toward him and extended my empty glass. He started pouring. “Hey, hey, just a half. I’ve got to give a talk in a couple hours.”
“Oh, right, I forgot,” Jack said. Then he impishly poured another splash. “Here’s so you don’t get nervous.”
I backed away from him and eased down next to Laura on the couch. I looked over at her. Her eyes were flashing and she wore the most beautiful smile on her face. “How’s your room? ¿Muy bonito? Like you?”
“Sí.”
I leaned into her and she pressed herself next to me and all my fears and anxieties about having invited her and her friend up to Justin evaporated. “Hey, Jack, did you know Laura is studying directing at the University of Barcelona?”
“No,” Jack said.
“She’s made a couple of award-winning documentaries, but she wants to get into fiction features. I’m going to write her a script.”
Jack, feeling happy—the wine, the girls—said to Laura, “Miles is a great writer.” He toasted me with his glass. “And the smartest guy I know,” he added magnanimously.
“Coming from Jack that’s not necessarily a compliment.”
The Spanish girls laughed. When they laughed, they were happy. And that made Jack and me happy. Happiness not generally being my forte.
“Hey, I just had a brainstorm,” I said. “Laura and Carmen should come up to the IPNC with us and document this trip. What do you think?”
“Brilliant,” Jack said.
I turned to Laura. “What do you think?”
Laura exchanged looks with Carmen, and they shrugged at each other.
Exhilarated by the wine, I said, “You’ve got Martin and Jake from Shameless, Martin’s mother in a wheelchair, and a pot-smoking Filipina caretaker. And . . . and a Yorkie terrier. I mean, you can’t make that shit up.”
Everyone laughed.
“If we had more time,” Laura said.
“It was just an off-the-wall idea.”
“Miles is having ideas all the time, girls. I don’t think he ever relaxes that big brain of his.”
I raised my glass. “That’s slowly shrinking.”
Everyone laughed.
“What’s your next novel, Miles?” Carmen asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Everyone keeps asking me that. Maybe I’ll do a Thomas Pynchon and disappear for seventeen years.”
“You’re not Pynchon,” Jack said.
“How would you know? You’ve never read Gravity’s Rainbow.”
“I’ve read enough to know.”
“What? Like five pages?” I turned to Laura. “Have you read Pynchon?”
She nodded. “He’s, how do you say in English? Impenetrable.”
“Impenetrable! I agree.” I turned to the three of them. “I want to toast Laura and Carmen. An unexpected surprise. Right, Jack?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
Fueled by the wine, I added bombastically: “Are there two more beautiful women in the Central Coast?”
Jack raised his glass. “If there are, they’ve had a lot of surgery.”
Everyone laughed.
At 6:15, we walked over to the Tuscany suite to gather up Joy and my mother. Joy had bathed my mom and styled her hair and sprayed her with a spritz of her favorite cologne and she looked ten years younger.
“You look nice, Mom,” I said. “Do you have a date?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I wish I did.”
“You have Jack and me.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m starving . . . and I need a glass of wine.”
“Coming up,” I said. “Coming up.”
Together, the six of us trooped down a path of dirt and gravel toward Deborah’s Room, Justin’s on-premises restaurant. It’s a small, high-ceilinged space with only a handful of tables. I wondered how it sustained itself with just the four suites on the property, as it would be a long haul for anyone living in the area.
The menu was very limited, but ambitious, with just three entrées. We all ordered the prix fixe with the restaurant’s wine pairing. The wine list was small, but adequately represented the world, traipsing from Burgundy to the Rhone to New Zealand to California. They started us with a ’97 Bollinger Grande Année Brut. My mother loved champagne, but she had never experienced a vintage one like this. It had a toasty, yeasty, chalky quality to it and it disappeared quickly with the six of us, so we ordered another with the first course.
Then they moved us on to their reserve Chardonnay, a big buttery, full secondary malolactic fermented wine my mother rhapsodized as “the nectar of the gods.” As we progressed to the entrees, we moved into the reds. I was in an expansive mood, so, from the handful of Bourgognes rouges, I broke ranks from the pairing selections and asked for an ’02 Domaine Mugneret-Gibourg, Grand Cru, Echézeaux, an ethereal wine that had everyone exultant except my mother, who stayed with her ambrosial Chardonnay.
“Mom,” I said, to reel her into the conversation which Jack had been dominating with apocryphal stories from our lives that had spawned my book. “Do you remember the time you almost burned the house down trying to make french fries?”
“I remember,” she said, her face a little slack from wine.
“Phyllis, you burned the house down trying to cook?”
“My mom couldn’t cook, could you, Mom? You could resole your shoes with her roast beef.” Everyone reared back in laughter, including my mother. “Our family dinners lasted like ten minutes. Everyone just wanted to get away from the table.”
“So, how did she almost burn the house down?” Jack said.
“Do you want to tell the story, Mom?”
She shook her head.
“She put this huge pot of oil on the stove to make fries, then she went into the family room and had a cocktail. Then, a couple more cocktails. The next thing you know the pot of oil had ignited and the whole kitchen was on fire. There was so much smoke we had to crawl out the front door on our hands and knees. Do you remember that, Mom?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I forgot about the oil.”
“Mom, you burned down half the house because you were drunk.”
“That’s not true,” she said. Then she looked at me with a pained expression. “Why would you say such a thing about your mother?”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Besides. We got a whole new kitchen from the insurance.”
Everyone laughed and that seemed to mollify the slight tension that had sprung up between mother and son.
I put a hand on my mother’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I didn’t mean that, Mom,” I said in an undertone.
“I was not drunk,” she said.
“Okay, I said I’m sorry.”
She held out her empty glass. “Can I have another glass? You made me upset.”
Feeling guilty, I refilled her glass without doing battle with her. Joy glanced over circumspectly. Now, I felt doubly guilty and reached for my glass of ice water.
As eight o’clock rolled around, a middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair and a friendly smile materialized at the table and reminded me it was close to time to go on.
“All right, let’s rock and roll, it’s show time,” I said, animated by the wine.
My mother had grown drowsy. She tried to inveigle “just a smidgen more” of Chardonnay, but I wouldn’t let her have it. It would have been unfair to Joy, who’d have to do bedtime with my mother half in the bag. I whispered to Joy that she should put my mother down and not bring her to the event because there would be more wine there, but that she was welcome to attend.
Outside, the night sky was speckled spectacularly with stars. Cricket-song chirred loudly, making me realize just how far out in the country we were. Guests had started arriving en masse and the headlights on their luxury cars were blinding, spraying the vineyards and the various winery structures and lighting them up.
Jack, Laura, Carmen, and I made our way over to the winery, laughing, cracking jokes.
We entered the winery, laughing, our arms around one another like a foursome of college kids out on the town. It was the most capacious barrel room I had ever seen. In the tenebrous light its arched corridors seemed to stretch to infinity. There was a large anteroom with a movable rostrum set up for me to speak. The crowd was already near overflowing, all of them sipping wine they found at the three tasting stations set up for the event.
The Justin PR person ushered me up to the podium. The guests, most of them wine club members who had ponied up $100 to sip Justin’s finest and hear me tell saucy anecdotes about Shameless, broke up their conversations, settled into the fold-up chairs, and directed their attention to the rostrum. The PR lady looked a little nervous. Had she seen the latest humiliating YouTube post? She took the microphone and spoke into it: “All right, everyone, we’re ready to begin.”
The attendees collectively stopped their chatter and the room gradually fell silent.
The PR lady cleared her throat. “Tonight, we have a special guest. I’m sure most of you have seen the movie Shameless, which has had such a tremendous impact on the wine industry.” There was a scattering of applause. “And although Justin doesn’t make a Pinot”—she turned and gave me a mock reproving look—“and although we do use a little Merlot in our Cabernet varietals just as they do in Bordeaux, we feel indebted to the man who finally wrote a novel that celebrated our passion for wine. So, without further ado, I offer you Miles Raymond.”
As I walked to the rostrum, wineglass in hand, there was an explosion of applause. I already had them where I wanted them. I adjusted the mike. I looked down. There were Laura and Carmen and Jack seated in the front row. Laura was beaming up at me. Behind her, a sea of waiting faces. And I had nothing prepared!
“Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. I really didn’t think anyone would show.” Laughter. I took a sip of wine to fortify myself. It weirdly animated me. “When I wrote Shameless, my life was shit. My mother—who is with us here at Justin, but in bed right now—had suffered a massive stroke. My younger brother brought her back home after a three-month stint in the hospital and then proceeded in just two years to gut her modest savings.” Audible groans. “I then had to leave Los Angeles and the film business to go down and care for her. It was the start of a brutal two years, during which time I weathered my agent’s dying of AIDS and my being divorced—deservedly—by a loving, supportive wife. Thus the character of Martin and his remorse over a wrecked marriage. Anyway, I finally crawled my way back to Santa Monica and my rent-controlled apartment, had to take in a roommate for the first time since college”—I shook my head to myself at the memory of yet another indignity—“and started writing.” I paused for another slurp of wine and barreled forward, the crowd growing blurrier and blurrier in my vision. “I wrote a novel that got me a new publishing agent. He submitted it and over the course of a year we accumulated about seventy rejection letters—thus Martin’s character of the budding author who can’t get published. Then, with no money, having tapped out all my friends, the wolves nipping at my heels, in a heightened state of anxiety, I wrote Shameless.” There was applause. “Wait a second. It gets worse before it gets better.” Nervous laughter followed as I regrouped. I raked my hair back off my forehead. “We went out with it to both film and publishing. The publishers hated it, wrote it off as an over-sexed screenplay.” There were some groans of discontent from the audience. “And the film world turned their noses up at it. They didn’t know what to make of it. Two guys go where? Do what? That’s not a movie. That’ll never be a movie!” The laughter resumed. “Finally, ten months after it had been submitted to him, Dmitri Anton, the director, read it and called his agent and said it was going to be his next film. My new agent got really excited. Everyone got really excited. It was leaked to the entertainment trade papers. But . . . it wasn’t his next movie. He went off to do something else. But the option money allowed me to breathe a little. Still, you know,” I said, pausing to take another sip of wine, “looking back, being broke and in debt with horrible credit, I learned a valuable lesson”—I found myself raising my voice like some Baptist preacher—“You can rise like Lazarus from the ashes of your despair and destitution!” I took another, this time, gulp of wine. I was being more personal than I had intended, but that was my wont, and my Achilles heel. “There’s an upside to bad credit, however.” I paused for comic effect. “You’re immune to identity theft.” Roaring laughter. “And there’s an upside to being so broke you can only afford the cheapest bottle of Merlot.” Another pregnant pause. “I got really expert at cunnilingus.” There was kind of a collective bemused response from the audience. “I was so destitute, I couldn’t afford prophylactics.” The cachinnation that followed was deafening. I looked down and Laura and Jack and Carmen were laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes. “How has my life changed? Well, I don’t have to drink cheap Merlot anymore. They probably wouldn’t sell it to me anyway after the damage I did to their industry.” More laughter. I was on a roll. “And the Pinot people owe me royalties!” Laughter now crescendoing. “But I’m not totally down on Merlot. Anyone out there with a bottle of ’82 Pétrus—100 percent Merlot—I’ll quaff it like a sailor on shore leave.” The laughter was infectious now. It didn’t seem to matter what I said anymore. I was giving them what they wanted, surprised at my ability to turn it on without a script, completely extemporaneously. “Anyway, I could go on and on about my life before and after the book and movie, but I think I’ll turn it over to all of you, should you have any questions.”
A forest of hands shot up. The predictable queries came in a veritable avalanche. How long did it take me to write the book? “Ten years of drinking my way through the Santa Ynez Valley, nine weeks to write it up.” Reverberating laughter. Why did Martin have to steal from his mother? “In the book he was flat broke and wouldn’t have been able to go on the trip; plus, his mother was relatively well off. In the movie, she was middle-class and Martin had a job, so maybe it made him less sympathetic, I don’t know.” Was I happy with the movie? “Well, the movie won over three hundred and fifty citations and awards from various critics and awards organizations and was a very faithful adaptation of my work—with a few necessary compromises—so, absolutely, I got lucky.” What are you going to do next? I finished my glass of wine. “I’m going to sign some books and then go back to my suite that the nice people of Justin gave me with my friend Jack—who was the inspiration for the character of Jake—and these two lovely women we met at Foxen today who agreed impromptu to join us.” Finally, in a rising tone: “I don’t know what they were thinking. Did they read the novel?!” Riotous, eye-watering laughter. Even Laura and Carmen were jackknifed over in their chairs.
When it was over, the Justin PR lady led me to a table that had been set up in the cavernous barrel room and sat me down. My ears were still ringing from all the hilarity and applause. I asked her to bring me another glass of wine to gird myself for the book signing. The guests formed a line. It snaked all the way out the entrance and into the night.
The signing got underway. I tried to personalize all the books by asking them a little about their lives, whom the book was for. They crowded in on me, peppered me with more questions. Spouses and girlfriends flirted degenerately. Some slipped me their business cards. Other people—vintners, people in the wine world—slipped me their business cards, inviting me to this high-end tasting or an event at their winery where I would be the guest speaker. Most of the cards would be in the wastebasket in the Sussex suite the next morning. Some that held promises of obscene appearance fees I would pass along to Marcie to ferret through.
The book signing lasted an exhausting two hours. From time to time, as I grew more and more inebriated, I was asked to stand and take pictures with some of the attendees. Some women, uninhibited thanks to the liberal pours, unrepentantly groped me. One woman brushed her hand against my groin and told me where she was staying in Paso Robles, then passed me a business card with her cell number scrawled on it and implored me to call her anytime I was in town. Even though Laura was hovering protectively over me and had been introduced as the woman I had brought to Justin!
When it was over and the crowd had filtered out, my hand was cramped and I was feeling a little lightheaded. All who remained were a few people from Justin, the incandescently lovely Laura, Carmen and the thousand kilowatt-smiling Jack, lit up on wine like a Roman candle. I surmised the event had been a success, but it had taken a toll on me and I histrionically slumped forward.
“Are you okay, Miles?” Laura asked, hooking an arm around my neck.
“Get me the fuck out of here.” I looked up. “I’m fine. These events just take it out of me.”
I said my goodbyes to the organizers and the people who had helped put the event on, and then the four of us weaved our way back to the Sussex suite. Jack had cadged some more bottles of Isosceles from the vintner and proceeded to open one the moment we bustled into the suite. The windows had been left open and a slight chill invaded the room. I squatted down in front of the stone fireplace and lit a fire that was already set up with starter paper and split logs of oak. I shuttered the windows and sat down wearily on the couch next to Laura. As if she couldn’t restrain herself, as if her passion for me had been building up in her all day and had reached an apotheosis at the event, she leaned over and kissed me ardently. I kissed her back. With the relief of the evening’s being over I just melted into her like emollient equatorial waters.
Jack poured everyone glasses of wine. The collective mood was borderline euphoric: the sylvan locale, the event, my well-received talk—one of which I had no recollection!—the sumptuous wine, all free of charge. I was delighted to see everyone so elated. As the fire grew into a warming blaze that flickered lambently over everyone’s faces, the three of them reminisced over the things I had said, laughing at lines they remembered and I didn’t. These events were always a blur to me in retrospect. Little white-water rafting trips on acid.
“Well,” I interjected at one point, “at least I didn’t drink from the spit bucket.” And they all laughed. “But they probably wanted me to.”
“Is that true,” Laura asked, “that you once drank from the spit bucket?”
“It is true. It was exaggerated in the movie and it didn’t happen in a tasting room,” I lied, “but rather at a private tasting. The oenophiles were pretty appalled, but they joked about it for a long time after so I thought, that’s got to go into the book. And I’m glad it made it into the movie. It gets a huge laugh. I love making people laugh. Tragedy qua tragedy can be such a downer. But if you can meld tragedy with comedy, I think that’s the secret. Tragedy is leavened and mitigated by comedy. And comedy underscored with tragedy makes it less inane.”
Laura’s and Carmen’s expressions grew thoughtful as I digressed, per my wont, into my intellectual analytical mode. But when I glanced at Jack I saw only a look of unmitigated consternation. He was slowly shaking his head. I smiled back at him. I was so loaded on wine my smile was difficult for him to accurately interpret. Laura and Carmen didn’t know what to make of our facial signals.
Jack unlocked his eyes from mine and moved his hand to Carmen’s thigh. She smiled up at the big guy, semaphoring he wouldn’t be disappointed. Laura still had her arm clamped around my neck and was leaning her head against my shoulder. A strange thought flared in my besotted brain: I’ll ask her to marry me and move out to LA. She was beautiful—I loved brunettes—educated, cosmopolitan. Could I do any better? Best not to propose when drunk, I cautioned myself, but I was suddenly so assailed by the loneliness of all the one-night stands, I really did want to marry her on the spot. I exhorted myself to pull it together, not to go down that mawkish road, think carefully of what would be lying in wait for me the next morning when I went, “Huh? What? Did I say that?”
Holding Carmen’s hand in his bearish paw, Jack stood and said, “We’re going to take a walk. Smell the vines.” Carmen rose with him.
“Euphemisms aren’t necessary, Jackson.”
He and Carmen both laughed. Christ, I thought, she’s almost as tall as him. Thank God they’re not going to be in the adjoining room!
“See you in the morning,” I said, waving.
Jack winked at me and then they were gone, their shoes crunching on the gravel outside.
Laura and I started making out. Between Lethean kisses she said, “You were really funny tonight, Miles.”
“I was?” I said, pretending not to know.
“Really funny,” she said. “But all those women coming on to you.” She shook her head. “They have no, how do you say . . .”
“Conscience.”
“No tienen vergüenza. Sí.”
I kissed her briefly. “God, I love it when you speak that Catalan Spanish. It’s so sexy.”
She blushed, then said, “How does that make you feel? All those women?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t mean anything to me, Laura. I mean, it’s flattering. But, do any of them really want to get to know me? Or do they just want to go on this little ephemeral celebrity ride, then dump me when it’s over? I’m just happy to be here with you. I’m happy that you and Carmen came up.”
“You mean that?”
“Yeah,” I answered, kissing her softly, but meaningfully.
“I can’t believe I met you. It’s so unreal I’m sitting here in this beautiful place with the author of Shameless.”
“I’m just a guy who got lucky,” I said, trying to infuse some modesty into the dynamic.
“No, you’re not, Miles, you’re a genius.”
“Oh no, not the G word,” I said. “I’ll never write another book. Besides, I’m doubly lucky. Look at you.”
She laughed, then pulled me toward her and lashed her lips to mine. I kissed her back. Her lips were soft and full. Her ardor was palpable. When her hand groped my thigh I instinctively thought it was time to refresh our glasses. I disentangled myself from her and said, “I’m going to go to the bathroom, then open another bottle.”
“Okay,” she said.
I navigated an oblique path to the bathroom. I took a pee, shook a V out of its vial, bit off only half, ground it up and moved it under my tongue for quicker absorption. We were going to be having sex—and soon—and given how much wine I had consumed, I was anxious not to disappoint. Besides, I had a reputation to uphold! Couldn’t have it getting back to Spain that I had failed her in the sack, I chuckled to myself.
In the kitchen, I foraged around in the little Vinotemp that Justin had provided and found, to my amazement, a hard-to-find, small-production ’08 Hilliard Bruce Pinot from the Santa Ynez Valley. I couldn’t believe the way everyone was treating me. Currying my favor with special bottles like this, and all the rest.
I uncorked the bottle. When I turned away from the kitchen, Laura had slithered off the couch and was lying on a faux-animal-hide throw rug in front of the fire, which was now blazing away, tendrils of flame licking the flue. During the few minutes I had been gone she had somehow managed to remove her top, her jeans and her shoes and now lay contentedly on her side, in black bra and panties, her elbow propped on the rug and her head resting in her hand, staring contemplatively into the fire. With her olive complexion, the light emanating from the fire made her appear like some odalisque in a seraglio. The cigarette she had lit—she languidly blew smoke rings with her exhalations—could have been opium.
I sat cross-legged next to her and handed her the glass of Pinot.
“Thank you, Miles,” she said. She took a sip.
“This is a really special bottle,” I said, sampling it myself. “Impossible to find.”
“Mm, it’s good,” she said. “Muy intenso.”
“Muy intenso, indeed.” An explosion of Pinot fruit, even to my half-shot palate.
Bewitched by the wine and the moment, I traced a hand down one of her bare arms, gawking at her near-naked body. She was small breasted, and she had this hair that overran her panties that most American men would have found disgusting, but which I found sexy. “God, you’re a beautiful woman, Laura.”
She smiled. Then she inhaled from her cigarette and chased it with another sip of the elegant Hilliard Bruce. She locked her onyx-black eyes on mine and asked, “Do you have a lot of women in your life, Miles?”
“What do you mean?” I answered evasively.
“In your speech, you talked about the women since the movie came out.”
“I don’t have anyone special right now, if that’s what you mean.”
“Are you looking?”
I sipped my wine—shaking my head every time at how tremendous a Pinot it was—and shrugged. “I know that I’m not happy with this parade of women.” I looked up at her for a response. She was staring down at me with blinking eyes. Those dark, thick Salma Hayek lashes. God!
“Did you mean what you said, that it was fate that we met? That you might come to Barcelona?”
My hand glided slowly down to the furry part of her inner thigh. I was a little embarrassed suddenly that she had thrown my words up in my face. It’s one thing to utter them, it’s another thing to have to affirm them. Not wanting to lose the mood, I found myself saying, “Yes, Laura. I feel like there’s a connection between us. An inchoate one, but one nonetheless.”
Her eyes watered a little. “Because I thought it was really sweet what you said.”
“I meant it, Laura.” I continued to stroke her inner thighs. “But you’re only here one night.”
“I know,” she said.
“Let’s make the most of it.”
Our mouths found each other’s in the fitful firelight. The Viag was kicking in and my cock stiffened with alacrity. I slowly slipped my hand inside her panties and it found a Pyrenees forest dark with mystery. I maneuvered them off, and in doing so found myself between her glorious legs. Unhesitatingly and unapologetically, I licked the inside of her thighs. She lowered herself to the faux animal hide. We were back in the Foxen vineyard now picking up where we had left off when my mother’s daredevil feat to retrieve her dog had rudely interrupted us.
I brought her to orgasm four times in the course of the night and the next morning, twice by licking her, twice by the fire and twice in the comfy bed. In between we shared cigarettes and sipped wine. We confabulated about our shared passions for food, wine, film, literature, travel (okay, I lied). Now and then I complimented her on her body, the taste of her mouth and the odor of her pussy. Drunk, I held nothing back. I was an open wound. Every romantic fantasy, everything I ever wanted to say to a woman sober, every dream I had ever had about being in love, it all came out in an unbridled torrent from my deepest recesses. And every time we started up again, despite our weariness, it was more intense, and I found myself wanting her more and more, wanting to express it like I hadn’t done in a long time. Was it because she was leaving the next morning and I wouldn’t have to deal with the psychological mess my words and actions would have engendered? Did I really mean the things I was saying? Or was I just so lonely for a real love relationship that I was impersonating someone I wanted to be but was incapable of becoming? Whatever, she let me ravish her. God, it felt good to be making love to someone I really wanted to be making love to.