Chapter XVI #2
“Me next! Me next!” Pietro calls out. He’s lying on his side with his head propped up on his hand as if posing for a portrait, and from this position, he raises his glass.
“I would kiss you all on the mouth right now, but I think Julian would kill me.” Ruby puckers in his direction and he winks back at her.
“I loooove you all so much. You will come to Milan, every one of you, and you will stay in my home, and we will party all night, all day. But always, when you come to Italy, my home is your home. Si?”
He raises his glass, Ruby mimics his posture of repose, and I throw my head back gleefully.
“Et moi?” Henri interjects, rising to stand.
He assesses each person in front of him individually before lingering, with unwavering focus, on me.
“Well, to start, I should probably mention that I just broke up with my girlfriend. And it’s no coincidence that I’m doing it now.
” He pauses and looks down at his feet. Ruby elbows me in the ribs, and I chew on my lower lip.
Perhaps it was my conversation with Emma, perhaps it’s the Champagne, but this time, the second time, hearing Henri share this news makes me feel light. Giddy, even.
“Obviously, there are some anxieties. But I . . . I feel really good about making big life choices. And changes.” He raises his head again, looking off at some unnameable point in the distance.
“So, I guess I wanted to tell you all thank you. You’re bizarre, and fearless, and a nice reminder that the world is so much bigger than the one I’ve felt so trapped inside of for the last few years.
I’m, uh, I’m grateful. And I’m hopeful. So, yeah, thank you.
Also . . . thanks.” He returns to his seat on the ground abruptly, as if disinterested in the reception.
“Cheers to that!” Pietro coos. “Free man, single Henri, watch out France!” Everyone laughs, myself included, and a smile erupts across Henri’s face. Some of the tension goes from his shoulders like I’m seeing his ligaments loosening in real time.
“New York, it’s your turn.” Henri’s voice is so low, it’s nearly a whisper.
I nod. “I’m not going to stand, OK?” My knees are tucked to my chest, my chin propped on top of them, my arms wrapped around my shins like some kind of armor.
“Lazy, much?” Julian taunts.
“Shut it,” Ruby shoots back, shoving his arm and spilling a splash of wine over his hand.
“You all make for a good metaphor,” I start, beaming my gratitude at Ruby.
“For the most part, I fell in love with all of you shielded by the vines.” Ruby squeezes my knee encouragingly.
“I’m not quite as stoney as Julian, but I am protected.
I don’t share much, don’t lay much out on the line.
But here, something about you guys, or about this place, or about the land .
. . I don’t know. It unstuck whatever was so guarded in me.
At least for a little bit. So, thanks for reminding me about awe.
And about honesty. And for correcting my French.
I’m . . . I’m not ready for this thing to be done.
It feels like we’ve been building toward something, and what a shame to dismantle it just because we’ve run out of grapes.
” I can feel my eyes tearing. “Lucky to be here, lucky to know you.”
I release one arm from around my knees and raise my glass. For the last time, the group mimics the gesture. Ruby wraps her arms around me and kisses me on the forehead tenderly. “Me too!” Pietro cries, catapulting toward us and encircling us both in his arms.
“OK, fine.” Julian sighs and shuffles over to join. “Henri, hurry up.”
He does, and for a moment that is both too long and too short, we stay like that, this cocoon of too-new and too-familiar bodies.
“This is what bubbles sound like,” I whisper, and everyone leans in closer, squeezes tighter, holds harder.
Suddenly, the grim sound of shattered glass clatters beneath us, and it shocks us back into form.
We move toward the edge of the roof to see what has gone wrong: It’s Antoine, a shattered bottle at his feet, his hand bleeding.
He sways just slightly, and I register my own surprise.
I’d assumed it would be near impossible to get a man of his stature drunk.
Henri and Julian hurry down the ladder, and I watch as they rush to either side of Antoine to guide him into a seat.
Bea appears with ointment and a bandage.
Julian locates a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the glass.
Henri crouches by Antoine, talking close to his ear, offering platitudes I wish I could hear.
When Pietro climbs down to urinate in the bushes, I realize that we have polished off the magnum—and rather quickly, at that.
I am drunk. Drunk-adjacent. Ruby and I lay back, staring up at the wide-open expanse of the blue-black night sky stamped with stars.
“I’d say we’re quite good for each other.
Right place, right time,” she says, leaning her head against my shoulder.
“Right place, right time,” I respond, nuzzling her closer. “I’ll always have been lucky to know you, even when there are oceans—plural—between us.”
“Nothing gold can stay,” she whispers with a certain singsongy swell. “Some great male author wrote that, right? I think I saw it tattooed on someone at the beach once.”
I laugh. “Robert Frost—good poet, bad tattoo.”
“Isn’t that always the case?”
I stand up and extend a hand to help her. Then together—slowly given our degree of intoxication—we amble down to greet the rest of the world.
At ground level, the party is swelling like an oceanic thing.
Empty bottles litter the grass like debris.
The tables are strewn with half-eaten plates of tarte flambée, pairs of hands fluttering over squares of rolling paper and pouches of tobacco.
The music is a jagged, rumbling form of jazz, akin to the disjointed rhythm of the event.
Across the lawn, I see Henri, now in a blue chore jacket—the kind that you can buy for €5 on the streets in France and $500 in a boutique in New York. He moves through the crowd, the long glide of him, stepping past angled bodies and outstretched hands.
I refill my glass with the first half-empty bottle I spot without bothering to check what it is, then I comb my way through the crowd in search of Ruby, who has gone off to find a real bathroom in lieu of the bushes.
As I wander, I’m pulled into intermittent conversation with the folks peppered throughout the yard—people who want to know what, exactly, an American girl is doing in Alsace. How is harvest treating me? And do I have a visa? Am I married?
I make my way through each exchange inelegantly—though, much to my delight, my French spills out fluidly, void of the stopgap of my sober self-consciousness. Drinking can be useful that way.
By the time I reach the edge of the crowd, my usual compatriots nowhere to be seen, I’m grateful for a moment of reprieve. I lower myself to the ground and gaze out at the labyrinth of vines, the wall of quiet. How unto itself this place is. How far from my own world—and how close too.
I feel a hand come to rest on my shoulder as if I’ve willed it into existence—I don’t need to look up to see who it belongs to. I know his smell, the particular tension in his fingers, the way his touch makes my muscles want to cling closer to my bones.
“Bonsoir,” he says quietly—more to the expanse of vines than to me.
“Bonsoir,” I reply, matching his volume.
“Can we speak yet?”
He is crouched next to me, and I can feel the warmth of his breath on the side of my face. I can’t tell if he sounds drunk—or if, through my own intoxication, the whole world seems that way.
“We can.” I stand up, and he does too. I can’t help but want more proximity, more closeness. More and more and more.
I kiss him, and he kisses me back—the two of us negotiating the space between us trepidatiously this time. But when I reach for the back of his neck, my grip is firm, desperate, pleading, and he presses his mouth harder against mine—a whole conversation of its own.
We pull apart, and he grasps my shoulders, stepping back a footprint to look somewhere deep inside me from arm’s length. “Can you tell me what’s happening in your brain, Alice? I can’t figure out what’s going on.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” I rest my hand on top of his. “All night, I’ve wanted to ask you about . . . about what happened. And if you’re OK. I just . . . we haven’t been alone. And I spiraled a little before.” I look up at him, and he raises an eyebrow.
The truth is, I can’t figure out how to contextualize us now.
And more hauntingly, the plausibility of an us at all clarifies the size and shape of my feelings.
The largeness, the substantiveness. “It just all feels so real now . . . or at least so possible,” I tell him.
“But also, I don’t know . . . what if the sense that it’s possible is an illusion?
What if you regret the breakup?” I’m gaining some momentum.
“And I know what it feels like to carry guilt around as this thing tethered to romance.” I start to pace.
“I spent so long trying to unlearn that—the idea that by loving someone, you’re taking something from them.
Causing them pain, offering them false hope.
And now there’s no way for me to feel anything other than this impending fear that unless we end up happily married in the south of France, I’ve destroyed your life as you know it.
And frankly, even if we wanted to be together in some real way, it’s not viable.
We live on different continents, Henri. Different time zones!
” The thought of trying to reach him via FaceTime from such different vantage points feels vaguely tragic, the idea of constantly adding six hours to the clock somehow heartbreaking.