by Don Lee
Out of the corner of his eye, Lyndon detected a tennis ball flying through the air and bouncing on the ground, Bob tearing after it. Oh, Bob. Where did he keep finding these tennis balls? It was Woody, of course, who was playing fetch with him. But as Lyndon rounded the corner of the house, he saw that Woody wasn’t alone. A red SUV, decorated with flower-power splotches of pastel paint, was parked on the gravel driveway—the standard-issue vehicle for The Centurion Group, the developers of the hotel and golf course flanking his farm. Woody was talking to Ed Kitchell, the latest in a long string of polo-shirt-and-khaki-clad wonks who were trying to convince Lyndon to sell his property. Mud was on the SUV’s tires, surely from following Woody’s tracks through the creek ditch.
Lyndon went to his shed, dropped the hula hoe, and retrieved his Viper M1 semiautomatic rifle, a smaller version of an M16. He made sure it was locked and loaded and strode toward Kitchell. The gun had an extended barrel and a telescoping buttstock, which Lyndon braced against his shoulder. He took aim and fired at Kitchell. The shot missed, whizzing over Kitchell’s head.
“Lyndon!” Kitchell screamed, ducking.
“You’re not supposed to be here, Ed!” Lyndon screamed back.
“What are we going to do?” Kitchell said, his hands raised, backing up toward his car as Lyndon approached. “You won’t answer your phone. We need to talk. We’re running out of time.”
These unannounced visits had been coming at a fever pitch of late. Apparently the design of the golf course was reaching a crucial juncture, a point of no return. After being harassed on and off the farm, Lyndon had applied for a temporary restraining order, and, to everyone’s surprise, he had gotten exactly what he’d wanted. They couldn’t come near him without first arranging a meeting via telephone, correspondence, or e-mail.
“I’m going to have you thrown in jail, Ed,” Lyndon said. Even at this distance, he could smell Kitchell’s awful cologne—Brut or Hai Karate.
“What about what you’re doing to us?” Kitchell said. “To me personally. What about all that? You think that’s legal? You think that’s just fun and games? All the pranks? You’re supposed to be cooperating with us, Lyndon, actively engaging in a dialogue. That’s what the judge told you.”
Lyndon fired off another round, which hissed past Kitchell’s blow-dried blond hair and splattered against his SUV.
“Jesus!” Kitchell said.
“Watch it! Watch it!” Woody said to Lyndon. His shiny midnight-blue Range Rover was parked in front of Kitchell’s SUV, which now had a new banana-yellow splotch to accompany the other blots of happy hues.
Lyndon had custom-ordered these Zap Talon paintball shells. They were filled with permanent oil-based paint, not the usual water-soluble type, and they were guaranteed to be fast-drying. They were also advertised to be scented, alternately, with cat urine and doe in heat, although that claim had yet to be verified. He shot another paintball, this one lime-green, which tagged the back of Kitchell’s SUV with goo as he sped away.
“You’re a madman, you know that?” Woody said. He followed Lyndon into the house through the mudroom, where Lyndon peeled off his boots, then into the kitchen, where Lyndon began washing up at the sink.
“Are you insane?” Woody said. “Ten million dollars? They’re offering you ten million dollars for your farm, and you’ve said no?”
“This is none of your business, Woody,” Lyndon said, scrubbing his hands with Borax soap.
“Why are you even hesitating?” Woody asked. “Your place is only worth a fraction of that. You could ask for anything you want. You could probably push them to twelve million, maybe even fifteen.”
“I’m not interested.” He glanced at the kitchen table, where Woody had laid out his cell phone, headset, pager, PDA, BlackBerry, iPod, and laptop, which was open to a complex spreadsheet, all of them hooked up to a tangle of chargers.
“Fifteen million, Lyndon!”
Lyndon had been afraid of precisely this, that Woody would learn about The Centurion Group’s offer while he was here for the weekend. Now he would never let go of it. “I’m not talking to you about this, Woody.” He shut off the water, flicked his hands dry, and put on another pair of shoes.
“Where are you going?” Woody asked.
“I have things to do.”
“What about lunch?”
“I told you, Woody, I don’t have time to socialize with you.”
“You have to eat, don’t you?”
“I’ll call you.”
“Do you have a cell?”
“There are still pay phones around, you know,” Lyndon said. “I’m not a complete yokel. I keep up with things. I have the Internet.”
“You have dial-up, Lyndon. Dial-up. It’s 2005. It’s thirty-year-old technology. And you have a TV that gets reception for shit, no satellite or cable, never mind upgrading to digital, thank you very much, not even a DVD. What the hell do you do for entertainment? Read books? Have you become that much of a hick?”
“You might think of it for yourself. It might do you some good.”
“Wait, hang on.” Woody trailed after him as Lyndon walked to the door. “Here’s my card with all my numbers. I might head into town. Your coffee, I’m sorry to say, stinks. And keep the gate unlocked, will you? It’s a nuisance, but hardly a deterrent.”
Lyndon put the card in his back pocket. “Do me a favor, Woody. Don’t play fetch with Bob. He’ll keep bringing you tennis balls, but ignore him. He’s got bad hips. He shouldn’t be running at all.”
He took his panel truck with his welding equipment. He had a small wrought-iron sign frame that he needed to deliver later that morning. First he had to get fitted for another temporary crown. It took them over an hour to squeeze him in between appointments, at which point the dentist joked, “What’d you do, get into a fight?”
Lyndon installed the sign frame at the boutique on Main Street, and then drove up Highway 71 to Skyview Ridge Road, following the contours of the hillside to Sheila Lemke’s house, a cedar-and-glass monstrosity with wraparound decks that she had bought from a former colleague.
Sheila had once been a high-powered attorney for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, but she had vested out her options long before the dot-com bust, escaping with a bundle of cash. Husband and child in tow, she had moved to Rosarita Bay eleven years ago when she was thirty. She had retired and divorced when she was thirty-one, and remarried when she was thirty-four. She’d stayed with Steven Lemke for three years, until she had left him for Lyndon.
Sheila answered the door with a cordless telephone pressed against her chest. “Just the person I wanted to see,” she said balefully.
Lyndon waited. God, that face. What was it about her face that made him weak with devotion, willing to withstand her steady, withering scorn? She had blue eyes and straight auburn hair cut into a bob. She was slender, with long limbs, but really she was all mouth and sculpted cheekbones, her skin unnaturally pale, porcelaneous.
“Oh, all right,” she said. “Come in. Let me finish this.”
She took the phone with her down the hallway to her study, and Lyndon wandered into the living room. On a clear day, the house had a beautiful panoramic view of Rosarita Bay—the harbor to the north, the marsh to the south, the town in the middle, the Pacific everywhere beyond. Only it wasn’t a clear day, the fog still a blanket. Lyndon’s gaze settled instead on a line of chocolates on the dining room table. Chocolates. A dozen pieces of dark chocolate were on the table, each centered meticulously on individual white saucers, surrounded by stacks of photocopied articles and books: Gourmet Chocolate, Purely Chocolate, The Bittersweet History of Chocolate.
Sheila replaced the telephone in its charger and told Lyndon, “You wouldn’t believe how many health and fire regulations are involved in running a chili cookoff. That’s before we even begin to talk about the insurance issues.”
“Wasn’t the festival your idea?” Lyndon asked.
“That means I can’t complain abo
ut it? Sit down. You’re here, you might as well make yourself useful. What happened to your eye?”
Lyndon pulled out a chair. “Long story. It’s fine.” A small black bruise had arisen underneath his left eye. He had been kicked in the jaw, but somehow the damage had migrated up his face.
“Taste,” Sheila said, pointing to a chocolate.
She seemed composed, none of the histrionics that were on display yesterday lying in wait, and apparently she didn’t care to discuss what had happened, which was perfectly acceptable to Lyndon. If she wanted to pretend for the moment that all was normal, that no hammers had been wielded, no judgments of abject evil cast, so be it. He picked up the square of solid chocolate and opened wide to pop it into his mouth.
“No, no,” Sheila gasped. “Not like that, you Neanderthal. This isn’t a Hershey bar. These are gourmet chocolates. You taste them like you taste wine. Look at it first.”
Lyndon looked, and saw a piece of plain chocolate.
Sheila sat down in the adjacent chair and leaned over. “Look at its surface, its texture. Turn it around in the light. See how smooth and unblemished it is? It has this silky sheen, no blooms from heat or moisture. See what I mean?”
“Okay, sure,” he said, although he didn’t.
“You feel it melting in your fingers? Chocolate stays solid up to 91.4 degrees and melts at 93.2. The quicker it melts, the better the chocolate. Now smell.”
“When did you start learning about this?”
“A couple of days ago. It just came to me, this overwhelming craving for chocolate. It was the weirdest feeling.”
Lyndon lifted the chocolate, and they bent down together and inhaled.
“Isn’t that heavenly?” Sheila asked. “There are some incredibly subtle characteristics in here, floral and earthy and fruity all at once. These are all handmade, and they’ve got a high percentage of origin beans, cacao beans from the same country. Brazilian beans are smoky, Guyaquil are sweet, Madagascan more pungent. This one’s the highest grade, a criollo from Venezuela.”
It wasn’t unusual for Sheila to take an impulsive interest in something and acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject overnight. She was frighteningly intelligent and passionate, and Lyndon found her sexiest when she was engaged like this, embarking on a new pursuit.
“Breathe in again,” she told Lyndon, “let the aroma settle.”
Breathe in, breathe out, Lyndon thought. They smelled the chocolate together once more.
“Now snap off a piece and listen,” Sheila said. “You hear that? A crisp, clean snap?”
Lyndon didn’t hear much of anything. “Can I eat it now?”
Sheila frowned at him. “You are so male. You need instant gratification. All right, if you must, but don’t chew it yet, just put it in your mouth.”
Despite the lingering effects of Novocain, the hit of flavor immediately engulfed Lyndon, as if someone were peeling off his scalp. He’d never tasted chocolate anywhere near this sumptuous.
“Let it sit on your tongue,” she told him. “It should feel firm but melt like butter, nice and smooth, without a residue. It shouldn’t stick to the roof of your mouth or cling to your tongue. Connoisseurs call it a clean melt. Do you feel that?”
Lyndon tried to speak, but was momentarily incapacitated.
“Those are just the primary flavors,” Sheila said. “Now chew on it, slowly, to release the secondary flavors. Roll it around with your tongue. Let it touch all four taste zones and get the full range of the flavors.”
Lyndon, chewing, looked at her quizzically. Four taste zones?
“The tip of your tongue for sweet and salty,” Sheila told him, “the sides for sour, the back for bitter. Do you notice how the taste changes as it goes to different parts of your mouth? Feel how long it lasts, how it rises and lingers, how varied yet balanced it is.”
Lyndon could take it no more. He swallowed the chocolate. He was breathless, light-headed, zapped, delirious.
“Wasn’t that sublime?” Sheila asked.
“Again,” he said.
“Cleanse your palate first.” She sliced a lime in the kitchen, squeezed a wedge in a glass of water, and gave it to Lyndon. “Rinse.”
“You’re going to make your own chocolates?”
“No, I’m going to sell them. I’m going to open a chocolate boîte, a boutique chocolate shop. I’m going to handpick my line from the best artisanal suppliers in San Francisco and have them delivered to me every day. You’ve heard of the health benefits of chocolate, haven’t you? The flavonoids and antioxidants? And there’s very little sugar in these chocolates, so less calories.”
He could hear the sales pitch already, the formulation of a new business plan. Sheila liked starting businesses. In her relatively short time in Rosarita Bay, she had had three: a bakery, a flower shop, and a bookstore, all launched with the same zeal, all ending because of certain niggling, insurmountable obstacles. To wit, she had hated waking up early and didn’t really enjoy baking, she was allergic to most flowers, no one read books anymore.
“All right, let’s do another one,” Sheila said. “I’ll taste it with you. This one’s a porcelana, the holy grail of criollos.”
They looked at it, felt it, smelled it, listened to it, put it in their mouths, and swooned. Everything in Lyndon’s mouth swelled and lifted, his vision blackened, he almost passed out. That buzz, that weird energy he’d felt after Laura Díaz-McClatchey’s massage, returned, and he could see Sheila felt it, too, the two of them moaning, swaying, opening and closing their eyes, enraptured. They looked at each other, and they began kissing, an udderly licious liplock, tongues and chocolate commingling, rolling into all four taste zones. They fell to the floor, pawing each other, grabbing body parts, pulling on clothes, and Lyndon sank into the smell of her—her skin, hair—the feel of her, everything coming back to him, so familiar, he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her. But then Sheila pushed him away—an audible pop, Lyndon swore—and, long limbs punching and flailing at him, she perhaps inadvertently, perhaps intentionally, kicked him in the nuts.
Lyndon’s brain exploded, his body combusted into flames. While he writhed in pain on the floor, Sheila stood and straightened her clothes. “I’m not falling for that again,” she said to him. “You’re crazy if you think I’ll make that particular mistake again.”
A year ago, she had ended it with Lyndon—another mandated shutdown in a relationship that had seemed more off than on. She was tired of his grumpiness, his solitary routines, she had said, she was tired of waiting for him to open himself up. She didn’t understand him at all. When narcissism had become the national pastime, how was it that Lyndon could be so self-effacing, that he had so little interest in self-reflection? Clearly he wanted to be alone.
She got back together with Steven Lemke, only to walk into Lyndon’s bedroom in the middle of the night two months ago and make love to him, descending upon him like a succubus, only immediately afterward to deem him a louse, a miserable excuse for a human being, why couldn’t she accept that she couldn’t change people, why did she keep falling for these blue-collar lunkheads, and demanded Lyndon stay away from her, stop stalking her, she never wanted to see him again, only to once again ask Steven to move out, admitting after much badgering and weeping (by Steven) that she had slept with Lyndon, making it twice that Lyndon had broken the covenant of Steven’s marriage, which was why he was now giving Lyndon traffic tickets at every opportunity.
“I want you to get out,” Sheila said. “I’m not another one of your floozies.”
So now it was coming out, Lyndon thought, now they were going to get into it. “I just went to her for a massage.”
“I see. A massage.”
“Not that kind of massage,” Lyndon said, gingerly standing up. “Shiatsu.”
“You just move right along, don’t you? You don’t skip a beat.”
“Sheila, you know I’m not like that. I’ve had five girlfriends in seventeen years.”
“What do you want me to do?” Lyndon asked. “You keep breaking up with me. You keep telling me you don’t want to be with me.”
“As any smart woman would do, someone as secretive as—”
“What’s going on?” Lyndon asked. “Why are you putting nails in my tires? What was with the meltdown yesterday?”
“Go. Just go.” She pointed to the front door.
On the threshold, Lyndon faced her and said, “You still love me, don’t you, Sheila?”
“I don’t.”
“You do,” he told her. “Just admit it. I’ll admit it if you admit it.”
It was true that they were completely unsuitable for each other. It was true that Sheila’s election as mayor and her plans for Rosarita Bay had lodged a fundamental wedge between them. It was true that Lyndon had never asked Sheila to live with him or marry him, that he’d never fully let her into his life. Yet he’d loved her, he’d been happy with her, he’d given her as much as he was capable. He’d been brokenhearted when she’d left him and returned to Steven, and that one night together two months ago, madly fucking during a freak heat wave, unearthing all those emotions he’d had to work so hard to bury, only to have Sheila discard him once again, had been nearly as devastating for him. If anyone had the problem with constancy, with commitment, Lyndon thought, it was Sheila, not him—witness her inability to stick with any of her businesses.
“You should just go after your hot little tamale masseuse,” Sheila said. “I’m serious. We are never going to get involved again, understand? There is zip chance. Nada. Rien. Zenzen betsuni.” She knew smatterings of five foreign languages but was fluent in none. “And I don’t want Hana helping you with the harvest this year. I know she said she’d come home and give you a hand, but that’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not a very good influence.”
“Come on.”
“It’s not in anyone’s interests—and I mean practically the entire town, Lyndon—for you to have a good crop this year.”