Corked (12 page)

“What is that wine?”

“Oh, Tou Tou. It's such a wine. One of the most prestigious wines. It's been made in Puligny by the Marquis de Laguiche family since the fourteenth century. Today, certain vintages of Laguiche retail for around $1,000.”

“Do we have any in the cellar?”

“Yes.”

“Give them to me.”

“One day.”

I let out a little groan. “Keep going!” I demanded.

“Then there were reds from Bordeaux, all Grands Crus, mostly from the 1953 and 1955 vintages—elegant years. With the cheese, some champagne—a nice Moët—to clean the palate, then harder stuff, generally Armagnac, and cigars to finish.”

“So it was like a sort of Bacchanalian game of Russian roulette.”

“What do you mean?”

“These are the dreams of which heart attacks were made!” I shouted.

“Yes! Exactly! At the end of the first Atlantic crossing in the 707, more than 150 bottles had been drained. We called them the cadavers…and that's only wine. Remember the hard liquor—vodka, Armagnac, Cognac, Scotch. When the flight landed, Air France personnel was on the ground, ready with a half-dozen stretchers to unload the passengers. Most were drunk as stones.”

“That's not an expression.”

“It doesn't matter. They were drunk, torpid. Once they were gone, we climbed into the cabin, which was full of oily smells and smoke, and began the cleanup.”

“And so?”

“You know what the writer Alphonse Daudet said, Tou Tou,” he said.

“Uh, no.”

“When the wine has been poured, it must be drunk,” I responded.

“My 21-year-old palate was almost virginal. I hadn't had anything to drink since Scouts, right? The purity, the seduction, of these wines was immediate and overwhelming. If you are born with a musical ear, you will take to Mozart instantaneously. If you are born with a receptive palate, you will have the same
expérience déterminante
.”

“Not necessarily right away, though,” I sighed moodily.

“With me, it was instantaneous,” he said, unaware that I'd descended into a small, disheartened spiral. “I picked through the spoils, and gathered a half-empty Krug, the generous ends of two Grands Crus Bordeaux, and some food. Heavy, pearly spoonfuls of the wet, glistening caviar. Leftover meats, coated in their shiny, opulent sauces, a bit of
la petite
salad, a piece of Camembert, some tarts. I placed them all in a bag and set them aside until my shift ended. Then I got on a bus, sat in religious silence until it stopped at McGill Park, stepped off the bus, chose a tree, sat down under its branches, laid out my feast, and in the cool spring air under a cool pink sky, I fell in love.” He fell silent.

“That's a lucky story. Romantic.” I allowed myself to relax again, if only for a moment. Because then, this:

“Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a woman getting fucked by a donkey?”

This made me laugh violently. I accidentally let the car veer into the oncoming lane, then straightened it out.

“No, no, you didn't tell me about the time you saw a woman getting fucked by a donkey.”

“It was in Beirut, in a cabaret. I walked in, and there she was, getting fucked by a donkey in a harness. There was a small man at her side, holding a can of oil, painting the donkey's penis with a brush.”

“I have no words,” I said.

“You're not supposed to. You know what?” he asked with a sudden, strange solemnity.

“No, what.”

“I would like to buy a donkey.”

“Why do you want to buy a donkey?”

“Because they are hardworking. Smart. They take a lot of shit.”

“Like me.”

“Like you, from me. But with you, it is too late. I have failed you. I want to atone for my sins by being good to a donkey.”

“You haven't failed me!”

“Well, I still want that donkey.”

A big fuzzy sun was dangling low as the landscape changed once again from highway to yellow green fields with their orderly rows of vines. We both hushed up. Despite all the vines' gnarly sky-grabbing and their weird, wild Medusa-like shapes, perceiving them was no longer causing my stomach to feel as if it were filled with a bag of squirming piglets. We'd arrived in Burgundy.
Please make this the site of my own determining experience
.

I remembered for no reason a small triumph in my father's cellar. He'd been cradling a bottle in each hand, thrusting one into my face, pulling it back, then thrusting the other into my face. The bottle on the left had sloped, feminine shoulders; the bottle on the right had square, masculine shoulders. As his right hand thrust forward, he'd asked me to identify which region the bottle came from.

“Bordeaux,” I'd said.

The left hand moved.

“Bourgogne.”

We checked into the hotel. As I hauled our bags up the wide, winding staircase to our rooms on the second floor, I noticed a public computer, a black PC.
Internet access. Jesus Christ. Internet access. Matthew access
. As my father strode off down the hall, I let the bags in my left hand plop to the floor. I pulled out the cell phone and checked again for the envelope icon. The screen was empty, save for the date and the time.

Oh fuck. Don't ruin Burgundy with this crap
.

I unfroze myself and marched along to my room, jamming my plastic key into the electronic reader.

“We'll go for a walk now, eh, Tou Tou?” My father was standing at the door of his own room.

It was evening, and the town had finished up its work for the day. We zigzagged through the tight abandoned streets, passing a row of stone houses, a vineyard, a clothesline with soggy rumpled pants. The day's work was all around us, especially under us, squishing into the rubber of our soles, staining the pale gray asphalt with bloodlike streaks. It was a delicious murder scene. My father lifted his foot and stretched out his leg toward me, like a karate man.

“Look!” His voice was as close to a squeal as tonally possible.

“Hey, juicefeet.”

“That is at least $20 worth of Pinot Noir.”

“How do you know it's Pinot Noir?” I asked, distracted.

“Tootsie, please, we are in Burgundy. Everything is Pinot Noir. And all the whites are made from Chardonnay.”

“Right, right,” I responded. “Sorry, I wasn't thinking. It's all Pinot and Chardonnay.”

He veered off course into someone's vineyard. I followed, watching the grape skins accumulate around the edges of the soles of my boots.
Organic spats
. We ate grapes for a while, he silent, me on another hyperbolic plane. I'd gone back to thinking about the computer and the phone and all of it. “What are you thinking about?” My father was watching me.

I studied his face dumbly, not wanting to bring up Matthew again, searching for a quip or question to adequately fill the silence.

“Peacock tail!”

“What about it?”

“Describe it to me.”

When we'd do Burgundy tastings, he would refer to the effect of the wine on his palate as a peacock's tail.

“It's a difficult grape, Pinot Noir. Thin skin,
eet eez
susceptible to disease.
Ce sont des vins de méditation
…these are truly the most meditative wines on earth. André Simon, Harry Waugh, these great wine connoisseurs called the effect of the Pinot Noir the peacock's tail…. When you dr—”

You are a selfish person. You are not a criminal, but you are selfish. Sure, you can make a compelling case for yourself to him. You can continue to mine his love and indulge in it unilaterally. Explain what happened at the tasting with Nast—how you breathed deeply and the feeling of the wine in your mouth lasted and lasted, even though you'd swallowed it already. And how then, the words came. Just ask for a little more time to breathe, so that truer feelings will develop—ones that will last and last. Buy yourself some more time with him. Prove to him and yourself that you are not ruined and rotten and incapable
.

I became disgusted with myself, with how much I needed.
Pathetic. Manipulative. Cowardly
.

“We should quit stuffing our faces,” my father said, poking me on the shoulder, “or someone will see and throw our asses out of here.” He tossed the last of his handful of grapes and they squished melodramatically against a stone, bursting easily.

Pinot Noir. Thin skins
.

After dinner, we had a cocktail in the quiet bar off the lobby. We hugged goodnight at the door to my father's room. When it clicked shut, I turned on my heels and skittered down the hall to the computer. The light was warm and dim and had no calming effect on my stomach, which felt as if it were tacitly declaring insurrection. I couldn't help myself—my thin skin and I just couldn't help ourselves. Surely he'd written to me. Sensing that maybe his text messages weren't crossing over to a cell phone in France, he must have decided that it was a better idea to e-mail me directly. I logged into my e-mail account—there was nothing from him. I scanned my instant message contact list. He was online. I double-tapped the mouse and opened a message window.

“are you there?” I typed.

Nothing. No movement.

“hey.” I prodded. “are you mad at me or something? i've been texting you.”

I felt desperate. My midsection was throbbing with stress pangs.

“i miss you.”

The window turned red and told me this person was no longer online and had not received my last message.

 

M
y father had a surprise for me. He had just announced this over our third and final coffee of the morning. We were picking bread crumbs off our plates with our fingertips. The sun was strong, the caffeine was detonating in my head, I was eager for the surprise and the day's tasting.

When I'd returned to my room, after the fruitless computer communication attempt, I'd sat cross-legged on the bed and meditated on my progress over the last few days. It had been without epiphany, but steady and honest. I tried to concentrate on the idea of subjectivity—of wine and people—and the innumerable variables that inform our experience with them. One inconsistency could throw everything off kilter: A good bottle of wine that is left in the backseat of a car to roll around or cook in the sun will likely turn to vinegar. Bad conditions can do the same to relationships.

I'd resigned myself to stop acting in bad faith with respect to my situation with Matthew. And I'd started, gingerly, to let myself off the hook for failing to find my language with him. There was no 100-point Parker scale for human affection.

“The Pinot Noir is a tricky bastard,” my father said.

“He is a thin-skinned little fucker,” I replied.

“He is known as the ‘heartbreak grape' because he will break a winemaker's heart.”

“He is the tortured child genius of the varietal world.” We were both laughing.

“There is a universe of potential in that grape—like you, my Tou Tou. He has a disarming personality. To drink a good Pinot Noir from here is to be captivated. There's a subtle power and complexity to it. But it is not a resilient grape. Its skin is delicate; it is prone to sickness and rot.”

“Thank you, I think?”

“Ultimately, if a Pinot Noir is hit by a blast of cold air at the wrong time, or an afternoon of humidity without an evening of dryness, it suffers greatly. Its life can change in an instant.” He reached over his plate of ham scraps and cheese rind and pinched my index finger.
Is he getting at what I think he's getting at?

Fearful of descending into a moment of sobriety, I began riffing as fast as I could.

“Like, if an action movie was made about grapes, and it was set in the slums of Baltimore or Flint, Michigan, and the main character was a street-fighting grape who became embroiled in a back-alley rumble situation, and was about to have the living crap kicked out of him by a gang of tough fruits—like rambutans or, God forbid, pineapples, that grape would
not
want to be rolling with a crew of Pinot Noirs. Those Pinot Noirs wouldn't step up—no way. Pinot Noir grapes would rather be curled up on a cushy velvet divan poring over Baudelaire's
Les fleurs du Mal
or weeping over a Rachmaninoff concerto. Forget those grapes! What our street-fighting main character grape would need is an entourage with muscle—brawny, brass-knuckle grapes. Ones that have gang colors and a special walk—Cabernet Sauvignons—from Australia, if possible. One of the dumb, thug Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with no discerning characteristics, save for their ability to fight it out—not with finesse, only muscle—just like all the other dumb, thug Cabernet Sauvignons. Right? Right, Dad?”

“True. You're right. Sometimes when you are not at home I will go into the cellar and read Baudelaire to the Burgundies.”

“What's the surprise?”

“It's a surprise.”

The drive to the surprise took very little time. Down another pastoral road covered in vines, winding through dusty rectangular homes of beige stucco and squat terra-cotta flowerpots, over cobbled roads, up a hill flanked by tilled fields.

“WHERE DID YOU PUT THE CAMERA, TOOTSIE?? I WANT TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE SURPRISE.” My father was out of breath from rummaging around the car in his patented ineffective manner: lifting every lift-able object in sight, while looking straight ahead, his face contorted with a sort of faraway concern that is distantly related to the knowledge that he'll never find what he's looking for, because he's not really looking. This is his subtle manner of delegating; he flails around and whines until someone jumps in and does the finding.

“Dad, it's right here.” I plucked the little case from beneath his left thigh.

“Okay. Let's go.”

The morning was blue and spotted with smoky clouds. There was no wind, no people, no movement, only gently snaking rows of greenery sloping ahead of us, up, up, up until the greenness collided with the sky. In front of us, a tall cross was guarding the entrance to the vineyard. He entered it with a funny look of devotion on his face. I followed.

“This is it,” he said.

“This is what?”

“It—the vineyard of Romanée-Conti.”

“Uh huh,” I said, standing dumbly with the camera.

“These vines make the best wine in the world.”

The vines had already been harvested, so we stood around and ate
grap-pillions
, the leftover grapes that were too small and runty to be picked. I clicked a picture of him with a mouthful, while he took three of me. We rustled the leaves around some more, foraging. Pouring another small handful into my mouth, I was hit.

“OH!” I gagged and coughed up a tiny grape. It sat at the back of my throat. I took a breath and swallowed it again.

“What?”

“My birthday bottle—”

“Yes!”

“Is from this vineyard.”

“Yes.”

“This one right here.”

“Yes.”

“Like, this grape,” I said as I spat it into my palm and peered down at it, “could be the great-great-grandkid of one of the grapes that went into my birthday bottle.”

“Yes.”

“Stop saying yes,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

“What do you think about the surprise?” he asked.

“It's really something, Dad.”

I chewed another little grape carefully. When he'd presented me with my bottle, I'd been an awkward 17-year-old. His movements had been so sure. We'd walked down to the cellar together. He'd scanned one of the wine stands in the middle of the room and swiftly slid out an old-looking bottle with a simple white label with “La Romanée, 1979” printed on it in black letters. Placing it in the cradle of my hands, he'd rolled it so that the label was facing him. The glass was cold and gritty with dust. Joyfully and generously, he'd written “Tou Tou's birthday bottle,” and said, “This will be ready for you when you are a woman. I don't care what you drink this with, or who you drink this with. You can have this with a hamburger. I don't care. It's yours. When you choose to open it, just make sure you're happy.”

I looked over at him from across a row of vines. “I think this is a terrific surprise—the best.”

He continued to eat, but my throat was tight with love.

Five minutes later, I exclaimed again.

“Oh!”

“Yes?”

“And Romanée-Conti was the vineyard where they harvested….” I paused.

“What year was the year where everything was all screwed up and….”

“Nineteen-seventy-five.”

Like magic, I brushed the dust off a story I remembered only sketches of, a story I always enjoyed and had attempted to recount in proper company, where it came out vague and lackluster, devoid of punch line:
So, in…eh, France…I can't recall what year exactly, maybe the 1980s…maybe 1982? Anyway, for some reason or another, the harvest got all screwed up and the harvesters couldn't, you know, harvest properly, and they didn't know what to do. It was a famous house, one of the big ones in, I think, like Bordeaux or Burgundy? Ehh
…. “Remind me?” I prodded him.

“In 1975, most of the country got clobbered by terrible weather. It lasted from May to September—sticky, humid, rainy—awful. The berries on most of the vines were mutants. The grapes were bloated with water. They were sickly and sad, so this left the managers of Romanée-Conti with a tough decision: make the wine and risk hurting their reputation, or scrap the crop.”

“But they came up with a solution, right? They picked the grapes individually?”

“Exactly. The harvesters were sent out to comb through each bunch, picking only the healthy berries. Some bunches had only one or two salvageable grapes. The vineyard produced a tenth of what it normally would in a year—a few hundred bottles as opposed to a few thousand. The 1975 vintage turned out to be the essence of what is produced in this area. It was not a classic vintage, but it did justice to its name.”

This story filled me with comfort.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Do you think viticulturists here are more psychotic than other viticulturists? I mean psychotic in a nice way—obsessed. Obsessed in the same way you'd be if I'd been born more delicate than other babies, like if I'd had a skull made of pressboard. Am I making sense? Is this a stupid question?”

“Pre-eh-ess-boo-ard?” He drew out the word, trying to find its meaning.

“Forget the pressbo—”

“No, the question is not stupid, but I don't know. You know, I met Lalou Bize-Leroy a few years ago. She had me in for a tasting.”

“I remember.” Lalou Bize-Leroy used to be one of the two owners of Domaine Romanée-Conti and is still one of the most fabulously talented winemakers in the world.

“You remember what?”

“I remember you telling me you met Lalou Bize-Leroy. I know who she is.”

“Who is she?”

His question caused me to shrink down to little-girl size. Slightly annoyed, I answered, “She used to be one of the two owners of DRC.”

“Right,
bravo
. Before we did the tasting, she took me for a tour of the vineyard—standard procedure. She is a tiny, intense woman, always surrounded by her adoring dogs from an exotic breed, pedigrees that date back to Charles le Téméraire, the greatest of the warring dukes of Burgundy.”

“Mmm. Go on.”

“Standing with her in the vineyard, I saw a change overcome her. She was becoming a high priestess before my eyes. She pointed up and said, ‘See, the moon has to be there, in its fourth quarter, which is when we lay the organic fertilizer.' She does not say ‘blood of Christ,' but that's what she means when she talks about the earth, the ‘
sol nourissier
,' the origin of life. She looks at me and says, ‘
La puissance de la vie
…' and trails off. She was searching for something in me, an understanding, a nod of recognition, but I'm not a member of this club. She has before her a guy who is partial to what comes out of a decently pressed Pinot Noir. I am not one of the enlightened ones, who understand the moon and its relationship with the earth, or the
sol nourissier
, so she smiles and says, ‘I think it's time for a little
dégustation
in the cellar, no?' I have become, in her eyes, a mortal.”

He is mortal. He is a mortal
. I simultaneously felt worse and better.

“That's pretty incredible,” I said.

“What's incredible?”

“To dedicate your whole life to loving something you have no ultimate control over.”

“That is what it is to be a winemaker.”

“And a parent?”

“Same thing.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He smiled. “Thank you for being here.”

On the walk back to the car, I tried to sort things out. He and I seemed to be reaching a place of new honesty. I reminded myself to be patient with the other subjects—the big ones—my accident, how he
had
failed me, in a way, with his words and actions in the days thereafter. How I wished he had more of an intuitive understanding of my agony. How this prevented me from asking for his help with my feelings toward Matthew, and how I worried I was cursed with his terribly timed selfishness. How all of this was eclipsed 1 million times over by my huge love for him and my much huger fear of his death.
Honesty does not flow trippingly off the tongue
.

Once seated in the car, my father asked for the cell phone. As I pulled it out, I masochistically scanned the display for that goddamned little envelope I'd been waiting for.

It was there.

Oh God
.

It was there, plain and proud. A tiny rectangle containing a fat inverted isosceles triangle.

Christ
.

“Tootsie, the phone, please.”

“One second, Dad. There's a message. Let me check what it says.” My voice wobbled out of my throat, which felt as if it had been smacked with an iron pipe.

Fingers fumbling along the digits, I opened the message. It was from Matthew. It read: