House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  “I don’t think anyone will think that,” Laura answers. “I’m not covering anything up, that’s the point.”

  “At the risk of sounding like a pedantic old lady, maybe you should rethink this.” Dorothy shakes her head. “Your mother’s going to go through the roof.”

  “I can’t help that,” Laura responds, stubbornly.

  “That’s another thing to rethink.”

  “I don’t need her permission.”

  “That’s a thoughtless remark, Laura. It’s not about asking anyone’s permission, it’s about common decency towards your parents.”

  “But that’s exactly the point, Grandma, don’t you see? If I have to check with Mom before doing something that might be controversial, then I do need her permission. I’m sick of that. I’m twenty-five years old. I’m sick of having to ask my parents’ permission to live my life.”

  Dorothy steeples her fingers. “Sleep on this,” she counsels Laura. “Let us both think about this action, a day or so. If you still want to keep your detective on hire after that, I’ll go along with it. But don’t do something rash you could regret later.”

  Laura bites her lip. “All right. I’ll sleep on it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I don’t think it’s going to change my mind. And Grandma,” she adds hastily, “you have to promise me something in return.”

  “What?” Dorothy asks warily.

  “Don’t tell Mom. Not till I do.”

  Dorothy finishes her drink. She’ll need another to help her fall asleep tonight.

  “All right. I won’t tell your mother,” Dorothy promises her. “That would be betraying a confidence, which I would never do. But if you continue along this line of action she’ll find out, sooner or later, and when she does—well, you know your mother.”

  “That’s why I don’t want her to know.” Laura stands up, stretches. “I’m beat. I’m going to bed.” She gathers up her stuff, kisses Dorothy on the forehead. “Good night.”

  “Once you let the genie out of the bottle it’s not so easy to get him back in,” Dorothy counsels her. “Think about that.”

  “I want to know what it is everyone’s so afraid of,” Laura responds. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Is this where you make the wine?” Kate asks Cecil.

  They’re in the large wine-holding room at his ranch, surrounded by dozens of sixty-gallon oak wine barrels. Even now, in the middle of summer, the room is cool and dark, the concrete floor exuding a musty moistness.

  “Where you make the wine is in the field, working the soil and the grapevines,” he says. “What happens in here is refinement.”

  “Come on, there must be more to it than that. Otherwise anyone could do it. I know I couldn’t do it.”

  “You have to have the feel,” he tells her. “Like hitting a curveball or blowing jazz tenor.”

  “I can’t do those, either.” Looking around some more, she asks, “What kind of wines do you make?”

  “Sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir. What grows well here. What kind of wine do you like?”

  “I like chardonnay.”

  “Want to try some?”

  “Sure.”

  He leads her down a row, stopping at a barrel that has a silicone bung in it. He takes a tasting-room wineglass off a wooden overhead shelf, picks up a glass wine thief, siphons some wine from the barrel into the wineglass, hands it to her.

  “We’ll bottle this in the fall.”

  She sips. “Um, good.” She takes a deeper drink. “This is really good. This is better than the wine we drank at dinner.”

  “This’ll be a reserve bottling. It’s our best stuff.” She can hear the pride in his voice. “I’m glad you like it.”

  “How much will it cost?” she asks.

  “About twenty-five a bottle in the store,” he says.

  “Oh.” She looks at the glass. “I shouldn’t be drinking this so fast. My speed’s the six-dollar category at Long’s.”

  “I’ll give you some.”

  What he just said to her, that was a commitment. She’s a woman who doesn’t believe in commitments anymore.

  “Thank you.” She feels shy, suddenly.

  They stand on the floor, kissing. He leans her back against a barrel. It’s cool to the touch. “I don’t have protection on me,” he says. “I didn’t last time, either,” he admits.

  “How come last time you didn’t say anything?”

  “It was our first time. I didn’t think anything would happen.”

  That figures. He’s the kind of man who thinks nice women don’t fuck on the first date. That wasn’t even a date, it was a pickup. She almost let him, anyway. What he’s saying is, he wouldn’t have even if it had been okay with her.

  Old-fashioned. That’s new and different.

  “I’m on the pill.” Which is a lie, but she doesn’t want them to stop this time. “From when I was married, I never quit. It gets to be a habit, like brushing your teeth,” she rambles like it’s no big deal, wanting him not to read too much into it. “Are you clean?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know for sure?”

  “I’ve only been with one woman for the last three years, and we tested, so I guess I am.” Leaving the decision to her, an out if she wants one.

  She’s been with more than one man, and she’s always made them use a rubber. Usually she has one with her; tonight she doesn’t, but she wouldn’t pull it out anyway. She doesn’t want this man to know she’s the kind of woman who carries a contraceptive in her purse.

  “We’ll be all right,” she assures him.

  They make love in his bedroom. Nice, gentle, unhurried. As he begins to enter her, his blocky muscular body poised on top of hers, the hair on his chest tantalizing her nipples, her hand guides his erection as it finds the fit between her legs and she flashes for a moment on a memory of an image she recalls having seen, of whales copulating in the ocean, roiling the water as they plunge and dive, the male whale’s penis gliding in and out of the female like an underwater muscle-sword finding the soft sensual scabbard.

  If she could will it he wouldn’t come until dawn, they would fuck all night long. She wants him in her, the orgasm is almost irrelevant.

  Without warning, Juan Herrera flashes into her mind, staring at her breasts through her wet shirt, her arms around him, her mouth eating his.

  She can feel her body tightening. Keep the rhythm going, don’t lose this, people’s minds wander during sex, it’s natural, this is where she wants to be, she opens her eyes and looks up at Cecil, whose eyes are closed, the way she wishes hers were, he’s not thinking of any other woman, this is where she wants to be, trying to bring herself back to being with him again.

  She would have fucked Juan Herrera—a married man, a policeman—if the phone hadn’t rung at that precise moment. What kind of woman are you? she thinks. How easy are you, anyway? What was Cecil really thinking as he entered this woman he barely knows, who gives herself to him so eagerly, so willingly?

  Shame courses through her body like a river of mercury, she feels on fire, burning to ash, all that will be left of her will be a thin plume of smoke that will drift out the window, into nothingness.

  She wants this man. And all her instincts tell her she shouldn’t have him, because it’s too clean.

  Let it be, she pleads with herself. Give yourself permission, to believe that you deserve it.

  He must feel what she’s thinking, that connection she wants so bad, because he is in her a long time.

  She wills herself to be back with Cecil, in the present; her orgasms begin, wave after wave, each stronger than the one before.

  “How are you doing?” he asks her.

  Where does this sweetness come from, she wonders, in such a rough package? “I’ve come a million times,” she breathes into his ear. “I’m going to pass out.”

  “Good,” he says, and then he explodes, and she feels yet another orgasm building
, coming on top of his.

  They doze for a couple of hours, waking up at the same time, about one in the morning.

  “Are you tired?” he asks her.

  “I should be, but I’m not.”

  “Me neither.” He sits up out of bed, pulls her up. “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

  They stand at the top of his property in the middle of rows of grapevines, his old ranch pickup truck parked off in the dirt. She is in her light dress, nothing on underneath, and he’s wearing a beat-up pair of shorts. Both are barefoot, they threw on whatever was handy. It’s hot and the wind is beginning to pick up, foreshadowing a Santa Ana.

  He kneels down and plucks a handful of ripe rose-colored grapes off a vine, holds them out to her. “These are Pinot grapes we’ll be picking next month.”

  She takes a couple from his palm, pops them into her mouth.

  “Delicious,” she tells him, juice running out the corner of her mouth.

  Far down below them a set of headlights comes bouncing along a gravel road, heading for a small, dark house that’s set back under a grove of eucalyptus trees. The car parks in front of the small house. A man gets out, the moon casting his shadow like a spotlight.

  “Hmmm.” Cecil grunts.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I don’t think so,” he answers cautiously.

  The front door of the house opens. A woman comes out onto the porch. The eaves shadow her face.

  “I know her, though,” Cecil says.

  The man walks up to the porch. He and the woman exchange a hurried kiss, say a few words to each other, go inside.

  “You didn’t recognize her?” Cecil asks Kate, his eyes fixed on the dark house.

  “Should I?”

  “You just met her.” A moment’s pause. “That was Miranda Sparks.”

  “It is?” Talk about weird coincidences. “People tell me this county is one small town. Now I know what they mean.”

  He nods. “My property line ends there,” he says, pointing to a low two-strand barbwire fence about forty yards off. “On the other side is the Sparks ranch, one of the biggest in the county. You stand up here in daytime, you couldn’t see to the end of it.”

  “You’re neighbors,” Kate says, starting to get the picture.

  “I’m just a little old winemaker, Kate. Our property line is the only thing we have in common.”

  “I wonder who that man was?” she says. “It wasn’t the man she was having dinner with, I could tell that from here. Could that be her husband?” she queries, casting a line. Cecil should certainly know Miranda Sparks’s husband.

  “No. Even without seeing his face I could see that man is younger than Frederick.”

  So now I’ve met the daughter and the mother, Kate thinks to herself. I wonder what the husband is like—Laura’s father.

  And who’s this midnight caller? her mind continues on. From the way Miranda Sparks greeted him his visit wasn’t unexpected. It’s none of her business, as far as her business goes, but the detective in her is intrigued.

  They walk back along the row of grapevines to his truck.

  “That lady gets around,” she comments, the dry earth puffing up around her bare feet.

  “That is for sure,” is Cecil’s terse reply.

  The ranch house is dark. There’s enough moonlight coming through the windows so the lights don’t need to be turned on.

  Miranda likes it in the dark. She’s always known that illusion is more exciting than reality, more compelling. She feels strong when she’s in darkness, sensing her surroundings rather than seeing them. One of the reasons she loves sex so much is that senses more imaginative than sight—touch, smell, taste—are the most important. It is of second nature to her that she uses her sexual power: why was she given it if not to use it? But no matter how calculating she can be, some amount of pleasure is always there, some touch, some taste, some smell. Years ago, more than half a lifetime, she had slept with a man who was unremarkable in bed, in most ways he was a turnoff (she was very young and he was an older man, as old or older than her father, the sexual encounter they were having was strictly to help her out—he was a professor at her college and she needed a B or better in his class to keep her scholarship and the course was utterly baffling to her, so she fucked him, once, to get the grade she needed), but at one point during the grunting and groping she had smelled his hair, his stiff, white-yellow shock of old Swedish ancestral hair, and it had brought a memory of a haystack that she had jumped and played in at a farm once, a memory that she loved. Her orgasm with this man she otherwise had no attraction for at all was so intense she has always remembered it.

  Her father always said you can find some good in everyone, one of many stupid homilies her father lived by. Her father was a jerk and a loser, a total failure, but he was right about that. But only, she had to qualify, when it came to sex. The rest was all bullshit, there are plenty of people you can’t find anything good about. The majority of people, in fact.

  Not her late-night caller, though. He has plenty of power of his own, he doesn’t have to grovel at her feet. She likes powerful men, she just doesn’t know many.

  “I saw the shindig you threw down at the beach today,” Blake Hopkins says to her, raising his Booker’s-with-a-splash in toast. “It was on the Channel 3 Nightly News.” He’s sitting on a worn leather couch that’s covered with a Chumash Indian weaving; his shoes are comfortably off.

  “It was an important thing to do,” she states. “I told you that.” There is no cynicism in her voice.

  “It was a wonderful gesture. And you’re a wonderful person.”

  “Why are you being sarcastic?”

  “Force of habit.” He laughs. “If only the rest of the world knew what I know.”

  “They don’t. And they never will, unless you tell.”

  “Get serious. I’d be in as much trouble as you if this ever came out.”

  “Then we’re both safe.” She takes him by the hand, pulls him up from the couch. “Come on to bed, I’m horny.”

  “You had dinner with that guy Wilkerson. Didn’t he satisfy the inner woman?”

  “He’s not for me.”

  “How do you know that unless you try?” His shirt is off now, he’s sitting on the bed taking off his socks.

  “He’s not for me.”

  They make love like a happily married couple, which she is, with another man.

  “When’s your husband getting back?” Hopkins asks. He’s sitting up in bed, drinking a Coors and eating a ham sandwich she made him.

  “Tomorrow night, I think. He’ll call first.” She takes a bite out of her own sandwich. After making love she gets hungry.

  “Does he know about us?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t he ever get suspicious, all the nights you’re not there?”

  “He doesn’t allow himself to be.”

  “How can he not be? He’s married to the most erotic woman in—”

  “Don’t,” she says, cutting him off.

  “I’d be. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.”

  “You’re not him.” Seemingly out of the blue: “I love my husband,” Miranda says.

  He thinks about that. “You know, I think you do.”

  “I do. I love him very much.”

  “I hope he never finds out about us, then.”

  “He won’t.”

  The house is hot and still. They sleep naked on top of the sheets.

  She wakes him before dawn.

  “I’ll make you coffee,” she offers. She’s wearing a cotton nightgown, her hair is twisted back in a ponytail. She is without any makeup, which makes her look younger, but no less beautiful.

  “You’re being domestic this morning.” He’s putting on last night’s clothes.

  “I like pleasing men.”

  “You do a good job of it.” He pulls his boots on. “Don’t bother with the coffee, I’ll grab a cup in Santa Barbara, I’m going to shower and cha
nge in my motel room.”

  They walk out onto the front porch. Dawn is breaking over the eastern hills, as it was when she stood out here with him before.

  “Drive carefully,” she says. She could be his real wife, sending him off to work in the morning.

  He starts down the steps to his car, then turns back to her.

  “There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why do you sleep around?” he asks. “If you love your husband so much.” He pauses. “I know I’m not your only lover.”

  “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No. I mean … I suppose there’s a little jealousy, once in a while. Wondering who the other ones are, that kind of thing.”

  “Just other men. There aren’t that many. Or that often.”

  “First among equals,” he says, trying to keep it light.

  “You’re all first.” She smiles at him. “But you’re not all equal.”

  6

  CHASING YOUR TAIL

  “A-1 BAIL BONDS. SO I’m the first one listed in the phone book,” the proprietor had explained. “I know that’s a ploy as old as the hills but you’d be surprised how many people call the number at the top. Probably adds 10, 15 percent to my gross. Besides, with a last name like mine, A-l sounds better.”

  His name is Eustis Lutz—he has a point, she has to concede. The bond company he runs is not the biggest in town, or the smallest. Middle-of-the-pack. Lutz operates out of his house, normal SOP for bonding companies in cities the size of Santa Barbara. All you need are a bunch of phone lines. Kind of like being an old-time bookie, Kate imagines. Not that she’s ever known any old-time bookmakers—or modern ones, for that matter. Gambling isn’t one of her vices, thank God. She has enough problems without the burden of that one.

  The house is a small tract on the Mesa. Lutz is a bachelor, fiftyish, with no personal style whatsoever. His decor is even more utilitarian than hers. Mostly files, and volumes on regulations.

  “Wes Gillroy,” he says in response to her question. He doesn’t have to look that one up. “Yes, I wrote his bond.”