Chapter XVIII
XVIII
When I finish my tasting notes, I give Antoine my handwritten pages, hug him hard, thank him. I promise to stay in touch and trod off to pack.
After I fold up my clothes, all of them grape stained and tinged with dirt, I write letters.
This, I know, I can orchestrate with far more finesse and feeling than an in-the-flesh goodbye—espousals of affection unhampered by nervousness or my seemingly ingrained aversion to effusiveness.
Bea has taken most of the crew into town to pick up ingredients for the week’s final few dinners, so hugs are off the table anyway.
Henri stayed behind to drive me to the train station.
In our future planning, that’s as far as we’ve made it: There’s been no discussion of communication once he’s dropped me off.
Just a ride to the station—something I am doing my best to view as a simple, logistical fact and not a Victorian tragedy.
I tear sheets of paper from a notebook. One for Julian, for Pietro, for Bea. I write a soggy, atrociously saccharine note for Ruby. I fold them into squares, scrawl each name across the front in black ink, and place them gingerly in a row on the kitchen counter.
Pressing my weight against my suitcase as I pull the zipper shut, I gaze out the small, perfect bedroom window that’s like a portal into the vines, and I feel something wet against my cheek.
I’m not crying so much as leaking—a string of slow-moving tears tracing their way down to my chin.
Why does the noneternity of things hurt so much?
I lug my suitcase downstairs, and I find Henri reading a book at the kitchen table.
It’s an old Annie Dillard essay collection, a favorite of mine: Teaching a Stone to Talk—Apprendre à une pierre à parler, translated into French.
I’d told him about it one night, lying together in our hallowed truck bed.
Before coming here, I’d purchased it in French, assuming that I knew the original version so well, I’d be able to parse it.
I’d spent far less time reading here than I’d imagined.
I’d given my copy to Henri earlier this morning with a message inside the front cover.
H.,
In French and in English, you make good, old-fashioned sentences sound like prayer. I am the better for hearing you—and you’ll be the better for reading this. “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”
—A.
Watching him with my book in his hands, it dawns on me that I’ve hardly taken any photos since arriving. Screens had come to feel like an unwelcome intrusion whenever they infringed on our rustic setting. But this, right now, requires camera preservation.
I hold up my phone, and the photograph is this: Afternoon light blinking in; French pots and pans hanging behind the crown of Henri’s head like a personal skyline; the lovely, acute corners of his chin dipped in concentration; my paperback, warped and mottled, clutched in his hands; his legs stretched and his ankles crossed beneath the battered round table where we took so many morning espressos with the toil of a workday looming ahead of us.
He looks up and meets my eyes, and I think I might cry again—feel something so loud coursing through me that I don’t know where to put it.
“Well, I guess we’d better be going, then,” he says, setting the book down and standing to take my suitcase from my hands. The gesture is too big and too small. The clichés are humiliating as they mount; the list of things I would like him to carry for me is long.
As I climb into the truck, I look out once more at this wonderland: Limbed vines, tidy in their rows. The cellar door. The long, weathered table, scarred with archives of the meals passed. A litany of toasts.
“You ready?” Henri asks, hand on my knee, watching me as I inhale my final image of the domaine. “Oui,” I say with a nod, turning back toward him, allowing him to fill my frame of vision.
The drive is short—ten minutes—and I am trying to focus on the joy of it rather than its end. The low drone of French pop playing softly on the radio while wind skips through the window. Grape vines bleeding together on either side of the road.
Henri and I are physically tethered as much as we can be while he’s driving—we hold hands, I lean on his shoulder, he kisses the top of my head—but we are quiet.
We have too little and too much to say, and there is an odd peace in sitting this way—not opposite one another but side by side, moving through space at the same speed in the same direction.
Ten minutes pass, and we aren’t at the station. I slip out of my tender fugue state and realize that we’re on a highway. “Wait . . . Henri, I’ll miss my train. Where are we going?”
“We’re driving to Paris.” His delivery is flippant, matter-of-fact, as if there were no other plausible course of action.
“It’s a five-hour drive! What, you’ll drop me off then turn around and go back? That’s crazy, c’est fou!”
“I have an appointment.” The corner of his mouth lifts in a knowing, boyish smirk.
“An appointment?!”
“We need some gas—let me pull over here and I’ll explain.”
We sidle into a gas station, and the motor sputters to a stop while Henri unclicks his seat belt. “I wrote you a letter, actually.”
He produces a piece of white loose-leaf paper from his pocket, folded into a tidy square, and places it into my hand. “Pour toi.” Then he slides out of the driver’s seat, scooping his wallet from the dashboard.
His handwriting has an unapologetic, graceless slant. My breath catches on the point of his A, the curve of his e.
Alice,
I like writing your name in ink.
Here goes. Mostly, I’m writing to tell you thank you—for more reasons than I’d like to list. But firstly, for this: I signed a lease in Paris, that venue space I was telling you about. The keys are mine whenever I’m free to make the trip.
Oh, and thank you, also, for the name: I’m going to call it Faux Amis.
The thing is: I’d like for you to come see it. The bar. I promise I’ll get you to the airport on time.
Will you?
Yours (but only a little bit, in certain light, don’t worry),
Henri
Underneath, he’s written the address. What was it that he’d told me?
A corner spot in the tenth arrondissement?
I can imagine its proximity to the canal, the way the storefront might crouch on some wide-open boulevard, carrying the weight of a terrace-studded, centuries-old building on its shoulders.
I can picture Henri, in his electric-blue chore jacket, writing prices in chalk on bottles as he pulls them from cases and lines them up against the wall.
I know the posture he’ll adopt while plating halved figs with triangles of blue cheese, fresh bread, puddles of honey.
Selecting records to fill silence in his however-many square meters of space.
I can see the checkered floors, the tall wooden stools. I can imagine his hands on all of it.
I fold the paper back into its original form, and there, on the back, are two words, Oui and Non, with empty checkboxes beside them.
I laugh with a sting in my throat and rifle around the glove compartment for a pen to hastily mark my answer before Henri can return.
My hands shake as I draw my X. How desperately I want to see him in context. To be there too.
When he arrives back at the driver’s side, my ballot is waiting for him on the seat, face up.
As he sees it, a grin unzips, wide across his face, and he leans across the driver’s seat, wraps his hands around both sides of my jaw, and kisses me before he’s even climbed in.
“It’s a business trip, then,” he teases, bracing the back of my neck and starting the engine.
His foot presses the gas pedal, and the truck lurches forward with the same jittery enthusiasm sputtering inside of me.
The train runs alongside us while we drive.
It announces its presence with a crescendo of hisses and chugs, skulking along like some haunting taunt, an alternate ending.
While we drive, towns and small appellations rising and falling on either side of us, we tell stories.
First kisses, sports games, driving lessons, apartment moldings.
The rhythm of it all, the eager back-and-forth of prompting questions, my own thirst to understand the texture of the world that created him—well, it all makes me feel like we could keep going for all of eternity, drive clean off the end of the earth.