Adriane: The Chaos of Desire

She loved Mickey’s apartment even though it was a hovel. It was small and the bathroom floor sagged so badly the toilet rocked whenever she sat on it. The whole place smelled of mildew because the roof leaked. His bed was in the back room… a dark cave. The only natural light in the place was where, by the window, he sat at his desk typing on “the ole Remington”, his antique manual typewriter. Most times, when she visited, she had to clear a spot on his couch of the pages and pages of his writings. Fondly remembering, she thought of him as the only intelligent American she had met in this country that resembled Gotson. He had some idea of what she was trying to do with her paintings. Most people, like her brother Robert, when they find out she is a painter, ask her, “Do you sell any of your paintings?” Or, they ask her, “Do you paint abstract or figurative?” It is a judgment… they don’t like abstract unless it matches the couch… Silliest of all, once they do see one her paintings they ask, “How much time did it take to paint it?”... like it is a job to punch the clock? She just gave her age and let them figure it out.

“Mickey rarely speaks in mundane terms and admires what I do…Homer. He doesn’t try to impress me... he sees it. He is my eccentric American friend.”

“So, is Mickey being a bad boy, Homer?”

 “Eeee-oow,”

“Not telling, eh?” Homer slid up to her ankle and took a full body rub on it. “Homer, I see Mickey is still not drinking?” There were only empty ice-tea bottles on his desk where the beer bottles always had been. She pulled a pile of typewritten papers off the desk and went back to his cave. She giggled and whispered, as if she and Homer had a secret… he followed her, “It is dark in here Homer, do you mind if I turn on a reading lamp?”

She crawled under the covers to read. The first page was about her.

Adriane

Ah, the chaos of desire…

The unrelenting agony… rejected by the body of love as though I am a foreign body, a bad organ, genetically unsuitable for a healthy existence.

I fear most that I’m damned forever in exile from love as though I’ve committed some sort of despicable crime against it in a dream a long time ago. I live where longing unfulfilled gathers by the wind in back alleys Hades like fast food wrappers trapped by swirling eddies in dark dusty corners. This is the life that God seems to be expecting me to accept and this is the fate that I refuse most adamantly… a life without love is no life at all.

These are not the frivolous railings of youth against the lovely chimeras of the day. These are the railings of a man in mid-life wounded beyond his comprehension of where it chooses this or that above him all his fucking life…

Some crime I must have committed some time ago.

The world around my house keeps grinding on our fate towards the turning of dust to dust and ashes to ashes while I cry out… a bison in a drought for one green blade of moist grass to take me into the night nurtured and fed by its promise.

It must have been a crime that I committed in some dream some time ago.

She set the sheet down on the nightstand and wept… cried herself to sleep. If only… if only.

She woke up later to the sound of moaning… a woman’s tittering, coming from the front room. The curtain was pulled on the cave… she couldn’t see out but it was a familiar enough of a sound. Oh, god, she thought, he’d gotten lucky today and it wasn’t me! There is a back door to the cave but it is blocked by one of those small office refrigerators where Mickey once kept his beer. She pondered what it would take to move it but thought better of it. Maybe she’d see what kind of response she might get walking out through the front room to the door.

“Oh, shit, my clothes are on the couch… what am I going to do… walk out in my briefs to the door?” She pulled the covers over her head to decide what the next move would be. When the moaning and grunting stopped, she waited until hearing one, or both, snoring; then crept carefully across the front room. They were splayed out on the floor and her clothes were between the cushions on the couch. Not bothering with her jeans, she put on the top and stepped over Mickey, placing a foot between their heads. Homer stretched out from where he was laying on the desk and jumped down onto the floor to escort her out the door.

She made it to her car. “Mickey had to know I was there because I was parked right next to his funky old van.” Her stomach ached… disturbed by raw emotion. It came from the gut. It was an anguish she never expected. “Hadn’t I always wished that he would find someone to…? Oh, shit, am I jealous?  While they were going at it I longed to be the one in his arms.” This is not something she was used to feeling: “Sobriety sucks.”

She drove by the liquor store… it was automatic, the car turned into the parking lot on its own. Lighting a cigarette, she sat there in her car waiting for 6 a.m., dressed only in a tee-shirt and cotton panties… and finished the smoke, “Oh shit, sure… just to take off the edge. It isn’t like I want heroin… it is just vodka. I will only get a pint and then I will just have one shot and throw out the rest. I haven’t painted since I left. Yes, a shot will do just fine… loosen me up.”

The Iranian clerk eyed her up as she came in the door, “Good morning, Adriane, you are dressed nicely today.”

“Fuck you,” she pointed top the row of pints… “I’ll have that one.”

She took the pint upstairs to her studio and set it down on a shelf by the door. A fresh linen canvas that Mickey had stretched for her stood by the window overlooking the garden. She missed seeing the dogs, Sushi and Tofu, sprawled out on the pavement below. Nick still kept an office at her place but she knew he couldn’t be trusted to take care of the dogs at all so they were boarded when she left for Biarritz. “They can wait one more day.” She wanted some time to think things over without distractions. She smiled thinking of  how both Gotson and Mickey liked cats. Mickey says it is because dogs are too dependent. Gotson agrees, saying that a cat is a natural revolutionary and cannot be trained the way a dog can. She thought Sean and Gotson would get along fine.

Another stream hit her, “There I go again… thinking about him, Sean… everyone calls him Mickey… Sean is his name…, No one calls him that. I once saw his driver’s license… Sean McKee. That’s why they call him Mickey.” She heard herself say it out loud, “Sean… Sean McKee… Mickey… is he a cartoon mouse or an Irish gangster? The fucking Mick! What the fuck… Ooops…. They always say… Pardon my French. My French is good… it is my English where I get these words. Forget the English I was taught in school before coming to America. I learned to speak English from junkies and drunks over here. Mickey says I have the mouth of a sailor.” She opened the pint and took a taste. “He, Mickey, lets me call him Sean. I am the only one I know off…. maybe his family…” She let the vodka wash over her tongue and swallowed no more than a drop or two of it, then went back to the canvas. The brushes were laid out, cleaned before and as she had left them. The tubes of paint were in order too, spread out on the counter that ran the length of the studio. 

Adriane Remembers

Adriane stayed clean on the flight back to L.A. and had begun to feel so much better, drinking only orange juice and coffee… lots of coffee. She had been happy to spend a few months in the big house outside of Biarritz where; besides Gotson, the cook and a house maid, she had the whole property to her self. She rode in the hills above the estate and she basked on the beach of her childhood… the almost private beach below the property of the beach house a couple of miles away from the estate near Biarritz. 

Robert and Mère returned to the house after spending most of that time in Paris taking care of the rest of Pères estate. Much to Robert’s chagrin; Mama eventually stepped in and wrangled control from him, taking over where Papa rarely allowed her to venture since the early years of their marriage. She put all of it in order and made sure Adriane’s stipend was generous enough to live well but held back the rest of her inheritance in a trust of some sort. Mère turned out to be as financially astute as Père. Robert had treated his mother as though she was a financial dolt but now, after all, she assumed the role of the matrone of the estate that Marcel had left to his beloved Annika.

Unknown until then to Robert was that his step-mother, Annika, had been a close associate with Wallraven van Hall, the banker of the Dutch resistance who was only 39 when arrested by the Gestapo and shot in 1945. His personal assistant, Hanneke Lippisch, was an acquaintance but became somewhat of an associate of hers. Their whole purpose during the Occupation was to finance the resistance by bilking whatever could be pilfered from the Nederlandsche Bank. The other more legitimate part of the financing of resistance groups was to borrow money from wealthy Dutch in exile. This experience gave her an astounding capability to come up with funding through old connections. It was these connections that led her to meet with the young journalist in hiding, Fournier. It was she who mentored Marcel on European underground financial maneuvers that brought him his fortune when the war ended. She never talked about her activities in the Dutch Resistance and Fournier never spoke of his. Their mutual self-censorship was attributable to their deep respect for those who had lost their lives in the cause and not at all out of shame or fear of being found out. After she was sufficiently recovered from grieving she’d assumed her long dormant talents for handling money.

Even with Mère now in charge, Adriane couldn’t bear Robert’s scrutiny and sarcasm much more than a few days before getting back to Nick and California. Once she returned to her home in Santa Barbara, she found the sink full of dishes and newspapers spread over the kitchen table or stacked on the floor: six weeks worth. The other rooms, besides the bedroom, were untouched except for the music room couch. The evidence of bottles and full ashtrays, no more than an arms reach from the couch covered every surface bore witness to his presence. Still, she felt it was good to be home although she had begun to despise Nick long before their separation or her trip to France for the funeral. He was supposed to be watching the house while she was gone. Wondering where he was and, oddly enough, missing him, she decided to call Mickey instead.

Mickey was her cab-driving drinking buddy before he caught sobriety.  Yes, caught sobriety. Sobriety, was like a virus… everybody ended up getting sober back then… it was spreading, celebrities and people like Mickey: sober, dead, or in prison. She got his answering machine… “Hello, I won’t pick up the phone…. Leave a message.” …beep.

He hated getting phone calls and screened them bitterly. Anyone who knew him well enough could get through while he listened to the answering machine. Everybody else could leave a message that he would most likely promptly erase, “Hello, Mickey? I am back… it is Saturday afternoon… what… it is noon or so… Oh, you bad boy… you are at Mel’s? Or are you at an AA meeting? Pick up the phone… okay.”

Shit, he wasn’t home. She thought… a stream of conscience flooded her mind, “If I go to Mel’s… I can’t sit there without having something to drink. I drink and I want something better… to relieve the hang-over… or whatever.”

 “Maybe I’ll go to his house and crawl into his bed… surprise him? When he comes home he will get a present from me. No, we’ve only made love once. We flirt, but Mickey is too much like Gotson to me… even more than a dear friend.”

Arriving at his place she sees Homer on the screened-in porch, she greets him as he goes before her… the door is unlocked. “No one is home, Homer?”

Mickey’s room, with all his books and his old typewriter, brought back still vivid memories of it … of when she was young, the summer Gotson took the picture of her in the surf…Gotson was younger then, middle aged… a handsome man. Remembering that one day, “He protected me, Homer,” she purred, “from my asshole brother.”

She had been basking nude on a chase lounge, as was customary at her family’s pool.  It was a beautiful day. A world of hormonal surges was opening up to her and, as her fingers probed the moisture of her flowering nest, suddenly Robert was there before her. He had been watching from a distance and had become aroused. Kneeling between her knees, he put his hand on her inner-thigh. Before she realized what was going on he was on top of her. The eroticism of the previous moment reversed itself to become a terror. She struggled at first but he persisted, forcing her thighs apart.

“He was my older brother… what was I to do?” He was already a young man… bigger, with a powerful physique. Ma-Mère was visiting her family in Amsterdam and Père was in Paris. She hoped Gotson would show himself but he was nowhere around… She knew what sex was but this was not sex. She’d seen their horses mate… it was very much like that… violent. It hurt and she cried out at him to stop but he did not.

Gotson finally showed up with Eder at his side so that Robert could hear them on the graveled path leading down to the pool house. Robert lurched away as though Adriane was a bed of hot coals. He stood; standing unashamed, even defiant, before Gotson.

“Ah, Roberto, we need to have a discussion,” but without saying another word he put an arm around Robert and took him to the other side of the cabana.

She wasn’t sure whether Gotson saw all of what happened. The confusion in her mind muffled their voices, but, she heard a slap and Gotson’s voice repeating, Roberto… oh, Roberto as she gathered her clothes and walked with Eder, dazed, up the path to the house. Robert’s head was hung down as he passed them hurriedly but she could see, when he turned to glare at her and Eder. Eder glared back at him but they could see that Robert had a blackened eye under his Gucci’s. On the way up the steep path Eder comforted her, “He did the same to me when I was ten.”

Gotson sat by the pool with his head in his hands as they left.

To say it was more than awkward the rest of that afternoon is an understatement. Robert sped away in his Ferrari back to Paris before dinner and never tried to mess with her again.

“That was how I lost my virginity…” she said out loud to Homer.

Robert didn’t talk with her after that incident on the beach for several years. She could never forgive him and, whenever she thought of him… his smug face, the bile of disgust rose from in her gut.

That one time; when she was making-out with Mickey, she’d gotten a sudden flash… a memory of a feeling… like now… she couldn’t help it and she stopped him in the middle… when he penetrated.... she felt the betrayal, the shame and she just wanted to shower and cry. It seems as if making love would sully the affection she had for him. She never cared what happened with Nicky or the other men she’d have casual sex with. But, as always, when the sex was over, she just wanted to get home and shower; or, if it was her house, send the poor fool away.

Adriane: The Sequel Revised

I have taken this story back to its original intent: And that intent has been the relationship of addiction , sexual abuse, enabling wealth. My creative adviser, Bonnie, suggested I also take out the spiritual mumbo-jumbo of angels and imps that were hinted at in A Taxi Romance.

Chapter One:

Adriane

The Chaos of Desire

It was cold. Adriane had left a window open the night before and she had passed out wearing only light cotton pajamas. Off to the side, over the garage, a light cast a glow onto the lawn from the servant’s quarters. Other than that the house was as empty as it was large. She had the urge to talk with somebody and Gotson... Gotson, he had been a guardian angel to her throughout her tumultuous and awkward teens. He was there, when her Papa wasn’t, to console her after the tragedy…, the lingering death of her younger brother, Eder. Now it only seemed fitting that she should find comfort in the company of this single-most dependable man in her life since her dad, Marcel, was gone.

She tapped lightly at his door, “Gotson… are you awake? It is me, Adriane.”

The door swung open, “Of course, Adriane, please come in.”

She could see the loom of the light of the morning sun rising above the hills from the window of his small but comfortable room. She held her hand out towards the view beyond the window and whispered, “So, this is why you didn’t take the guest house when Père offered.”

“Yes, I have room enough to care for here.” He moved some magazines and books off the chair at his desk and motioned for her to sit. “How are you doing, my sparrow?”

She looked around the room. A picture of her is framed on the wall next to his writing desk. She is fourteen, naked in the surf with her arms stretched above to the heavens. He’d snapped that picture in better days… before the incident with Robert. Next to it was one of Gotson with an arm over Marcel’s shoulder from the days before Madrid fell. They cut dashing figures as they stood in Basque berets… boyish grins… like they were going to bite-off Franco’s balls. Pères eyes were raised to the taller, hardened veteran, as though he were a fan standing next to a film star even though her Père was eighteen and Gotson was only sixteen. The two were together in ‘38 when Madrid fell and Gotson was looking much older than Marcel; who, as a free-lance journalist there, was little more than a Civil War tourist.

“You are always up before dawn, even when no one is here,” she stood by the window. Under the glass of Gotson's desk was another picture Adriane hadn't seen before. It was a wallet sized, black and yellow, crumpled photo of a young woman with fierce eyes under a beret cocked jauntily to the side holding down a cascade of curls that must have been as jet black as Gotson's once were. Her cupid bow lips kissed the end of an odd shaped knife she held in front of her face, "Who is that woman, Gotson?"
"Should you ever love..." his eyes darkened and he turned away, "Yes, how are you?"

“Oh, I don’t know… things are so strange. Robert tried to take charge of everything. Mère was content to let him run all our affairs at first… what have I to do?”

“And this is not okay with you?”

“I can’t complain… I am hardly ever here anyway. Robert can handle all the lawyers and banks… the estate. I counted on being here for Mère, and that’s all, but Robert swooped in and scooped her up before I could do anything.”

“You could have come for the funeral, perhaps?”

“Funeral services are nauseous for me.” It was a sore subject for her since the village congregation wouldn’t allow her little brother, Eder, to be interred on church grounds. Memories of the fucking village assholes, so afraid of queers and AIDS, sitting with the priest in his office while Père pled: He, Marcel Fournier, the financier and huge donor to the church whose office he was begging in, still brought up a taste… the bitterness of bile from her guts. “Are you afraid the dead will be infected? Or are you more afraid that your corpses buried there will become queer?” she castigated the smug elders of the church as she stormed out of the office.

“Understood, so, what is it you plan to do now?” he held both her hands. It was a comfortable gesture and a fatherly one she longed for now from her real father. Eder too was like a son to him as he was named after Gotson’s father. The once jet-black hair of the Spanish Civil War vet, and hero of the Maquis of Southern France, was completely white now but time had been kind to his gentle features. The lines on his face had the contours of kindness, and hardly at all from hard chiseled revolutionary fevers his face showed in the old photographs. He and her father had survived the Franco, Stalinist partisans, camps in Vichy France, Hitler, and the hungry years that followed the war. Marcel, a French Basque with good business instincts, amassed tremendous wealth and had mysteriously become one of the powerhouses of France’s recovery after the war. Remaining apolitical, between the radical socialists and the moderate democratic socialists, he eventually drifted to the Right and had been instrumental in helping Charles De Gaulle found what would become the Fifth French Republic in ‘58’. This was all happening while Gotzon suffered in Franco’s prisons after leading a small band of Basque maquis hanging on in the Pyrenees. Still, to his credit, in time for Adriane’s christening, Père managed to bribe, maneuver and otherwise wrangle, the Franco government into releasing the Basque Maquis and hero of the Resistance from the very pit of hell, Caracremada. Ironically, he was now termed a terrorist mastermind by Interpol as he sat isolated in a small room on the estate of the French billionaire, Marcel Fournier.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t look well… are you… again?”

“Is it that obvious?” She was sweating and cold. Every cell in her body ached.

“Please, little Sparrow…” his brow knitted before he spoke, “There is a spa in Switzerland; Edelweiss… I believe.”

“No, no Gotson… don’t go on like my brother. Robert taunts me all the time. I can’t go through that again.”

“But you are so sick …”

“Yes, but I can get through this. I’ve done it several times already,” she knew that she could too. This wasn’t just bravado. She knew that quitting was easy compared to staying quit. “You know, Robert tried to get Père to have me declared incompetent the last time….”

“No, though I did suspect something was troubling Marcel after you left that last one.”

“No way am I going to grant Robert another opportunity. I am going to take this respite to get clean and go back to California where Robert won’t be watching every move I make.”

“Suddenly, the odor of fresh coffee caused her stomach to turn, “Please excuse me Gotson, I have to …”

Gotson put a trash can under her chin just in time.

To be continued...

Adriane: The Sequal... changes

I've had to do some serious rewriting of this one and cut out the parts that were taking us in another direction that became fodder for my fourth book: changed the POV to third person singular... I can’t write from a woman’s point of view… if no one has noticed, I’m not a woman. I can observe women but I am not one… sooooo.

… Also the story had branched off into Gotson’s and Adriane's father's. This caused it to become more of a war-crime/intrigue/mystery story than where I wanted it to go. I'll let the sequel to this one take it there but I want to explore Adriane's addiction and how the enabling of wealth and privilege can be so crippling to recovery. I’ll post the changed manuscript as I go along… now.

Adriane: The sequal to a Taxi Romance

Still in progress. Doing some reconstruction and editing. Have to simplify...simplify... simplify. I can get too convoluted. I have to find a writer's group where I can straighten it out. I am convinced that a writer's group is the best way to edit a piece without having to pay out the nose for the service.

The Smell of War

Gotson was in position to catch most of the rest with his Sten when Baker made his move. These men were green... Franco had to send his more experienced, so-called volunteer, Blue Divisions to the Russian Front to appease Hitler. The army never recovered from the loss of experienced fighters. Now Spain, with the exception of a few Moroccan veterans, had nothing but barracks mavens to send out on patrol: they looked good for the parade grounds but were of little use in the field.

It was over before anyone was able to lift a weapon. They had all moved in such precision that only a short burst from Gotson’s Sten made any sound. Baker worried that the sound of that burst might have carried. He had taken out three with a knife as Iniga made short work of two more with one of the Welrods. The three had moved in unison as though choreographed in a deadly dance.

In the end Iniga had one pinned against a tree by the Mauser she held casually to her side with the business end of the barrel only inches from the boy’s crotch. He was no older than Iniga.

“What are we going to do with him?” she almost plead.

Baker walked straight up to the quivering kid with tears of fear on his adolescent face saying calmly, “Its going to be alright…” he assured the boy as he put a silenced round into the side of the youth’s head. The boy dropped to the ground in front of Iniga’s Mauser muzzle.

She turned to catch Baker walking away as though he’d only delivered a paper. She understood… no prisoners… but a deep ache welled up in her with tears of her own.

 Jerking away she called out to Baker, “Hey, it went through his helmet like a butter knife!” displaying the bloody smatchet.

Baker kicked the Regular's body over to see the wound in the back of the head. The helmet had a hole in the middle of the top, “You did the helmet afterwards.”

“I had to try it,” she answered coyly and smiled broadly. 

He gave her a pat on the back and the three of them got busy hiding the bodies.

War… the crisp clean autumn mountain air now smelled of blood, shit from exploded intestines and urine soaked trousers. All three were young and should have been cramming for studies in dorms or going on chaperoned dates… but here they were. It had to be accepted… it is unfair… every dead soldier has a grieving family… a mother… a father… a lover… war!

Iniga felt a strong urge to have sex with one or the other… it didn’t matter… Gotson or Baker… who cared… she was young and so were they.... far away from a life that was thought to be civil… there were no rules. The cave was where they bedded down and bonded… the three of them. Sex took her away from the anguish… the horror she saw in that boy’s eyes… if only she hadn't seen his eyes... she understood her own fate was there and did not expect to live beyond the boundaries of time set by this war. There was no turning back as she surrendered to the primal instinct to be held and caressed, entered… she was guidari and had tasted blood.

Adriane... continued

They made their way along a path known only to a few; skirting the limestone cliffs that dropped several hundred feet from the barren landscape to wind, below the tree-line, sidelong the steep slopes down and over a crest, forested with firs and some beech trees to a hidden limestone cave where they met the others and stashed the radio. All except the three then dispersed, some down into the town, Jaca: others scattered elsewhere. It is said that the garrison of Jaca’s mutiny against the monarchy and its suppression in 1930 gave birth to the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War. At the cave the three; Iniga, Baker and Gotson, would bind their fates far beyond the immediate circumstances of that day in 1943.

“Unbind him,” Gotson nodded to Iniga.

“What, you want to give him a chance to escape?” she sneered indignantly.

“He could have had that chance a half dozen times by now…” Gotson answered. An uncustomary grin showed the worried features, so weary of warfare, on what ought to have been a youthful face,
“You should be a little less eager for blood, my dear one.” But he knew full well how bitterly the savagery of Franco’s oppression etched itself into the lives of what should have been the carefree youth of the times. He was only twenty years of age and had been a hardened veteran since his first taste of combat as a messenger when he was fourteen.

Gotson returned Baker’s weapons, “Sorry, we can’t be too careful... Iniga, give him back his smatchet.”
“But he said I could have it…” she pouted, intriguingly girlish.

“We have to set up a drop site…” Baker interrupted.

“Please can I keep the smatchet?”  Iniga looked at Baker and patted her side where under her coat the smatchet was holstered.

“Sure,” Baker smiled flashing his straight white teeth. He couldn’t figure if she was patting her breast teasingly or the smatchet sheath. He then turned his head up the hill and held his hand out, palm down to signal silence… he heard voices.

The three fanned out and took cover. Gotson’s took a position above and to the side between a couple of boulders where he could watch the entrance of the cave. That radio in there was crucial for their survival. Ambush strategies and tactics had been worked out long before by the maquisards but Baker had only his well honed instincts to land in a perfect place to observe the approaching column. Iniga found cover a hundred meters up the hill camouflaged behind some scrub beneath some beech trees.

This was an operation with too many problems for Gotson. He preferred quiet operations, where a couple of spikes on a mountain railway track could be dislodged, resulting in a supply train headed for Southern France to derail and tumble into a gulch long after his men would be enjoying a few carafes of wine in Jaca; but this one was suspiciously compromised from the start. He would get a chance to gain respect for Baker’s abilities this morning as an ominous mist cast an aura of mystery around the arrival of two Civil Guards and a half-dozen Regulars.

As the squad approached Baker let the point pass within feet of his position. Gotson had been in so many ambushes by now that he felt calm and focused. The men looked tired and finally the squad leader ordered a rest. They had to scramble up and down these trails, far from the warmth and security of their post. Dumping their packs, rolling and lighting up cigarettes, each made a tremendous amount of noise. From his position he could see Baker gesture, pointing out the sergeant… claiming him for his own… as he was separate from his squad…. taking a dump. Garrote ready, Baker waited, making sure that the sergeant finished his dump before taking him out. He didn’t want to mess himself up in close quarters like that. He gave Gotson a hand signal to wait.