Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Great,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Are there a lot of people coming to the event tonight?”

  “It’s sold out.”

  “No shit. I haven’t prepared anything. Now I’m nervous.”

  “Just be yourself.”

  “Easy for you to say. If I’m just myself it could end in pouring spit buckets over my face.”

  “Yeah, I saw that on YouTube,” he laughed.

  Chagrined, I wiped a hand across my face.

  Mike patted me on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

  I broke away from Mike and approached Carmen and Laura, standing off to the side, puffing Gitanes. “You’re in,” I said.

  “Is it expensive?” Laura asked.

  “It’s all comped,” I said. “Won’t cost you a peseta. And dinner’s on me. Wine’s free. All you can drink. So, put your traveler’s checks in your money belts; they aren’t good here.” The girls looked at each other and shrugged. God, it felt good to wax munificent instead of sneaking Ben Franklins, back when there were any to sneak, from my mother’s upstairs safe.

  I went over to where Mike was chatting up Jack. They bore the same bearish features and each possessed an easy sense of humor, laughing frequently.

  “Hey, Mike, I think we’d like to get settled in, take a power nap, maybe have an early dinner because my mom probably will be put to bed before the show.”

  “No problem,” Mike said. “Let me show you your suites.”

  Being special guests for the event, we didn’t have to bother checking in. Mike called an assistant who came and helped us with our luggage. Carmen and Laura had the clothes on their backs–and not for long, as Jack, lips pressed to my ear, wolfishly reminded me.

  The Just Inn, as it’s known, consists of a block of two structures with four guest suites. They’re gray, wood-shingled buildings engirded by dense vineyards that, now it was the middle of late-July, were leafed out in a profusion of variegated shades of green. My mother was in heaven. I could see it in the glow of her face and it made me happy.

  “Pretty nice here, Mom, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, as Joy continued to push her in the direction Mike was taking us.

  “See, all that money you loaned me when I was broke didn’t go to waste, did it?”

  “Oh, no. I always knew you were going to hit the big time.”

  I laughed. I was in a good mood myself. Jack was in a good mood. Laura and Carmen thought they had stumbled onto Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.

  Mike led my mother and Joy to the Tuscany Suite, a 600-square-foot room done up in kind of a European style with tapestried curtains and a marble bathroom. Laura and Carmen were given the Provence suite, beautifully appointed with leather-upholstered chairs, marble-tiled bathroom and a sisal rug half-covering a gleaming hardwood floor. And Jack and I commandeered the much larger Sussex suite. It was a little frou-frou for me with its canopied bed and Provençal upholstery, but I wasn’t complaining. All the rooms featured beautiful stone fireplaces. And even though it was the summer and stiflingly hot in the hills, I fantasized an image of a crackling fire, a glass of Justin’s finest and Laura snuggled next to me on the couch.

  I let Jack carry the luggage into our suite while I accompanied my mother and Joy into theirs to make sure everything was okay. My mother would never have stayed in a place like this when she vacationed. The height of her travel accommodations would have been a Marriott–or worse. When she saw her sun-dappled room she broke into tears.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  She had trouble voicing her answer. The tears choked her words. “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  “Okay, Mom, the restaurant opens at six-thirty, and I know you like to eat early so you can get your wine…”

  “Oh, yes,” she chimed in.

  “So, Joy,” I said, turning to her. “Get her bathed and ready by then, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. I was constantly concerned about Joy. This trip was a big undertaking, a huge risk for me, and I couldn’t afford to lose her due to apathy, or worse. But the money I was paying her was ten times what she would be making at Las Villas de Muerte, so I had that to counterweight my worries. I leaned in close to her and whispered so my mother couldn’t hear. “I’m going to try to make more pit stops so you can…”–I brought two fingers to my lips to pantomime smoking.

  She giggled. “Okay. Thank you.”

  “Come here,” I said. She didn’t move, so I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her and murmured in her ear, “I know it’s hard taking care of my mother. I know she can be a real bitch at times. Just ignore her. She’s had a massive stroke and she doesn’t mean most of what she says. She’s very needy. This is a long trip, but we’re going to get there, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “So, we’ll come get you around six-thirty. All right?”

  “All right,” she said.

  Raising my voice, I directed it toward my mother. “We’ll see you in a few hours, Mom. They have a terrific restaurant here with a lot of tasty Chardonnays.”

  “I can’t wait,” she said, as she stared out the window at the vineyards.

  I left the room and went over to the Sussex where Jack and I were bivouacked. In the capacious suite I found Jack sprawled listlessly in one of the mahogany leather armchairs. He had already opened a bottle of the complimentary wine. I must have been a special guest because the complimentary bottle was Justin’s signature wine, the Isosceles, a Bordeaux style, a gold medal winner at some wine festival, with an impressively high score of 94 from some wine magazine. I poured myself a glass, kicked off my shoes and slumped onto the couch across from Jack who looked at me, grinning, nodding, his face already florid.

  “You’re living the life, Miles,” he said. “You are living the life.”

  I sipped the wine. It was massive, still young, with a walnut mouthfeel of tannins, but had a softness to it from the addition of Merlot and Cabernet Franc that made it satiny, velvety. A beautiful wine. And although Pinot was the grape variety I was hopelessly in love with, this was a wonderful palate change.

  “You know,” I said, “I wondered why they invited me to speak because Justin doesn’t make a Pinot.”

  “You’re the wine dude, man,” Jack said. “All wine sales, except Merlot, are going through the roof. These people owe you. You’re good publicity for them.”

  “This is quite a setting, isn’t it?”

  “Beautiful,” Jack concurred. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to go back to LA and my shitty one-bedroom in Silver Lake.” He shook his head to himself at the deplorable image that had suddenly blossomed in his imagination. In an effort to efface it, he drained and immediately refilled his glass.

  “So, Laura’s going to be staying here with me. And you’ll be down with Carmen.”

  “I will be down with Carmen.”

  “Laura confided to me that Carmen hasn’t had a man in her life since her divorce, so I’d go light on the grape if I were you. You don’t want to disappoint her.”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, setting his glass down. “Do you have any more of those Vs?”

  I set my wineglass down, went over to my suitcase, rooted around in my toiletries kit, found the vial of Viagra, shook out three, then walked over to Jack and slipped them into his open palm. “These are a hundred mikes, dude. You’re still young. I suggest only taking a half.”

  Jack dropped the three blue, football-shaped pills into his shirt pocket and said, “Okay.”

  I returned to the couch and my Isosceles and rummaged for my cell in my pants pocket. There were four messages. One was my publishing agent in New York beseeching me to come up with a one-sheet (synopsis) proposal for my next novel. It would be too late to call her back in New York. Besides, I still didn’t know whether there was going to even be a next novel! The second call was from the indefatigable Mar
cie, wondering whether I’d made it to Paso Robles “in one piece”–knowing my penchant for getting derailed at tasting rooms and canceling events last-minute she had worked hard to set up. The third call was from my older brother. He was pretty lit up, slurring badly, and would never remember that he’d made the call. The fourth was–and I leaned forward when I heard her voice–from my ex-wife, Victoria. She was just checking up on me, seeing how I was doing, wanting to know how I was “holding up.” Relations had normalized between us. I had e-mailed her about the proposed trip. She thought it was pretty crazy, but since she was no longer controlling my life and colonizing my unconscious, she ended with “whatever.” Now she was checking up on me! Worried no doubt that I had gotten into another one of my wine-fueled adventures that was sure to end in disaster.

  I returned Marcie’s call. She answered on the first ring. “Hey, Marcie, it’s Miles.”

  “Miles. Did you make it to Paso?”

  “I made it to Paso. I go on in four hours.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding reassured. “How’s it going with your mom?”

  “Everything’s going great. There was a little mishap at Foxen Winery earlier today, but–”

  “What?” she said, cutting me off.

  “I don’t want to go into it, Marcie. Everything’s fine. I’ll make the IPNC, don’t worry.”

  “What about the AMEX black cardholders’ dinner at Per Se in New York?”

  “I don’t know. I know it would be good promotion for me to hobnob with billionaires, but… but the Silverseas Cruise thing with me as the enrichment lecturer, keep that one on hold. After this trip I may need to get on a cruise ship for two weeks.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Knock ’em dead.”

  “I always do, don’t I?”

  “And don’t drink from the spit bucket. You don’t need that kind of publicity.”

  “I hear you Marcie. No antics. Take it easy.” And I hung up.

  When I looked up Jack had disappeared. I heard the shower running. Jack was lustily belting out a tune I didn’t recognize. I took a sip of wine, then straightened to my feet and drifted over to the picture window. The immaculately manicured vineyards stared back at me, nonpareil in their beauty. The pre-twilight sky was streaked with cotton candy-like clouds colored orange by the fading light of the sun.

  I left the Sussex suite and sauntered out into the vineyards, wineglass in hand. When I was far away from everything I sat down cross-legged in the dirt. The ripening grapes were drooping pendulously on the vines. I picked a grape from one of the clusters and bit down on it. Sour; they would need more ripening, of course, before they were ready to be harvested. Wine is so complex, I mused. Thousands of experts and hundreds of thousands of amateur experts would rhapsodize or vilify the vinification of these seemingly simple bunches of grapes. But in the end, it was just these innocuous clusters, photosynthesis, rain or no rain, cool ocean breezes, alluvial soils, that produced these epiphanies in the bottle hundreds and thousands of miles away.

  I studied the wine in my glass. Held it up to the descending sun. It was garnet-colored in the glass. My thoughts drifted to Joy’s foot and what it must have been like to wake in a hospital and have a doctor inform her that it might have to be amputated. I felt sorry for her, and it changed how I felt about her all of a sudden. Next my thoughts strayed to Jack. His life had changed so dramatically in the last five years. He had journeyed as far as he could go to the other side since his marriage ended and sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t slowly killing himself on purpose. I had trouble thinking about my mother. It was true what I said at Foxen that we had never been close. I realized suddenly that I didn’t really know her. And though her stroke had hobbled her speech, her ability to ambulate, her memory, she was still a human being and maybe there was a reason she had survived the congestive heart failure, even though at the time I had chastised myself for having called 911 and summoning the paramedics to come in and save her life.

  Reflection provided me no answers to these complicated life questions, so I hoisted myself to my feet, clapped the dirt off my pants and shirt, and walked slowly back to the huddle of suites. The fading light of the sun painted them in a golden hue, drawing me toward them like a fairytale realm.

  When I entered the Sussex suite, Laura and Carmen, looking refreshed–lipstick, make-up, wet hair–half-filled wineglasses in hand, were there yakking away with Jack.

  “Miles, where were you?” Jack asked in his now booming voice, fueled by a second bottle of Isosceles which he had uncorked in my absence.

  “Oh, I just took a little walk. Trying to come up with something original to say tonight.”

  “Here, let me refresh your glass,” he said.

  I came toward him and extended my empty glass. He started pouring. “Hey, hey, just a half. I’ve got to give a talk in a couple hours.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot,” Jack said. Then he impishly poured another splash. “Here’s so you don’t get nervous.”

  I backed away from him and eased down next to Laura on the couch. I looked over at her. Her eyes were flashing and she wore the most beautiful smile on her face. “How’s your room? ¿Muy bonito? Like you?”

  “Sí.”

  I leaned into her and she pressed herself next to me and all my fears and anxieties about having invited her and her friend up to Justin evaporated. “Hey, Jack, did you know Laura is studying directing at the University of Barcelona?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “She’s made a couple of award-winning documentaries, but she wants to get into fiction features. I’m going to write her a script.”

  Jack, feeling happy–the wine, the girls–said to Laura, “Miles is a great writer.” He toasted me with his glass. “And the smartest guy I know,” he added magnanimously.

  “Coming from Jack that’s not necessarily a compliment.”

  The Spanish girls laughed. When they laughed they were happy. And that made Jack and me happy. Happiness not generally being my forte.

  “Hey, I just had a brainstorm,” I said. “Laura and Carmen should come up to the IPNC with us and document this trip. What do you think?”

  “Brilliant,” Jack said.

  I turned to Laura. “What do you think?”

  Laura exchanged looks with Carmen, and they shrugged at each other.

  Exhilarated by the wine, I said, “You’ve got Martin and Jake from Shameless, Martin’s mother in a wheelchair, and a pot-smoking Filipina caretaker. And… and a Yorkie terrier. I mean, you can’t make that shit up.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “If we had more time,” Laura said.

  “It was just an off-the-wall idea.”

  “Miles is having ideas all the time, girls. I don’t think he ever relaxes that big brain of his.”

  I raised my glass. “That’s slowly shrinking.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “What’s your next novel, Miles?” Carmen asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Everyone keeps asking me that. Maybe I’ll do a Thomas Pynchon and disappear for seventeen years.”

  “You’re not Pynchon,” Jack said.

  “How would you know? You’ve never read Gravity’s Rainbow.”

  “I’ve read enough to know.”

  “What? Like five pages?” I turned to Laura. “Have you read Pynchon?”

  She nodded. “He’s, how do you say in English? Impenetrable.”

  “Impenetrable! I agree.” I turned to the three of them. “I want to toast Laura and Carmen. An unexpected surprise. Right, Jack?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  Fueled by the wine, I added bombastically: “Are there two more beautiful women in the Central Coast?”

  Jack raised his glass. “If there are, they’ve had a lot of surgery.”

  Everyone laughed.

  At 6:15, we walked over to the Tuscany suite to gather up Joy and my mother. Joy had bathed my mom and styled her hair and sprayed her with a spritz of her favori
te cologne and she looked ten years younger.

  “You look nice, Mom,” I said. “Do you have a date?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I wish I did.”

  “You have Jack and me.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m starving… and I need a glass of wine.”

  “Coming up,” I said. “Coming up.”

  Together, the six of us trooped down a path of dirt and gravel toward Deborah’s Room, Justin’s on-premises restaurant. It’s a small, high-ceilinged space with only a handful of tables. I wondered how it sustained itself with just the four suites on the property, as it would be a long haul for anyone living in the area.

  The menu was very limited, but ambitious, with just three entrées. We all ordered the prix fixe with the restaurant’s wine pairing. The wine list was small, but adequately represented the world, traipsing from Burgundy to the Rhone to New Zealand to California. They started us with a ‘97 Bollinger Grande Année Brut. My mother loved champagne, but she had never experienced a vintage one like this. It had a toasty, yeasty, chalky quality to it and it disappeared quickly with the six of us, so we ordered another with the first course.

  Then they moved us on to their reserve Chardonnay, a big buttery, full secondary malolactic fermented wine my mother rhapsodized as “the nectar of the gods.” As we progressed to the entrees, we moved into the reds. I was in an expansive mood, so, from the handful of Bourgognes rouges, I broke ranks from the pairing selections and asked for an ‘02 Domaine Mugneret-Gibourg, Grand Cru, Echézeaux, an ethereal wine that had everyone exultant except my mother, who stayed with her ambrosial Chardonnay.

  “Mom,” I said, to reel her into the conversation which Jack had been dominating with apocryphal stories from our lives that had spawned my book. “Do you remember the time you almost burned the house down trying to make french fries?”

  “I remember,” she said, her face a little slack from wine.

  “Phyllis, you burned the house down trying to cook?”

  “My mom couldn’t cook, could you, Mom? You could resole your shoes with her roast beef.” Everyone reared back in laughter, including my mother. “Our family dinners lasted like ten minutes. Everyone just wanted to get away from the table.”