Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  I poured some more wine–where had it gone so quickly? “God, a woman who works the earth with her mind! Is there anything sexier, Jack?”

  Jack smiled. “Nope.”

  “You know, it’s too bad we have to be up in Paso Robles and you girls have to fly out tomorrow.”

  Now Jack frowned. “They don’t fly out of LAX until late tomorrow, right, ladies?”

  “It’s a red-eye,” Carmen said.

  “Well, then maybe the two of you would like to come up to Paso with us.” Relief washed visible over Jack like a thunderstorm bursting over a desiccated floodplain. “We’re staying at this great little bed & breakfast. There’re only four suites, and they’re amazing, and I’m confident I can get you into one.”

  Jack was nodding nirvanically like a bearded Buddhist. The girls were making intense eye contact, locked in a dialogue whose language was composed of darting eyes and subtle birdlike expressions.

  “Okay,” Laura said. “That sounds fun.”

  “Great,” Jack said.

  I straightened from the bench. “Laura? You want to take a stroll with me and check out the Pinot grapes?”

  She leapt to her feet. I held out my hand and she took it in hers. “Grab your glass.” I raised my eyes to Jack. “Hold down the fort, Jackson.”

  “Will do, Capitán.” He tented his forehead with one hand and mock saluted me.

  I seized the near-empty bottle of the Foxen Pinot and escorted Laura away, toward my lair of drunken erotic fantasies. Over my shoulder I said to Jack, “Susan’ll give you another bottle. Try their dry-farmed Cab Franc.”

  “We’ll see you in a bit, Miles,” Jack said, waving and smiling.

  I ushered Laura down into one of Foxen’s vineyards. Out in the open, away from the shelter of the main winery and the tasting room, the cooling wind off the ocean rustled the flora and cooled the perspiration that had our clothes sticking to our skin. It was late July and the gnarly, trellised and netted rootstocks, abundantly leafed out in canopies of shimmering green, rose above us as we descended between rows. Clusters of fruit the size of a girl’s fist hung nestled in the leafage, promising an autumn profusion. In the next two months they would swell to twice their size and ripen to a dark blackish-purple, ready for harvest.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do with this girl. She was barely thirty, more than a decade my junior. She had journeyed 6,000 miles to visit the locations in the movie, spurred by a vivid imagination that the film inspired, wanting to see where it all happened in reality. I sensed that she was looking for romance and that, in her mind, it was her felicitous fortune that she had stumbled upon the author of the book that had inspired her vacation. For a moment I felt what it must feel like to be a rock star after an electrifying set.

  “Do you have a boyfriend back in Barcelona, Laura?”

  “It’s LAU-ra,” she corrected.

  “LAU-ra. I love that pronunciation.”

  “No.”

  “No. How come? You’re so beautiful.” She was.

  She shrugged. “I’m too busy.”

  “You’re not gay, are you?”

  “No. I tried it once, but I didn’t like, forgive me my English…”

  “Lobster nibbling?” I attempted to joke, but it didn’t translate.

  She looked at me strangely and I tried to maintain.

  “So, you want to make movies?” I inquired, quickly shifting the subject.

  “Maybe. Be the female Almodóvar?”

  “Do you like his films?”

  “He is a genius.”

  “I agree,” I said. “What about Buñuel?”

  “More than genius. A god.”

  Christ! “Hey, if I came to España, would you show me around?”

  “Claro! You should come. It’s a beautiful country. You speak castellana?”

  “Muy poco.”

  She smiled shyly.”

  “All right. I’m coming. That’s not a threat. It’s a promise.” I pointed my wineglass at her for emphasis.

  We had reached the end of the vineyard grid. A patch of wild fescue beckoned and I plopped down on my butt and elbows, the sky a vertiginous swirl of blue and drifting wisps of indolent clouds. Laura coiled down next to me. I poured us both more wine. She sipped it with evident pleasure. I inquired whether she drank a lot of wine and she said she did, she loved wine. But since Pinot Noir wasn’t indigenous to Spain and because Bourgognes rouges were too expensive she rarely drank any. “But this tastes a lot like our Riojas,” she remarked, studying the wine in her glass.

  “You know,” I said, “some wine historians contend that when phylloxera decimated France in the mid 1800s and destroyed most of their vines, they took the Pinot rootstock they salvaged to Spain, where it flourished and was renamed Tempranillo.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she said.

  At a momentary loss for words, I said, “So you like Almodóvar, huh?”

  “Yes. He is a true auteur.”

  “Talk to Her was a brilliant film.”

  “I think I like his earlier films better. More…” She fumbled for words.

  “Risk-taking?”

  “Yes. Risk-taking.”

  Our eyes locked. Totally high on the Foxen grape, I said, “I’d like to write you a film, Laura.”

  “Really?”

  “When I come to Spain. Maybe we’ll write it together.”

  “I think you’re drunk, Miles.”

  I sipped more wine. “Drunk on you, Laura.” I leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were soft and pliant. We set our wineglasses down. Then we kissed again, this time more ardently. “I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been within five feet of.”

  “Now, I know you’re drunk.”

  “No, seriously. And I’ve met Penelope Cruz.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. I mean, she’s pretty, but your beauty is… unique, muy especial. Okay, so I am a little tipsy.”

  She laughed and we kissed again. Then we stared meaningfully into each other’s eyes. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. I wanted to make love to her so badly, maybe because I was still smarting from Maya’s rejection, but I feared if my move was too aggressive it could blow the whole Paso plan. And that I would never hear the end of it from Jack.

  I tore away from our lovestruck gaze and cast my eyes over the trellised vineyard. I could make out my mother, still parked atop the knoll with her glass of wine and frisky dog. She seemed content so I returned my attention to LAU-ra. “I can’t believe we met,” I whispered into her ear before kissing it lightly. “Do you think it’s fate?” I nuzzled her ear again and spoke mellifluously into it. “Maybe I wrote my book so that a woman like you would come to me from somewhere faraway and make me deliriously happy.” I actually meant it when I said it, even if all the wine had disinterred a romantic fantasy I pathologically kept hidden from women.

  “Maybe,” she said. She picked up her glass and took a sip. I sipped mine. The sun beat down on us. A native raptor cawed overhead. We locked eyes again. I wanted to say, “I really want to lick your pussy,” but, instead, I quoted a line of poetry from memory: “‘I seek in my flesh, the tracks of your lips’.”

  “That’s Lorca,” she cried.

  “Yes. One of my favorite writers.”

  We kissed again, this time more passionately. She set her wineglass aside and lay down on the wiry grass. I eased myself on top of her. Her chest swelled and I wondered if she wanted me to take her then and there. Slowly, with my eyes fastened on hers–rejection be damned!–I unfastened the top button of her jeans. She made no move to protest. Wordlessly, very slowly, teasingly, I undid the other four until her panties were revealed, shockingly white against her light brunette skin. She fell silent. Her face was frozen into a kind of compliant smile. She may have been floored by my romantic patter, or she may have, well, just wanted to get laid in a vineyard. Then she looked up at me. In her unblinking eyes there was yearning, an attempt to read me, and perhaps a scin
tilla of danger stirred with lust. I stared into the dark passageways of her eyes as I concomitantly slid my hand into her panties, forded her silky-haired pussy, found the wet crease in her thatch of wiry hair and carefully everted it. Again, without receiving any remonstration.

  “You’re so wet,” I said in a susurrus voice.

  She smiled, threw her head back, then collapsed her arms and lowered herself to the grass and surrendered to my desires.

  I massaged her clitoris with my forefinger until it swelled like the flesh of a raw mussel. She shut her eyes against the advent of pleasure. A gust of wind clattered the leaves of the Pinot rootstock and freshened our bodies. I kissed her. “You taste like tapas, Laura.”

  Her body rocked with laughter. “Oh, yeah?”

  I kissed her lightly again, my left hand still gently massaging her clitoris. “Scampi. Pickled olives. Smoked paprika. Saffron. Seafood. Paella.” In-between kisses: “I make an amazing paella.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It took me about fifty botched attempts to perfect it.”

  “You cook?”

  “I love to cook.”

  We kissed again, this time more passionately, our lips deliquescing. I could feel her chest swelling, surrendering to me. She was a beautiful woman. Perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever kissed. It made me want to kiss her that much more. I gently pushed my finger inside her and she moaned. I obliterated her moans with more kisses. My cock grew hard and struggled to escape my tight pants. I deftly unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my jeans and swiftly brought her hand to my fleshy rudder. She squeezed it artfully. Her whole body leapt up into mine as if her soul were a succubus inhabiting me in my dreams and tyrannizing my unconscious. I awkwardly rode her tank top up to her neck and redirected my mouth to one of her exposed breasts. She had been blessed with dark, sexy nipples, the color of squid ink, and I could feel them distending against the flicking of my impious tongue. Her chest heaved against mine. Unrepentant, I licked a trail to her belly button. Her hand lost purchase on my cock and it staggered in the air like a sword stabbed in stone. I wriggled her jeans off to just below her knees and bifurcated her legs. I dissolved into her pussy. Her small hands reached for my head and clutched it forcefully as if fearing I would decamp for more conventional expressions of licentiousness.

  “Pour some wine on me just like your character did in your book,” she said, startling me.

  I looked up at her. “Really? That’s so cliché, Laura.”

  “I don’t care. I want you to lick wine off me. Por favor.”

  Her por favor made me laugh. I reached for the bottle, scrabbled to my knees, my cock still leaping around like a boom cut loose from the rigging, and straddled her pussy. Like a cellarmaster decanting the finest aged Burgundy, I tilted the bottle until just a trickle streamed into the Tastevin of her bellybutton. She giggled, as if undergoing some kind of pleasurable torture. I traced a trail of wine from her navel along the gloriously faint line of dark hair to the nearshore of her abundant pubic hair, then to the headwaters of her wetness.

  She laughed all the way during the teasing liquid journey. When the bottle was emptied, I fell on her again with an unquenchable thirst for both the sexual thrill that the wine inspired and the vertiginous thrill of her midday al fresco nakedness. All, it appeared, because one day I dared to write a book that I thought for certain would capsize my “career.”

  “Oh, God, Miles. That feels so good!” Her voice rose and her spine arched and her thighs tensed and quivered. “Don’t stop! Please.”

  I had no intention of stopping. Sex in the out-of-doors, especially with someone you just met, whether it be on a deserted beach accompanied by thunderous surf or in a ripening vineyard emitting its floral piquancy, is about as torrid as it gets. It was, that is, until I heard a faint, but familiar, cry.

  “Snapper,” the distant voice sounded. “Snapper,” my mother wailed from atop the knoll. “Snapper! Come back here!”

  Sensing something amiss, I hoisted myself up off Laura and clambered to my feet. I tented my forehead, shielding it from the sun, my cock hard as a hammer. I could make out my mother hunched over in her wheelchair, her arm extended toward the vineyard at the bottom of the grassy hill, calling frantically for her dog.

  “What is it?” Laura asked, whiplashing from the cunnilingus interruptus.

  “My mother,” I said.

  I didn’t see Joy anywhere in sight and my mother continued to yell at Snapper, who was running around in crazy circles, chasing another taunting blue jay. Suddenly, in a moment of utter foolishness engendered by her stroke, she released the brakes on her wheelchair, clutched the handrim with her one good hand and dislodged herself from the precipice and started down the hill! In her demented determination to reclaim her pet, she picked up speed and charged down the slope, looking surreally like some handicapped Soap Box Derby contestant on a collision course with a trellised row of grapevines instead of a finish line.

  “Holy shit!” I cried.

  Laura scrambled to her feet. “What?”

  “My fucking mother!” Bent at the waist, she was now halfway down the hill, trailed by a funnel of dust. I pulled up my pants and took off running, buttoning them as best I could manage in a full headlong sprint toward God knows what calamity. I ran tangle-footed along the perimeter of the vineyard until I came approximately to where my mother had launched her kamikaze pursuit of her uncontrollable dog. Careering into the vineyard, I ran up between the Pinot rootstock, the foliage slapping at my arms. “Mom? Mom? Where are you?” I called out.

  I emerged on the other side, but didn’t see her. When I looked around I saw Joy diagonally navigating the knoll in a frantic descent, slipping and falling on her ass a few times. I walked along the vineyard rows calling out my mother’s name. About a dozen rows down from where I’d emerged I heard whimpering.

  “Oh, Snapper, you make me worry so much,” my mother was cooing to her incorrigible pet.

  I found her about ten feet into the vineyard and closed in on her hurriedly. “Mom, Mom, are you all right?”

  Strangely, as if in a dream, she lifted her wineglass, which she had tucked between her thighs, and took a sip. The wine had sloshed out on her death-defying plunge down the hill and she was more dismayed to think that it was empty than that she could easily have been maimed in the brakeless ride. “Can I have some more, please?” she said, squinting her eyes against the sun, utterly oblivious of what had just happened.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What’d you do that for?” I implored.

  “Snapper was running away.”

  “Jesus, Mom, you could have killed yourself!”

  “Then you would have gotten your trust fund.”

  “There’s no trust fund left, Mom. Doug spent it all!”

  “I don’t care if I die,” she said petulantly. Or, possibly, truthfully.

  “Well, I do. Not on my watch.” I patted her Gilligan’s Island hat. “I was worried. You freaked me out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you want me to cut your wine allotment?”

  “Oh, no.”

  I stared angrily at the panting Snapper and brandished a reproving finger at him. “It’s your fault, you little devil. Do it again and I’m going to have you euthanized.”

  “Don’t say that,” my mother screamed. “He’s all I’ve got.”

  I looked at her, incredulous. “Mom, I’m all you’ve got.”

  “You’re not always there for me.”

  “What’re you talking about? Okay, so maybe we weren’t very close when I was growing up, but that doesn’t mean I’m some heartless bastard. I’m fucking taking you back to Wisconsin.”

  “Because you want to get rid of me! And watch your language.”

  “Want to get rid of you? If I wanted to get rid of you I wouldn’t have called 911 when you had your congestive heart failure. You had died, Mom, and gone to heaven. I mad
e that call and they brought you back. I’m the reason you were sitting on that beautiful knoll with an expensive glass of wine in your hand a moment ago.” I shook my head. “You think I wanted to go on this journey? Take you and Joy and Snapper all the way to Wisconsin? If you thought about it for one second–if I thought about it for one second–you would have to conclude I had one foot in the loony bin!” I lowered my voice to a more conciliatory register. “And all I ask is that you not do crazy shit! Otherwise I’m going to have to lock you in your hotel room with Joy and that”–I pointed at Snapper–“stupid animal.”

  “He is not stupid,” she said, breaking into tears.

  I exhaled a sigh and knelt in the dirt beside her chair. “Look, Mom, I know only half your brain is working. But that pretty much sums up half of the people in this country. Especially those nincompoops in Washington. So, to me, you’re almost normal. I mean, what possessed you to release the brakes on your chair? You could have gotten a WUI?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Huh?”

  “Wheelchairing under the influence.”

  She chuckled. “Oh, no.”

  “Look, Mom, we have a long way to go. I want to have fun on this trip, just like you. I’m doing my best. Okay?”

  “I know,” she said, suddenly contrite.

  “So, no more reckless wheelchairing or I’m going to turn this thing around and deposit you back in Las Villas de Muerte.”

  “I’ll be good.”

  “Okay.”

  Joy found us in the vineyard. Seeing my mother none the worse for wear, she searched me for an explanation.

  “She’s okay,” I told her.

  “I’m sorry. It’s my fault,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “It’s not your fault, Joy,” I said.

  My mother crooked her forefinger at me and said, “What’s that on your face?”

  Remembering suddenly the wine-infused cunnilingus, I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm a couple of times to tidy up.

  “And how come your buttons are undone?” my mother asked, jabbing her finger at my crotch.

  I glanced down and noticed that I had managed only half the fly on my jeans. I quickly remedied the oversight, but not before a bedraggled Laura materialized in the vineyard, running her fingers through her straggly hair.