Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

“Somebody here has a rich fantasy life.”

“You held her in your arms. You pressed your fingers into the spaces between each vertebra.”

She pressed Stein’s fingers into her hand. “You’ve never come on to me. Do you know how incredibly sexy that is?” She tugged on the sleeves of his blue work shirt. “Lift your arms.”

He bowed obediently, not sure if he was about to be stroked or beheaded.

“What are we doing?” he whispered.

Her fingertips pressed so gently against his temples that he was not sure whether he was being touched or merely wishing to be touched. “This is called L’ang Pao Tong. It means ‘Caress of Butterfly Wings.’” Sensation shot through all of his nerve endings. She pinched his earlobes between her fingernails. He cried out in surprise. “There are no barriers between our thoughts, Klein. You had her right on the floor, didn’t you? Tell me what she looked like naked. Put me there with you alongside her.”

“Did you just call me Klein?”

She unwrapped the fabric tied round her waist, and her skirt was no more. She wore nothing underneath. Her legs were long and slender. She had a small tuft that looked like the brow over one modestly averted eye.

“Tell me how it felt to be inside her,” she breathed. “Was she soft like dandelions?” She laced her fingers behind Stein’s neck and brought him closer to her.

“You’re using me as your sexual surrogate.”

“And what would be the downside of that?”

“You want to use my body as a vehicle to have virtual sex through a character you invented with a woman you think I had intercourse with after she was dead.”

“Too intimate?”

“I wouldn’t know who I was making love to.”

“It’s never who we think it is anyway.”

Her soft, supple skin, her desire for him, the scent of the sage, his exhaustion all wove an erotic blanket that snuffed out the fire of reason. He brought her to him. He felt a jolt of electricity as her nipples pressed into the flesh of his chest. From across the courtyard Watson began barking like a hoarse, frail lunatic. Stein catapulted himself from the embrace and ran outside, tucking his shirt into his pants as he stumbled out of her apartment.

Which is what Lila saw from Stein’s front steps.

I T WAS HOT as a Gila in heat in the desert, but it was frigid in Lila’s Acura even without the air conditioning. She had stared straight ahead for seventy-seven miles without speaking, without needing to pee, without yielding to Stein’s repertoire of annoying pranks, which in the past had succeeded in extracting her from the periodic funks into which she was prone to fall.

Earlier that day, fearful that Stein might leave for the desert without her if she were late, Lila had gotten a quick trim and set but had foregone her manicure, had dressed with what for her was wild haste, had the gas tank filled, the oil level and air pressure checked, and arrived at Stein’s apartment fifteen minutes early. On the way over she had telephoned from the car and gotten his machine, which intensified her anxiety. She was overwrought when she arrived and did not notice that his car was parked across the street. She had knocked and rung the bell and gotten no response but for Watson’s disoriented barking.

She did not knock at Penelope Kim’s door. Lila had made clear to Stein that she was not as big a fan of Penelope as he was. What Stein perceived as Penelope’s loopy mysticism, Lila viewed as lazy, magical thinking. Where Stein saw non-judgmental, all-accepting youthful exuberance, Lila saw an immature lack of awareness. And Lila also thought that Stein’s tacit approval of Penelope’s hedonistic lifestyle sent the wrong message to Angie at an impressionable age.

Stein had to laugh when he saw the look on Lila’s face as he stumbled across the courtyard pulling his pants on. “I almost wish it were what you’re thinking,” Stein said. She had slapped her car keys into his hand without looking at him, uttered her only two words for the next hundred miles. “You drive.” Ninety minutes later he pulled into a rest area that contained a string of twenty luxury clothing outlet stores, cut the engine and reached for her hand. “We’re not married, Lyle. I don’t want you to be miserable. We don’t have to prove we can endure an ordeal. Let’s just go back. Or you can leave me here. I’ll get a cab.”

Lila refused to respond. He backed up to turn the car around.

“I thought you had to see somebody.”

“It’s really not worth your being so unhappy.”

“You can fuck whoever you want to,” she snapped.

“That’s not entirely true in practice, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

“I don’t hear you denying it.”

“I would, if I thought it would help.”

“It would, if I thought you were being honest.”

He turned the engine on so the air conditioner would work. “She’s working on a script and she likes to pick my brain.”

“Well, that makes more sense than her being physically attracted to you.”

Stein felt that she was mollified and that the siege had lightened. “I’m just speaking hypothetically,” he said, “but some young women do like older men.”

“Older rich men, Stein.”

“You think money is the only attraction?”

“No, I’m sure that flaccid skin, diminished sex drive, and increased risk of prostate cancer are all major turn-ons.”

Stein extended his arms to her and she allowed her head to be coaxed onto his shoulder.

“Just explain what our relationship is,” she lamented. “We’re not lovers anymore. We’re not colleagues. We’re not business associates. We’re not related. We’re not clients. What the hell are we?”

“What about flovers?” Stein offered.

“Flovers?”

“Friends-Who-Used-To-Be-Lovers.”

“Are we not the two most pathetic beings on the planet?”

“We’re up there.”

“T HERE IT IS.” He looked down and sighed. Palm Springs lay before them, wedged into the mountain pass like a tracheal tumor. It represented to Stein everything that was wrong with America. Conspicuous consumption. Privilege and entitlement. Start with the name. Palm Springs. You had to say it in Italics. Like everything else liquid and verdant sounding around Los Angeles, it was a lie. The Palms were imported from Florida. And the Springs? Without the trillions of gallons of water it plundered from the Colorado River it would rank among the six most inhospitable climates on the planet. The theoretical temperature/misery index stayed consistently above one-seventy for eight months out of the year, and with an annual rainfall of less than an inch, its natural ecology supported but two indigenous creatures: the red-rimmed scorpion and a leafless, rootless, anaerobic cousin of sagebrush. Yet the median value of a home was upwards of three million dollars and it boasted more banks, more large American cars, and more golf courses per capita than any other metropolis in the world save that other bastion of democratic ideals, Kuwait City.

Lila’s mood had vastly improved. “I like it,” she smiled. They drove slowly through the commercial main strip of town, passing a succession of restaurants, pottery shops and real estate offices. “Don’t take this as a criticism,” she said, “but you never actually told me why we’re here.”

“It’s a surprise. I’m going to make up for all the times I’ve ever disappointed you.”

“We’re staying all month?”

He slowed down as they approached a beauty shop where a crowd was waiting to get in. But it wasn’t the name he remembered. “I’m looking for a beauty shop called Pavanne,” he said. “Have you heard of it?”

“Have I heard of it? Is that some kind of joke? Stein, I have told you about it a hundred times. It’s where all of my pampered, trust fund girlfriends go.”