It was nearing dark when we pulled into the tautologically named Christchurch. I didn’t want to grill Jack too much on the Dan O’Neill connection and movie deal until I learned more details. Having to reinvent myself as a novelist in New Zealand, I felt a sense of uplift, a scintilla of redemption.
Christchurch had suffered a devastating earthquake a few years back and was currently in the process of rebuilding. Among construction sites scarred by cranes reaching to the sky, we glimpsed beautiful new, modern buildings that had sprung up in the renovation aftermath of the quake. New Zealand had come together and rallied around the destruction.
We followed Hana’s Subaru up a tortuous, hair-pinning road too narrow for the hulking camper van to the top of Mount Pleasant and the house where the no-doubt self-deprecatingly, risibly named Cougars of Christchurch Book Club held their monthly get-togethers. Surely they couldn’t be serious. Surely they were being humorous with the club’s name alliteration and the blaring of attention to their ages. I had reached the point in life where nothing surprised me. Henry Miller once said at age twenty he thought he knew everything, but by age fifty he believed he knew nothing. That’s because life is too surreal. The accretion of lived experiences only produces more befuddlement, not more clarity.
We heaved the camper van into an enormous driveway that fronted one side of a two-story house cantilevered over the steep hillside, sprung white like a giant, ostentatious mushroom. In the driveway, our camper van competed for space with an enormous speedboat mounted on a trailer, the kind seafaring men pilot into treacherous oceans. Fishing rods rose from the rear and speared the twilight sky. Appeared the host’s husband was an avid sportsman.
Jack and I—the Quartz Reef rosé bubbly demolished and feeling a little tipsy as a result—clambered out of the camper van and drank in the view. We were tired, our bodies straightened against the creaking of aching bones, but the champagne had lightened our moods, soothed what the depredations of age exacted on one with hours logged on the road in buffeting winds and blinding rains in a vehicle no one should be piloting in these climes. Apparently, Hana had noticed, because before we could get prepped on the Cougars event, she was holding up the empty Quartz Reef bubbly we had killed and shook it at us reproachfully.
“Getting an early start, lads,” she mocked, thrusting the bottle in our faces as one shoves a puppy’s face into its own poop.
“Three-hour sipping, Hana,” Jack said. “Relax. We’re fine. We just sandpapered the edges.”
“Laid the Pinot base for the Cougars of Christchurch,” I added for good measure.
Dropping the bottle to her side, Hana was unamused by our facetiousness. Her wide nostrils flared with an angry exhalation. She’d been warned of Jack’s and my predilection for overimbibition, and in her expression was a downturned look of failure.
Jack swung around and faced the harbor, arms outstretched in a eureka moment. The sun spilled on his brown locks and highlighted where they were frosted with gray. The panoramic view overlooked an estuary that fed out to a cold ocean blistered with whitecaps from the unceasing wind. “These folks must have serious coin,” he said.
“Come on, let’s go, lads,” said Hana, hustling us along. “Grab your clothes and toiletries.” Jack and I faced her. “And wear something nice. Button-up shirt. Jacket. I want you to look like proper celebrities.”
“Hana,” I said, still feeling a little large from the half bottle of bubbly, “I’m an artist. Artists don’t dress up. If you show up sartorially sharp, they don’t believe you’re an artist.”
“These are society ladies. Their idea of artists is different than yours. Besides, Hughie instructed me to advise you to wear your finest. He wants you lookingfuckingnice, all right?”
Jack and I looked at each other, smiled, shrugged. “Whatever you say, sugar,” Jack said.
“Don’t call me sugar, Jack.”
“Forgive him. He reverts to the atavistic now and then.”
Hana narrowed her eyes at me at the word atavistic. “I’m going to look that up.”
Jack and I rummaged in our luggage for clothes and shaving gear and met Hana at the wide double doors that led into the hilltop estate. We were greeted by a diminutive mustachioed man smartly dressed in slacks, a shirt, and a blazer. He was introduced as Peter. “Right this way, Miles and Jack,” he said, beckoning us in with an outstretched arm.
We walked into the house with Hana in tow, paused in the foyer, and marveled at the vast, high-ceilinged living room.
“Where are the Cougars?” Jack queried Peter. Hana elbowed Jack in the ribs. “Forgive me. The lovely ladies hosting this book club,” he rephrased with affected emphasis.
“They’re at the country club,” Peter said, without elaborating. “Let me show you gentlemen the bathrooms.”
“Gentlemen,” Jack whispered to me and Hana, nodding. Hana smirked at him.
Peter led Jack to a bathroom downstairs, then returned upstairs to escort me to an en suite doozy in the master bedroom. A picture window looked out cinematically onto the ocean to the east and Christchurch to the west, now scintillant with multicolored lights pricking the night sky. A ceiling mirror suggested the couple who lived here enjoyed watching themselves copulating. I’ll never understand that kink, I mused to myself. Who wants to look at themselves fucking? Apparently, men who go fishing for bluefin tuna. Or women with Brazilian butt lifts.
The showerhead was a foot in diameter and rained water over me as though Christchurch had never suffered a drought. I luxuriated under it, stretching my shoulders, pulling slow strokes with my razor underneath my beard, which I had moments ago taken scissors to and trimmed down to less primordial magnitude. I was feeling in a slightly ebullient mood, despite all the portents on the horizon—the face-the-music return to California; Ella calling it quits with me; the potentially cancerous neoplasm plaguing me with thoughts of mortality—and I thought it was high time for an adjustment in the hirsute department. I drew one hand over my face, and when it had reappeared, I didn’t think I looked all that old, maybe even a few years younger than my age. Had New Zealand rejuvenated me somehow? Had a relationship with regular sex revivified me to my university virility? Despite his denials to the contrary, Jack was on the ED meds already, but not me.
“You look nice, Miles,” Hana said approvingly as Jack and I emerged from the house, he in a designer navy bowling shirt under a black bomber jacket with Washed-Up Celebrities stitched on the back, a gift from the US production before its cancellation; me in a shawl-collar cardigan over a blue linen button-up shirt. With one foot on the stepladder, she beckoned us up into the passenger compartment for a run-through of the event.
Inside the van, Jack and I eased creakily into seats in the lounge area as Hana leaned against the stove, standing imposingly over us. She was wearing a simple combat boot with chunk heel and yellow threading that lent her more stature, not that she needed it. Her military jacket with the brass buttons had been paired with a different shirt, but it still conferred on her a look of authority. In the cramped space she also emitted a female hotness. Jack, in particular, was jumping out of his skin, but even he, too, was keenly aware those days where age wasn’t a factor were in his past. We just grinned until it hurt.
“Okay,” Hana said, clutching her hands together and shaking them twice to highlight her preamble and gain our undivided attention. “When I tell you it’s time, we’re going to go in. I want to make sure all the ladies are here so you can make a proper entrance.”
“What’s the big deal?” I said. “It’s just a book club, right?”
“Right. But they want it to unfold in their orchestrated way.” Jack and I exchanged puzzled looks. “They’ve never hosted an author of your stature before, so they’ve planned something a little different.”
“I thought you said they had The Luminaries author Eleanor Catton back when? She won a Man Booker.”
“They did. You’re the first male author of prominence they’ve hosted, and the first non-Kiwi.”
Jack caught my eye and nodded once as if saying, Take the compliment.
“Okay,” I said. “To them, I’m a celebrity author.”
Hana appeared nervous. She cracked knuckles on both hands, first one, then the other, the popping noises discomposing Jack and me. “This is Hughie’s personal connection, so we need it to go smashing.”
“How long have you been doing this PR gig, Hana?” Jack queried her, as her eyes were diverted to her ubiquitous phone.
“A couple years,” she replied to the phone in an unconvincing tone.
“Ever do one with an author in a camper van?” I said.
“Nope.” She barked a sardonic laugh. “This is a first for me.” In her upbeat way, she added, “This could start a whole new trend in book tours.”
“What’s this orchestrated program?” I said. “Do you know?”
“I don’t, no.” She looked up from her phone. “They might have you read, they might just want you to field questions about your writing process, I don’t know. Go with the flow. Wherever it goes.”
“We like to improvise,” Jack, dressed for damage, said with an impish grin. “We welcome the unexpected, don’t we, Miles?”
Hana stabbed a bejeweled forefinger at the empty bottle of Quartz Reef on the counter. “And go light on the grape, lads.”
“Everyone here can hold their mugs,” Jack informed her. “No need to kill the vibe.”
Hana ignored his reproval. “After the introductions, I’ll be cutting out of here. You’ve got your camp spot here, you’re all set.” She glanced at a text lit up on her phone. “All right, they’re ready for us.” She looked up. “You boys behave now, okay?”
Jack and I rose cumbrously to our feet, heads bent to avoid the ceiling. Hana led us out of the camper van. We followed her across the asphalt driveway, past the mammoth powerboat with the two onboard Mercury engines, to the double front doors. She rang the chimes, and they seemed to reverberate inside as if activating sonorous bells in every room. Peter opened the door with a great flourish and a performative bow as if a prohibited substance had improved his mood, and let us pass by him with a dramatic sweep of an arm.
A raven-haired woman in flowy and silky print pants and an equally colorful halter top dangerously pulled down to a chasmic cleavage glided up to us, borne aloft on the magic carpet of obscene wealth. Bangles jangled at her wrists. Gold earrings with intricate patterns sparkled at both earlobes. Midforties, I guessed, put together and effervescent with personality. A flute of bubbly was held aloft in one hand, tilting precariously at an angle suggesting the festivities had already begun. “This must be Miles Raymond,” she cooed through lips that looked unnatural.
“Miles, this is Eileen,” Hana said.
I extended my hand.
She shook her head reprovingly. “Oh, come on, you can do better than that.” With her free hand, she curled an arm around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks, reeking of champagne-and-cheese-scented breath. “I’m glad you agreed to come. We love living authors.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Especially ones who risk the debauched.” Laughter cackled out of her as my eyes widened in dismay.
Hana turned to Jack, who was smiling over my shoulder. “And this is Jack. Washed-Up Celebrities.”
“And other credits,” Jack amplified.
“Jack,” Eileen blustered, “there is definitely someone I want you to meet. A fellow thespian.”
“Can’t wait. Nice to meet you, Eileen.” And they enthusiastically exchanged the European double kiss.
“Come on in,” Eileen enthused, “and meet the Cougars of Christchurch.” She cupped a hand around her mouth and insisted, “We’re not really,” with a twinkle of salacity in her eyes. “It’s all for fun.”
We trailed a traipsing Eileen inside, who skated across the foyer into her capacious house. Hana stayed back to exchange a few words with Peter standing sentry at the door. A dining room larger than most of the apartments I had lived in was centered by a baronial table littered with plates heaped with food: cheeses, cured meats, olives, quartered fruits, sliced baguettes, dips. Champagne from the eight unique wine regions of New Zealand sloshed in huge decorative pottery bowls filled with half-melted ice. A cork popped on one and foam spewed from its neck, but it didn’t seem to bother the woman holding it. My eyes widened when I noticed a fat pâté formed into an arcing erect penis, cue ball and scrotum expertly crafted!
“Ladies, let me introduce you,” Eileen said, a toggling beringed hand encouraging me to come closer to the table, her arm now hooked around my waist and pulling me nearer her warm, perspiry body. “This is the author Miles Raymond and his actor friend, Jack.”
We were greeted by a chorus of “welcome” and “hello there” and other fulsome salutations from the well-dressed, 1 percent (I was guessing) Christchurch cognoscenti, the ones who supported the arts even in the face of catastrophic earthquakes and draconian pandemic lockdowns.
“Would you like some bubbles?” trilled a tall woman in a high-neck, structured houndstooth dress, accessorized at her voluptuous hips with an enormous black belt cinched by a gold buckle designed in the image of a roaring lion.
“We would,” Jack said, beaming moronically, as if he had stumbled into a Kiwi salon of fin de siècle decadence on the heels of my book.
Two Baccarat flutes were produced and rosé champagne was poured and handed to Jack and me as Eileen launched into the introductions.
“That’s Olivia,” Eileen said, indicating the woman who had filled our flutes. Eileen threw her head to Jack with such force I thought her makeup was going to fly off: “She used to star on a soap up in Sydney, didn’t you, dear?”
“I did,” boomed Olivia in a baritone voice. “And I’m still big. It’s the soaps that got small.” Jack and I forced chuckles at the jokey paraphrastic reference to Gloria Swanson’s famous line in Sunset Boulevard. She toasted Jack, who met her flute for flute with clinking gusto. “Yes, I used to be on TV. And I’ve done the boards, once with Geoffrey Rush.”
“I’m impressed,” Jack said, eyeing her with elevated interest. “We must . . .” He finished his sentence with a spiraling motion of his index finger inscribing an imaginary circle in the air saying continue the conversation in private.
Eileen directed our attention to the next woman in her book club soiree. “And this is my dear friend Sonia.” Eileen pressed her mouth to my ear and whispered, “Recently divorced. Crypto queen extraordinaire, got out before the crash, not authentically Russian,” before rearing up again. I shook Sonia’s hand. She was wearing a one-shoulder silver dress, blinding to look at under the bright chandeliered lighting. From her ears hung pendulous massive gold panels encrusted with tiny glittering diamonds. A heavy choker of jewels shone around her neck, ostentatiously showing off her wealth.
“We need to talk,” Sonia said over her flute. “Privately.”
“After the book club,” I said, chuckling nervously.
“After the book club,” she echoed.
“And this is Colleen,” Eileen continued the introductions.
Colleen, the youngest of the gaggle, perhaps late thirties, tossed me a vacuous smile, eyeing my wardrobe up and down with great trenchancy. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miles. I confess I haven’t read your book. But I want to! If only I could find the time.” She tossed back half a glass of champagne, then broke into a smile that occupied half the real estate of her face.
I shrugged at her comment. Feeling uncomfortable in the setting, sweat trickling from my underarms, I discreetly sipped my champagne for liquid courage, then had my attention directed to Ava, a voluptuous woman shoehorned into a black pleather minidress and plunging-neckline sweater top. The pleather mini produced the same noises the blue penguins made on their journey to the Pacific when she adjusted herself in it. “I loved your book,” she slurred. “A Year of Pure Fucking. How did you ever get that past the censors?”
“A Year of Pure Feeling,” I deliberately corrected her, growing uneasy in this throng of lubricious ladies.
“I know, silly!” She reared back in a gargantuan laugh that disorganized her face, a face absent of expression because of all the peels and chemical injections it had been subjected to. “You need to tell me more about this book, wily Miley. I can’t be expected to flip pages with a dirty martini in my hand.” She roared with laughter at her own joke. “Kidding again.”
Eileen bent to my ear. “Ava likes to drink.”
“You think?”
Eileen straightened up with a derisive laugh. “You’re funny, Miles.” She turned to another woman next to sloppy Ava. “And this is Fiona.”
Fiona, a leggy brunette, was draped in a loud pink strapless dress top-heavy with poufy shoulders. When she bent forward to shake my hand, it was impossible not to notice she wasn’t wearing a bra, as her chest quaked in all directions. Her sharp, dagger-shaped earrings seemed to stab at her dress as her frame closed in on me. “What do you make of our little group?” she said, her eyes wolfishly casing me up and down.
“My writing has taken me to some interesting places,” I said, trying to maintain a sense of decorum in the Babylon I had found myself imprisoned in. “I’m never surprised. That you ladies are interested in books makes me interested in you.” Sounded saccharine coming from me, but that penis pâté still had me a wee unsettled.
Fiona, sensing speciousness, sighted down her champagne flute, which she tilted at me, her eyes narrowing devilishly. “After they finish the next bottle of bubbles, they’ll forget they’re married and you’ll have a target sign on your back. And front, too.” She pointed her flute at my crotch and some spilled out, playfully tossed or otherwise, I couldn’t decide.
I lurched back a step and brushed champagne from my zipper. “No worries,” I said. “It’s all good.”
Eileen extricated me from drunk flamingo Fiona, clutching my elbow with a clawlike grip and dragging me around the plundered table of gourmet hors d’oeuvres. Champagne bottles plunged in and out of the buckets with unapologetic regularity. Confabulation rose in volume until it felt like we were aswarm in an aviary of fledged female hominids who hadn’t laid eyes on men in weeks. Jack was now nose to ruddy nose with the former soap opera star Olivia, grinning and laughing at her no-doubt-apocryphal anecdotes.
“This is Nadine.” Eileen introduced me to a beautiful woman with dyed black hair, her face a furrowed field of tiny wrinkles suggesting time was running out but that hope sprang eternal the more “bubbles” she imbibed. She was wearing a light-blue linen wrap dress with a ruffled hem. The top of the dress clamshelled over her chest at a competitively low position compared to the other Cougars. The loose structure of the dress made me wonder whether if she uncrossed her legs too suddenly the whole ensemble would fly open and expose her to the crowd. Tiny silver hoop earrings coruscated down her cheeks, framing a pair of rapidly blinking eyes. A mauve-colored gem twinkled at her cleavage, held by a delicate silver necklace.
“Nice to meet you, Miles,” she said in a deep voice. “I loved your book, but we’ll get deeper into it later.” She winked at me.
“What’s the gem?” I inquired politely, motioning to her necklace.
“It’s a pounamu, quarried in Central Otago, home to your beloved Pinot Noir,” she whispered in a personal tone.
“You’ve done your research,” I said.
She telescoped her head forward and breathed heavily on me. “I like to know my prey.”
I sucked in my breath. An eavesdropping Eileen roughhoused me away in the nick of time and introduced me to a woman named Susan, the oldest of the group. She was wearing a colorful caftan, over which was strung a heavy wooden necklace with Māori ancestral designs inked in scrimshaw. Though judging by her Aryan physiognomy, I deduced her whakapapa was probably closer to Captain Cook’s.
Susan extended her hand in a queenly fashion. “Hi, Miles. I’m probably the only one here who read your book all the way through.”
“It should make for a lively discussion then,” I said.
“When you give the Cougars this many bubbles”—she held up her glass—“the void has no bottom.”
I laughed at her Baudelairean stab at poetry. “I like your description,” I attempted to flatter her. “I might borrow it one day.”
“I write, too, you know.”
“Do you now?”
“I have a lot of titles,” she told me, reaching for her wooden necklace with her thumb and forefinger and rubbing the scrimshaw for good luck.
“Just don’t have the chapters,” I said.
Her expression turned into one of scorn. “Smartass.” She turned like a boat heaving into the harbor and reached for the nearest bottle of champagne, indiscriminate about whether she mixed her “bubbles.” Champagne Meritage!
Eileen squeezed my elbow tighter and motioned with her eyes across the hors d’oeuvres table to a young woman sitting under a voluminous head of red hair, so voluminous her face was but a mere egg glowing red in its nest. “That’s Robin. She doesn’t read books, but we’ve taken pity on her because her inheritance didn’t come through as she had hoped.” She lowered her voice another register. “Husband absconded back to America and took his hedge fund millions. With a younger woman.”
I widened my eyes at the intimacy. “Damn Yankees,” I said, trying to make light of Robin’s tragic divorce backstory. “I didn’t get anything, either, but then I couldn’t afford a family law attorney.”
Eileen dissolved into a laugh so gratingly affected I had to wait for her to stop convulsing.
Susan with the wooden necklace, in a gesture of amity, asked with large eyes and an extended bottle if I wanted a refill, then sloppily refreshed my flute after I held it out with eagerness. I quickly came to realize Jack and I were drifting, rudderless and with busted engine, into uncharted waters, and libations were needed in lieu of a sextant.
“I didn’t mean my comment,” I attempted to apologize.
“Didn’t offend me at all. You writers are all bitter fucks. My ex-husband was one, and a successful one, too, and then he shot himself.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, wincing at the lurid image blossoming in my head.
“He left a note. ‘Went out like Ernest.’” A hyena-like laugh surged up out of her, suggesting she was relieved he had left Christchurch in a final blaze of self-loathing. “As if he’ll ever be remembered,” she spat nastily, closing the chapter on that confession.
Eileen, our butterfly extroverted host, and owner of the hilltop mansion with her real estate magnate husband—in Fiji to fish, I was informed—clinked her flute with an hors d’oeuvres fork to summon everyone’s attention. “Okay, Cougars, it’s time to convene. Grrr. Grrr.” In unison they all grrr-ed back in a drunken chorus while simultaneously raising their hands in cat-scratch gestures like something out of The Lion King crossed with a football team performing a power chant before the big game.
Jack’s smile was widening from ear to ear while I was teetering on the verge of one humdinger of a panic attack.