Corked (10 page)

“ROOM SERVICE!”

Dad. Outside.

Fuck. Matthew. He knows. He knows I used him. But he might not know. How would he know? Did I use him? Would it be easier if he thought I didn't really love him, and that was it?

I saw him on my front steps, shivering in the cold, hearing his voice through my cell phone, but also in my other ear
. I'd never even asked for the spare key to his apartment. I couldn't have given him that safety.

“Room
SERVEEEECE
.”

My eyes were heavy and sticky from dreaming too hard. I jammed my thumb and index finger parallel to my ocular cavities and wrenched up the lids, blinking and blinking. In my open-mouthed dream stupor, each of my teeth had been covered with a little wooly sock. Feeling like 152 bucks and a bit chubby, I rolled over to the pillow trough and checked the phone once more to be sure. No envelope icon. No movement. No nothing.
He knows. He must know
. My colon became a knot of dread. I should have been brave. And honest. I was now too far away to mitigate the hurt, the damage.
I am treacherous
.

“ROOM
serveeeeeeeece
.”

I envied this man's ability to endure—no, be infinitely enchanted by—his own jokes. Room service.
Yes, Dad, you are room service, which is why you are at my door, knocking and knocking, just as a room-service attendant does
.

Answering the door, I found my father standing in the middle of the hallway. A couple of chic Europeans with leather luggage sets flattened themselves against the wall to get by, carefully maneuvering their belongings to avoid touching him. His outfit was a pair of untied sneakers and a set of dripping navy swim trunks. They were a touch too short. He reeked of chlorine and was not wearing a shirt; his chest rug was wet and matted.

“Hello, would you like some room
serveeeece?
” He was grinning broadly.

“You swam?”

“I went to the spa. I ran in the water. It is something I learned to do in Kenya.”

“You did aquarobics in Kenya?”

“It's low impact. Good for my knees.”

“Old people do aquarobics.”

“I am not old.”

“You are old.”

“You're right, I am old.”

“Obviously, because you do aquarobics. Come into the room. People are staring. Your hair looks like the hair of a freshly hatched baby chicken.”

He flopped down on the heavy woven bedspread, snatched my paddle hairbrush, and gave his scalp a once-over.

“Kissum.” He pointed his cheek up to me. I gave him
la bise
.

“Enough!” he said.

I grabbed the brush back from him, then performed a slow tap dance away from the bed, over to the mirror.

“Did you dream?” My father is one of three people I know who is interested in hearing others' dreams.

“I did, mainly right before I woke up. One of those dreams that lasts a thousand years and leaves you feeling more exhausted than you did before you went to bed, you know? I was being chased by zombies in a pit. I was on a skateboard.”

“Ah. This probably means you were not hugged enough as a child.”

“You're probably right.”

“Do you want to hear mine?”

“Bring it on, turkey.”

“I was having group sex.”

There was no section in the Father-Daughter User Manual for these circumstances.

I waited a beat. “Hm. Was Blondie there, at least?”

“No, but there was a shark. I was having group sex, and I was getting the most attention from a shark. I thought to myself,
This aaaiiiin't good
, and then I woke up.”

“This probably means you weren't hugged enough as a child.”

“Heheh. Precisely.”

He paused and studied my face. “You look tired, sweet thing.”

“Mm. Yeah. Right. I texted Matthew last night and he didn't respond.”

“So? He maybe didn't receive the message yet, or he's busy.”

“Maybe. I'm just in a bit of a paranoid place. I was a little—oh, what's the word?—like, eh, overzealous after I broke up with Matthew.”

“Overzealous? How?”

This is the part where I admit to my father that I am a slut
. A few years ago, the two of us went fishing for a day. We spent most of the day coming up with NHL offensive strategies for catching trout and screaming, “
Go away, grass!
” when our hooks would dredge up the slimy phytochemical sludge at the bottom of the lake. Between these two activities, we managed to share a handful of bonding moments, one of which was him admitting to me that he had been a lothario before his marriage to Bernadette, his first wife, and during one of their separations, a decade before he met my mother. I asked him how many women he had bedded, and he said, “
Environ 60
.” Since then, I'd been toiling diligently to surpass him. For a while I was trying to work my way through the alphabet. But
Q
s,
U
s,
X
s,
Y
s, and
Z
s are almost impossible to find.

“Overzealous in that I've become involved with three men—I mean, boys. They're not that old. Dudes. You know, dudes,” I stuttered. “But it's more complicated than that—”

“We will call them the Three Tenors,” he interrupted. He was joking, but curious. This was the first time we'd spoken of my sex life. My father's eyes darted around the room. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

“Sure, okay. The Three Tenors. Fine.” I wanted to tell him the rest, to say,
But there's other stuff, Dad. It's more complicated than the Three Tenors. My feelings are broken, and I wonder if they're broken because of you
.

“And so?”

I sighed and went on.

“And so Matthew is sharp, and has a tendency to be catastrophic.”

“Like you.”

“Like me, yes, right. Anyway, he's a catastrophizer, and I'm concerned he might know that I've been dating.”

“Dating the Three Tenors?”

“Yes, dating the Three Tenors.”

“Sleeping with them all?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“But you are no longer together, with Matthew.”

“No.”

“But you are friends.”

“Yeah, but there are boundaries in these situations. Full transparency can be hurtful. I don't want to hurt him.”

“Then why do you still speak with him?”

“Because…because I still care about him.”

“An ex-lover cannot be the one who comforts an ex-lover,” he said sternly.

“I know.”

“It's unethical.”

“I know it is.”

“Tootsie, you have to be fair to people. It is a potent blend, what you've been given. Genetics have been your friend. You have your mother's sensitivity and my charisma. That can be deadly to a gentle soul. Right?”

“Right. Right? I don't know. Thank you. For the compliment. Let's go. I am hungry for food.”

Outside, it was a gusty morning, and the first weak leaves were quivering off the trees like golden Post-it notes.

“Go left.” My father was settling into his role as navigator.

“Dad, my only option is to go left.”

I was not focusing well, caught between a cross-fade of paranoia—all the latent meaning contained within the failure of my relationship with Matthew and today's wine tasting—but the cross-fade became caught in the middle.
But there is also latent meaning in wine
. My paranoia doubled as I dragged all the Matthew luggage into what was supposed to be a pleasant midmorning activity. My pastry breakfast sat like lead in my stomach.

I needed a tinfoil helmet and an Ativan.

“Tootsie?” My father was watching me.

“Hello,” I said.

“Are you tense?”

“Ehm…yes.”

“Can I help?”

“Ehm…no?”

“No?”

“I don't think so.”

“Are you nervous about the tasting?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you nervous?”

“Why do you think I'm nervous? I am afraid of another disaster. I am afraid of looking like a
jackass
,” I said. The words were too forceful, imbalanced.

“But you are not a jackass.”

“I just feel like I'm going to say all the wrong things, like I'll describe the wines incorrectly.”

“But there is nothing wrong to say. There is no ‘incorrect,' if what you're saying is the honest impression of what you are tasting.”

“Oh come on. It's not that easy.”

‘It is.'

“It's not.”

“It is, really.”

After pulling into the lot, I parked the car exactly between two spots; the white spray-painted line stretched out beneath the car, dividing it in two perfectly.

Inside the Pfaffenheim headquarters, on the ground floor, there was a beautiful silent wineshop. At the back, a dark wooden bar stretched out, the wall behind it top-lit with soft yellow bulbs that showcased neat rows of the winery's bottles. The floor was gleaming, the sunlight fizzing through an opaque layer of clouds and through the windows, giving all objects and persons an angelic tinge. Someone had set up a large round table for our visit, covered it in a carefully ironed white tablecloth, and dressed the tablecloth with a square arrangement of four wine glasses and an elegant black spittoon resembling a mod version of the Rubens vase. Aesthetically, we could not be further from Rémy's mushroomy cellar and all my old memories of my father's New Jersey cave. For this, I was grateful. The place looked like a hotel. The wines were always put in storage when we lived in hotels.

We stood waiting. My dad scanned through his day planner—his
bréviaire
—shuffling pages. The room smelled a bit antiseptic. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, moving it back and forth so the taste buds would become warm with spit and friction, stopping when I realized that my tongue was not my quadriceps and this was not race day at school.

“What happens next?” I asked.

A man behind the bar who, up until that point, had been blending seamlessly into the ecosystem, raised his hand as if answering a question. He was wearing a white starched shirt, a black scoop-necked apron, and a bow tie. If he'd removed the apron, and outfitted himself with a pocket protector, he would have looked like a professor of mathematics at the University of Munich—friendly and nebbish and precise-looking, his face an oval, with tidy brown hair.

“Bernard Nast?” my father said.

“Bernard Nast.”

I did a quick inventory of questions I would avoid asking.
No questions about soil; none about the north, south, east, or westerly directions of the vines and what impact this might have on the grapes. No technical questions, nothing about the types of pneumatic presses the winery uses to extract the juice
.

Bernard Nast and my father were in the middle of the getting-to-know-you back and forth. Blah blah blah, she's a journalist, I'm with Fairmont, blah blah blah.

I would not ask about aging, or what kinds of barrels were used. Whether I knew the wine sat in French or American oak barrels was irrelevant for now. Maybe on another trip, maybe one through another country, like Italy or Argentina, I would be accomplished enough to glean why certain varietals need very hot days and cool nights in order to develop properly.

Nast was collecting bottles, placing them two by two in the middle of the immaculate tablecloth. He and my father were still chatting; they had moved on to the subject of Robert Parker, the famed wine critic whom my father was describing as “
un homme constipé
.” Parker is one of the most influential voices on wine in the world, and, many years ago, developed a 1–100 rating system for wines, which was perplexing, based on what my father had told me in the car and what Alex Heinrich had said in his vineyard. If I were to believe these men, objectively defining any sensual pleasure would be akin to developing a rating system for, say, making love.
If a man dressed up in a giant periwinkle bunny costume before bedding me, I would likely rate that experience a 2 out of 100, with 10 or 15 points of available added value depending on his technical aptitude. But if I were a furvert, the rating would surely be much higher
. According to my father, Parker was the same.
The only difference is the man in the plushie outfit is an expansively flavored, easy-seducing wine with little nuance
.

Two small oblong wicker baskets full of fresh baguette, cut into cubes, bracketed the group of green bottles huddled on the tabletop. In total, there were 13.
Lucky 13. Lucky me. Really, though, lucky me
. I was flummoxed by Nast's generosity—these were not cheap castoffs; there must have been $500 worth of wine sitting there, quietly, like little musical theater actors waiting to tap dance onto the scene and sing us the show tune they'd prepared.

“Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plaît,”
Nast said.

He waved us into the plush banquette surrounding the table and uncorked one of the tap dancers. My father flipped open his day planner, adjusted his glasses, and wrote down the label details.

Rooting around in my satchel, I searched for writing implements.
God, have I brought any?
At the airport in Montreal, I had scanned the meager collection of notebooks at the French bookstore and all had gay children's motifs—juggling cartoon bears or mice wearing bonnets, doing anachronistic human activities, riding pennyfarthing bicycles, or churning butter—crap like that. My hand touched a leather-like material.
Excellent
. I'd brought my small desk calendar, a compact red book bound in what looked to be fake alligator skin, yes, the wily red fake alligator of south-central Peru. This would do fine. I had no pen, so I steadied my M•A•C lip pencil in my left hand, hoping my father and Nast would not notice. I tested the solidity of the tip. It smeared all over the place. Adjusting my hand, I hovered the pencil farther away from the page and tried writing again.
Why didn't you bring a PEN? There were PENS all over the hotel room. PENS. How are you supposed to focus on LANGUAGE and FEELINGS when you don't even have a proper PEN?