Corked (9 page)

“What do you taste?” He waved his hands around like a symphony conductor.

“Le sucre et les fleurs.”
This, I was sure of. Sugar and flowers.

“Tell me the grape,” he ordered.

I looked over at my dad, who was keeping one eye on me and one eye on Jumpy Man. I caught Jumpy Man's gaze, which had moved down my ass—a rookie pervert's move.
Doesn't he know the rules? You steal a glimpse when a girl looks away and make sure to take your eyes off the prize when the girl is on her way back to make more eye contact. Simple
.

“Kathryn?”
Alex Heinrich had his eyes where they were supposed to be: on my face.

“Ah, oui. Je crois…Gewurztraminer?”
I was almost positive it was a Gewurztraminer grape. Almost.

A correct answer! Buoyed, I marched over to a higher row of vines to find a different grape to taste and identify correctly to further confirm the measure of my latent oenological prowess.

After plucking one that was bluish black, I inspected the skin. I rubbed off the thin film of dust and split it open so that its slick, pale jade insides burst forth, then shoved the thing on the end of my tongue. Again it was sweet, but more discreetly so than the Gewurztraminer, with an acidic bite that made the edges of my tongue curl inward. I did the math: We were in Alsace, a region where not a lot of red wine is produced. The local red wine I'd noticed on the wine list during our lunch with Manou Massenez was Pinot Noir—
noir
in French is black, and this grape was black as all hell.

“Oui, c'est bien ça, du Pinot Noir,”
Alex Heinrich confirmed. My father was not paying attention anymore. It was elementary stuff, this juvenile game of grape identification. He was absentmindedly picking berries off another Pinot Noir vine and vacuuming them into his mouth, which he'd formed into the O shape of a perfect berry-size suction machine.

“PINOT NOIR,”
I repeated loudly, hoping to make my father's ears prick up.

Mr. Heinrich's cell phone buzzed; he took the call. I lobbed a grape toward my dad and it hit him in the back of the head.

“Hey,” I said.

“Aieee,”
he said.

“I get it. Are you seeing me get it?”

“Yes, I see that.” He held out his hand for a high five. I smacked it.

“And I just figured out tannins, eating those Pinot Noir berries.”

“You know what tannins are.”

“Well, no…kind of…not really. But I do know—now, I mean. They give a red wine its structure. It's in the skins. Tannins come from the skins.”

“Its skeleton comes from the skins,” he said.

“Yes, whatever—its skeleton. Sure. The bones. If it had no bones, it wouldn't stand up. It would just be a big floppy mess. I could feel it on the sides of my face with the Pinot Noir, but not with the Gewurztraminer.”

“Do you know why?”

“Sure, of course.”

I paused. I didn't actually know.

“Wait. No, I don't actually know.” Yesterday, it was the question I'd dared not ask. Today, we were allied again.

“Red wine gets its shape from…”

“The skins of the grapes.”

“And white wine gets
eets
shape from…”

“Not the skins of the grapes.”

“
Vahree
good.”

“So…”

“From the acidity of the fruit,” he encouraged.

“Ah, right.” This was basic architecture.
Skins and acidity help build reds and whites like good, intuitive language helps build real feelings
. I was going to share this with my father, but Heinrich reappeared at my side, gesticulating.

“You have to understand that the Alsatian microclimate makes it the driest winegrowing region in France.”

I smelled the air and turned my face into the sun, breathing in the straw-like grass and the chocolate brown earth and the vegetable scents emanating from the vines.
All of this is architecture
.

He pointed up to the Vosges Mountains and explained how they form a protective barrier for the region.

“The summers are warm but not oppressive, and the grapes here mature slowly and calmly.” He crouched down in the soil. “These vines are kept at a certain height above the ground so they can receive more sunlight and be protected from the frosts.” He brushed his hands over the bottoms of the vines with care. He'd removed his blazer and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. All of a sudden, the trip was not intimidating. The information, coming from Heinrich, was not loaded with any history or expectation. It was clean.

“You see, wine defies objective material description. It is a tool for conviviality, a bond between people, and is therefore totally subjective. The bond is reflected in the vines—an earth-and-sky bond.”

I turned to my dad and elbowed him gently in the ribs. He looked happy.

“Alors, on va aller voire la récolte.”
Heinrich wanted to show us the day's harvest, and thrust his chin in the direction of a set of stone stairs. They led up to a second and third tier of vines. Above them was the swanky hotel Château Isenbourg and the mammoth processing area where the grapes were having their current lives squeezed out of them.

For all the talk of the careful handpicking of the grapes, and the vines' dual link to the heavens and the soil and all things earthly and human and spiritual, I was surprised as hell to see that the bulk of the work was being done by robots—massive, whirring, crushing robots. The air was jammed with mechanized noises and organic noises; for every
bjjjjjzzzzzeeeoooo
and
pffsshhhhhhhhh
there were a thousand long, wet squishes. It was thrilling, this breathless preservation and transmutation of the harvest.

“Robots!” My voice was a ripple. I was entranced.

The rickety pickup trucks were in the overhead unloading zone, dumping their luscious bounty into a wild, screwy, rotating machine that blitzed away stems and leaves, creating overflowing piles of clean little scrotums that were then pushed dripping and languid into massive cylindrical containers, the size of two and a half full-grown African elephants, and squashed slowly, chokingly, by the round pneumatic squashers. One vat was full of Gewurztraminer, another full of Pinot Noir. Forming my four fingers into a small cup, I let them run under the tiny dripping silver taps sticking out of the presses. The juice was still warm, the grape skins having served as an incubator to retain the heat from the sun in the fields. It tasted fresh, clean, ambrosially sweet.

“C'est bon, hein?”
Heinrich came upon me as I was sucking on my index finger with spasmodic relish.

“Oh, monsieur, excusez-moi.”
I wiped my hands along the length of my hips and thighs.

I finished fellating my finger and nodded in agreement…it was
absolument délicieux
. I wanted to position my face underneath the taps and suck dry this mighty teat.

We clunked and clanged up an industrial metal staircase for a bird's-eye view of the tanks. The Pinot Noir container was wearing a thick hat of its deflated grape skins. Over the sounds of the machines, I yelled at my father for a translation.

“Dad, what's the grape-skin hat called?”

“The pomace,” he shouted back.

“Right. Good. And the whole thing—the new pressings and all—is the must, huh?”

“The must, yes.”

“And so the hat gives it character. The character depends on how long the hat is left on.”

“Yes. Like men.” He grinned.

“Like a man wearing a hat,” I confirmed.

One by one, the trucks, their outsides spattered with brown muck and their insides stained with inky juice, fired up and cruised away into an early evening as ridiculously vivid as a fistful of sunflower petals. We reached out for another round of handshakes with Heinrich and Jumpy Man. Heinrich reiterated his earlier invitation to have us meet with Pfaffenheim's head sommelier for a wine tasting in the morning. As they turned and walked off, I crammed the tips of the fingers of my right hand into my mouth and scraped my bottom teeth along my nails, dislodging the remaining bits of teat juice. Out of nowhere my father's arm appeared, slapping my hand away from my probing tongue.

“You are disgus
teeng
,” he said. Then he cackled.

At the Château Isenbourg, I was in my room taking mental notes of the hotel wallpaper: a
toile de Jouy
depicting a kind of elephant safari, with colonialist women riding on elephants, some in profile, some in portrait; palm trees with elephants standing near them; and rocks with elephants standing on top. It was silly wallpaper, really. I felt safe and solid and I wanted to make a joke about this dumb elephant wallpaper, but not with my father. I wanted to make a joke with Matthew. I wanted to tell him about how poorly the trip had been going and about the triumph of today. I wanted to hear how his days had been and whether he'd been missing me, so I located our international cell phone and sent him a text message. I shooed away the creeping voices.
You're torturing him by doing this. Leave him alone
.

Staring at the small gray screen of the phone, I waited for an answer, even though it was early over there, too early to be replying to text messages from ex-girlfriends. Matthew was an insomniac. There was a chance.

I punched a trough into the unused feather pillow lying to my right and nestled the phone into the dent. I drifted off, and the phone didn't beep.

 

E
arly daylight seeped into my room, causing me to flop over impatiently onto my stomach and force my head between the crevasse of the two stacks of pillows. My left arm immediately touched cold plastic. I regained a bit of consciousness.
The phone
. I slid it around in my hand until the screen was upright, then brought it in close to my face with dread and hope.

He'd always responded. Matthew was my first responder. During one of our sleepovers (always at my apartment, never his), he'd wait for me to finish brushing my teeth. The door was closed as I'd made it clear that new lovers should not watch each other perform any bathroom-specific duties of grooming and function. Patiently, he'd waited outside the door to brush his own teeth. My cheap electric toothbrush, one that ran on AA batteries, buzzed weakly each time I applied its head to my teeth. I grumbled swear words and rapped the thing on the counter. Matthew asked if I was okay. I said I was okay and grumbled some more, eventually emerging after having given up on the magic electric life force of the toothbrush. I'd worn out the bristles with a vigorous manual brushing and chucked it in the garbage.

The next day, we were standing in the lunch line of a Thai restaurant in a food court. Tapping me on the shoulder, he said, “I have a small surprise for you,” and made me reach into the kangaroo pocket of his zip-up sweatshirt. Inside was a new toothbrush.

Whenever I made it clear in sentences and in movements and in grumbles that I required the Body and Brain of My Boyfriend, he stretched out those branch-arms of his and I was immediately encircled. He was my safety. My eyes remained closed.

He is not yours anymore
.

I knew there would be no message from him.

When I ended my relationship with him, I did it all wrong. Really, there are only two ways of breaking up with a person. Option 1: Selfishly. Option 2: Unselfishly. Unselfishly is the correct option and feels awful, as it should. To be the person who has already surreptitiously removed his or her heart from the table, and to then discontinue a partnership with a person whose heart remains on the table all gooey and throbbing and exposed, relegates the discontinuer to doing one and only one job.

That job is to eat shit with a shovel. Great piles of shit, loaded up onto a gleaming shovel.

If I'd been correct—unselfish—I would have stormed in quickly, pressed my C-4 plastic explosives into the crags and gaps, set off the detonator, and run like hell. I would not have stuck around for post-attack negotiations, or for rebuilding efforts, or to play soccer with my orphan, who'd just lost his hand and part of his ribcage; I would have gotten in and gotten out. Zoom. And after walked farther and farther away from the disaster zone. Only
then
would I have been allowed to ask myself questions. I would have been able to analyze how I'd been cruel and if I was all broken and split like old gray driftwood. I would have been permitted to ask if the union was not love but some twisted vanity project to temporarily sate a much larger, more intricate hunger. Only
then
could I have pondered and doubted my capability to discriminate between Cupid's golden arrow and his lead arrow, wines of meditation from wines that required no real investment or concentration.

If I'd been good, I would have done all this questioning far away from him, in my room or quietly on my short, depressed jogs. Only
there
would I have been allowed to describe myself as “an emotional slut” who was “dead inside,” like an ancient hollowed-out gourd with a sad little pile of dried-up seeds amassed at the bottom that make an even sadder plinking sound when I walked.

There, alone, I would have had license to do this kind of thinking while trying to silence the plinking noises by forcing piles of crispy bacon and cream-based pasta sauces into my mouth and far too much thick, microbrewed beer down my throat. If I'd been considerate of him, I would have allowed myself to go blobby so that when I was faced with seeing him at work, he would be in the luxurious position of gushing to his friends that I'd become fat, jiggly, and altogether unlovable, and, furthermore, undateable since the breakup. Of course he'd never say that, but I should have become overweight to give him the opportunity, or I should have at least
wanted
to give him the opportunity.

But I didn't.

I had
not
smiled resolutely as I watched previously bipartisan friends choose a side that was not mine, and did not focus on my shoelaces when I ran into them in the street, knowing them to be judging what I'd done based on the intelligence they were obtaining solely from Matthew. Instead, I'd trap them and babble a stream of excuses, justifications, corrections. I did not stoically read one friend's biting e-mail, and did not sob in agreement over her refusal to be sympathetic to my plight, her incapacity for stroking me between the eyes. She said I should have known better than to lead him on when I did not want him. (Had I ever truly wanted him? she'd asked.
OF COURSE
, I'd screamed angrily to myself, at my computer screen.) She was
not
right. I
could
continue to use the line “Oh, poor me, I'm so fucked up!” That was my
birthright
. It was absolutely appropriate that I cast myself in the starring role of this drama. He was in pain, but
I too
was in pain. And no, it was
not
time I grew up.

If I'd been unselfish, I would have accepted all the brokenness, and studied my vanity and my proclivity for love odds that ruled in my favor, the cowardly tendency for unilateral adulation.

And if I'd been smarter, I would have sat in my emotional bunker eating canned pears (and shoveled shit and bacon and pasta), waiting for the air to clear so that out of it, I could pluck some truth to apply to the next man. To myself.
That
would have been the correct course of action.

With Matthew, I chose to be selfish.

We worked so well in a foxhole. We cooked together. He was good at knowing how much salt I liked in my food. When one of us would get quiet and sad, the other would walk up, stick out a finger, and press it into a piece of flesh. Then we'd say, “Poke.” The worse it seemed, the softer and closer to the face the pokes would become. If it was really bad, it would be just the slightest poke on the cheek, with the most hushed and whispery, “
Poke
.”

His commitment to me was doubtless, unflinching. He calmly abided my rants and extremes, my constant hunger and dissatisfaction with myself, with life, with everything. During our first February together, on the weekend before the twenty-third, I'd attended a party where I knew barely anybody. The people were older, and the friend I'd come with left early. I'd been talking to a gaunt woman. As she became drunker, she detailed her recent back surgery, and offered me some of her pain medication. I gobbled down the pill and asked for another, for later. She gave me two.

When I called Matthew's apartment at five in the morning from a taxi, my voice falsetto with panic, a swamp for a head, having forgotten where I was and where I lived, he patiently fed me words to relay to the cabdriver. When I pulled up in front of my house, Matthew was there, in the cold with no jacket on, waiting on my front steps, his boots unlaced, his cell phone in his bare hand.

“I brought your spare key, just in case,” he said.

I described to him my allergy to the present. Matthew nodded patiently when I stomped around, detailing how I could not exist within or enjoy the present (even though he was in mine), and how it had pressurizing and irritating effects on the contents of my skull (which, at the time, included him). He abided this allergy, which was at once an itch and a fear, an itch that could be scratched only by getting on with it, moving on to the next thing, satisfying the curiosity that there is something beyond
this
place, this annoying purgatory that is holding up my trajectory to the
other
place—the other place, of course, being much better and more stimulating than
this
infernal place. He internalized how my itch paled in comparison with my fear, the fear of
this
place ending. The fear that this place was, in fact, the best place, and it was moments away from ending. The fear that I would not be in this place again; that once it was gone, all the feelings will also be gone, and not gone momentarily, but gone forever. He got how the itch, at least, was an enabler, whereas the fear, contrarily, precluded my happiness and made me wonder why I bothered doing anything at all. And he didn't seem afraid of any of it. He didn't seem terrified. Not even at the beginning, not even during our first beer date at a greasy Toronto Tex-Mex restaurant, when I was acting itchy, so itchy, and I stared at him like a creep in his striped long-sleeved shirt with its flattering collar that emphasized his smooth, boyish neck. I sat there pouring pitchers of beer into our glasses. I encouraged him to drink faster and faster. We became drunk, and he smiled an amused smile when I thrashed my arms at the waitress as though I were an epileptic air-traffic controller, demanding that she bring us our bill and four shots of repulsive German liqueur so that I could drown out the faint final voice in my head's Greek chorus that was meekly crying,
Don't kiss him in the restaurant. It's tacky and you have nacho breath
. And he didn't mind when I scooted off my bench, pivoted across the width of the table, plunked down next to him, and thrust my face into his.

Weeks later I announced, “We're a couple now!”

He replied, “Sure. I wasn't planning on going anywhere.”

He was never cruel, the way Peter had been during those brutal months after the accident when I was still consumed with depression, when he yelled, “If your knee is broken, you go see a knee doctor. If your head is broken, you go see a head doctor.” If Matthew made a Face of Intense Contemplation, and I asked him what he was thinking, he would not say something like “Oh, nothing…” or “I don't feel like talking about it; I am a very private person, you know.” He would just come out with it and allow me to help him, if I could. A lot of the time I couldn't, but when we were alone in the little quiet egg of our love, at least he let me try.

When I had a bad day at work, he'd take me out for coffee and quietly sing Lyle Lovett's “If I Had a Boat.” He'd look me straight in the eye and sing until any illness in my head would be muscled out by images of Lovett's flaming vertical hair bobbing up and down while he (mysteriously) rode horseback on a boat.

When I broke up with him, he stayed with me in my house. He stayed because I had just been walloped with a bout of stomach flu, and despite his broken heart, he fed me Jell-O and applesauce for three days. He stayed also because I was not brave. I was selfish and turned into a huge sobbing mass of muscle and flesh and blood and whimpered that I loved him and would always, always love him and how I couldn't imagine a world without him and his collection of different-colored polo shirts.

As he spoon-fed me applesauce through my tears, he said, “I'm not sure I understand what you're telling me.”

To which I should have responded, “I'm breaking up with you, so now you must leave. Thank you for the applesauce, but I can feed it to myself.”

To which I instead responded, “I love you and want you in my life but I can't appropriate your existential dread anymore.”

To which he responded, “Does this mean we're breaking up?”

To which I responded, “Yes.”

Then I added, “I still love you.”

My weakness set us on course for three months of beige. I wrote the rules with his tacit consent. We could spend as much time as we wanted together. Phone calls were unlimited. Physical contact was discouraged, but permitted when we lazily or drunkenly blundered into it, as long as it was completely dry. A head on a lap during a rented movie, fine. Sleepovers were okay as long as we were fully clothed and our bodies were shaped in the form of spoons. We did not speak of romantic rendezvous with other humans, especially me, who in my beige freedom had taken to engaging in romantic rendezvousing with three other men. My life took on the dual shape of a juggling act and a sexy Venn diagram. And in the week before my departure for France, I had a hunch that Matthew, who tap-danced between the territories of supreme perceptiveness and outright paranoia, began putting the pieces together.

In my hotel room, I'd fallen back into a fitful sleep under the
toile de Jouy
elephant wallpaper. I was skateboarding around an asbestos pit to avoid a group of zombies who seemed intent on acquiring my brain or spray-ing infected zombie blood all over my face. I couldn't make out whether they were the slow, atrophied late-twentieth-century zombies or the fast, rabid, early twenty-first-century zombies.
Is it a group of zombies? A pack of zombies? A herd of zombies?
Whatever it was, I was terrified and skating fast, planting my foot firmly into the gravelly earth, swooping down the arc of the pit, throwing my weight forward as I hit the upward slant, all the while looking back, checking to see how much terrain I'd gained on the zombies. There was Kate Moss in the middle of the pit, sitting on a splintery wooden bench. She was all in white. What was she doing here in this pit? The cuffs of her white jeans were absorbing the gray-brown dirt like denim sponges. The zombies had no interest in her. Oh, she was kissing Matthew. Matthew and Kate Moss, me and the zombies. Curious. There was pounding. Pounding a fist on wood; someone was at the door.
What door?
Rap rap rap. Room service.
Room service can't help me now. Room service?