Chapter XII
XII
By the time we tackle our final case of grapes, my palms are pink and swollen like something undercooked.
However slow the progress, there is, blissfully, evidence of our efforts: the mass of jeweled fruit piled high in the barrel beneath the grate, looking bizarrely naked without the web of stems typically attached.
Antoine shows up just in time to share in our victory. “Excellent work, you’ve earned your apero . . . come on outside,” he says with a hand on each of the boys’ shoulders. “Bea and I have a surprise.”
I try to catch Antoine’s eye, to gauge where I stand, but he turns away just as quickly as he arrived.
When we emerge, he has two bottles of Sylvaner at the ready—the name of the grape and the vintage scrawled haphazardly on the glass in white chalk.
Beside him at the outdoor table, Bea sits bathed in late-afternoon light, a flat plastic tray loaded with oysters in front of her—the enormous, fist-sized French kind, marled and cracked like aging skin.
I watch while she expertly maneuvers her shucking knife through the clenched lips of a shell without a rag or a glove to protect her.
She makes it look graceful, some ballet of the fingers.
“Had a friend drive by and drop these off!” Antoine beams, merry and buoyant in a way that seems altogether too youthful to suit his stature.
He passes an oyster to each of us before selecting a shell of his own and gesturing toward us in a mock toast. I turn to each of the other four, and our lines of sight click together like something far more tactile (train tracks, manual locks).
This is a French tradition that continues to delight me, the mandatory meeting of every set of eyes in order to perform a toast. So much more penetrating than the clinking of glassware.
When our eyes meet, Bea gives me a warm nod; Julian offers a curt one.
Antoine smiles gently—at least, I think he does, though I can’t decipher whether it’s meant for me or is a residual grin.
Henri chews his lip and lets his eyes drop from mine and trace down to my neck.
As we all tip our shells back, I feel his gaze linger on my throat.
In my mouth, the oyster is swollen and organ-like—a double for the tongue. In that fleeting, briny moment before I swallow, it’s like kissing.
When I take a sip of the wine, it’s almost cutting—angular and sharp but not enough to hurt.
It slices through the lazy salinity of the oyster.
I look between Julian and Antoine on either side of me, and they seem equally submerged in states of rapture, both of them glassy-eyed and silent.
How special it is to taste things, I think.
How bizarre that we spend so much time forgetting to do so.
Almost as soon as we finish the first bottle, the picking teams arrive back from the vines, the techno van beating with its signature thrum.
The oysters await them, shucked and gleaming—flirting, even.
The wine, so golden it seems more metaphor than potable liquid, spills into waiting glasses like some sacramental thing.
Something demanding of prayer, or at least expectation.
As the remainder of the second bottle dwindles, so does my ocular discipline, and I watch intently as Henri slides another oyster into his mouth, swallowing with his lips closed and his head tipped back.
“Not bad, no? Pas mal.” Antoine juts his chin at Henri like some gesticulatory question mark.
“Pas mal.” Henri rocks his head back and forth in sleepy satisfaction. “How’d we do today in the cellar?”
“Not bad either,” Antoine replies with a clipped glance in my direction—some sprouting olive branch, I decide.
Evidence that the not-bad-ness of the day belongs to me too.
Henri looks at me inquisitively, and I shrug, hoping to convey the proper amount of evasion.
Why, after all this work whittling our way toward communion, am I reverting to coldness?
I reprimand myself silently. Why is coldness still the default?
“We basically just cheese-grated all the skin off of our hands . . . for seven hours,” Julian pipes up and then aerates a sip of wine with a low, liquid gurgle. “I think this glass is the antidote.”
“My hands are in pretty bad shape,” Henri adds and takes a tentative step toward me. “Let me see yours.”
My breath catches, and I hold out my palms like an offering.
The skin is crosshatched with evidence of the day, ruddy and parceled off with cuts, scratches, blister constellations.
Absentmindedly—perhaps forgetting himself—Henri traces a finger along the largest groove, a wound shaped like a longbow.
I wince. I have the absurd urge to tell him it hurts more than it does, to make myself into a fragile thing—for him to feel responsible for soothing my anguish.
It humiliates me, this desire for him to solve this unsolvable problem.
This pathetic wish to be delivered from distress. Saved from nothing.
As he assesses my palm, running one finger along the arc of my thumb and another across the crease of my wrist, the empty oyster shell in my opposite hand falls to the ground—as if my digits, distracted by his proximity, have simply forgotten to do their job.
At once, he kneels down to retrieve it, lowering onto his left knee.
“Careful, mon ami!” Julian cuts in. “She’s picky about proposals.”
Henri snickers beneath me, and when I search his face, I expect some potent tinge of ridicule in his eyes. But he just looks up at me, his gaze glittering like seawater.
“Well, I’m going to go have the first shower while everyone finishes up,” Julian announces, setting his empty glass down on the table before nodding his polite adieus.
“Wanna take a walk?” Henri asks as he gets to his feet. “We’ve been indoors all day.”
I hardly need convincing. I glance over at Antoine, who is gesticulating animatedly to Bea, and nod.
My shoulders drop as if all day they’ve been on alert, waiting for this—the opportunity, at long last, to be alone together.
Henri gestures ahead of him, and I lead us, veering left where the nearest pinot noir vines will obscure us from vision.
I take a deep breath, expecting him to launch into some diplomatic “We Need to Talk” exchange. “I have a follow-up question for you.” Henri tucks both hands in his pockets as he walks.
I nod for him to continue.
“Did you stay together after he proposed?”
I exhale. He’s picking up where we left off in the cellar. “Why do you ask?”
“Answer it first . . . s’il te pla?t.”
“We tried for a bit.” I pause to linger in a patch of fading sunlight and lift my chin up toward the sky.
I like answering his questions. I like that he’s asking them.
“But the reality is, human brains like to angle themselves toward a goal, I think. However watery and mysterious it is. If I didn’t want to get married and he did, we were just moving along this parallel trajectory, taking care of each other for what purpose?
We’d already achieved this version of Real Thing.
But then what? And honestly, for both of us, it was too tempting to think of romance only in absolutes: forever or not at all.
If a commitment to eternity is the barometer for relationship success, then we were left with just one option: to reduce ourselves to nothing. ”
“What did it feel like? To be alone?”
“A little bit like dying, mostly.” I force a laugh in the hopes of communicating the hyperbole.
To make light of the feelings that I’d committed so much time to eradicating prior to arriving here.
“Like I was severing off this whole, enormous piece of the world as I knew it. And, you know, I felt that loss like a phantom limb. There were Max-shaped holes in so many rooms I entered, so many tables where I sat down to eat.”
Henri scrapes his hand through his hair. “I’m scared of that. I’m in limbo now, you know? It’s not gone completely yet—Charlotte, I mean—but I’m scared of that feeling. Did you regret it after? Did you wanna take it all back?”
I wonder if I’ll ever stop hearing her name like some kind of thumbtack to the throat.
“I missed him a lot. But I think I missed him more than I loved him, in the end. So no, not regret.” I twist a piece of my hair around my pointer finger.
“When I was in the throes of it, I thought a lot about how we don’t have a grieving ritual for breakups.
There’s no funeral march, no memorial service, no paperwork, even.
When it happens, we’re sort of without a proper place to store that genre of loss. ”
I remember it all so well, better than I can remember plenty of things that happened a month ago: When I’d properly fallen in love—could use that turn of phrase without wincing—nothing could have prepared me for what it felt like to be submerged in the actual experience.
It sated me in ways that resisted language.
Then, over the years, it calcified into something sturdy and real.
Something that carried weight. When he was gone, when I made him leave, it hurt in ways that were deafening, that were garden variety, that were hopelessly cliché.
Mostly, though, it just hurt. I was constantly resisting the rather obvious (and trite) truth about the version of me that followed: It hurt so badly, I’d actively avoided feeling anything of that caliber—anything like love—again.
“And now? How do you feel now?” Henri plays with a twig suspended from the curl of a vine.
“For a while, I felt a bit like a robot. But now, I feel human again. Some days more than others, sure.” I inhale and press my thumb into my palm as if applying pressure in the right spot could elicit bravery. “Not to be overly saccharine or whatever, but kissing you felt human.”