Sideways (18 page)

Back at the Windmill Inn, Jack hit the phones while I meandered over to the Jacuzzi to soak my aching muscles. Slouched in the bubbling, foamy water, that reeked of chlorine, I gazed upward. The twilit sky was starting to break out with little pinpricks of starry light. I closed my eyes and grew lost in it for a drowsy moment. All I could hear was the peaceful hum of air-conditioning units droning away from the surrounding rooms.

I finally dragged myself out of the Jacuzzi and barefooted it back to the room. Jack was nowhere to be found. I switched on the TV out of habit and went into the bathroom for a shower to rinse off the chlorine smell. Taped to the mirror was a note handwritten in large block letters:

WE’RE AT THE HITCHING POST. HOPE TO SEE YOUR FACE IN THE PLACE.

Fanned out on the Formica vanity were six fifty-dollar bills: payment on the golf debt. I ripped the note off the mirror angrily, crumpled it into a ball, and flushed it down the toilet.

Under the needle shower, weariness overcame me. I fantasized about heading back to L.A., leaving Jack a note of my own saying I didn’t want any more to do with his newfound affair. He’d cheated on Babs many times before. One that almost wrecked their relationship had to be worked out over a stormy, tequila-soaked weekend in Acapulco—a contrite Jack no doubt on his knees blubbering
I love you
s—but if she found out this time there would be no reconciliation. I was paranoid that maybe Jack
wanted
her to find out and blow the whole wedding, a wedding that had been in the planning stages for months. He was that reckless.

In the main room, I lay on the bed and shuttled through the TV channels—all twelve of them—uncertain what to do. The news had the eerie familiarity of a déja vu: a philandering politician, a weather catastrophe that destroyed half an island country, heinous murders and global terrorism and medical marvels and something uplifting involving domesticated animals.

Unsettled, and wanting to avoid the Hitching Post at all costs, I drove to the local multiplex and took in a movie. The theater was crowded and stank of perspiration and cheap cologne. The seats were cramped and the soles of my shoes stuck to the soda-pop-coated floor. The movie was one of those cripplingly boring summer action flicks starring a smirking overpaid actor who seemed to be mouthing, amidst all the special effects, that we in the audience were all a bunch of idiots while he was laughing all the way to the bank. Walking up the aisle before the end credits, I felt like I’d been sucked off by a toothless hooker.

I loitered outside the theater, my ears still ringing from the aural assault, thinking about what to do next. Driving around seemed silly and returning to the motel depressing. Jack always had a plan, was never at a loss for the next stage in the evening’s revelry, and I felt idiotically incomplete without him. I wasn’t sure if I was seething because he was cheating on his fiancée or because he had abandoned me.

Stubbornly, I drove past the Hitching Post without stopping. I had a vivid image of Jack and Terra and Maya drinking Pinot and laughing and having a grand time. It took all my fortitude to keep from turning around and pulling in.

I headed in the direction of Solvang. Yellow streetlights illuminated Highway 246 on either side of me in a limpid light. Cruising past one of the many ostrich farms that had sprung up in the area, I could make out the surreal silhouettes of the tall birds standing motionless in the moonlight.

Passing slowly through sleepy Solvang, I glimpsed a woman hunched in the doorway of a shop, smoking a cigarette, her elbows chickenwinged into her stomach, warding off the cold night air. I projected my own loneliness onto her, picturing her closing up, then making the thirty-mile hump

I shook off the image and hung a left on Alamo Pintado Road, heading aimlessly north. The streetlights disappeared, darkening the terrain. The sky’s ceiling was now brightly speckled with stars. A flare went off in my memory banks and I braked the car to a stop on the gravel shoulder and climbed out. I suddenly remembered that the night before, Maya had stopped on a similar dark stretch of road and coaxed me out of the car to look at the sky. According to her, a comet was streaking madly across the empyrean, leaving a static phosphorescent tail in its wake, even though it was hurtling through the cosmos at millions of miles per hour. I searched the sky until I found it, feeling a certain elation in my success. I wondered absurdly if my own dying would be that visually dramatic, if I, too, would cross the galaxy in a flaming instant and burn out in glory.

A truck hurtled past and broke my reverie. I got back in my car, drove a few more miles, and parked in front of the Café Chardonnay, situated on the first floor of the quaint Ballard Bed & Breakfast, a two-story Victorian house in the tiny, nondescript town of Ballard. Eight years ago, Victoria and I had honeymooned here. It was a good week, marked by lust and intense conversations about our glorious future together. I didn’t really know what had gone wrong, and the thought of trying to analyze our relationship while eating by myself only intensified my feelings of emptiness and remorse. The thought of dinner by myself was too depressing, so I left without going in.

The roads were almost deserted when I drove back to the Windmill Inn. I poked my head out the window several times hunting for the comet. I found it finally, but was hard-pressed to tell if it had budged at all. Maybe a million miles per hour in a faraway galaxy is only an inch through

Evidently not, because Jack, as expected, wasn’t at the motel when I got back. The message light on the phone was flashing obnoxiously, pulsing red onto the walls. I rummaged through the boxes stacked by the door and rooted out a bottle of the Byron Sierra Madre—to hell with Jack!—and meandered my way over to the lobby.

A balding man with a gray moustache and dark eyes hidden behind dark-framed glasses was manning the office when I came in, bottle and corkscrew in tow. Closer up, the harsh overhead lights revealed his alligator-dimpled complexion. I asked him about Cheryl—thinking I would share the bottle with her—but he said she was off for the night and went back to his crossword puzzle, buzzing switchboard, and forlorn graveyard shift.

Disappointed, I took the bottle back to the room, feeling fidgety, not wanting to drink it alone.

Restless, I left the room and crossed the parking lot to the Clubhouse. It had closed early and I was starting to feel like it was a conspiracy. I took a walk to clear my head. The night offered nothing but stillness and emptiness and I needed something else, but I didn’t know what exactly.

Back in the motel room I wanted the red light on the phone to go away, so I called the desk for messages. There were six: Babs for Jack (twice), Jack for me, Babs for
me
(shit!), Jack for me (urgent!), and … Maya for me (phone number included).

The first call I returned was Maya’s. A sleepy voice answered on the other end, “Hello.”

“Hi, this is Miles,” I said. “Karaoke specialist. You called?”

She chuckled hoarsely, then cleared her throat. “Yeah. We missed you tonight.”

“I was a little under the weather, as you can well imagine.”

“Oh,” she said with a tinge of disappointment. “I was hoping we could continue that argument on whether true love is still feasible after divorce.”

I had a fractured memory of the discussion. “It had nothing to do with you. I just needed to chill out tonight.”

“I’m glad,” she replied. Then, she lobbed a grenade: “I think Terra has it bad for your friend.”

An imaginary spider skittered up my spine. “Apparently,” I said, trying to disguise my disgust. “I haven’t seen him since this afternoon. Must be quite a romance.”

“You don’t approve?” Maya asked, picking up on the edge in my voice.

I didn’t say anything. We fell into silence. I had decided not to spill the beans and bring Jack’s wrath down on me. What he did was his business, even if I disapproved. And, I was still confident that it would all end with the suddenness of a Midwest thunderstorm, just as abruptly as it had begun. If Terra got her heart broken,
c’est la vie
. At least she would learn in the future to give a wide berth to the Jacks of the world. “Oh, I don’t know, Maya,” I finally answered.

“Do you want some company?” she asked.

I did, desperately, which is why I had gone looking for Cheryl and visited old honeymoon haunts and gazed up at comets in an effort to summon up some sense of belonging to a world that wasn’t solely stitched out of fading memories. But, as much as I liked talking to Maya, I didn’t want to encourage Jack’s fantasy of an orgiastic, wine-swilling

“Okay,” she said.

“Hey, I saw the comet again tonight.”

“You remembered?”

“Yeah, it just sort of struck me all of a sudden. It’s weird the things you remember the night after getting sideways.”

“How’d it look?”

“Still disintegrating, I guess. Sort of like life.”

That last remark injected a chill into the phone line and brought a formality back to her voice. “Well, call me when you feel like it.” We exchanged good-byes and hung up.

I looked at the phone in my hand for a moment, and decided not to return any more calls.

I crawled into bed and turned the television on. Channel after channel insulted me with its inanity, deepening my melancholy, so I shut it off and lay wide awake in the dark. It was as if I had enwombed myself in a sensory deprivation chamber. My feeling of dread spiraled. Soon, I felt like I was floating, borne by some fickle wind, defenseless, sucking the marrow of my own brain. The beginning stirrings of a panic attack began to assail me. I felt like something was about to go horribly wrong: heart attack, stroke, asphyxiation. As my anxiety slowly tightened around me, I wheezed for air, pusillanimously invoked God—a god I didn’t believe existed except when I needed him—and cursed my absence of a partner who might have consoled me in this troubled moment. I broke down and dissolved a Xanax under my tongue. It took maybe thirty minutes for the drug to kick in, but that half hour felt like a terrifying eternity. Storms raged in my head. At the height of the attack, a sentimental memory of Victoria caused tears to

In the dead of night, I woke to the jangling of the cheap motel phone. I didn’t answer it. A few minutes later, the message light began flashing, accompanied by an annoying little
ding ding
noise every few seconds, and the room was suddenly throbbing red all over again. I inserted a pair of earplugs and pulled the covers over my head. Maybe I should have taken Maya up on her offer.

J
ack wasn’t in the room when I returned from breakfast, so I climbed into my 4Runner and rode out to La Purisima. The sky was an opulent sea of blue, and the local flora was turned out in one of Nature’s more resplendent displays, imparting a sense of peace to my anxious soul.

I played twenty-seven holes with a reticent Japanese kid whose wealthy parents, he told me, were bankrolling his unrealistic dream of making it on the PGA Tour.

Afterward, I sat up in the observation tower sipping a frosty bottle of Firestone Ale and watched the shadows lengthen over the fairways, the late-afternoon sun bewitching the course in a green-gold light.

At a pay phone mounted on the side of the clubhouse I called home for messages. My agent hadn’t called and I was starting to worry about the response from the editor at Conundrum. Was this going to be yet another disappointment ? When I hung up, my fears escalated. What the fuck was I going to do if it didn’t sell? I had made money in the past as a screenwriter, but I had frittered most of it away

I drove back to the motel in the faint light of dusk, lost in self-deprecations. In my rearview mirror, the sun was a red disc narrowing on the horizon. Momentarily distracted by my bleak reverie and blinded by the sun’s intensity, I swerved at the last moment to prevent being flattened by a horn-blaring 18-wheeler.

It was almost night when I arrived in Buellton and swung into the Windmill Inn. As soon as I opened the door to our unit, I stopped dead in my tracks, assailed by the sounds of pleasurable moaning. In the dim light of the curtained room I could make out Jack on top of a splay-legged Terra, his hairy ass thrusting piston-like as he grunted like a rutting rhino. When they realized someone had broken in on their lovemaking, Jack leapt off Terra like the fornicator en flagrante he was, exposing her magnificently flourishing black bush. Terra started laughing uncontrollably, and her naked body seemed to be unintentionally rebuking me.

“Sorry, folks.” I quickly backed out of the room, shutting the door behind me, as muffled laughter erupted from inside.

I strode over to the Clubhouse, desperately needing a libation or five. The only other person in the place was the sepulchral-faced bartender and he was so mesmerized by a baseball game squawking on the overhead TV that he didn’t even see me at first. He finally turned when I called out “Hello,” and came over, without apology. I ordered a glass of the wretched Firestone Cab and he poured me one. An attempt to make small talk about the game quickly broke down because my heart wasn’t in it. I glanced over

Two glasses of Cab later, I had sandpapered the rough edges and momentarily shaken the image of my naked friend and his tittering small-town courtesan and her hot naked body. A body the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in nearly a year.

I climbed off the stool, found a pay phone by the bathroom, and called Maya. She wasn’t in and I didn’t leave a message. Had she been at home, I had half-resolved to disclose what was going on with Jack and his impending marriage. But not on an answering machine.

I slipped back into the bar and returned to my stool. Locals punching out of work were beginning to trickle in and the noise of pool balls smacking one another and voices jawing and music on the jukebox started to rise and overtake the gloomy quiet.

An hour or so later, Jack finally rolled in with Terra hanging on his arm and tilting her head up into his sheepish smile. She was laughing at something he was saying with the air of a young girl in love. It was obvious from the bloom in their faces and their disheveled appearance that they had been drinking and fucking all night and into the next day: a debauch of Dionysian dimensions.