Chapter VI
VI
The following morning, Henri hardly speaks while we work opposite each other in the vines.
We fill bucket after bucket with Sylvaner, emptying them one by one into the baquet, listening to the relentless thrum of French conversation around us while we harvest in silence.
This hush, almost deafening, reinforces my gnawing sense that whatever transpired yesterday was, somehow, a transgression—even if a devastatingly innocent one.
He jumps down and walks along the outer perimeter of the vines. “OK, you three—come with me.” He gestures toward myself, Henri, and Ruby, and we traipse to the vehicle and maneuver ourselves inside.
“The chosen ones. Aren’t we lucky?” Ruby sings, sitting between Henri and me and placing an arm around each of us. “You think we’re being promoted?”
“From free laborer to senior free laborer?” I joke.
“Maybe demoted,” she amends.
“Feels more likely,” Henri adds.
“With that attitude.” Ruby musses his hair, a brusque, fraternal gesture.
We’ve been picking low to the ground since I arrived, but now we drive past miles of midrange vines within reach at a proper standing height. Then we arrive at a portion of the domaine where the grapes stretch so high, I wonder how we’ll pick them at all.
The answer: We’ll do so perched on stacks of overturned buckets.
And within minutes, my calves ache from standing on my tiptoes.
Our arms are angled upward as if we’re performing a ritual to will rain from the sky.
My triceps throb from holding the prolonged position, a pain that recalls the discomfort of blow-drying my hair (something else that takes too long).
It is hot—scorching enough that the work grows more tedious as the sun beats down on our shoulders.
Our pace is glacial. Our buckets fill at a devastatingly slow rate.
The size of the fruit, the difficulty of the task, makes it impossible to move quickly.
These shriveled, tiny grapes, Julian takes great pains to explain, will be used for sweet or fortified wines, since they’re so overripe, so loaded with late-season sugar.
“God, I’m sweating heaps,” Ruby announces. “You’ll all need to entertain me if we’re going to make it through today. Who has gossip?” With excessive drama, she lugs her bucket several feet to the left to begin hacking away at a new section. “Julian, you’re up. Tell us a secret.”
Julian, who has just removed his T-shirt to tie it haphazardly around his head, looks over in mock anger. “I have no secrets. I’m German.”
“What does that even mean?” Ruby cries and tosses up her hands.
“Not true. Impossible,” I say. “Good characters all have secrets.”
“Just because you and Henri spend all day sharing your oral autobiographies doesn’t mean I have to.” Julian looks between the two of us tauntingly.
“Sure does!” Henri pipes up.
“I’ll tell mine if you tell yours,” Ruby proposes.
It isn’t difficult to siphon information out of Ruby, but in this particular context, there’s something to offering collateral. And Julian seems like the sort of man who requires negotiation to close any deal.
“Fine,” he starts. “I’ll answer any question you want if I can ask any of you a question in return—and you have to answer honestly.”
“Deal,” Henri agrees, and Ruby and I nod.
“OK, then, what exactly do you want to know?”
“Obviously we want to know if you have a lover,” Ruby responds without hesitation, lingering on the syrupy syllables of that last word.
I grin and swell with buoyant affection for her.
Ruby, with her hands on her hips, socks pulled nearly up to her calves in her Blundstone boots.
Julian is now shirtless, but Ruby’s taken a different sartorial approach: She’s wearing enough fabric to cover the both of them.
In a long-sleeved button-down with a handkerchief tied around her neck, she’s committed in full to protecting her alabaster, redhead skin.
The overall effect implies camp counselor or zookeeper.
“Oh, well, I’m actually engaged.”
“Like . . . to be married?” Ruby guffaws.
“Yes, doch, oui. My girlfriend and I have been dating since high school. We went to university together, and then she’s been working to go to law school while I’m finishing out viticulture school.
And then, eventually, once we’re married and settled, we’re going to inherit her family’s vineyard, and we’ll make wine there together. ”
“Wow! A full twenty-year plan! Way to make a romantic story deeply unromantic. At the very least, give us some details,” Ruby prods. “How’d you fall in love? What’s she like? Is she beautiful? What’s her zodiac sign?”
“She’s a Taurus, and yes, she has very nice hair,” Julian answers earnestly. The three of us hiccup with laughter in response. Ah, the austere Julian-ness of it all.
“I don’t know! It just makes sense. I’m not a very romantic person, but yeah, I would like for us to get older together or whatever, OK? Is that not sappy enough for you?”
“But . . . you’ve never dated anyone else? Ever?” Henri sweeps a curtain of hair out of his eyes with his forearm, leaving a small scrim of dirt across his forehead.
“Nein.”
“As in nine people or as in German for no?” Henri pokes.
“No—but don’t make fun of me.” Julian gives him a stern look. “Haven’t you been dating your girlfriend for just as long? At least I had the balls to propose!”
I feel Ruby nudge me in the ribs, a physical acknowledgment that we’ve crossed over into new territory. And though Henri seems just as reticent to answer as I am to hear his response, I know we’re all flagrantly curious.
“The difference is . . . I couldn’t marry her.
Can’t marry her.” Henri shrugs and angles himself toward Julian so I can see only the back of his head while he speaks.
“We’ve been together since university, but we’ve known each other since we were little kids.
We grew up together; we’ve got shared friends and all that.
We’ve both dated other people . . . but barely.
That’s why we’re taking this break. Or . . . it’s part of the reason, I guess.”
“Is romance dead? My God!” Ruby throws her hands in the air in frustration. “You’re both telling the most unsexy stories about being in love I’ve ever heard.”
Henri laughs gently. It’s an exhale, really, tinted with laughter. Fou rire is a phrase he taught me yesterday afternoon: “giggling.” What sparkling wine tastes like.
“Well,” he continues, still angling his speech toward Julian, “I think we’re both a bit unhappy. But we’ve never been unhappy without the other one. I guess maybe we both sometimes feel like furniture in each other’s lives.”
“I don’t understand.” Julian shrugs and bends a branch down toward him to clip a particularly healthy bunch, letting it fall with a heavy thud into the bucket below.
“Furniture is a good word for that.” I feel compelled to contribute something to the discussion—as if my relative silence is telling on me. As if to prove that I can participate casually, that I’m not rapturous over these tepid declarations from Henri.
“I don’t think of my girlfriend as a sofa, particularly,” Julian retorts, and instantly, the rest of us are doubled over, laughing with giddy fatigue.
A rare, unexpected joke, nestled in Julian’s signature deadpan delivery, punching through the melancholia of the exchange.
It’s like we’re letting air out of an overinflated thing.
As I giggle, I reach above my head to clip the end of a vine, and my hand slips. My clipper clamps around the end of my pointer finger instead. I draw in a sharp inhale and drop the clippers to the ground to clutch my finger, where blood is blooming like an ink stain at the tip.
“?a va?” Henri is fast in that boyish, poised-to-protect way. Our first declaratively tender exchange of the day, I think. How relieving, how relieving. He holds my finger and examines it from both sides. “Hmm, yes, we’ll have to cut that one off.”
I roll my eyes, and he smirks. Then he holds my wrist, elevates my hand, and leads me around the back of the pickup truck to our water jug, switching the tap on to rinse my cut.
I watch ribbons of bright red mix in with the water and drip down both of our forearms before pooling at our elbows and then the ground.
I wonder what’s loosened him up, warmed him toward me. Why now?
When things look clean enough, he pulls my hand out of the stream to reassess, watching as fresh blood finds its way out in small droplets.
With an assured, pointed curiosity, he flicks his eyes up toward mine.
Then without hesitation, he lifts my finger to his mouth and sucks as if he’s releasing olive flesh from its pit.
My other fingers dangle uselessly, debating whether they’re meant to cradle the stubble on his chin or hang limp.
I feel the damp, living heat of his mouth, the gentle edge of his teeth.
Feel my body respond with desire, the swell of it radiating from somewhere deep inside me.
We stand like that, no longer anxious or shifty about the project of prolonged eye contact, daring each other to look away. He pulls my finger free, inspects it for improvement, then retreats to the cab of the truck.
He returns with a Band-Aid. “All better, no?” He wraps it around my finger.
I nod. “Thank God we have a medical professional here.”
“I think I might’ve just saved your life.”
“It’s possible.”
On the other side of the truck, there’s a loud “Ahem” from Julian, looking askance with his hands on his hips. “If you’re done over there, we’ve got grapes to pick.”
We jog over, smiling, to resume our positions. I glance at my finger with fondness, as though the neatly applied bandage serves as some saccharine souvenir of Henri’s affection.
“Well, now that I’ve got an audience back, it’s my turn,” Ruby starts as soon as we’re in a rhythm, clipping away, shaking out our knotted biceps. “I do, indeed, have secrets.”
“This better be good.” Julian tosses a mangled branch of rotting grapes gently in her direction.
“Of course it’ll be good,” I call back without a clue what she’s about to share.
“It’s true.” Ruby loosens her makeshift ascot as if prepping her vocal cords to begin.
“Since you lot seem incapable of delivering, I’ll tell you something that’s actually interesting.
Withhold your judgment . . .” She tucks a few rogue wisps of hair behind her ears, emitting a palpable eagerness—as if she’s been waiting for precisely this pack of pseudostrangers, cloistered in this precise patch of no-man’s-land, for her disclosure.
“The truth is, I’ve been sleeping with a married man.
” She pauses, gazing at each of us slowly, gauging reactions—but no one seems particularly scandalized.
We know so little of one another beyond the scope of these vines.
As comfortable as I am with her, I can barely envision Ruby transposed into the real world, party to its ethical guidelines.
“I don’t know how you feel about infidelity,” she continues, “but I, myself, would have said I was opposed until, well, right now.”
I consider my own stance. Surely, I’d have said the same—opposed!
—but then again, nothing about her admission inspires a sense of righteousness in me.
It does little to change my perception of her.
Ruby, a three-dimensional person, is moving through the world, making choices, submitting to romance, perhaps wreaking a bit of havoc along the way.
We all wreak our havocs of varying degrees and intensities, don’t we?
“Anyway, he’s quite a bit older; he’s been married for longer than I’ve been alive.
” Her attention is back on the vines. “They don’t have sex anymore, he and his wife—which, I know, not a rare issue.
But the thing between us, whatever it is, is very real.
And no, I don’t mean that in a deluded way.
I don’t pretend like I’d like to marry him, and I certainly don’t want him to leave his wife.
But in this particular moment, I think we’re both giving each other exactly what we need.
And I have to believe that’s a good thing. ”
“And what’s that thing?” Henri asks. “What’s the thing you both need?” I’d wanted to ask the same question.
“To feel like we’re both deserving of being heard, and adored, and ravished.
Or maybe just being looked at in certain ways.
” She pauses, squinting her eyes up at the sun in thought.
“I think people require that sensation, or at least a piece of it, to move through the world. And sometimes you’ve been with your partner for so long, they don’t see you anymore.
It’s nobody’s fault, but everyone needs to be noticed. ”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that desire,” Julian admits.
“Maybe that’s because you’ve never been without it—that sense of being witnessed.
At least, not at an age where the lack-there-of-ness would feel palpable,” I offer.
I know, in the marrow of my bones, what it feels like to have your partner look right through you.
It requires extreme measures. Leaving. Cheating. Demolition of some kind.
“The problem with things like that is they always become uneven. One of you always wants more than the other,” Henri chimes in. As my finger throbs, I attempt to interpret his meaning. Whether want, in his terms, is a burden or a gift.