Corked (3 page)

Matthew had written me a letter before I left Toronto to meet my father here. A week after our breakup, as a parting gift, an emotional bribe, or a conciliatory gesture, or a little from columns A, B, and C, I'd asked my mother to mail him my father's Peugeot racing bike he was no longer able to pedal because of his poor, poor knee. Matthew's letter was one of thanks for the bike, and one of permanent goodbye to me. To torture myself, or to not forget him, or to ensure that my eye would not wander while in France (or A, B, and C), I'd tucked the letter into my overstuffed wallet, among an old boarding pass from the beginning of the millennium and a receipt for a Caesar salad and a medium Hawaiian pizza and other detritus. Matthew was younger than me, and my love for him had mutated from passion to compassion in the time we'd been together. It had gone from loverly to motherly. And this was untenable, and could not be untransformed. In his letter, he'd written of his terrible love for me, his terrible, debilitating romantic love, and how his heart pumped lead at the thought of being without me. That's what it had said: “My heart pumps lead at the thought of being without you.” I'd thought love letters were for weepy, ridiculous people until I'd received this one—and read it and reread it and re-reread it, taking maudlin delight in my chest seizing, or my eyes burning, or my head spinning. Dizzy abstract feelings I wish I'd had for real, and in the positive sense, when we were together. He'd spoken of how he fell in love with me over and over again, whenever I called him Matty, whenever I broke my electric toothbrush, whenever I touched my bangs. If the time had called for a joke, I'd have run up to him, clutching my gut, and said, “Ooh Matty, you got me right in the feelings. Right in the
feelings
, man.” We'd joked our way through all our psychic intimacy, our respective revelations of the tragedies we'd known. He'd cracked a joke that made me snort after I told him about my most terrible day, about an old man dying. But death, for some reason, is funnier than love. This stuff was not the stuff of jokes.

Reflexively, I removed my hand from my bellybutton area and smoothed my bangs straight, running it down my forehead and face. I sighed a sad sigh and waved the excavation finger under my nose. It smelled like feelings. Crusty old feelings.

I noticed my father had stopped talking and was staring at me.

“ARE YOU SMELLING YOUR BELLYBUTTON?” he bellowed. But his anger was half-assed. He was only feigning reprimand. I turned my head and looked at him with only my unblinking left eye, like a shark, with the criticism that only a half-face-shark-face can achieve. This bellybutton yelling was coming from a man who decadently plunges his ears with Q-tips, then packs the soiled sticks back into his toiletry kit for reuse.

“I'm sorry, Dad.”

After pacing around for a little while, he came back to where I was sitting. I flipped to the Languedoc section of the itinerary.

“Dad, I'm sorry. Continue. I was listening,” I urged. I jostled my head back and forth, trying to rattle my brain into the correct position, like a CD that needs to be poked into position in its tray so it can actually play music.

“You listen to
me
. When it comes to smelling parts of your body, I know. I have an automatic radar for this stuff. I might miss a lot in life, but not in these areas,” he admonished.

“I know, I know. I know. I do,” I said.
It is your duty to stop this habit before getting off the plane
, I thought.
He has set this whole thing up for you, dammit
.

I made a vow to study the Languedoc section and the rest of the sections later when I was less tired and more together. As I closed the booklet, I read the last line, which had been written by whomever my father had tasked with the transcription. It said, “
Youpi! Le voyage va être formidable! Good luck and have a marvelous safari!
”

 

A
fter kissing my father on both cheeks and bidding him goodnight, I shut myself into my bedroom in the Montreal suite. I sat on my bed, nervously folding and refolding my underwear, which sat on the top of my open turquoise backpack. I always pack the underwear on top.
Fifteen hundred kilometers with this man, in a car
. I thought about the geographic and philosophical breadth of the trip. My lip tingled. This meant a cold sore was brewing. I get them when I'm stressed. Typically, they grow so large and puffy, I look like I have a harelip.

He was so excited, telling that old story about Fabre-Abeille, about the circle of wine, of life. Wine as life.
Such a bland metaphor, so trite and easy!
But as channeled through my father, it was the opposite: epic, sweeping, full of pure emotion and genuine faith. During the retelling of the story, he'd even stopped stuffing croutons into his mouth.

I recalled a moment I'd witnessed several years earlier, one Christmas, when I'd been folding paper napkins with pictures of cartoon reindeers on them. My dad had been in his cellar, choosing bottles for our Christmas Day tasting. I'd heard a loud crash and a choked scream. I thumped down the basement stairs, rounding the corner into the wine cellar.

Splayed on the nubbly concrete like some big, disturbed animal was my dad, panting nervously over a big splash of oozing dark red liquid. In his right hand was a spoon, which he was using to scrape along the floor to collect the thinnest layers of the fluid. Every three or four scrapes, he'd insert the tip of the spoon into his mouth and tentatively suck dry the little pool he'd accumulated. He'd stop for a moment to swish the liquid around, then stick out his tongue and tap at it to make sure he wasn't swallowing glass.

“Dad,” I'd said.

“Oh Toots.” He gazed up at me with pathetic, watery eyes.

“What happened?”

“I was getting this lovely Port for us.” He dropped the spoon and flattened his hand, moving it all around the cellar, indicating the shambled state of the bottle and its contents, “and I
treeped
and fell and the bottle fell and now it is broken and lost forever.”

“That's bad news, Dad. Was it an expensive bottle?”

“Yes. Ah, yes. But who cares about expensive? It was a Taylor Fladgate from 1945.”

I stared at him blankly.

“Nineteen forty-five,” he repeated.

“The evacuation from Auschwitz?” I'd offered. That was one thing I knew about 1945. My paternal grandfather had been part of an organization that helped move Jewish orphans from France to Switzerland and Spain during the war.

“No, come on. Come on, Toots—1945, an
extraordinary
year for Port, one of the best of the twentieth century.”

“Riiiiiiiiight. Nineteen forty-five. Of course. A classic year.” I had repeated this deliberately, hoping to sound convincing—if not in my fake understanding, then in what had been my real empathy.

I stuffed the little squares of underwear back into my bag. I had packed some lacy things, in case the trip revealed to me a handsome, young, tryst-worthy vineyard owner. Guilt made my head pound. This trip was not for trysts! I solemnly reached for my satchel and fished around for my wallet, snapped it open, and unfolded Matthew's letter. I read the line I loved and hated the most, out of all the lines that had probably ever been written to me on the subject of love: “If we can't be together, I have to start the long, painful process of falling out of love with you.” I puzzled over the idea of one-way chemistry. Matthew had burrowed his way into me, and I was somehow incapable of dropping to my hands and knees and crawling into him. There was too much muck involved, too much faith required. So he was abandoning me because I was not—or could not—become motivated to love him properly. I felt stupid and cowardly and dry inside.

I tried to think of one relationship—with a human, with an object, with a concept—in which I'd experienced alchemy. Something irrational and magical had happened when I'd met my first love, Peter. But everything exceptional about that love was ruined quickly because of bad luck and worse timing.

Meanwhile, my father seemed to have an unlimited capacity for it. He waited three patient, silent years to capture my mother. His love of me and my three brothers was at times bafflingly articulated, yes, but generally full of devotion and democratic respect. He had a pious and limitless dedication to history and conjured its ghosts at will. He and Bach went on trips together; his head dropped in sadness as he spoke of champion French boxer Marcel Cerdan's love affair with Edith Piaf. He owned a 600-page book on cat psychology. He'd run eight marathons, clocking his best time of 3:03 when he was 55 years old. And the alchemic reaction that occurred when he drank wine was lyrical. It was as though every component of his face and skull—his swishing mouth, his deep and generously fascinated expression, his flared nostrils—all were having a smooth, unspoken dialogue with the liquid in the glass, and the conclusion they'd reached was some great and secret human truth. How could I learn to love like that? How could I show him I shared that capacity?
In two weeks?

I drew the diaphanous white screens and then the heavy, opaque curtains halfway across the cold cobalt blue of the window so that I would be woken by the sun, rather than by my father, who had a habit of storming into my dark room in a hotel-issue bathrobe and pinching one of my big toes until I screamed a curse at him. Turning around, I eyed the itinerary that I'd chucked into the middle of the comforter. I swaddled myself in the crisp sheets and picked it up again. There were little wine-themed graphics on each page—curly vines, jagged leaves, small circles representing grapes. The title of the program was in large red letters,
“SAFARI VINICOLE EN TERRE DE FRANCE: de son Honneur le Maréchal P. Borel et son aide-de-camp
.” Our French wine safari: for the honorable Field Marshal Philippe Borel and his camp assistant.

That was me, the nameless camp assistant.

Earlier in the evening, before story time, I'd asked him, “
Aide-de-camp
? That's my role?”

He'd answered, “That's a high-rank position. You should be wearing a ceremonial golden braid.”

“But I don't have a braid. I don't even have a name. I am braidless and nameless.”

He'd looked at me silently.

“Dad.”

Ignoring me, he'd slowly lifted an empty plastic water bottle off a marble-topped coffee table and then, quick quick, he'd begun shaking it and wiggling his ass to an imaginary cha-cha beat, singing, “
Maracas! Marrrrrrracas!
”

I shook my head at the itinerary. The nameless camp assistant, assisting the most honorable Philippe Borel. The joke amplified my feelings of being small and stupid and without heart. I counted our scheduled visits and winery tours. Alsace, Burgundy, Côtes du Rhône, Languedoc. I flipped the page, expecting to count those in Bordeaux, but there was no other section; only typed-out directions and more accompanying maps. Flipping through the package again, I scanned each page. No Bordeaux. Perfect. In our years of cellar-bound dad-daughter wine lessons and countless tastings, only one nugget of information about wine had stuck readily, easily. I'd use it as a point of pride when reminiscing about my Euro-influenced childhood to strangers I wanted to impress. And for this trip, it was my one saving grace, my one instant-access point of reference within what was beginning to seem like an endless landscape of French grapes and zero feelings. My memorized knowledge of Bordeaux was the earliest lesson my father had imposed that had managed to gain any traction.

For the record, it was this.

There are five producers of Grand Cru wines in the Bordeaux region of France. The term “Grand Cru” refers to the highest level of classification in winemaking. If you are drinking a Grand Cru wine, you are drinking the best wine from that winemaking region, in the year that particular Grand Cru was produced. In Bordeaux, there are five winemaking houses that make wine good enough to earn the classification of Grand Cru: Château Margaux, Château Mouton-Rothschild, Château Lafite, Château Latour, and Château Haut-Brion.

I pulled the comforter up to my chin and reached up and behind me to turn off the light. On the desk across the room was an old phone, its orange message light blinking inexplicably. I wanted to call Matthew to say a final, final goodbye, but I resisted. Maybe I wanted to tell him to not fall out of love with me just yet, to just love me enough for two until I learned how to unclench my own chemical reaction for him. I did not get up. If we could fix our future, or if something could be tweaked or modified in the name of some kind of sexless but enduring friendship, it could wait two weeks. The world was an elastic band ball of future. Fourteen days would not cause that ball to disappear.

In the morning, in the airport, my father and I divided and shared a panini while waiting for our plane to board. The arugula inside was a bit limp, like me. I picked and poked and took small bites, fretting about my cold sore, which had developed overnight into a magnificent blister. My dad chomped through his section of the sandwich with a vengeance that would indicate that it was responsible for the sacking and burning of his ancestral village. Bordeaux was still on my mind.

“Why are we not doing Bordeaux?” I asked in a small voice.

“Fuck Bordeaux!”

“Fuck Bordeaux.” I repeated. “Okaaaaay….”

“Yes, fuck it.”

“Why?”

“Speculators. Wines from Bordeaux are a market, just like any other market…stocks, art, anything. Speculators come to Bordeaux and make predictions about the quality of the wine. What kind of year will it be? Is it worth investing? This kind of stuff. The big names from Bordeaux….”

“MoutonMargauxLafiteLatourHaut-Brion!” The five Châteaux fly out of my mouth, fast and smooth as ball bearings covered in Crisco.

“Very good, Toots. These big names, the Lafites and the Latours, are well-known like a painting by Chagall or Monet. People know these names of Bordeaux. Chateaux produce a finite number of bottles a year. Once a price is set, immediately 90 percent of these wines will disappear to market makers, who then, if their predictions come true, will turn around and sell them at inflated prices.”

“Market makers, like hype men for hip-hop MCs.” I nodded furiously.

“Like who?”

“Never mind. Go on.” I stopped nodding.

“These people are driving up the prices of Bordeaux. The prices are balloons. I don't buy balloons. I am alert. I am vigilant. I go for the deal. The deal can happen at any time, but it is not happening in Bordeaux, especially not this year. Two thousand and five has a buzz. A
beeg
buzz. There is a
beeg
buzz around this year. It will be extraordinary in all of France. All the magazines say so.
Wine Spectator. Decanter
. They follow the harvest of all the vintners and are saying this is going to be an awesome year. Everything is set up for it to be extraordinary. It's what happened during the previous season. Rain. Lack of rain. Dryness of the soil. A bright October, not too dry. The winter was even. No surprises. Two thousand and four lay the foundation for two thousand and five to be a potentially great season, so FUCK Bordeaux and its speculators,
hein?
” He pressed out a sigh, tight-lipped, as if he were blowing air through a straw. He punctuated the monologue by throwing a meatless bit of focaccia down on the sweaty green tray.

“Yeah, right. Okay. Fuck them then!” I agreed. I loved fucking. Them, I mean. Those people, fuck THEM! He was so mad! Rants, I could retain.

The inside of the plane was quiet and dark blue and humming with engine sounds and the startled breathing of its semi-asleep passengers. There were five hours to go before we touched down on the tarmac in Paris, and my father had disappeared. We had booked our tickets separately, so as we boarded the plane, I lost him in a row around the early twenties, on my way to row 4,291.