“We both need music to snap us out of this funk. Put on some Pink Martini. They’re so upbeat and bouncy.”
“Yeah. I love ‘Yolanda.’ It makes me want to dance. Even the melancholy ones become upbeat. Great idea, Sophia. But first, let me uncork your wine, madame, and allow it to breathe after I pour it into your very special crystal bowl of a glass,” he offered.
“You are too kind, monsieur. Pour away, s’il vous plaît,” Sophia responded.
They sat side by side, enjoying the food and drink and each other’s company, listening to the camp upbeat tunes. Jack stuck with scotch while Sophia savored the deep purple wine. It tasted of blackberry, plum, earth, and tobacco. Jammy. Complex. Leggy and heavy. It was going down smooth.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it home tonight,” Sophia said, enjoying another large mouthful of Cabernet.
“You’re welcome to stay here, of course,” Jack offered. “I wanted to discuss a case with you and even try to persuade you to come in on it, but I think we’re past the rational, clear-headed discussion stage. Way past that stage,” he said, taking a healthy swig of scotch.
“Yes, Jack darling. We are at the mellow, floating stage, I would say. Everything one would hope for from a wine,” Sophia said, leaning back into the couch with a self-satisfied look, worry lines erased for the moment. “I don’t know if your scotch buzz is like my wine buzz, but I don’t want anything to do with rational discussion, problem solving, or cases of any kind, whether murder or therapy. Cheating husbands and Nazis be gone. A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou is all I need,” she quoted, stretching her arms wide for emphasis.
“Who wrote that?” Jack asked.
“It’s from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Then it goes on about singing in the wilderness. Luckily, we don’t have to do our own singing. That might ruin the mood. And thankfully, we’re in your wonderful tame place and not in the wilderness. What are you doing for Christmas next week?” Sophia asked.
“Nothing. Certainly not going home to see the parents in Boston. Too much churchiness for an old atheist like me. I was thinking of putting in for duty, even though it’s probably too late, or just working on my problem case.”
“Don’t be silly. I just had the greatest idea. Two lost souls like ourselves need to spend Christmas together. After all, we are forced to celebrate something, even if we are two unholy misfits. It’s a national holiday, for Christ’s sake. Listen to me. For Christ’s sake indeed.”
“I’m glad to see that you crack yourself up,” Jack said.
“I know. I can be really funny when it’s inadvertent. When I’m not trying and I’m relaxed enough.”
“You can be funny when you are trying too. That dark, sarcastic humor. My favorite kind. Edgy,” he said.
“Anyway, listen. Listen to what we could do. Have a Jewish-outcast Christmas like I had in high school with other Jews, usually foreigners, who didn’t feel compelled to celebrate Christmas but didn’t want to feel like the envious infidel kids on the outside looking into Christmas-observing homes with their faces pressed to the windows, beholding heavily laden colorful conifers rising to the ceiling with tempting, perfectly wrapped gifts under the trees, tables groaning with food, and cheery Christians toasting each other with fragrant brandy-laced eggnogs while lights blazed everywhere,” Sophia said, warming to her memories
“Okay, Charles Dickens. You’re bringing tears to my eyes,” Jack said.
No, listen. We could go to the movies and then have Chinese food. The Jewish-outcast Christmas. Perfect. The Cinematheque is showing Happy New Year or La Bonne Année, a seventies film by Claude Lelouch. It’s terrific. Then Chinese food. Then back to my place to watch the American remake with Peter Falk. No trees, no mangers, no eggnog, no lights. Well, maybe candles. A perfect Christmas nonetheless,” Sophia said.
“I remember my mother used to love the whole Christmas ambience,” she reminisced. “She loved the lights and trees. If we had been American Jews, we could have celebrated, and she would have reveled in it, I’m sure. But Ma and Ta had barely escaped with their lives because they were Jews and not Christians, and there would be no Christmas shenanigans in the Werniczewski household. Our holidays tended to be pretty grim and uncelebratory. Especially the Day of Atonement, which consisted of serious fasting—even water was a no-no—and worrying about how you would be judged in God’s big book for the coming year. Grim. Could have been in a black-and-white Bergman film.”
“It sounds great. Not the Jewish holidays or your mother’s Christmas envy. The movies and the food. Just what the abandoned lapsed Catholic needs. I’m looking forward to it. And I can’t think of anyone with whom I would rather spend Christmas.”
“Me too!” Sophia returned his smile, feeling charmed by him. He was a good sport. “Blood brother and sister,” she said, looking off into the distance, sipping her wine. She clinked her glass against his, toasting the moment.
“Okay, Miss Party Planner. Maybe you can think of something stunning for Christmas Eve. We can begin the festivities then. Or am I being too needy?” he asked, anxiety furrowing the space between his eyebrows, his warm wary eyes searching hers, pulling at her heartstrings.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jack. Didn’t I just tell you we’re blood buds? If we were like almost everyone around here, we could have that tattooed somewhere on our persons. But since neither one of us goes in for that sort of thing…” She trailed off. “I’ll think of something marvelous for Christmas Eve. Leave it to me. We’ll dedicate it to my mother. It’ll be an extra special UnChristmas.”
“I want to play you this wow music from the nineties I just rediscovered. German new-age electronica with sacrilegious religious stuff thrown in. Gregorian chants gone awry,” Jack said. “Enough of this happy, happy Pink Martini mélange. Let’s get to some serious antichrist music.”
“Enigma!” Sophia shouted. “I forgot all about them. I love them. You pulled out a plum. Great holiday music for us sinners.”
“You know them? You’re an encyclopedia. You know everything. Encyclopedia probably dates me. Let me pour you another glass, dim the lights, light some candles as befits Enigma’s The Principles of Lust, and get the show on the road.”
“You have my attention. Enigma and candles. A great way to end the evening. And wine, of course.”
Jack lit several thick three-wick aromatic candles and turned the lights off. The sultry light sparked new life into the room. Sophia inhaled, appreciating the intoxicating aromas of sandalwood, evergreen, and vetiver, infusing the room with a new energy.
“You gave me those candles,” Jack reminded her.
“I have great taste, you must admit. I’m enjoying my gift to you. Thank you,” Sophia said, closing her eyes.
They sat, sinking into the couch, losing time, listening to the strange concoction of unholy chants, throbbing beats, ancient Latin intonations, and multilingual whispering women. They were transfixed and more than a little drunk.
Sophia was the first to rouse herself. “I’m getting really sleepy. Must go to bed. And I am not calling Barth. Let him think whatever he wants,” she said, leaning toward Jack, looking at him as if she were asking his permission.
Jack, leaning toward her, said, “You don’t need my permission. Do what feels right. Let me take you to bed. Whoops. That didn’t come out right. I mean, let me take you to the bedroom. Oh, you know what I mean. I just changed the sheets this morning. Lucky. I’m too beat to do anything now.”
“I’m not going to argue about your giving me the bedroom. I’m too tired too. But thanks.”
As he walked her to the door, he said, “I may tiptoe through to use the bathroom, so don’t worry if you hear someone. But I’m too lazy to brush my teeth now, so I’m just going to flop out,” he said, rubbing his forehead.
“Well, good night,” Sophia said, reaching for his cheek with her pursed lips.
“Good night,” he echoed, reaching for her cheek with his lips.
She
didn’t know who moved first toward the other’s mouth. Perhaps it was mutual. Suddenly they were kissing open mouthed, tongues working away, probing, twisting, and entwining, holding onto each other in a fierce embrace. It seemed unreal to Sophia. As if she were dreaming. This was no way for blood buds to act. But it felt wonderful.
Sophia managed to break away first after what seemed like a timeless drop into limbo. “Jack, I don’t know what just happened. It has to be a fluke,” she said, turning away from him to mask her rapid breathing.
“Sophia, I don’t know either,” he said. “I didn’t plan it. But it did feel great. Good night,” he said, turning toward the living room.
Before Sophia fell into a deep alcoholic slumber, she envisioned Jack as he was at the bedroom door. He was like a whey-faced baby, ingenuous and vulnerable. She had to be careful. Those powerful, well-muscled arms felt good, and it had been a long time.
“Tread lightly, Sophia,” she whispered. “He aches like a man, but he’ll break like a little boy.”
CHAPTER 13
Barth had decided to leave for Key West early. Disgruntled, dismayed, and disheartened by Sophia’s disappearance, he was packing hurriedly in order to set off for the Keys as soon as he could. He had called Jess and Ginty, who sounded happy to welcome him on Friday instead of Sunday. The museum would be fine without him.
Sophia had never stayed out overnight. She had proved herself to be faithful and loyal. He wasn’t going to wait for her to show her face. He didn’t want to let his imagination run amok, conjuring up scenarios of Sophia, vamping in garter belt and red lipstick, exacting her revenge with other men. He left a terse note letting her know he was leaving for Key West today.
“I don’t know why I’m being so considerate,” he said to the lonely four walls. “I should just take off without a word. Does she even give a shit?”
He stepped into the garage, threw his bag onto the passenger seat, and swung into his beloved BMW Z3 roadster convertible. Its 1999 vintage, classy red chassis, camel interior, and soft-top radiated good cheer. It was lovingly tended inside and out by his trusty South Beach mechanic, Carlos. The car was like a powerful panther, carrying him to Key West in style.
The first Z3, circa 1996, was featured in the Bond film GoldenEye, causing the car to sell out before it was off the assembly line. Barth was attached to his 1999 version. It had personality. He had named it “Pussycat.”
Barth zoomed along in his cherished car, feeling the tension lift, flying along the Overseas Highway for the last one hundred and twenty-six miles to Key West. He missed Sophia. He didn’t want to go to the Keys alone. They had their rituals associated with her nature-loving ways. They would stop on the grounds of the South Florida Baptist Hospital searching for companies of colorful feral parakeets and parrots. Then they would stop as soon as they hit Key Largo for sightings of the rare white-crowned pigeons, followed by a stop at Big Pine Key to mingle with the docile doe-eyed miniature deer.
Barth worried that Sophia might leave him. He enjoyed her company, her intellect, her style and beauty, and above all, her massages. He would miss her terribly. She had heated him up with her burning love, and he feared he had doused the flames, never to be rekindled again. He dislodged these ominous thoughts. One peccadillo couldn’t really blast her out of the relationship, he concluded, trying to reassure himself. Once she cooled off, he would have to make it up to her. As long as she hadn’t cooled toward him, he thought, his heart sinking.
Once he hit the new seven-mile bridge running parallel to the old seven-mile bridge, he gave himself over to the pleasure of driving his red purring Pussycat over the longest bridge, suspending him between sky and sea, immersing him in a phosphorescence so dazzling and pure that a hundred shades of blue seemed to enfold him and make him theirs. He could taste, touch, and smell the sea and sky. For a short timeless moment, he was one with them. Clean and pure. Without a thought in his head.
Once in town, Barth, admiring the clapboard houses, the bars and restaurants, the motley parade of locals and tourists, felt familiarity rush in. He couldn’t believe it had been a year since he and Sophia were last here. Should he call? No, best to give her time. Maybe in a few days.
Barth drove to his friends’ aptly named shop, “I Went All The Way,” a common phrase describing Key West, situated at the farthermost tip of Florida, a mere ninety miles from Cuba.
It reminded Barth of that other spit of land jutting out as it curled in on itself at the very end of Cape Cod, Provincetown: “The Last Resort.” He had enjoyed happy times there when he was at boarding school in Massachusetts. His parents, doting on each other, living in a sealed-off world for two, had no emotional room for their only child. As soon as his father was doing well in the States in his newfound bilingual journalistic career, he shipped Barth off to boarding school. A unilateral decision.
During his middle-school years at Northridge, Barth developed a taste for oral sex with males. The sweet sizzle of it. Relief from the gray, monotonous, lonely boredom. He had met Gunther there, nicknamed him Ginty. Their bond was close, but Ginty did not participate in the sweaty, clandestine circle jerks so prevalent in the dorms. Barth graduated to individual oral sex with Timothy. Timothy, the runt of the litter, small for his age, already effeminate, was an easy target for bullies, but boy, did he know how to please. Barth discovered he liked to receive rather than give.
He travelled back to those dark times of bad food, dingy surroundings, and stern, sometimes sadistic taskmasters. The only sources of warmth in that dark dirty world were sex and sports. He never cared for sports. Not even soccer. But sex. Exciting, spicy, and engrossing. He was becoming aroused, imagining Tim’s hot eager mouth on his head.
Barth had not been honest with Sophia. The act she had stumbled upon with Keith was not a second-time anomaly. Barth had never lost a taste for what started at Northridge. But he did not consider himself gay. The thought of French kissing or intercourse with a male repulsed him. He just wanted his “candy,” his oral sex from time to time.
He was transported back to his sixteen-year-old self, already a sybarite, wandering the propitious, serpentine streets of P’Town. Happy to be in such an exotic, loose place compared to the confines of his penitentiary-like school, run more like a reform school than a school for middle-class boys.
Portuguese fishermen, artists, writers, gays and lesbians flaunting it, and tourists of all stripes coexisted in some sort of crazy patchwork quilt of harmony, all enjoying in their own way the unique light at the ends of the earth—the federally protected dunes and the raucous freedom.
He remembered overhearing a fisherman’s wife at a bar telling her lesbian lover that she feared her husband might have discovered their secret. He wondered how many in that town took a walk on the wild side. He also remembered the outré, colorful religious extravaganza called the Blessing of the Fleet, complete with Virgin Mary and a little girl dressed to the nines lowered out of a second-story window onto the procession to initiate the fishing season.
He recalled the eponymous Commercial Street, the main drag, loaded with bars, restaurants, galleries, army-and-navy stores, gay sex shops and even a movie theater where he had once seen a woman who was so much the spitting image of Gertrude Stein, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Reincarnation. And then there was “The Meat Rack,” an unremarkable bench in the center of town in front of Spiritus Pizza where the desperate could pair off with someone at three or four in the morning.
A sixteen-year-old fetching blond boy had not needed to resort to “The Meat Rack” when he wanted what he wanted. And so he had branched out, no longer confining his taste for oral sex to Timothy amid the stark dorm rooms within the hallowed hungry halls of Northridge.
Sophia had witnessed the proverbial tip of the iceberg. He had not indulged when he was with her. Now his thoughts turned to the possibilities of independence. Key West and Provincetown were evil twins—both havens for wild promiscuity, drunkenness, drugs, debauchery, and just
plain unconventional behavior. Key West was more commercialized, not subject to the more conservation-minded ways of New England. But both were unbuttoned, unlaced, and unhinged last resorts.
“Barth, Barth!” a resonant deep voice belonging to the six foot four Gunther penetrated the dense thicket of Barth’s ruminations.
He leaped out of the car, embracing Ginty.
“Jess and I were wondering what you were doing out here sitting in your car for so long. Lost in thought? This is not a thinking town, Barth. Time to let your hair down and just be.” Gunther clapped him on the back after their embrace, emphasizing how delighted he was to see him.
He led the way into their terribly cute shop, crammed to overflowing with every imaginable representation of Jessica’s sculptures and Gunther’s paintings. They ran the gamut from tacky to artistic, from camp to beautiful, from cheap to pricey.
Jessica sculpted enormous human forms while Gunther painted small oils depicting nature, Key West style, in brilliant jewel-like colors. In here, one could buy anything from mugs, T-shirts, and key chains printed with their art to recreated copies of the originals. Something for everyone, as befitted the Key West ethos.
Unlike Barth and Sophia, Gunther and Jessica were physically similar. Both had robin’s-egg-blue eyes and sun-bleached white-blond hair. They were also both tall and thin, and they looked more like each other every year they were together. They even sported the same shoulder-length haircuts, shop T-shirts, and tan Bermuda shorts.
“Such a shame Sophia couldn’t make it this year,” Jessica said, releasing Barth from a tight, warm embrace.
“I know. It’s not the same without her. I already miss her. But for some reason, she’s swamped with work. Patients in trouble, an overdue article to write, a subpoena too, I think,” Barth lied shamelessly.
As he trotted out Sophia’s phony work commitments, he felt a twinge of lascivious excitement in the pit of his stomach, a stirring in his groin, and sensual memories of the lusty P’Town encounters flooding over him. Eight years of abstinence until Keith came along and lured him in.
Time's Hostage: The dangers of love, loss, and lus (Time Series Book 1) Page 8