Chapter VIII
VIII
I stand at the sink, feeling my fingers prune in the soapy water. Dirt clings resolutely to the skin under my nails, holding fast even in the pool of dish liquid. There is a certain catharsis to washing dishes—the tactile ease with which a situation can be resolved, debris expunged.
One by one, I pull from the precarious stack of plates beside me.
As the others mill back and forth from the table, clearing away dishware, the pile grows steadily in size.
I feel a surge of gratitude for the silence of my task.
No French to be spoken, decoded. It dawns on me that this is the closest to alone I’ve found myself since arriving—that I haven’t had the opportunity to get acquainted with my own brain material for some time.
I decide that after the clean plates are stacked, the sink drained, and the compost loaded, I’ll call Emma, who will love nothing more than the news that I’ve developed a crush.
I can imagine the tinge of hyperbolic awe in her voice: A crush?
Is this my Alice we’re talking about? Tell me everything.
I’ll start by telling her about harvest writ large: The geometric impossibility of vines reaching toward some unknowable horizon.
The ways in which French has started to change, has fermented into something more available to me.
The earnest, endless confessions amid the sacred space of the vineyards.
And then Henri. I want to talk about Henri.
I can’t figure out where, exactly, to place him.
I know that all of it—the whole of being here—feels so decidedly large, so worthy of reflection.
He, however, is different. Separate from the Experience, a more novel plot point for me.
I can feel it—whatever it is that I’m feeling—in my sternum.
Not quite my heart but the pulsing, vibrating space around it. It feels like hunger.
I finish sponging the countertop clean, and when I turn away from the sink to wipe my hands dry with the dish towel, there he is. Like some willed hallucination.
Henri leans against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, watching. I pause, wondering if it’s possible that he’s just stared right through my skull, read the full transcript of my interior dish dialogue.
“What?” I shrug like I’ve been caught.
“Didn’t wanna interrupt you. You looked very zen.”
“I like doing dishes.”
“In that case, you’re welcome to come visit me in Lyon any time.”
“How generous.”
“Wanna take a walk?”
I do, of course. Want to. But the two of us alone, without a grapevine barrier, feels more concrete than hypothetical. Part of me, I’m aware, prefers to enjoy him as a metaphor—some bit of evidence toward my capacity for feeling and being felt, but at arm’s distance.
I can see him register my hesitation, the slight false start. My body’s involuntary draw toward him while my feet remain rooted in place.
“Come on, it’s just a walk. Harmless.”
Who am I kidding? Henri is not an abstraction or some savory bit of gossip.
He is right here with his fingertips hooked onto the doorframe.
My reluctance is flimsy, performative for my own benefit, and he sees through it, a taunting grin etched across his face.
But hell, agency isn’t about making the righteous choice.
It’s about making a choice—and I want to breathe this boy’s air.
I walk to him, and he weaves his arm through the crook of my elbow.
“What were you thinking about in there? You were so absorbed.” He opens the door for us.
I shrug.
“Fine, you’ll tell me later. Do you wanna know what I was thinking about?”
“Oui.”
“Your hands.”
I exhale through my nose and bite my lower lip, picturing my wounded fingertip in his mouth. Instinctively, I curl both hands into fists. “Go on.”
“You have crazy hands. Seriously, they’re never still.
So much of your personality lives in them—I see it when you talk, when you work with grapes, when you cut food.
When you do dishes, apparently. I like it.
” He unfurls my fist and loops his fingers through mine, resting his thumb against my palm and pressing down as if to trigger some button-operated response.
“I have, indeed, been known to gesticulate.”
“You know, I think about hands a lot. They’re a thing for me.
I’ve watched my uncle’s hands working the vineyards since I was a little kid.
I’ve worked in restaurants for ten years.
All this time, looking at palms and fingers.
And your hands are specific. They’ve got energy in them, like they’ve always got something to say .
. . even if you don’t know what it is yet. ”
He pauses, lifting one of my hands to his mouth, pressing his lips to my knuckles, resting there as if taking my temperature.
For a moment, I relish the gesture for what it is.
Then I look at him and sigh. “Henri, before—” Suddenly, I feel soap operatic in pressing him.
Nothing in this is meant to be heavy. Summer camp, no?
But I’m too tired of our convoluted rapport, this state of limbo, not to meddle.
“What about Antoine? What about your girlfriend?”
He locks eyes with me, a certain wounded surprise settling into his face.
“Antoine is just protective, OK? Paternal. It’s nothing against you.
It’s just that he knows my girlfriend, knows how devastated I was when the bar closed.
He thinks I’m gonna make some kind of rash decision and blow up my life.
But he doesn’t understand: Charlotte and I chose to take a break. I wanted a change.”
“Charlotte . . .” I feel the contours of her name against the back of my teeth. It had been easy up until now to forget that she was a real person—with a distinct laugh and painted fingernails, probably. “OK, but . . . Charlotte, does she—”
“Look, can we not talk about this right now? We’ve been working all day. I don’t have the energy.”
I can feel him recede a bit, retreat into himself—and I want him back.
I resent having ruptured the intimacy between us in my attempt to depose him.
I’m not sure I even want to know more about Charlotte.
Or Antoine. It seems just as likely that I’m simply trying to squelch my own—rare—inclination toward affection.
Making things difficult for impossibility’s sake.
“Oui, oui, OK, désolée. You’re right.” I miss his lips on my knuckles.
“Merci . . . I appreciate it.” He pauses, looking down at his shoes, and slides his now-open hand into his pocket. For a moment, we stand like that, too far apart, and he shifts uneasily from one foot to the other.
“Ah! I almost forgot!” His voice is gleeful now.
He unveils an envelope of gold foil and peels back each layer as if unearthing some historic thing to reveal two small rectangles of chocolate.
“The best and darkest chocolate there is. So bitter, it’s almost savory.
You love the taste of strange things. I thought you’d want to try. ”
I reach for a piece and place it in my mouth: The texture is grainy and tough, like soil. It has the sour, acrid drone of coffee grounds or lemon rind, but underneath, it’s still chocolate—cautiously decadent.
Bitter things, I know, once signified danger. Way back when we were untamed and primal, it was how we detected poison—or at the very least, forbidden matter. Now we’ve been coddled into believing we needn’t heed warning signs. Everything has an antidote; danger is relative.
“Tastes like rot.” I swallow. “Like rot on purpose. The good kind.”
“Just like wine, no?”
“Precisely.” I grin in spite of myself.
He says the right things. And what am I to do with someone who keeps on saying the right things?
I watch as he fingers the hem of his linen shirt anxiously—another shift in demeanor. He seems to be shuffling between two modes of being: one flirty, breezy, and cavalier, the other apprehensive and withholding. I wonder if my own shaky indecision is radiating off me just as clearly.
“Alice, it’s hard,” he blurts—as if he’s long been holding this particular statement, fully formed, poised at the front of his mouth.
“I’m realizing that people hardly ever leave.
They stay, and stay, and stay, like Ruby’s guy.
They stay when all the feeling is gone, as long as things aren’t awful.
We have no protocol for leaving something that is just fine.
I don’t know how it’s done.” He toys with the edges of the foil wrapping, and his forehead creases in thought.
How strange it is to care for someone. Even with plenty of my own selfish Henri-related impulses to gun for, right now, I want to absolve him of his malaise.
I want to carry it for him. “Well . . . I think it’s easy to assume that leaving is the solution, but, I mean, you don’t get to arrive anywhere clean.
Relocating doesn’t rewire your brain.” I put my hand over his to pause his restless fidgeting.
“Listen: I’d be lying if I said I wanted anything less than a new identity or, perhaps, a fresh code of DNA from this experience.” I realize I’m talking to my feet and look up at him. “But, unfortunately, I have to stay me, and you have to stay you.”
He laughs and chews on his lip. “You know . . .” He takes a step closer. The dark is so complete that the glowing squares of window light from the house appear like floating portals. “You’re quite wise, New York.” Another step closer. “I . . . I’d like to watch you do dishes more often.”
I laugh, run my tongue over the compliment, savoring the perfect symmetry of his delivery. Ruby was right: There’s nutritional value in being looked at in certain ways. It’s nourishing, the way he witnesses.
“Oh yeah? You into that? Dish-doing?”
“I guess I’d watch you do most things.”
I laugh, louder now.
“Sorry . . . too much?” His eyes dart across my face, searching for some legible reaction.
I nod, doing my best to keep my face neutral, to weigh down the corners of my mouth.
“Do you want me to look at you?”
Again, I nod. But this time I don’t suppress my smile. It arrives both because of and in spite of him.
The space between us is so narrow, I can see the gaps between his teeth. It’s almost as if we could transfer air in some closed-loop system, breathing each other in.
“I’d like to kiss you.” His voice is not quite a whisper.
Some in-between decibel. I can feel the kinetic force of the acknowledgment.
I don’t dare lean in, however desperately I want to.
If there is a line, it’s his to cross. Stay still, stay still, I will my feet, repeating the directive like some protective omen.
He runs his hand through his hair, bites his lip again.
As if on cue, out of the dense silence: the sound of a glass shattering, sharp and briny. A light switches on in the kitchen, leaking yellow into the dark void where we stand.
“I’d like to kiss you too,” I say, and I turn to walk back toward the house.