Sideways

by Rex Pickett

  Jack was reclined on the bed, seemingly relieved that the phone call was behind him and another fire had been extinguished. He straightened to a standing position, looked me over, then said in a booming voice: “What—are—you—wearing—Liberace?”

  “My tux,” I said proudly, puffing out my chest. I had borrowed a purple velvet tuxedo from a friend of mine in an effort to save a little cash, and though it wasn’t tailored to a perfect fit, I thought it would get me through. Besides, I reasoned, I was infamous for occasionally appearing sartorially outré at social functions, and rationalized it would be dismissed as a joke.

  “You are not going out in that eyesore,” Jack howled. “They’re going to think we’re a couple of wheelhousers.”

  “This is what I brought for the wedding.”

  Jack frowned. “We’ll rectify that later this week. Now, get out of that silly monkey suit and into some manly

  Following his example, I quickly changed into jeans, ankle-high urban boots, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt: my signature look. Stroking his chin and looking down his nose at me, Jack finally approved.

  Nervous about the double date, I had smuggled the Byron into the car and was hitting off the bottle at regular intervals to build up some courage, much to Jack’s disapproval as he did the honors and chauffeured us to our destination.

  The trace of a zephyr bearing the piney scent of nearby mountains caressed our faces as we rolled into the tiny town of Santa Ynez. The place cultivated a kind of faux Western motif with its timbered facades and replica red barns and other anachronistic Old West architectural flourishes.

  We found a parking spot, tumbled out of the 4Runner, and walked along a planked sidewalk that creaked in protest with our heavy footfalls. As we neared the supposedly trendy restaurant with the supposedly unrivaled wine list, the murmurous voices from the diners inside increased in volume. Fifty paces from the entrance, Jack stopped me and said, “Are you weaving?”

  “No, I’m not weaving.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Jack gave me a final once-over. He raked a hand through my hair and straightened up my shirt, then amiably slapped me on the cheek. “You’re a mess.”

  “I’m an artist. Epigone though I may be.”

  “Let’s hold off on the ten-dollar words, Webster, okay?” He jabbed a forefinger into my chest. “It’s fucking ostentatious.”

  “Pretentious.”

  “Whatever. Okay?”

  “We don’t want to risk intimidating them, is that what you’re implying?”

  “Just put the pompous-asshole side of your personality away tonight.”

  “Be patronizing?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Just be yourself.”

  “This has been my contention all evening.”

  “The self you used to be.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Before you went into the tailspin,” Jack pointed out.

  I slapped my forehead. “Oh … oh, the tailspin! You mean before the divorce and the failure of my first book and the reclaimed credit cards, that self. Oh, oh, okay.”

  He ignored the sarcasm. “It’s a new Miles.” Jack tried to bolster my ebbing spirits. “And, remember, your novel’s coming out in the fall.”

  “What’s it called?”

  Jack looked stricken. “What do you mean what’s it called? You’ve got a title, don’t you?”

  “Confessions of an Onanist,” I cried out.

  “Shh. Jesus. Are you just out to sabotage me?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of standing in the way of your cheating on your fiancée. Uh-uh. No, not me.”

  He brandished a finger at me. “Don’t sabotage me. If you want to be a lightweight with Maya, that’s your call. But don’t sabotage me. Or this trip ends mañana.”

  I affected a similarly serious air and saluted him. “Aye, aye, Captain. We’re on a correct heading. Full speed ahead.”

  He gripped my shoulder and spun me around. “Let’s go. Maintain. Don’t weave.”

  “You’re the one weaving, not me.”

  “I’m weaving because you’re weaving.”

  “Weaves of grass.”

  “No references to esoteric poetry, either.”

  “Whitman? Esoteric? Incroyable!”

  “Don’t slip into French, Homes. Do not go into Frog. That’s when I know you’re really twisted.”

  We started back down the wooden sidewalk, Jack leading the campaign. The restaurant glowed yellow from inside large picture windows adorned with quaint white lace curtains. I was ambivalent, I knew I was ambivalent, and I knew I should have just turned around, but I felt too weak to protest any further. Not to mention that my reservations were compromised by the expectation of a gastronomic blowout funded by Jack’s resolve to get laid.

  As we approached the restaurant, Jack stopped me with a halfback’s stiff arm from barging in. He peered through the window to case the scene. “Oh, my God!” he said. “Oh, my fucking God.”

  I attempted to push past his arm to take a look. But Jack clutched me by the shirt and held me slightly back to afford me a restricted view. I could make out Maya and Terra sitting next to each other at a horseshoe-shaped copper-top bar, glasses of wine in front of them. Terra was wearing an unbuttoned charcoal gray sweater and a pair of tight low-rise blue jeans that offered a glimpse of her flat midriff—pierced bellybutton included. Maya wore a short black skirt and a tight-fitting red woolen shirt. From my perspective, she looked like a lioness secure in her preeminence on the food chain. Firelight from a wood-burning brick oven romanticized their features and made them seem all the more unapproachable.

  “Oh, baby,” Jack crooned, rubbing his hands together. “Come to papa. Come to papa.”

  “I thought they were going to blow us off,” I said, feeling a tingle radiate up my spine.

  Jack smirked. “Don’t try to monopolize the wine selection. We’re going with their palates. If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.”

  “They’re not going to order Merlot. They’re way too hip for that.” I turned to Jack and threw open my arms. “And if they do, I’m splitting.”

  “Relax, Miles. Jesus. Calm down.” Jack glanced back inside and luxuriated in a second look. “Man, they’re beautiful.” He turned to me, wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug and lifted me off the sidewalk. “Thank you for suggesting we come up here. I knew you were good for something.” He let go of me and raised his arms dramatically. “How did I pull this off?”

  “They can smell a man about to be married two vineyards away.”

  Jack giggled. “Shh. Shhshhshh!”

  “Something musky emanating from him. Noble rot.”

  Jack clamped a hand over his mouth to suppress his laughter, then cautioned: “No marriage shit. No matter how much you have to drink, no mention of Babs. You understand?”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “No mention of my ex either. Big downer.”

  “It could work in your favor. She might feel sorry for you.”

  “She’ll conclude I’m a loser, but maybe vouchsafe me a mercy fuck, is that what you’re implying?”

  “Come on, what did we talk about?” Jack tried to rally me. “Act confident.” He administered a playful wake-up slap. “Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to walk in there

  “Hey, wait a second,” I interrupted, pretending I didn’t understand. “I thought Terra was mine.”

  “Homes! She thinks you’re an arrogant wine snob jerk.”

  “Oh, and no doubt you confirmed that to her this afternoon while I was MIA in the bathroom.”

  Jack wrestled me away from the restaurant window and stuck his face close to mine. “Yeah, well, while you were MIA I was in that tasting room using all my charms so that tonight we wouldn’t be DOA in that fucking morgue called the Clubhouse.”

  “QED.”

  “QED. Fuck you. Look, Miles, let me explain something to you. Terra is hot to trot. She’s my type. We’re not going to let our fucking bra
ins interfere with the task at hand. You and Maya, on the other hand, have a history, you have Pinot in common. Intelligent conversation. Okay?” He leaned closer. “She’s obviously the more beautiful of the two. I’m doing you a favor. I could get either one of them tonight. I could get both of them in fact!”

  “Oh, give me a break. You are so fucking full of yourself.”

  “Miles. Miles.” He placed both hands on my shoulders and spoke to me gently now. “This may come as a total shock to you but sometimes … chicks just want to get pounded.”

  I looked wordlessly into the artificial smile frozen on his big round face.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “They’re waiting.”

  “Wait a second.”

  “What now?”

  “I feel a mild panic attack coming on.”

  “For crying out loud,” Jack said, exasperated. “Did you bring your meds?”

  I unpocketed a small vial of Xanax and rattled the pills around inside. I hadn’t had to resort to any since my most recent hospitalization a few months before, but I carried them with me everywhere as a kind of security blanket.

  “Good. Because, Lord only knows where 911’s going to take us up here.”

  I chuckled anxiously.

  “All right,” Jack said. “Let’s rock and roll.”

  We circled around to the entrance. Inside the loud, crowded restaurant we paraded right past the “Hey, can I help you?” maître d’, and made a beeline to the bar. Jack, sporting his ear-to-ear convivial grin, spearheaded our offensive.

  “Hey, girls,” he said in a rising tone. “Sorry we’re late.”

  They swiveled on their stools at the same moment and faced us with friendly smiles and a toast of their glasses.

  “We got stuck in traffic,” I said.

  “Yeah, that 246 can get really jammed up this time of night,” Terra joked.

  Everyone laughed. As planned, Jack circled around and plopped down on a stool next to Terra and I mimicked his move on the north battlefield next to Maya. I noticed Jack touching a hand briefly to Terra’s bare neck and massaging it casually. “How’re you doing, beautiful?” he said in his sweetest voice.

  “Good,” she said, beaming at him. “How’re you?”

  “Great,” Jack said. “You look smashing.”

  “Thank you. Not bad yourself, sexy.”

  I finally eased onto the stool next to Maya. Unlike Jack the actor I was clumsy at flummery. Besides, I didn’t think Maya was really the type who would fall for it. “There’s no karaoke here,” I said. “Let’s split.”

  There was laughter as Jack and Terra turned toward us.

  “My apologies for last night,” I said to Maya. “I really don’t despise myself that much.”

  Maya looked at me. “That’s good to hear. I found it amusing. In a kind of sad and pathetic way.”

  I laughed. “You must be bored here in Buellton.”

  “Homes!” Jack reproached me with arching eyebrows.

  “Why does he call you Homes?” Maya asked in her throaty, low-register voice.

  “Because if he uses my real name it’ll sound too personal. We’ve depersonalized our relationship for the sake of its longevity.”

  “So, what’s his nickname?”

  “Oh, it varies. Lately I’ve been stuck on peckerhead, but I’m open to suggestions.”

  Maya cracked a smile and I looked away. Our shoulders were touching, and there was something electrifying in that glancing tactility that I couldn’t wrap my brain around. Part of me wanted to close my eyes and lean all the way into her lap, but I knew that that indiscretion had the potential to capsize the whole evening, at least as Jack had it scripted out.

  Jack and Terra were laughing hard on the starboard end of our foursome, and for a moment I fantasized what it would be like if Babs were watching us on a hidden camera, what conclusions she would draw. What gun shop she would patronize.

  “So, what are you drinking here?” I asked Maya.

  “Andrew Murray Viognier.”

  I brightened. “Oh, yeah, how is it?”

  She slid the glass in front of me. “Here, try it.”

  I swirled the wine in the tulip-shaped glass and put my nose in it. It smelled of apricots and melons. I took a sip. It was massive, a viscous conflation of tropical fruit, butterscotch, and spritzes of limes. “Nice,” I said. “Very nice.”

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  “I like it a lot.” I helped myself to another mouthful. God, the wine tasted delicious on my palate. It was refreshing to be once again beyond the narrow simplicity of champagne and back into some serious grape. “Mm. Delish,” I said, sliding the glass back to her.

  The maître d’ appeared behind us and said, “Your table’s ready.”

  All four of us pivoted off our bar stools and were escorted to a corner table. We assumed strategic positions: boy, girl, boy, girl. Terra knew the maître d’ and thanked him personally. After he passed out menus, he recited the roster of the evening’s specials: seared ahi on a bed of mixed baby greens as an appetizer; medallions of pork with a light dusting of black truffles; a poulet with pommes frites; and Copper River salmon roasted on an alder wood plank. After he had concluded his recitation, he said, “Who would like to see the wine list?”

  I raised my arm in the air with the zeal of an over-achieving first grader, but Jack was zapping me with one of those withering looks of his, so I lowered my paw.

  “Did you want to choose the wine?” Terra asked, laughing.

  “No. No. Be my guest. Please.” I held up my hands in surrender.

  Across the table, Jack nodded at me with a Cheshire-cat smile. The wine list was handed to Terra. “So, what is everyone in the mood for?” Terra wondered.

  “Whatever you girls are drinking, it’s on me,” Jack said magnanimously.

  “What is everyone ordering?” Maya said. “Then we can sort out the wine.”

  I turned and looked at her. “Exactement!”

  Jack wagged a finger at me. “No, Jean-Pierre, no.”

  Maya and Terra exchanged bemused looks, but pressed on reading their menus.

  “I’m going to have the salmon,” Maya decided.

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to have,” I said, slamming my menu shut.

  “Duck breast for me,” Terra said. “Maybe the house salad to start.”

  “Excellent choice,” Jack said, slapping his menu decisively on the table.

  “So,” Terra said, turning her attention back to the wine list again. “What—are—we—going—to—drink?” She pretended to be poring over the list for a few serious moments, then raised her head and rested her chin on the rim of the menu, peering over it with theatrically batting eyelashes. She looked coquettishly at Maya, then at me, then back and forth a few more times. “Sounds like Pinot Noir to me!”

  “Pinot!” Jack and I both echoed simultaneously, raising fists into the air. Our rah-rah response caused our dates to titter. They were probably wondering if we were fun guys or full-blown lushes.

  “The question is,” Terra settled us down, “which

  Maya scanned the list briefly.

  “May I make a humble suggestion?” I offered, timidly holding up my hand.

  “No,” Maya snapped without looking at me. Then she smiled to mollify her curt response.

  I leaned over, cupped a hand to shield my mouth from Jack, and whispered into Maya’s ear, “Remember, Jack’s paying, and he’s butt rich.” Maya touched my arm conspiratorially. “Don’t be afraid to cross the Atlantic,” I added.

  I straightened back in my chair. Jack’s eyes were narrowed at us, trying to decipher our little tête-à-tête.

  “Why don’t we go back in memory lane and revisit the ’95 Whitcraft from our own Santa Ynez Valley?” Maya suggested.

  “Sounds good,” Terra said.

  “We’ll pay for the food,” Maya said.

  “Forget it,” Jack said. “It’s on us. We’re celebrating Miles’s bo
ok deal.”

  My head slouched forward and I shielded my embarrassment with a swiftly moving hand.

  “So when does it come out?” Terra asked. “You must be excited.”

  “In the spring,” I said softly. I hated to lie, but I had little choice.

  “Isn’t that awfully quick for a book just acquired?” Maya asked.

  “It’s a hot commodity.” Jack came in to shore up the levee.

  “Very little editing,” I said.

  Maya gave me the gimlet eye, then lifted her Viognier to

  The maître d’ returned—thank God!—erect and proper in his black pants and white shirt.

  Maya looked up at him and said, “Greg, a bottle of the ’95 Whitcraft.”

  “Excellent selection, as I would expect.” He disappeared into the back to uncellar the bottle.

  “Have you had the Whitcraft?” I asked Maya, wanting to steer her away from my bogus book deal.

  “I’ve had the previous years, which were all pretty amazing.” She turned to Terra. “You’ve had the ’95, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. It was great. Be interesting to see if it holds up.” She raised her eyebrows in anticipation of its uncorking and smiled. Jack kneaded the back of her neck again and she gazed up at him with moony eyes.

  Maya turned to me. “Ninety-five was a really dry year and the taproots had to go deep for water. That produced a low yield but a highly concentrated fruit.”

  A giddy feeling washed over me. It was fun to be in the company of these two knowledgeable wine women, and I was beginning to feel slightly guilty for having agreed to the dinner on such false pretenses, in tow with my wickedly amoral friend.

  The maître d’ promptly returned with the bottle of Whitcraft, opened it, and placed the cork aside.

  “Hey, aren’t you supposed to smell the cork?” Jack blurted out.

  Maya, Terra, the maître d’, and I all exchanged raised eyebrows. I broke the silence: “Jack, that’s like sniffing a woman’s butt before you have sex with her.”