Dawnlight poured in through the canvas-slatted blinds. I blinked awake, my head about as light as the Liberty Bell, complete with crack and tintinnabulation produced by the repeated impact of the clapper. On the twin bed, I found myself in a sweaty knot of naked body parts. I stroked Natalie awake. She reached, apparently instinctively, for my cock. The fifty mikes of Viag must still have been coursing through my bloodstream because my organ sprang to life from fallow, parched ground. We made love again, less intensely, more agreeably, ignoring each other’s halitotic breath, sticky flesh, and piquant bodily fluids.
When that session had come to another rousing conclusion, complete with fingernails clawing my back and intense eye-locking looks, I crawled over her and out of bed. I slipped into the change of clothes I had brought in the brown paper sack, kneeling before her as she lay on her side, her pretty head balanced on her hand. “You are something, Natalie. You are really something,” I said, genuine feeling swelling in my heart. I took her free hand, held it in mine and stroked it. In my befogged vision I noticed a faded area at the base of her ring finger. The left ring finger.
“Are you married, Natalie?”
She smiled a somewhat distant smile, sighed through her nose. With the back of her wedding band-less hand she caressed one side of my unshaven face. “Yeah, I’m married. And . . . I have a kid.”
“Oh.” I felt like a sewer main deep within me had developed an air lock and the cloacal waste matter was backing suddenly up into my stomach. “Where is he?” I asked anxiously, half expecting an irate, hung over, oenophile—probably French!—to burst into the room wielding one of those machetes used on ceremonial occasions to open champagne.
“Back in New York.”
“That’s a relief.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I think you and your husband should see a sex therapist,” I half-joked, feeling around for a foothold on this friable precipice. I dared not look down lest I go mad.
She laughed, probably at my obvious mood shift rather than at the wit of my feeble remark. “Yeah, probably. We haven’t done it like that in a long, long time.” She took a momentary look inward. “In fact, we haven’t done it in a long time, period.”
“You must play a lot of Scrabble?”
She laughed in the affirmative.
“It’s amazing how many women out there are in sexually unfulfilling relationships. Why get married? Why be with one man? All you’re doing in the long run is consigning yourself to a life of sexual barrenness.”
“Well,” Natalie started as I found myself pouring from the Arnoux (at 7:00 a.m.!), “we don’t all base our marriages on the illusion the sex is going to be great the rest of our lives.”
A night of uncorking had softened the wine. The sulfites had blown off, the tannins had muted, and now it was all pure Pinot fruit.
“So, what then? You stay married and get royally fucked on the side when the opportunity presents itself?” That came out sharper than I meant it to, but I was feeling hurt.
“Something like that,” she said. “Now that we live well into our eighties, I don’t think it’s humanly possible to fuck the same person for half a century or whatever.”
“Probably right,” I agreed. “But even if I started tomorrow, I’d have to live nearly to a hundred to test the theory. And I don’t think Pfizer has a pharmacological solution to that.”
She smiled. I smiled back, raked my hand through her long dark hair, mildly depressed, hung over, sleep-deprived, a touch of panic setting in at the thought of my roustabout freak troupe wondering on what shoals their captain had shipwrecked.
“If you’d known I was married before we slept together, would it have been any different?” she challenged.
“Probably not.” I rose to my feet, trying not to wobble. “Can you run me back to where I’m staying?” I asked, blatantly impatient, and feeling a bit rooked.
“Are you angry?”
“Me?” I emitted a laugh that sounded bitter even to myself. “I was just starting to like you, that’s all.”
“Half our life is the tragedy of relationships.” She looked up at me and smiled. “Paraphrasing Willa Cather.”
“Well, with all due respect, fuck Willa. Fine prose stylist, but she always came across like a pretty frustrated dyke to me. How about that ride?”
“Don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry. I’ve just returned to normal, happiness once again having narrowly eluded me.”
The mordancy was not lost on her. She pulled herself together while I waited, refreshing my sommeliers’ glass with another splash of the Arnoux.
We drove in a clock-ticking silence back to the Brookside Inn. It was another blistering hot day in the making. The digital thermometer on Natalie’s generic rental reported mideighties. The sky was a cloudless, immutable blue, the Sunday roads devoid of vehicles.
As before, I had Natalie stop at the turnoff. She slid the stick into Park and turned to me. “I’m going to be coming out to LA in Septembe—”
“Natalie,” I chopped her off, “I have to be honest with you, too. I met this Spanish girl on the trip up. It was just one day and one night, but there was something special there. I’m thinking after I get my mother to Wisconsin, I’m going to play it out, see what happens. My problem with seeing you on the sly is that every time I see you, when you leave it’s just going to remind me how fucking lonely and empty I feel. Am. If you were available . . . you’d be my dream girl. I’d go all in. But, you’re not. So, thanks, but no thanks.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to get all entangled, then have to disentangle myself—it’s just such an emotional rollercoaster,” I said wearily, massaging my temple with the palm of my hand. “I had a great time, Natalie.”
“I said ‘okay,’ Miles.” She replied with a smile, at least. “I had fun, too.”
I kissed her on the mouth, opened the door and stumbled out into the implacable early morning heat, already feeling lonely and empty . . . and stupid.
Fifty yards from the Carriage House I heard faint but unmistakable ululations from the ground-level floor. I quickened my pace. When I reached my mother’s suite, she was calling out frantically: “Joy! Joy! I have to go to the bathroom!”
I lumbered, a little buzzed from the Arnoux, into her room and found her, to my dismay, lying on her back on the bed, helpless. “Where’s Joy?” I asked, sensing something calamitous.
My mother gaped at me, panic-stricken. “Oh, Miles, I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know where she went. I’ve been calling and calling. I’ve got to go. Will you help me, please?”
Battling a hangover that felt like a sledgehammer pounding a submerged rock, I exhaled wearily and sprang into action. I rolled her wheelchair next to the bed, helped her sit up, and slid her over to the lip of the mattress. “Okay, Mom, give me your hand.” She held out her right hand and I grasped it. I pulled her closer to the edge of the bed until I managed to get her feet to touch the carpet.
“I’m falling, I’m falling,” she wailed in an exaggerated paroxysm of fear.
“No, you’re not, Mom. Now, come on, stop being a baby.”
With our right hands lashed together, I hoisted her to a tottering upright position, then eased her into the wheelchair. I rolled her into the bathroom, praying she wouldn’t pee her pants, performed a mirror image of the previous transfer maneuver, exited the room while she urinated, apprehensive at the thought of Joy off with one of the randy Japanese Bourgogne rouge hoarders from the Mosh Pit at the Salmon Bake.
My mother called out that she was done and I returned to the bathroom, block-and-tackled her off the throne, and wheeled her back out into the main room.
“I’ll go find Joy,” I said.
“She’s no good,” my mother barked in a croaking voice.
“Mom, she’s exceptionally good. More to the point, she’s all we’ve got. So, just fucking cool it. It’s your birthday today and we’re going to go to this big champagne brunch. You like champagne, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, her ill-tempered expression instantly transmogrified by the mere mention of drink. “I love champagne.”
“Okay. I’m sure Joy’s just taking a walk somewhere.”
“And smoking her goddamn Mary Jane!”
“All right, Mom, chill. Not everybody’s perfect. Not even you.” That extracted a chuckle from her. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon to give you your bath.” I walked out before she could start in on her litany of complaints, closing the door behind me so I didn’t have to hear them trailing me like a pack of bloodthirsty coyotes.
I trudged upstairs. I noticed that the heavy door separating the upper floor rooms from those on the lower floor, usually left open, was closed. I opened to the unambiguous sounds of humans engaged in wanton copulation. Moaning. Grunting. Female. Male. More alarmingly, this noise was issuing from Jack’s room. I crossed the hall as if the floor were booby-trapped and I were a snapper with a mine sweeper. The door was slightly ajar, so I ventured a peek.
The reality by which I was confronted was worse than I had feared when I thought Joy had gone AWOL. My eyes widened in horror at the spectacle that rudely greeted me: Jack lying on his back, Joy (!) doubled over him, sucking his fully—and I don’t employ that term lightly—resurgent cock. Our demure little taciturn Filipina looked like a jackhammer run amok. The salacious tableau so suffused me with revulsion I just about vomited on the spot.
Instead, I drew a hand across my haggard face, hoped the image would be effaced—it wasn’t—miraculously regrouped psychologically from the multiple consequences of this ghastly revelation, pushed the door open to about six inches, instantly summoning Jack’s attention. Joy, oblivious of my presence, fed voraciously like a jackal on the carrion of his dick. He attempted to wave me off. In silent reply, I fashioned a face of outrage and pointed my index finger at Joy, stabbing it several times in her direction for emphasis. Then, as if pantomiming a desperate hitchhiker in a game of Charades, I jerked my thumb downward, making clear where Joy was truly needed.
Jack held up both hands, one of which was intemperately holding a sommeliers’ glass half-filled with red, mouthing: Okay, okay, let her finish.
Disgusted, I crossed to my suite, ensconced myself within, and collapsed on the bed. I was still having difficulty processing the image of Jack and Joy in unholy congress and the repercussions of that for the rest of the trip. I had to keep my eyes open to ward off the appalling picture of their incongruous coupling, but even then it wouldn’t go away, it stuck to my brain like an insect on flypaper—and agonized there, still horribly alive.
Twenty minutes later, a sheepish-looking Jack shambled heavy-footed into my suite and filled up one of the chairs with his bare-chested girth. He sipped from the sommeliers’ glass, apparently welded to his hand. “She’s with your mom now.” I was gratified to hear a tinge of remorse.
I closed my eyes at last, exhausted. “I didn’t think you’d do it, Jack. I really didn’t think you would.” I opened my eyes and bulged them out. “Joy?”
“The chick was all over me, man. You get a little wine in those Asians and they go nuts.”
I nodded in despair. “That’s because they don’t possess the gene that helps them to metabolize alcohol.” I looked over at him sharply and raised my voice. “What the fuck were you thinking, man?! Huh?”
“We were just having a good time.”
“What’re you, going to fuck Joy all the way to Wisconsin while my mother wails at the top of her lungs for her to help her relieve herself? Which I just did, motherfucker!”
Jack furrowed his brow and waxed defensive. “Miles. Let me tell you something. That chick’s about to mutiny, your mom is such a fucking a-hole. My fucking her is about the only thing that could save this trip.”
“That is such fucking twisted logic, Jackson,” I groused, pinching my temple with my thumb and middle fingers to impede the blood now throbbing into my hurting brain.
“Hey, I’m sorry, dude. It just happened. It was one wild fucking night.”
“Fine. So, it’s over now. I’m not going to dwell on it.”
“Me either,” Jack said.
A disconcerted silence fell over us. Birds chirruped out in the trees. They didn’t know anything about over-imbibition, hangovers, stroke-addled mothers, sex (me and Natalie, not just Joy and Jack) that never should have happened. They just knew hunger and procreation, and maybe blissful avian contentment in flight.
I exhaled through my nose. “How’d your big guy hold up?” I inquired.
“Worked like a gem sans meds. No pain.”
“I’m relieved to hear that.”
“How was Natalie?”
“Fucking smoking. On paper, the ne plus ultra. But . . . she’s married. Has a kid. Lives in New York, anyway. Though I’d risk hospitalization to get on a plane to see her, she’s that hot.”
“Just keep her in the coop, Miles. For when she comes out again.”
“I’m over that. Too bad, though. We really bonded. There was never a forced moment, never a lag in the conversation. The sex was levitational. And she’s fucking married!”
“What’s with these married chicks today?” Jack said. “Fucking hornier than shit.”
“You know what it’s like. One, two years in, you’re lucky to get licked. Five years, forget it. Maybe once a month when you’re half asleep and don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why there’re so many women at this bacchanalia. They need to get away, get drunk on their ass, and get fucking pounded. They’re not looking for commitment. In the winter they’ll rendezvous in the Bahamas and fuck Jamaican kiteboarding instructors.”
“Good for them,” Jack said, toasting his glass to motiveless sex.
“Yeah,” I said, “good for them.”
“So, what’s on tap for today?” Jack asked. “Another mystery tour?”
“No, it’s my mother’s birthday. We’re going to take her to IPNC’s champagne brunch, back at the campus in McMinnville.”
“When’s that?” Jack asked, rising to his feet.
“I don’t know, starts at 11:00, goes to whenever. If we don’t get too plastered, maybe we can check out of here and make a dent in the leg to Wisconsin.”
Jack pushed himself up from the chair with some effort. “Okay, I’m going to try to get a little shut-eye.”
“So,” I said, “you’ll just put the brakes on with Joy until we get my mom to her sister’s?”
“No prob, dude. Besides, I think I ripped her up pretty good.” He winked. “She might need till Wisconsin.”
I smirked through my nose. Jack turned cumbrously. I heard the door close and Jack’s heavy footfalls receding down the hallway. I closed my eyes. All I could see was Natalie Meunier’s naked, yoga-lithe body pressed up against me, her widemouth smile looking at me joyfully as she humped away with abandon. Oh, well.
In the middle of a sinister dream hurled down by an angry god, my iPhone jangled.
Joy said, “Your mom wants to go to champagne brunch like you promised.”
I glanced at the time. It was nearly 11:30. I’d slept four hours. Why didn’t I feel at all rested? “Okay, Joy, I’ll be right down.” I rang Jack’s cell.
He answered grumpily. “What is it?”
“Champagne brunch. My mother’s seventy-fifth. Remember?”
“Three-quarters of a century. Man. Do you think we’ll ever make it to the big seven-five?”
“The more probing question: Do we want to? Limp dicks and gray pubes.”
“I hear you. Gimme fifteen.”
A quarter of an hour later, on the nose, I was downstairs. Jack ran late as usual. Joy—a little worse for wear—was trying to brush my recalcitrant mother’s hair and make her look pretty. “No, not like that,” the patient said peevishly.
“How do you like it?” Joy asked.
“Let me do it myself,” my mother snapped, snatching the brush from Joy’s hand. “You’re no good.”
“Stop it, Mom. Stop it!”
She brushed her hair off her ruddy face with slashing strokes. She needed a drink, but didn’t have the courage to voice it.
Joy backed away. Jack sauntered in.
“How’s the birthday girl?” he said in his booming voice, having obviously gotten a start already on the day’s drinking. At my mother’s non-response, Jack grew silent, looked to me for elucidation.
“All right, everyone, let’s go,” I said, clapping my hands, hoping that would disperse the mounting disquiet that everyone, for entirely discrete reasons, was clearly feeling.
“I don’t want to go,” Joy said.
“Oh, come on,” Jack tried to persuade her.
Joy’s face hardened into a mask of silent contempt. Jack stepped close as if to comfort her when I waved him off, shaking my head in a tight no.
“What if I have to go to the bathroom?” my mother piped up, still locked in combat with her hair in front of the mirror.
“I’ll take you,” I said. “But, if we’re lucky, you can hold it this once.” I turned to Joy. “All right, Joy. Why don’t you just relax, get some sleep? We’ll take her off your hands for a few hours.”
Joy swiveled her head to the side until her chin was touching her right shoulder and glowered at the flora.
The Oak Grove had been magically transformed. The dunking contraption remained, but the vat had been drained and disassembled. At the entrance where we signed in, a young woman informed us that a lot of people hadn’t shown, unapologetically citing their crucifying hangovers, and invited us to take whatever table we favored.
With Jack in tow, I pushed my mother down a cement pathway and parked her at one of the many empty, umbrella-shaded tables. It was hot, that oh-so-rare heat wave still in lockdown over Oregon. Jack and I, both on little sleep, sat down listlessly. Within minutes, a wine steward appeared with a bottle. “Champagne for everyone?” he asked cheerfully, blithely unaware of the personal damage that the three of us bore.
“Oh, yes, please,” my mother said on hearing the magic words.
He filled the three flutes on the table with a cold, zesty, pale-golden liquid, geysering with bubbles. He ground the bottle into a bucket of melting ice and departed with a chirpy, “Enjoy your brunch.”
I raised my glass. “Here’s to being seventy-five, Mom,” I said.
“Happy birthday, Mrs. Raymond,” Jack said.
We clinked all around. Smiles momentarily returned, though my inner telepath could make out thunderclouds on the horizon.
“I’m sorry I’m such an old cuss,” she said.
“No, you’re not, Mom. Liar.”
She laughed. “You ought to just take me out back and shoot me.”
Jack and I looked at each other and laughed. There were those moments her clouded mind cleared and she was downright perspicacious.
“Mom, you ever hear what Lily Bollinger said about champagne?”
“No,” she said, enjoying another much-needed sip.
“‘I only drink champagne when I’m happy, and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I am not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it—unless I’m thirsty.’”
My mother responded with a throaty chortle. “You know what Churchill said?”
“No.”
“‘In victory we deserve it, in defeat we need it.’”
“Well put, Mrs. Raymond!” Jack said, raising his glass.
My mother consumed her first glass with alarming alacrity. It rocketed straight through the foundered ramparts of her stomach lining and directly up to her half-necrotic brain. Her face all but instantly colored a refulgent red, her mood turned to golden sunshine and the world was once again a magical place where all her cares floated out to sea on a rudderless vessel of alcohol. Seeing this transformation and how elated the champagne made her, I unhesitatingly refreshed her empty glass before she could wheedle. She sipped it greedily as if she, like Jack and me, needed the libation to quell all her anxieties. Why not let us all enjoy our little oasis of peace? It would prove a mirage soon enough.
The mood turned buoyant. Champagne will do that. The IPNC was almost over. Two days to Wisconsin, dump my mother with her sister, and fly back to L.A. It had been a sometimes Pyrrhic struggle, but we were just about to enter the home stretch, Jack and I happy that we were on the declivity of the trip, as it were.
Halfway into her second glass, my mother raised her right index finger, shook it in place, and said, with bowed head and furrowed brow, “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“What’s that, Mom?” A little facetiously—damn champagne!—I said, “Let me guess. The man you met last night fell in love and he wants you to stay in Portland?”
“Oh, no,” my mother chuckled.
“What’s the big confession? Spit it out.”
She took another sip of champagne, and I saw, all at once, that it was a sip for fortification. A look of worry furrowed her brow. Her face pinched shut into an expression of darkening apprehension. Her head bobbed up and down.
Jack and I waited.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tears hobbling her words.
I leaned forward and squeezed her forearm. “What, Mom? You can tell me.”
She gathered herself, then dropped the bombshell: “I stole Joy’s money and gave it to Bud.”
I half sat up out of my chair. “What?!”
“I took it out of her purse when she was in the bathroom that morning, probably smoking her you-know-what. And gave it to him,” she said through tears of shame. “All of it. Poor Bud. He needed it more than Joy.”
My chin sagged on my chest. All that anguish and acrimony because my mother had decided to be charitable to her down-at-heel, ne’er-dowell brother.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes now flooded with tears.
“Why didn’t you just ask me for money? Why did you steal it from Joy, then turn around and blame the poor girl? Mom. Jesus Christ! Have you lost your mind?”
“Don’t swear.”
“Jesus FUCKING Christ!”
“I knew you’d be angry with me, that’s why I didn’t tell you,” she said, now crying uncontrollably.
“I mean, did you even think about the repercussions of such an act—let alone the morality—when you did it?”
“No,” she peeped.
“Fuck!” In panic, I fished out my iPhone and hunted up the number for the Brookside Inn. Thank the good Lord I had stored it. Bruce’s wife, what’s-her-face, answered. I asked her, calmly, if she wouldn’t mind ringing the Rouge Suite. She tried to make small talk, but I cut her short and she cheerfully patched me through. The extension rang and rang. I hung up before Bruce’s wife came back on to take a message. I scrolled through my call list, found Joy’s cell and dialed that. Straight to voicemail.
“Who’re you calling?” my mother asked, feigning innocence.
“Joy!” I exploded. “Who do you think, you fucking stroke-addled idiot? Do you think I’m doing this excursion for my health?” I slammed my phone on the table, rattling the cutlery. “I’m sure she’ll be greatly relieved to hear Jack and I know she’s not a lying, thieving O.F.W.” I also, ironically, was relieved to learn this because I imagined, once Joy was apprised of the truth, that it would go a long way toward mollifying a rightly discontented, and possibly mutinous, if Jack wasn’t bullshitting, traveling caretaker.
“She’s probably smoking her Mary Jane,” my mother said.
I brandished my champagne flute at her and locked my eyes on hers. “You’re going to apologize—apologize profusely! abjectly!—when we get back. Is that clear?”
“Oh, don’t talk to me like some child.”
“Is that clear, Mom?” I insisted, way more worried at this point about Joy’s welfare—not to mention my own—than my mother’s.
“I promise,” she said.
“And I’m going to be there when you do it. And we’re going to offer to buy her all the cannabis she needs to get her to Wisconsin!”
My mother looked down, shamefaced. I glanced around. The brunch was a buffet. I wasn’t hungry, and doubted Jack was either. Drinking copiously over a period of weeks without respite is an effective appetite suppressant.
“What would you like to eat, Mom?” I asked gruffly.
“Oh, a little of everything.”
I rose and went over to the buffet line. Plate in hand, I piled on scrambled eggs, biscuits with gravy, maple pork sausages, and a ratatouille she probably wouldn’t touch, brought it back to the table and set it down in front of her, hoping that she would have a myocardial infarction on the spot and spare me any more of this insanity!
“Oh, how gorgeous,” she said, conveniently forgetting the enormity of her confession.
I noticed her champagne glass was full, which meant she was now on her third. When I looked over for the bottle, it was upturned in the ice, indicating that it was empty. I signaled the wine steward and he glided across the lawn. “We need another bottle.” He pivoted in place and hurried off. My mother dug ravenously into her heaping mound of food. Every now and then she would stop to sing its praises. I had to remind her several times during her private repast to wipe her mouth with her drool-cloth where the food dribbled, which she always immediately did, not wanting to look like what she was: a stroke victim.
My anxiety mounting, I tried Joy’s cell again, but the call still went straight to voicemail.
Since it was my mother’s birthday, I allowed her to have a fourth glass of champagne, trying to balance the celebratory nature of the occasion with Joy’s need to be able to transfer her into bed.
When my mother had finished her mountain of food, the wine steward, in tow with some of his staff, appeared carrying a large slice of cake, a single candle stabbed into it and burning. They broke into an a cappella “Happy Birthday” and my mother glowed, tears forming in her eyes. It was quite possibly the highpoint of her life until . . . her face froze and went ghostly white. For a sickening moment I thought she was having another episode of congestive heart failure.
After the wine steward and his staff had drifted off, I said to my still dismayed-looking mother, “What’s wrong, Mom?” She raised her one good hand shakily and cried. “What’s wrong?”
Through her tears, with champagne flute in hand, she answered mortifyingly, “I made chocolate.”
Jack looked at me for an explanation. I hung my head in despair, and he knew the interpretation wasn’t good news. “i.e., shit her pants,” I translated in an undertone.
“Oh, Christ,” Jack muttered.
“I’m sorry,” my mother blubbered. “I’m sorry.”
“We’ve got to get her out of here and back to Joy,” I said urgently to Jack.
Jack and I drained our glasses of champagne and straightened quickly from the table.
I leapt behind my mother, unlocked the brakes, and wheeled her hurriedly down the oak-shaded path and back to the Rampvan with Jack trailing.
The Rampvan now reeked of excrement. My mother’s new white pants were stained brown on the insides of both thighs. She euphemistically apologized over and over through prodigious tears. “I’m sorry I made chocolate. I’m sorry . . .”
Jack tried to make light of the situation. “Mrs. Raymond, if that’s chocolate, I’d sure hate to be the CEO of Hershey’s.”
My mother tried to laugh, but humor was beyond her as she sat in pants soaked with diarrhea.
We sped back to the Brookside, braked to a dusty halt, rolled my mother out and straight into her room.
“Joy?” I called out. There was no answer. “Joy?” My eyes raked the room. On the dresser I spied a folded sheet of inn stationery. I opened it. On it was handwritten: “I did not steal money. I did not hurt dog. Can’t take care of your mom no more. I fly home—Joy.” With the note was left $2,000 in hundreds, her calculation of a pro-rated payment for services rendered-and now sundered!
It took a moment for the full force of this development to strike me. When it did, it T-boned me like a Ford Escort plowed into by a Lincoln Navigator running a red light.
Jack came up behind me while I held my head once again in my hands in despair. “What does it say?”
“She split.”
Jack threw a backward look at my mother, his expression growing dismayed.
I sucked in my breath. “Fuck. Fuck!”
“What’re we going to do?” Jack said.
I looked up at him. “We have no choice,” I said. “You’ve got to help me clean her up.”
“What?” His oversized face disorganized into one of horror. “This was not in the job description, Miles.”
“Jack. The woman has shit her pants. She has full left-side paralysis. She can’t clean herself, okay? Joy has flown the coop. She’s probably halfway to Manila by now. Do you think Bruce and Susan are going to help us? I don’t. I need you to stand her up in the bathroom while I towel her off. We’ll get her into clean pants. And then we’ll figure it out from there.”
Jack saw I was at the breaking point and, resigned to the grim duty at hand, grumbled, “Okay. Just tell me what to do.”
We wheeled my excrementitious mother into the bathroom. Using all weapons at our disposal, Jack turned on the bath water, flung open the little window, and I opened the faucets on the sink. Positioning himself behind her, Jack hooked his meaty paws under my mother’s armpits and stood her up from the wheelchair as one might a heavyset rag doll. I rolled the wheelchair out from under her and, the dirty work being my unannounced responsibility, peeled off her pants. Diarrhea was streaked all down the back and inside of both legs. The stench was overpowering. I shot a glance at Jack and noted that his nostrils were clenched and he was making every effort to breathe through his mouth.
With warm wet towels I painstakingly cleaned up the mess—my mother, that is to say—while Jack held her erect. She was blubbering how sorry she was, obviously humiliated to find herself in this opprobrious position on her seventy-fifth birthday. Jack never once looked down, uncomfortable, and understandably so, at seeing my mother disrobed.
It took a good twenty minutes—what seemed like an eternity—to get her washed up and into a fresh change of clothes. I sequestered the diarrhea-soiled ones, as if they had come off the back of a Chernobyl technician, in a plastic laundry bag and discarded the malodorous bundle in the trash outside. When we were done and had her back in her chair, Jack excused himself to go to his room.
I sat down with my mother and broke the news. “Joy left.”
“It’s my fault,” she said, still a lachrymose mess.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, a nauseating fear welling up in me now that the immediate crisis had been dealt with and the grim implications of Joy’s departure opportunistically sunk in.
My mother wore a hangdog face, born of fatigue, humiliation, and her own farrago of fears. “You ought to take me out back and shoot me,” she said again, this time sounding like she meant it.
“Don’t say that, Mom. We’ll get you to Wisconsin.”
“Me wan’ to go home,” she sang, mimicking Belafonte. But this time with significantly less conviction.
“I know.” I rose from the chair. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where’re you going?” She asked it in a rising tone of trepidation. With Joy gone, she had quickly shifted all her insecurities about who was going to care for her to me. And the realization of that burden was making me revert to my suicidal outlook, a standard when I couldn’t sell a screenplay or a short story to save my ass.
“I need to talk to Jack. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m not sneaking off anywhere, okay?”
“Oh, please,” she cried. I heard the fear that her apprehensions were falling on deaf ears. That and her innate distrust of her dissolute son.
I plodded upstairs, my mother’s voice calling out after me with a flurry of admonitions. I found Jack lying supine on his bed, fingers interlaced behind his head. The TV was on some sports channel, the volume was muted. A glass of wine stood on the nightstand next to him.
I slumped onto the bed and bent forward, elbows on my thighs, raking a hand through my hair. “Happy birthday, Mom,” I attempted to joke.
“That was dark, dude,” Jack said, with none of the usual bonhomie in his voice. “Dark.”
I raised my head and looked up at him. He was staring into space, the gears in his gourd grinding. I’m sure he was cogitating on the 2,000 miles left to Wisconsin, absent the indispensable Joy. It was a dismal look that accompanied his thought process.
I decided to preempt the inevitable. “Look, Jack, there’s nothing left for you to do on this trip.”
He started nodding, as if to himself.
“With Joy gone it’s not going to be much fun from here on out. The wine part’s over, too. I’m going to have no choice now but to stay in the same room with her. You’ll be all alone . . .”
“I don’t want to bail on you, man,” he said, though his tone suggested otherwise.
I shrugged. “It’s a long drive to Sheboygan. Three gonzo days and she’s home. A day or two of transition with her sister and then I can bid goodbye to the whole deplorable mess.”
“Why don’t you hang around here in Portland, see if you can find somebody?” he suggested, his mind already on a jetliner back to LA, two double Absoluts in the bar before takeoff, and an Ambien for good measure.
“By the time I find somebody, train them, I’ll be stuck here at least a week. I’d rather just brutal it out.”
“If I were you, I’d take her back to that Las Villas place.”
“No. This is something I promised her. She’s going to be happier with her sister. I got into this, and I’m going to get out of it.”
Jack kept nodding, as if his neck were mounted on a spring. “I feel bad, man. It’s a rough gig.”
“I’m used to it. I’ve done it before. I took care of her when her money ran out and I was trying to get her into assisted-living. I know the drill. You’d just end up in a hotel room all by yourself with nothing to do because”—I reached for his glass and took a healthy swig—“it’s 24/7 with her from now until I deposit her into the arms of her sister.”
Jack turned and looked at me, his still-unshaven face grizzled with gloom. “Are you sure, man?”
“It sounds like your buddy Rick’s got an AD-ing gig lined up for you. You probably want to get back and lock that in. I can handle this. Besides, from Portland you can get a million flights back to LA. Once we get out into the hinterlands, your only choice would be Greyhound.”
“I don’t want you to think it’s because of what happened this afternoon,” he said, all but admitting that he had been thinking of leaving after the IPNC.
“We’ll be laughing about that one for a while,” I said, chuckling sardonically.
“Man, that mother of yours has got the bowels of a horse,” Jack said, able to joke now that he’d been excused from his duties.
I laughed a laugh of evacuating relief. But it sputtered to an end as I envisioned the end of the trip without Joy or Jack . . . or Snapper.
Jack sidled close to me and hooked an arm around my neck. “If I were you, when you get Phyllis settled in, I’d go to Spain and just get out of this fucking place. Hollywood’s killing you, man. You’re not the same Miles Raymond.”
“I know,” I said. “When the movie hit, I vowed I wouldn’t succumb to the cliché of fame and start dancing in the Conga line. Now, look what’s happened to me? I’m a fucking mess.” I pointed at Jack’s wineglass. “Too much of that shit. No writing. Women I don’t remember or who just fuck me because I’m Miles Raymond, author of one overrated novel made into a pretty good little movie that’ll be forgotten in one year. I’m just playing into everybody’s hand, drinking and whoring, and doing what they expect of me, all the while destroying myself, my gift, what vestiges of it remains.” I looked at Jack. “Maybe I need a dose of reality to clear the jets.”
“Well, you’re about to get one now,” he said, with a mordant chuckle.
“That I am,” I said. “That I am.”
The decision was cemented with a hug.
As Jack—his spirits lifted!—got on his cell to book a flight I hiked across the lawn, up to the Main House to check out. Bruce and Susan wondered why I was checking out early, not staying the night. I told them that I was eager to get on the road, not wanting to disclose the whole imbroglio, Joy leaving and all the rest.
With a palpable mutual sorrow, Jack and I packed up, got Mom secured in the back, and GPS-ed the Rampvan to Portland International. I double-parked at Alaska Airlines departures, switched the hazards on, then climbed out to help Jack with his luggage. We looked at each other for a pregnant moment, then he wrapped his arms around me. He held on to me for the longest moment. “Good luck, man,” he whispered, his scratchy beard pressed against my cheek.
“Yeah, I’ll call you from the road, let you know how it’s going.”
“Do that,” he said, reaching for his duffel bag. He smiled and nodded, a sadness creasing his face. “See you back in LA.” Then he turned and was swallowed up by the teeming terminal.
I climbed back into the van, turned to my mother sitting in her wheelchair in the back. The vehicle looked, and felt, empty. Twin feelings, sadness and a sense of duty, possessed me. My stomach felt like a toilet with no water in the bowl, vainly trying to flush. “We’ve got a long way to go,” I said. I tried to do the voice of Barbara Stanwyck: “So, hold on to your bladder, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
“Where’d Jack go?”
“Where you’re headed, Mom. Home.”