Sideways (11 page)

Before we left Byron, Jack sprung for a case of the Sierra Madre and, feeling a little silly, we purchased a couple of sweatshirts with grape bunches embossed on them.

We drove the length of Tepusquet, turned back onto Foxen Canyon, and cruised south. All around us, open fields of resplendent heather pastured daydreaming livestock chewing their cuds in the lazy mid-afternoon sun.

Jack had hopscotched over my feelings about the wedding and had now shifted his concern to my money situation and was volunteering advice: “Why don’t you write for television?”

I scowled. “You’re already superannuated at thirty-five and I’m pushing forty.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. Besides, I’m not a hack. I don’t do formula.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. You’re an
artiste
. Truth and honesty and the baring of the soul.”

“That’s right. Don’t make light of it.”

Jack laughed. “Well, what about the panic attack experiments? That paid pretty well, didn’t it?”

I shuddered. “I don’t want to be a lab rat for some soulless research guy experimenting with re-uptake inhibitors.” I tapped an index finger to my temple. “This is all I’ve got left, right here.”

“Well, what’re you going to do if the book doesn’t sell?”

I shrugged.

A flare went off in Jack’s head and he continued excitedly : “What about the Internet? There must be a way to make money there.”

“The Internet is a dark road to infinity potholed with links,” I opined. “For a writer, it’s like shitting where you eat.”

Jack clammed up, fresh out of ideas. “Okay. Sorry I brought it up.”

“Apology accepted.” I picked up my winery guide, relieved to move off the topic of my bleak future.

We detoured off Foxen Canyon and motored down a narrow road that dead-ended at Rancho Sisquoc Winery. Their wines were so uniformly wretched that we left without finishing the lineup. After our initial success at Byron, I was starting to grow disappointed.

Next on the wine trail, according to the map, was Foxen Winery, a quality producer of Pinots, Cabs, Cab Francs, Chards, Syrahs, and even Mourvedre and Grenache. They were a small operation but wildly ambitious, and I had enjoyed their wines immensely in the past.

Their tiny tasting room was a ramshackle roadside barn broken at both ends by enormous sliding doors kept open to allow the sunlight and air to pour in. It was a refreshing change from the sterility of most tasting rooms, and an unprepossessing rebuke to the tawdry excesses of Fess Parker’s vulgar estate just down the trail.

Tipsy now, we swayed into the tasting room, joking, momentarily back on good terms, wine having mended the fences. Jack was laughing pretty boisterously, and when he laughed like that his whole body convulsed and his voice boomed so that you could hear it from a long way off. Just

As we bellied up to the tasting bar, our ears buzzing, Jack turned to me and brought a finger to his mouth to shush me. But I’m sure it was already obvious to the pourer that Jack and I were already a little on the other side of the vineyard.

She broke away from a discreetly sipping couple and approached us with a bouncy step and an alacritous smile. She was all of five feet five with short blond hair combed over in a left-center part, framing a pale, lightly freckled face. She had flashing gray-green eyes as alert as a bird’s, suggesting that she might be a product of the East Coast rather than the West with its sunworshipping surfer girls, skin tanned to leather, all trancelike smiles and no ambition. When she spoke, her New York accent came through, and she was quick-witted and sarcastic, affirming my prediction. “Doing the wine tour?” she asked.

“We are doing the wine tour,” Jack said, loud enough to be heard in Solvang. “And my wine snob friend, Miles”—Jack hooked an arm affectionately around my neck—“claims Foxen makes one hell of a Pinot.”

“Excuse my friend. Yesterday, he didn’t know Pinot Noir from film noir.”

The pourer laughed.

“Give me a break, Homes.” Jack turned to the pourer, all sparkling and flirty eyes and said, “But I’m learning.”

“That’s good, I guess,” she said. I got the impression, even in that daze of modest inebriation, that she was

“In town for a while? Or just up for the day?” she asked, thumping the cork out of the maiden Chardonnay.

“We’re en route to Paso Robles where my friend, Jack, here is …” A foot stomped on mine, making me cry out a little.

“ … Getting an introduction to the wines of the Central Coast,” Jack finished for me. He turned sharply to me and dared me to contradict him.

“Ah,” she replied, uncertain how to read us. “Well, Jack and Miles,” she said, leaning forward and drawing out both our names teasingly. “How about some Chardonnay?”

We nodded. She slid a glass in front of each of us and poured flirtatious dollops.

Jack swirled the wine around in his glass with the practiced air of a sommelier. “Now, there’s someone who knows how to pour. What’s your name?”

“Terra,” she said.

“Terra firma?” I joked, hoping to alienate her with my silliness so she would turn a cold shoulder to Jack’s charms.

“No, just Terra,” she corrected.

Jack ignored our banter and leaned in closer to his new mark. I turned to the Chard. It was another undistinguished, generic rendition of the most corrupted varietal in the world, and I was eager to delve deeper into the lineup.

“Cab Franc?” Terra asked, moving right along, raising her eyebrows as she held up the next bottle. There’s something about a beautiful woman holding up a bottle of wine

“Fill ’er up,” I urged. “Pour with your heart.”

Terra laughed. No company miser her, she uninhibitedly poured both of us half glasses.

I took a mouthful, swished it around, then swallowed.

“What do you think?” Terra asked. She planted an elbow on the bar—as if wanting to afford us a closer look—and propped her chin on her hand.

“Quaffable. For a blending varietal. I don’t expect greatness from Cab Franc.”

“I like it,” Jack said, his brow beetled as if trying to fertilize the seed of a description.

“You like all blending varietals,” I needled.

Jack brushed me off with a laugh, then turned his attention back to Terra—glowing ever more beautiful through our winey haze—and asked, “Do you live around here?”

“Uh-huh. Just outside Buellton.” She corked the Cab Franc and set it aside.

“Oh, yeah,” Jack said, “that’s where we’re staying.”

“Yeah, where?”

“Windmill Inn.”

“Slumming it, huh?” Terra said.

“We like tacky,” Jack said.

She laughed again. Then she pursed her lips to suppress a smile. Her eyes locked with Jack’s in coquettish combat for a few moments, an electric current arcing in the intimate space they had mutually created.

“Hey,” Jack said, emerging from his trance, “do you know a woman named Maya? Works at the Hitching Post?”

Terra brightened, revealing a mouth of brilliantly white teeth. “Yeah, I know Maya. Real well.”

“No shit?” Jack said, excited now. “We had a drink with her last night.”

Terra frowned, then burst into a sardonic laugh. “Don’t tell me, were you the guys making fools out of yourselves singing karaoke at the Clubhouse?”

Jack jerked a thumb my way. “He’s Caruso. Not me.”

Terra shimmied forward on her elbows closer to Jack and practically whispered: “Oh, you don’t sing?”

Jack bent his big head toward her smaller one. “Only in the shower and after you know what.”

Their eyes pulled each other closer to actual physical contact. I suddenly had an image of Babs in a changing room fussing over the fitting of her wedding gown, and decided it was time to intrude. “Could we move on to that Pinot, please?”

“Sure,” Terra said without unlocking her eyes from Jack’s. After a few pointed seconds, she broke out of her dreamy state and uncorked the bottle of Pinot.

Jack turned and winked at me. I made a sour face and shook my head in disapproval.

Terra free-poured us each a quarter glass, continuing to defy tasting room protocol.

“Oh, you’re a naughty, naughty girl, Terra,” Jack teased, holding up his glass.

“I know. At the end of the day, I might need to be spanked,” she bantered back. “Excuse me a second.” She straightened up from the bar and moved over to the only other people in the tasting room, a gay couple who had become visibly annoyed that we were monopolizing the pourer.

When I looked at Jack he was turned in my direction, away from Terra, his mouth frozen wide open in imitation of a man pantomiming a scream. He relaxed his countenance, elbowed me sharply, and whispered, “Cute, huh?”

“Yeah,” I reluctantly admitted. I watched Terra work with a portraitist’s eye. She was wearing a pale pink cashmere sweater decorated with delicate pearl white buttons. She down-dressed it with a white T-shirt underneath and a pair of nicely faded and frayed Levis. She glanced over at us frequently while she poured for the other visitors. In her eyes I sensed a feeding look that exposed her as the kind of woman, recently jilted, who hunted for men like Jack to quell her insatiable need for romance. If she flashed one more smile at us I thought I would scream. Worse, Jack signaled back every time by toasting her with his glass.

“I’m going to get this whole thing lined up,” Jack announced sotto voce.

“What whole thing?”

Jack gave me a look as if I were as slow as one of those brainless bovines we had just passed on Foxen Canyon.

“You. Me. Terra. Maya.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said unenthusiastically.

“What are you talking about, ‘Oh, yeah, right’?” He snorted. “Miles, the-glass-half-empty.”

“Do you know how many guys hit on these pourers? Especially ones as adorable as her?” I tried to discourage him because, for a weak moment, I thought of Babs, of men everywhere cheating on women, the whole male matrix of swinish deceit, and how, as it was salaciously shaping up, I didn’t want any part of it. But then Terra returned, bearing a new bottle and a sexy smile, obviously as interested as

“Like that Pinot?” Terra asked me.

“Not bad. Smooth.” I took another sip. “Sort of gutless for the price.”

Jack shot me a dark look and Terra picked up on it. “No, he’s right,” she said. “It’s
not
a great Pinot.” She plucked my glass away from me and upended it into the spit bucket. “Here, try this.” She reached under the counter and poured me a healthy taste from an unlabeled bottle. “This is a barrel sample from our 2000 Pinot.” She glanced at the couple at the other end of the bar and dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s not released yet.”

The wine was dark and unfiltered, but it had a kind of feral richness that called to me. “Very nice. Can’t wait until it comes out of hiding.”

Terra smiled and poured Jack a sample. “Maya’s a big Pinot fan, did she tell you that?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Are you going to the festival at Fess Parker’s?”

“Got our tickets right here.” I slapped my back pocket where my wallet was.

“Should be fun.”

“We’re excited,” Jack said. “And I
love
this Pinot.”

“I’m glad,” Terra said.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked, desperate to extricate myself from the growing flirtation.

Terra pointed and I shuffled off in the direction she indicated. Inside the tiny bathroom, I plopped wearily on the toilet and held my head in my hands. Negative thoughts swarmed in: What if the novel didn’t sell? What did Victoria’s new husband look like? Was he some virile, successful

I must have been camped out in the bathroom longer than I’d thought, because when I reemerged Terra was assembling a mixed case of Foxen’s finest in a cardboard box for Jack, who was up on his tiptoes leaning over the bar. His sunburned face and tousled hair were inches from Terra’s face, and he was making her laugh while closing the deal. He scribbled his cell number on the back of a business card and said: “So, call Maya and feel her out.”

“I will,” Terra said. She closed the case, gave it a slap, and shoved it across the bar toward Jack.

Jack hefted the case into his arms and called out to Terra at the register, “So, give me a call.”

“It’s a promise,” she said.

Jack jerked his head toward the open door. “Let’s move it, Homes.”

“Bye, Terra,” I said.

“Bye. See you tonight, maybe.”

Jack shot me a glance, silencing me. I almost didn’t believe it was happening, but I’ve witnessed Jack having this magnetic pull on women many times before, and this was just another example of how effective, when he was in full attack mode, he could be.

“That chick’s got it going on,” Jack said excitedly, as we stumbled our way out into the blinding sunlight back to the 4Runner.

“She’s pretty good-looking.”

“
Pretty
good-looking? She’s fucking dynamite.” I opened up the back of the 4Runner so Jack could stow the case. “And you fucking go and almost tell her I’m about to get married. What is
wrong
with you?”

We started back down Foxen Canyon. Jack was still on my case. “Do not tell these women I’m getting hitched.”

“So, what’s supposedly happening tonight?” I asked.

“She’s going to call Maya and see if she wants to get together and make it a foursome tonight for dinner.”

I bit my upper lip and watched the pastoral landscape blur in my vision.

Jack kept crowing about his good fortune. “I told you I was going to get this whole thing lined up.”

“What’d you have to do? Brag about being in the fucking movie business?”

“I’m hungry,” Jack cut me off. “Let’s get something to eat.”

We drove into the tiny, quaint town of Los Olivos. The place had one major intersection and only a few blocks fanning out from there. It was both a stopping-off point for tourists on the Santa Ynez Valley wine tour and a place to hang out for the affluent residents who lived in splendor in the surrounding hills.

We found a good sandwich shop called Pannini’s with outdoor tables shaded by large green umbrellas and ordered at the counter. While we waited, we cleansed our palates and cleared our heads with cold bottles of Pellegrino.