Chapter I #2
“Work.” I drop my gaze. Decidedly the least sexy of her offered options. “My boss sent me. He distributes Antoine’s wines in the US.”
In truth, Alec, said boss, is hardly dull: He, of the famed Alec Golde Selections, spends his weeks marauding back and forth to Chablis and Emilia-Romagna, charming winemakers into offering him custody of their bottles in exchange for the assurance that he’ll make them Burgundy Rich, while I—a “rep” by trade and by accident—hawk his wares in New York.
Nearly two years prior, I’d been Alec’s waitress at a French restaurant in Fort Greene, and at the start of his meal, he’d asked me the difference between two sparkling options.
I’d said that one tasted like unripe clementines and the other like whispering.
Whether or not my customers enjoyed this particular mode of wine discourse, it seemed apparent that few among them truly knew the meaning of oxidative either way.
“The second is saltier, of course,” I’d added.
“Interesting. I don’t think of Pineau d’Aunis as a particularly coy or quiet grape,” he’d said.
“Nobody whispers about boring things,” I’d replied conspiratorially, and he’d offered me a job on the spot.
In my experience, people were always trying to rescue servers from the plight of serving, when in reality, it was a perfectly solid and entirely lucrative profession that did not feel akin to a slow-burn lobotomy in the way I imagined so many others might.
In any case, I’d said yes. It’s nice to be rescued sometimes—even if from nothing.
Within the first few months of working for Alec, I learned that he had a sweet, obsessive quality about him: a tendency to carry on with games of backgammon until 3:00 a.m., a daily squash regimen, a set of his own pool cues, which he gleefully toted between dive bars.
With no sport at hand, he would busy his fingers rolling cigarettes, palming tobacco from a plastic pouch.
He’d gladly tell anyone who asked that he’d had a nasty narcotics problem, enjoyed a brief incarceration stint, obtained a handful of lightly regrettable tattoos, then reemerged as the largest natural wine importer in the Western Hemisphere.
“Not a bad boss, eh?” Ruby prods, interrupting my silent, jet-lagged soliloquy.
“Can’t complain,” I say through a stifled yawn. “Sorry, long day of travel.”
“The wine’ll help, don’t worry.” Ruby puts a hand on my shoulder. “You ready for your debut?”
I nod my consent, and she squeezes my arm before skipping down the stairs. I trail behind and hear her mimic a trumpet noise with her mouth: “Hear ye, hear ye. écoutez! Alice has arrived! Elle est arrivée!”
As I join her, she crosses her ankles, bows deeply, and sweeps an arm out in front of her in a sloppy curtsy.
I can’t help but grin as I take stock. Bea winks at me from the stove, where she tastes pasta sauce in a stained apron, looking so en place here, it’s as if she’s come up through the floorboards.
“Ciao, bellisima!” a lanky boy calls out, loping over in nothing but athletic shorts and a leather vest, several necklaces armoring his sternum.
He kisses me on both cheeks then holds me back to look at me from arm’s length.
“You are bellisima! Thank God,” he nearly shouts in a sloped Italian accent.
“We need more beautiful girls around if we’re ever going to pick all these grapes without dying of boredom. ” I roll my eyes and laugh cautiously.
His name is Pietro, he explains, hardly breathing between clauses, and his father is a rather prominent businessman in Milan.
Earlier that year, at the ripe age of twenty-two, he’d been offered a banking internship for the summer via his father’s valuable connections .
. . though he’d threatened to run away to Slovenia were he pressed to go through with it.
Instead, he’d found work doing vineyard labor here, which was not exactly as good for his CV but might build character all the same—or so his father supposed.
While he speaks, he gesticulates so effusively, he seems to be whirring.
“Cool it, ragazzo. Catch your breath. You’ll scare off the American girl.
” Another boy nudges in, holding a stack of cloth napkins.
His English is excellent—nimble and well trained even under the tint of his French accent, like he knows how to say what he means.
His hair tumbles out from under a navy logo-less baseball cap like cartoon waves, and his shirt, a short-sleeved button-down, is the same color as Bea’s Fiat—a milky weathered blue, shallow like puddles.
“She’s a New Yorker, not an American!” Ruby shouts over her shoulder from the opposite side of the kitchen, sawing away at a baguette.
“OK, New York.” He takes me in from the ground up, his gaze rising like helium, eyes as blue as his collar. “Welcome. I’m Henri.”
I test out the H-less pronunciation in my mouth: Aaaahnrree.
“Alice. Enchanté.” I hold his eye contact.
“Ah, the accent is not so bad, she speaks some French! Elle parle francais.” He grins mischievously. “Can she set a table too?” He thrusts the napkins into my arms and gestures toward the door.
I turn on my heels and march outside, clutching the cloth, oddly reluctant to break away.
There is something distinctly non–New York about him.
He’s tall and sturdy, tan in a way that suggests he’s never been anything but, has never been indoors too long.
No visible tattoos, no status sneakers, no designer T-shirt.
Bare feet, freckles. He is, it seems, without angles.
Not sanded down, exactly, but polished—as if by water.
Outside, the table has nearly reached its final form. Silverware lies at the ready, mismatched juice glasses scattered like mancala pieces. Candles and lanterns are lit. “Coucou!” I hear Bea cry from the kitchen. “Le d?ner est prêt, dinner time, on doit manger!”
I watch apprehensively as the crowd assembles, unsure where to place myself. Are there designated seats? A stout, dark-haired boy in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt emerges from behind me, cradling several dusty bottles of wine.
“I see the American is here,” he says in a German accent as he places one in front of me. “I’m Julian. Nice to meet you.”
“She’s a New Yorker, not an American.” Henri’s voice pipes into my left ear as he slides onto the bench beside where I’m standing.
“Have a seat, Alice.” He taps the space next to him.
It’s an oddly intimate gesture, and I’m suddenly self-conscious, fighting the urge to glance around to see if perhaps there’s another Alice in the vicinity.
As I settle in, Julian arranges himself across from me and proceeds to explain, without solicitation, that he is enrolled in viticulture school in Germany. This is his final internship before he can start making wine of his own. He speaks in brusque, geometric English.
“Has a bit of an ego, that one,” Ruby whispers, sidling up to the place setting on my other side. “Thinks he knows best in a man-who’s-never-had-a-real-job way.” I bite back a smile.
Once the table is fully set and occupied, the whole tableau is impossibly striking. It has the dreamy, slippery quality of a memory, some re-creation of a bygone scene: seven seats, a mess of plates, all of it flanked by vines, multilingual chatter, the warm breath of late summer air.
In French, vu is the past tense for “to see,” like déjà vu.
When I first started learning the language in college, the past tense had stuck with me more firmly than the present.
For months, I phrased everything like a long-gone missive.
Like something remembered rather than something transpiring.
That’s what eating dinner in Alsace tonight looks like to me—something remembered.
“Julian, tell us what we’re drinking,” a voice booms out of the near darkness, first in English, then again in French.
The pronouncement comes from a man who is now looming over the farthest end of the table.
He is tall and wide with a scar shaped like a comma above his left eyebrow and a dark, woolly beard.
He has on overalls with plastic buckles at the shoulders, the legs tucked into knee-high rubber boots.
“Have you met Antoine yet?” Henri whispers.
I shake my head.
In blocky, German-washed French, Julian answers: “All Loire Valley stuff tonight. Whites.”
“Ahh, interesting,” Antoine muses. “I suppose we’ll have to ask the new girl to blind taste.”
He strides over, growing larger as he nears, and kisses me on both cheeks with a warm, thunderous laugh.
He looks like Santa Claus in his early forties, if Santa Claus went to the gym.
“We’re so glad to have you. Our first American!
” He places a glass in front of me. “Alec says you’re his favorite.
And your boss is the reason we can afford this house.
” He laughs, pouring from a bottle Julian passes his way, carefully covering the label with his opposite hand.
“By the time you leave, you’ll be able to blind taste vintages.
But for now, let’s just start with the grape. ”
I can feel the chill of a dozen eyes trained carefully on me, and my heart rate quickens. This is not an unfamiliar practice for me, but I’m unaccustomed to the audience. I close my eyes and inhale from the glass through my nose, take a sip, aerate, swallow.
Henri’s voice, hot in my ear: “You know, you don’t have to close your eyes to blind taste.”
My eyelids shoot open, glare at the ready, and Ruby punches him in the shoulder from behind my back.
I turn my attention to Antoine, eager to make a good impression.
“It’s Chenin. Loire? I guess they’re all Loire, Julian already said that.
” I shift my eyes back to my glass. “It might be blended with something else, but I’m not sure.
Can’t be more than two years old?” I look up at Antoine nervously, wondering if he, too, can hear my heartbeat.
“And what do you think? Do you like it?” Antoine asks.
“It tastes like . . . the sound a bell makes.”
He shakes his head back and forth slowly, and a grin spreads wide across his face. He picks up the bottle and holds the label for me to see. Chenin—nearly four years old, single-variety.
“Close enough, you pass!” He fills my glass and hands the bottle back to Julian to distribute at the table. “Well done! Alec told me to write down everything you say—I suppose now I know what he meant.”
I beam, my cheeks growing warm. Oh, to be praised at this table, of all the tables in the world.
“Pas mal, New York, not bad,” Henri whispers, elbowing me gently in the ribs.
Antoine claps me on the back, then straightens to return to his seat. “I think you’re going to like it here,” he says over his shoulder.