Chapter X
X
Ruby and I arrive at dinner with wet, perfumed hair, looking not so much clean as reborn.
Henri appears in a shirt so pure white, it seems holy.
Antoine is distributing tapered candles around the table.
The wind is gentle tonight, he explains, and he thinks we might be able to keep a flame or two in business.
“Would you look at that!” he exclaims, having lit the first. “It’s elegant, no? C’est élégante.” I nod, charmed by the absolute innocence of his delight—this childlike glee sprouting from a man shaped like a Roman column.
“Have you brought out the wines yet?” Bea calls out from the kitchen. “Dinner is nearly ready!”
“Ah, yes!” Antoine abandons his wax display to look for Julian, who is nowhere to be found.
“Henri it is, then.” He produces a ring of rusted, cartoonishly antiquated keys from his pocket.
“Why don’t you pick three magnums from the cellar while I finish up here with the ambience—we’re having lemon pasta, sardines, bread. Something that’ll pair well.”
Henri elbows me emphatically in the side, jingling the keys, and I can feel his smile even without looking up. The lucent warmth of it. “Come with me,” he says. “Allons-y, let’s go.”
I follow him around to the rear of the house, where he tugs open two iron cellar doors and we descend into the ground.
Unlike the clinically clean space where we make the wine, this subterranean tavern gives the impression that no one has so much as considered sanitizing in decades.
The place is cobwebbed and filthy, the walls lined with shelves labeled by region on slips of paper in a scrawl that is years past legible.
The bottles are so thoroughly cloaked in dust, the whole thing feels like hyperbole for “wine cellar.” I love it, this hard-and-fast evidence of time passed.
Henri pulls the string on one finicky lightbulb that hangs in the center of the ceiling, but it hardly sheds enough light for us to see past the cobwebs directly in front of us.
He grabs a flashlight shaped like a tulip from a pile just at the bottom of the stairs and switches it on, spraying a narrow, precise beam across the floor.
With his other hand, he reaches behind him and clasps mine, leading me farther into the watery depths of the space.
“OK, what is it that we want?” He casts his light haphazardly across the shelves.
“Citrus for dinner. So something rich and creamy to offset all the acid,” I reply. “We’re eating sharp things. We need something soft. Chablis, probably.”
We weave around, waving the flashlight, blowing dust off of labels like anthropologists.
“Here!” I pull a magnum from a bowling-pin stack, holding the label close so I can read the text.
It’s a producer my boss Alec loves dearly—a bottle we opened in the office on his birthday once.
“Listen, this is the sort of wine that changed a whole generation,” he’d announced then, taking a dramatic stage sip, extending his pause, looking us each in the eyes, relishing in our anticipation.
Henri steps closer, holding the flashlight at an angle to decipher the label. Then, without warning, he clicks it off. “Henri!” I scold, reaching for him instinctively—grasping at spatial awareness in this container of darkness. He stands stock still, making no moves to flip the switch.
I clutch him, blinking as my eyes adjust reluctantly to the dark. I can see his teeth, his shirt (holy white). His eyes too. His high-wattage gaze set upon mine.
“We lost a lot of therapeutic progress without you in the vines today.” He whispers even though there’s no one else to hear us. “Had to spend all day talking to Julian—and wishing he was you, of course.”
“And how did Julian fare as my stand-in?”
“Doesn’t hold a candle.”
I am painfully aware of my breathing, the sound it makes. I want to mute it, listen to him without dilution. Keep on talking to me, I think. Don’t stop ever.
“I . . .” He pauses, searching for words.
Without meaning to—or perhaps meaning to with the full weight of my body—I kiss him.
I expect my heart to race, but when I feel his mouth open to me, it calms. Maybe it’s the quiet mask of darkness, the boyish, just-laundered smell of him.
Maybe it’s the fact that some part of me has been holding my breath, waiting for this particular moment, since I first arrived.
He pulls me toward him, spreading his hand across my back, and seals the gap between us.
It feels good to have this much surface area in contact.
His tongue is warm and slow, graceful like calligraphy.
He tastes like br?léed lemon. Like a sour-sweet thing, cooked to coax all that hard, bitter pith into tenderness.
Carefully, he removes the bottle I’m still clutching by its neck and places it gently on the floor.
Then he draws me close again. Even less space between us now, and I’m euphoric.
His fingers nestle neatly into the curvature of my spine.
They climb upward, gently feathering the back of my neck.
He squeezes me toward him tighter, and still this version of touching is nowhere near close enough.
I reach for the nape of his neck, and we both stumble backward, kicking the bottle over.
It falls with a loud, thunderous clank, and we pause, withdrawing. That unkind, now-recurring pang surfaces—of being found, caught, seen.
I reach for the bottle and run my fingers along its contours, determining that it’s not broken. Gratefully, protectively, I scoop it back into my arms, holding it to my chest, hoping it might conceal or at least calm the dramatic rise and fall, the heaviness of my breathing.
“All good?” he whispers, and I nod.
“What are you thinking about now?” he presses.
Kissing, such an odd phenomenon. Already, Henri and I spend so much of each day directing our mouths at each other, speaking ourselves ever closer to something that sounds like intimacy.
Unspooling our biographies and our brain material.
And yet the simple fact of our mouths, in contact, means something so large. So substantial.
“I’m thinking about mouths,” I reply, and he laughs and presses a finger against my temple.
“Wish I could rifle around in there for a bit.”
“You wouldn’t survive five minutes up there. It’s absolute chaos.”
“Just like New York, non?”
This nod to my real life, my real context, rattles me.
My ears prick at the clank of silverware coming from outside—a reminder that we are not, in fact, exempt from the passage of time down here.
“We should get back . . . before . . .” I say, trailing off reluctantly.
He nods and kisses me hard on the mouth, then switches on the flashlight, pulls two more bottles from the same shelf, and guides me back toward the door.
When we exit, the sky has a slippery, before-dark quality—the richness of proper nighttime diluted with eggshell primer.
In the filmy soft-focus, the vines ahead seem to taper into both sky and earth at once, as if they don’t know where they end and the rest of the world begins.
Henri’s hand is in mine, and something about his grasp feels that way too: I can’t quite distinguish where our perimeters live, where I end and he begins.
Once more, he pulls me toward him, and our bodies arch away from each other where we cradle the wine in the crooks of our elbows.
I press my mouth to his, and already, the taste of him is familiar.
I can imagine waking up to it with the lacquer of sleep still on his teeth.
As he pulls away, our noses brushing, the light of the emerging moon flashes across his eyes, and his mouth sets in a goofy grin.
How large it feels to actualize a thing I want—the ways it satisfies and the ways it merely spawns more hunger.
We turn back toward the house, and I feel Henri halt suddenly.
He drops my hand, reestablishing our perimeters—and then I see.
There is Antoine, arms folded across his chest, unmoving.
I clutch tighter at the bottles in my possession, like some kind of useless armor, and I clock the ways anger—perhaps disappointment or merely sternness—contort his jaw, tempering the rise and fall of his chest. I feel some old, familiar flash of childhood shame—as if I’ve just been caught passing a note in class or hacking away at my own bangs with a pair of safety scissors.
I look at Henri, but his attention isn’t with me anymore.
He’s with his uncle, engaged in some silent discourse I can’t even pretend to access.
“Dinner’s ready. Bea is waiting.” Antoine approaches only to remove the bottles from Henri’s arms and turn back toward the group. I follow him dutifully, leaving Henri in the dark, feeling like poison matter.
When I arrive back at the table, depositing bottles on either end, Pietro skips over enthusiastically. “Ragazzi, at long last!” He reaches an arm over my shoulder, and in his oversized, floppy enthusiasm, it is more headlock than anything else. “You’re covered in dirt! You crazy girl.”
I look and see my arms are coated in the dark, ashy debris of the cellar—my T-shirt now far from fresh. “Oh no!” I say in mock horror and wipe filth affectionately from my own shirt onto his forearms.
“Terrible! How could you! My beautiful arms!” he shrieks, giggling.
“Lucky for you, you’re still my favorite.
Go clean your hands and I’ll save you a seat.
” He frees me from his grasp, and I traipse into the kitchen, trying to steady myself.
The hum of my own panic runs through me like the cool, unwelcome rush of IV fluid.
While I watch the soap bubble up over my fingers in the sink, I remember that bit about the “Happy Birthday” song—from start to finish, precisely the time it takes to wash one’s hands properly.
Precisely how many musical bars kill toxic matter.
I imagine the suds having some sanctifying power, rinsing me clean and absolving me.
I don’t regret kissing Henri, exactly—at least, I don’t think so. But I do resent the concreteness of it. We’ve changed our state of matter. With Antoine as our witness, we are no longer a charged, dreamy plausibility. We’ve dipped our toes into something else.
After rubbing my palms raw and chanting my way through “Bonne anniversaire” silently, I dry them with a dish rag and then return to Pietro, who has already loaded a plate of pasta for me. I thank him with a squeeze of his elbow and lift a forkful to my mouth, chewing slowly.
All through dinner, I am careful to offer appropriate nods, to engage without engaging, and at some point, just as the wine bottles are verging on empty, I hear Ruby call my name from across the table.
“Alice, honeybee, where’s Henri?”
I look around, mimicking surprise at his absence—as if I haven’t spent the last hour registering the lack of him so potently that he’s occupied more space than the living, breathing bodies at the table.
I shrug. “Haven’t seen him since we sat down . . . maybe he went somewhere with Antoine?”
“Humph, their loss.” She twists a final bite of pasta around her fork.