Orchard Grove Page 2

  There were other issues to contend with… issues that kept me from being formally introduced to the woman I watched in secret through the window. The main issue being that I’d become reacquainted with the bottle, so to speak. The bottle helped me out on two fronts. First, it helped me forget the physical pain that seemed a constant companion. And second, it helped fill the void left behind when I found I was far too occupied with Lana’s presence to even type the words, “Fade in.”

  So I guess you could say the booze became like a friend to me after she moved in and all I wanted to do with my time was stand by that bedroom window, crutches holding me up, my brown eyes staring out onto the most angelic sight you ever did see living and breathing on Orchard Grove.

  And sure, the liquor helped me cope with the guilt. Guilt that accompanied looking at her for even a few seconds. It wasn’t just an invasion of her privacy. It was just plain wrong, and I knew it. Still, I found myself glued to that window while everything else around me seemed to fall apart. In all honesty, it made me feel good to look at her. Made me feel like I was still a man and that all the old private parts still worked.

  It was the opposite of how I felt when Susan would return home from work or her P90X class. When she’d take a good look at me, a double bourbon gripped in hand, no pages typed on the typewriter, a three day growth sprouting on my face, she’d simply shake her head in disgust (or disappointment which was worse) and silently walk away.

  Lana’s morning routine was almost always the same, and it was something I’d come not only to count on, but look forward to. She’d emerge through her house’s rear sliding glass doors onto the attached wood deck at nine o’clock sharp. Always, and I mean always, she’d be wearing a silk, red and black robe with Japanese images printed on it.

  What do they call them? Kimonos?

  Delicate red cloth covered in Japanese letters and pictures of smiling, naked Geisha girls with their hair pinned up into buns, fanning men lying on their backs.

  Her hair was lush and blonde. It also draped her shoulders, but most of the time it was pulled back neatly into a ponytail, while on other occasions she’d allow it to fall where it may, like a silken gold veil that would become swept up in the wind. Covering her eyes were big square sunglasses like the kind you might find the women wearing on Venice Beach or down on Fifth Avenue in the Big Apple while they shopped on a sun-drenched afternoon. The thick sunglasses allowed her to look straight up into what thus far had been a perfect summer of unrelenting sun, seemingly without pain and without damage to eye and iris, as if she were exempt from the laws of biology and nature. As if she weren’t human at all, but some lovely creation I made up in my head out of desperation. A woman whose life I had just begun to script.

  She wasn’t a tall woman, but she wasn’t short either. Her name (according to the mailman who’d also taken special notice of her) was Lana Strega Cattivo. The family name, Strega, no doubt originated from Italian decent. But, if I had to guess, her blonde, blue-eyed features screamed of northern Italy. Her body was Gold’s Gym slim without being overly muscular or too thin so that it retained every ounce of femininity and, in fact, oozed with it.

  Her bottom was heart-shaped for lack of a better description and it provided the perfect balance to a pair of breasts that reminded me of fresh peaches. Those delightful breasts were fully exposed when she removed her Japanese robe, gently setting it onto the empty chaise lounge beside the one she always occupied without fail.

  The house her APD detective husband, who himself was a transplant most recently from the Poughkeepsie PD and prior to that, the LAPD (thanks again, Mr. Postman), purchased for her was also a ranch that, like I said before, was identical to my own. Its layout was precisely the same so that the locations of the rooms were a mirrored reflection of my own home. Mine and Susan’s that is. The home she’d been paying for on her own. The home we were about to lose, unless that is, Hollywood came knocking at my door again, which didn’t seem very likely seeing as I hadn’t even begun my new script.

  I guess, if nothing else, Orchard Grove was a cookie-cutter heaven or hell, depending upon where your architectural sentiments lie. But nowadays, the only thing that resembled an apple orchard around here was the name printed on the battered roadside street sign.

  Sometimes at night, while lying beside Susan, my right foot elevated by two pillows stuffed under my heel, my body only inches away from the exterior wall that separated my home from the Cattivo’s, I pictured Lana lying in her bed a mere two dozen feet away. Perhaps she was sleeping on her side, facing me, breathing in and out gently, maybe her sheer, satin nightgown having run all the way up past her waist to the very bottoms of her breasts.

  As of late, I found myself dreaming about her.

  It’d become a kind of recurring dream. Together we’re lying in a bed inside a room with no windows or doors. Naturally, we’re both naked, but we have no clothing lying around, as if God put us in that room for us to discover and explore one another without anything in the way but our own nakedness.

  In the dream, we aren’t making love so much as we’ve just finished the act, and now we’re resting, she with her head on my chest so that I can smell the lavender scent on her blonde hair, our naked bodies covered in a sheen of sweat that glistens in a light that doesn’t come from electric light bulbs or candlelight, but that seems to shine down from the ceiling, like moon rays.

  The music begins softly at first, but then builds up. Arabic music with drums beating, cymbals crashing, horns blaring. The once bare room becomes a forest suddenly, our bed surrounded by thick trees, all of which bear fruit. Round red fruit just oozing with juice. In the dream, Lana always says the same thing to me.

  “I know you’ve been watching me. Through the window. Your wife, Susan, told me that you spy on me.” She smiles then, sits up, and plucks a piece of fruit off the tree. “I like it when you watch.”

  I don’t respond because my throat has closed in on itself while my chest grows tight at the sight of a black snake that’s emerging from out of the tree foliage, its long thick body coiled around the same tree branch from which Lana stole the fruit. A snake with black eyes and a pink tongue that slithers and hisses as it slips in and out of a narrow half-moon shaped mouth.

  Watching that snake, I don’t feel fear so much as I feel myself being aroused. Something Lana can plainly see and enjoy. Reaching out with her free hand, she takes hold of me, and begins to caress me. She bites into the fruit and laughs, while the snake lowers itself down from the branch, opens its mouth wide, exposing four curved fangs that impale themselves into my neck…

  Sometimes after I woke up from the dream, sweating and breathing hard, Susan would be lying on her side, facing away from me. Although she was asleep, I’d consider rubbing her back, and maybe sliding my hand gently in between her thighs. But knowing she hadn’t slept with me in more than a year, and that she had no intention of starting back in on our sex life now, I always pulled back to my side of the mattress.

  Eventually, I’d silently go back to sleep, praying that my physical reality might once more turn back into my dream life. The life I preferred to live with my new neighbor, Lana.

  Back to reality… if you want to call it that.

  Standing before the window, the crutches positioned beneath the tender place where my arms met the shoulders at the sockets, I’d watch her beautiful tan body awash in the bright morning sunshine. Since my work had taken a serious backseat to lust, I might already have a drink going. And if I were feeling particularly nervous or edgy, a joint going from the pot-for-profit plants I was harvesting inside a small patch of thick woods located just beyond the backyard privacy fence (A Maxwell House coffee can filled with five emergency G’s was also buried on the site).

  But the drink was just a hobby and the weed a way to make some badly needed dough, not to mention, a way of numbing the pain of not working. The pain of the guilt, and of knowing that my lack of production over the past two months was just one
more reason that Susan and I were not only about to lose our home, but on the verge of losing our marriage.

  I knew I should peel myself away from the window, dump the whiskey, and at least try to get back to my typewriter, forget that this woman ever existed. But as much as I would try, the effort seemed impossible. The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t written a word since Lana moved in. The problem was that I didn’t want to write a word. I didn’t even want to make the effort. It didn’t hold an interest for me, as if her presence had severed the synapse or vein inside my brain that connected the desire to write to the actual physical act of production. You could say I was a doomed man. Doomed from the start. All I wanted to do was look at her. It was as though her very half-naked presence had cast a spell over me, rendered me impotent and worthless as a scriptwriter while, at the same time, making me feel like a new man.

  In a word, I’d become a slave. But a more or less, happy slave.

  Since Lana Cattivo moved into Orchard Grove, all I wanted to do was stare out the bedroom window at her body and when nightfall came, all I looked forward to was laying my body down only two dozen feet away from hers, and dreaming about our bed inside the forest.

  Before I go any further, it’s time I explained myself.

  Time to come clean, as it were.

  I’m not what you call a creep, or a sex fiend, or a pervert, or even a voyeur in the classic sense of those creeps who like to expose themselves without having actual human contact with the female source of their obsession. The point here is that I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.

  Under normal circumstances, I’m not the type to spend my days looking out the window at an attractive blonde. As a child I was what your average eighth grade teacher might describe as a good kid, a real pleasure to have in class, cuts us all up from time to time with his humor, gets along with everyone, needs to apply himself more, yadda, yadda. I scored average grades, played Pop Warner and high school football, suffered through Little League baseball, didn’t binge drink (until college), limited my recreational drugs to pot, and actively participated in the Boy Scouts.

  As an adult, I’m a hard worker, a good neighbor, a loyal husband, I pay my taxes on time, hand over my pocket change to the Salvation Army Santa standing outside the door of the Shop Right at Christmas time, and I even part with a monthly donation to the Wounded Warrior Project. Why? Because I’m a true believer in good vibes versus bad.

  I was raised by two loving parents in upstate New York who fought a lot for sure (what parents don’t fight when the money gets tight?), but taught me right from wrong, brought me to church on Saturday afternoons, educated me in private schools, made me answer for my transgressions be they getting caught with a joint in my jeans pocket or taking the car out when I wasn’t supposed to and who, in the end, did the best job they could.

  Later on when I married only to divorce a half dozen years later, they wondered not where I went wrong, but where they went wrong. People stay in marriages for better or for worse. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. My failure must have been something they didn’t do right when it came to teaching me family values. But when they saw for themselves just how badly Hollywood was eating me up, they supported me in my decision to come back east. When I found Susan and they saw how happy she made me, they further supported me by being nice to her, and they both went to their graves believing I’d found peace in the form of my second wife.

  They weren’t far off.

  For the ten years that Susan and I had been married, I’d always thought, well, two’s the charm. We were friends as much as we were lovers who enjoyed experimenting in the privacy of our own bedroom. It made a difference not having children underfoot, I suppose. It meant we could tryout things with one another more than the average Orchard Grove couple who were always tending to the unending needs of their kids, or so we assumed. We could play every night with the candles burning, the music blaring, the doors open, or even invite another playful couple over if we wanted to. Or we could simply make wholesome white, Wonder Bread love under the covers as we turned in for the night or when we woke up bright and early in the morning.

  For a period of many years, Susan and I did the things a couple who are in love, and in love for a long time, do. Ours wasn’t a question of lust, as it had been when we were young and new. Ours was a matter of trust, respect, and love.

  True love.

  But as time went on and my success in Hollywood dwindled, Susan and I grew apart. Her role as lover dwindled in direct proportion to the responsibility she had no choice but to take on as sole breadwinner. But even then, the bills were piling up alongside my rejection emails. Although we didn’t fight a lot about it, it was a constant source of tension which invaded our veins like a bizarre variety of sickle cell anemia which in the end, resulted in, you guessed it, no sex… “Don’t even think about it, Ethan buddy!”

  But something improved for me when Lana Cattivo moved in next door. There occurred a sea change of sorts. It was like my skin had cracked open as easily and as fragile as an eggshell, my insides spilling out onto the floor. But at the same time, the void left behind was filled with something else entirely. I guess you’d have to call that something else, desire, since lust wasn’t entirely accurate. But then, neither was love. Not by a long shot.

  Desire…

  A desire like I’d never known before or, more accurately rendered, hadn’t known in quite a while. It was as if I’d caught a virus and no matter how hard I tried to shake it, it just wouldn’t exit my blood and bone. In a word, I wanted Lana like I wanted no one else.

  And as I finished my second drink of the morning, I’d decided enough was enough.

  No more creepy spying.

  I was either going to do the right thing and pull myself away from this luscious woman and force myself to get back to work. Or, I would do the wrong thing by hobbling outside on my crutches and introducing myself to her, naked face to naked face. My gut told me that the former would have been the most sensible, most responsible decision, and one that just might have saved our home from entering into foreclosure. That same gut told me the latter would be like opening a can of venomous snakes or, in Biblical terms, like taking a huge, near-choking bite of the forbidden Orchard Grove fruit. It was that wrong.

  Naturally, I chose the latter.

  The brutal truth: I looked like shit.

  For sure I smelled like it too.

  In the six weeks since my “comprehensive foot reconstruction surgery,” or so the doctors called it, I’d only bathed three times since the act of setting myself down into a tub of hot water was a project that required so much strength and balance, I couldn’t possibly do it alone. That meant enlisting Susan. While she portrayed someone who was always willing to help, it was just easier to let the bathing go, opting instead for sponge baths. Take it from a scriptwriter, portraying the willing wife and actually wanting to be the willing wife are two different things entirely.

  But even when I did bathe, I had to be careful. From what the doctors told me, getting any water on my incisions would mean infection. I also had a six-inch stainless steel rod that had been drilled through the bones of my index toe. A full inch of the rod now stuck out of the toe. One day when I was finally healed, the doctor would grab hold of the one inch piece of rod and yank the entire length out with a pair of common constructer worker pliers. In the meantime, should the rod become bent or misaligned in any way, it would not only cause severe pain, but it would require a second surgery to straighten it out.

  No two ways about it: I was housebound, and smelly, and for good reason.

  In the bathroom, I shaved and gave myself a sponge bath. Slipped into a fresh, plain black T-shirt and put on a pair of clean Levis. For footwear, a single, brown leather, Tony Lama cowboy boot on my left foot while the bandaged wounds and the exposed rod on my right foot were covered with a thin black sock and a knee-high, Velcro-strapped walking boot. Stealing a look at myself in the mirror, I smiled.
It might have been the first smile I’d seen on my face in ages (who looks at their face all that much when they’re not content?). Maybe my house was about to be foreclosed on, and maybe I wasn’t working, and maybe my wife and I had drifted apart, and maybe I was in a great deal of pain all the time, but a big part of me felt like a teenager again.

  “Here’s Johnny,” I said to my reflection. And then, for the first time in a long time, I made my way out of the house.

  She lies back on the chaise lounge, feeling the sun soak into her face and her naked breasts, and she once more wonders how she got back here. To this place that holds so many horrid memories. Why purposely seek out a house that’s been built on the property where you were hunted like a wild animal by a monster who called himself your stepfather?

  The answer is simple. This is no longer the place where she was hunted, but instead the place where she became the hunter.

  Sure, she sees herself as a girl running desperately through the trees trying to hide from the step-monster. But she also feels empowered. She beat the son of a bitch and now, by returning to this place where the apple trees have been ripped out to make way for homes and cute little families, she’s come full circle. It will become the place where she will beat another monster.

  Meet the new monster… same as the old monster…

  But for now, no one knows what happened on Orchard Grove back in the late 1970s and early Eighties, and no one ever will. Only she, her step-monster, an Albany Police Department Detective by the name of Miller, and the Devil know. And that’s enough.