Chapter IX
IX
I wake up and nudge the debris from my eyes, wondering how much time has passed since I crawled into bed.
In New York, I often tossed and turned anxiously, anticipating whether or not sleep would wade in, would last. Here, I tend to lie down only to blink awake at the sound of my alarm moments later, as if the hours between have been nothing but a jump-cut. Two separate days spliced together.
I stumble downstairs, barefoot, for coffee.
The espresso machine makes a deep, guttural sound, something like a stomach whining, while it grinds beans and siphons liquid into the thimble-size cup.
I bring it to my mouth, and it’s hot enough to burn—just a small singe like some branding of the tongue.
Having woken before Ruby, I dress in the dark, choosing garments suited to the task of pigeage—or my understanding of it, at least. Outside the bedroom window, the sun is just beginning to leak over the vines, and its nascent light is yolky and thin.
I tiptoe outside to finish my espresso on a wooden bench that’s flush with the back of the house, and I revel in the quiet.
There is something I’ve always loved about waking up first in a house full of people, sampling the day before it’s intended for use. Borrowed time.
As I empty my coffee, a long shadow falls across my lap. Standing there, unapologetically tall, is Antoine, with an espresso of his own balanced atop a saucer. Briefly, I feel a certain nakedness at having gone saucer-less.
He sits beside me and takes a long, drawn-out sip before addressing me. “I love this time of day.” I wonder if he’s selected me for the task of pigeage with intention, sensing we might share some strange affinity for the day’s preamble.
“Me too. It feels so private.”
“It’s true. You know, harvest is quite social, isn’t it? I’m used to being here alone—or mostly alone—for so much of the year.” He set his drink down on the bench. “Then, for this little stretch of time, the whole place feels so alive.”
“Which version do you prefer?”
“This arrangement gets a little exhausting—I like my solitude. But then I have moments when I look at all of you at the end of the day. You’re all tired, laughing, enjoying one another.
That’s good for me. There are phases when I get so focused on the vine work, the soil, all the technical stuff in the cellar.
Tasting, sugar densities, blending, racking.
Sometimes I forget what it looks like to enjoy wine. ”
“Really?” I’m not sure why it surprises me that a man so gifted in his technical craft might be just as commendably thoughtful in more nebulous ways.
He smiles softly, gazing down into his cup.
“At the start of a meal, I watch you all taste something—you pay attention, you notice, you listen. Then, you forget. You talk to one another with so much enthusiasm. The wine is just there as background noise—that’s how it’s supposed to be. An accoutrement, not the main event.”
I can’t help but grin in that unabashed, anything-but-coy way I seem to do so much here. “That’s really good. You should write that down.”
“Why are you smiling so big?” He nudges my shoulder.
As I consider, I rest my eyes on the yellowing horizon. “Because it’s true. When I got here, that was the first thing I noticed—how layered and loud and rich it was to sit and watch people at a table like that. How it gives the wine a certain taste or, at least, some memorable quality.”
What I mean is: It’s begun to seem to me as if thirst presents in its own extraordinarily palpable ways here—not for wine but for everything.
A near-biological yearning for conversation, physical contact, intimacy.
Grammatically, in French, you “have thirst”: Tu as soif.
As if that kind of desire were something you could hold, a souvenir.
As if it were real and essential enough to exist in some three-dimensional form atop the table.
I continue, attempting to convey the vivid desperation and near-violent satisfaction this place conjures for me.
“Every day here, by lunchtime, it feels like I have never been hungrier, have never wanted food with such desperation. I don’t think I’ve ever drank—water and wine, both—with such enthusiasm, felt so enrapt in conversation, or so eager to crawl into bed.
It’s like this constant rhythm of longing and satisfying. ”
Antoine nods slowly, a smirk of his own growing. “I think that’s why people come here. It makes them feel very human.”
“I imagine it’s very therapeutic.”
“Is it? You tell me. You’re the one living it.”
I chew on my lower lip, tug at the hem of my shorts. “I’d say so. I think I forgot what it felt like to want things. Maybe wanting is the opposite of apathy—it’s so vulnerable to want.”
“You didn’t want anything when you got here?”
“I think I was just comfortable at home. Maybe a little numb. I forgot how good it feels to desire.”
“And Henri? Does that kind of wanting count?” he asks.
His question is abrupt, but his tone isn’t sharp.
My skin prickles with exposure. I feel the anxious groan of shame set in, somewhere in my abdomen, and I wonder if it belongs.
Antoine stares ahead, seemingly unfazed, in a way that I hope implies curiosity rather than criticism.
I resolve to respond in good faith, treat this as a plainly democratic conversation.
“I . . . yeah. Oui, ca compte, it counts. But I think the wanting is the important part—sort of a healthy thing for the both of us?” I attempt to take a sip from my cup, forgetting that I’ve already emptied it.
I don’t mean to speak on Henri’s behalf—I just want Antoine to understand that there is an odd innocence to our intentions.
“I like to think the wanting will have been special. Plenty of reasons to leave things unactualized, and . . .” I trail off, curious as to whether my spiel has made sense, has translated properly.
And I realize, in some small and mortifying moment of clarity, that I am telling the truth.
There’s something so rich about the longing—all the more savory and outsized because it’s an impossibility.
I have no need to complicate matters by integrating reality.
Or maybe that isn’t true at all. Maybe it is easier to bar myself from believing I can have the real thing. That way, the absence won’t hurt.
“Hmm. I see, I see.” He scratches his beard. “Listen, people are complicated—I can’t say what’s right for either of you. But be careful: Just because you’re both removed from your day-to-day lives doesn’t mean that whatever happens here won’t travel home with you.”
I nod diligently. Fearfully, almost.
By now, the sun is beaming, and the music of morning is spilling out from the house: phone alarms, spoons clinking against glassware, water running, footsteps and footsteps and footsteps.
“Shall we?” Antoine asks, standing and stretching one arm over his head. He presents as stoic, neither generous nor judgmental.
“Oui, on y va,” I respond, and I rush to deposit our coffee cups into the sink before following him into the cellar.
True to its name, the space is cavernous, with concrete floors and high, rounded ceilings.
It’s lined in what seems like a random assortment of casks, tanks, and oak barrels so large, barrel hardly seems the proper term.
Nestled between, there are enormous steel presses shaped like the tumblers on the backs of cement trucks and designed to squeeze juice from the fresh grapes we pick each day.
They cough out the excess bits—skins, branches, leaves—in a bin beneath.
Antoine shows me how to measure the sugar densities and the temperatures in each separate vessel, marking them down in black marker on a laminated sheet. As the wines ferment, both the temperature and the sugar levels rise. That’s how we know the magic is happening.
I climb into tanks one by one, dragging a rusted ladder with me for access, marching around the surface of each container to press the fermenting grapes gently.
Each day, these tanks are pressed by foot, the ever-alluring act of pigeage.
Waddling around inside feels like mucking through mud—how I used to imagine quicksand might function when I read about it in novels.
At first, the surface feels firm and unyielding—then, as I shift my weight from one foot to the next, I sink slowly until I’m thigh deep.
Then I wrench each leg free and go again.
Just like that, in circles, fifteen minutes in each tank.
Once the grapes begin to arrive, directly from the picking team in the vines, I stand in empty tanks while the fruit is loaded into each one via a long conveyor belt.
The machine is called a giraffe—jhee-raf, Antoine pronounces it—and it does indeed resemble the elongated neck of a zoo animal as it feeds fruit from bins on the floor up over the lip of this enormous cylinder.
Inside, my job is to press quickly with my feet to ensure that we are sealing in as many grapes as possible, making room for more.
At the end of the first shift, my legs ache. I crave sunlight. My temples hurt from the darkness and the mental work of translation—just as Julian warned, the cellar operates solely in rapid-fire French. I’m flailing about to keep up, faltering with directions given to me at a breakneck pace.
Once afternoon arrives, I begin to hear engines shorting outside, sputtering to a stop to deposit the pickers, and the faint, undulating beat of techno pulses, courtesy of our Italian boy.
I have one tank remaining—the day’s final pigeage.
It just happens to be a wide, square vat large enough to serve as a small swimming pool.
“Should only take you two hours!” Antoine teases, winking at me.
I’m rinsing pinot noir off my legs with a hose, and he must see the flash of horror in my eyes. “I’m just kidding. C’est une blague—it’s a joke.” He wraps an arm around my shoulder playfully. “I’ll have Julian send someone in to help you with the last tank. With two of you, it’ll take no time.”
Light unfurls across the floor in wide bands as he pushes open the cellar doors and strides outside, calling Julian’s name.
I stand, barefoot and damp, in spandex shorts and a sports bra—my skin, from the knees down, stained a rusted-red hue like a drunken shadow.
I position the ladder against the final vat and climb it slowly, rung by rung, careful not to slip as I hoist myself into the tank.
The grapes feel gelatinous and cool against my heels—aloe on a sunburn.
Then, in the doorway: Henri, shaped like a chess piece or a good omen.
He holds up a hand in a gentle half wave.
I do the same, feeling blithely aware of the distance between the cellar door and where I perch.
How many yards—or meters, here—separate us.
In painfully slow motions, he reaches down to remove his shoes and socks and picks up the hose to rinse his feet clean.
Then, at long last, hands on his hips, he turns to face me.
“You ready for me up there?” he asks, approaching the ladder.
“I don’t know if there’s room for you.” I gesture sarcastically toward the wild expanse of grape acreage in the tank.
He laughs and steps from the top rung of the ladder down into the red must with far more grace than I’d managed.
The hem of his shorts hangs too low. Already, he is submerged up to his pockets, the cloth blooming red in real time.
He looks down, assessing the damage, and reaches to remove his still-untarnished shirt from the equation, pulling the white cotton mass over his head and tossing it lightly over the edge and onto the floor of the cellar.
Thus far, I’ve spent so much time looking at his hands working in vines, his jaw as he speaks.
I’ve become so enamored of the smaller appendages, I’ve nearly forgotten about the absolute landmass reality of his body.
The tapered shoulder muscles, the ridge of clavicle, the gold chain that hangs like a garnish, twisted so the clasp faces front.
His stomach is flat and rigid with muscle, but not so much so as to seem inhuman.
Not architectural but alive. A certain softness there too.
“Ahem,” Henri interrupts, evidently amused by my unsubtle assessment of his new half-nakedness. “I’m not a piece of meat.”
I laugh, suddenly aware of my own skin—how much of me is on display. “I beg to differ,” I shoot back, wrapping my arms, by some gravitational instinct, around my ribs to remedy the exposure.
“Hey”—he steps forward and unwinds my arms one by one—“if you get to look, I get to look too.”
He takes a step back, raking his gaze over me from the bottom up in a way that doesn’t feel hungry so much as carnal.
Then, as if by some silent cue, we set about our task without breaking eye contact—marching around in operatic, hyperbolic strides, doing our best to maintain our balance, giggling all the while.
Outside, Julian turns on loud French pop music over a set of speakers, presumably while he and the team rinse buckets and sort the day’s final grapes.
“I love this song!” Henri shouts with a glint of wild, feral amusement. He snaps his fingers, stepping side to side with exaggerated effort, dragging his legs through the bog of fruit. “Come here, New York! Dance with me.”
He extends a hand and I grin, accepting it like a wrapped gift. He pulls me toward him with a firm jerk of the arm, catching me as I topple into him, and we move, side to side, like some underwater mass, one of his hands in mine and the other wrapped around my waist.
I rest my head on his shoulder, my free hand on his chest, and I feel the human pliancy of him as we trudge through the cold bath of fermenting grapes—this material that is not yet wine, just the beginning of the thing.