The Master of Seduction chapter 2 Her spirit reached out to me And I embraced it The highway to the stables undulates through soft, voluptuous hills and wide, sweeping turns, travel time from Napa about fifteen minutes. Normally, the route might be soothing, a drive to put one at ease. As the months progress, I notice contrary feelings mounting with every foray. Anxiety isn't what I feel, but rather a wary expectation of what might come. Identifying the anomalies dimly perceived took time, but it came to seem that our acquaintanceship began anew with every visit. Many of our times together consisted of intimate conversation, yet a next encounter would show no trace of the previous closeness, sense of trust. She acted as if I were a semi-stranger. Then we'd bond again for half-an-hour or so on an afternoon, and again, the next time, nothing. Warmth alternated with its absence. Add to that my growing feelings for Michelle, undetected at first, and then overwhelming in an instant, as when I saw her snuggle the horse, or heard the musings concerning a baby. I discovered I had a crush on her, every imminent lesson evoking the feelings of a sixteen-year-old going on his first date with the girl he really likes. Making the final turn down the lane girdling the hill that obscured the stable from the world, I would have to compose myself, remind myself to be cool. This was not something I usually had to go out of my way to remember. The admonition barely sufficed, as I acknowledged yet another phenomenon on the trips out. My metabolism began to mix hormonal cocktails of infinite variety on these drives, a dizzying concoction of affection, anticipation, fear of what might happen, what might be said. I experience all the exhileration of shooting a dose of cocaine. Imagine, then, my thoughts as I continued down that road following the weekend we exchanged the emails. I'd made some provocative moves which may have advanced my cause, but Michelle's unpredictability, and my bemusement over her unfolding complexities, totally disoriented me. Despite previous experiences, I was continually at a loss. Stay calm, slow down, think before you talk, I tell myself before getting out of the car on arrival. I breathe deeply a few times, exit the vehicle and walk with all the fraudulent ease and confidence I can bring to bear. We greet each other as usual, I take a lesson. We smoke and small talk afterwards. With my departure, she hugs me for the first time, and I think it's about time, she hugs everyone. The horseshoer, the hay truck driver, the guy who fixed the tractor. Embracing me, she says she's glad we dealt with all that stuff. Me too, I say. But it's evident she hasn't seen my second email. I tell her she doesn't need to respond when she reads it. What if I want to? she asks mischievously. That's up to you, I say. So I spend another day or two contemplating her response to the account of my past, my claims of empathy, and intoxicate myself again on the drive to her presence. She's busy when I arrive, ignores me as she often does. I take my seat under the overhang with the skull, smoke. Due to my long history with drugs, I'm getting better at maintaining under the influence of the self-generated high, getting familiar with the effects and how to manage them. Over the previous several days I recognize the progress made, the hopeful prospects. I begin to see the humor in the situation, the game. I get pumped up sitting there, feel ready for the scary challenge. Stay cool, I say to myself, you can still pull this off. I glimpse the same state I've entered hundreds of times before in tenuous endeavors. Preparing to throw men from planes, divining the right answer while questioned by killers, bribing my way out of third-world complications, approaching a bull with a cape. Now, waiting for Michelle. She's walking across the gravel drive in my direction, glances at me on closing the distance, offers an ambiguous hello, takes the chair next to mine. Get the email? I ask. Michelle's restraining a smile. So, you were some ladies' man, huh? Well...yes. Impressed? Oh, right, she says. Bit of sarcasm. She continues, muttering, as if to herself, Pure, wounded heart... Still with the hide-a-smile. And then, contentiously, Hey, I wasn't wearing a blue blazer. I don't own a blue blazer, and I wouldn't wear one with black. Yeah, you were, I argue. You looked great. The issue remains unresolved as we proceed into the arena for a lesson. It's early afternoon when I leave, but I stop as I drive off, turn around, and backtrack to where Michelle's working. She seldom eats on any schedule, and I've taken to dropping off a few Snickers bars every week so she has something to snack on. I roll down the window, pull up opposite her. I'm going to the deli for lunch, I say. Want me to drop off a sandwich on the way back? No, that's alright, she says. Dan's coming out for lunch. It's the first time since...since...it's the first time ever in two years. He's always very busy, lives in another town, travels often. Michelle arranges her schedule around this guy who has no time for her. Or so it appears to me. But she's smiling, has the look of an elated little girl whose daddy is finally coming to her recital, finally making a gesture as if he cares. Is there anyone who knows what a great woman she really is? I ask myself. Is there anyone who appreciates how special she is? I think not. What a waste of her fidelity. I drive back toward the gate, Michelle receding in my rearview mirror as she returns to work. My eyes begin to water. Days later, early the following week, lesson over. I'm leaving as Michelle sits at the picnic table under the soft autumn sky. The vines climbing the surrounding hillside are turning color, green to yellows and reds. The harvest is underway. She's doing paperwork. Hey, I begin. When's the farmers market start tonight? After six, she says. I'm going. Maybe I'll see you there. Yeah, maybe, I say, noncommitally. I knew the answer, had gone a few times before, hoping to see her. I'd asked just so I might hear that veiled invitation, no maybes about it. Returning to my house on the mountain, I put my vintage racing bike in the trunk. Sonoma's fun to ride around in, lots of historical sites, wineries close by on country lanes. After cruising around an hour or two, I head to the square and the market. Jazz band playing, vendors hawking organic produce grown within miles, hundreds of people picnicking on the grass. I circle the square on my bike, looking for Michelle without success. Dismounting, I navigate through the milling teenagers and townies squeezing fruits and vegetables. No sign of her. My cell phone rings, and I take a position on open lawn, the bike leaning against a tree within my sight. I'm stuck in deep conversation when I feel the tap on my back. I turn, Michelle's standing there as she takes a big bite out of a corndog. Her mouth full, chewing, she still manages to convey a smile as she wipes the mustard from the corner of her mouth. She extends her arm, offering a bite of the corndog. I take it, my interlocutor doing all the talking on the other end of the conversation. I raise a finger, indicating I'll get off as soon as I can. Michelle nods in acknowledgement. I turn away for a minute, turn back, and she's walking off, toward the street bordering the square. I look to my bike to insure it's still there. Then back toward Michelle, who has disappeared behind the parked cars. I disengage from the call, hop on the bike, ride around the square, through the square, but I can't find her anywhere. I call her on my cell phone. She always carries hers, answers it religiously, returns messages promptly when she can't. No answer. I leave a message. I'm still here, let's get together. I ride around Sonoma in the descending darkness, immune to the charms I usually enjoy. The minutes turn to an hour, then two. The hormones have kicked in again, a mixture of frustration, confusion, longing. I try not to curse the woman on the other end of the cell phone call. She entered my life through the devices of an elderly ladyfriend of some wealth and refinement. I'd entertained the Dowager and yet another friend of hers with tea at my place on the mountain one afternoon. On subsequent occasions the Dowager alluded to an impending visit from Jo. She would love your place, the Dowager repeated over the intervening months. Maybe you can have us up for tea? But of course. A fading beauty of my age to whom the years had been kind, Jo had long been married to a corporate CEO born to a dynasty of some distinction in a city back East. He was, perhaps, a fifth or sixth husband--I couldn't quite keep track--and she'd come to the union with her own considerable assets left over from the divorces, in addition to a family legacy. I met her briefly on an earlier trip. She knew people in the valley, came for a couple of weeks every year or so; when in town, she joined the little group with whom I regularly breakfasted. Smart, sexy, flirtatious, she dazzled the men at the table with her charm, directing an extra measure my way the morning of our introduction. Watch it, Jo, said the venerable old man who presided. He's spoken for, and you should see his wife. The awkward comment quickly passed, but a spark was there. As this next visit neared, as the Dowager kept talking up the tea, I began to wonder what might be afoot. I was no longer married, but Jo was, and I'd met her husband some months before, a decent man, a close friend of the Dowager. Curious. Then Jo hit town for tea. We ascended toward my house in the mountains on a mild, late-summer morning, and I took them on a tour of the redwood and fern forest I hoped soon to acquire. Retiring to the old barn where I live, we drank tea and amaretto, nibbled on cookies. Jo remarked on my library and collections, revealed her own affinity for antiques. And then, changing the subject, The hiking must be wonderful around here, she said. I love hiking, and it's amazing how hard it is to find places to go around here when you see all this beautiful country. Indeed, I responded. I've got temperate rain forest down the mountain, classic California meadows over the ridge, my own seasonal creek that begins down in the hollow and flows to the Pacific. I indicated the big, tree-specked hill visible through a window. Part of a 2500-acre tract, a once famous cattle ranch, the height looked down on the valley on one side, to the distant bay on another. It was too difficult for the Dowager to climb, but I described the manifold views. Mediterranean villas surmounting adjacent hills, restored farmhouses hiding in the declivities, the creek winding through the little canyon. The Spanish Mission replica with bell tower, the tiny glimpse of San Francisco. Best of all, I went on to explain, was hiking at night. The expansive ranch contained five or so miles of old fire roads coursing over the bare hills and through the copses of oaks, all easily navigated by the light of stars or moon. Jo is enchanted, but I become less so when, apropo of nothing much, she lets drop that she's an inveterate drama queen. That's a shame, I responded archly. I don't suffer drama queens. Later that night, around ten or so, I'm pacing the floor, smoking, drinking, thinking, listening to something dramatic, probably Tchaikovsky. My phone rings. It's Jo. I want to go for a hike, she says. Now. I'll be waiting outside the gate. Give me fifteen minutes, I say, looking across the valley to the mountainside where she sits on a rock. The next week passes fast in a flurry of activity, we have a good time. I take her to my friend's abuilding castle. Half of her acquaintances claim to live in castles, she says, monster houses with a turret. She's stunned at what she sees, this is the real thing, the most dramatic winery constructed in the last century. Miles of caves, crenelated walls, frescoed interiors, even a torture chamber with used hardware from the Renaissance. We share champagne lunch on a terrace above the vineyards, dinner on a patio above the river, sunsets above the western hills. We hike, we talk, we drink and smoke at my place. She shares more of her past than I want to hear. According to Jo, her existence as a trophy wife has been soul-killing, deferring her own desires for those of her husband, a man always on the road, always entertaining, her role to be the perfect hostess and personal assistant. She had so much to offer, she tells me, and he wasn't interested. Jo could have been any presentable bimbo and he wouldn't have noticed. His name, by the way, is Dan. He doesn't know me at all, she insists, he didn't recognize what he had. I can't take it anymore. These conversations are often punctuated by his phone calls, Jo dissembling easily as to her whereabouts and present companions. Throughout all of this, our getting to know each other, it develops that she ran off to the Haight-Ashbury as a teenager, indulged all the excesses I knew myself only too well. We realize we lived a few blocks from each other, frequented the same places, may have checked each other out on passing in the street. She was in Hollywood trying to make it as a singer not long before I was in Venice trying to make it as an editor. I succeeded where she didn't, the price of potential stardom numerous sexual auditions that still never resulted in a career. The ceaseless stream of revelation leaves me reeling, in large part because I think I'm looking at an older version of Michelle in some respect, a good-looking, adventurous woman who, because she was a woman, suffered batterings to which I was impervious. I'm haunted by the idea that even if Michelle's plans come to fruition, she'll end up a bitter fifty-something hating her life and regretting its subordination to some man who appreciates her not at all. The more Jo talks, the more preoccupied I become with Michelle's fate, provoking a most embarrassing moment. I refer to Jo as Michelle. Long pause, uncomfortable looks exchanged. Sorry, I say, She's my riding instructor. I had lessons on my mind. She's annoyed, tries to hide it, says, Hey, I know you had a life before I came along, you don't owe me any explanations. We survive the moment without a scene. As Jo's departure approaches, she informs me she's planning to leave her husband and move to Napa, will return soon to buy a place. I encourage her to leave me out of her long-term calculations; I'm not available for anything more than a certain kind of friendship. Oh, no, she says. This has nothing to do with you. We say good-bye at the coffeehouse of our first encounter before Jo leaves. The group is ignorant of our trysts, and we distribute our attentions elsewhere around the table, reserving for each other the slightest acknowledgments. But days later, I discover a shopping bag I overlooked in my back seat. It contains several hundred dollars worth of the best whiskies, cognacs and liquers, and cut glass snifters and flutes. A nice supplement to the several hundred dollars worth of sunglasses she'd already bestowed. To my great regret, I didn't notice the I love you she'd written in the dust on my car until after I'd been to the stables a couple of times. It was nothing compared to what I would come to feel over that phone call, however. Under any other circumstances, especially considering the critical stage I'd reached with Michelle, I would have ended the call in an instant. The touching, flattering nature of the monolog proved difficult to evade, however. That week with you transformed my life, said Jo. I don't know what you did, but I'm a new woman. I feel like I've come alive again. And all my friends notice, and they're asking me what happened in California. And men I've known for years are coming on to me for the first time. It was about then that I felt that tap on the back, and turned to see Michelle. That image of Michelle disappearing into the twilight haunts me still, and consideration of what might otherwise have happened plagues my thoughts. Agreeing to meet with me, however implied, marked a new threshold in our relationship. She'd never before assented to get together without a business-oriented excuse. The two times she took me into her house depended on the web work, and the two lunches at the deli didn't count because she was having lunch there anyway. This had been an invitation of another sort, a personal nature, and I missed an opening. Cycling through the darkened streets of Sonoma, I tried to evaluate the potential damage to my campaign, if any. That my moment of opportunity should be so brief and narrowly defined by Michelle's almost immediate retreat, refusal to answer her phone, served notice of a mystery-laden pursuit underway. A small victory had been achieved with her willingness to show up, lost by my lapse in follow-up. Could the situation be that touchy? Apparently, yes. At Thursday's lesson a couple of mornings later she acted as if little of note had happened, she'd just wandered off to find her daughter. I knew better than to say, I called, why didn't you pick up, answer the message? Too desperate sounding. I acted as little disappointed as possible. The abatement of Schmidt's arthritis with shots permitted a lesson, and I walked him around the perimeter of the arena several times in the warm-up pefacing the faster work to follow. Michelle sat in a corner on the step ladder used for mounting by the English riders, one leg dangling over the other, her torso bent over slightly as she looked up at me. She tells me to thrust my ass to the back of the saddle, sit up straight, remember to use my calves to steer. Then, out of nowhere, she says, Hey, Terry, you know, I'm going to Mexico for a week next month. Would you like to house sit for me? I thought you might like living in a regular home for awhile. Though I'd never succeeded in getting her up to my place on the mountain, Michelle knew by then that I lived rough, off-grid, with my own power and water systems of an unconventional sort. I don't know, I said, walking by on Schmidt. I'm so used to living rough, I'm afraid of going soft. During the next 24 hours or so, I analyze the offer and my response. This is big, and I wonder at that impulse that led me to decline. I did it on her behalf in part, I realize, not wanting to violate her privacy. But she invited it, so I'm feeling pretty stupid. The timing resonates, too; she was inviting me into her bed for a period exactly six months after our introduction at the party under the stars. I fixed on that concept: Michelle had actually invited me into her bed. That was something, even if she wouldn't be in it. I return for a lesson the next day, and yesterday's scene repeats itself. I'm riding around the arena, she's sitting in the corner, directing my movements. Oh, I say, as if just remembering, I thought about your offer to housesit. If it's still open, I'd love it, just so I can watch cable for a week. Michelle is noncommital now. Yeah, okay, she says, doubtfully. I spend the next several days wondering if I'd missed another major but tiny opening. This agonizing over the meaning of our encounters and the words spoken is getting to me. This shouldn't be so damn difficult I keep thinking, thinking like a man. She's known me almost six months, she has every reason to believe I'm at least a nice guy, and she betrays a strong subconscious interest in me despite the internal mechanisms that lead her to try to negate it. She directs signal after signal in my direction, but I can never be sure of what she really means or intends. I begin to question all the energy I'm expending on this, as if I know she's the love of my life, I have to do anything to land her. In fact, I simply want to get to know her better, and see if we're as compatible as it often seems. Why can't we go out to a movie or for a glass of wine and find out? And then it's the next Tuesday, we're sitting at the picnic table near the overhang with the skull. A lull in the conversation, she rises, goes to her jeep, pulls out a newspaper. There's a blues festival in San Francisco this weekend, she says, showing me the ad. It sounds like fun. Do you know where Fort Mason is? Yeah, I say, It's just north of Fisherman's Wharf. The rush of adrenaline starts, I know I've got an opening here, but I have to figure how to play it. This shouldn't be so damn difficult, I'm thinking again, as I labor mentally for a coherent move. Do you think you might be interested in going together? I ask. Yeah...maybe. Think about it, I say, and we can firm up plans on Thursday. Okay, she says. Photos cover the marble tabletop adjacent to the couch, black and white from the forties, fifities and sixties, color from the seventies, eighties, nineties. There's my aunt, as a beautiful teenager, now a handsome sixty-something, now my biggest fan, who regularly stoked my mother's anger against me during our troubles. My grandfather, a Bosnian Croat wearing a fez. Me, at the old cabin down the mountain, shooting an airgun, taken the same day I killed my first bird, my first vertebrate, a tiny, trusting thing; and felt dirty for weeks. It tops a stack of me, photos from throughout my life, child to adolescent to young man. To man. According to the visual evidence, I stop aging at around forty, later changes almost imperceptible. Belying ruthless reality. I glue the pictures into an antique morocco scrapbook, grouping them by years and theme, until uncovering a stack of girlfriends in color. The married Christian, the bi-sexual aerobics queen, the TV star. The Playboy bunny whose boyfriend came to shoot me, instead sharing his grief while I poured more wine, wishing I had more wine to pour. The cute little lawyer, ashamed of the biggest, firmest, most magnificently shaped breasts I ever rubbed my cheeks against. On my thirtieth birthday. I missed the call asking me to spend New Years Eve with her a few days hence, spent it drinking champagne with a news anchor on TV every time I go to Los Angeles. I still regret it, it was never the same. The Skater appears, she's looking right at me from the picture, big smile, big blue eyes, it took a year to bed her from the time she shined that smile on me at the Reseda roller-rink. She piroutted in front of me, aimed that look my way, and skated off with a wiggle of her beautiful ass to catch Cher and Jack Nicholson, thought I'd never see her again. Late one night weeks after, I see that ass skating down the boardwalk ahead of me, we're all alone, crashing surf audible, the rythm complementing that of the skates pushing off the pavement. She's moving fast, I accelerate and close, no problem, I'm one of the fastest guys at Venice Beach. I pull alongside, the tempo of our skates now in synch, say Hi, can I join you? and she says, Sure, taking off, thinking she'll drop me. If she were a guy challenging me, I'd pull alongside again, take her to her top speed, get her to where I see she's at the limit, and then flip around to skate backwards. The move always made them flinch, usually fall, and the last thing they saw heading face first to the pavement was my small victory smile leaving them behind at fifteen miles an hour. I don't want to hurt her though, she can try to beat me, but I make my point by going backward before I catch up, so I glide ahead, looking back at her, smiling, asking, What's your hurry? She's winded, laughs, we start talking, skate for an hour in the shadows, make a date. We have a nice time, don't remember what we did, but we connected. And I ruined it all by sending her roses. Let's be friends, she says, and she never wants to see me again. A record producer, she dated a rock star at the time, and it turned out I'd met another boyfriend when interviewing her best girlfriend on the debut of her first album. He produced music, too, I told him to leave or no interview, and got what I wanted. The Skater loved the story, had decided the guy was a schmuck. She was Jewish, peppered her speech with Yiddish, learned from her Holocaust-avoiding grandfather. Ended up writing about him, too. But much later. A year after she chases me away, run into her at a Hollywood club; the day before, the Times had me on the front of the metro section because I rappelled down a 600-foot building, one of two, designed by the man who did the World Trade Center. A publicity stunt for a magazine I ran. Was that you? she squeeled. But of course, I say. We're lovers within the week, old pals, and we body surf all morning, skate all afternoon, make love all night. She maintains a distance, though, can't surrender herself to me even for awhile, and I want more than just the sex, begin to feel the yearning I felt then, the yearning I feel for Michelle now. I smoke some cannabis, roll a cigarette, sip some Jack, start pacing and smoking, there's something there, there's something there, but I can't figure it out. It's so obvious I can't believe I have to figure it out. The pictures show the same spirit, big blue eyes, heart-melting smile, same flawless, tan skin, hair dark as Michelle's but different. The Skater's is short, curly. A tomboy, she punched me when I asked if it was a perm. She has that voice. It's the same expression Michelle wears in the picture on the web site, but there's more. They both grew up without fathers, both have trouble connecting with the right men, both display a desperate restlessness. And the Skater, I remember, had a golden retriever, who put his head onto my lap, willing to let me stroke him forever. I pace and smoke, pace and smoke, my mind's racing again, the combination of caffeine, cannabis, alcohol and nicotine just right, my thoughts are flying, the memories flickering by at speed. It was after the Skater that I met the girl who led to the rule. I'm at the bar with a trust-fund girl in a market cafe in an old bank, millions of dollars spent renovating it into the slickest place in Venice. She's just a friend against her desires, and a woman walks in the door forty feet away, a blonde, and our eyes lock across the room. She wanders the market shelves, looks at me at every opportunity, I look back, but I can't abandon my friend to work on her. She walks out with a backward-cast glance and my heart sinks. The next morning I'm sitting at the Rose and she walks in, her first time there, we have breakfast, it's perfect. We go to dinner two days later, spend hours enchanting each other, intimate stuff, fun stuff. I get her to open up, she spills her heart out. We kiss goodnight at her threshold, I don't try to talk my way in; she's special, I don't need to rush this, she wants me to call her, soon. And I do and she never talks to me again, won't answer the phone, or her messages, finally leaving a voicemail on the machine at work telling me to go away. I'm crushed, and I understand immediately. Grew up without a father, spent five years in therapy over it with a wonderful man who becomes her mentor, her platonic soulmate. He kills himself. Every woman, I realize, who made me work too hard, or came too easy, every woman who maintained an artificial distance, every woman who seemed to play strange games, every one of them grew up without a father. And somehow killed our relationship for no very good reason. Like the Patient. The Skater's tough, brave, we become great pals, but she's always looking for a better party, can't tell phonies from the real thing. I'm the older killjoy, and it doesn't matter if things usually play out as I say they will, or that people I say are flakes rip her off. She wants to learn hard lessons on her own, and she does not appreciate my opinions on these matters, so I stop offering them, and let her suffer the consequences. I'm pacing and smoking, see my old bike in the corner, think of the race. The Skater was my support crew in a triathlon starting with a swim from Alcatraz before the bike ride. I'm a slow swimmer, spend seventy-five minutes in fifty degree water, finish forty-nine out of fifty-one, almost die of hypothermia, stumble out of the water and collapse, keep trying, keep falling down. She's almost hysterical at the sight of me, pulls me to a hot shower, but it's really cold, and I stand paralyzed, but convulsing in place. Some big guys see our distress, take over, drag my compliant body into a steam room at the old health club serving as headquarters, dress me, send me out to the bike, but I'm still not me, I've transcended myself, I watch from above. I need to lie down, in the grass, she cradles my head in her lap, strokes my hair. I'm coming back, and she's saying, You don't have to go on, it's okay. Let's just go to brunch. In that voice. The hard part was over, but I never finish that race, never would, could never do that swim again and it's two years before I go back to the ocean, and only then in El Salvador, where it's like bath water. I never tell her how disappointed I was, how she was supposed to make me go on, make me exceed myself, tell me she'd never respect me if I didn't finish. She'd just returned from a month in Europe, had a great time, probably slept around a bit I know, but that's none of my business until some weeks before Christmas, a party at her house. I'd been away skiing, came to the party to discover Paolo, a friend she met in Italy, staying with her a few weeks. I'm sick, hide it, know it's over, know he's a clown. He's a record producer like she is, lots in common, and he gets to spend the holidays with her. I'd moved on to the girl with huge breasts and the news anchor, but I'm depressed for months, feeling no relief when the Skater eventually tells me he's an incompetent leech she can't get out of the house who embarrasses her professionally. What was I thinking? she laments, and she hints at wanting me back, even drives to Northern California to be with me on a visit with my parents. But I'm not sleeping with her anymore, it has nothing to do with Paolo. I want more from her than a fuck buddy, I love her even if I don't want to marry her, spend our lives together, but I love her now, even if I don't say so. But I need to be able to say, I love you, without being abandoned again. And she can't tolerate that because she never had a father. Then I met the Patient. Then I made the rule. No father, no sweetheart. Then I went off to the wars. After my Thursday lesson, I ask about the Saturday Blues Concert. No, I don't think so, she says. I'm going to the arts and crafts fair at the square with my sister. Maybe I'll see you there. That, again, I think. Well...when are you going to be there? Oh, probably between 12, 12:30, she says. Yeah...maybe, I say. Wouldn't you know it? I think to myself on the way back to Napa, another maybe invitation replacing a previous maybe invitation, and I have little faith that I'll see her at all if I do go. So what the hell is going on here? After telling me she's got a boyfriend, let's be friends, she arranges to meet without quite doing so. She goes on outings with Bruce and his buddies in what sound like blind dates with a chaperone. Bruce, of course, had made a move on Michelle in the past, before she gave him the let's be friends lecture. But I'm no Bruce, and ever since we had that talk, only two weeks ago, she presents several promising openings, none of which turns out quite right. I had just started writing our story the week before, and within a month or two of starting lessons, I'd begun to speculate about the arc of our potential relationship as my interest grew. Circumstances were different now, though, because after the issue of courting came up, if only for her to dismiss it, she appeared to be courting me in her way. Thinking about us, and the machinations required to become lovers, assumed a new importance for me and the story. We were in the middle of a budding romance of an indefinable nature, I decided, and Michelle was caught in a head and heart dilemma. Or so I began to think. The boyfriend didn't appreciate what he had, and she was unfulfilled somehow, but still committed to the idea of their commitment. And she was trying to keep it by putting me off verbally, but creating situations where she might be able to explore our possibilties. Guilt-free possibilities, the non-invitation invitations. She was sub-consciously attracted to me but fought the impulse. None of these considerations promised success or happiness, but I had nothing to lose. The game was getting better, I liked Michelle more than ever, and she was at least thinking about me as an option. All this I concluded by the time I parked my car down the street from the square that Saturday afternoon. A stunning day of mild warmth and clear sky, it was the first weekend of fall. I walked deliberately, carefully, as if being watched. If Michelle should see me first, I wanted to look cool, confident, unconcerned. I wore a button-down shirt, khakis, loafers sans socks. Whenever Bruce saw me at the stables like this he'd inevitably make a comment about my coming from the yacht club. I suspected that he was highlighting for Michelle the fact that I wasn't hanging around just for riding lessons, since I wasn't dressed for it. Evidence of my ulterior motives. The square is dotted end to end with booths, tables, tents, all displaying crafts ranging from jewelry to hokey yard gewgaws, or art and photography, all of it very decorative. Tourists predominate today, in contrast to the night of the farmers market when locals held sway. I weave through the displays of dubious aesthetics hardly taking note of what's offered for sale. I'm looking for the baseball hat, brown pony-tail sticking out the back. Michelle's tall, I have less than an inch on her, she shouldn't be too hard to find. I see her, and she's scrutinizing earrings on a table, looking down. She looks up, moving on. There's something regal about her bearing, a dialect of her body language never noted before. Her sister follows at a small distance, face showing boredom, and behind her, Bruce. Hi, Michelle, I say, sidling up next to her. She looks up, registers mild surprise. Oh, hi, she says, almost absent-mindedly, as if I weren't expected. Her sister joins us, Bruce following. This is my new, special friend, Karen. Terry. Hello, special friend Terry, she says, tilting her head so she can look down her nose at me. I remind her we met at the champagne party. Oh...yes, comes the painful admission. Bruce nods my way in acknowledgement, and I join them. I talk trivialities with Michelle while trying to maintain my cool. The sister's apparent disdain for everything or everybody within sight injects a new ingredient into the rush I feel in Michelle's presence. Menace. The mood is not welcoming, and through the desultory exchange of words with Michelle, I'm preoccupied by thoughts of how I came to be there. She'd suggested we go to a concert, and then this, as consolation prize. The melting warmth I should feel has been replaced by a seeping dread. Five minutes after sighting her, Michelle stops, Karen and Bruce halting behind. We're going over to Steiner's for a beer, she says. Maybe we'll see you later. No invitation this time. I'm being ditched. Oh, alright, I say, betraying, I hope, no distress. I've got to stop by the bank anyway. Maybe I'll see you at the bar. I don't know what to think, and I'm incapable of trying. This is a Michelle I've not only never seen before, but one never suspected. As they walk off, I look at her retreating back, remembering the last time we were supposed to meet here, the last time she disappeared on me. My head spins as I walk through the crowds unseeing, on the way to the bank across from the square. Should I just leave? Hell, no, I'm going to the bar. Composure returns, detachment sets in. I had sensed there was a tantalizing, strange story here, and I wasn't going to pass it up. Get my money at the ATM, cross another street to a liquor store for cigarettes, enter thoughtlessly. Michelle and her attendants stand at the counter. She's buying bar snacks, hasn't eaten yet today even though it's well after one o'clock in the afternoon. I trail along toward Steiner's, the four of us spread out. We pass an empty storefront, and Karen says to Michelle, This looks like a good place for the Coyote Ugly Bar. I don't hear Michelle's immediate response, I'm trying to figure out where that comment came from, and then the sister asks, So, would the bartenders be men or women? A little of both, I think, says Michelle. Head spinning again. Coyote Ugly Bar? Coyote Ugly is a movie about a bar scene and sexual allure, the kind of movie I reflexively avoid. And coyote ugly is an expression reserved for the wretched person you took home when drunk, and wake up next to after sex. Just as a coyote will chew its leg off to escape from a trap, a man will chew his arm off in the morning if its caught underneath the regrettable one-night stand, rather than wake her. Because she's coyote ugly. I detest bar scenes, and even though I could pull off the snarky banter one needs to succeed with the kind of women you meet in such places, everything about that world repelled me. The idea of competing with a roomful of drunken guys for the transient affections of drunken women strikes me as degrading, and I'm not interested in those women. Over the years, I discovered that the kind of women I do like have rules for men they meet in a bar, the most common never to date them. Additionally, those women go to bars with girlfriends, otherwise they don't go, and you can always depend on the homely girlfriend to sabotage you out of jealousy. So you seldom have a chance to get as far as the rejection. Or the pretty one discourages you so the friend doesn't feel neglected. If you get beyond all of that, actually connect with a nice woman who might like you, she'll reject you anyway because she doesn't want to appear easy to the friends. An oversimplification, yes, but one that proves accurate more often than not. At least for me. My mind is racing again as we enter Steiner's, packed by locals and a group that had marched in the morning's parade. The marchers wear Boy-Scout-like uniforms, but silly, performing as a parody of drill teams. The bar extends down the right side of the room to halfway back, where people play pool. We cluster toward the center of the counter, but Michelle positions herself on the other side of some guy. Bruce stands by her, Karen ends up being my bridge between the other two since there's no place else to stand. They order beers, I get a Campari and soda. Michelle seats herself on a stool, facing away from the bar and toward the room as a whole. She adjusts her bra, doffs her baseball cap, removes the elastic on her pony tail. She runs her fingers through her hair, head down, then head back. She slides off the stool to stand, and, in one heart-stopping moment, she rocks her head back smoothly, shakes loose the thick mane of dark brown hair, and thrusts her breasts out while running her fingers through her hair again. It's the most alluring exhibition of incipient female sexuality of my memory, a metamorphosis all the more devastating because she does it with no apparent sense of self-awareness, a wholly natural gesture she might have been performing in isolation. The image of Botticelli's Venus Rising from the Sea comes to mind, one of my favorite Renaissance paintings even before it appeared in gigantic form on a wall near where I lived in Venice. She turns to the bar, sips her drink, and rotates outward again as I edge by Karen with a slight smile. Michelle, I say, heart all aflutter but hiding it, that's the first time I've seen you with your hair down since the night we met. She stands still, arms hanging loosely to her side, unhearing, ignoring me. Trancelike, she gazes to a far horizon despite the wall twenty feet away. I return to my drink. Michelle and Karen are talking, I hear the sister say, catch and release, but I don't get the context, don't know what that means. Michelle responds, again out of earshot. Then Karen, in tones of wearied contempt. Yeah, I have to have another one of those conversations pretty soon. I'll try to let him go nicely. You know, let's be friends. Catch and release? I'm thinking, Let him go nicely? What am I hearing now? But I figure it out pretty fast, even though my head's ready to explode. And then Michelle approaches, gliding in my direction till she stands facing me, Karen to the side. Terry and I had one of those conversations awhile back, didn't we? she says in that voice that makes me melt. And we're friends now, right? Yeah, that's right, I say, smiling, boiling. Bruce makes a crack I can't hear. Then Michelle. Yes, but Karen does it on purpose, she says. All I do is have a drink or two, flirt a bit, and it just happens. I don't fucking believe this. I don't fucking believe this. I don't fucking believe this. I'm beyond thought, a mantra of incredulity erupting spontaneously, repeating itself against my blank will. I hear a rushing in my head, and I can't see straight, literally. My vision takes on the aspect of what you see from underwater, objects identifiable, but distorted by the liquid lense undulating above. I don't fucking believe this. Michelle goes back to her spot at the bar, returns to profer a bag of Chex Mix. I take a few, saying thanks as if nothing had happened. Then she and Karen discuss the merits of men with hairy chests. I inquire as to Michelle's preference, she has none. I only have hair where it belongs, so for me it's a draw. Then they ignore me, as they alternately flirt with or rebuff the men in the bar taking turns trying to score. She loosens up drinking beer, I've never seen Michelle enjoy herself so much, look so happy, at ease. Animated as never before, she juggles multiple suitors, trades innuendo. She's beautiful here, generating a magnetism attracting the attention of every man in the bar and not a few women. I try not to watch, breathe deeply, and attempt to absorb the events of the last hour. Who is this person? I ask myself about the Michelle I've only recently met after thinking I knew her for six months. Who is this person? I don't fucking believe it, I continue to say to myself, I don't fucking believe it. That is the unconscious backdrop for the rest of the afternoon. When I don't actually think about these events, the phrase runs through my head ceaselessly. I don't fucking believe it. They're negotiating with the bartender now, over t-shirts, he gives them a couple to try on. They return from the ladies room a matched pair of Steiner's Bar girls. That'll be good for business, he says. Michelle asks if I want to go to the alley so she can make a phone call, so we can both smoke. I follow her, she stretches out on a long, wide windowsill, back propped up on one end, Karen and I sitting in chairs opposite. Michelle's deep in conversation almost immediately, probably with the boyfriend, head dipped. I attempt talk with Karen. A month earlier, I gave Michelle for her aspiring-writer daughter The Devil Wears Prada, the fact-based novel about a young woman's experience in New York magazine publishing. The sister's reading it first, though, and I ask how she likes it. I'm about thirty pages into it and I don't think I can finish it, she snears. I hate the writer. She's so incompetent. Can't drive a stick shift. Dead air. I try again. She's a school teacher, I ask about her job. Something that smacks of English and media, she reveals, but I don't quite get it, and she's not going to explain. More dead air. But now I know what I'm dealing with, so I'll try to have some fun. So, did you two get along growing up or did you fight all the time? I ask. A little of both it seems; she says they were completely different from each other. Let me guess, I venture, you were the girlie-girl and she was the tomboy? Something like that, says Karen. In the same instant, Michelle, still talking on the phone, glances up at me, into my eyes. She locks on me for a split second, smiles coyly, lowers her head again. A thought hits me. The blue blazer Michelle says she didn't wear when we met. Hey, Karen, I begin to ask, What was Michelle wearing that night at the winery party? Ask me what I was wearing! she snarls, catching herself, before saying, in a more controlled voice, I don't remember what she was wearing. Visceral hostility. No rivalry there! Well, I begin, weren't you wearing a black dress with colored patterns on it? A snippy Yes in response. More dead air. I keep trying, and Karen finally opens up, talking about a trip with a bleeding heart boyfriend to a wretched third-world country for activities vaguely humanitarian. Losing track of the self-satisfied monolog, I'm irrelevant, anyway, the absurdity of her playing these catch and release games overwhelms me. She's so not that attractive, and the superior attitude founded on so little is astounding. The small town school teacher's talking to me about catch and release? With blue-collar yokels? I played the game with TV and movie stars at the height of their fame, even had Jamie Lee Curtis hit on me once. She's talking to me about catch and release? Besides which, I've never felt so despised by a stranger, let alone by one to whom I was introduced as a Special Friend. She behaves as if I'm just another slurring drunk to be snubbed, beneath anything resembling normal social intercourse. She drones on while I compile a list in my head. Over the years, I've engaged in conversation with English aristocrats, Central American oligarchs, United States senators, congressman, ambassadors, army generals, navy admirals. Rock stars, corporate titans, professional athletes. Guatemalan assassins, Mayan chieftains, Kalinga headhunters, runaway Nazis, drug kingpins, an African dictator. I've engaged in conversation Sandra Day O'Connor, Jane Seymour, Martina Navritilova, Vanna White, Anna Mahler, Heidi Fleiss, Marthe Feuchtwanger. I've engaged in conversation Richard Nixon, Walter Cronkite, Timothy Leary, Leroy Neiman, Muhammed Ali, Desmond Tutu, Paul Newman, Christopher Isherwood. But I couldn't pull off a conversation with Karen in half-an-hour of trying, one-on-one. I don't fucking believe it. Mercifully, Michelle finishes up on the cell phone. We return to the bar, Bruce reappears. Michelle tells him that the boyfriend's coming over later. Bruce wants to know if she's still going flying that afternoon, one of Bruce's pilot buddies. Michelle's not sure, has to talk to the boyfriend some more. Bruce is desperate for her to come. Another of his friends wants to meet her. He's bringing his Harley, Michelle, a Harley-Davidson, Michelle! Are you listening? exhorts Bruce. Karen rolls her eyes. I don't fucking believe it. Two hours have been enough. I say good-bye, take my leave. I'm emotionally drained, badly confused, half-amused. Organized, rational thought is impossible, my brain serving as a mere conduit conveying a stream of random images, scenes, unformed thoughts and deep feelings derived over the last six months, all being re-evaluated in the light of the previous hours. Who is this woman? I don't fucking believe it. Who is this woman? Rushing sound in head, cold draft blowing through heart. Reconciling the new Michelle with the old consumes me for days, the exercise less difficult than disturbing. I'd detected that wild side, concluded that she suppressed it in creating a future with the boyfriend. I saw instead that she alternately indulged it with a dangerous enthusiasm at odds with the vulnerable celibate harrassed by random men described in her email. And the upset stomachs, headaches, insomnia, may have less to do with stress than drink. Michelle was at war with herself, some part of her psyche destined to lose. I reconsidered my interest in her, and found it renewed with added resolve. She surrounded herself with malignant influences without knowing it, my instincts told me bad things could happen. She needed a friend like me whether she realized it or not, and I was sticking no matter how painful the ride. It was clear the romance I desired was doubtful, that any romance with her could be spirit-killing. I didn't care. I fell into the destiny trap, the belief that fate had conspired to interject me into her affairs at the very moment she most required my like. So, how was the airplane ride, I ask Michelle a few days later. Oh, I didn't go, she says. Dan and I ended up fighting all day. I'm disappointed for her. This was an excursion to overcome her fear of flying. She'd told me of the anxiety every time she got on a plane, of her desire to get over it. My brave little Michelle, I thought at the time. What happened? I ask. Well... were you still there when Dan got there? No, I say, realizing she'd been drinking enough not to remember. Throughout her account, I sit deadpan, uttering the timely uh huh, while my heart sinks in the telling. He'd arrived not long after my departure from Steiner's, took a seat at a table, and sulked as he watched Michelle manage the attentions of the marching men, growing resentful. When she visited him for a minute, he indicated a rummy regular at the bar, told her that's where she was headed within a few years. Instant, involutary flash. I see Michelle in ten years, barrel-body, wornout face, dead eyes. Wave of nausea. That really pissed me off, she says. And remember those guys who were in the parade? A couple of them just kept staring at me. It really bugged him. Then, when we were hanging around at the airport talking, Karen said something. I'd let her read this email from Dan, about how we don't have sex, and she made some comment. Nobody knew about that, and it really set him of. We just kept on each other until he went home. I'm thinking of the nice day we might have had at the blues concert, then, another quick flash, of the Coyote Ugly Bar, cognitive dissonance. How's that fit into her future of marriage, vet clinic, stability? Oh, Michelle, I'm asking. What's with the Coyote Ugly Bar? Is that your big fantasy, open a bar called the Coyote Ugly? Uh, no, she says, That's Karen's thing. The answer does not correlate with what I thought I heard. I see her wince, ask what's the matter? Slept wrong, sore neck. I offer a massage, That'd be great, she says. She sits in one of the white plastic chairs, bends over as I place my hands on her neck as gently as possible, our hands touching as we move the strands of pony tail aside. Her sun-browned flesh contrasting against a t-shirt as blue as her eyes, I begin to knead gently the perfect, poreless skin. Oh, yeah, she says breathlessly, that feels good. A little higher. Yeah, ooh, ooh. My fingers straddle her collar bones under the shirt, the pinkies brushing her bra strap, my thumbs searching for the tight resistance in her shoulder muscles. She takes my right hand, positions the thumb. Her t-shirt rides up, exposing at the small of her back the tattoo of the rearing horse, attack and escape, fight and flight. Michelle. Ooh, that's it, she says, in a higher tremolo. Oh yeah, yeah, harder, that's it. Ooh, ooh, ooh...aaaah. The back of her head's at about waist level, parallel with my body to the side as she leans in to me, her shoulder against my thigh. Oh, my God, I'm thinking, omigod! Ooh, ooh, aah, she moans, in that voice. I stop sooner than I intend. I'm ready to swoon. A week later, sitting in the plastic chair as I always do, looking back over the stable complex as usual, from under the the overhang with the skull. To the side, Michelle washes Lucy as we talk, I smoke. Task done, she leads Lucy to her stall, the pair walking off under my gaze. It's a picture I've seen a dozen times for real, and Michelle even included one like it in photos to consider for the web site. A cute picture, an iconic picture almost, Michelle's wearing the ochre-colored ranch jacket, jeans, baseball hat, she's turned her back on me and she's walking away. They're ten or fifteen paces distant, I'm looking at their diminishing backs, their ponytails. Lucy flicks hers, across the white rump, exposing her little pink vagina. I stiffen where I sit, my mouth parts slightly, my head starts shaking slowly from side to side while my eyes automatically dart from one ass to the other and back. Oh, my God. I don't fucking believe it, I don't fucking believe it. A few days later, a Monday, back at the table, her chores, my lesson, over. She's at the picnic table, I'm in the chair. Something really weird happened over the weekend, she says. Yeah? What was that. Well, I was at Steiner's with Karen, and I went to get my wallet from my purse, and it was gone. And I told the bartender, and he asked who was by us before. And there was this guy, and he was playing pool then, and I showed him to the bartender. And he goes, Yeah, him, that figures. And so he goes up to this guy and says, Empty your pockets, right now! And he does, right there on the pool table, and everyone's watching, and he has my wallet. And then the bartender threw him out. Then, about an hour later, Karen gets this call from my daughter, and she's sobbing, she's hysterical, and asking what happened, and if I'm alright. It's like she thinks I've been kidnapped or something. She was at home, and she got this phone call from some guy who was saying these things about me. And then I looked in my purse, and my cell phone was gone. And then the bartender asked who was around us again, and I told him about this guy. And then the bartender makes this phone call, and tells this guy he'd better stay right where he was. And then the bartender drives to where this guy lives, and he left my cell phone on his porch. He was afraid to open the door. Anyway, I got my phone back. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, sure is, I say, trying not to say more, trying not to say, big fucking surprise. Again, some weeks later. Something funny happened the other night, she says. Yeah, what was that? I was at Steiner's with Karen, and I played some pool with this guy, some lawyer. And he asked for my phone number, but I told him I wasn't interested. But last night he started leaving messages on my home phone. Almost no one has that number. It's unlisted. How did he do that? Isn't that creepy? Yes, very creepy, I agree, thinking, I don't have that number after seven months. Big fucking surprise. Again, some weeks later, one of the men from the marching troop starts showing up at the stables, a man my age who looks it. He's tries to get Michelle to spend a day with him on a horse rescue. Gee, you think he might have eyes for me? she asks. Could be, I say. Big fucking surprise. I'm sitting in front of my barn, staring blankly at the big hill on the other side of the arroyo, smoking. I'm thinking nothing at all, but the hormones are pumping all the time now, if at a lower level. I'm in a heightened emotional state, feeling Michelle in my gut even when I'm not thinking about her. Meanwhile, I discover the ability to evoke specific emotions when I do think about her. The mental image of her hugging Lucy in that photo creates a pleasant internal warmth not unlike the initial flush surging through the veins in the seconds just after shooting heroin. Thoughts of Michelle flirting in the bar replicate the anxious sensations felt as cocaine wears off. I can summon one or the other in a moment, and I do, just to observe the effects, but it's draining, I can only take so much. So I'm thinking nothing at all again. I see the road cutting diagonally across the hill, I see a woman on a horse emerge from behind the old oak, she stops, appears to look in my direction, I casually wave, she waves back and continues toward the fence separating the properties. It's a seven-year-old fantasy, and the way it went, I walked to the barb-wire separating us, saw that she was beautiful, we talk, I invite her in for tea and cookies, we make love. We're both married, but lonely, we find each other in a world away, we continue to meet and tryst, and it's not really cheating, because it's a world away. My mother died a year earlier, on my birthday, halfway between Christmas and the New Year. We had a party, a cake, I blew out the candles, wishing that she'd die soon, end the pain, hers and everyone else's. My aunts are stoic, my niece keeps trying not to cry, my stepfather plays my mother's favorite song on the piano. My sister Kate busies herself trying to be in control. My mother dies anyway. Her last words to me, croaked out, barely audible. Well, this is a helluva a birthday present, huh? Oh, Mom, that's okay, I say, and hug her for the last time. I forever wonder how that must have sounded As if her death was an acceptable present? My stepfather seemed determined to join her soon, lost interest in the land I was supposed to inherit, but didn't. Kate, again. I started cleaning it up anyway, as if it were mine, burning the junk, the vintage wood boats, the furniture, the pictures. The dotcom I ran was going badly, Tricia no longer had time for fun, let alone for romance. The land lured me back because it was a world apart, and I needed to escape. I hadn't lived on the property for twenty years, not since spending a winter in the barn between trips to the revolutions. My mother built the barn atop where we once had a little camp, with easy chairs, barbecue, used on clear winter days, when we could have fires without fear of them spreading, when it was cold and dank at the cabin down the mountain. Just being there unmoored me from current realities. The land transported me through time, through memory, made me what I became. I missed my first chance to lose my virginity up here, missed my second chance in the house down the mountain. She was a feminist before anyone heard the term, a hippie girl who took to heart the precepts of sexual liberation. We drove up in a '53 Chevy panel truck, just her and eight or ten guys, and we smoked cannabis and the other guys took turns fucking her in the back, while they watched through the windows. But I couldn't get an erection. This was not what I had in mind; I needed the romance. It happened again a few weeks later, when she and a friend came to the house with a half-dozen-guys. I couldn't fuck the friend, didn't turn me on. Didn't bother me, though. By then, I knew I needed to feel something. But it didn't keep me from pimping them off one night, three bucks a fuck, in the backseat of a car in the parking lot of the cafe we patronized. I think of the Feminist, try not to judge her, and don't judge her at all for what she did. She was a lot like me, getting adventure where she could, and she's doing great now, a prominent woman in the valley. Who gives advice to women. It's the friend I think about, a girl not so pretty, who fell under the Feminist's influence, who wasn't that kind of girl. I wonder if she's doing as well, and doubt it. Six months had passed between the day my mother attacked me and the gang bangs and orgies, and we'd made amends with each other. She gave up trying to control me, and I became the drug dealer they had falsely accused me of being. In the interim, I'd started shooting meth and whatever else came my way, hitchhiked to the South and heard death threats from every passing car, went to New York, stayed in the Bronx, passed for eighteen in the bars. I'd been expelled from the California school system, even the Catholic high wouldn't take me back, so I weasled my way into the local college. That didn't last long, lost interest, couldn't pay attention because the guys I rode to school with greeted me with a syringe full of meth when climbing into the car. They didn't last long either. To avoid arrest as a minor, I developed a false identity, traveling constantly between San Francisco and Napa, night and day, on drug runs. Just sixteen, my connections so good, my knowledge of the Haight and its business practices so accute, I was sought out by older guys, many of them thugs, as a guide. I was still infused with a measure of the peace, love, flowers ethic, but losing it fast. After seeing a hippie get slapped around in the park by a biker wannabe I knew through the Hell's Angels, a man they treated with contempt, I'd rather kill his kind than have to watch helplessly. There were ripoffs, too, but they stopped when people got the idea that someone might kick their doors in late at night demanding an explanation. People began to fear me despite my youth and apparently peaceful nature. The latter illusion I cultivated long after beginning to carry a large hunting knife in my back pocket, becoming ever more calm and softspoken as tensions mounted in various business situations. The surprise was all the greater when they crossed a certain line, when all of a sudden the kid had them by the collar and thrust a knife toward the stomach. I had discovered the fight or flight syndrome, without knowing what it was called, and cultivated it after learning there was a certain state that gave me powers. I was fearless, I thought fast and clearly, and I could kill in an instant. Or not, and I still shudder at the number of times I stopped just short of the fatal stab in realization that the blustering bully, the man who was going to rip off the kid, was crying, limp, begging for mercy. My mother worked and dated, and the house down the mountain, the Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff, may as well have been mine. Close to town, yet hidden in the woods above the road, forest everywhere, it provided the privacy desired for my endeavors. In Napa I traded drugs for stolen guns, in San Francisco traded guns for drugs, profiting on the spreads. I sold cannabis and acid, sometimes coke and heroin. I never had to go out much for entertainment, the frequent parties came to me, and when alone I read, watched old movies, hiked in the woods. I fell in love with Sherlock Holmes, especially after finding the story in which he shoots cocaine, and immersed myself in Arthur Conan Doyle, shifting then to Dickens, Boswell. Imperceptibly, I absorbed certain aspirations, liked the English gentleman image, but my version. I worked at being painfully polite, drank port from decanters, bought matched leather accessories at Abercrombie and Fitch, the real one, a Norfolk jacket someplace else. Some thug left a collie with me who decided to stay, and I took Squire walking in the hills, Remington automatic shotgun in the crook of my arm. We often hiked to the mountaintop where I sat looking at that big hill, we walked up the track my fantasy horsewoman rode down, sat on the rock on top of that hill. The valley spread out below, the distant bay shimmering in the morning light. The LSD encouraged the delusions, and I would stride back and forth on the crest looking down on the world that I claimed as mine, the joints I smoked adding to the fabulous sense of self. I was lord of the world, master of everything I surveyed. The walks ended before eleven in the morning, by which time I was seated in a favorite spot within a stand of redwoods just above the house, where I sat with Squire, Remington and Holmes, waiting for visitors. They'd come, find no one home, prepare to leave, and I'd be walking down the mountain, shotgun in the crook of my arm, in greeting. I never had to worry about burglars. Even when abesent, people suspected I might be watching. Late at night, I'd watch the Maltese Falcon, This Gun for Hire, The Naked City, stoned on acid, film noir values, suspicions and methods seeping into my brain, leaking into my behavior, when it came time to deal. I developed an odd melange of ethics and beliefs, they crystalized into my sense of morality, a solid core wrapped in a variety of personas. A chameleon quality emerged, quite by osmosis. I found myself talking like a good old boy in the South, a spade, that was the transitional term between negro and black, in the Fillmore, a streetwise hoodlum in the Haight. But not imitations, just a shift in tone, accent, body language. I traveled seamlessly among different milieu, creating networks for business, information, survival. Through these sources, through friends of friends who worked for the police and sheriff, my mother's plot came to light, allowing me to disappear before she could betray me again. My colleagues in San Francisco invited me to join their heroin operation, they needed my expertise, and we took an apartment in a grand old building with a manager who tipped us off before raids. That period in '68 and '69 was one of the most exciting of my life, but it ended with a bust in Napa, a charge I would have beaten if only because of the false identity. They found me out, however, discovered they had their underage nemesis, and my youth exempted me from the weight or safeguards of the law. All they needed was my mother's signature to send me to prison for a decade, and she provided it with enthusiasm, consigning me to a series of jail hells. I had her house burglarized in punishment, that house inspired by Frank LLoyd Wright, the house I built, the house I loved, the house she sold for a pittance because it was burglarized. But I never would discover who the girl was who snitched me off in flirting with the good-looking cop, the girl who scarred my life in betraying a secret I seldom shared. All this I think sitting and daydreaming looking at that hill from which I can see the world, smoking, and by now drinking sweet vermouth. The wine my parents started me on--at five--when they sequestered themselves in the living room for the hour before dinner, pocket doors closed, Gilbert and Sullivan on the record player as they read the paper and drank Manhattans. I sat on the couch while the siblings completed the meal my mother had started. The sun is setting now, it's getting chilly, I go inside, sit by the window in one of the iron butterfly chairs fifty-years-old that we used for the camp on which the barn is built, and the sun has just dropped behind the hill, and I see Michelle and I riding over the brow of the hill, cantering. I'm chasing her and she's laughing and she lets me catch her. In my dreams. One of my old green beret buddies invited me to join him at a convention in Las Vegas, a reunion of the Studies and Observation Group, the anodyne designation of the unit that did the company's work in Laos, Cambodia, most of the members killed in action. A week or so had passed since the day at Steiner's, and the shock had worn off. I was drawn to Michelle more than ever, a whole new range of mysteries evident just when I thought I had her profiled. The upscale roadhouse on the way to the stables served fresh doughnuts, a baker's dozen of small loops right out of the fryer, dusted by powdered sugar. I got an order to go, a couple of coffees, and drove over as fast as possible so they'd still be hot; I wanted to say good-bye before leaving for Nevada, wondered how she'd react to a gratuitous visit, rebuff or reception. She's cleaning stalls in the arena building, sees me outside the door, says Hi, I tell her what I have, she says she'll take a break. She never takes a break before chores are done, and she responds with warmth, happy to see me. We sit at the picnic table under the gentle morning sun, and I don't remember what we talk about, perhaps because it's so normal seeming, for once, a man and a woman who like each other, having survived the preliminaries. We're comfortable together, for once, and I don't have to measure my words or plan my moves. She dumps sugar into the coffee, adds cream, looking down, stirring. You know where I get my favorite coffee? she asks in that voice. At the Chevron station. It's just right, and I love it with vanilla-flavored artificial creamer. I'm really just a trailer park girl, you know. She glances up at me, then away. We run out of things to talk about, I have to leave, we rise from the table. She hugs me, I brush the side of her neck with my lips, a secret kiss searching for the right spot, my fresh-shaved cheek touching hers. She starts, says that hurt, but it couldn't hurt, I hit the spot. Diamond studs, maybe a half-caret, twinkle from her lobes; trailer-park girl? I'm walking to the car, she yells at my back, Don't get drunk and get married! Turning around, I smile, say, Yeah, that's going to happen. It happened to me, she says. No, I say, grinning. Really? Yeah, I was there with this guy, we got drunk and...well, we got married. At Treasure Island. She says this in that voice, with a weak smile and sad visage that asked if I could understand. Our eyes lock across the distance, I bob my head in farewell. I'm shaking my head as I drive away, shaking it off and on all the way to Las Vegas, thinking, not thinking, Michelle always in the back of my mind, feelings of warmth growing. I arrive late that night, I'm wearing my standard garb, variation on a theme, black baseball cap, black t-shirt, khaki pants, tan suede flight jacket, walking boots. The hospitality suite is closing, I get there just in time to blunder into the president of the organization, but I don't know it. I make my inquiries, he's unusually welcoming to me, an outsider, finally asking, Active duty, right? No, I say, but all week, grey-haired men attending the same reunion, men who belong there, earned their stripes with blood, salute me on seeing my admission credentials, my look, assuming I'm doing now in Iraq or Afghanistan what they did in Laos and Cambodia. I can't explain to all of them they're mistaken, but they learn more when they invite me to join them at a table with old comrades they fought and bled with, reminiscing about the dead not there, and after the initial greetings, the welcome, someone will ask some version of the question, but at least once in these terms, they'll ask, Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here? I have to tell them how I was kicked out of the forces, got sent down to the paratroopers. Sure to add I got my revenge, though, when the green berets mounted the post's first bicycle race, sure their picked man would win, but I crushed him, getting to look in the eye that day everyone involved in my expulsion, how I championed my regiment over theirs in an old rivalry. On that same antique Raleigh International I rode in the square that day when I lost sight of Michelle, and I know that if we'd spent any time together that night I'd have worked that story into the conversation. They drop names of famous warriors, and I know them, and signal events, and I was there, and they quiz me, sometimes drunkenly, and I'd better get it right or suffer ignominy, denunciation and another expulsion from their ranks, but I hear said, several times, Well, damn, that's right. When the part about being a journalist in the wars of the '80s comes up, the collaboration with the mentor who designed the assassination programs these guys conducted, demurrals that I did nothing, just watched, they nod knowingly and jump to conclusions I'll only reinforce with more denials. I love it, love playing the game of shifting images, love convincing these men, without effort, that maybe I did more than they did. A real operator shows up, just back from the wars, the kind they mistake me for, and he did Latin America, too, served in Honduras and Salvador and Colombia, but I was there ten years earlier, alone, in harder places. And he was never kidnapped, never put against a wall by a death squad, never targeted for assassination, never choked and beaten in a pit in Manilla. The widow and daughters of a much-revered commander attend, and his men present them with a plaque, and I start working on the unmarried one, ask how it feels to see how her father's regarded, and she smiles, looks down, and glances up, and says, It's really overwhelming, but, you know, he was never home. And all the time I was growing up I wondered why he wasn't home with me. And that was kind of hard to understand. And I understand completely, it hits me before she finishes the sentiment. I know he missed her, know it made him sick thinking about his daughters and his wife, and felt guilty about being away, but he knew they were safe. Just as he knew that if he were absent, those brave young men in their twenties would die in much greater numbers without him, that he got them home when others didn't. And I'm looking at her with a wan smile, nodding, feeling the agony of her father, choosing to leave his daughters so others' sons would not die, and I can't say anything because I'll start sobbing, and I can't bring myself to work on her anymore, so I leave. The convention plays out better than I imagine, make connections for future schemes, know that I'm on certain radars, with credibility. I take a friend's wife to explore thrift shops in old Vegas, look at art at Wynn's, on my own I bargain over twenty- and thirty-thousand-dollar necklaces that I'll never buy for Michelle, but damn, they'd look good on her. I don't buy jewelry for women, never did, the one exception a fatherless girl I came to know, and Tricia and I became surrogate parents somehow, and I sent little gold chains and such on her birthday and Christmas because no one else would, and it was all stolen anyway, by the good friends she made hanging out in bars. And I start thinking about her, and the colonel's daughter, and none of this is much fun anymore, and it's time to return in any case. On the Saturday morning following arrival home, I drop by the stables to say Hi, I'm back, and it's just Michelle and me. I give her the souvenir shot glass I got at Treasure Island, and a t-shirt from the convention I cannot wear because I was never a member of the unit. But a girl can get away with it, a unique conversation piece, bearing a small logo of a death's head and lightning bolts, subdued but powerful. Her sister, I'm sure, will find it very offensive. She asks if I'm going to a concert at some winery, she's leaving in a minute to go home and dress for it, someone gave her tickets the night before. Someone at Steiner's. And I ask why she thought I might be going, and she says because I seem to go to everything, and right off I'm wondering, another implied invitation? I didn't know about it, I say, But maybe I'll see you there. She says nothing to discourage me. Within the hour I'm running a web check, it's sold out. I go anyway, drive around Glen Ellen for half-an-hour doing a reconnaissance of the place and its security, see the teams on quad-runners searching the perimeters, get a sense of their schedules, routes. The winery's on the other side of a hill, don't know how far, but it can't be too distant even if they do need shuttles for guests. I decide to park on the far edge of the broad field just above a stream bed meandering in the right direction. I sit in my car till I see the security crew ride by again, know I have ten, fifteen minutes before a return, get out and walk deliberately down the hill, enter the dry water course. It's a pleasant walk for the most part, music's beginning to waft in my direction, the cool fall morning warming with the early afternoon sun. Blackberry brambles retard my progress in a short stretch, thorns rip my sockless ankles, forearms, get blood on my khakis and loafers, the rolled up cuff of the blue button-down shirt. Stop for a minute afterward, scrub out the stains with water from one of the remaining pools. After ten minutes I emerge behind a house where they're preparing food for the event, the security guard responsible for the opening in the fence chatting with a chef fifty-feet away. I straighten up, look myself over, and stride through like I own the place, come out in front of the house, into the oak-shaded VIP enclosure. Michelle is the first person I see. She's walking in my direction toward a table with wine, I speak her name, she looks up, yells, excited, Terry! What are you doing here? Michelle is all smiles, she's been drinking, Michelle approaches arms outstretched, engulfs me as never before, a liquid embrace flowing into every recess, Venus pressing against me all over, all at once, drowning me in an instant of physical affection, I'm breathless. The adrenaline's pumping, I can't believe I have her in my arms like this, a long, glad-to-see-me greeting too good to be true. I note the change of clothes on withdrawal. Clean, but tighter jeans, a skimpy tank top, a little red heart, askew, positioned beneath her cleavage. She asks how I got in, I tell her, she smiles like she should have known, and she's disengaging, pointing out her table, she's going back, and says, Maybe I'll see you later, inviting-not-inviting. Everything happens too fast, I need to think, get a sandwich, sit at a far table, eat, looking over Michelle's group of people. Finished with the sandwich, I amble over, the only empty chair next to Karen, Michelle's on the other side. I say Hi to the sister, she responds unenthusiastically, sit down. What a piece of work, I'm thinking. The men to my right introduce themselves, forty-somethings, self-satisfied, but know how to act in company, make polite conversation. One's a sports drink manufacturer, an athlete-consultant of his one of the people I made famous twenty years ago, started him on a writing career. The other's a tough-guy attorney from New York, could work for the mob. Michelle is standing now, talking to a few thirty-something men, look like corporate drones in golf wear, only snippets of the conversation decipherable. ...well, that's when I took him aside and told him I'd have a lot more respect for him if he didn't get into a fight, I hear her say, speculating with little doubt as to whom or what the potential fight may have been over. They're nodding approvingly at her role as peacemaker, when she turns and she sees me. Karen, she says across the table, loudly, slowly, enunciating every word for effect, Guess what? Terry crashed the party! Terry crashed the party? Karen says, just as loudly, mimicking Michelle's delivery. I don't fucking believe it. I don't fucking believe it. I don't fucking believe it. The roar in my head, the shock at what she just did, the realization that she went out of her way to embarrass me, the seamless routine with Karen, it overwhelms me, negates thought. Our eyes lock for an instant, she looks away, and I can't imagine the expression on my face, but I know it was deadpan, neutral, but deadly. I'm trying to think of something, don't know what, then it hits me, the line I rehearsed for just such situations, when I get caught crashing parties. You should be flattered I bothered to crash your party, I would say with gravity. I've crashed the great parties of the age. But I can't recall the line because I've ever had to use it. The winery owner's brother is sitting next to where she stands, in conversation, the two men I just met are engaged as well. No one notices, and the moment passes. Michelle gets her camera, she wants me to pose by the hedge enclosing the area. I rise, ask her why she did what she did as we close the distance, she says nothing, avoids looking at me, directs me into position, shoots a few pictures. I return to my seat, try to control my breathing, control the rage, but I notice it's not directed at Michelle, it's a free-floating rage at the situation. I discover at that moment that I can't be angry at her, cannot feel hostile toward her. I am, however, hurt and bewildered at this ingenuous cruelty. She can't help herself, I'm thinking, when I can think again. There's a banana sitting on the table, Michelle asks if it belongs to anyone, no claims made, she prepares to eat it. One of the thirty-somethings she met at Steiner's the night before says, Yeah! I want to see this! Michelle ignores the comment, hint of smile, and she slowly peels it halfway down, apparently oblivious to all the people around her, men and women, watching. She takes it into her mouth, bites off the end, slowly, and chews it slowly, eyes downcast. And another bite, consumed the same way, still standing, performing for an audience, not performing, as Karen takes a picture. And she eats it so naturally, so innocently, but slowly, performing, that the effect is even more suggestive than if she'd tried to be. I don't fucking believe it. I don't fucking believe it. Who is this woman? She glides over by me, exchanges words with Karen. She's standing to the right of where I sit, a VIP pass hanging from her waistband. The last name is a new one to me, not the same as her daughter's either, prompting an inquiry, and an explanation so convoluted she loses me, can't figure out if it's an ex-husband or what. I put my hand between her legs from behind, holding lightly the muscles above her left knee. I ask if she wants to go out, join the crowd, walk around. She stands, trancelike, looking off into the distance, for a very long time. I...don't...know...what...I want to do, she says, voice weak, almost disembodied, and I recognize for the first time this state I've seen before, when I said something slightly provocative. It occurs to me I'm tapping into some deep consciousness, some feelings I evoke, that confuse her. Feelings concerning me. But that's mere suspicion. She wanders off into the crowd alone, with her camera, leaving me with Karen. The sports drink guy tries to talk to her without much success, he keeps trying, asks what she does. School teacher. Dead air. Oh, he says, you're smart as well as beautiful. He wins her over with the hollow compliment. His daughter's a teacher, has problems with admin staff, he says, and Karen takes off on another monolog, complaining about the idiots she must tolerate, one in particular. She's a stupid fucking cow who should die, she says, sitting ladylike, knees crossed just so, hands clasped in lap, wearing the perpetual smirk. She reveals, and I still can't figure how she works this in, that she has an IQ of 145, apparently confident that this places her well beyond her present company. Mine happens to be within a point of hers, don't say so of course, but I'm thinking even I, an inveterate showoff, have never dropped my score on anyone, except, perhaps, my wife, and I'm not sure of that. And she's holding forth, the princess performing for inferiors, the sports drink man absorbing it with a twinkle of irony, but she doesn't notice, and the hard lawyer from New York sits there, looking as if he's thinking what I'm thinking, I don't fucking believe it. After excusing myself, heading to the network of tents where wine and food are available, crafts and the like, I try to avoid Michelle when I see her from time to time, don't want her thinking I'm following her around. She's taking it all in, seems detached, takes pictures, I think she might want to be a photographer. She's scrutinizing the crowd, in fact, just as I do when covering an event, and I'm thinking what fun we could have, especially since one of my web properties is ideal for party coverage, society page about the wine country, and we could go anywhere, meet anyone, and we'd be a great-looking couple, and I know it will never happen. My oldest friend does sound for the event, I discover, join him in the booth. He'd been a roadie for big names for thirty years, traveled Europe, made the most of the perks, especially the groupies who had to give him blow jobs before getting backstage. We smoke cannabis, watch the show, I circulate some more, work on some women I know, but don't see Michelle again until a few days later at the stables. I'm telling her how the attempt to embarrass me worked better than she knew, how the security people overheard her, waited until they saw me alone, away from the crowds, and arrested me for crashing the party. The ticket price was sufficiently high that I was facing felony theft charges, and the DA and the winery owner intended to make an example of me. She's sitting at one end of the picnic table, facing outward, I'm at the other end canted in her direction, relating the story in a tone of resignation. Spent a night in jail, car impounded, laptop stolen from the trunk, already out two, three thousand dollars, and that was before the check for five grand I had to write to my lawyer that very morning. Even if I beat this, I'm out ten thousand dollars. Why didn't you call me? she squeeks in a quavering voice. Because you wouldn't have answered, I don't say. Michelle looks at the ground, head down, her legs extended out, she's rubbing her hands together nervously, she can't talk, can't even say Sorry, and her lips are scrunched together, jaw beginning to quiver, and I'm afraid she might cry. Don't worry, I say, it'll work out. I'm just joking. She looks at me, lips slightly parted, it takes a split second for her to speak, and she says, Oh, God, I felt so bad. Well, you should feel bad, I say. Why did you do that? I was so drunk...I was drinking wine the whole time before you got there. I don't know... So what did you end up doing? I ask, changing the subject before she can get angry at me. Have fun? Oh, yeah, it was great, she says. I listened to the music with Karen, and then, afterwards, we got to go backstage, and hang out with the band. I had so much fun. And I was so happy I didn't go home with anyone afterward. Roaring in head, a whirlpool at my core sucks me into a cold abyss, I can't see, I black out mentally. I don't remember anything else about that conversation or that day. This woman first encountered two weeks ago at Steiner's bears no resemblance to Michelle. She's one of the finest women I've ever met, I'm thinking, and this other woman, this mischievous sex kitten, does not fit. I'm pacing and smoking and drinking in the barn on the mountain in the dimness, candle flames dancing to the distant bay breeze coming through the open windows. I don't think any less of her, can't say I'm disillusioned. I knew the woman had a past, suspected she was at war with it, but seeing it come to life before my eyes leaves me dumbfounded, wondering what I feel for her, wondering who the hell Michelle really is. The woman I observed at the stables works hard, she's wholesome, honest, forthright. And even though there was nothing overtly sexy about her, I caught a trace of it that first night at her house working on the web site. I tried to convince her we should go to the roadhouse up the highway for dinner, but she thought it too upscale. Just change your shirt, I said, and you'll be fine. You'd like that, huh? she said. Want me to change it here? She started to pull the bottom of her t-shirt up, as if to expose her breasts, so out of character, it caught me by surprise. Whatever, I said, thinking little of it at the time, but she betrayed that glint in her eye so evident recently, and a flash of manic grin. I registered the anomaly, and dismissed it. It stuck, however, in the recesses of my consciousness, dredged up anew with other inconsistencies. Michelle mentioned the occasional nights out with her sister and Annie, the woman with the black Jag, and, on occasion, Bruce. I'd questioned them to myself, especially since she'd begun to complain that Annie got moody because she didn't attract the men, felt sorry for herself. Though I saw her seldom, I detested the woman as an ungrateful bimbo, cruising for men even though she seemed to have a generous sugar daddy. And Karen, the disdainful sister who took such pleasure in making men squirm, specifically those interested in Michelle, the bait they used and resented. Bruce was something else altogether, a desperate cuckold encouraging his good friend to do to some other man what hurt him so badly. For a woman who couldn't handle the unwanted attentions of men, she surrounded herself with toxic companions determined to enmesh her in messy situations. The original friends who preclude the need for enemies. Before, when she alluded to these outings, they came to me as words, Went out with friends last night, and now, pacing and smoking and drinking, the imagery flows forth, an endless series of vignettes of Michelle at Steiner's, flirting innocently, in her mind, anyway, and exciting the lust of strangers. Bait, catch, release. Bait, catch, release. Bait, catch, release. A new memory surfaces, months old, talking about drinking, Michelle says, I just have a glass or two of wine, get a little flirtatious, and then fall asleep. Delivered in that voice. No problems there, I thought at the time, the words still fresh in the air. And I try to square all this with those other images, of that admirable, no-bullshit woman at the stables, the wounded celibate, and they're different people. At the stables, Michelle wears a work mask, a face of such tight-jawed determination that she squeezes much of her prettiness away. But one day, I gave her a bicycle, one of many I had to dispose of, and she rode it in a big loop up and around some of the paddocks, and down a little rise in my direction. Michelle spread her legs out from the pedals, yelling Yahoo! little-girl like, with an expression of pure joy and a beauty I'd never seen before. Not unlike that picture of her with Lucy that we put on the web site. That she feared might attract stalkers? God, I remember thinking, that's how I want to see you, that's why I want to see you succeed somehow, just so you can be yourself and have fun without worrying about money and cranky partners and those inner demons, whoever they are. The current realizaton that she could evoke that same elation with a few drinks and the leering of barflies renders me numb. Damn, she's hot, though, and I'm thinking, again, I want to connect with her more than ever. She has that nurturing, affectionate quality she so seldom shows toward me, and now I see one of the most naturally sexy women I've ever observed, childlike innocent and savvy siren all in one. God, we could have fun together, I'm thinking, and if anyone could help her indulge that wild side without catastrophe, it's me. And I'm thinking about that person I met that first night at the winery, the person she met that night at the winery, and she doesn't really know me, either. My natural demeanor is that of a hoodlum-turned-swaggering paratrooper sergeant. I have so many guises, people don't recognize me or my behavior from one venue to another. But I am always the same person under the skin. Considering that, I'm thinking, should I be surprised that Michelle has her own different roles? No, but the person seems to change with the costume, and that's what puzzles me. But I'm thinking of me again, thinking that aside from packaging myself to avoid profanity, to speak more slowly, to be less animated, to watch my posture, movements around her, all these elements of seduction, something else happened. I tried genuinely to behave as well toward her as I could. I avoided any negativity, let alone criticism, because I suspected she heard enough in her world as it was. I went out of my way to tell her how capable she is, how much I admired her, because I don't think she gets enough praise. I always try to be a gentleman, but I never felt it was more important than with her. If only for my sake, because I never want to associate anything sordid with her, never want to cloud this relationship, whatever kind of relationship it is, with anything selfish or petty if I can help it. Thinking of her, I consider the pains she takes to remain distant one day, the intimacies she shares the next. And wonder if she, too, was performing for me. But to what purpose? The extremes we navigate day to day, strangers in the morning, close friends by afternoon, strangers again the next time I see her. It's unlike any relationship I've ever experienced or observed, the willful smothering of friendship even as we mutually pursue it, for over six months. There's nothing natural about it, how she reaches out, pulls back, and the better I think it went on any given occasion, the greater the backlash I come to expect. But the more I learn of her, the more sense it makes, even if it makes no sense at all. She told me she was a simple country girl, loved the music, and I never hear country-western played at the stables. Bringing the half-dozen books to show me, when we weren't talking about books. The denial that the Coyote Ugly Bar was her fantasy, but Karen's. The non-invitation invitations, the snubs at Steiner's, the attempt to embarrass me at the concert. I'm pacing and smoking and drinking, and Bizet is playing on the stereo, remembering the incident at the concert, the elaborate lies invented about the arrest that never happened, an act, I wonder, of deliberate cruelty? No, I stopped before I took it too far--I hope so, anyway--but I had to do something. Whatever else she did, she could not make sport of me like that, and I needed to stifle the impulse. I still don't feel any better about it, the look of distress on her face, the idea I went out of my way to inflict a hurt on her, deliberately, whatever the rationale. The quivering jaw, the struggle not to cry. She couldn't help herself, I think, a phrase I'm repeating to myself with ever greater frequency. And I'm thinking it's already happening, the more she begins to feel for me, the more she counteracts it with some discouragement, and what disaster might that lead to should I make real progress, what defeats will I suffer after every transient victory? Something else is emerging, and I'm breathing hard, and pacing faster, inchoate thought surfacing, revealing itself. I smoke some cannabis, and pace some more, and try to organize my thoughts, try to set this one loose. I think I've got it. The kind of maverick men who attract Michelle hurt her, and I strike the spark that led her into the arms of every guy who ever disappointed her. Thus the safe, reliable boyfriend, a man who can provide a certain security, but nothing else, certainly not a spark. I'm just the man she's looking for, and she's going to deny me with all her being. A comforting delusion, even if I am wrong, a terrifying fact, if correct. I cannot win. Winning is not the point, though, and it's not about me anymore, what I want out of this. I've become devoted to Michelle's well-being, I cannot avoid it, and I make consciously the pledge I already felt. I'll do whatever I can for her, regardless of my prospects, I intend to be the best friend she ever had, if she gives me the chance. If one day we should become lovers, I'll be ecstatic, but I'm willing to accept whatever happens, with as much grace and fortitude as I can marshal. The sentiment makes me feel good, even noble, a first for me, a commitment to a platonic affection, and the glow darkens before it can be fully realized in the knowledge that it bodes more misery than gratification. The knowledge that every hurt she suffers will hurt me, the knowledge that she'll hurt me, to avoid the risk, of falling for me. This woman is a heart breaker. But I can take this, I think, I have no choice now, and I feel the stab of pain, the first reminder of the last time I made such a pledge. Unknown, to Tricia, she does not know now, I articulated the same interior dialog a month into our affair. It was all so right, the perfect courtship, a reasonable arc, lovers a month from meeting, no false barriers, we were willing to surrender to each other right on schedule. That was when she told me about her most beloved brother's small brain tumor, benign, he would be fine, and I wanted to vomit on the spot. I knew he was a dead man, I knew it would crush her with grief, and I knew I'd feel a pain through her I could never know on my own. Later that night, alone, I paced and smoked and drank and wept, and I didn't want to go through this, didn't trust myself to stick by her, didn't think I could take it. And made the pledge. I could take it, whatever it was. For her. It took six long months, it devastated Tricia, it corrupted her family, all nothing compared to what it did to me. I knew ahead of time the desolation, the torments, I lost sleep over it before they had an inkling. As bad as I feared, worse than I imagined, the cancer finally killed him almost a year to the day after it killed my sister. After six long months. Michelle's going to Mexico in a few days, one of the last lessons before departure. She's sitting in the corner on the step stool, I'm riding around the arena on Schmidt. She doesn't want me to house sit anymore, I saw that coming, and she reveals she's not going with her boyfriend, but rather a bunch of girlfriends. Reassuring, but scary; no romantic evenings with him, but what about that beach, those sunsets, those guys, whomever they turn out to be. And Michelle, a drink or two, flirting, and that phrase in my mind, delivered in that little helpless voice, as if it explained everything, I got so drunk... Oh, my God, who is this woman? Oh, my God. Somehow, we end up discussing the art of conversation, and she's describing how people ask you about something so they can set themselves up to talk about what they want, or interrupt your story to talk about themselves, she covers the whole gamut of dialog, and I'm thinking how perceptive she is, that she thinks about these things, and how she could be talking about me. I concede that I'm guilty of the sins outlined, and she says, No, you really listen. And she's right, there's no one in the world right now I try to hear more than Michelle, but I'm surprised she noticed, and gratified she so obviously thinks about me. As always, however, I'm distracted talking to her because of the shocks she's lately taken to inflicting on me without knowing, my desire to anticipate them, the ongoing effort to figure her out, divine a response, second by second, in her presence. So I have no idea how Karen came up, perhaps the very topic of conversation, maybe I said she was tough, and I mention to Michelle her IQ. I didn't even know that, she says, adding a comment of self-deprecation. You're alot smarter than you think, I tell her, no reply. After the lesson's over, and I'm leading Schmidt back to his stall, I note the shift in my perceptions, so many I can't keep track of them, when I note another one, small compared to meeting barfly Michelle, but significant. Her strength and independence and confidence appealed to me those first months, I'm not looking for anyone to take care of, to rescue, and I took to praising her for my sake, part of making her feel good about me, without any sense that she needed it. In our months together, though, I detect a certain self-doubt, a lack of self-esteem, even before she starts opening up, and I hate it. She's so much better than she knows, I think, and I'm desperate for her to know that, but the back and forth in our relationship, the constant need to start over again, reestablish intimacy every time I see her, makes it difficult. I can't say certain things to the stranger I keep running into, and don't have enough opportunities to express them to the intimate friend who keeps disappearing. Every time she gets together with her boyfriend they seem to fight, she has cash flow problems, and things always go wrong at the stables, something breaking down, someone not showing up to work. I see her swamped by the accretion of minor disasters, dragging her under, and as hard as she tries not to complain, Michelle shares the occasional lament, feelings of defeat. You're doing great, Michelle, I once told her. You've got a big job, you're keeping it all together. You're living the dream. You're making a living doing what you want, you live in a house in a vineyard, people all over the world would envy you. You're just doing what you have to do until the clinic gets built. It'll all work out. The discovery that her self-esteeem to some extent depends on getting drunk and being lusted after by drunks, all the obvious psychological implications, the boring father-figure boyfriend she can't please, the family history she can't overcome, and I worry that it won't work out for her at all. And I can't rescue her from herself, I don't want to, I can't change her, I don't want to, and all I can think to do is be there for her if she needs it, and this isn't what I had in mind at all when I saw that girl at the party at the winery. It doesn't matter, I've committed myself to her in some way still to be defined, I can deal with this. And she makes me wonder all over again. The day before she leaves for Mexico, Annie's out there, she's going too, and they're talking by the picnic table as I come and go, getting ready to ride, when I overhear this snippet from Michelle. For my benefit? All I want, she says, is a tattoed cowboy in a battered pickup truck. Jesus Fucking Christ, I think, that's her problem, stuck on some teenage country-western-song fantasy, and cowboys were losers anyway, the bullies who shot up towns, and molested the women, and that's why my earliest role model, at age five, was Wyatt Earp, who, very much against his inclinations, made his reputation shooting the stupid bastards when they didn't behave. And because I'm not a dumbass cowboy, I'm so much more, and even though I've done riding and round-ups the likes of which most cowboys have never seen, I'm not going to fucking count because I'm not just a loser fucking cowboy, and I'm trying not to shake my head visibly as I walk off. But not before I hear Annie's response. Not me, she says, I want a guy in a Mercedes. But I would sleep with the cowboy. I just wouldn't want a relationship with him. Jesus Fucking Christ, I'm thinking, and I hope you all have fun in Mexico together. Michelle and I do a lesson, and since we're having lunch afterwards, she arranges for Annie to pick up her daughter at school and meet us at the deli in an hour. We all show up, eventually, and while we're eating Annie's talking about various things, working in something about smoking dope and going driving, with a wink in the direction of Michelle's daughter. And the daughter gets a newspaper to show Michelle a picture of a highschool football player who made the news, a boy she has a crush on, and Annie says, with a knowing look, Boy crazy. Like mother, like daughter, and I want to smack her, though I've never hit a woman, but I'm thinking about it now. She's talking about the plastic surgery she wants one of these days, wants the wattle removed from under her chin, and then's she's showing off the huge, diamond-studded ring her sugar daddy bought for her upcoming birthday. At which point I tell the story about a bunch of rings we couldn't find after my mother died, and how, one day, while taking apart a table before moving it, my sisters found in the base a plastic container with the rings inside. And how, before I could open my mouth, they greedily divied them up, the biggest and flashiest of them, in a matter of seconds, and I was speechless, and they came upon one modest little engagement ring, with a one-caret diamond, and offered it to me, for my wife perhaps. I accepted, speechless on purpose now, neglecting to tell them what I'd intended to say at the outset. All the rings were cubic zirconia, except for the one they gave to me, an old San Francisco heirloom, given to my mother by the destitute old lady she let live with our family, a dying woman determined to live until I was born, who gave up the ghost the night before. Who turned out to have a treasure chest of jewelry stashed under the bed, all left to our family, and later stolen. Except for that ring, This is no cubic zirconia, Annie says. Steve knows I'll have it appraised, and he'll get the bill. For once I'm eager to leave from a lunch shared with Michelle, and before I go she hugs me good-bye, asks if there's anything I want from Mexico, and I tell her a bottle of Damiana, a liqueur with alleged narcotic qualities of an aphrodisiac nature, but I don't tell her this as I write the name down, and I don't expect anything to come of it. I'm thinking, instead, This is hopeless. Run! Run! Run! But I can't. I'm committed. And I say to her, my last words of good-bye, Hey, don't get drunk and end up in a show-us-your-tits video. Oh, right, she says.