Corked (4 page)

This was vaguely worrisome. I fidgeted in my seat, wanting to spider-leg, for the third time, over the body of my slumbering neighbor to search the plane for him. My dad was overcoming a supervirus left over from a recent African safari adventure, but he hadn't experienced any symptoms in the days leading up to our wine safari adventure. I was flummoxed.

He had dematerialized.

Perhaps not. Perhaps he was sleeping and had covered his face with a blanket.

Or not. Earlier, I had done a careful audit of each seat, scanning for his royal blue polo shirt with gold stripes. The search had turned up nil.

He was gone!

It was possible he had fallen asleep in a bathroom stall.

With nothing left to do, I turned my head and tried to distinguish hamster shapes in the black clouds hanging in the navy sky outside the plane's window. I wondered what would happen next.

This trip would be a phenomenal success. In history, it would be described the way movie reviewers are quoted on the backs of DVDs: “A touching, poignant tale of a father and a daughter, seeking unity in the vineyards of France. Funny, bizarre, full of pathos.”

This trip would be a spectacular failure. We would never speak again.

I remembered how disappointed he'd become during the Christmas tasting—that same day I'd found him drinking his 1945 Taylor Fladgate off the floor. We'd been sitting around the table in the middle of the afternoon, tasting a 1961 Clos des Mouches. I was sipping faster than my father, mother, and my younger brother, Nico, and was tipsy enough to dare to make an analysis. The rest of the family had been peering into their glasses, saying nothing. Waving my glass around in a fit of similes and desire to connect, I'd hazarded:

“This seems fledgling, full of potential, but was too young to be drunk. It's like the wine is a proud little boy at an adult cocktail party in a sharp tuxedo and hair he's slicked with such diligence that it crackles when touched, looking up at the adults, knowing that—not now, not even 10 years from now—but someday, he will be the life of a party like this one, but not now, not yet.” I leaned back and closed my eyes for effect. When I opened them, my father was driving his fingertips into his temples, his two eyebrows knitted into one angry caterpillar.

“The wine is corked, Tou Tou,” he'd said.

I looked down at my third glass of cheap white wine that sat in the circular indentation of my tray-table. I chugged it in two gulps and opened my mouth slightly, drawing in air to let the musty unpleasant flavors develop.
Armpits of woolen coat, socks, that weird bush I once smelled by a bog in Florida
. Dejectedly, I flopped my head back into my seat cushion and bounced it a few times. Maybe I was too lazy or dumb. I despised almost all poetry. I'd developed a Coca-Cola habit in university that would cripple me with gut rot. Grilled cheese sandwiches swimming in ketchup. Ripped flannel shirts and days-old underwear. Cracked IKEA cereal bowls I refused to throw out. Electric fireplaces. Puffy toilet seats. Shuddering with premature embarrassment over what I saw as the inevitability of failure at the tastings over these upcoming days, I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to be lulled into a headachy sleep of bad wine and cold, synthetic plane air.

I woke up to another bumping food cart and ate my Eastern Standard Time night-breakfast, meaning my Greenwich Mean Time breakfast-breakfast: dry little croissants and orange juice made from oranges that are made of other biochemical elements—dust, sodium sulfate, hippo tallow, agar—science experiment orange juice. I shamefully relished every bit of the badness, and in my gluttonous haste I'd even swallowed a piece of the red wax that sheathed the Babybel cheese. Perking up a bit from the injection of sugar, I thought of my father, temporarily forgetting he'd gone missing.
The point of this trip is to learn from his guidance. Fifteen hundred kilometers in a car with that man! He is my Sherpa, and I am receptive. I am alert! Proximity and willingness can give way to chemistry. I just have to relax!

The cabin lights went off; the plane landed and sneezed to a stop. I rose and collected my things. I peeked over passengers' heads, being careful not to jostle them with my carry-on luggage and pieces of my dad's carry-on luggage, which he had gallantly bequeathed to me before I walked the aisle mile to my seat. No peppery head appeared in the distance. I lumbered toward the exit.

Where was this man?

The pale French morning sun blundered through the airport windows. In spite of my fatigue from the fretting and the jet lag, I was overcome with the prickly excitement one gets from being in another country with its different smells, foreign McDonald's menus, and drugstore products that somehow seem more effective than the ones at home. I bobbed and weaved. Still no Philippe.

Then, at the luggage turnstile, one Philippe Borel appeared. One Philippe Borel with one clayey face and one frowny mouth, shiny with saliva. “
PAPA!
” I called. His head whipped up and his eyes crossed briefly. One hand attempted a wave, then dropped down as slowly as it went up.

Approaching his hunched figure, I made my palm into a cup, then placed it on his stubbly cheek lightly.

“I am very sick,” he said breathily.

“You look very sick.” I paused. Bad news was imminent. “Why are you very sick?”

“Plane food,” he said.

“Plane food,” I repeated. “Plane food, plane food,” I repeated and repeated. This was a 1990s stand-up comedy routine. How about that plane food! (Canned laughter.)

“Bad chicken. Bad something. I don't know, Tootsie.”

“So that's where you were during the flight.” Now I understood.

“In the bathroom,” he replied.

“Right.”

“Vomiting so much,” he said.

“Right. All right.” An inauspicious beginning.

Bags came off the turnstile, and rental car keys found their way into his hand.

I heaved all the bags into the trunk of the hatchback Citroën Picasso he'd rented. I shuffled tentatively from left to right, not knowing whether I was required in the driver's seat. Before I could do anything decisive, he slumped behind the wheel even though it was clear he should not be driving. This was easy to see—he had just accidentally backed into one of the concrete walls in the airport's underground parking lot.

“Are you sure you don't want me to drive?” I offered.

“No, Tootsen. Thank you. I am fine. You navigate.”

Before we left the parking lot, I forced him to drink a liter of Perrier. He steadied his hands on the wheel, belched loudly, and we were off, along the French highway, small European cars zipping by us on all sides. He was becoming steadier with every kilometer. Great. Good. What was left of my limp-arugula anxiety faded into post-airplane orange juice stokedness.
We will laugh! We will tell each other secrets! We will invent a new language, for ourselves and for wine! This is significant!

I wanted to share a laugh with him, the inaugural laugh of the trip, the laugh that would set it all off. Traffic had seized up around us a bit, so I leaned into the front panel of the Picasso and pressed my index finger into the area below the hazard light button. I looked at my dad, who was looking at me, and drummed my finger on the spot over and over while screeching “Beee-ooo!…Beee-ooo, bee-bee-bee-OOO!”

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I'm vaporizing the traffic with the car's laser,” I said.

“What laser?”

“The
laser
—you know.”

He got it. He cheered up. “Where did you learn to do this?”

“It's something Matthew and I do when we want people to get out of our way or die,” I responded.

He cackled and brushed my hand away, replacing it with his own. He made a French accent laser sound.

“Pyoo…pyoo, pyoo PYOO!”

We both bee-oooed and pyooed our heads off until we were laughing like insane people. The traffic eventually vaporized and we turned off the highway onto a smaller road, driving through perfect little French villages built of brown and gray stones, flowerpots overflowing with Lego-like petals of yellow and orangey red and hot pink, everything dusty and bright in the white, early afternoon sun.

We stopped for lunch in one of the villages close to the city of Troyes, about halfway between Paris and Contrexéville. My father, who had reverted to nausea and frailty, attempted to straighten the car between two other cars and was using the age-old art of Braille parking—slamming our car into the bumper of the car in front, then the bumper of the car behind until it was nestled comfortably between them and next to the curb. We walked to the village
boulangerie
. I chose a ham sandwich, the best sandwich you could get in this country of transcendent ham sandwiches where the meat is slow-roasted and generously stacked in perfect pink strips between a bumpy layer of cold fresh butter and a baguette that is crusty and dark blond outside, soft, fragrant, and yeasty inside. We located the cobbled town square, which was deserted. Sitting on the steps of the church, I waved my sandwich in front of my father's face. He could only stomach plain bread and was sadly tearing off little pieces, rolling the squishy dough between his fingers before pushing them into his mouth.

“You look like you're about to pass out. Really, Dad, I'll drive the rest of the way. You can navigate,” I offered again, this time punching my words more, like I'd acquired a medical degree in the last two hours and me driving meant the difference between life and death. “Okay, Tootsen. Aye aye. Fine then. You are the captain.”

Minutes into my reign as the captain, we became lost. I was experiencing a mental block when it came to understanding the subtleties in the arrow directions in French roundabouts and ended up bailing out onto a road too early. We found ourselves in a town that looked like all the other towns we'd passed. I slowed the car when I saw an ancient woman sitting outside her house on a rickety stool. My father poked his head out of the window.

“Pardonnez moi, madame. On cherche la route pour Contrexéville.”
(Excuse me, ma'am, we're looking for the road to Contrexéville.)

She nodded, and the two mumbled to each other for a few minutes. My father thanked her with an excessive amount of gusto, as though she'd just given him directions to Eldorado.

He turned and stared out the windshield.

“Did you get that?” he asked.

“Get what?”

“What the old broad said.”

“Uh, no. That's your job as navigator. You didn't listen to her directions?”

“No, I thought you were listening.”

“No.”

“Oh.” I silently fumed over what I saw as selfishness—I was tired too, after all—but I contained myself and pressed evenly on the accelerator.

We came to another roundabout and noticed a trucker who had pulled over.

“I'll ask this guy maybe, huh, Dad? He'll probably know where Contrexéville is.” I was careful not to tinge my voice with any anger or exhaustion.

The trucker gave new directions, so I drove. My dad was sleeping when we arrived at the hotel, a repurposed castle called the Cosmos. I shook him awake, I hauled the bags without his help, and we checked in. We ordered room service; the waiter knocked too violently and delivered chicken that was undercooked in the middle. The smell of it sent him running into the bathroom for another fit of auto-decontamination. When he emerged we spent a few hours in silence, reading drowsily and waiting for the evening to bring us an hour that would be appropriate enough to fall asleep and trick our bodies into adjusting to the new time zone.

Later, when the sky was mostly dark and we were tucked into our tiny single beds, my father was lying awake, looking at the ceiling with a small, satisfied smile on his face.

“You're smiling. Are you feeling better?” I asked.

He shook his head like one of those spring-necked dogs that taxi drivers keep on their dashboards.

“No. I am thinking about the waiter—that fucking waiter—to knock like that. Bullshit, unprofessional. And the chicken—disgusting. I am smiling because I am looking forward to giving the front desk staff some shit tomorrow for all this.”

“Oh,” I said, immediately suppressing my panic. I wanted sleep; I wanted the new day to begin and I wanted the chance to prove wrong my fears about the trip. I lay there, trying to twist his cruelty into something good.
If he's well enough to humiliate us tomorrow morning, it's possible he'll be well enough to prevent me from humiliating myself during my first real tasting
.

I wanted to tell him this thought.

“Dad?”

But he had already begun to snore.

 

A
detour.

Two days after my father's sixty-second birthday, I killed an old man with my car.

If the weather of 2004 had arranged for 2005 to be buzzed about as a classic vintage in France, it was that big occurrence that created the conditions for our wine trip. It began with a car accident and a joke. On February 23, 2001, I hit the old man. Three days later, my father made a joke about it. He made the joke as we were driving to the Quebec City airport. My university reading week was over. We were cruising along the same road upon which I had killed the old man.

At 2 p.m., I would board a plane back to Halifax where I would sob and nap my way through my last semester with a head that felt as though it were full of seawater. Three months later, a little thinner and much older, I would numbly accept the degree for my honors Bachelor of Journalism. A few days after that, I would study the calligraphy on the degree and see that I had received an honors BJ. I laughed hard at my honors BJ, but not as hard as I laughed at my father's joke.

My father wanted to drive me to the airport, even though he has never been the to-the-airport-driving type of father, and my mother has always been the quintessential to-the-airport-driving type of mother. He had said all the wrong things after the police called the house and reported to my teenage brother, Nico, that the old man had died in the hospital from head trauma. When the call came in, and Nico relayed the news of the death, my father picked up the phone and spoke with the police officer who was handling the paperwork. An hour or so later, I arrived home from the gym, where I'd spent an hour running on the treadmill, looking at my eyes and the bags underneath them in the mirrors that lined the walls. He got up from the sofa, fumbling a bit as he pushed himself into a standing position. He stood too far away from me and began to talk. His voice was clumsy and unsure. He said, “I thought you might like to know a little bit more about the man who you
keeled
.” He paused and his eyes flickered around, absorbing my reaction. He was searching, I think, for either a softening or a hardening. There was a hollow feeling in the back of my face.
Dead. It happened. I made it happen. I created a death
. I thought of the cracking thud his body had made as it connected with the metal of the car. The blood. Unsurprised, I stood still in front of my father. Two thoughts crawled around in there like beetles. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know all about him. Knowing might be some kind of punishment—a proper repercussion. But also, it had been an accident. I was a killer, not a murderer. I was just an accidental killer. A
killer
. I thought, amazed. I nodded at my father to keep going.

“He was 83, and a pharmacist. He was from France. I want to tell you his name. Maybe it will help you to know some more about him. His name was….”
That's enough for the killer
. I held up my hand and stopped him, and ran with small, shuffling steps to my room, my spine as stiff as a crowbar, my face spewing the kinds of tears you see only in cartoons—animé tears—the ones that spring from your eyes horizontally instead of vertically. I shut the door and stared at my face again, watching how the tears made my eyes as bright as leaves. I waited.
He should be coming in now. He will be coming in any minute now to acknowledge that we both didn't know what we were doing back there, sharing details about something that does not yet make any sense
. My tears dried up. I walked over to the edge of the bed and sat down, breathing so that my ribs were as big and open as they could be. I watched my ribs move in and out for a long time. Too many minutes passed. Eventually, he knocked and poked his head in, his face pointed toward the carpet. “Are you ready for dinner? I have made you some fish,” he offered. I didn't like fish back then.

The road to the airport was slippery with little fresh flakes that looked more like sand than snow. The car smelled faintly of his pipe tobacco and the body lotion my father would steal from his hotel's housekeeping carts to rub into the leather upholstery with an old, gross hand towel, also stolen from the hotel. When he did this, he would drop his voice to a baritone, like that of a wealthy, new-money creep who vacations in Monte Carlo, and say, “Apply liberally. Apply LIBERALLY! Heheheheh!!” Sitting on these shiny and slightly greasy seats, we drove in silence down the speckled road where three days earlier I hit the man and watched him ricochet sideways off the hood of my mom's kelly green GMC Jimmy. The man was jaywalking with his breakfast groceries, all of which shot up into the sky like a food geyser and landed around him in an eerie circle just one second later. When I screeched the truck to a stop and barreled out of it, I saw that some of his groceries—the economy-size box of Special K and a bag of puffed rice—were spattered with blood. As I watched some more blood leak from his wrinkly ear and form a pool, I thought,
He sure does like cereal
. “Special K” was my university nickname from freshman year. I thought about how I'd have to tell my friends back in Halifax to refrain from using my nickname. For many interminable, sickening moments, I absorbed his image; I sucked him up like ink in a quill: his frail white body as crumpled as a puppet cut from its strings, his outfit of navy blue Wellingtons, navy blue ski hat, and down-filled coat, navy blue mittens and nylon pants, an inch or two of navy blue thermal underwear peeking out from where his pant leg had scrunched up. Then I wailed and wailed and covered my face with my cold hands and screamed, “I'm so sorry!” The breathy heat from the words blew back into my face. I screamed some more. Some people had started to form a circle around the old man; others were on their cell phones, calling ambulances. I thought of a lifesaving course I'd taken a thousand years ago. RED, the acronym for bleeding wounds: rest, elevate, direct pressure.
Unless the neck is broken. If the neck might be broken, wait for the ambulance
. A curly-haired woman was kneeling close to the old man's feet. I lunged at her and swatted her hands away from his body. “Please give him space. He needs space to breathe,” I said hoarsely, not sure if I'd rendered him incapable of breathing. My boyfriend Peter, who had been sitting in the passenger seat, ran toward me with my woolen winter coat. Through my blurry eyes, he was a big manta ray man, running like that with my long gray coat outstretched. Even though I'm more afraid of manta rays than any other creature, I shoved my face into Peter's turtleneck and gripped his waist as he folded himself and the coat around my quaking body and said, “Borel, this was not your fault.” Right before the ambulance arrived, the old man stirred and opened his eyes. I grabbed the lapel of Peter's coat and scrunched it hard, hoping.

My father sped up along the road as he is French and has the French stupid-fast-driver gene. Not far in the distance, we saw a shape step off the sidewalk. It was an old man. Not as old as the one I killed, but quite old nonetheless. My hand was twitching, just about to rise up and slap my own forehead and face to cover my eyes, when my father made the joke. He pressed his foot onto the gas, turned to me with quizzical eyebrows, and said, “What do you think? Should we make it two for two?”

It hurt to laugh at this, but I hadn't forgotten how to laugh. I don't believe those tragic people when they look at you with their condescending puppy-puddle eyes and say, “I've forgotten how to laugh.” Like hell you've forgotten, you illogical, tragic, puppy-puddle-eyed, self-important asshole! So I laughed just like I knew how, but my throat hurt when the sound pushed out.

“Thanks for making that joke, Dad.”

He nodded and continued to step on the accelerator. The old man scurried across the lane and made it safely to the sidewalk. My father cackled. His cackle is twisted and intense, like he's accidentally swallowed feathers from a sparrow's chin and is attempting to force them out his trachea. If one were to record his laugh and download it into a supercomputer that deconstructs the emotional significance of vocal tones, the laser print-out of the analysis (sectioned into a nice, color-coded pie graph) would look something like this:

Mirth (Light Blue) = 29 percent

Cruelty (Puce) = 12 percent

Affectation (Goldenrod) = 15 percent

Delight in the expression of detachment/unconventionality (Forest Green) = 41 percent

Madness (Periwinkle Blue) = 3 percent

I laughed and he cackled until he pulled up to the departures entrance of Quebec's then squat and grimy airport. Snow fell on the windshield and melted, tiny stars turned to blobby droplets. I listened to the hydraulic explosions of planes taking off, waiting for him to drive into the parking lot so that we could have a proper airport goodbye, near the security gate, where dads are meant to say goodbye to their daughters after their daughters have just undergone the age-old ritual of killing old men with their cars.

“Okay, Tou Tou,” he said with finality.

It seemed this proper airport goodbye was not in the cards.

“Ehm…right. Can you pop the trunk?”

The trunk went
vvvjjeeeet
.

We embraced awkwardly in the cold. He couldn't get his arms around my body and my turquoise backpack, which slumped over my back and shoulders. Instead, he held the side straps of the bag and pulled me into something that resembled a half-assed calisthenics exercise. My forehead pressed into his Adam's apple. His sweater smelled of pipe and something minty. I wished he were parking the car, walking me into the airport, standing with me in line to get my boarding pass, buying me a muffin, treating me to some magazines for the flight, waving at me one last time from the security threshold.

“Thanks for driving me,” I said.

“Thanks for coming,” he answered.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you so much,” he answered. “
Zees
next months will be hell for you. It will be very hard for you to digest,” he added.

My eyes stung. I nodded and turned on my heels, slipping a bit, dazed by his capacity to say the truth at exactly all the wrong moments.

For a long time after the accident, I felt that stupid jaywalking old man and I ruined each other's lives. He was dead, real dead for sure, but God, that was the easy part, to be so goddamned dead. For Christ's sake, that was an easy ruination. Concerning my own ruination, at first, in moments, I did not see it that way at all. It was not ruination, but the saddest glory. During my first days back on campus, as the news of the killing spread and morphed and eventually turned into gossip, I was glad, even proud occasionally. I heard that a boy named Dave had whispered, “Does she need a lawyer?” I imagined others asking, “She hasn't been in class. Is she on lithium and heroin and Southern Comfort and going insane?” I loved this. I loved it when I wasn't in my bedroom, fully clothed and surrounded by pillows, contemplating the rest of this life that was unfurling in front of me: a scroll, the first lengths written in careful script, then a big black line, and everything after the line scratched and psychotic and illegible. I was a 21-year-old with some definition, with an edge like new dental instruments. I was a killing machine, a velociraptor, a badass. If I wanted to become a gangster rap MC or that silent tattooed guy with the sociopathic glint in his eye who drives the forklift at the mattress warehouse, I probably could just go and do those things, no problem. It excited me in moments, filled me with heat, and then left me freezing. Young people taunt the outside world to bestow upon them meaning, like teenagers who decide to become Wiccans or punks. The old man had done that for me in mere seconds, and it hadn't even required me to burn sage or put Elmer's Glue-All in my hair. My professors didn't say a word when I skipped weeks' worth of classes. And my two roommates never complained when they'd come home and find me supine on the couch, mumbling my way through a hamburger made with one's frozen meat patties that I'd lined with the other's barbecue-flavored potato chips because they'd had the gall to let us run out of actual barbecue sauce.

I had killed, therefore I was untouchable. I flopped around lazily in the womb of my depression. I had limitless prerogative. On some days, it was my dream come true. On others, I became immobile with terror as I considered the litter of slippery baby demons the accident had birthed.

The demons overtook the dream that summer. It happened while I was cooking orzo, at my parents' house in Quebec City, in the kitchen where I'd been told the news of the old man and his quiet hospital death.

Nico was going for a bike ride on the Plains of Abraham, where, in the eighteenth century, the French and the British used to stab at each other with bayonets. He waved to me as he was exiting the big sliding glass door that separated the living room from the world.

“Bye, Tou Tou.” His way of pronouncing my nickname was cute: “
Tuh
-too.” His floppy blond head bounced out of sight.