Chapter III
III
Lunch in Alsace bears no resemblance to the flimsy notion of the meal I maintain in New York, pieces of string cheese and complimentary office pretzels inhaled while drafting emails.
Around noon, Bea arrives at our post in the fields in a truck and begins to unload a swath of folding tables, dead-straight down the vines.
We all stand in a line, washing dirt and grape debris from our hands at the spout of a gallon water jug, rinsing our tools and stacking our buckets before helping her shepherd unmarked bottles of chilled wine, silverware, and trays of bread to the tables.
Then we line up again, clutching our plates, waiting as she scoops enormous, entirely implausible quantities of lentil goop onto each of our dishes.
I’d have thought the whole tableau was some kind of glimmering mirage—this apparition of a feast set amid endless greenery—if I couldn’t smell the food myself.
Instead of queueing up with the rest of the throng, Henri takes a seat and starts methodically rolling a cigarette, seemingly immune to the human ache of hunger.
Watching him, I feel some pang of grade school fear—if we don’t enter the line together, we can’t sit together, and I’ll spend the whole of this meal entertaining a lengthy speech about Milanese rave culture from Pietro, or perhaps an even less amusing anecdote from one of the elder Frenchmen.
“What? Not hungry? Too proud to wait in line?” I taunt Henri, circling around the table, taking the long route to pass by him.
“Saving us seats.” He smiles and places his grape-stained palm on the plastic bench to the left of his leg. OK, OK, OK, I think. Even better.
“Ah, merci.” This boy is like a tooth gap. The relentless, curious tug of him.
As Bea fills my plate, I contort my neck to see what, exactly, it is that she’s doling out in such hearty quantities.
I make out carrots and sausage in the stew, and my stomach revs with a frantic whir—a reminder that I am not used to spending my mornings like this.
I’ve performed more than my standard share of manual labor, and I am hungry.
Walking back to the table, I see Antoine approach Henri, speaking quickly at a low volume close to his ear. They both look up at me in unison before Antoine knocks Henri’s cap to the side playfully and strides off to the opposite end.
“What?” I whisper to Henri, sliding into my seat.
He leans in close and puts out his cigarette in an empty water glass.
“He said, ‘Be careful; she’s your type,’” he murmurs through his exhale, and I forget to breathe.
He goes to fetch his food, leaving his statement hovering in his wake, shrouded in smoke, and I can feel his words lingering up by my ears.
What, exactly, constitutes his type? I wonder.
And does that give more or less weight to this fluency between us?
We drink Gewürztraminer out of small juice cups, and I fall into conversation with Marc, the septuagenarian day laborer to my left, who keeps suggesting I might be interested in meeting his grandson. The steady scrape of forks against plates undercuts the murmur of conversation like a bassline.
Once we’re through eating, we help return the table and its accoutrements to the truck, and Antoine redistributes us into the vines.
Admittedly, I am tipsy, just ever so slightly, ill-adjusted to the daytime wine—and the beating sun, the shade of the vines.
All of it lends a soft-focus, film-grade effect to the afternoon.
This is not New York, I think to myself, grinning. This is something else.
As soon as we reassume our positions, Henri picks up precisely where we’ve left off, wasting no time. “OK, so, have you ever been in a relationship that didn’t bore you?” He clips with a renewed, postbreak fervor.
“Of course! It’s not like I’m immune to romance.”
“Prove it.”
I smirk at his unabashed prompting before I realize I’m meant to tell him a story.
“Fine . . . well . . . a few years back, there was something. Someone,” I begin, twisting the sinew of a grape stem between my fingers, urging myself to press through my typical brand of reluctance.
“Long before the nothing-guy, I had a much larger thing end. And I think, in some ways, I haven’t really felt anything since.
” As I say this, I realize how true it is.
I hadn’t bothered to pit the relationships so neatly against each other until now.
“How long were you together?”
“Six years, almost. A long time. It was the right thing—I mean, I think it was the right thing. The separating.”
I rarely talk about Max and try to think about him just as infrequently. I’ve devoted a considerable amount of time to building a life that functions entirely independently of his, thus absolving me of this particular breed of conversation.
“But . . . ?”
“But . . . I don’t know, I’m always scared that that was my best thing. I’m glad I got to have it for a little while, but I’m not sure you’re allowed to have it twice.”
“Well, that’s not a very optimistic thought.”
“Maybe everyone says that about the last person they loved? I don’t know.
” I fiddle needlessly with a knotted stretch of vine.
“After that, I started working in restaurants, and then in wine—these really social, shiny, public-facing jobs. Things I was good at, things I could be entirely absorbed in,” I continue.
“And at the same time, I think something switched off, or malfunctioned in my brain. It was like I’d spent too long feeling everything in caps lock, so instead, it all went mute. And it hasn’t gotten loud again yet.”
I can’t remember the last time I’ve spoken about Max—even with Emma.
This is the sort of dialogue that usually embarrasses me.
But there’s something about Henri’s prompting questions, the steady rhythm of corrected verb conjugations, the green barrier between us that makes it easy.
Something about the faraway closeness of us.
Perhaps even some long-dormant desire I’ve harbored, unwittingly, to relinquish this narrative to the air.
He pulls aside a leaf and winks at me, an unabashed I told you so smile plastered across his face. “Therapy! See?”
Fuck, he’s right. I grin back. “Therapy.”
“And that man, what was he like? We need all of the details if we’re going to heal you of your ennui.”
I laugh and share the contours with uncharacteristic generosity: The man, tall and sturdy, raised in a Brooklyn Heights apartment too astoundingly charming to be true.
A handful of key plot points involving the Rockaways, Thanksgiving, cigarettes on one stoop or another.
Intermittently, Henri asks for another detail or clarification, ushering me along like some gentle, almost imperceptible current.
“And there’s nobody, in the whole wide city of New York, who’s held your interest since this ex?”
“Nope.”
“Not a single person?”
“No.”
“OK, so why did you bother with this last guy, then? The accident?”
“It’s not like there was anything wrong with him, but . . .” I try to understand it myself—or, at the very least, explain it in a way that makes me a vaguely sympathetic narrator. “It was bizarre, actually. Most of the time, I wanted to like him. But I just couldn’t feel anything.”
“OK, so, wrong person, wrong time. Right time, wrong person. Right person, wrong time. If you’re having fun, no harm, though, right?”
“Sure. I’m not always very good at having fun, though. My roommate back home always tells me I’m wired wrong.”
He snort-laughs. “You’re wired just fine.”
“You don’t know me nearly well enough to make that assessment.”
“Sure, but give me a week of vine therapy. Maybe two. By the end of les vendanges, I’ll know all about your wiring.”
I wonder if we’re still talking in the same metaphor.
“We’ll see about that, mon ami.” I overturn my bucket into one of the baquets.
“Your turn. What about your girlfriend? Far more interesting than addressing my nonboyfriends.” I make my voice light and bright.
I do and do not wish to know—but by the etiquette of our vine rapport, it would be gauche not to ask.
I feel him hesitate on the other side, shaving vinaigre from a bunch of grapes with a needless attentiveness. “Well, um. We’re on a pause. A break?”
I exhale as quietly as possible, surprised at my own discernible relief.
“I’m not sure I have the right word. I . . . I don’t know. I wasn’t doing so well after the bar closed, and we were fighting a lot, and we thought some time away would be good.”
“Has it? Been good?”
“Well, thus far . . . relieving, yes. But I’m not sure that’s what I’m supposed to feel. For a while now, it’s just been a little . . . empty. Maybe I blame her for what happened with the bar? Maybe we’ve grown out of each other? Maybe it’s just a rough patch? I don’t know.”
“How long has it been?”
“We’ve been together since we were young—even before university. Our families know each other, our friends are close. But sometimes it feels like we’re just going through the motions because we don’t know how not to: parties, laundry, birthdays, emails.”
“Well . . . going through the motions can be nice. You forget how comforting it is to do laundry next to someone else until you’re washing your sheets alone.”
“Trust me, I know. The shape of our life . . . it’s good. Very comfortable. I don’t know why I’m complaining.”
“Why are you, then?” I nudge aside a leaf cluster to look at him. I take in the line of his chin as he clenches his teeth, running his hand across the surface of his mounting haul of fruit before turning to meet my gaze dead-on. “Therapy, remember?” I goad, emboldened by his own tactics.
“Touché. It’s probably because the whole break thing feels good.
Really good. Which, if I’m being honest, probably means I’ve been unhappy for longer than I realized.
Or . . . I don’t know. I don’t know if I see myself as unhappy.
That doesn’t feel like the right word. But something that’s like unhappiness. ”
“Go on.”
“It’s this thing that’s next to being sad but isn’t. Not quite.”
“Hmm, I like that. Maybe we’re both just whining because we’re the same flavor of unhappy.”
“Same flavor? So, you think unhappiness has a flavor?” He shakes his head. “What does it taste like?”
“Like pennies,” I declare, reverting to English.
He laughs. “Do you always talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“You know what.”
“Yes, I do. It’s why I’m so boring in French. I don’t have any isms.”
“I don’t think you’re boring in French.”
Now, in the warm, ambient blur of the afternoon, I don’t feel boring in French either. I grin, picturing the two of us from overhead: Mirror images, ambling along slowly on either side of the same vine, down on our knees, mid-confession.