Chapter II
II
The following morning, when my alarm sounds, it’s still dark. Ruby switches on a lamp, and in the half-light, we shrug into tall socks, shorts, tank tops, boots.
“You’ll want another layer, it’s cold in the morning,” she advises just as we stumble out the door.
Pietro, the animated Italian, ushers us toward a twelve-passenger van parked at the edge of the property, waving his arms in the air like human windshield wipers, keys in hand.
“Get in, bella, this is the techno van,” he shouts across the lot, urging me forward with a toothy grin.
“That just means it’s cool,” he explains.
“When something is cool, my friends and I, we call it techno.”
We file into the vehicle, which is caked in dried mud and littered with supplies: buckets, clippers, gloves, bottles of water. I Tetris my way into the back and onto a bench seat while Julian flops into the trunk.
“Pardon, make room.” Henri’s boyish voice hits me like an amphetamine. At the sound of it, I’m awake.
He wedges himself next to me in a purposefully clumsy maneuver, wiggling his hips to shimmy his way into a space already clearly at capacity.
He’s wearing the same baseball cap and a black nylon jacket, and he smiles at me sideways before reaching an arm around my shoulders.
“Too tight in here, trop serré.” I can feel the warmth of him even through the sweatshirt I wore at Ruby’s urging.
He grins like he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“No problem, pas de problème.” I smile back, briefly wishing there were fewer layers of cloth between us.
“Techno van! Techno van! Techno van!” Pietro chants rhythmically from up front, pumping his fist in the air.
Minutes later, he screeches the vehicle to a loud, needlessly dramatic halt and turns around sheepishly to survey us for a response. None of his passengers pay him the sort of glowing attention he seems to thrive on, and he shrugs. “Not far to go today!”
As we drowsily climb out, one by one, I realize I’m reluctant to give up my real estate in the crook of Henri’s arm.
Stepping off the van’s running board, however, the scene is well worth the trade-off.
The sun is slowly inching in, teasing its way out over the vines, and everyone looks haloed and ruddy in the half-light, the vines behind them extending toward infinity.
The day laborers, most of whom, I was told, had driven over from neighboring towns, have already begun smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and the ends pierce like hole punches through the muted light.
“OK, everyone listen up!” Antoine shouts, emerging from the front seat.
“I will speak in English first—we have an international harvest crew this year. French second, ca marche?” His gaze shifts over to me and Ruby, flanked by Pietro.
The island of ex-pats present. “Everyone, take a bucket and un sécateur—how do you say . . . clippers? I’m going to call your name and assign you a vine.
You’ll stay there and pick until I tell you to stop. ”
He unloads tall stacks of plastic pails from the truck as he explains: When we fill our buckets, we’ll find baquets, large bins, throughout the vines where we can empty them, and the baquets will be hauled back to the winery intermittently throughout the day.
I queue up to collect my tools, and there’s a soft tug at my elbow.
“Stay next to me, New York,” Henri whispers.
“We can practice your French.” His pointed focus on me is oddly reassuring.
As if on cue, Antoine points at the both of us, leading us to opposite sides of the same vine just ahead.
He shows us how to use the sécateur to clip each cluster of grapes by the stem, holding the pearled ends so they don’t fall, how to use the edge of the tool to scrape out vinaigre, dried or rotten bits.
“Pinot gris,” he says, holding up a dense bunch so perfect in its arrangement that it resembles an oil painting. “Go?te-le, taste it.”
I drop one of the pristine orbs in my mouth. It’s like ripe pear, permanent marker, jazz apples. I can feel it up front by my teeth.
I make my first snip and hear Antoine shout instructions toward Ruby a few rows away. It’s just Henri and me now.
“Alright, then.” Henri tosses a handful of grapes over the top of the vine and into my bucket. “You’ll speak to me in French, I’ll speak to you in English. It’s good for us. So tell me, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m here for work. On business.”
“I don’t believe you. No one travels overseas to crawl around in dirt . . . unless you’re in, like, witness protection.”
His English is much better than my French (I haven’t the slightest idea how one says “witness protection” en francais). “I work in wine. I like wine. Those are good reasons, no?”
“I think you can do better.”
I offer him my professional spiel: a top-level summary of what it is to be a rep, Alec’s prestige, the industry cred I’ll earn from the presence of soil under my fingernails.
“You make it sound like you were forced. Surely you could have said no?”
Of course, I could have said no. But it had hardly occurred to me at the time.
Whether or not I’d have phrased it as such, I’d practically been waiting for an opportunity like this—something to counter all the monotonous rhythms of work and play I had fallen into.
“I wasn’t forced, no.” I rock my head back and forth indecisively, even knowing that Henri can’t see me.
“But I don’t think I would’ve made it here on my own if my boss hadn’t proposed it. ”
“So you wanted to come. Is that so hard to admit?”
“Fine.” I sigh playfully. Already, I like more than the look of him—his buoyant readiness to spar, his immediate air of familiarity.
I take stock of the mounting fruit in my bucket.
“To give you the short answer, I guess I’ve been bored at home.
Je sentais ennuyée.” I prepare myself for the oral acrobatics that come with sliding in and out of a language so rubbery and untrained in my mouth.
I don’t have the words to make my point properly—which is, more or less, that I have no patience for the specific malaise of apathy, especially when it belongs to me.
I’d been looking for a jolt. I didn’t know how to trigger one all on my own.
“Je me sentais ennuyée—it’s reflexive,” Henri corrects, pulling aside a leaf cluster to look me in the eyes. The vine divides us like a verdant hyphen. “And have you been bored for a long time?”
“I’m not sure. That’s a hard question.”
“We have a lot of time. And a lot of grapes to pick.”
“The answer would require lots of backstory—and you, monsieur, are a stranger.”
“Ah, you don’t get it yet. About les vignes.
This is what we do here: We talk.” He clears his throat.
“Among les vendangeurs, there are no stakes—we don’t know each other in the real world.
We don’t have friends in common. We don’t work in the same offices.
I’m Alsace; you’re New York. So, all day, while we have no choice but to work right across from each other, we talk.
It’s like therapy. Americans love therapy, no? ”
A laugh escapes me involuntarily. “Certain Americans, yes.” I grind my teeth, tighten my jaw, weigh where to begin.
In truth, proper therapy has never been easy for me; I lack the willingness to concede personal information without equal collateral from my conversational partner.
I tend to bristle at the imbalance. “OK, how about you go first? Basic exposition. Tell me why you’re here. Then, I promise, I’ll share.”
He sighs his consent, and through the vines, as we clip, he explains that he’d been living in Lyon with his girlfriend, tending bar at a small spot he’d opened with a childhood friend.
A proper dream come true (“Not to be sentimental about it,” he says).
Regulars, his own wine list, a record collection.
Walls he painted himself, tiles he cemented into place, a chalkboard smudged with rotating menu items. Tragically, however, the bar had closed earlier this year for all the usual reasons, and in a justifiable stupor, he’d come back to Alsace as a bit of a palate cleanser.
This is where he grew up, and working the vendanges with his uncle was meant to mark the end of something.
“Or perhaps the beginning of something else,” he says.
“I’m not sure which. Either way, a balm. ”
“Uncle?” I ask, doing my best to ignore the sour flinch in my throat the word girlfriend provokes.
“Ah yes, you didn’t know? Antoine’s family.”
“No wonder he likes you so much.”
“Blood lineage and my winning personality.”
“Of course, of course, bien s?r.”
“Anyway, I’m here for medicinal purposes. That’s the story.”
I understand. “Je comprends,” I tell him.
If I subtract the mental image of the partner, it’s easy to picture him in his own amber-lit bar, apron tied around his waist, refilling the glasses of patrons he knows by name.
I like it—like conjuring him in the architecture of the real world, even knowing I’ll never encounter him there.
Relatively speaking, our motivations are similar.
I, too, had been in the market for something hard edged—some capital-letter Experience to slap me awake—when I left home.
The antidote to ennui, whatever that tasted like.
Pinot gris, I hoped. “Comment dis-tu ‘jaded’?” I ask him. How does one say it in French?
“What does this mean?”
“It’s hard to explain—boredom about things that are not particularly boring. Being too cool, I guess.”
“I don’t know if we have this word.” Through the greenery, I can make out Henri rubbing his chin. I can almost hear him mining his own mental thesaurus. “Maybe it’s just that we enjoy boredom more than you do.”
By now, the sun has clicked into place overhead.
Henri flings off his jacket among the vines, and I do the same with my sweatshirt.
It feels like peeling off some protective membrane, and in turn, we start picking faster, speaking more freely.
I am somewhere between switched on and ignited with the arrival of true daytime.
“Americans—you’re not so good at sitting still,” he adds, and it’s as though his words are italicized with accent. “If you give it a different name, boredom can be poetic too.”
“It’s a nice thought, but I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Well, tell me about your boredom, then. It’s your turn.”
“Maybe I’ve never properly diagnosed it myself.
” I feel warm, and I don’t know if it’s the rising temperature or the continued interrogation.
“My job—it’s a lot of shmoozing about things that feel so distant.
I develop a script and I perform it—it’s well-informed lying.
And it gets exhausting. The whole wine-sales thing.
And . . .” I pause, unsure how to frame the next bit tactfully.
“And? Come on . . . it’s a boyfriend thing, isn’t it.”
“Am I so devastatingly predictable to you?”
“Go on!”
“Yeah, OK, fine, you’re right. I concede. Until recently, I was in this relationship—this relationship-adjacent thing—kind of by accident.”
“You ended it by accident?”
“No, I mean . . . the relationship itself was an accident.”
“How, exactly, does that happen to a person?”
“I guess I just never resisted. I kind of feel like it happened to me.”
“That’s cold.”
“Is it?”
“Very.”
We both go silent, and I consider it. Technically, I’d been seeing Jameson for months—long enough to be employing more committal verbs than seeing.
He was the GM at a restaurant downtown that charged $12 for buttered bread, and he substantiated my theory that all women are obliged to spend 60 percent of their dating lives with men whose names begin with the letter J.
He was algorithmically handsome in a way that suggested he’d never had to work terribly hard for positive romantic results.
In the greater context of our slice of New York, we did the same things, knew the same people, drank wine in the same rooms—places where we could send texts under the table or whisper suggestive things over our Zalto glasses.
We made sense together like certain salad toppings or discordant garments—but I never thought about him when he wasn’t there.
There was some bizarre, invisible-ink quality to my affection.
At times, his name would pop up on my phone screen and I’d realize I’d forgotten about him entirely.
When Alec had emailed me with my departure instructions, annulling my pseudorelationship had been my first order of business—and even I could acknowledge that I’d been all too eager for an “out” . . . especially one that involved a clean, intercontinental exit.
As I finished packing, I’d recounted the details of my so-called breakup to my roommate Emma.
“Maybe you’ll fall in love with someone you actually like now.
Someone French,” she mused. She’d spent the morning handing me dresses and ballet flats, all of which I’d promptly returned with the reminder that I was not, in fact, heading off to drink pastis by the Canal Saint-Martin with men named Pierre-Yves.
I was going to crawl around in dirt, picking grapes with aging, bitter farmers, most likely—ones who spoke in dialects of French I’d find even more difficult to parse than the Parisian version.
“I’m not sure my French is good enough to seduce anyone,” I’d countered.
“You’re pretty enough to be bad at grammar.” She sat on top of my suitcase while I struggled to yank the zipper shut.
“Sometimes you sound like someone wrote you,” I replied, knowing that was just the sort of thing she loved to hear.
“To the baquet?” Henri asks, reasserting his presence. I lift my bucket with one hand and pat my brow with the back of the other, feeling my skin go warmer by the minute.