Dead in the Dregs (2 page)

Why
had
I quit? What had happened to me?

Just as fruit ripens, it rots. By the time I walked that night in Seattle, I was disgusted by the pretension, the posturing, the
bullshit. Fed up with sophomoric wine writing and the endless plays for power, I blamed it on the trade. But the truth was, I was symptomatic of what had befallen the industry. Worse, I’d allowed myself to become more committed to my career than to my own kid. That definitely made it time to throw in the proverbial bar towel.

 

Norton was a
sprawling facility done up in wine country moderne, all steel and beams, weathered barn board, and rough-hewn stone. A gravel drive ascended through a stand of poplars. The parking lot was nearly empty, hardly surprising given the hour of day and time of year. I walked through the front door. A sign on the reception desk read DURING HARVEST, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I stood there momentarily, not sure where my former brother-in-law had gone. I was contemplating a still life on the wall behind a side table, calculating that its value exceeded my total net worth, when a young woman craned her head through a doorway.

“You’re Babe, right?” she said. “I recognize you from the bar. Nice, huh?” she added, following my eyes to the painting.

“Form is never more than an extension of content,” I said, but I wasn’t talking about art. A grape in its skin had nothing on her. If she was Wilson’s pretext for blowing me off that evening, I couldn’t blame him.

“Follow me,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

She led me down a hallway. It ended at an opening that gave on to the winery, and I could see the crew cleaning up after a long day of hauling and crushing fruit. All I could hear was Spanish. She stopped midway down the hall and opened a door to what doubled as a conference and tasting room. Wilson was already seated, a half dozen bottles arrayed before him, each with its own glass. Colin Norton stood at the end of the table.

“Hey, Babe,” he said with jocular familiarity. He possessed boyish good looks and wore jeans, running shoes, and a peach-colored polo shirt with its collar turned up.

“Hey, Colin,” I said.

“I had no idea,” he said, obviously referring to my relationship with the esteemed Richard Wilson. My stock had suddenly increased exponentially.

I’d never much cared for Norton. Every bar has its resident band, and Pancho’s was no exception. At certain times and in certain places, a rock and roll band is like a black hole, attracting every musical mediocrity in its gravitational pull, and the lines of Pancho’s coterie of losers, never very clear to begin with, possessed a fluidity that saw all sorts come and go. Colin occasionally sat in on the drums, and he played them, or thought he did, in the same heavy-handed style with which he made wine—a steady, monotonous thumping of the bass with a sudden flourish of cymbals for effect. Why Wilson would be enamored of his wines escaped me.

They’d finished with small talk, and Norton was walking him through the lineup, describing what he wanted to achieve stylistically. I had no interest but took a seat. Colin put a set of stems in front of me as he waxed rhapsodically about his latest experiment, a Sangiovese Cab blend. I dutifully took a sip. If there were Sangiovese anywhere in the glass, I couldn’t find it. Nor could I figure out how Wilson and I were going to talk about anything with Norton standing there.

A moment later we heard a knock, and a young man stuck his head in the door. He appeared tongue-tied and simply stared at Wilson as if he were some kind of exotic sea creature.

“What do you need, Jean?” Norton asked.

“I . . . nothing,” he said, poofing his lips.

“You guys done back there?” Norton said.

“Francisco is cleaning up. I have to take off.
C’est bien?
” He spoke with a thick French accent.

“Yeah, get out of here. It’s fine.”

“I am going to my sister’s,” the young man said. He took a last look at Wilson, nodded, and shut the door.

Wilson didn’t notice a thing. He was concentrating on the wines, moving from glass to glass, sniffing and scribbling away.

“A young French kid,” Norton said to me. “Doing an internship.”

“Look,” I said to both of them, “I have to take off myself.” Wilson came out of his trance. “I have to get ready for my son’s visit,” I explained to Norton.

“But I thought . . .” Wilson started.

“You’re busy,” I said. “Unless you want to swing by the bar in the morning. I open, so I’m there by ten. Nobody’ll be around.” I waited for an answer.

“Okay, I’ll call you. It’s important,” he said.

“I’m sure it is,” I said as I jotted my cell number on the sheet Norton had set out for tasting notes and handed it to Richard.
But not important enough to interrupt your tasting or cancel your date tonight,
I wanted to say.

I thanked Norton and let myself out. Silence had descended on the winery. Everyone had left, it seemed, for a few hours of sleep before heading out to the vineyards and doing it all over again.

The next morning
I was sitting at the bar, nursing a double espresso and doing the books, awaiting Wilson’s phone call. I smelled Janie before I saw her. You never forget the scent of a woman you’ve slept beside that many nights, made love to that many times.

All the same, every bar possesses its own bouquet, a distinctive mélange of stale beer, detergent-soaked urinals, spilled wine, dried citrus, and human sweat. The aroma of Pancho’s was milder than most, but I hadn’t been able to get rid of it altogether. Even so, that I could smell my ex-wife at all is saying something. Not about the pungency of her scent but about me. My sense of smell has been acute for as long as I can remember.

When she walked in with our son in tow, the perfume of her wafted across the bar, the memories cutting through the stink of the place and washing over me.

“Hi, Dad,” Danny said.

“Hey, kiddo.”

He walked past the bar to the pool table. Janie and I regarded each other from a distance. The luminous brown eyes were the same, but the splash of gray silvering the wave of dark hair that fell across her back had grown, it seemed, and I discerned a line, a tension shaping her upper lip, that I hadn’t noticed before. Even so, her mouth possessed the old, familiar sensuality.

I got down off the barstool and gave her an awkward hug.

“Thanks for bringing him up.”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, slipping out of my arms.

“Enough for an espresso?”

“Sure.”

I stepped behind the bar, turned the grinder on, filled the group, and tamped it down. As I pulled her coffee, I said, “How’s your dad doing?”

“He’s babbling in French now.”

“I didn’t know he even knew French.” I set the demitasse on the bar. “I saw your brother yesterday,” I said. “He swung by.”

“Richard? Here?”

“Like a ghost out my past.”

“He stood me up the other night,” Janie said.

“He told me.”

“Did he give an excuse?”

“Not really. An appointment, I guess. He said he’d try to call you tomorrow.”

“Why didn’t he call to tell me he couldn’t make it?”

“He’s very busy, Janie.” Why was I making excuses for him? I didn’t care what Wilson did. “Anyway, he said he was going to call me this morning.” I glanced at my cell on the bar and lifted my hands in the air. “Still waiting.”

“Do you know where I can reach him? Our father’s getting worse. This whole thing is costing me a fortune.”

“Call him on his cell,” I said.

“I did. He won’t pick up. And I left messages at the apartment he keeps in town. I get the feeling he’s avoiding me.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I have no idea.” She sipped the coffee. “Delicious,” she said, offering me a grudging smile.

“Dad!” Danny called out from the pool table. “Did you see that?” He held the cue stick over his head in a gesture of victory. It was nearly as long as he was tall.

“I missed it. Try it again,” I said.

He set up the shot he had just made and craned his little body
over the table. He was biting his tongue as he took aim; he made a pretty clean stroke but missed the shot.

“Let me try it again,” he said, running to the end of the table to fetch the balls. “Keep watching.”

Janie and I looked at our son from across the room—a distance of ten feet and the unbridgeable distance of our separate lives.

“Would you like me to find him for you?” I said to Janie, letting the question hang in the absence of a common vocabulary that married couples share.

“You know where he is?” she said, facing me.

“I think so.” I had no interest in telling her that her brother appeared to be having an affair with the office help at a certain winery. “It shouldn’t be all that hard. I followed him to Norton late yesterday afternoon. He asked me to. There was something he wanted to talk about.” She examined me, waiting for me to divulge her brother’s confidence. “Sorry. We never got around to it. He was too preoccupied.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. “Look, I have to go. I’m already late.”

“That’s funny. That’s just what your brother said.”

 

I called Mulligan
and asked if he could spell me for an hour. He said he’d be down in time for the lunch rush, a standing joke between us during harvest. A little before ten, Tony, the resident pool shark who practically lived at Pancho’s, walked through the door.

“Hey, Tony!” Danny cried. Tony had taken to giving him lessons when the place was dead, and his game had improved noticeably.

“Look after him for an hour, will you?” I said. “If you get a victim, have him suit up in the kitchen. Ernesto can put him to work.”

I explained to Danny that I had to run an errand for his mom and that I’d be back soon. He didn’t seem to mind a bit.

“Rack ’em up, Danny,” Tony said, “and go easy on me.”

 

I stood in
the parking lot, called directory assistance, and was put through to Norton. No one answered.

Traffic was already stacked up on 29, the tourist buses crawling behind the tractors that were bringing in the first fruit of the day,
so I cut across on Lodi Lane to avoid St. Helena. The Silverado Trail wasn’t any better. I settled in for the drive.

Richard Wilson and I had tasted together regularly for nearly a year before he introduced me to his little sister, Janie. I guess I’d proven myself to him. God, she was gorgeous. Beautiful hair, eyes that went on forever, and a mouth—I’d never seen a mouth like that. And she was smart. She was in premed, studying molecular biology, and doing an internship on the human genome project. I never did understand how they did it, even after she explained it to me on a series of coffeehouse dates at Le Bateau Ivre and Caffe Mediteranneum in Berkeley. My childish notion of genetics dated to high school biology: DNA composed of colored ribbons twining around each other. Janie was deciphering code, letters scrambled into what we had thought were an infinite number of variations and then, to our astonishment, learned were not infinite at all.

I moved to Seattle to attend grad school in comparative literature at U Dub and lost touch with her, but my obsession with wine and my postgraduate career soon declared they had irreconcilable differences, and I dropped out. I began to do a little bit of everything in the wine trade, starting at a retail shop and then putting in a short stint as a distributor’s rep, a position I secured with a single flourish of Wilson’s pen. But I wanted to go deeper, like a root searching for nutrients. Problem was, I wasn’t a salesman, and I’ve never fooled myself that I was a farmer.

Wine jobs were few and far between in the city back then, and the siren song of restaurant work beckoned. Wilson and I remained in touch, and I asked him to write a generic letter of recommendation. He wasn’t that well known yet, but a food and beverage manager at a major hotel was an early subscriber to his newsletter,
The Wine Maven,
and a nod from the Great Palate got me the job. The hotel’s budget afforded me the opportunity to taste extensively, and I devoured every book I could lay my hands on.

I watched in fascination as Wilson’s readership grew and his influence increased, and even though I knew that his reputation rested squarely on the very real foundation of his talent, I was envious. My own impulse to excel, I admit, was fueled in part by an unconscious desire to compete with him.

Eventually, as his success began to demand more of him, and as I developed my own reputation and contacts, our stream of communication dwindled to the odd postcard or hurried phone call. He was too busy traveling, writing, basking in acclaim. He’d morphed from my onetime tasting pal into a feared critic, one perfectly capable and willing to wield his power and influence without compunction.

Janie hadn’t wanted to leave the Bay Area, but after finishing her doctoral work, she was offered a job at one of the fashionable companies that had spun off the genome project as scientists chased the pot of gold that lay hidden somewhere within the coils of the double helix. The company was headquartered in Seattle, and she looked me up once she was settled. Within a few months, we were living together.

We worked like maniacs, putting in crazy hours. A beautiful, manic relationship, it worked, for a while at least. But once I started pulling five shifts a week, ten till midnight, and Janie was getting up at six each morning and in the lab by seven-thirty, the fun wore thin. The few moments we shared together were more like collisions.

If people had told us we were going to have a child, we’d have told them they were nuts. We had no plans to get married or to raise a family, but in one of those collisions she got pregnant, an accident that should have been impossible but never is. I rationalized our new reality, silently praying that our child would heal the wounds we were inflicting on each other and make everything right. Anyone could have pointed out that having a child will never make an imperiled couple whole—I’m not sure we would have listened, anyway—but it was too late for that.