Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Thank you.”

  “Have you lost weight? Doing Pilates? You look like you’ve been working out.”

  “Maybe a little,” she said. “I’ve been taking long walks on the beach. And I cut out all carbs.” Realizing the paradox, she held up her glass of wine. “But today, I’m celebrating.”

  “Well, you look great.” I lowered my voice to a more sincere register. “I missed you,” I shamelessly lied. “That’s why I had to take the chance and write you that e-mail.”

  “You must have a lot of women now that you’re a success?”

  I waved her off. “Totally meaningless. All this Hollywood glamour doesn’t mean shit to me. It’s so shallow. I mean, you were there when I was nothing, down on my luck, and that means more to me than all these wine chippies flinging themselves at me. You’re a woman lacking in pretense, a woman of substance… intelligence…” I chopped myself off because I feared speciousness was growing detectable in my slurry voice. “That’s what I’m really looking for,” I finished. “A real, down-to-earth woman. Like you.”

  Her eyes batted with the emotion of the moment and I seized the opportunity to plant my lips on hers. It was a fervent kiss, mouths slammed together as if we were an adulterous couple meeting in a motel room for an hour. Without hesitation, she placed her hand on my groin and coiled her fingers around my cock. The half Viagra I had taken an hour before–non-performance was not an option!–primed me for her advances and my cock sprang to life, bulging in my jeans.

  The door burst open with a blast of unwanted sunlight and Jack re-emerged. Melina, however, kept kissing me, the exhibitionist in her rising to the occasion. “Excuse me, lovebirds,” Jack said.

  Melina unlocked her mouth from mine so that I could reply, “It’s okay, Jack. Uncork that second bottle. I realize it’s a little early in the afternoon, but, hey, I’m an artist, Melina has her own practice, and tonight I’m going to take us all out to The Wine Brasserie.”

  “Really?” Melina said.

  “Absolutely. We’re going to celebrate!” I turned to Jack. “Wine Brasserie’s one of the finest restaurants in all of San Diego.”

  “Awesome.” As Jack disappeared around the corner to find the corkscrew, Melina attacked me again. Her hand was back on my tumescing cock and I matched her gesture with my hand sneaking up her dress and slithering catlike under the band of her panties to beach itself on a verdant island of a pussy. For a moment I felt a twinge of nostalgia because I did miss that barbarian bush of hers.

  Jack returned with the open bottle of an ‘07 Witness Tree Claim #51–another blockbuster, a heartstopper–and refilled all our glasses. Melina and I were now half-entangled in each other, but a pang of concern struck me when I realized that I hadn’t seen or heard the familiar yipping of Snapper.

  “Hey, where’s Snapper?” I said insouciantly, not wanting to arouse suspicion. “Where is that little devil dog?”

  “He’s out back in his new doggie house I bought him,” Melina said, incipient inebriation beginning to slur her speech. “I had it custom-made by this cabinet-maker friend of mine. Cost me $2,500.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You must really love that dog.”

  “Do you want to see it and say hi to Snapper?” she suggested, starting to rise from the couch.

  With my hand still on her thigh I gently pushed her back down and said, “No, it’s okay, Melina. He’s your little bundle of joy now. My mother is so addled she doesn’t even remember him anymore. Besides–” I paused, kissing her lightly on the mouth to reassure her I hadn’t forgotten the moment that our flirtatious e-pistolary exchange had promised her. “I came here to see you, not Snapper.”

  She fixed her gaze on me with flashing, lovesick eyes, smoothed down her dress and said, “I’ve got to go to the little girl’s room. Excuse me.”

  I took my hand off her thigh so she could straighten herself up from the couch. When her footfalls had receded down the hall and she was safely out of earshot, I turned to Jack with an expression of urgency. “Offer to take Snapper out for a walk. Give a little wink-wink to let her know that it’s going to be a long walk. Say you want to leave the two of us alone so that we can have a private moment. And be insistent.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, screwing up his courage with another quaff of Witness Tree’s finest.

  Melina returned. We shifted desultorily to the topic of her law practice, but Jack was bored and cut her off, “Where’s your bathroom?”

  “Around the corner,” Melina said.

  Jack got up and lumbered toward the bathroom.

  I turned to Melina and said, “This is such a lovely afternoon.” We kissed again. I didn’t stop–and neither did she–when Jack returned. The way she was clutching my cock I really imagined that she wanted to do it on the couch with Jack watching. She was that kind of a naughty girl. She’d once fellated me on a beach in broad daylight.

  “Hey, you know what,” Jack started, “maybe I should, oh, I don’t know, take little Snapper for a walk.” He actually performed the wink-wink, which almost had me in stitches. “Maybe go down to the beach, leave the two of you alone to catch up. I need some fresh air; it’s getting a little… steamy in here.”

  Melina laughed her tittering laugh. She loved all the verbal foreplay.

  “That’s nice of you, Jack, to offer to take Snapper for his afternoon constitutional,” I said with both deliberate sarcasm and double entendre for Melina’s salacious benefit.

  Melina, her pussy slicker than a sea urchin, took the bait and rose. “Come on,” she said.

  As she spearheaded a path toward the kitchen and out to the back yard, Jack and I exchanged bug-eyed looks.

  A few minutes later she returned with Snapper on a leash, barking and yelping.

  “Don’t let him off the leash,” Melina admonished.

  “Don’t worry, Melina, I’m in no condition to chase a dog.”

  She passed the loop of the leash to Jack and I exhaled a sigh of relief. Jack lashed the leash around his wrist and set off out the front door. I smiled to myself–Part I had been beautifully executed.

  As soon as the door closed, Melina and I fell on each other in a torrid deliquescence of bodies. Within minutes I was unzipping the back of her dress and she was fumbling with the buckle on my belt. Half-clothed, we stumbled tangle-footed into the bedroom where we quickly dispensed with the rest of our attire. She was vocally impressed with my pharmaceutically enhanced erection, worshipping its totemic magnificence with her ardent mouth. While I worried what I would do in the event she skipped her customary post-coital shower, she pulled open a drawer and produced a vibrator. She liked to be on top and work the vibrator on her clitoris for the first half, her torso vertical, her eyes drifting ceilingward like a clairvoyant in the throes of some providential vision. It was a pruriently hilarious image that once, after we had smoked some pot, sent me cascading into uncontrollable laughter, halting her mid-thrust and causing her to dismount, so I learned to keep my eyes closed as she went through her swooning ritual. The second half had her cooing underneath me, coaxing me toward a last-minute-withdrawal climax on her perspiry thigh. But I was having trouble coming. Anxiety was closing off my imagination to the erotic images I needed to recreate in order to finish. With eyes closed, I went through practically every woman I had ever been with–and it was a pretty eclectic gallery!–as if desperately shuffling through a deck of cards searching for a rare joker. I debated faking it, but the blue magic had me so erect I didn’t think she would buy it. Finally, I alighted on a woman I had made love to on a beach in Mexico. I concentrated hard and could suddenly make out the full moon that eyeballed us, hear the roaring surf pounding the sand, and smell that pungent pussy stuffed into my face. Mixing dirty talk with romantic love talk, I drove her to new heights of expressiveness.

  “Fuck me, Miles. Fuck me hard. Don’t ever stop fucking me.” It did the trick. Just before I came I pulled out. She grabbed my cock and finished me with her piston-pumping hand.
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br />   When it was finally over I felt like the last vestige of humanity had been sucked from my very being. I felt like a whore. But my agenda remained unchanged. I kept intoning to myself: My mother will not get in the Rampvan to go to Wisconsin if I don’t get her stupid dog.

  “That was the most intense sex I’ve had in a long time,” I whispered in her ear as we lay on our backs, our hearts still racing from the exertion. “God, I missed you, Melina. I forgot what a fantastic lover you are.”

  “I wish you had come inside me. I really want to have a child.”

  “Let’s talk about it when I move down,” I said, as sincerely as I could muster.

  She tilted her head onto my shoulder. “You mean it?”

  “Yeah.” I touched her cheek affectionately with the back of my hand. “Do you want to take a shower?”

  “Take one with me,” she suggested, to my consternation.

  “No, I just want to lie here and bask in the afterglow of this wondrous moment.” I kissed her. “Actually, I want to leave your scent on me all day.”

  “Okay,” she said, kissing me on the mouth as she coiled her Rubenesque body away and clambered off the bed like a baby sea elephant off a moss-covered rock. A minute later I heard the shower running. She broke into one of Enya’s treacly uplifting songs, which further inspired me to get out of there. I leapt from the bed and hurriedly climbed into my pants. I grabbed my shirt and shoes, not wanting to squander precious seconds.

  The front door, through which I attempted to make my escape, was locked. I remembered that Melina always locked it from the inside with a key. And you had to have the key to unlock it. My eyes frantically ransacked the room. The key was nowhere in sight. Suddenly, my blood froze. I cocked my ear to the hallway which led to the back bedroom and heard a faint voice call out, “Miles, come shower with me.” Fuck!

  I strode briskly through the kitchen and fled out the rear sliding-glass door. But now I was trapped in her fenced-in back yard. My eyes shot a glance at Snapper’s new doggie house. It was a magnificent, alpine-style domain with Snapper’s name painted in blue on a shingle hanging over the entrance. I ran past it and scaled a head-high wooden fence, clawing to get over it, piercing my hands with splinters and scuffing my knees. A little walkway where the neighbor’s trashcans were parked led out to the street and I made a dash for it, pulling on my shirt and trying unsuccessfully to button it mid-sprint, and knocking over one of the metal cans in the process.

  “Hey, hey!” a man’s voice shouted.

  I hit the Rampvan half-naked. Jack shot me a look of alarm and turned the engine over so frantically he produced an ear-shattering screech from the starter motor. Snapper barked like a maniac in the back, knowing in his sentient canine way that something was amiss.

  “Hit it,” I said, “hit it!”

  Jack shifted into drive and floorboarded it. The Rampvan lurched forward like a startled leviathan and Snapper lost his balance like an astronaut in outer space and tumbled backward, whimpering, flummoxed.

  “We’re not dognappers, Snapper. We’re taking you to your rightful owner.”

  He cocked his little box-shaped head to one side as if he understood me.

  I directed Jack to the freeway onramp and we sped north to Las Villas, dog in hand, splinters in hand, semen still sticky and warm on my thigh, mission accomplished.

  Once on the freeway river and safely away from Melina’s, Jack started laughing uproariously as I buttoned my shirt, laced up my Patagonias and combed my hair with splayed fingers. I regaled Jack with the sordid sequence of events, beginning from the point he took Snapper for a walk, and he couldn’t stop laughing.

  “How was the lay?” he asked, bearing a gleefully obscene expression, always interested in the rehashing of sexual details.

  “Nerve-racking. All I could think about was you waiting outside with Snapper. Couldn’t concentrate. I was afraid I couldn’t come. Remember that gorgeous Mexican babe I screwed on the beach in Cabo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I used her. Worked like a charm.”

  “Excellent,” Jack said. “Say, whatever happened to Isabel what’s-her-name? She was pretty hot.”

  “She was using me to get a green card. So, I bailed.”

  “Oh,” Jack reflected, “it’s always something. Babies, green cards, dinners. I want to meet a chick who just wants to fuck, you know what I mean?”

  A sudden wave of nausea swept over me. “I’m looking for true love,” I said. “Stop living this crazy fucking life of mine.”

  “Oh, bullshit! Don’t lie to me. Ever since the movie came out you’ve been getting laid like Clinton.”

  “I’m sick of it.”

  “Bullshit!” Jack threw me a look. “What’d you write the book for? Art?” He cackled maniacally. “You wrote it so you could get laid. Don’t lie to me.”

  I turned slowly and looked at him. “You’re projecting, dude.”

  “Don’t psychoanalyze me, short horn.” He paused and sipped on some wine from a plastic cup. “How many women have you had, Miles?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “No, come on. How many?”

  “I don’t give a shit. I was married for ten years and faithful for seven of them.”

  “I’ve had over a hundred and fifty.”

  “Outstanding, Jackson. Is that what you’re going to remember on your deathbed when the Great One snatches you away and drops you off in some celestial sports bar with scantily-clad San Diego State cheerleaders?”

  Jack, sensing that I was still a little bent out of shape by the unpardonable dognapping antic, said, “Hey, Homes, it was not my idea to have you go in and fuck that chick and steal her dog.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, still a little nauseated. “I really didn’t want to do that to her, but I had no choice.”

  “What’d you do? Tell her you wanted to get married and have children?”

  “Might as well have,” I said, shaking my head in disgust.

  “Hey,” Jack consoled. “You got your mom’s dog. That’s awesome. And you can put it in your next book.”

  “Yeah,” I said, brightening a little. “My next book.”

  We bent off the freeway at Carlsbad Village Drive and headed in the direction of Las Villas de Carlsbad. As orchestrated, we hooked up with Joy, who was parked on the street in a beat-up Ford Escort. We pulled up behind her and I climbed out of the Rampvan to greet her. When she rolled down the window the piquant smell of marijuana wafted from inside her car. She hastily extinguished the joint in an ashtray, hid it in a small tin that mints come in and smiled at me. She was no more than 5’2” and her short-cropped black hair ended at her slender shoulders.

  “Hi, Joy,” I said.

  Out of the driver’s-side window, Jack telescoped his head and said, “Hi, Joy.”

  “This is my friend, Jack,” I said. “He’s going to be helping me with the driving.

  “Nice to meet you,” Joy said demurely.

  “You got my mother’s things?”

  “Yeah. They’re in the trunk.”

  “Meds and everything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good job, Joy.” I squatted to her level and said, my voice still harried from the canine abduction escapade, “I’m going to go in and get her. Jack will help you load your and my mother’s things. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Las Villas de Carlsbad is a three-story assisted-living complex situated next to the roaring Interstate-5. Every time I visited my mother I popped some Xanax for fortification against a panic attack, the place was that depressing.

  I left Jack and Joy together on the street and crossed Las Villas’s expansive lawn and entered the main lobby. My cell rang urgently in my pocket. I glanced hurriedly at the incoming number. No surprise, it was Melina. Shit! I put the phone on mute and quickened my stride.

  I wended my way up to the third floor on a glacially slow elevator. A sepulchral pall hung over the facility. The infirm e
lderly residents, either slumped in wheelchairs or upright-ish with the assistance of walkers, moved torpidly and aimlessly about. Most of them had frozen on their faces that permanently startled look of people who have suffered strokes, or are dosed on so many medications they’re tranquilized into another universe, appearing as if they don’t know where or who they are.

  Just as the Xanax kicked in, I found my way to my mother’s tiny, claustrophobic room and stepped inside. Cluttering it were a desk, a TV in the corner, and a bed positioned diagonally against one wall. Between the bed and wall was the portable toilet she used at night. I looked away when I noticed that the previous night’s contents had not been emptied.

  When she heard me enter, my mother gave me a backward look from her desk, where she had a view of the freeway out her only window. I came around and placed a hand on her shoulder. After her stroke she had stopped coloring her hair and it was now a slate gray. Her mouth sagged on the left side where the paralysis had crippled her. Early pictures of her revealed a woman who bore a remarkable resemblance to a young Ingrid Bergman and, if one looked hard enough, you could still color in vestiges of a once beautiful woman, now wizened by a stroke and old age. She didn’t look anything like the actress who played my mother in the movie, but then the actor who played me was a far cry from how I looked then, too.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Miles!” she said, almost as if she hadn’t expected me.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  “We don’t have time for that.”

  “I have to go,” she said. She grabbed the right handrim and started windmilling her one good arm and rolled herself past me into the bathroom. In the reflection of a wall mirror I witnessed her hoisting herself up out of the chair and plopping down on the toilet. She slid down her loose-fitting, elastic waist-banded sweat pants and stared blankly into space.

  Impatient, I glanced at my watch.

  “I didn’t think you were going to make it,” she said from the bathroom.

  “Hurry up, Mom, we’ve got to move.”

  “Don’t make me nervous,” she said, “I won’t be able to go.”