Sideways

by Rex Pickett

  “Jeeves! Did that cheerleader scream ‘touchdown’ when she came?” Jack asked, jerking me out of my reverie.

  Brad wrinkled his nose up like a bunny and laughed his peculiar laugh all over again. It was beginning to grow on us.

  Jack elbowed me in the ribs. “This cracker’s cool.” Then, louder, toward the front seat. “Critterman, you’re cool, you know that? Just stay off the brewskis and you’ll get through this journey.”

  Brad blinked and concentrated on the narrow, winding Foxen Canyon Road, feeling happily like he was now one of the gang. Jack, despite his facial injuries and fractured rib and bruised ego, was in the best mood he’d been in since the beginning of the trip. The prospect of losing those wedding bands must have weighed more heavily on him than I realized. Perhaps the early-morning tears had not been hyperbole after all. Okay, so he had fallen for Terra, but we both knew it was an unrealistic pairing, and that as the big day approached, reason and the comforts of marriage would prevail. As I watched him yuk it up with Brad, his face growing rosier and rosier from the champagne and the boisterous repartee, I felt just a trace of jealousy that he had finally found happiness with a woman and I had not.

  Jack must have sensed my pensive mood because he suddenly called out to Brad to stop the car.

  “We’re not there yet,” Brad said.

  “I know. Just do what I tell you and pull over.”

  Brad steered the 4Runner onto the dirt shoulder of Foxen Canyon at the edge of a vineyard. The harvest here had already come and gone and the leaves on the vines had turned gold and ochre, foreshadowing winter.

  “Get out, Homes,” Jack instructed.

  “Where’re we going?”

  He reached an arm across me and pushed open the door. “Come on,” he urged, gently shoving me out. He turned to Brad. “We’ll just be a few minutes, Bradley. Don’t boost the car.”

  “Don’t worry,” Brad replied, shutting off the engine. Jack and I clambered out. He hooked an arm around my neck and drew me into the leafy, neatly rowed vineyard. Billowy gray-white clouds mushroomed in slow motion in the creamy blue sky. Insects buzzed in the balmy air. A crow chattered territorially on a fence post when he heard our footfalls in the crusty dirt.

  “So, what’s the call mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said sourly. “All I know is a Friday-leaving-the-office call is not the same as a Monday-morning-I’m-dying-to-dial-those-digits call. All the scripts I ever sold, my agent was on the phone to me early.” I looked down at the ground, which was appropriately crawling with ants feasting on a large insect.

  “You’ve got to put it out of your mind. We’re going to have a good time. You’ve been looking forward to this Pinot festival for a while.”

  I gazed off at the horizon. “I’m also a little apprehensive about seeing Maya there,” I confided. “Thus, my less than enthusiastic mood.”

  “Let me handle it.”

  “I’ve been letting you handle it, and it’s gotten seriously out of control.”

  “I appreciate your going into that chick’s apartment and getting my wallet back. I will never forget that.”

  I nodded facetiously. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “And I appreciate your helping me put Terra in perspective. Had it been me and someone else up here, it might have been a different story.”

  “It’s just the grape, man,” I said. “It’s just the grape.”

  “No, it’s not just the grape,” he protested. “Okay, so the grape liberates some shit, I’ll grant you that. But that doesn’t mean that shit isn’t brewing down there, that it’s some illusory nothing thing.”

  “Oh, illusory. Big word for you.”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Homes.” For a moment, he looked fragile.

  “What’s the point then?”

  “The point? We had to descend, you and I. We had to go down. In vino veritas and all that shit you talk about.”

  “Okay, we had to descend,” I said sarcastically. “To find what?”

  Jack swatted one of the grapevines violently, annoyed that I wasn’t getting the message. “Fuck, man, you know what I’m talking about.”

  Maybe I did but didn’t want to acknowledge it openly just then. I’d always had trouble with men who wanted to bond, to get emotional, to slit our thumbs with Boy Scout knives and make a blood pact. I just never wanted to get that close. Not to Jack, not to anyone, and at that moment in the vineyard I realized that I was the lesser for it. And that Jack, despite his carelessness and amorality, genuinely possessed a depth of feeling that served him well and endeared him to others.

  “You’re not still sore at me?” he asked.

  I shook my head, my mind on something that had been gnawing at me too long and needed to surface. Drawing a deep breath, I dropped the bombshell: “Here’s the reason I’m being pissy,” I started. Jack waited with his hands on his hips. “I’m not going to be able to make the wedding.”

  Jack’s head sagged forward, his brows knit together, and his mouth hung open in stupefaction.

  “You’re going to have to press Peter into service. I’m sure it won’t be a problem. Rent me a car here. Drive mine back when you get it repaired.”

  “Homes?” he said, a little plaintive.

  “I don’t want to see Victoria up there with her new husband.” I lowered my head. “Surely, you can understand that much.”

  “Oh, fuck, Homes! How are you ever going to get over the fact that you’re divorced and she’s no longer in your life unless you do see them together, in the flesh and blood?”

  “That’s your solution, not mine,” I countered.

  “You see them. You see they’re just another couple, and I’m telling you it’s all going to be fine. Trust me.” Jack remained motionless, waiting for a change of heart.

  I turned away. “Can’t do it,” I said.

  Jack jerked around and shadowboxed one of the rootstocks. Then he turned to me, a little desperate. “I need you up there, man. It’s important to me. It’s the end of the cycle. The curtain call. Without you, it’s incomplete.”

  I shook my head no in response.

  Jack planted both hands on my shoulders and jerked me toward him like a coach chiding a player. “Why?”

  “Because you lied to me,” I said in a rising tone. “Victoria has a new husband and they’re going to be there together. Victoria didn’t want me up there.” I was hot in the face now. “You could have told me so at least I would have had the option. Now, I look like some fucking party-crashing loser.”

  “They’ve accepted your coming.”

  “Yeah. Under duress.”

  “Okay, so I wasn’t on the up-and-up with you,” Jack acknowledged, reaching deep into his arsenal. “But, we wouldn’t have had this wonderful week if I had been.”

  “Wonderful?” I coughed out a laugh.

  “Yeah, wonderful. The best.”

  I conceded that the week had had its moments, but it didn’t change my resolve not to participate in Jack’s wedding.

  Suddenly, it was as if a light snapped on in his face. “Why don’t you invite Maya?”

  “Are you kidding?” I snorted at the suggestion. “Half a bottle of champagne and you’re fucking stinko.”

  “She’s got it all over Victoria, man. She is such a fucking babe. You walk in with her on your arm and you’re going to be the story, dude, not me and Babs, and surely not Victoria and what’s his name.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You want me to ask her?”

  “What are you? A blockhead? You think she’s even going to talk to either one of us after what happened with Terra? Not to mention the thousand-dollar hay roll. Forget it. Not interested.”

  “What if I get her to come?”

  “That’s not the issue, man,” I said irascibly.

  “What’s the issue? Huh? Tell me?”

  I faced him squarely. “The issue is: I’m going to be in

  “I understand,” Jack said. “But
I still want you up there. For me.”

  I fell silent, unreachable.

  “Well, this is a fucking bummer,” Jack said. “You’ve got me on a bummer now.”

  “Tell Babs and the family I had to go to the hospital because of the car accident. I’m sure she and Victoria will be delighted to hear I’m in traction and won’t be around.”

  “You’re really not coming?” Jack said as if it were finally dawning on him.

  “No,” I said stubbornly. “Weddings depress me. Especially ones where my ex-wife and her new husband are going to be present, fresh off their own honeymoon!”

  “I don’t believe this,” Jack said.

  “You don’t get it. That woman was my Rock of Gibraltar for eight fucking years. She supported me through some tough times and believed in me. And I fucked her over. I’ve been wanting to find atonement ever since, but I can’t find it.” I paused. “And now, knowing there’s no chance of any reconciliation is just more than I can bear.”

  “You can’t keep running from your failures, Miles.”

  His words pissed me off precisely because they were true. “Can’t do it.”

  Jack came forward and wrapped his arms around me and put his mouth close to my ear. “It’s going to be all right, man.” I let my arms dangle at my sides, unable to reciprocate. He tried to hug me tighter.

  I pushed him away and stared off. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Jack looked at me, crimson with anger. Then he spun in

  Jack wasn’t taking off anywhere without me. That I knew. I felt guilty that I had waited so long to spring my resentment on him, not to mention my reason for not wanting to attend the wedding. Then, too, he shouldn’t have hoodwinked me into coming to the wedding knowing that Victoria and her new husband were going to be there. I vacillated between my peevish feelings about the whole affair and Jack’s big moment in the sun and what it meant to him to have me there at his side. After a long debate, I reluctantly came down on the side that Jack was right: I was being unreasonable in pulling the plug at the penultimate moment, and whether Victoria was remarried or not wasn’t the crucial issue.

  I let a few protracted minutes pass. The clouds didn’t seem to have drifted much and the crow hadn’t stopped chattering the entire time. His anguished cawing was making me sick. I clapped my hands loudly and the crow rose with a furious clattering of wings and flew off at a low trajectory over the vineyard.

  I turned and trudged slowly up the vineyard furrow back to the car. When I got there, Brad was sitting on the hood puffing a cigarette, looking bored. I climbed into the back and shut the door quietly. Jack had his arms folded morosely across his chest.

  “All right, I’ll go,” I said, less than enthusiastically.

  Jack slowly turned his head and gave me a glower.

  “And try to have a good time,” I reassured him, manufacturing a smile.

  A smile dawned slowly on his ravaged face, and he appeared victorious for a moment. “It’s going to be all right, Homes,” he said consolingly.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I know.”

  Jack, relieved, raised his right arm and snapped his fingers sharply three times. “Jeeves! Tally ho!”

  Brad flicked his cigarette away and leapt off the hood and returned to the driver’s seat. He looked back at Jack, awaiting his marching orders.

  “Fess Parker. On the double. We’ve got some Pinots waiting.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brad said, springing into action and firing up the rattletrap.

  “So, who’s the guy Victoria married?” I asked as Brad started off.

  “David somebody,” Jack answered reluctantly.

  “David who?”

  “O’Keefe,” Jack mumbled.

  I turned and looked at Jack for a long moment. “Guy who directed Lessons in Reality?”

  “Yeah,” Jack admitted. “That’s the guy.”

  “One goes up, the other comes down,” I muttered, musing about my ex-wife married to a high-profile Hollywood director whose debut feature had been a critical and box-office success, assuring him of a solid future in the business.

  “She wasn’t right for you, Homes,” Jack said, hoping to assuage any feelings of diminished self-esteem—not that I could sink any lower.

  “Is there any woman really totally right for anybody?” I declared cynically.

  “You find the best you can,” Jack philosophized. “Then hang on for dear life.”

  I turned to him, taken aback. “That may be the most intelligent thing you’ve uttered all week.”

  “I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid.”

  “I think it’s the other way around.”

  We both laughed.

  Fess Parker Winery is a monument to kitsch: a large, wood building nestled amidst manicured lawns and manicured vineyards and gravel paths bounded by blooming flowers. My idea of a winery tasting room is a small, clapboard toolshed with open windows, buzzing flies, stinky cheeses, and serious wines. Fess Parker’s was designed to look like the lobby of a resort golf club, complete with wine pourers wearing identical monogrammed Izod golf shirts and flashing trained smiles.

  At the entrance, Jack and I checked in for the Pinot festival and were each handed a tasting glass and a pamphlet detailing the representative wineries and the barrel samples they would be pouring.

  As soon as we entered the festival setting I was disappointed. An hour after the noon starting time, the place was suffocatingly jam-packed with wine aficionados from all over California jockeying for position at the numerous booths. Clearly, the Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Association had oversold the event.

  All the local big Pinot guns were in attendance: Au Bon Climat, Calera, Brewer-Clifton, Sanford, Byron, and some lesser-known wineries like Tantara, Whitcraft, Longoria, Melville, Clos Pepe, and Ojai. Despite the obnoxious noise level and the elbowing necessary to get to the wines, I settled down and began to feel a tingle of excitement.

  We threaded our way through the crowd, wineglasses clutched to our chests, toward Au Bon Climat, a consistently solid producer of Pinots. I noticed some of the regulars from Epicurus—Eekoo, with his own Riedel Sommeliers glass, and Carl, with a cheap-looking woman in tow—and it seemed like months since I had last seen them.

  At Au Bon Climat it was four-deep to get a taste. After a frustrating, jostling wait, we finally managed to make our way to the front. We sampled through four single-vineyard Pinots, but the pourers, swamped by all the arms extending empty wineglasses and clamoring for more, were slow and we were constantly getting pushed and shoved. I quickly grew irritable.

  At one point, Jack nudged me in the ribs and gestured with a nod of his head. I glanced in the direction he wanted me to look. Over the shifting room of oenophiles, I spotted Maya at the Brewer-Clifton station engaged in conversation with an older, sandy-haired man. I don’t know if she had seen me first and was looking to see if I had noticed her, but she glanced over at me and, I thought, managed a smile.

  I turned back to Jack. “She moves fast.”

  “I’m sure it’s not a boyfriend,” Jack said, making a face. “Guy’s not her type.”

  “Depends how stocked his cellar is,” I quipped, reaching my glass out for another taste of the Rosemary Talley single-vineyard. “Fuck, it’s crowded in here. I can’t get settled in.”

  “Call your agent, would you?” he urged. “Then you can relax.”

  “I’ve got to get some wine in me.”

  I went back through the Climats. They were uniformly fine, if not transcendent. But then what could compare to the rarefied Bourgogne Rouges that Maya had uncorked? I had new standards now and they were pretty exalted benchmarks to meet. I couldn’t help looking over at Maya from time to time. She occasionally shot back a glance that I had trouble deciphering. Finally, bored with the glacial pace of the pourings, I broke away and went off to make the call.

  Outside, I found a pay phone anchored to the side of the building. In the distance, motionless swells of Fess’s immaculately te
nded vines spread in every direction. I had a buzz, but I wasn’t drunk when I dialed Evelyn’s home phone, reading the number off the back of an old business card. I decided I was in the perfect frame of mind for good or bad news.

  “Hello, Evelyn?” I said, enunciating carefully in an effort not to slur.

  “Speaking,” I heard her familiar husky voice reply.

  “It’s Miles Raymond, your roustabout client, returning.”

  She chuckled a little. “Miles. How’s your trip?”

  “Pretty adventurous,” I said. “Might be a book in it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I hope you’re drinking some fabulous wines.”

  “Oh, yeah, that I am. So, what’s happening?”

  She cleared her throat. “Conundrum passed,” she said, getting right to the point.

  “I see,” I said, not sure what I was supposed to say.

  “They really liked it, they really wanted to do it, but they had trouble figuring out how to market it. It was a tough call.” She labored in an effort to find some consoling words.

  “I see,” I said blankly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t say anything else. I was trying to figure out who exactly had punched me in the solar plexus.

  “So, I don’t know where that leaves us,” she said, measuring her words. “I’m not sure there’s any more mileage I can get out of continuing to submit it,” she said, hammering in the final nail. “I think it’s one of those unfortunate things that happens in this business, Miles. A terrific book with no home.”

  I was nodding, but again couldn’t think of anything to say. I could tell this was difficult for her, too.

  “Are you there? Miles?”

  “Yeah, still breathing.”

  “I’m really sorry. We tried.”

  “So, I guess that’s it,” I said, unable to summon anything else.

  “These things are so subjective. So many deserving books go unpublished. You’re not the first.”

  Platitudes rushed in to fill the breaching chasm. “I thank you, Evelyn. You’ve been great. Really. You believed in me when no one else did and you tried your heart out. What more can a writer ask?”

  She didn’t reply for a long moment. Her silence and her obvious discomfort with the call was her way of demonstrating just how awful she felt. She attempted to diminish the disappointment the only way she knew how. “Are you enjoying your trip?”