Mendocino Coast

"Does she know about us?"

"Brigette or Grand Mere?"

"Either."

I haven't told either of them, but Grand Mere knows everything. We don't know how, but she always does. I don't know if Brigette knows. I haven't told her, but I wouldn't lie about us, if she asked. They both know you exist. You met them at your first gallery show in Paris."

"Yes, that was unpleasant."

"I know. I'm sorry."

Actually I had gotten to know Brigette a good deal better after the gallery encounter, but I kept that story to myself.

"Would she hunt me down and scratch my eyes out if she found out about us?"

He laughed. "Hardly." He was silent for a moment. "But she won't ask. She doesn't want to know, especially if the answer is no. She wants to think I have others so she can feel moral about her other lovers. It is a family of secrets, a strange life, no?"

"But there are others?"

"Oui. For both of us."

"Okay. We promised that we would never ask about others."

"Yes, we did."

"And John-Paul, he is your partner in the wine business, isn't he?

"Not quite. He and I are the Co-Presidents. A title Grand-Mere made up. Grand-Mere owns all the stock. We just work there and run the business."

"But you are on good terms with him, aren't you?"

"Yes. Certainly better than I am with his sister, Brigette," he laughed. "No, I don't think John-Paul would fire me if he wound up owning the whole business. But it works as it is, so why stir the pot."

"So we are doomed to be lovers when one of us visits in the other's home, but no more?"

"Oui."

He was falling asleep at my side now. "You sleep," I said. "I'm going for a hike. Claudine is joining us for dinner at the Lodge tonight." Claudine was one of my "others" and one of his. These days she was an art student in Oakland, but we had first met in Paris

He picked his head up. "Oh," he groaned. "You two will fuck the life out of me tonight. I've only been in the country for, . . ." he looked at his watch. "18 hours. Lord have mercy on me."

"You love it and you know it. I'm going for a hike."

Chapter 2. Before Andre; Howard and Ernesto

Once Andre sank into sleep, I dressed quickly and put on a pair of hiking shoes. Minutes later I was across the highway and starting up the steep trail that led into the mountains to the east. I was looking forward to a threesome with Claudine and Andre tonight, but I wanted my daily workout while he slept. My sex with Andre was great sex as was my sex with Claudine, but on those occasions when the three of us could get together it was spectacular.

As I climbed I asked myself why I was distressed about the limits on our relationship. I didn't have an answer. We had had virtually the same conversation on a couple of his prior visits so there was nothing in what he said that was news. He loved me but he simply wasn't available beyond our relationship as lovers.

I certainly had other lovers, including Claudine. After all even though our affair had been going on for three years, we were only together for a few days a year, usually every six months. Would I have married him? I didn't know, but it wasn't a problem because he was trapped in his Paris relationships. Still, I wanted more of him than I had. We had talked about my moving to Paris, but that was equally impractical. The inspiration for my art was here in Mendocino and I couldn't leave it.

Looking back I had always had multiple lovers. I had concluded I just wasn't cut out for a monogamous life style. Even when I was married I had others, although I doubt if my husband did. His life allowed room for only one passion and it didn't involve sex with me or, to the best of my knowledge, others. But that wasn't what ended the marriage. The marriage ended largely due to lack of interest. My husband and I had married while we were both in law school. Law school or my husband—which was the biggest mistake? I've never been able to answer that question.

My husband was passionate about the law. He loved law school. How? Almost no one loves law school. It's drudgery. I ground my way through it and then through a law practice until I was just about to make partner in a medium sized San Francisco firm. I spent years grinding my way through a life that, for my husband was a passion, almost an obsession, and for me, just something to grind my way though, day after dreary day. How different could we be?

Just as I was about to make partner (The papers were on my desk. All I had to do was sign them and return them to the managing partner) it finally occurred to me that my life had to change. It was a rainy afternoon in San Francisco, and I was in bed with our gardener, Ernesto. He and I had had a regular Tuesday afternoon schedule for over a year. It didn't always work out, but if my schedule could accommodate the time, he was always available.

Ernesto wasn't a Tom Cruise by any means. He was short, fat, and barrel chested. His upper body, chest and back, were covered with thick, dark, wiry hair. He trimmed his thick, coarse beard only when it threatened to look like a real beard. His thick black hair, heavily streaked with grey, was pulled back into a pony tail. He was strong as a bull, able to lift me off the ground and throw me into any position he wanted to fuck me in. He didn't speak much English, but my god, could he fuck. And he always arrived at the seedy Van Ness Street motel we used ready to go. He had this long, stiff, thick prick that stuck out of his bushy, black, pubic hair like a flag pole. I mean it was always there when he walked in the door and stripped his clothes off. I never had to suck him to get him hard. He arrived ready to fuck and that was what he wanted, none of this oral shit. He wasn't big on foreplay either, but if we had scheduled an afternoon, I usually had spent most of the morning thinking about fucking him, so I was good and wet by the time I got to the motel. He could come two or three times in the two hours we usually allotted to our assignations and maintain a rigid erection the whole time. On this particular afternoon he had already made me cum twice. I was sitting astride him, enjoying the feel of his rigid cock as I humped him with all the enthusiasm I could muster. Oh god, his cock felt good. Each time I skunk down on him and that thick rigid cock filled my cunt, I gasped for breath.

But then, mid-fuck, the damndest thing happened. There I was swinging my head back and forth, my tits swinging to match, when suddenly I had a revelation totally unrelated to the marvelous fucking I was getting from Ernesto. It came like a flash in my brain, an insight that foreclosed thought about anything else, including the fantastic way Ernesto's cock was filling my cunt. I completely stopped my rocking motion on Ernesto when the revelation hit me. His cock was still in me and still felt marvelous, but I was doing nothing as far as the fucking went, because all I could think of was the startling revelation I had just had.

"Que mierda? (What the fuck?)"

"Oh, yeah. Sorry."

Before I could resume my motion, he rolled me over to the side and then grabbed me by the hips with his rough hands and spun me over so I was on my knees, my face pushed into the bed and my ass in the air. I felt his cock probe my sex, and then he rammed it roughly into my cunt.

"Ahhhhh." I screamed. Now he was pounding me from behind. Oh what a fucking I was getting. Ernesto was okay with me occasionally setting the pace, but if I didn't keep it going the way he wanted, he would take over as he had just done. Now he was fucking the hell out of me. Whatever the thoughts I had just had were gone and I was focused only on the sensations of his dick pounding away at my cunt while his legs slapped against my ass on each thrust and his big balls banged against my clit. He was swearing at me in Spanish that I had no understanding of. I groaned as each thrust hit home. Oh god, this was why Tuesday afternoons with Ernesto were so good.

I came twice more that afternoon, before I looked at my watch and told him we were done for the afternoon. He pulled out of me, got dressed, said "Gracias. Te veo la proxima semana.

(Thanks. See you next week)," and left.

I said, "Gracias. Buenos Dias," as he shut the door. The relationship was strictly about the fucking. Another thing about my relationship with Ernesto. As spectacular as the sex was, I never noticed any synesthesiastic effect. It was purely physical. Good, but not like what came later with Andre.

I lay in the bed for the next half an hour, oblivious to his cum leaking out of my cunt while I lay on my back, considering the startling thought I had had mid-fuck—I hated practicing law. Really, I hated practicing law, and I had hated it all the way back to my first year in law school. I also realized I had nothing in common with my husband. I didn't hate my husband, but he was essentially gone from my life, so committed to his law practice that nothing else in his life, including me, mattered. And, I had no interest in his law practice, in fact, no interest in him, anymore. The only thing I did that I enjoyed these days was fucking the gardener, and I couldn't even have a conversation with him afterwards because my Spanish was as nonexistent as his English. There had to be more to life than being Ernesto's Lady Chatterley.

After I cleaned up and left the motel I went directly to the managing partner's office. I handed the unsigned papers back to him, with a request that he keep me on as an associate for another six months while I figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. He was surprisingly understanding. I've always wondered if he didn't share my distaste for the practice of law.

It took me two weeks, but eventually I got my husband to sit down and talk about it. After he got over the shock of discovering that the person he was married to was not at all who he thought she was, he simply said, "Okay, I don't have time for this." That's the way he was. The only thing he had time for in his life was his law practice. We each hired a lawyer, and they negotiated an amicable divorce. I haven't seen him since that day. We talk through lawyers, if we need to talk at all. It's not hostile. It's just that he doesn't have time, and I don't have the interest, to do it any other way.

There was another realization that came that day as I lay in bed with Ernesto's cum leaking from me. I wanted to go back to the art I had studied in college. Yes, I had gone from a BA in art to studying law. There should have been an obvious clue right there that something was wrong, but I had somehow missed it.

As soon as the divorce was final I went back to college at California College of the Arts, or CCA as it's known in the art and design business, to get an MFA in painting. I worked hard at it for two years, and in the end: I felt like it had been a total waste of time. I got the degree all right. But it was too much like my law school experience—all grind and no passion. I was always finding myself trying to create something that met someone else's standards of excellence and creativity rather than my own.

When I finally graduated I retreated to the cottage on the Mendocino Coast I had received from the settlement of my uncle's estate, set up my easel, and spent a year painting the colors that the sounds of the place were creating in my head. I was totally engrossed in my work. It was perhaps the best year of my life to that point. For the first time I was pursuing something I was passionate about. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that it was what my ex-husband felt about the law, but I wasn't thinking about my ex-husband, just the art.

The work was totally abstract. I was trying to paint the colors that occurred in my head as the sounds and forces of nature around my cottage in Mendocino generated them. No one but me could understand what I was doing, but I was ultimately pleased with it. It took me a long time to perfect my technique, but it ultimately resulted in collection of 18 large canvases, all abstracts in wild combinations of colors and patterns. I called the series, Sounds of Mendocino.

I dragged them to galleries all over Northern California, and no one wanted to hang them. When I tried to describe what I was painting and what the canvases meant, they just looked at me like I was crazy. The closest I could get to approval was a gallery owner or two who would simply say, "Well, okay, but that story will never sell. Come back when you have a story that will sell to customers."

About the time I was ready to give up calling on galleries I wandered into a gallery in Yountville, a pretty little town about 10 miles north of Napa. The gallery was owned by a fine old gentleman named Charlie Rossini. His family had lived in the Yountville area for at least three generations. Yountville was once just a little farm town surround by fruit orchards and the vineyards that replaced them, but it has since become a significant tourist destination that caters to the flood of well healed tourists that come to Napa every year. It has a small number of very high end hotels and B&Bs and a number of the best restaurants in the Napa Valley, including the famous Thomas Keller, Michelin starred restaurants, The French Laundry and Bouchon. There are of course galleries to cater to people between meals and wine tastings. Charlie took pity on me and offered me a job. He didn't want to show my paintings, but he was willing to hire me to sell the paintings of others. All the technical education I had picked up at Cal and CCA turned out to have value to someone, even if it wasn't me. I needed to get away from trying to be a painter for a while, so I took him up on his offer. I closed up the cottage, rented a place in Yountville, and took a break from painting. I left the paintings in the cottage. Certainly no one would steal them, if I couldn't sell them.

Chapter 3. First Sale; Andre

When I reached the top of the ridge I was warm. It had been a long steep climb and once above the fog it was hot work. I stripped off the sweat shirt I was wearing and sat on a rock letting the cool Pacific wind dry the sweat off my naked breasts and blow through my hair. Delicious. My mind wandered back to my first meeting with Andre:

I had been working in the gallery for about six months when Andre walked in. I hadn't touched a paint brush since I took the job. I could hear his French accent as he chatted with my boss. My first thought was that he was just another tourist visiting the Napa Valley, with a typical Frenchman's skepticism about the quality of the region's wines.

He was not particularly tall, less than six feet with the classic lean French physique and sculpted features, about my age or just a touch older, I guessed. His wavy hair was thick and dark, neatly trimmed and combed straight back with just a bit of grey at the temples. He had an olive complexion (Provence heritage I would later learn), but it wasn't until my boss led him over to my side of the gallery that I saw his eyes—a sparkling blue that a woman could lose her soul in. My god he had sexy eyes.

It turned out that he had an interest in abstract art that our gallery couldn't satisfy, but my boss thought perhaps Andre might be that one in a thousand customer who might like my paintings. I didn't have any to show him (the big ones were all still in the Mendocino cottage), but I showed him a small book of photos I had at my desk and I started to try to explain what I was doing. He listened intently until there was a subtle click of an alarm on his watch. Ignoring it, he continued to listen, but I could tell I was losing him to something else he had to be besides an art collector.

Finally he interrupted me. "Excuse me," he said. "I really am interested, but I have appointments at a couple of wineries up the valley," (wineries it turned out his family was interested in acquiring. He was on a preliminary scouting mission.). "Can I come back this afternoon after I have discharged my duties?"

I said, "Of course," and he said thank you and left—and didn't come back. Instead at about 4:30 he called and apologized because his meetings had run longer than he hoped, and could I possibly join him for dinner that night so we could continue to talk. When I said I could, he said thank you and he would meet me at Bouchon at 7:30 and rang off to run back into a meeting. Just like that, I suddenly had a meeting with a French art collector at a Michelin Star restaurant to talk about my art.

Dinner was lovely, as it always was at Bouchon, not that my budget allowed me to dine there on a regular basis. More importantly, unlike our earlier conversation, this time I had Andre's undivided attention. We talked about my art at length, including his interest in art as a collector, and my theory that my abstract paintings were images of the colors associated with sounds. We talked about his family's wine business and their interest in broadening their production beyond the properties they owned in France and Italy. He even managed to explain the details of how to read the label on a Burgundy bottle—well, at least the basics. I explained how I went from being a successful, and miserable, lawyer to an unsuccessful, but much happier, artist. Oh yes, and at some point during the evening he mentioned that he was married, but did not share the details of his relationship with his wife. Those would come later.

I had brought the little booklet with photos of the Sounds of Mendocino collection and this time he studied it with care, finally saying, "Well, I would have to see the paintings themselves, but they look very interesting. I'm here for another day. Can I see them?"

I explained that they were stored at my cottage on the Mendocino coast.

His response was, "Fine let's go," as he raised his hand in typical French fashion to flag the waiter for the check. It was nearly ten and I tried to explain that a drive through the mountains from Yountville to Little River on the Mendocino coast in the middle of the night was not perhaps the best way to get there. He blew my objection aside, but I at least managed to convince him to let me drive since I knew the route. We jumped in my little red Mazda Miata and set out, but not until he had procured another three bottles of one of his family's premier cru burgundies from the restaurant's sommelier. So, wine tucked safely behind the seat, we careened through the mountains towards the coast. It was 1:30 by the time we crunched down the gravel road and stopped before my cottage. The heavy fog blowing in off the Pacific hadn't helped things.

The cottage was cold. It had electric lights, but the only heating system was an old wood stove. I told him where to find glasses and a cork screw and I went to work firing up the wood stove while he opened one of the expensive wines he had brought with us. Fortunately I had left an ample supply of kindling and dry firewood in place the last time I had been there, but I knew it was going to be an hour or two before the stove really managed to heat the place up.

Andre came out of the kitchen, with an opened bottle of Nuits-St-George and two jelly jars. I lacked stemware, having gone through a protracted hippy phase after my divorce. He poured the wine, and we took seats side by side in a battered old love seat that he dragged up to the wood stove. We stared into the fire through the fogged glass face of the wood stove as we savored the wine and each other's warmth, pressed side by side in the love seat.

"The art?" he asked.

"No, not tonight. I don't want to let you see them for the first time in this light. Wait until morning."