Chapter XIV
XIV
Before I fall asleep, I type an email to Emma. I think about calling, but it’s midday in New York, and I hate the discordance of talking to each other from the vantage point of different times of day. How can we possibly hear each other correctly while she blinks through daylight, and I, darkness?
So I write. I tell her about the rare flavor of friendship that I’ve found with Ruby, the absolute, violent joy of sitting at this dinner table.
Then, Henri—the fact of wanting, the destabilizing whirr of it.
The buoyancy, the heaviness. The guilt, the euphoria.
At the end, I sign my name and add a postscript.
P.S. Feeling this way about someone tastes like vanilla ice cream. It’s juvenile and innocent—even though, the reality is, it can burn holes through your teeth if you’re not careful.
I fall asleep nearly instantly after hitting send—as if I’ve used up some great quantity of caloric energy shipping the contents of my note through the airwaves and over an ocean into the little Brooklyn apartment that awaits me on the other side of all of this.
However impossible it seems that there is an other side to all of this.
When I wake up the next morning, there is already a reply waiting for me.
Listen up, mademoiselle. I’ve got some profound wisdom to offer (you’re welcome): You’re awfully good at tasting things, but you haven’t had an appetite in a long time. I was starting to wonder whether I’d ever see you blasted open and raw to the world again.
I know you were the one who left Max—but that’s heartbreak too.
And frankly, I think falling out of love devastated you more than the breakup did.
The fact that you had it in you to experience something that large—and that it could vanish.
Poof. I think that terrified you (of course it did).
So it makes sense that you’re terrified now, huh?
You denied yourself an appetite for so long. And now it’s back!
Even if this all ends in a dumpster fire—which it very well may—you’ve still proven to yourself that you’re capable of feeling in BIG (and dare I say healthy?) ways.
And if you get off the plane and all you wanna do is lie in bed and subsist on whiskey and peanut butter for several weeks, I will happily lie right on down next to you and do the same.
For now, go make me jealous.
Signed, your utterly irreplaceable, radiant, disarmingly wise best friend,
Emma
P.S. You’ve always been better at postscripts than actual letters.
I black out the screen and hold my phone to my chest like some mummified treasure.
Thank God for the friendship of women. Emma, in all her astuteness, is correct: It hasn’t occurred to me that there’s one more fear at play.
It’s not just my aversion to full-bleed tenderness; it’s also the stupid psychological specter of falling out of love.
The fact that some sentiment could grow to mythic proportions—then somewhere, in my own fallible little brain, it could disappear.
A cruel trick of serotonin, maybe. And without admitting as much, I’ve been denying myself the pleasure of love for fear of letting it evaporate.
In the morning, working the vines feels like a montage from some prized, shot-on-film flick with an immaculate Rotten Tomatoes score—the kind produced by Swan Dive or Neon that well-dressed, tastefully tattooed people buy tickets to see at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Henri and I inch along each row in tandem, speaking to each other like windup toys, never letting up.
At every opportunity, he reaches through the vines to squeeze my hand.
And even for all the innocence of the gesture, few things have ever felt so potent.
Every few yards, when the greenery grows sparse enough for us to face each other full-on, unobstructed, he leans in to kiss me gently, quickly. A halfhearted attempt at discretion. At times, he ducks in and out so swiftly, he catches me on the chin or the cheekbone.
In the afternoon, when the sun has shifted, panels of light slip through the vines, framing him in gold. We’re picking Sylvaner, talking about cities. “Tell me about New York,” he says. “About your New York.”
My favorite question. I smile big, even knowing he can’t see it. “I’m biased. It’s my hometown, ma ville d’origine. I’ve been there my whole life.”
“Even better.”
“You know, there was never a time before I started riding the subway—and sometimes it makes me wonder how much of my life I’ve spent underground.
” I scrape curdled grapes onto the grass with the edge of my clipper.
“It’s not an easy place to live. It’s dirty, and expensive, and impossible to navigate—or impossible to keep up with, at least. It makes your world feel too small and too big.
But then, just when you’re ready to give up all hope, it reels you right on back in. ”
“But how? Give me an example?”
“I, um . . . I have this thing about riding my bike over bridges. No matter how disaffected or bitter I feel about the city, every single time I ride my bike over a bridge, and I watch the rim of the city unfurl in front of me, I’m hit with this stupid, giddy twinge of awe. I can’t help but be astounded.”
“Why bridges, though?”
“I don’t know . . . from up there, it’s like the city has better posture.”
Henri looks at me with pointed intrigue, his chin cocked. “And that’s what goes on in your head while you commute on your bicycle?”
I blush and keep clipping.
He pauses, moves aside a branch, and kisses my eyebrow. “Tell me what it sounds like. What does New York sound like?”
“Well, it’s loud. It hurts a bit, feels like an affront—this constant cocktail of sirens, voices, car horns, rattling trains, music.
But sometimes it’s hard for me to sleep without it.
” I empty my now-overflowing bucket into one of the baquet lined up behind me.
“And the din of restaurants—that’s the best part. What it sounds like to eat out.”
I’ve always liked din as a word because it’s all wrong.
Because it is a naked and tiny thing, nothing like the inside of a restaurant.
Restaurants in New York sound like applause.
Like winged insects stumbling around cardboard boxes.
Like ice in a highball glass. Ice against anything, really.
Like for two, chilled red, she’s twenty-five today, I’d recommend, how’s your mom, can I kiss you, have you read?
Like we hated it, grinning, over empty plates.
Like swimming, like atonement. Everyone bathed in light that forgives.
“What about your bar? What did it sound like in there?” I wonder if I’m slipping into sensitive territory by asking.
“God, so good. Like music—all the mismatched percussion of a thousand meals, conversations, occasions, rubbed up against one another. And in spite of the chaos, it all just worked together. Never sounded like mismatch.” Our knees bump gently through the vine that separates us.
“Everyone looked so beautiful in there.”
I press my knee more firmly against his. “Tell me more.”
“Hmm . . . you’d look around and it was like all flaws had been sanded away; everyone left their anxiety at the door.
No one ever sat silently. People talked.
For hours. And I’d be in the back, taking inventory or restocking bottles, looking out at this absolutely mad, perfect room of bodies and wineglasses and secrets, and I’d feel like I’d unlocked a portal. ”
I smile. “What happened at the end, then? What did it feel like?”
He exhales, slow and heavy. “We weren’t making enough money, our landlord sucked.
We could hardly afford to hire real staff, which meant we almost never got away.
I mean, we had all these big ideas . . .
but we couldn’t pull them off without more support.
And at a certain point, however magical it all was, it started to feel tedious.
Nothing ever got easier. Then we had this big flood.
The cellar—which was basically the most valuable part of the whole operation—got destroyed, and we just decided to call it. ”
“God, I’m so sorry. That sounds brutal.”
“It was. It’s like what you said about a breakup: There was no funeral, no big ceremony—it just . . . ended. And with it, there was this whole chunk of my identity that was gone.”
“Have you thought about opening something new?” I’m tempted to reach for him, but I don’t want to slow or muddle his response.
“Of course, every day. But, with good reason, I’m terrified—it feels like something I can’t possibly bear to fail at twice.”
“OK, in theory, if you were opening a new spot, what would you do differently?”
“I’d open a place in Paris. There’s this little corner spot in the tenth arrondissement, right by Canal Saint-Martin. I know the owner. Old guy, family friend. Doesn’t wanna run his own spot too much longer. That’s the fantasy.”
“That doesn’t sound like a fantasy; that sounds like a very distinct possibility.”
“I’m just tired of introducing myself by saying ‘Hello, je suis Henri. I used to be someone. J’étais quelqu’un.’”
“Well, you don’t have to open a second bar to do that.
In fact, ‘Je suis Henri’ is a perfectly fine introduction.
” I feel for his fingers, nestled around a cluster of pinot gris.
“I get it. I’ve spent so much of my life borrowing qualifiers.
Being someone’s girlfriend or someone’s employee. It’s nice to be just Alice.”
“Juste Alice, ca marche. It works.” I can hear his grin even without looking up.
That night, we slip out of our beds and walk up the street, navigating by the light of our phones, searching for the spot where Henri parked his truck upon arrival, weeks ago.
We lug blankets and towels to line the open-air bed of the vehicle.
Once we climb in, it’s just us and the star-punctured night sky.
When Henri presses his mouth to mine, I know his taste, the rhythm of his tongue flicking around behind my teeth.
I feel like it belongs to me. Like with appetite, with consumption, the more of him I swallow, the more I want.
There’s a ravenous quality that makes it nearly impossible to sit across from him at dinner, to view him across the kitchen storing a platter for Bea without aching for physical contact.
When he comes inside me, he digs his nails into my neck, holding fast to my throat as I lean into his grip. I can feel the sharpest corners of his person permeating my skin—as if sex isn’t enough. I want him in my bloodstream.
Then, we sleep, curled into each other like parentheses. As I drift off, I wonder if there’s a metaphor about asides buried in here.
In the morning, in the rearview mirror of the truck, I examine my neck, the chain of half-moon marks from his fingertips. I have the distinct thought that I hope they won’t heal, that they’ll stay with me as this souvenir of whatever it was that we were.
When I try to convey this to him, he smiles slyly. “Souvenir is a French word, you know? Je me souviens: ‘I remember.’” He kisses me softly on the corner of my mouth. “Only in America do you need an object for remembering. You will still se souviens even when the marks are gone, I promise.”