Ram was about to say something in reply, but when he opened his mouth, Vera covered it with hers. She kissed him deeply, slowly and deliberately, disarming Ram from conscious thought and pinning him to the heat of the moment, incrementally drawing him in ever more deeply with each probe of her tongue into his mouth until he was lost to it, lost to her and the heated dreamscape he and she were creating.
And so it was for days and weeks on end, all through their first spring and summer together; with music and cappuccinos in the morning at The Pergolesi, followed by individual endeavors thereafter, Ram at the new shop and Vera at one of her theaters, auditioning or rehearsing. Late afternoon reunions at the Oak Room, the Lotus, or the Nasty Asti, with its dead animal heads lining the walls and bottles of pickled pigs’ feet behind the bar, which Vera would sometimes have along with a beer and a shot with Ram. She was a Cleveland girl, from a large family, Sicilian on her father’s side, Czech on her mother’s, a working-class family from the inner city projects. She was tough and foul-mouthed as a guy could be and felt more comfortable among men than she did with women who often resented her. Ram introduced Vera to his Endymion friends including Fran, and Vera presented Ram to the friends in her circle. But each circle didn’t understand what the attraction was between their old friends and their new mates, thereby unintentionally closing Ram and Vera’s bond with each other more exclusively. They each accepted the reaction from their friends, although it made social decisions awkward between them.
Sometimes, they had dinner out, dining at The Bistro on weekdays, or at The Courtyard in Izquell on Fridays, where Ram established his ritual pattern of buying a gardenia for Vera and pinning it behind her ear after the cognacs arrived. Vera would then present him with an Armas de Casa Churchill, which she’d start for him by lighting it in a manner so sexually provocative that it sometimes turned heads and made Ram blush. But just as often, they’d cook dinner together back at Vera’s walled garden apartment—fresh seafood and pasta dishes mostly; heavy cream sauces with piquant herbs and spices; multicolored imported pastas from the Italian deli downtown; mussels and clams and scallops that Vera bought directly from the fishing boats at the end of the pier.
Their lovemaking was a constant punctuation to whatever else they endeavored to do together, and the world outside them faded into a halftone that seemed almost without bearings, almost as though it were a movie they might later recount vaguely to one another when they were much older and could no longer act on the passion of that which then propelled them. The long summer days of light and sunshine dripped and melded into one another, becoming an attenuated smear that meant nothing to anybody except themselves, for Ram and Vera were the sole occupants of this circumscribed world. All the rest they dismissed as detritus exterior to them; as obligations to be met without enthusiasm; as props and sets and costumes and bit players, all in sepia tone, in contrast to the blazing hues of their brilliant and almost blinding otherworldliness; time in frozen stop action, or time they were passing through, or more accurately, a world that was timeless and placeless as spring swelled into summer ripeness.
Chapter Six
Just past noon, the light was already dusky within the glade. The foliage above them was deep-green, and the light that penetrated the pines, painted Venetian blind shadows on Vera’s body as she waded across the shallow pool of the San Gregorio. Ram sat watching her from a flat rock alongside the river. She talked coolly to him; her voice barely audible above the nearby brook that fed the pool.
“I don’t know why you still bother with that crowd,” she said. “You’re not one of them anymore. They don’t appreciate you, and they really don’t like me,” Vera said.
“That’s not true,” Ram said, stubbing out his cigarette and pulling a Dos Equis out of the water. “It’s just a little different now, and besides, they do like you.”
“Michael Boswell and Phillip Sussman, maybe they do. The others, I don’t know, your brother, definitely no.”
“Let’s not go down that road again.”
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t tell you,” she said, then dove under the water and swam toward the sunning rock on the other side of the river. Ram watched her graceful form, her long, strong legs scissoring the water behind her, her arms pushing outwards in front. Although he denied it, Ram knew that what Vera said was true.
They had been together for a little more than two years now, most of it spent in Refugio, with Vera sometimes joining Ram on the road for a week or two in whatever city where he and the Mad Dog crew were building a store. They had done ten stores in that time—one in San Luis Obispo, one in Santa Barbara, one in Berkeley, one in San Francisco, three in Phoenix, two in Salt Lake City, and the big one in Las Vegas on the Strip, kiddy-corner from the Stardust, as Endymion Records raced ahead, challenging Monument for supremacy of the West.
The score currently stood Monument 18, Endymion 13, although Endymion was planning on adding seven new stores in the coming year. Ram had just finished telling Vera of the year’s coming expansion plans and Vera didn’t like it, knowing how much he’d be out of town. Ram took a pull from the bottle, set it down next to him, and thought about what Vera said.
He remembered their official coming-out party, at Suzie’s welcome home party from France held at Bracero. It started badly, then it got worse.
It was an odd amalgam of characters collected that night—even by Refugio standards where oddity was the norm. There was the Mad Dog crew—Fran and Ram and Sandy and Bochs and Jimmy Wales and all the Endymion front office workers and retail clerks who were friends of Suzie’s. Then Vera and Oscar Sands and the theater crowd showed up, and it created a palpable polar shift. The theater folk secreted themselves in the kitchen mess alongside the oilcloth-covered mess table while they conversed and whispered amongst themselves. The Endymion bunch was in the other room near the pool table, while Ram migrated between the two knots, attempting to strike a balance between being Vera’s lover and one of the movers in the Mad Dog gang. He introduced Vera to his Endymion friends and tried to stimulate conversation between them. Vera felt nothing in common with them, and made a conscious point of establishing the fact that their world was one that didn’t interest her in the slightest. At one point, Paul Bochs made a vain attempt of trying to engage her in conversation. She looked at him as though he was speaking a foreign language. Tor sensed Ram’s anxiety and came and stood beside him. He put his arm around Ram’s shoulder and squeezed it.
“She’s a beautiful woman, Ram.”
Ram smiled.
Tor laughed.
“What is it?” Ram said, turning to Tor.
“You’ve got a lot to handle there, Ram. I hope you’re up to it,” Tor chuckled.
“I think I know what you’re saying,” said Ram. “Come on. I could use a shot.”
Three minutes later, Vera came up to Ram in the living room. She had her coat on; as did the other thespians who’d arrived with her.
“This isn’t our scene, Ram. We’re going to a party at Jimmy’s. Do you want to come with us or stay here and play with your friends?”
Ram’s ears burned. He felt his face flush but said nothing. Vera bade him goodnight as she and her friends made their exit while Ram watched alongside Tor and Suzie, both of them smiling at Ram uncertainly. He could hear Vera’s laughter outside in the driveway and watched the cars as they pulled away.
“Maybe she didn’t feel comfortable here,” said Suzie. “She doesn’t know any of these people.”
“Maybe,” Ram said.
Ram thought about that scene and others like it as he sipped his beer and watched Vera sunning herself on the rock. He thought of the dinner party with Tor and Suzie and Fran and he and Vera, which turned out badly and ended when Vera excused herself to minister to a neighbor’s cat. He thought of the poker game he hosted at his house for Cisco and Milo and Phil and their other Lotus friends, which likewise ended early when Vera came home and behaved so frigidly that everybody suddenly remembered t
hey had somewhere to go. He thought of the time when his mother came to town with her boyfriend Walter, and Ram came home from work to find the two of them seated in the living room, without food or refreshments, while Vera stood with brush in hand, dressed in hot pants, painting the bathroom door and talking about the Holocaust. As his mother and her boyfriend were leaving, Ram’s mother kissed him goodbye and whispered in his year. “I don’t think your girlfriend likes us, Ram,” she said, which told Ram that, in fact, his mother didn’t like Vera.
In their first fifteen months together, one incident after another served to isolate them further from their respective crowds, who tended to regard them as an unlikely pairing, an uneven seam, as a discordant chord. The longer they stayed together, the louder that dissonance grew.
While she could be sweet and loving with Ram alone, Vera could combust when others were present, and she often did, which distressed Ram deeply and embarrassed him. She was extremely jealous and hot-tempered when she felt provoked. This tended to restrain Ram’s natural gregarious and outgoing nature. Other women’s motives were always suspect with Vera, as was Ram’s loyalty to her, no matter how hard he tried to assure her that he was interested in her alone. Scenes could ensue at parties or gatherings if Vera found him talking one-on-one with attractive women, and oftentimes, when they got home, the scenes would escalate into violent arguments that sometimes ended with Vera smashing china or crystal. In their relatively brief time together, Vera had already smashed two sets of fine china while they were together and was halfway through the third, one evening, when Ram yelled at her to stop it and said that if she continued, that that was it and they’d be using paper plates at the next dinner party.
That next party occurred two nights later when John Devlin came to town unexpectedly and called Ram from the Greyhound station to be picked up. They stopped at a liquor store for wine and returned home to Vera, who’d met John once before in San Francisco with Miranda and told Ram that she liked them. At dinner, Devlin said something that provoked Vera and Ram could see from her expression it was bad. Ram tried to steer the conversation onto another topic, but Devlin kept running on. John didn’t like Erica Jong and he was telling Vera why. Vera was a big Erica Jong fan. They were seated at the dining room table eating spaghetti with clams in a red sauce and drinking Chianti as Devlin hammered on. Vera took offense at another dismissive comment and threw her glass at John who avoided the brunt of it, the glass smashing against the wall. Vera then removed the gardenia from behind her ear, squished it into the spaghetti sauce and hurled it against the wall. Then she stomped off into the night. The splattered spaghetti and rouged gardenia clung to the wall for a moment, then slid down to the floor.
“Geez, was it something I said?” asked Devlin laughing, looking across the table at Ram, who smiled wanly.
“Don’t worry, John. She goes off sometimes. It’s the Sicilian in her.”
“Maybe I should find a hotel,” said Devlin. Ram agreed that it might be a good idea, but an hour later, Vera returned with another bottle of Chianti, contrite and embarrassed at being a bad hostess to the one friend of Ram’s she liked besides Tor and Phil. The three of them managed to salvage the evening, or what was left of it, going to see Bonnie Raitt at The Pacific Steamship Co., ending with a midnight breakfast at Flap’s.
“I think we should probably get going now,” said Ram, calling out to her across the river. “I want to get up there while it’s still light.”
Vera rose from the sunning rock, plunged into the pool, and swam back across the river. They gathered their gear and walked up the path where the Roacho was parked under a redwood. Soon, they were driving back down the grade. Ram turned left on Skyline and headed north, following the ridgeline of the mountains spidering up the peninsula to its terminus at The City fifty miles ahead.
At La Honda, they stopped at a Dairy Queen for burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Ram called John and Miranda to say they’d be there by three. Miranda reminded Ram to call the friend that Ram had told her about. Ram called the number Doc had given him. When he got a message machine, Ram left Miranda’s number on it and said he’d be arriving in San Francisco later that afternoon. He got back behind the wheel and put Sail Away on the stereo cassette. When You Can Leave Your Hat On came on, Vera did a vampy faux striptease number, sitting next to him, rolling her hips and eyes to the bump-and-grind backbeat and razor-sharp slide guitar. When it was over, she laughed and settled in close to Ram. She put her hand on his lap.
“Not now, Vera. Remember the last time,” he said, recalling the time Vera was going down on him while he drove along the coast near Seaside. They’d been surprised by a passing trucker who caught them in the act. The driver honked his horn in appreciation and grinned at Ram as he passed.
“I’ll wait a little while, Ram,” Vera said sweetly with a touch of evil. “But remember, baby, this cat’s got an itch and this pussy needs to be scratched,” she said, parting her legs and touching herself so Ram could watch her.
“I swear to God, one day you’re gonna get us in a wreck,” Ram said, not knowing if he meant it jocularly or not. Vera chose the former and laughed a single crackly Ha. Soon, they were bumping east on Mission, trailing down the front side of Twin Peaks. Ram turned right on Church and cruised into Noe Valley, pulling the car to a stop at 23rd and Sanchez and asking Vera if she needed anything from the store. Inside, Ram bought two bottles of claret and cigarettes for John and Miranda while Vera looked at National Lampoon, reading Two Month Affair out loud to Ram as they made their way forward through the checkout line. A minute later, they were walking arm in arm to Miranda’s, Vera still reading bits to him from the magazine. She had somehow neglected to pay for it, and the clerk did not confront her even though Ram saw the girl knew what Vera was doing. That was Vera, all the way.
Ram had no reference point for a woman like Vera, absolutely none at all. And while it was certainly true that his experience with women was limited, it was equally true that Vera was a rare breed, unlike any other woman Ram had ever met.
Although Vera was attractive in a seductive, sirenis sort of way, she wasn’t classically beautiful, but she used her physical idiosyncrasies to maximum effect by playing to them rather than attempting to hide or disguise them: the uneven teeth with the pronounced canines were frequently displayed in a wicked grin. She called attention to her long, thin neck by wrapping it in colorful scarves or piling her curls atop her head in a thick nest. The opacity of her white skin, she likewise highlighted by displaying as much of it as she could. But of all the myriad affectations that Vera Dubcek enshrouded herself in like so many winding gowns, perhaps the most singular one among them was her absolute refusal to have truck with anything remotely resembling or even approaching contemporary or conventional standards.
She refused to use toothpaste; preferred myrrh instead. “If it worked for Mary Magdalene, then it’s good enough for me,” she’d purr to Ram as he watched her brushing her teeth while he leaned against the bathroom door jam, Vera’s knees locked together in high black socks, black lace panties barely covering her bottom, intently working her teeth, watching him stare, winking and wriggling her ass good morning to him, while Ram sang back to her. “Oh, Magdalena, nothing like a saint you are…” With Vera, there was never a bar of soap in the house unless Ram brought one home himself. Vera preferred to bathe in dried rose petals—“offerings from old lovers,” she’d tell Ram when he looked at her quizzically, her laughter more taunting than mirthful or reflective. In the bath, she rubbed herself with a loofah or pumice stone, for these, she said, were untainted by men and were what Collette or Dietrich or Barbara La Marr used, the latter of whom Vera looked like whenever she wore her cloche hat and pouted. Vera said that all those actresses used those things and said they enhanced her skin’s alabaster tone. Her cigarettes were English Ovals, or Russian Sobranies, the multicolored pastel-toned ones, or sometimes Indonesian cloves; her perfume was Je Reviens, or sometimes, on special occasions, a smoky j
asmine oil from Persia that came in a long slender vial nestled in an excelsior-stuffed sandalwood box covered on the outside with Arabic script and government wax stamps. “Men remember it because they’ve never smelled anything like it,” Vera would say… Vera, sui generis, Vera Diva…
She found current fashions utterly appalling. “Haute couture, as far as I’m concerned, died in the early fifties with Fath, and these current poseurs should all be impaled,” Vera would say to women at parties who complimented her on her dress and style and called it “interesting.” When Vera finished excoriating fashion for them, the women would shrink, claque-like, back into corners to whisper among each other what they really thought about her while Vera laughed too loudly in their general direction, now in a more comfortable conversation with a member of the opposite sex. “I can’t stand these uptight cunts,” she might offer to the man she was now huddling with, slinging her champagne carelessly, spilling it onto the man’s jacket, which he would attempt to disregard but then couldn’t after Vera would lick it clean for him… For her own attire, Vera preferred antique lace, brocade, beads, cashmere, and silk, and she had a special fondness for those old-fashioned, black lace-ups that Ram remembered the nuns at St. Francis’ Elementary wearing. Ram first saw it as just plain silliness and ritual indulgence (the latter of which Vera would have freely admitted, for those words separate and conjoined were two of her favorite Ave Marias). It was a touch too histrionic, too much a badge that breeds bad memories, thought Ram. Then, one night, Vera wore them with a black lace camisole, matching garter belt, and patterned stockings. When she entered the bedroom, she asked Ram whether he now understood why she wore them, and as she was asking this, kneeling over him, making slow circular movements, her hips clicking in their sockets, Ram almost directly below her, his eyes nodding an assent, cursing and praising her concurrently, remembering the thoughts he had at age eleven over Sister Amelia and recalling her, but finding Vera’s face instead, under the white cowl surrounded by black, the lipsticked smile now becoming a sneer, the lips peeling back to expose her canines, Vera vanquishing then becoming that taboo herself.
Windwhistle Bone Page 19
