Isn't It Romantic? (10 page)

Each of them separately smiled.

“Women,” said Pierre.

19

O
wen's gas station. Eleven
A.M
. A white Camry rental car pulled in and Pierre hustled out. Remarkably, another Frenchman seemed to be touring America with his family. His wife was holding their littlest child with here-there-be-monsters wariness. The dapper father timorously rolled down his window just a few inches and said, “
Parlez-vous Français?
” (Do you speak French?)

Pierre held his right forefinger and thumb an inch apart.

The Frenchman said, “
De l'essence, s'il vous plaît
.” (Gas, please.) He shot his thumb upward as he said, “
Le plein
.” (Fill 'er up.)

Pierre said, “
D'accord. Est-ce que je vérifie l'huile?
” (Okay. Shall I check the oil?)

“
Non, monsieur
.” And then the Frenchman was astonished at the gas station attendant's fluency. “
Habitez-vous le coin?
” he asked. (Do you live around here?)

In his bored way, Pierre tilted his chin to indicate the house behind Owen's gas station. Pierre inserted the fueling nozzle in the tank and locked the handle in the on position. Children were gaping at him from the Camry's back seat.

With his familiar French as his protection, the driver felt safe enough to roll down his window completely and lean his head out. “
Tu as presque un bon accent
.” (You have a fairly good accent.)

Pierre offered him his Parisian shrug.

The Frenchman held up a map. “
Y-a-t'il des choses intéressantes à voir ici?
” (Are there interesting sights around here?)

Pierre told him, “
Le village pionnier de Harold Warp
.” (Harold Warp's Pioneer Village.) And in a connoisseur's lascivious aside, he whispered,
“Ne manquez pas l'exposition du monkey wrench
.” (Don't miss the monkey wrench exhibit.) And then Pierre noticed Owen's packet of chewing tobacco atop the gas pump and he stuffed a huge helping inside his cheek before he began washing the Camry's front windshield.

Suddenly Iona was leaning on the hood next to him. She said, “Listen. We have to talk. We have to see each other. Tonight?”

Embarrassed about the chew, Pierre was unwilling to fully open his mouth. He mumbled, “
Ce soir
.” (Tonight.)

Tilting his head out the window, the Frenchman inquired,
“Il y en a beaucoup qui parlent Français au Nebraska?
” (Are there many who speak French in Nebraska?)

Pierre tapped his full left cheek and Iona got the message. The only French she could think of was, “
Oui
.” The whole family fell into agitated and amazed conversation, and Iona asked, “What do you have, Owen's chew in your mouth?”

Pierre nodded.

“You like it?”

Machismo compelled his agreement, though he was in fact hunting a place to spit.

“Listen,” Iona said. “We're having a shower for Natalie tonight.”

Shower?
But he couldn't then ask if she meant what he thought she did. Wild imaginings overcame him and he knew he wanted to see this cleanliness in the worst way.

Iona said, “I'll leave a note telling you where you can find me. Around six check the bulletin board in the café.”

Pierre held a hand to his mouth while nodding his head. Iona kissed him on his unlumped cheek and left, and Pierre immediately turned from the Camry to gratefully spew half a pint of tobacco juice and wipe his chin.

And now the friendly French were gaping at him with disappointed revulsion. The father's side window very slowly rolled up.

Owen strolled over to handle the cash transaction, and Pierre went inside to rinse his mouth out. And when he got out to the gas pumps again, he saw he'd accidentally spit on a paper bag of sandwiches that Owen had intended to share with him. Owen got one out and painfully offered the dripping mess to him, saying, “Hungry?”

Pierre shook his head.

“Help me then.”

Owen got on a step stool and half-disappeared inside a truck on a hoist as Pierre sort of watched him, lazily holding various tools. On the garage wall was a sign that read:
ANYONE FOUND AROUND HERE AT NIGHT WILL BE FOUND AROUND HERE IN THE MORNING
. Owen was, for the instant, wholly absorbed in his work. He said, “Hand me those vice grips there,
mon négociant
.”

Yawning and guessing, Pierre handed him some gloves. A dribble of oil spattered his face from above.

Owen, seeing the gloves, said, “Yep, that's close: vice grips/gloves. I can see that.”

Owen bent to get the tool for himself as Pierre sought something to wipe his face with. Hanging on the garage wall was a giant white towel that he used, and then he saw, to his horror, that it had emblazoned on it a bold red “N,” and below that “National Champs, 1994.” With panic, he scrubbed at the towel with his shirttail, but when he found he'd only widened the smudge, he folded and hung the memento in such a way that the oil stain would hardly show.

Inside the truck Owen said, “Romance! Young love! The hectic valences of the heart! When I see the way you two bill and coo, I question the bachelor's life of solitude and higher purpose that my vocation as a vintner has forced me to choose.”

Pierre asked, “Which two?”

Owen said, “You two, of course. But then I think, ‘Oh, boy, Owen! Can't you just see yourself skimping on the
petit verdot
because little Oweena needs braces?'”

“I am not understanding . . .”

Owen answered, “You're in love, pardner! Whole lotta things are gonna be gettin' by you.” Owen pulled something unidentifiable loose from the underside of the chassis and there was a disconcerting rain of bolts and washers on the garage floor. Owen got out of the engine and happily held the thing up in front of Pierre before going off with it. A hammering could be heard that seemed absurdly energetic.

Pierre walked under the truck engine and just to be doing something idly fiddled with a nut on the oil pan. Immediately the oil pan spurted a leak and he frantically tried to stop it.

Owen yelled over his own banging, “Aunt Opal told me all about it. And don't think we humble Husker fans aren't honored you and your inamorata chose Seldom to be hitched in.”

Pierre held both hands to the source. Black oil crawled out between his fingers and eddied over his bandaged wrists. “Hitched?” he asked. “I do not know this word.”

“Conjugal bliss!” Owen called. “The nuptial bond! The hymeneal rites of summer!”

“I am Confucius,” Pierre said.

Owen corrected him. “Confused, my friend.”

“
C'est juste
. Confus-ed.”

“Well, cold feet's only natural,” Owen said. He hammered some more. “And we are going to cure it with one of Doctor Owen's famous Friday-night-infantile-drinking-games-and-foods-galore bachelor parties. Hijinks, jokes, plenty of beer, and sober words of wisdom from some of the least useful guys in a workable radius around here. The whole thing's gonna go as smooth as cruise control on a Cadillac.”

Pierre took his hands from the oil plug experimentally, and a huge gout of oil drained out over his shirtsleeves before he stuck his thumb up inside the oil pan again. Woefully, he looked to Owen. He heard something ring off and ricochet from the hammering. Owen muttered, “Oh, damn.”

20

A
nd yet, an hour later Owen and Pierre were spiffed up and at the fairgrounds in tuxedos, Pierre's bandages off, suavely walking past the booths and Weird Animals exhibit just as Mrs. Christiansen and Natalie had on Thursday. Pierre lagged behind to give the Afghan hound a look. Owen pulled him along and walked Pierre inside the food tent. Immediately there was utter silence from the forty tuxedoed but, truth be told, farmerish would-be wine connoisseurs and onlookers at folding tables on which wines, wineglasses, and spittoons were placed.

Owen announced, “
Permettez-moi de vous présenter, Monsieur Pierre Smith, négociant extraordinaire
.” Hearing silence, he offered as an aside to Pierre, “Tough crowd.”

On a front table were many bottles of homegrown Nebraska wines. Pierre rotated some of them to scrutinize their labels: Owen's own “Big Red,” but also “Côte du Silo,” “Domaine Diddly-squat,” “Chateau Sorta-Roth-childish,” “Henrietta's Grand Vino,” and “Property of the Googler Family.” Pierre blanched, but then Owen was escorting him up to the dais and whispering, “We'd like you to kind of walk us through how a wine tasting oughta go, just in case we haven't been doing it right.”

“Sure.”

Owen sat. Pierre scanned a skeptical crowd as he poured the first wine into his glass and held it up in front of his face. “We first look at the color.”

All stared in a surly way.

“We do not want to see clouds, or sediment, or . . .” He couldn't think of the word in English.

“Grape skins?” Owen guessed.

Someone in the food tent protested, “Well, hell! I lost the contest already!”

Pierre sought a change of subject. He swirled the wine in his glass as he thought. “We can talk about the methyl alcohol. What we call the legs.”

“Hubba hubba,” Carlo said.

Pierre glanced agitatedly at Owen, but Owen simply offered encouraging thumbs-up, you're-doing-great gestures.

“We will skip ahead to the bouquet,” Pierre told them, and lifted his glass to his nose to inhale the aroma.

A would-be connoisseur put his nose completely inside the glass, dunking it into the wine. Watching him, Owen got up. “We might need some hands-on teaching here, Pierre.”

Owen and Pierre stepped down to the main floor as Pierre instructed, “And then we taste.”

About half the guys at the folding tables dipped their forefingers into their wine and then slurped it off.

Owen said, “And as far as what Jerome told us last month, I done some checking and that's totally wrong.”

Pierre demonstrated, “Hold the wine in your mouth like so.”

But Owen jumped the gun, saying, “And then spit it out.”

A host of them spewed and gushed their mouthfuls. Pierre watched in abhorrence as a burly highway worker named Orville bent with his knees wide apart and spit a jet of wine to the floor like it was tobacco juice.

Owen happily slapped Pierre on the back, “See the effect you're having? We're already better than last time. And we got forty minutes to go.”

21

T
he sole customer in the Main Street Café was a four-hundred-pound wedding photographer who, in the on-the-nose way of Nebraska, was nicknamed Biggy. Scanning the sports page for Cornhusker news, he slurped coffee and went through a half-dozen stale doughnuts as if gaining weight were his full-time job.

Iona and Natalie stood behind the pink Formica counter blowing up bright balloons for The Revels. With the worm of one deflated balloon in her mouth, Natalie was trying to tie off another. Shrinking throughout her efforts, it was finally knotted when only the size of her fist.

“This food is lousy!” Biggy shouted and got up from the booth, hardly a smidgen of doughnut left on his plate.

Natalie was mystified as she watched him storm out.

Iona just sighed. “I can't be worrying about his little world.”

Natalie got his coffee cup, saucer, and doughnut plate and took them into the kitchen. And she was putting them in the dishwasher when Dick stood up from a crouch outside and just appeared there at a screened window beside her.

“Hello,” he said. Embarrassed, he looked down. “I'm standing in the pansies here.”

Alarmed, she leaned forward to see.

“Oh, I'm not squashing anything. I just want to talk to ya. Will ya go for a horse ride with me?”

“But the café is still open . . .”

“You won't get anybody. Opal handles the after-lunch on Fridays.”

Natalie looked back into the café, which was, indeed, vacant. She smiled and took off her apron as Opal trundled in with her ironing board and a basket of clothes. Natalie looked for Iona to say where she was going, but Iona had spied Dick and disappeared. A lone balloon floated across the floor.

22

F
renchman's Creek was pelting and gurgling in the background as Owen and Pierre sidestepped among Owen's trellised grapevines in sunshine in their tuxedos. Owen said, “You see here how I've used the classic, double-guyot way of training the vines?”

Pierre gently touched the grape leaves and hefted the grape cluster in his palm like a lovely breast, measuring its weight. “You have very many the grapes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Too manys they hang on one vine. She has only the few nutrients to give.” Abruptly but expertly, Pierre began snagging grape leaves away. “And you are letting the canopy grow too thick. You are keeping the sunlight off the grape clusters.”

“And that's why they're so hard and tannic?”

Pierre, agreeing, tore off more leaves. “The shade is bad for. The grape mold he likes the humid and dark.”

Owen, joining in the harvesting, asked, “You think we have prospects, though?”

Working ahead, Pierre said, “I don't know this . . . prospeck?”

“Hope,” Owen said.

Pierre picked a pliant grape and bit into it, shutting his eyes as he tasted the tones and inflections of its juice. He was studious, doctoral, then impressed. “We have hope.” Tearing away more grape leaves and then looming sunflowers, he finally opened up the vineyard enough that he could accidentally view across the water the saddled horses Shep and Ida as they minced their way down to Frenchman's Creek and drank with equine delicacy. Higher up the hillside, in the loam and shade, Dick Tupper was snapping out with great earnestness a picnic blanket that seemed as red as passion and Pierre's erstwhile fiancée was looking on with fondness, her loose hair softly rippling like Frenchman's Creek on a sultry August wind.