Sideways (32 page)

I raised my glass for another toast. “Here’s to your finally coming to your senses.”

He toasted me back. “Here’s to your ex-wife and her new husband. May they lose all their money in the stock market and have to take jobs at Starbucks.”

I laughed. “Here’s to your lovely fiancée, Babs. May she never learn what went down in this valley of sin.”

Jack howled with delight. “Amen, brother. Amen. I escaped the wrath of God and lived to tell the tale!” He turned his attention to Brad, who was driving responsibly—staying below the speed limit, overusing the turn signals—making me wonder if his driver’s license might still have a little probation time left on it.

“Bradley, what do you do for a living?” Jack asked. “Besides poaching wild boar and taking potshots at strangers, of course?”

“Construction,” Brad answered, as he cautiously merged onto the 101 and headed north. “What do
you
do?”

“Work in the film business,” Jack said matter-of-factly.

Brad turned around, startled and maybe a little impressed. “No shit. Are you a producer?”

“No, I’m an actor and a director.”

Brad turned back to the road and the streaming flow of speeding cars. “No shit? I once worked on a commercial up here.”

“What’d you do on it?” Jack asked. “Security?”

“No. Rigging,” Brad answered, adjusting the rearview mirror so he could frame us in it. He spoke earnestly into the mirror: “Can you get me a job in Hollywood?”

“I don’t know, Bradley. But I’ve got some advice for you.”

Brad swiveled his head around and said eagerly, “What?”

Jack bent forward. “Don’t go shooting at prospective employers. Bad first impression.”

Brad laughed nervously, or possibly dementedly, depending on how one interpreted his strange, stuttering snicker.

“That’s all right, Bradley,” Jack said, slapping him on the shoulder reassuringly. “You’re a little nutty. But you’re in luck, because we’re the kind of guys who understand nuttiness.”

Brad cackled again. In the mirror I could see his eyes pinched shut and his acne-stippled cheeks coloring red. Jack and I fell into a laughing jag. Somehow Brad’s was bizarrely infectious. The Byron was beginning to sandpaper the edges and once again I felt myself dissolving into its delicious emollience. There was so much to think about: the fate of my manuscript, my tenuous life as a writer in L.A., and Maya. I wondered now if there was any way in hell that something could be salvaged from the wreckage of our last encounter. The champagne coalesced all my worries into one amorphous blur, distancing them with each palate-puckering sip.

I rolled down the window and let some warm air buffet my face. Jack was chatting up Brad, inquiring about his sex life of all things, but I tuned out and let the rushing wind mute their voices. I couldn’t remember if I was so sex-obsessed before
my
marriage, but I also thought this particular rite of passage did something to a man. Maybe marriage isn’t natural, I philosophized. Sure, bonding, coupling, that’s in the genes, but perhaps marriage is just too inadequate an institution, faultily designed to curb our primitive instincts and preserve the family unit. Is that why men go nuts before taking the vows and women make such ceremonial pageantry of the whole thing? I suddenly tuned back into Jack, who was eliciting a confession from Brad that he’d surrendered his virginity on the high school football field when he was seventeen. I rolled the window up and rejoined the conversation.

“Homes, what was your first sexual encounter?” Jack

“A car,” I said laconically.

“Brad fucked a cheerleader on the football field,” Jack roared.

“She
tried
out for cheerleader,” Brad corrected, making an important distinction.

“Oh, a
failed
cheerleader,” Jack teased. “Is that when you went off the beam?”

Brad cackled again. It sounded like an automatic weapon with a jammed trigger. He liked Jack. So did most who made his acquaintance.

Brad took the 154 exit and headed east toward Foxen Canyon. Vineyards started to come into view as the terrain turned bucolically agricultural.

“You want to know where
I
first had sex?” Jack asked.

“We don’t want to know, do we Brad?” I said.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Jack said. “High school play. Her name was Nicoletta. I was her leading man.”

“How fucking trite,” I commented, with a smile.

“No, listen to this, Homes. After rehearsal, we used to hang out backstage and do it in our costumes. She had a thing about my costume.”

“What was the play,
Come Blow Your Horn
?”

Jack laughed so hard I thought his nose bandage was going to come unmoored from his face. Brad cackled, too, even though it seemed unlikely he was up on his repertory theater.

“And guess what, Bradley?” I added. “He’s
marrying
a costume designer.”

Brad gave us another round of his rat-a-tat-tat laugh.

Jack, growing quickly tipsy on the bubbly, turned to me and sputtered, “God, that first snatch is something, isn’t it, Homes?”

I looked at him and smiled. I had a vague memory of six months of heavy petting, ending one clumsy night in the parking lot of a Presbyterian church in five minutes of frenetic, soul-emptying penetration. I remember Lisa looked stunned, like,
Is that all it is?
Three months later I was holding her hand in a fluorescent-lit office listening to a gynecologist sympathetic to teenage mistakes, a thousand bucks lighter in the wallet, and scared shitless I had almost become a teenaged father.

“Jeeves! Did that cheerleader scream ‘touchdown’ when she came?” Jack asked, jerking me out of my reverie.

Brad wrinkled his nose up like a bunny and laughed his peculiar laugh all over again. It was beginning to grow on us.

Jack elbowed me in the ribs. “This cracker’s cool.” Then, louder, toward the front seat. “Critterman, you’re cool, you know that? Just stay off the brewskis and you’ll get through this journey.”

Brad blinked and concentrated on the narrow, winding Foxen Canyon Road, feeling happily like he was now one of the gang. Jack, despite his facial injuries and fractured rib and bruised ego, was in the best mood he’d been in since the beginning of the trip. The prospect of losing those wedding bands must have weighed more heavily on him than I realized. Perhaps the early-morning tears had not been hyperbole after all. Okay, so he had fallen for Terra, but we both knew it was an unrealistic pairing, and that as the big day approached, reason and the comforts of marriage would prevail. As I watched him yuk it up with Brad, his face growing rosier and rosier from the champagne and the boisterous repartee, I felt just a trace of jealousy that he had finally found happiness with a woman and I had not.

Jack must have sensed my pensive mood because he suddenly called out to Brad to stop the car.

“We’re not there yet,” Brad said.

“I know. Just do what I tell you and pull over.”

Brad steered the 4Runner onto the dirt shoulder of Foxen Canyon at the edge of a vineyard. The harvest here had already come and gone and the leaves on the vines had turned gold and ochre, foreshadowing winter.

“Get out, Homes,” Jack instructed.

“Where’re we going?”

He reached an arm across me and pushed open the door. “Come on,” he urged, gently shoving me out. He turned to Brad. “We’ll just be a few minutes, Bradley. Don’t boost the car.”

“Don’t worry,” Brad replied, shutting off the engine. Jack and I clambered out. He hooked an arm around my neck and drew me into the leafy, neatly rowed vineyard. Billowy gray-white clouds mushroomed in slow motion in the creamy blue sky. Insects buzzed in the balmy air. A crow chattered territorially on a fence post when he heard our footfalls in the crusty dirt.

“So, what’s the call mean?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said sourly. “All I know is a Friday-leaving-the-office call is not the same as a Monday-morning-I’m-dying-to-dial-those-digits call. All the scripts I ever sold, my agent was on the phone to me early.” I looked down at the ground, which was appropriately crawling with ants feasting on a large insect.

“You’ve got to put it out of your mind. We’re going to have a good time. You’ve been looking forward to this Pinot festival for a while.”

I gazed off at the horizon. “I’m also a little apprehensive about seeing Maya there,” I confided. “Thus, my less than enthusiastic mood.”

“Let me handle it.”

“I’ve
been
letting you handle it, and it’s gotten seriously out of control.”

“I appreciate your going into that chick’s apartment and getting my wallet back. I will never forget that.”

I nodded facetiously. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“And I appreciate your helping me put Terra in perspective. Had it been me and someone else up here, it might have been a different story.”

“It’s just the grape, man,” I said. “It’s just the grape.”

“No, it’s
not
just the grape,” he protested. “Okay, so the grape liberates some shit, I’ll grant you that. But that doesn’t mean that shit isn’t brewing down there, that it’s some illusory nothing thing.”

“Oh,
illusory
. Big word for you.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Homes.” For a moment, he looked fragile.

“What’s the point then?”

“The
point
? We had to descend, you and I. We had to go down.
In vino veritas
and all that shit you talk about.”

“Okay, we had to descend,” I said sarcastically. “To find what?”

Jack swatted one of the grapevines violently, annoyed that I wasn’t getting the message. “Fuck, man, you know what I’m talking about.”

Maybe I did but didn’t want to acknowledge it openly just then. I’d always had trouble with men who wanted to bond, to get emotional, to slit our thumbs with Boy Scout knives and make a blood pact. I just never wanted to get that close. Not to Jack, not to anyone, and at that moment in the vineyard I realized that I was the lesser for it. And that Jack, despite his carelessness and amorality, genuinely possessed a depth of feeling that served him well and endeared him to others.

“You’re not still sore at me?” he asked.

I shook my head, my mind on something that had been gnawing at me too long and needed to surface. Drawing a deep breath, I dropped the bombshell: “Here’s the reason I’m being pissy,” I started. Jack waited with his hands on his hips. “I’m not going to be able to make the wedding.”

Jack’s head sagged forward, his brows knit together, and his mouth hung open in stupefaction.

“You’re going to have to press Peter into service. I’m sure it won’t be a problem. Rent me a car here. Drive mine back when you get it repaired.”

“Homes?” he said, a little plaintive.

“I don’t want to see Victoria up there with her new husband.” I lowered my head. “Surely, you can understand that much.”

“Oh, fuck, Homes! How are you ever going to get over the fact that you’re divorced and she’s no longer in your life unless you
do
see them together, in the flesh and blood?”

“That’s your solution, not mine,” I countered.

“You see them. You see they’re just another couple, and I’m telling you it’s all going to be fine. Trust me.” Jack remained motionless, waiting for a change of heart.

I turned away. “Can’t do it,” I said.

Jack jerked around and shadowboxed one of the rootstocks. Then he turned to me, a little desperate. “I need you up there, man. It’s important to me. It’s the end of the cycle. The curtain call. Without you, it’s incomplete.”

I shook my head no in response.

Jack planted both hands on my shoulders and jerked me toward him like a coach chiding a player. “Why?”

“Because you lied to me,” I said in a rising tone. “Victoria has a new husband and they’re going to be there together.
Victoria
didn’t want me up there.” I was hot in the face now. “You could have told me so at least I would have had the option. Now, I look like some fucking party-crashing loser.”

“They’ve accepted your coming.”

“Yeah. Under duress.”

“Okay, so I wasn’t on the up-and-up with you,” Jack acknowledged, reaching deep into his arsenal. “But, we wouldn’t have had this wonderful week if I had been.”

“
Wonderful
?” I coughed out a laugh.

“Yeah, wonderful. The best.”

I conceded that the week had had its moments, but it didn’t change my resolve not to participate in Jack’s wedding.

Suddenly, it was as if a light snapped on in his face. “Why don’t you invite Maya?”

“Are you
kidding?
” I snorted at the suggestion. “Half a bottle of champagne and you’re fucking stinko.”

“She’s got it all over Victoria, man. She is such a fucking babe. You walk in with her on your arm and you’re going to be the story, dude, not me and Babs, and surely not Victoria and what’s his name.”

“Forget it.”

“You want me to ask her?”

“What are you? A blockhead? You think she’s even going to
talk
to either one of us after what happened with Terra? Not to mention the thousand-dollar hay roll. Forget it. Not interested.”

“What if I get her to come?”

“That’s not the issue, man,” I said irascibly.

“What’s the issue? Huh? Tell me?”

I faced him squarely. “The issue is: I’m going to be in

“I understand,” Jack said. “But I still want you up there. For me.”

I fell silent, unreachable.

“Well, this is a fucking bummer,” Jack said. “You’ve got me on a bummer now.”

“Tell Babs and the family I had to go to the hospital because of the car accident. I’m sure she and Victoria will be delighted to hear I’m in traction and won’t be around.”

“You’re
really
not coming?” Jack said as if it were finally dawning on him.

“No,” I said stubbornly. “Weddings depress me. Especially ones where my ex-wife and her new husband are going to be present, fresh off their own honeymoon!”

“I don’t believe this,” Jack said.

“You don’t get it. That woman was my Rock of Gibraltar for eight fucking years. She supported me through some tough times and believed in me. And I
fucked
her over. I’ve been wanting to find atonement ever since, but I can’t find it.” I paused. “And now, knowing there’s no chance of any reconciliation is just more than I can bear.”