Neither of them had spoken yet, and Dion was aware that the silence was becoming awkward. 'Do you--' he began.
'Are we--' Penelope said at the same time.
They laughed. 'You go first,' Dion said.
'Are we going to see each other this weekend?'
'Yes,' Dion said. He was stroking himself, and he closed his eyes as he pressed the receiver to his ear, wondering if Penelope would be stroking him this weekend.
'They're having a fair tomorrow and Sunday,' she suggested. 'I read about it in the paper.'
'That sounds good.'
'I can drive if you want.'
'No, I can drive,' Dion said. He suddenly thought of Penelope's mother, naked on her hands and knees in front of Father Ralph.
And he came. Semen shot all over his jeans, all over the bedspread. He released his softening organ and looked at the mess, disgusted. 'I have to go,' he said quickly. 'I'll see you tomorrow. Okay?'
'Okay. What time are you going to come by?'
'Is ten o'clock okay?'
'That's fine.'
'Ten o'clock, then.'
'Okay.' There was a pause. 'I love you.'
'I love you too.'
'Good night,' Penelope said.
'Good'--he had been about to say 'bye,' but somehow 'night' seemed nicer, more intimate, more appropriate --'night.'
He hung up the phone, looked around for Kleenexes or a towel or a napkin, something to clean up the bedspread. He grimaced as he wiped his sticky left hand on the cuff of his pants. What the hell was the matter with him?
He didn't know, but he thought again of Penelope's mother, on her hands and knees, and for some reason he remembered the wine he'd had at Penelope's house, how it had tasted, and his penis began to stiffen.
Before he knew what he was doing, before he could think about it, he had pulled his pants down around his ankles and was once again furiously stroking himself.
He climaxed almost immediately.
'Fifteen cents is your change. Thanks.' Nick Nicholson dropped the coins into the young woman's open palm and watched admiringly as she walked out of his store to the red Corvette in the parking lot. Her ass swayed gently back and forth beneath the material of her tight skirt.
She looked up at him and smiled before unlocking the car door and getting in. He glanced quickly away, caught but not wanting to admit it.
What was in those Daneam wines? He'd received a shipment on Tuesday and had just sold the last bottle of burgundy to the Corvette woman. And he wasn't the only one who couldn't keep them in stock. Jim over at OKay Liquor had sold out almost immediately, as had Phil at Liquor Shack.
The amazing thing was that he had never before seen a Daneam label. He'd been aware of the winery, of course, but as far as he'd known, Daneam sold only by mail order and only to specialty collectors. Now, all of a sudden, the company had been supplying its vintages to area stores, offering everything in its catalog.
Just as spontaneously, people had been buying. Not just collectors, not just connoisseurs, but regular people. There'd been no advance publicity, no hype of any sort, but there was now a sudden demand for Daneam wines among seemingly all segments of the general public.
He didn't understand it. He'd talked to several of his friends who were buyers for some of the area's better restaurants, and they too had started carrying Daneam wines. Two of them had even elevated the vineyard's products to 'house wine' status.
All within the past week.
It was crazy.
A bearded, burly man wearing ripped jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt walked into the store, jingling the bells over the door. He strode directly up to the counter. 'You have any Daneam wines?' he asked.
Nick shook his head. 'Sorry, just sold the last one.'
The man slammed his fist down on the counter. 'Shit!'
'You might try Liquor Barn over on Lincoln.'
'I just came from there, asshole.' He glanced around the store. 'You sure you don't have some hidden in the back?'
'No. Sorry.'
'Bullshit! I'm going to check myself.'
'No, you're not.' Nick reached under the counter until his fingers touched the handgun hidden there. 'You're going to leave. Right now.'
'Who says so?'
'I say so.' Nick looked hard into the man's eyes, trying to stare him down, hoping he wouldn't have to pull out the gun and threaten the man with it.
'Fuck,' the man said, shaking his head. He knocked over a small display of Chapstick products and pushed open the front door, causing the bells to ring crazily as he stormed out of the store.
Nick relaxed, able to breathe again, but he did not take his hand away from the handgun until he saw the man cross the street and disappear from view. He stood there for a moment, uncertain, then walked around the edge of the counter, locked the front door, and flipped the sign in the window from Open to Closed. The store wasn't scheduled to close for another half hour, but he didn't feel like remaining open any longer.
There wasn't any point to it.
He was all out of Daneam wines.
And he had the feeling that the customers who came in tonight weren't going to be asking for anything else.
Dion awoke, robbing his eyes, stretching. The blanket on top of him seemed heavy, and he kicked it off, sitting up. Outside the sun was out, light streaming through the window in pillars roughly the shape of the wood- bordered panes, but the atmosphere felt dark, oppressive. He had never been claustrophobic, but that was how he felt now. Everything seemed close, confining, as though both his room and the world outside were pressing in on him. Even his underwear felt unnaturally restrictive, the cotton much too tight against his skin. He peeled off his T- shirt, peeled off his shorts, but the feeling persisted.
He stood up. His body felt small. It was a strange thing to think, but it was the only way to describe the sensation. He had certainly not shrunk during the night, but his body seemed somehow compacted, as though his being was too large for its physical form.
No, it was not as if his body had shrunk. It was as if, inside, he had grown.
But that made no sense. Why would he even think of something like that?
He'd had dreams. All night. A lot of them. And though he could remember only fragmented images, he was filled with the certainty that the dreams had been all of a piece, that they had been not only related but interconnected, like individual episodes of a serial.
That frightened him for some reason.
Just as frightening were the images that had remained with him: the head of Penelope's Mother Margaret, grinning, impaled on his enormous erection as he paraded before a huge, orgiastic audience in an outdoor amphitheater; a line of ants on the dirt suddenly growing, changing, metamorphosing into men who bowed before him and promised their undying fealty; dead women swimming in a black lake, their faces blank and lifeless but their legs kicking, their arms paddling; Mr. Holbrook, shirtless, pushing a boulder up the side of an incline in a dark cavern;
three beautiful nude women standing on top of a high cliff, singing, as men on the flat ground below the cliff ran crazily forward, smashing their heads into the rock.
He wasn't sure why the dreams had frightened him so, but they had, disturbing him in a way that seemed almost more real than real life.
