by Rex Pickett
Jack refilled my glass, hoisting me out of my reverie. “What’s up, dude?” he asked, noticing I had dropped out of the conversation.
“I don’t know. I was just thinking what a bizarre little household we are here. You’re like my dissolute brother; Joy”–I patted her on the head–“the sister I never had and always longed for; and my mother, well, my mother. We’re the ultimate dysfunctional family.”
“You’re getting sentimental, Miles,” Jack said.
“No, I’m not.”
He shot me the look that said I was waxing specious, but shook his head and smiled.
The various courses came and we dug in. From time to time we were interrupted by someone wobbling over to the table to have me autograph something–cocktail napkins being the most popular. With her half-necrotic brain, my mother didn’t really comprehend what it all meant. She just knew that I was the center of attention, and that I had accomplished something momentous, the magnitude of which was lost on her. Joy, appearing prettier and prettier the more Pinot I consumed, would drop her gaze into her lap if I tried to make eye contact. Being in the Hitching Post, with all these people fawning, she understood that I was a celebrity of some ilk, but she seemed embarrassed by all the attention.
Near dinner’s end, my iPhone beeped. Wrestling it out of my pocket, I saw a notification for a text message. The text read: I’m at the Clubhouse if you want to have a drink-M.
“Who was that?” Jack asked, noticing my eyes narrow and my brow beetle.
“Maya. Wants to have a drink.”
“Are you going to meet her?”
“Yeah. Why not? Can you get Joy and my mom back to the Marriott?”
“No problem, dude.” He fingered the business card in his hand. “Hmm. Patricia. Sounds promising.”
“Why’s that?”
“Starts with a ‘p.’”
“You fucking dog, Jackson.”
After dinner I shook more hands, declining numerous importuning offers to hang out at the bar or decamp to another location for more wine. We gathered ourselves back in the Rampvan and took off.
Jack dropped me off at the entrance to the Clubhouse Bar, the cheerless watering hole at the former Windmill Inn. A major scene in the movie had been shot there and I was expecting another crowd, but when I ambled inside the place was relatively sedate. A few stragglers sat at the bar. A couple of locals, who looked like they would stab you to death for an hour’s pay, were shooting a game of pool.
I found Maya seated exactly on the same stool Jack and I had found her on years before when we met her here for a drink. A glass of red wine stood on the bar in front of her. Next to it was a bottle. Maya wouldn’t stoop to drink the paltry, and poorly chosen, selections on the Clubhouse’s list, so she usually brought her own and paid a corkage. Now that the Hitching Post was overrun every night, she likely preferred the solitude of the Clubhouse.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said, forcing a smile. She hadn’t changed much, but too many cigarettes and too many hours under the hot sun in her vineyard had conspired to produce crow’s-feet that crinkled at the corners of her large eyes. A dye job had lightened her hair, and it looked like she had lost a little weight since we had last seen each other.
I corkscrewed down on the stool next to her. We didn’t embrace, we didn’t kiss cheeks, we didn’t even shake. A tension had to be bridged before we could touch each other, so much had gone down since our meeting, the movie’s coming out, and my meteoric rise to my odd version of fame. Circumspection ruled over the short space between us as we tried to read each other through the subtlest of inflections.
“What’re you drinking here?” I said, reaching for the bottle on the bar and turning it so that the label faced me. “Ne Plus Ultra Wines. This your label?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“I like the name,” I said. Then, in what I thought was a humorous tone, I added, “I taught you that word, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t,” she said caustically. “You’re such an asshole, Miles. Besides, it’s not a word, it’s a phrase, you philistine.”
“That’s true,” I quickly back-pedaled. “You’re right.” She turned away from me. “But,” I teased, “I believe I used it in my novel to describe what it was like to have sex with you.”
“Yeah. And now the whole valley knows what it’s like to have sex with Maya.”
“Sorry. I write from personal experience.”
She rolled a tongue over her front teeth. There was palpable hostility in that space between us now.
The bartender broke away from a baseball game on the overhead TV that had mesmerized his weary, brain-dead soul, and came over. “Would you like a glass?”
“Or you want me to drink straight from the bottle?”
Mirthlessly, he slid a glass from an overhead rack and set it in front of me. Maya proudly poured it half-full with her maiden Pinot. I took some into my mouth and sloshed it around like a wine professional. Maya expressionlessly waited for my assessment, no doubt braced for a trenchant critique.
“Where’re the grapes from?” I asked.
“This new vineyard north of Clos Pepe. First vinifiable harvest.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Nice?” she jumped on me. “That’s all you’re going to say?”
I took another sip. “It’s more than nice, Maya. It’s elegant. Like you.” She forced a smile. “And I appreciate the fact you’re going for something not so highly alcoholic. More Burgundian. Not one of those Syrah-laced Pinots that Bruno used to make.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“How many cases did you produce?”
“Only about a hundred.” She glanced at the bottle. “You really like it?”
“Yeah. I do. And not just because you made it, either. Makes a lot of these other valley Pinots pedestrian by comparison.”
She laughed. “Put it in your next book.”
It was kind of an odd sensation, after the scene at the Hitching Post, to have Maya hustling me. “If I write one, I will, I promise.”
She nodded. I nodded. We sipped her wine in silence. We were, as usual, avoiding talking about our history. Uncomfortable, I looked around the Clubhouse.
“It’s refreshing to see that the Shameless insanity hasn’t gripped this place in its steel vise. The Hitching Post looked like something out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I mean, I actually heard people quoting lines right out of the movie.”
“I know. You ruined it for all of us. I can’t go there anymore. It’s so crazy, Frank’s thinking of closing it one night a week and only letting locals in.”
“He should. Pour free Highliner. Be a goodwill gesture to the community.”
“So, you’re up here with your mom and Jack the asshole and…”
“And my mom’s caretaker. Oh, and my mom’s nasty little dog.”
At the picture of the four and a half of us Maya just shook her head. “How’s it going so far?”
“So far okay. One day down. Nine to go.” I smiled. “I brought plenty of wine.”
Another silence descended. We sipped. The bridge still needed another section. I wondered if more wine would complete the construction.
“How’s your new boyfriend?” I ventured.
“We’re just dating,” she said, her voice still serrated with an undertone of rancor.
“Dating seriously or…?”
Maya simmered at the question. Then she picked up her glass and tossed the wine in it into my face. She swiveled off her barstool and strode outside. I forearmed the wine from my face and glanced in the direction she had fled. Maya hadn’t left. She was standing under the portico, a match illuminating her face as she lit a cigarette.
After a moment I got up slowly off my barstool and sauntered outside. I stood next to her. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. A chill had crept into the air, and it wasn’t just the ocean breezes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. She glared at the burning end of her ci
garette, as if studying it. “Can I bum a cigarette?” She handed me her pack of American Spirits. I fingered one out and stuck it between my lips. She flicked a lighter aflame and I inhaled it until it glowed red. We warily observed each other out of our peripheral vision. The passing traffic on the 101 was light. Stars dotted the clear night sky. I should have been feeling on top of the world, but instead I was feeling a sinking despair. Women with whom I had a history often made me feel this way. If I’d gone to a headshrinker I’m sure he would have pointed out that this was a pattern with me: throw myself headlong into something, get high on wine and wax all passionate and romantic and tell them what they longed to hear–and actually feel it, too!–then wake from the hangover and gradually push them away. That’s what I had done with Maya, and now, out here in front of the Clubhouse Bar, where we had shared a number of wonderful times–God, I remember once kissing wildly and not caring who saw us–there was a tension as ugly as a barbed-wire fence.
“No one ever taught me how to deal with success. I’m sure you can be taught. I haven’t dealt with it well. I’ve alienated a lot of people. You know, obviously I have intimacy issues. And all the wine has clouded my judgment.” I took another drag on my cigarette. “And so I’m sorry that I blew you off and went off on…” I faltered, “…on this crazy, hedonistic journey to nowhere. I liked myself better before the movie, if you want to know the truth.”
She stamped out her cigarette, spit smoke, and looked at me for the first time with her dark, brooding eyes. “So did I,” she said. Then she reached both hands up and grabbed my head as if catching a hard-thrown football. She brought her mouth to mine in a savage kiss. Her voluptuous lips smashed against my face in a torrent of fury or passion or longing or some other emotion volcanically brewing inside her, taking me by surprise. She finally withdrew her mouth, but still clutched my head in her hands as if she were going to crush it. “I want to hate-fuck you so badly, Miles.” She brought her lips to mine again and kissed me like she wanted to devour me, not make love to me. “But I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.” With that, she pivoted in place and started off. Ten paces away from me she stopped and turned. “You know, Miles, I liked you so much better when you were a pathetic, pathological lying loser who couldn’t get his novel published and couldn’t get laid. You’re a different person now. So fucking full of yourself.” She shook her head disgustedly, then strode over to her black Jeep Cherokee, turned the engine over and roared off.
Desolate, I walked back into the Clubhouse. Maya’s half-empty bottle still sat perched on the bar. I poured a glass, debated calling Jack–I could guess where he was!–but decided against it, not wanting to get shanghaied into a long night at the Hitching Post.
I paid the corkage, tipped an obscene $100 so the bartender could invest in a new shirt, and left. Walking along a deserted stretch of 246 in the direction of the Marriott, I considered what a contemptible, smug jerk I had become, what a little gust of fame had engendered in me. And all it took was thirty minutes with Maya to evoke it. I missed her. I had her and I let her go. Now, like my marriage, it was over. No going back. God, I was miserable. I didn’t know what I had been expecting when I came to the Clubhouse, but I got hit upside the face, and it hurt. Hurt. Made me think of a line Kafka wrote in a letter to his Czech translator, Milena Jessenska: “You are the knife that I twist into myself.” Is it why I couldn’t love without always wanting to run away?
I stopped on the 101 overpass, jackknifed over the guardrail and stared at the red and white rivers of traffic. Naturally, Maya had been hurt by my pushing her away when the movie hit. I’m sure it wasn’t too difficult for her to go on the Internet, punch my name into Google, and find photos of me with different women at premieres and film festivals and awards shows. She’d heard me profess my love for her enough times to believe it. And now the only way she could express her deep-seated–and legit–resentment was to invite me for a drink, kiss me hatefully, then give me the middle finger and walk off forever. I felt lousy.
The 18-wheelers rumbled under me, heading north and south to dropoff destinations. A part of me wanted to join Jack and get obliterated, and another part of me just wanted to return to my hotel room and reflect on everything condemnable I had become.
I started off again slowly, my legs heavy. Here I was in the valley I had done a bit to help make famous and I was suddenly all alone, anonymous. It was a stark reminder of the future that awaited me. Fatalistic, okay, but I knew in my gut it was true.
The walk past a McDonald’s and a Motel 6 and a 4-plex showing Hollywood’s dregs was depressingly lonely. (Had I fantasized that Maya and I would laugh it all off and have a wild night in the bedroom? What a fool I was, I thought, for being so oblivious of how I had hurt her.) The hotel lobby was lonely. The slow-moving elevator–come on, already! Down the corridor back to my room. The room was lonely. I poured a glass of Pinot and lay on the bed. My cell rang. I was hoping it was Maya, but it was Jack. I didn’t pick up. A minute later I received a text message: “It’s happening, dude! It’s on!” I closed my eyes and fell into a disquieting sleep.
Jack barreled in around four a.m., complete with slamming door and thundering footsteps. He was loud and drunk and laughing, filling the room with his presence. He turned on the light, annoying me.
“Jesus, Jack,” I said, jerking upright.
He found his wineglass and helped himself to a healthy pour. “Man, it was wild over at the Windmill.” He whistled. “Fucking chicks, man.” He pointed his glass at me. “They really wanted to meet you.”
“They didn’t want to meet me, they wanted to meet this shell of a man I’ve become,” I said, still irritated by the glaring light and Jack’s barely pre-dawn arrival.
Sensing my peevishness, he said, “How’d it go with Maya?”
“Ever heard of hate-fucking?”
“Heard of it. Not quite sure what it is. Probably how Byron was conceived.”
“She said she wanted to hate-fuck me, then she flipped me the bird and split.”
“Fuck, man, why didn’t you go back to the Hitching Post?”
“I was tired. And a little drenched with Maya’s maiden bottling. Did you get your nut? Pour me a glass, will you?”
Jack was happy to oblige. “Yeah, I got my nut,” he said, handing me the glass he had refreshed. “I think I promised her and her friend that we would take them wine tasting today. Hit all the locations in the movie.”
“Well,” I sighed, “that’s not going to happen.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
We stayed up talking and drinking until raw dawnlight was visible through the curtains, then split an Ambien and conked out.
chapter 6
When I woke, there were eleven messages in voicemail, all from my mother. Suspecting she might call, I had muted my cell phone so that I could get some sleep.
As Jack snored, I showered, climbed into fresh clothes, and stepped into the corridor. I found my mother parked outside her door. She raised her one good arm toward the ceiling and demanded in a rising tone, “Where were you? I was so worried.” She started crying.
I squatted down in front of her. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I thought you’d gotten arrested.”
“I was out with an old girlfriend.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Mom! Jesus.”
“You could have called. We say goodnight before I go to bed. You scared me.”
“I’m sorry. I accidentally had my ringer off. It won’t happen again. Didn’t Joy take you down for breakfast?”
“No, I was so sick with worry I couldn’t eat.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” I said, rising to stand upright.
Joy, hearing our voices, opened the door. The piquant smell of marijuana preceded her. She rubbed her eyes with her small hands fashioned into fists, looking sleepy-faced.
“Good morning, Joy,” I said. “You don’t look like you slept much.”
She combed the hair out of her face with her hand. “Your mom’s tooth was hurting.”
I looked down at my mother in quiet alarm. “What’s wrong with your tooth?”
“It’s fine,” she said curtly.
“Joy just said it was bothering you last night.”
“It’s fine this morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m hungry,” she said.
I faced Joy. “You didn’t take her down for breakfast?”
“She wasn’t hungry earlier. She was upset about you.”
“Well, let me find Jack. Why don’t you two go down to the restaurant and we’ll join you in a minute?”
“Hurry up,” my mother barked. “I’m starving.”
I went into my room and found Jack lounging on the bed in a courtesy bathrobe, sipping a glass of Pinot. He toasted me silently, a salacious grin on his face.
“Let’s go down and get some breakfast before my mom flips out. Then we’ll do a little wine tasting on our way out, you fucking degenerate.”