“Yes, it is quiet. A small fortune was spent having that door installed. It is solid steel, quite thick actually, and it rises and lowers on a magnetic track, thus the silence. Living next to the ocean at my back door and the PCH at my front door has made me appreciate quiet.”
Waldo’s monologue was timed well enough for me to recover from his scaring the shit out of me. I opened the cargo compartment on the front of the car and retrieved my bag before I followed him in. The atrium off of the garage was a Zen garden of neatly raked pebbles with a rock in the middle, the top of which featured a small bonsai garden. On it’s own it was beautiful, but a Zen garden in this house just seemed unreal. Malibu is unreal, I thought. We entered through a pair of old brass doors like you’d find in an old bank and then on into the main room with a to-die-for view of the Pacific.
“My passion for silence flows into the house. You’ll find the windows are quite thick to resist the storms and they also feature a layer of liquid quartz. You flick the switch here,” he demonstrated, “and voila!”
The room was plunged into utter darkness. Where had been the Pacific Ocean was now a wall of purest ebony black. Instantly, the room was ablaze wth sunlight again.
“You could shoot someone to death in this house and no one would ever hear a thing outside.” He turned to me with that devilish smile again. “Not that you would, just that you could.”
The tour of the house was like getting the E-ticket at Disneyland. Every room featured things you’d never imagined in your wildest dreams and one of the rooms featured the things you’d never imagined in your wildest nightmares. Waldo was into some very kinky things and his ‘playpen’, as he called it, was evidence of the demons running around in his head. Happy people just don’t have the kind of things I saw in that room. For all intents and purposes, it was a dungeon. Waldo made a few lewd comments as he showed me the various items in the room and then told me he liked to think of it more as a gym than anything else. He also pointed out that there was no phone in the house as he’d always used a cell phone for everything. A pay phone was down at the grocery if I needed it.
“You’ll be alone, so don’t be bashful about exploring in here, I really don’t care if you do.”
I was quietly relieved when he closed the door to the dungeon and we went on our way about the house. As we toured he told me about the grocery store nearby where he had an account and he invited me to enjoy myself as I saw fit. I would, I promised with a chuckle. The kitchen was magnificent and he eventually led me upstairs to the master bedroom with it’s modest and tasteful decor which he said was to avoid distracting from the view. I appreciated that thought. I laid down my bag on the bed and he handed me the key and walked out the door without even saying goodbye. The unreality of the past twenty minutes was enough to make me think about the Scotch he showed me in the liquor closet. Not a cabinet, mind you, a closet.
And just like that, I was alone.
Amazing. Twenty-four hours ago I was driving a rust bucket and living in a ten metre square room and now here I was driving a Ferrari and about to spend a month living the dreams of Avarice. If you’re a twenty-three year old girl who suddenly finds herself the mistress of a Malibu beach house what’s the first thing you do? That’s right, you go sit out on the patio in your best bikini and let the common folks stare at you from the beach with envy.
The patio was steel and glass just like most of the rest of the house and the glass afforded a clear view of the beach. It also afforded the beachgoers an unobstructed view of me. I like to think that I don’t have any ego problems and I think I have a healthy self-image. That’s my polite way of saying that I know I’m not hard to look at. Different people have told me that I resemble Natalie Portman, Audrey Hepburn (my fave compliment!), and one even told me I look like Kristen Kreuk. I like to think I’m just me and that’s usually enough to make me happy.
This particular day was special and I pulled out all the stops. My very special Burberry string bikini came out and I tied it criss-cross to make the most of my 34C’s. Heading downstairs I found the control for the windows and I just had to play with it for a while. Like a little kid I had the room dark, then light, then dark, and so on. The folks outside must’ve thought I was crazy. My curiousity served, I flicked it again to roll the heavy window open and then I strode out to the patio like I owned the place. There were some guys on the beach playing Frisbee and I made a point of distracting their game by leaning over the rail and hanging ‘the girls’ to their maximum effect. The Frisbee hit the sand. A couple of jaws nearly did, too.
My egotistical needs sated, I laid back on the chaise and sunned myself for a few minutes. I’d never done this before, but after a bit of an internal struggle with my modesty I undid my top and let it fall to the deck. I felt so racy. Just like a Malibu starlet. I could do anything. My skin being what my mom calls ‘porcelain white’ I really couldn’t stay outside too long so when I felt the tingle of a burn coming on I packed it up and headed indoors for a shade break. Predictably, the boys on the beach strained to see me as I got up. I looked over my shoulder at them and then turned back to pick up my top. It was worth a little thrill to see their faces as they saw me in all my glory.
The heat was a little much and I touched the control to close the massive sliding window closed. Without even the slightest click, whirr, or whine the heavy glass slid along the track in the floor until it slipped into the frame on the other side of the patio. The noise of the surf and the people on the beach faded and fell silent as the widow closed, leaving me in a church-like silence. A strange chill went through me as I realized that it fit into the wall frame exactly the same way a prison door fits into its own frame.
The house was completely wired and Waldo had shown me the flat panel displays set into the wall of each room that gave control of temperature, sound, windows, and light and had given me basic instructions on how to use them. The graphical display clearly showed the temperature as 86F and I touched the on-screen numbers until they read 70F. A moment later a cool breeze began to blow throughout the house and ‘the girls’ came to attention. I hesitated about putting my top back on and elected to let it go for a while. I decided to go back and take the tour again.
I walked by a mirror and saw myself topless and complimented myself on how Continental I looked just now. The light blue bikini top with my dark hair and pale white skin just looked so perfect in the reflection. Then I chastised myself for being as bad as Waldo and kept walking. The liquor closet was something else. It was about three metres by ten metres with shelves and racks of various wines, champagnes, Scotches, bourbons, specialty liquors, and even some choice beers I’d never seen before. Getting a little exotic, I selected a bottle of Midori and an inappropriate brandy snifter (I wanted a big glass, see?) and poured myself a very generous helping of the chartreuse colored liquid. Smooth and sweet, the delectable inebriant tasted especially wonderful before lunch.