The Diviners (63 page)
Thus, Randall begins to compose:
Is that what you want for your vineyard? Do you want to have an expensive meal with a twenty-three-year-old with genital herpes, so that when you attempt to bed him in order to ensure the fine review of your pestilential product he infects you with his suppurating sores? Is that what you want? Maybe if you calved off his finger warts and mixed them in it would improve your beverage.
The language is closing in on what he needs. Truth is a condition of language, and when the outrage is pure, then the review is accurate.
What about the piece he fashioned entirely of similes? Reviewing the wines of Paraguay? Magnificent, really.
What are these wines like? They are like the teenage sacrifices of the Aztec peoples at the moment that these sacrifices wet themselves; like the smoked banana peels of banana republics; like the scorched smell of freebasing at the coca-producing factories of the Colombian cartels; like the acidified pages of the tomes of the Magic Realists; like the revolutionistas, unwashed and unfed; like the Disappeared after a good six months in their unmarked graves; like the punctured rectums of the fervent Catholic altar boys on their way to another round in the confessional with the good Father; like the smoking sky over the scorched rain forest; like the rainwater running down the gutter of an Indian village with no plumbing; like the throbbing bosoms of the sun-ripened, thong-wearing transvestites of the humid slums; like the discarded thatch of a continent’s worth of Brazilian bikini waxes; like the cannibalism of the interior tribes; like the moldy grooves of another box full of warped tropicalia LPs; like the nectar of slug-infested mangos; like the ear-splitting cry of the toucan and like its gaudy, excessively colorful exterior and its thinly constructed beak; like the bomb shelters of the hidden Latin American Nazis; like the still throbbing organs of their victims; and like the soiled loincloths of the victims of cannibalism at the moment of their demise.
Yes, he is the greatest, and no one can take the mantle from him, and yet there is the one thing missing, namely a personal life of any kind. There were some married men, in his later teens, the sort of men who liked much younger boys, no matter the appearance of these boys. He has been with some of these men, and he loved these men, and he learned a lot from them, including something about wine. But many years have since elapsed with nothing to show for them but the occasional tawdry sally with a vigneron or a sommelier. These never did satisfy, especially when he tried to get them to tie him up properly.
In the wake of this realization, there was no choice, really, but to take the search for love out into the world. And that was how he, Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history, came to conduct wine tastings at the hospices and in the chronic-care wards of the Bay Area. To be Randall Tork, stripped of his reputation and his franchise, in a hospital ward, with a couple of bottles of swill and a box of digestives, filling plastic cups for men and women who had cast off all but the last few pounds of their body weight, this was actually a rather moving experience for him. He got the okay from
les médicines:
a glass or two would not unduly affect the tripartite cocktail of chemicals routinely prescribed for his
étudiants.
He began spinning out his tales of wine excellence, how the grace to make a good wine did not take just root stock and ample sunshine, it took five hundred years of perfection and the beneficence of the gods, and he spoke of the kinds of political stability (monarchy being especially good) that made this perfection possible and of the secret languages that needed to be handed down, and in telling these stories, he found that he suddenly had a greater purpose. He found that he could feel great affection for the HIV afflicted, even when they made uninformed evaluations of the wines. He looked forward to getting out of the house.
It was in this context that Randall met a certain handsome gentleman. Raoul was not exactly who Randall Tork was imagining when he went to speak in the wards of the damned. Many of the men in the hospices at least dimly recognized the importance of wine, perhaps as part of their dining lives. Some of them even had strong opinions on the subject. They would occasionally take issue with him, and there was vigorous back-and-forth. Raoul was not one of these men, and Randall was of the opinion that Raoul had never even tasted wine before he had his first plastic cupful on the ward. He knew so little of wine that he had no idea that the stuff in the chalice at church on Sundays was reputed to be the same beverage that Randall Tork was now handing out. Raoul, it seemed, was mostly interested in professional baseball, the argot of which he pronounced in a charming Hispanic way.
Whippet thin, with short curly black hair, Raoul also sported one brown eye and one that was sort of greenish, a combination so lovely that Randall Tork felt a need to compose lines on the subject. It turned out, of course, that the vehicle for these lines was a review of a New Zealand white that everyone said was so vivacious,
full-bodied, like an Oakland hooker, with the fruit of her cheap douche and the overtones of a Sumatran boar barbecued on a spit. Yet still this wine reminds me of the multicolored eyes of a beautiful man who once offered to take me to see the legends of local baseball frolic on their fields.
Always Barry Bonds this, Barry Bonds that, Barry Bonds is a Greek god, he will live into eternity. This was Raoul’s sweet song, along with the fact that his surname, he said, proved that he was related to someone called A-Rod. Raoul was full of strong opinions about baseball, as befitted a young man, and seemed to come to the wine tastings with the cross-purpose of perseverating on America’s pastime.
Raoul said he was straight, which is what they all say, especially those men of the Catholic countries to our south, notwithstanding that they have all been around the block, pledging their eternal love to their boyhood friends before going and knocking up some she-vixen because they are too prideful to use a condom. Raoul said to Randall at the first tasting, “I am not a fruity wine like these others here,” and then he giggled as if he had never said anything so amusing in his life, which was perhaps true. Maybe he was straight, because who knew about these things? The libido is as mysterious as soil and sunlight and precipitation and the vine.
One fact was incontrovertible, however, and that was that Raoul had been an intravenous drug user during many years. He had lived on the streets for some of these years. It was likely that Raoul had been a male prostitute, perhaps in the Tenderloin. And this dark history of Raoul was, for Randall Tork, especially thrilling.
Accordingly, Randall visited this particular ward more often. Other locations of the needy began to get fewer lectures, less exacting attention. And then abruptly Randall Tork was visiting Raoul on a nonprofessional basis because Raoul was very sick and very thin, with a lingering pneumonia, and some days he could get out of bed, and some days not. Raoul was never less than enchanting, in his consumptive ghostliness, and he was always gallant when Randall Tork came around. The question was why. Why would a former male prostitute and IV drug user who claimed to be straight, whose main interest was Barry Bonds, get excited about the attentions of a stumpy, middle-aged wine writer with muttonchops and a beret, who sat around all day trying to decide whether to repaint his living room while checking the prices of his stock portfolio?
There was no reason on earth why Raoul should care for the attentions of Randall Tork, and thus the reasons must have been abstract and perfect, and Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history, did, of course, attempt to divine the nature of these abstractions while considering the force and meaning of the Castello di Ostuni, 1999 Chianti Classico (fifty-five dollars a bottle):
Why should this be the top Chianti from Ostuni, a region not widely noted for its fine wines? Why should this estate, which has been in the family since 1580, suddenly produce a wine that I love, after a run of the worst, most undrinkable table swill of my considerable experience? To answer these questions, reader, there is no choice but to speak of sweet love generally. When in love do you not see depth where once depth was unapparent, and when in love do you not see elegance where once elegance feared to tread, and when in love do you not see complexity where hitherto all was simplistic, and is not a condition of willingness and openness to novelty the most succulent of trances? Does not love eventually work its magic on even the unworthy? Yes, complexity is love’s highest aim, and in the case of a wine, its symbol is in the full-bodied nature of the vintage, and by full-bodied I mean the kaleidoscope of liminalities in one sweet goblet. Hold it up to the light, hold up the beloved wine to the light and see how when your love is decanted his blood is deep and red like history. Now drink of its bouquet, the bouquet of this sweet Chianti, its bouquet of musk and lilies and warm semen, and now you are ready to see the precarious balance in the taste of your love, citrus, honeydew, and birch, and now and only now are you ready to sip, oh yes; here are the fierce tannins, which ask for your courage and which call after you, reminding you of the responsibility of this sweet instant; now let the echo of that taste linger, bringing with it a sweet waiting. It is yours to delight in love and to remember that love and wine call you to the same reverence, to take and delight and remember and describe and teach and succumb to the sweet wrestling, the longing for what will soon be gone, for a bottle of wine must end, like the greatest love story told.
He threw caution to the wind and read the column aloud to Raoul. And though Randall wasn’t sure that Raoul would really understand all of it, the critic nonetheless performed his love poem, acting out his Keatsian excesses with stylized sibilances and exclamations. If Randall Tork could not answer why Raoul should favor him with attentions, perhaps it didn’t matter any longer, because the column proved that Raoul brought out the best in him. He even took Raoul out to a Mexican restaurant in the Mission, and he actually drank
beer
with Raoul, which he previously would never have been caught doing with anyone, and he laughed uproariously at Raoul’s tales of the street, of the camaraderies of the street. He didn’t care if the louts and toughs of the authentic Mexican restaurant used that horrible Spanish slang word to describe the two of them. Then he took Raoul back to the hospice, giving the taxi driver very exacting directions, which if not followed to the letter elicited torrents of abuse, because he now cared about the vintage known as Raoul and, notwithstanding the haste of the decision, he wanted to know if Raoul would come and live with him in Marin County, in his little house on stilts.
Of course, it occurred to Randall Tork that Raoul might be lying about various things. It occurred to Randall Tork that he was taking in a felon with a past full of shadows, but he was willing to do what needed to be done, which was to administer the tripartite cocktail when it needed to be administered, and to cook healthful soups from scratch, and to laugh when laughing was possible, and to give constant updates on baseball scores, and even to watch televised baseball if that was what was needed, to help the patient dress, to bestow kisses on the patient, and when Raoul began improving a little bit, when he seemed to rally such that he was even talking about getting a job, perhaps at a discount-beverage center, then Randall Tork knew that in addition to being the greatest wine writer in history, he was also a person whose love was curative. How to tell Raoul this, that he had never ever before been such a person, that his principal motivator had always been the urge to despoil? Now he wanted only to despoil the vineyard owners of Sonoma and Napa Valley, no one else. Passersby seemed more benevolent than ever.
There was the wrinkle: that Raoul would never make love with him. Would not, at any rate, have an orgasm with him. Raoul said that his spunk, which was the word he used, was toxic, and that it was not fair to subject Randall Tork to it, when the truth was that the very poison of Raoul’s little frogmen was what made them more ambrosial and heavenly. Randall would have delighted to eat them, as a testament to his sacrifices, since there was no apparent link between this practice and viral transmission. But no, when it came to these moments, Randall had to beg of his Hispanic lover, and this was proof that there were always further depths of humility for Randall to know, if he would know love.
The amounts of money that began to go missing were mainly inconsequential, because Randall Tork did not leave a lot of cash around the premises. He hated cash, in fact, and dealt almost exclusively in debit and credit cards. He was an inveterate saver, and most of his fortune, which was not much, considering the reach of his annual paperback and his Web site ratings, was tied up in mutual funds that had nosedived, along with everyone else’s, earlier in the year. Yet he was frugal and thrifty. When two hundred dollars disappeared from his wallet just after these monies were extracted from a cash machine, he didn’t fail to notice. Nor did he, however, immediately confront Raoul. He waited to see what would happen. Would the two hundred dollars be converted immediately into a speedball or whatever the term was? Six weeks later, there was another precipitous disappearance of cash. Randall asked himself what the saints would do. Would the saints thank the heavens that Raoul was feeling frisky enough to go in search of drugs? Would the saints forgive and forget?
One afternoon about dusk, in early October, which is after all a perfect time for a shocking revelation, Raoul, weeping, put his hand on the knee of his patron and said that he was again putting the needle in his arm. It was not what he wanted to do, he said, lapsing into the Spanglish patois that was so divine, “The thing calls to me, and I cannot refuse.”
Randall listened to the circles of Raoul’s reasoning, and his disgust was with himself, more so than with the rampant lies that peppered the confession. Because he had not yet sacrificed enough, as anyone could see. Holding the emaciated head of his lover in his lap, he said, “How can I help?”