Curious Wine (9 page)

As she got out of the car she reminded herself with a trace of self-pity that she had been a long time without sex, nearly two months.

She waited until she was almost across the parking lot to admit the pleasure of the night before. She had not wanted the night to end; she had loved Lane’s touch; and much of her pleasure had been savoring the knowledge that Lane had enjoyed her mouth, her arms, her body.

It was different. That was all, she told herself. She had had more wine than usual—but with satisfaction she considered that neither she nor Lane had made the easy, dishonest suggestion that wine had contributed to their night together. Deep emotion had surfaced in both of them from the encounter games. And Lane had protected her from that cruel, pathetic, drunken woman. And she liked Lane, liked her very much.

She walked into Harrah’s uncomfortable with her last thought. She knew that
like
was not precisely what she felt for Lane.

Across the street at Harvey’s she found Vivian, bleary-eyed, dispiritedly pulling the handle of a dollar slot machine.

“How’s it going, Viv?” Diana’s spirits rose at the sight of her. The world seemed suddenly more normal.

“Terrible. John gave me another hundred and practically ordered me to make it last.” She added with a crafty grin, “Till Vivian can get him back in bed.”

Diana laughed. “Dollar slot machines aren’t recommended for making your money last, you know.” She gazed at Vivian with affection.

“I know, I know. But maybe I’ll hit something. If not, I’ll just go up to the room and sleep. I could use some.” She dropped another dollar into her machine. “Diana dear, Vivian needs a favor. You can do it for me. Will you?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Call Fred at the office and tell him you want one more day off. You know it won’t be any problem. They love us to take vacation this time of year instead of summer when everybody wants to go. I want to stay another day. Say yes, Diana.”

She considered quickly. This meant that they would leave Thursday. Lane would be leaving Wednesday anyway.

Vivian said, “I know Liz won’t mind having you stay another day. If you don’t want to stay there I’ll pay for a motel. At least I think I will.” She looked balefully at her machine.

“I love the cabin,” Diana said. “I’m sure Liz won’t mind, either.” She knew Liz would welcome a chance to atone for her behavior.

“You’ll stay?”

“Sure. What are friends for?”

“You’re a dear. I’ll take you to breakfast.”

“I’ve had breakfast.”

“Stupid me. I forgot those fabulous ranch-hand breakfasts Liz whips up. I wish George hadn’t ruined everything. It was wonderful when the two of them were together.”

“So I gather,” Diana said drily.

Three symbols settled across the center of Vivian’s slot machine. Diana jumped as Vivian shrieked. The machine lit up and began to ring.

“Three hundred dollars!” Vivian screamed, pointing, her hand trembling. Nearby players regarded her with expressions that ranged from amused smiles to sour-faced resentment. Vivian grabbed Diana and hugged her. “You’re my good luck charm! Oh what a great day it’s going to be!”

Diana laughed as Vivian again hugged her ecstatically. She helped collect Vivian’s winnings as they clattered into the metal tray, the machine ringing interminably. They went off arm in arm to the change booth carrying paper cups full of silver dollars.

Diana, in a pay phone in Harrah’s, hung up from her call to Los Angeles. As Vivian had predicted, Fred McPherson had told her in his dry tired voice, “Sure, Diana, no problem. See you Friday.”

She watched a girl with lustrous dark hair stroll by her phone booth. She leaned back and closed her eyes and remembered Lane’s face against hers, Lane’s fingers stroking her hair as if she would never tire of the texture, drawing Diana’s hair across her face, bathing her face in it. Diana had shifted her body to lean on her elbows, to brush her hair over Lane’s face, her throat. “Yes,” Lane had whispered, the only word spoken between them during the night. With Lane’s arms around her, she had endlessly brushed and caressed Lane with her hair; and when Lane’s arms finally released her, Lane had brushed Diana’s face with her own hair: soft, perfumed silkiness caressing Diana’s eyelids, her throat. Then Lane’s mouth had come to hers.

Abruptly, Diana opened the phone booth door and walked into the casino. She paced the length of Harrah’s several times, wanting to exercise, use her body. She selected a blackjack table.

“How’s your luck running?” she asked the dealer. She had discovered that most dealers answered this question readily.

“Not too bad. Make yourself comfortable.” The dealer was young and pretty, a cool-looking brunette with hornrimmed glasses and a nametag that said Karla.

“How’s the winter been?” Diana asked sociably, placing a two dollar bet.

“Depends. How high do you like your snow?”

Diana laughed. She and the dealer chatted amicably but intermittently. Diana occupied her mind with gambling.

Her cards ran in patterns — mediocre, or for streaks of eight to ten hands, very good. She played carefully, with concentration, betting her good cards more aggressively than usual. She ran into a series of bad cards, lost six hands in a row. “I’ll sit out a round,” she told the dealer.

She flexed tight muscles in her shoulders and glanced around and saw a young man and an attractive blonde walking slowly by, heads close together, holding hands.

She remembered holding Lane’s face in her hands, kissing her; Lane’s hands covering hers, taking Diana’s hands from her face to kiss her fingers, her palms, inside her wrists. Then Lane had held her hands, their fingers intertwined and caressing, her mouth on Diana’s in sweet, slow tenderness.

“You in yet?” the dealer asked.

“I guess,” Diana said, pushing two silver dollars into the betting square.

“You looked a million miles away.”

“Thanks a lot for bringing me back,” Diana said wryly. “You just dealt me another fifteen.”

“Sorry. Wherever you were, you looked like it was pretty pleasant, too.”

“Mmm,” Diana said, smiling, signaling for a card.

“There,” the dealer said, giving her a four. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Is it high enough?” The dealer’s upcard was a queen.

The dealer shrugged noncommittally and turned to the player next to Diana, an elderly man smoking a cigar and drinking a vile-looking green concoction. “I get a million miles away, myself,” the dealer said. “The customers’d choke if they knew what I think about sometimes.”

Diana chuckled, and there was laughter from around the table. The dealer turned over a six and hit her sixteen with a four. “Oops,” she said.

Diana picked up her money. “You’re getting a little warm. See you later, maybe.”

She was having lunch with Vivian when it occurred to her that Lane must also be struggling to understand the previous night. With growing dismay, Diana remembered that she had put an arm around Lane twice when they had looked at the stars; Lane had not touched her. And the next morning she had told Lane she was beautiful. In dawning horror she realized that Lane might think that she was actually a—she swallowed over the word—lesbian. Or bisexual, more accurately. She was suddenly grateful to Liz for exposing her relationship with Jack.

“Are you listening to me?” demanded Vivian.

“Of course. You were talking about your jackpot and how clever you were to hit it.”

“You cynic.” Vivian chuckled. “You’re being awfully quiet, even for you.”

Diana smiled. “You talk enough for both of us.”

As Vivian resumed her chatter, Diana decided that it was futile to torment herself with speculation. Her night with

Lane belonged in the category of just one of those things, and tonight Lane would know that as a certainty.

Vivian said, “Why don’t you stay in town and celebrate with John and Vivian tonight?”

“Liz is expecting me.”

“Oh, she won’t mind. She knows how easy it is to get hung up on gambling.”

“I can’t tonight,” Diana said firmly. She knew her absence would be misinterpreted by Liz; and there was another, more compelling reason for returning to the cabin. After a day with her thoughts she wanted to confront her feelings in the presence of Lane and further diminish them, to assign a final unimportance.

“What about tomorrow then? John and I want to take you somewhere special.”

“Tomorrow’s just fine.”

At the end of the day Diana was slightly over one hundred and fifty dollars ahead. Just before seven, she returned to the cabin.

Chapter 7

Liz said, “Everyone’s agreed to let me take them out to dinner. I hope you will too, Diana. We’ll go into town, get rid of our cabin fever.”

“Sure Liz, I’d love to,” Diana said, her eyes searching for Lane.

The women were all dressed for dinner in pants and blouses and sweaters; Lane, sitting on the sofa with her feet tucked up under her, wore black pants with a belt of small gold links, a white silk blouse fastened at the throat by a thin silk cord, and tiny gold earrings.

Their eyes met. Lane smiled. Diana smiled in return, and looked away from her, stunned by her beauty. Flustered, she walked into the kitchen, nonplussed by her rapid pulse, a sinking sensation, a feeling of weakness.

Liz followed her. “Pour you some wine? Or how about some vodka?”

“No, I’ll just get a glass of water,” she murmured. She drank icy cold water slowly, and calmed herself by relating the story of Vivian’s jackpot, mentioning also Vivian’s request that she stay another day. As she expected, Liz insisted that she remain at the cabin.

She joined the group in the living room, talked again about Vivian’s jackpot, her own success at the tables. She said to Liz, “You really ought to let me take everybody on my winnings.”

“No way,” Liz stated.

“You can lose it back just as easily,” Chris said.

“I shouldn’t do worse than break even now,” Diana said. “Maybe I should take up gambling,” Lane said.

“You?” Madge scoffed.

“Me. Why not?”

“Gambling just doesn’t go with that ironclad self-discipline of yours.”

“You make me sound perfectly dull,” Lane observed in a dispassionate voice.

“I could teach you blackjack, it’s the only game I know anything about,” Diana said, thinking with an emotion close to amusement that from now on she would have to dress her favorite male fantasy figure in something other than a white silk shirt. She excused herself to change clothes.

She selected green pants and a white cashmere sweater; the soft sweater felt unusually sensual on her skin, especially at the top of her breasts above her bra. She saw Lane’s pajamas hanging from a hook in the closet, faint discolorations across the shoulders.

They got into Liz’s station wagon, Diana climbing in first, wanting Lane to decide where she would sit. But Liz said, “Lane, sit up here with me.”

As the station wagon descended the mountain road, Liz said in a low voice, “It’s so lovely here in the summer too, the streams and wildlife. You just get your groceries and stay in the beautiful mountains, away from all the carloads of tourists.”

Madge said, “They’ve been talking about protecting this area for years. Too much politics involved if you want my opinion. Nevada needs money too badly.”

“I work with all the groups trying to protect the area,” Liz said. “George and I were here when nothing else was and we’ve seen all the ugliness come.” Liz peered over her steering wheel up at the sky. “Could be some snow tonight. Sky looks bad.”

Diana murmured, “ ‘The Sky is low—the Clouds are mean’ ”

Chris said something Diana did not hear; Lane had turned around, and with her chin resting on her arm she looked back at Diana with a slowly deepening smile that pierced her with its loveliness and intimacy.

They had dinner in the Sage Room at Harvey’s. “I’ve been coming here for twenty years and the food is consistently some of the best at the Lake. Not many things in this life are consistent for twenty years,” Liz said.

“True,” Lane said. “And there’s no awareness of a casino, all that noise just a few feet away.”

Lane sat next to Liz; Diana was across from her. Lane seemed relaxed, casual. She sipped occasionally from a vodka and tonic.

Liz said to Lane, “Madge tells me your dad was a lawyer. You catch the law bug from him?”

“Yes. To begin with. There are aspects of it that totally fascinate me.” As the women looked at her expectantly, Lane continued, “It’s so convoluted, so fluid, so flexible. It’s the opposite of mathematics. It’s logical, but there’s nothing precise or exact about it. It’s like water filling up a container and conforming to fit the shape of the container.”

“I’m not sure I understand all that but it doesn’t matter,” Liz said. “You’re so sharp and good-looking I know damn well you have to beat the men off. You deliberately avoiding marriage?”

“Liz,” Chris protested, “that’s a very personal question.”

“It’s all right.” Lane shrugged. “No, I’m not avoiding marriage.”

“What the hell are you looking for?”

“Mister Right,” Lane said mockingly.

“What’s Mister Right like?” Liz persisted.

Diana expected another facetious response, but Lane answered seriously, “Someone I don’t dominate. I seem to always end up dominating my male relationships.”

Liz gazed at her levelly, with frank appraisal. “I really admire you. You’re one steel-strong lady. But I’d sure think twice about taking you on if I were a man, I don’t care how good-looking you are. I bet there’s a few sadder but wiser male bodies lying around San Francisco.”

Lane smiled thinly. “I’m afraid so.”

Liz turned to Diana with a grin. “You still think she’s gentle and sensitive?”

In a flash of memory Diana thought of Lane’s mouth leaving hers to tenderly touch her eyes, under her eyes; her tongue stroking warmly, gently, slowly down her cheeks, washing the traces of tears from her face; Lane’s mouth coming back to hers, the taste of salt on her lips, and as Lane’s lips parted, the taste of salt on her tongue.

“Yes,” Diana said.