Corked (16 page)

Aubert's voice was a patchy radio signal. I caught bits here and there, but was focused mainly on staring at a row of thick old volumes on an inset shelf above his head.
Oh, you are a fool
. He and my father were bonding over France's lost innocence. The chances of me knowing anything about France's lost innocence were low.
You could barely remember the uncomplicated name of a man who essentially founded the most prestigious terroirs in the region
.

“Wine is the story of a generation. It is the manifestation of nature and psychology,” Aubert said. I felt like yelling for the third time today.
I KNOW IT IS THE MANIFESTATION OF NATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS TRIP
.

Now my father and Aubert were laughing at something I had not caught.

“Kathryn!” Aubert said. I jerked up. When my mother is angry, she says “Kathryn!” loudly in French, and I know I'm in for it.

“Have you ever tasted a wine that's been fermenting for only a few days? Would you like to see the operation?” he asked.

“Oui, j'aimerais bien ça, M. Aubert,”
I said.

As soon as we were back in the courtyard, I received another hair-lashing in the other eye.

Aubert laughed.
What's so funny, Aubert?
I contained my impulse to kick at the ground like a petulant child.

“C'est le mistral,”
he said. He looked at me with one eyebrow slanted and went off in the direction of what looked like a low-lying barn. We followed.

Inside, there was that characteristic smell of bubbling fruit and warm, blooming yeast. He filled two glasses, one with a cloudy gold liquid and the other with a cloudy pink liquid. I sipped the yellow one, which was a mouthful of the tropics: super-ripe pineapples, all drippy and honeysweet. The other was the best spiked fruit punch.

“The white is Viognier,” Aubert said.

“Strange,” I said.

“Why?” My dad looked at me.

“Because the Viogniers I've had have always been more flowery than fruity,” I explained.

“C'est intéressant, hein?”
Aubert said.

He was being cryptic, withholding information, maybe waiting for my questions. I
did
want to ask him a question—I was desperate to do a tasting—but I was too unsure about protocol and too distracted to ask questions and diligently take notes, to take more of these notes I'd been jotting into my red desk calendar, these quips and philosophies from viticulturists and vintners and sommeliers. Could Aubert explain why a bunch of Viognier grapes, in their first week of fermentation, when the yeast is industriously converting the sugar into alcohol, tastes like pineapples only to end up, a year later, tasting like flowers? Probably. But I was tired! It's magic! Magic need not be deconstructed! MAGIC! Just because I enjoy driving a Saab doesn't mean I have to ask a mechanic to take the Saab apart in front of my eyes to show me why I like driving the Saab, right? Can't I just taste the Saab? I mean,
drive
the Saab? And taste the wine?

“Oui, c'est intéressant.”
I waited, let a pregnant pause pass—not too pregnant, first trimester, probably—then went on.
“Très interéssant.”
I mustered as much authority as I could and injected it into the latter part of my response, hoping to defend myself from a possible follow-up question.

We moved on to the red punch. Aubert listed the grapes. The list was long:
Mourvèrdre, Syrah, Grenache, Cinsault
….

“What a party!” I said.
Party punch
.

“Mais oui, Kathryn. Bien sûr. On est à Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”
He chuckled. Of course, he said, we are in Châteauneuf-du-Pape after all.

He whisked our drained glasses out of our hands and marched them over to a big sink. I looked pleadingly at my dad.

“Toots, Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines are all
assemblage
. Lots of grapes in every bottle. Major, major
assemblage
.” He said this under his breath quickly.

“
Assemblage
. Got it. An assembly. A bunch of different types of grapes, I know. But when do you think we're going to do a tasting?”

Aubert returned before my father could say anything. He announced,
“Venez,”
and let himself out the back door.

In the vineyard, with my hair swirling all around me as though I'd just jumped out of a goddamn plane, I decided that I would change my strategy.
Seduce him with questions until he had no choice but to let us taste his wines. Take those scraps of information and rework them into a flock of good questions. I am ready. I have shimmied into a pair of short shorts. I have laced up my sprinter's cleats. I have stretched. I am limber. I am in the blocks. I fire the starter's pistol. And I'm off
.

“What field are we standing in?”

“These are Grenache,” Aubert said.

“And over there?” I weathervane-spun to the left, pointing over a road of packed dirt and rocks to another field.

“Syrah.”

“And when the grapes are picked and put into the fermentation vats, are they done together or separately?”

“Separately, naturally,” he said.

“So you can mix them after? To control the taste? Like combining red and blue to make purple, and adding more blue for a darker purple?”

“Eh bien, c'e….”

“Like, if you were to put a bunch of babies from different families into the same room and just let them spend their first crucial months together, the lot of them would turn into some weird amalgam toddler with a collective nondescript personality, traits so mixed up you'd never be able to tell which families the babies originally came from.” I noticed Aubert's eyebrows were cocked again, in the shape of the pointed roofs of neighboring houses.

“I think your color analogy was more accurate,” Aubert said.

“Oh. All right then.”

“We just came from Burgundy,” my father offered by way of explanation.

“Alors, une dégustation?”
Aubert led us in the direction of the wine showroom.

“Oui, avec plaisir!”
I said.

I jumped in the air and kicked my heels to the side, as a joke just for my dad. He reached out and grabbed the nape of my neck. I felt like a good kitten.

Aubert uncorked five bottles, set out a long row of tasting glasses and filled them generously. We chewed the liquid in the first glass in silence. It came from a bottle called
Les Partides
, from 2000.

“This one is a Grenache-Syrah blend. We leave the Grenache on the vine,
en surmaturité
, so that the hot weather can dry them. This concentrates their flavor. We do this to give the wine structure.”

I wasn't inspired to say anything, so I grabbed for the next glass: a 2003, Grenache, Cinsault, and a bit of Syrah.

“Oh, it tastes just like
birthday cake
.”

“OUI, oui! Le cake,”
Aubert agreed. “Kathryn, it's the first time I've seen you become excited today.”

I blushed.

“Sorry,” I said, shamefully, “it was a long drive for me.”

“No, no, no apologies.
C'est de la vraie passion!
” He looked over at my father and said, “
Votre fille est charmante, intelligente
.” He was suddenly interested. “
Quelles sont vos passions?
”

“In general?”

“In general, about wine, whatever.”

I thought about how to appropriately answer his question. My father was gazing at me with pride.

Death, no, jokes, no, boys, no, masochism, no, sweater vests, no, well-toasted toast in the shape of France, no, drinking, no, fronting, no, running, maybe, German philosophy
….

“I studied German philosophers in university. I suppose that was a passion.” I uttered this in a vague way, feeling self-conscious.

“Which ones?”

“I loved Schlegel a lot. His
Philosophical Fragments
especially.”
You sort of sound like a wanker, dude
.

“Why?”

“Because I like the idea of a tiny phrase, a small thought, conveying more than the individual meaning of the words put together.”

“Explain.”

“Well, I've never liked lists.” I stopped and self-corrected. “I mean, I use them all the time when I'm going nuts, but in theory, I hate them because they reduce grand concepts, or moments in history, or people, or even wine down to something that is small. When you sum up the items in a list, it never amounts to the original concept,” I went on, gathering momentum, “but with Schlegel's
Fragments
, there's this radiant moment that goes beyond its own boundaries.”

“It expands,” my father said. He was telling me he was engaged. I gained more speed.

“Right. It expands and expands, like with wine. This cake wine is not just Grenache, Cinsault, and Syrah….”

“It's everything around it too, all the growth around it,” Aubert said.

“YES. It's not only the soil and the weather patterns and the manner in which it was treated in the bottle. It lives individually, then lives in your mouth, and in my mouth, and in my dad's mouth. There, it doesn't just live, but it
reacts
, and not only chemically to our taste buds. It reacts and relates to the person whose mouth it's in, to how they're feeling that day, to their memories and the company they're in.”

Aubert and my father were beaming at me.
Holy fuck. Nice one, Borel
.

“You must have lunch with me.”

We feasted happily on a meal served by Aubert's grandmotherly cook: a salad dotted with boiled eggs, the yolks orange and pleasantly runny; grayish pink ground meats in aspic with pistachio studs; soup and more meat; bright steamed vegetables, the carrots carefully turned and glazed; dessert and coffee.

We all said a goodbye worthy of
Le Bal Crillon des Débutantes
, full of flourish and grace—one kiss, two kisses, dainty waving, demure smiles. My father and I slammed our car doors,
clack clack
. I checked my side and rearview mirrors, and turned the car out of the courtyard.

“You're a slam-dunk, Tootsen,” my father said. Then he laughed crazily, 100 percent proud.

“Oh man, thanks. That was…that was really a thing, you know? We should go out somewhere good tonight—you and me—and champagne,” I blathered happily, grabbing the itinerary from his hands, ready to do all the driving and all the navigating. We passed a sign that told us we were going in the right direction—in the direction of Suze-la-Rousse. The magic-hour sun flashed off the silvery whiteness of the sign, blinding me for a moment. Dumbly exhilarated, I stepped into the accelerator and cracked the window to let in the crazy viney wind. I breathed in. A tiny ghost of Aubert's cakey wine worked its way back into my mouth. My father tapped the glass of his window, indicating that I should turn down a packed dirt road. I slowed down and turned the wheel. The road turned into another courtyard, this time covered in smooth gray pebbles. I parked and squinted at the main house of the bed and breakfast—an adorable stack of stones with big cutout windows.

“I
theenk
there is a great restaurant Blondie and I once went to around here. Somewhere. Not that close, but close. It's a 30-minute drive away, maybe. I can't remember exactly. Good for you, Toots?”

“Yes. Excellent. It will be perfect.”

We unfolded ourselves from the car and began to stretch.

 

I
am going to vomit all over the cobblestones, right outside that hell of a restaurant. Just spray them down with every drop of Aubert's wine and hope that it is that gold-faced waitress who will have to clean it up because we are technically still on the restaurant's property. It will be red, and it will look like the blood that formed in a pool around the old man's wrinkly ear, lying in the street, on the early afternoon of that frigid gray February day. My hands are on my knees. For the shortest of moments, I try to summon the laugh my father released in the car, just two hours ago. The one that said
I'm listening to you because you are a grown woman and my daughter and you are good and worthy of respect and I am proud to be your father
.

I kill that thought dead.

My father is watching me. I do not register what emotion is on his face; I am in flames.

You must get away from him now
.

Knowing he cannot keep up with me, I barrel down the hill toward the car. I am resigned to put the fear of fucking God in this man. I will make him feel the way I do: powerless.

When I scream up the hill and the lights first flash on shape, his face is immediately bathed in bright white light. His eyes are as wide as flapjacks.

“I'M HUNGRY. GET IN.”

I will yell
.

He opens the car door and swings his body around quickly, fastening his seat belt.

I reel the car around so fast that his head slams back into the headrest. The tires squeal and the smell of burning rubber floats in.

“You are 66 years old, and you understand NOTHING!” I yell.

My father does not react.

“You are going to die. You know that, right? You are going to
die
. And you will have given nothing to me. A bunch of monologues about stuff I don't give a
shit
about. A handful of moments that were of
your
doing, that
you
planned without ever asking me what
I
wanted to do.”

My heart speeds as quick as the car.
I need all this air in here. I need more than all this air
.

I open a window and breathe the way I would if a doctor were holding a stethoscope to my chest.

The wind batters its way into the car and causes my hair to whip around as it did in Aubert's field.

“You are going to die in a way that is just as sudden and ugly as when I hit that old man. And then I'll be left with nothing and more nothing. A bunch of stories that you did not share—a bunch of stories with you told from your soapbox, stories with no lessons for
me
that I could use in
my
life. Oh, and your cellar's worth of wine. Your thousand bottles, your buddies, the ones you
actually
listened to, thought about, were intimate with. You can't remember my birthday, but you can tell me how many bottles of Clos des Mouches are in the basement. You studied the ullage of your bottles, smelled the corks, tasted your wines, took notes about their character.
What can you tell me about my character, Dad?
You yelled ‘That's the game' at my tennis matches, but you will fly over an ocean to a London auction to buy a bottle of wine that might have already turned to vinegar.”

“That's not true,” he says, his eyes focused on his lap.

“And you don't even
care
that I might be ruined—that the accident
changed my entire life
. It changed who I
am
, Dad. I am
unhappy all the time
. I
worry all the time
. You talk about almost dying in the war and you don't make the connection that I am driving in a car, fast, on a highway and how that might make me feel
fucked up and scared because I think about you dying all the time
.”

Tears flow down my face.

“And I don't know what happened with Philou and Marc, but I know they're mad at you because they feel you didn't do enough for them, either. I understand why Philou called you a Good Time Charlie. I understand why religion seemed like a safer option for Marc. Because you don't understand that we are adults, and we too have seen and done REAL THINGS and you turn us into little kids because you don't listen to ANY OF IT. You disengage. And then I turn into a stupid little kid because that is how my
father
sees me. He sees me as someone who is not worth listening to, but
I am worth listening to
. I resent you for that. I hate you for that. I
hate
you, Dad. DO YOU HEAR THIS?”

My breath becomes short. My breaths are those of a puppy who's just gone running after a delicious-smelling animal. They click at each inhale. I look at him. He is scared. I am terrified of what I'm saying.
You didn't mean that last part. Now you are not being truthful
.

Fuck it.

My mind speeds along with the car.
This is it. I will no longer be his daughter. I can lose him before he loses me
. The space behind my eyes zooms and my stomach goes floppy. It's the vertiginous rush of desperate and ultimate freedom.

We reach an intersection. I do not know where to go.

“Choose,” I demand.

“Wherever you want.” His voice is a whisper.

“FINE,
DAD
.”

I shudder and the vertiginous feeling widens in my stomach, chest, and head. My breath shortens further. It goes
ha-click-ha-click-ha-click-ha
, a half second between every exhalation, a breath every quarter second. Squeezing my hands tight around the wheel—so tightly that I feel the plastic grooves imprinting dents into the fattest part of my thumb pad—I gaze far down the road, fixing it on a tree with a big fat trunk. It looks like a baobab tree, though I don't think there are any baobab trees in the south of France.
Whatever! Shut UP! The genus of the tree is not what's important right now. What's important is a fat trunk, and a good deal of speed
.

Now, a decision. Shall I come up on this tree fast and then? Or shall I create a brief mood of foreboding by slowly veering into the oncoming lane and then?

With steady, committed wrists, I pull on the wheel. Left, left, a little to the left. The front of the car goes from facing 12 o'clock to 11 o'clock. I'm frustrated, though. There are no cars in the oncoming traffic lane. The tree that is thick like a baobab but not a baobab—when combined with 115 kph—should be enough. Should—I don't know for sure. When it comes to cars and death, I know only that 55 kph will kill an old man.

My father is immobile.

I reposition the front of the car to a more dramatic angle—from 11 o'clock to 10 o'clock.

My father's hands are now on the wheel. Tugging it in the opposite direction, he screams.

“TOOTSIE TOOTSIE TOOTSIE TOOTSIE TOOTSIE TOOTSIE STOP THE CAR PULL OVER PULL OVER STOP THE CAR DO IT

NOW NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW NOWNOWNOWNOW!!!!!!!!!”

What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck have I done?

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOOOOOUUUUUUU?” His voice is tense, livid, crazy.

I pound on the brakes and fishtail to a stop on the gravel shoulder. I fling the door open so violently it makes an angry squealing noise and bounces a few times. Then I jump out and stomp over to the other side of the car.

“Jesus Christ.”
He mutters this as we cross paths behind the car, him moving toward the driver's seat, me toward that of the passenger.
Perfect. It takes a near-death experience for him to offer, after 800 kilometers, to drive
.

“Are you okay?” he asks. His tone is low and flat.

I squeeze my lips into a line and rest the side of my forehead on the glass, looking up at the ugly sky.

He drives.

When we arrive in the town of Orange, he parallel parks near a bistro with an entrance like the mouth of a cave. I sit still as a stone. My father gets out of the car.

When he shuts his door, I press the button to my left. The doors go
th-thunk
and lock. His face appears at my window.

“Toots,” he says impatiently through the glass.

I stare straight ahead.

“Toots, come on. Enough.” He sounds exhausted.

From inside the glove compartment I remove Aubert's parting gift to us, a book on vinegar his sommelier had written, and leaf through it. I settle on a page and read the first three words of the same sentence over and over again.

“Fine then.” He walks a few paces, and I watch him. He turns around and my head shoots down again. He walks back to the window.

“Tootsie, you can't sit in the car like this. You must eat,” he scolds.

My stomach rumbles. He is right.
Dammit
. I turn the page.

He raps on the window, using his thick gold wedding band to make an annoying clanking sound.

“Come on, Toots. I'm hungry.”
He cares more about the food than to talk about what has happened. How can I share a meal with this man?

I keep reading.

“You can't stay in here all night. You will go hungry. I don't want to eat alone.”
For once, I don't care what you want
. I decide I will eat, but for myself. For
my
nourishment.

Organizing my face into the most spectacular display of contempt, I grab the handle and kick open the door so that it hits my father in the hip.

We have pizza and a bottle of wine. Sensing rottenness, our teapot-shaped waiter presents us with complimentary shots of Limoncello at the end of the meal. I drain mine, then grab his before he has the chance to drink it. My father attempts conciliatory scraps of conversation. I rebuff them. He insists I eat the dessert he ordered; I shake my head in refusal.

Back at the hotel, he moves to hug me. Eluding his arms, I back up through the glass doors of my room, staring at him. All the while, my stomach churns and storms and froths.

“Goodnight, Tootsie. Thank you for eating with me tonight,” he says, not able to meet my gaze. He pulls shut his door.

As my own door clicks behind me, I try to orient myself by focusing on specificities. I put on my pajamas and wrap myself up in the duvet.
What is happening? What now?
I roll over so that my face is thrust deep into the pillow and begin to howl.

This trip is making me lose more than I am gaining
.

In order to stop crying, I clutch my torso with both arms, cutting off my breathing from the source. Dementedly, I sweep my arm around the side of the bed, searching for my satchel. I locate the phone and dial Matthew's phone number.

He picks up the phone on the third ring. He says “Hello” the way he says “Hello.”

“Hull-oh?”

“Oh, it's
you
,” I say. I release a million cubic tons of air from my lungs.

“It's me,” he agrees. The line makes him sound far away.

“It's
me
,” I whimper.

“I know.” I scan his tone for rage, for pain. I can't pick up anything.

“Matty.”

“Kathryn.”
That's my real name. My real, adult name
. In English, it sounds foreign. I start crying again.

“What are you calling about? Do you know how late it is here?”

“Matty, I said the most terrible things to my father tonight. I was so mad at him—and humiliated. He humiliated me in front of a waitress tonight at dinner. In front of the entire restaurant, even though I'd begged him not to. I begged and begged. But he ignored me and turned this tiny little girl waitress into a pile of dust. And everyone in the restaurant was staring at us like we'd come from the asylum. He knocked over a chair. And then I tried to hit him with our car…and then I drove to Orange….” I start babbling, grabbing at the pieces of our evening and putting them into sequence for Matthew so that he can properly comfort me. “I mean, he really yelled, you know? And then I ran, and I drove, and I almost hit him. Why is he so bad at being a father? He's going to die and he doesn't care enough to protect me from anything.” I pause to catch my breath and hear Matthew's steady breathing into the receiver of the phone.

“And so I went a little nuts, right? Saying all these things to him. But he wasn't listening, he didn't look like he was listening to anything and so I tried to make him say something by trying to drive us into a tree.”

“Kathryn? What the
hell
,” he continues severely, “are you doing calling me and telling me this?”

You've lost him, too. You've done it now
.

Petrified, I descend into weak babble.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm calling. I'm homesick. I miss you. Tell me I don't suck.”

He wants to be left alone. You have disrespected him
.