Corked (8 page)

“It's touching, that you're taking this trip together,” Rémy said, fixing his careful eyes on my father and me. “Wine is pleasure,” he said, “and doing this with family must be a pleasure, too.”

I glanced at my father, who was back to clawing at the table and his wasted gut.

I finished wine number seven. The cellar became brighter and strangely defined. The color palette of the room changed. The shadows seemed darker, and the air fell on me like damp hand towels. I attempted to make my Face of Intense Contemplation by crinkling my brow ever so slightly, pulling up my chin at a 20-degree angle, and seizing the left corner of my mouth. I hoped it made me seem as though I were thinking hard, and this thinking was of such complexity and unattainable truth that I was slightly annoyed at myself (which I was, for other reasons).

As Rémy cleared the glasses, I searched for the keys to the car.

“You're okay to drive, Tou Tou?” My father's voice was weak. He stared at the upper corners of the walls within Rémy's cellar, back and forth, head lolling slightly, his eyes registering nothing, his lips saying nothing, his body stooped and concave. It was like watching a piece of industrial machinery power down for the night, a piece of industrial machinery that is outfitted with an LED display that powers on automatically when the machine powers down, and a message that scrolls, “YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN….”

Outside in the fresh soggy air, I trapped Rémy's right hand in both of mine and shook it hard, feigning radical delight.

“Merci, merci, M. Gresser. Merci infiniment! Merci!”
I babbled psychotically.

Dutifully, I placed myself behind the wheel, even though I should not have been driving. But I wanted to FLY to the second tasting. I wanted my father to ask me the same questions so that I could think harder and try harder and give him truthful responses. I wished I could tell him that I was afraid to drive, and that I hadn't tasted any minerals in that Riesling.

And that I was afraid of no higher common language emerging from our special trip. Panicking, I fumbled the key around the ignition, clattering it against the plastic and metal until it found its way inside. We took off.

Breathe
.

“How late are we?” I asked.

“One hour and a half,” he responded.

“Oh Christ.”

“Why are you upset?”

I avoided the question. “Where are we going?”

“I don't know. Toots, why are you crying?”

“Can you check the map?” I answered.

“Yes.”

“Can you check the map now?” I snipped.

“So, the town is called…”

“Zeeven-blech Oval.”

“Huh?”

“Jeeven-black Oh-Vale.”

“What?”

He was mumbling. He righted himself and tightened his jaw. “DeefenBACK o-VALL!” He fired off the name like a German general.

“Spell it.”

“D-I-E-F-F-E-N-B-A-C-H A-U V-A-L.”

“Oh, okay. Which way?”

“I don't know.”

I went around the same roundabout three times. I was dizzy. All the towns looked the same. We were lost in another farming community, with the same fields and the same animals and the same quiet houses, gray and cold, with no one on the identical streets. I drove up a gravel road. It was a dead end. There were no people, just mist and sodden grass and soccer pitches. This went on forever. Forever and ever. My tears flowed harder. I thought of how the old man had looked, lying on the highway, and how it had been so similar to my father's position at the bottom of his cellar stairs after he'd fallen down them so hard and fast.

“Whose vineyard are we visiting anyway?” My voice wiggled around. I needed to maintain.
Maintain maintain maintain. Be the road. Be the car. Be the vineyards. Be the grapes. Breathe
.

“It's not a vineyard,” my father said. He'd stopped asking me why I was crying.

“What do you mean it's not a vineyard?”

“We are doing an eaux-de-vie tasting.”

“Eaux-de-vie.”

“Eaux-de-vie, yes.”

“Like, the hard alcohol?”

“Exactly.”

“But WHY?”

The tears reached a critical mass and came spilling out in hot rivulets, pooling at my chin, dropping off onto my sweater, forming a puddle on the thin wool covering my chest, then sliding
en masse
down onto my lap. Like my pants, this day was mess.

When we got to Dieffenbach-au-Val, we were two hours late in meeting Manou Massenez, a gorgeous, sleek woman in her late forties wearing a suit of heather blue that had been made by angels. She was stunning and sweet and gave us a tour of the Massenez distillery, where her family had been making fruit brandies since 1870. We went into the bowels of the operation, where the pressed fruits were heated up, where the aromas were squeezed out and steamed and cooled and condensed and transformed into deadly potent liqueur. And she was so gracious, and my cold sore was bleeding again, and I was fighting back more tears because none of this was what I expected. How could my father and I do this every day for the next 15 days if I was not talented and if we kept getting lost amid roving bands of goats and kept tasting liquid that was not wine while my father vomited all over France's beautiful countryside? And why was I panicking in this countryside, on a trip that I was so lucky to be on, so lucky with my dear father and this dazzling woman who was racking up 24 shot glasses of different
eaux-de-vie
—waters of life—which were doing exactly what the name promised, giving me life, giving me new life so that I was not very sad anymore and certainly no longer felt like crying because the
eaux-de-vie
were 100 proof. And so this water of life carried us into the woodsy little
auberge
, which looked like something out of
The Chronicles of Narnia
, where a blurry-faced waiter served me foie gras and boar with blackberry sauce
avec
endless glasses of clean, light red wine, which I drank while my father ate plain spaetzle until it was gone. And when it was gone, someone was signing the bill and suddenly we were saying goodbye to Manou Massenez, who had just given me a tube of special balm for my bleeding cold sore, for which I hugged her emotionally and turned and stepped into the car, cross-eyed but hiding it from my sick dying father because I wanted to take care of him not only now, but for the rest of his life or mine or time.

As the tears returned, I turned to him and said, “Please, Dad. No more for today.”

And he said, “I know, Tootsie. I will call to cancel the next tour. But first, please drive up the road. I have to vomit.”

This time I didn't even try to reach out and pat him on the back. I just sat there, my heart mute and paralyzed.

 

T
here was a knock at my door. The time was 7 o'clock or some time that was very early—too early for him to be here, bugging me to get up, to join him for breakfast, more toast, more embarrassing unbuttered toast that will crumble and spread crispy shrapnel all over his stubbly chin, crumbs I would have to dust off with a napkin because he didn't notice, like he didn't notice as I faked and fumbled through all of yesterday. I pulled open the door. He was smiling eerily. Inexplicably, he was Mister Golden Sun. His brightness was invading my gloomy, guilty sleepiness. I wanted nothing to do with him. Last night I had made up nervous dreams, had woken up frequently to scratch at my viciously itchy right arm. These were my anxious physical crosses to bear, the ugly manifestations of the contents of my skull. Stress-induced cold sores and a condition my naturopath describes as “phantom itching.” My arm was bleeding. My father was smiling. I was heavy. Every molecule of my body was weighted with a drop of mercury, attached by a short gossamer line of good-quality fishing tackle.

“Why are you here bothering me?” I folded my arms high and tight across my chest, so that my fingers were grasping the outside of my shoulder blades. I bitchily wondered why he hadn't pushed me harder for elaborate answers to his questions during the tasting, while I was losing my mind in the car. I was reminded of his searching face after he'd tried to reanimate the dead old man.
The man you keeled. He was 83. He was a pharmacist. I have made you some fish. I don't like fish! Why didn't he know how to talk to me properly?! His sensitivities are all crossed! He throws analysis at me when I need comfort and comfort when I need analysis!
I tugged at my shoulder blades and flexed my biceps to seem tough.

“Tootsie, sweet, poor, sensitive Tootsie. Good news,” he said.

“Hmm…what?”

“It is finished—the sickness. I have not vomited for….” He began counting on his fingers, then ran out of fingers. “Many hours. The stomach is good. I can begin eating garbage again. I am good. We are good. Everything is good.” He smiled and hit me with a double thumbs up.

Letting go of my shoulders, I stuck my palms up and out for a tentative high-10. He wound up and swooped his arm toward me, smacking his hand against mine along the way.
I can bounce back from things. I have medium-to-high bounce-back capabilities. They used to be better, quicker, bouncier. For a while, after the accident, they were buried under 600 tons of landfill garbage, but they're still around
.

“And we should maybe drop some appointments too,
hein?
” he added.

My dad was with It. He got It. He's the heavyweight champion of It. We were back.
This trip is not going to Shop-Vac my soul out of my very core. It will not cause our relationship to morph into a landscape of nuclear winter. Likely not. It is not likely that I will come into contact with a Shop-Vac for my soul and, later, a landscape of nuclear winter. I have never believed in absolutes
.

My father sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone. “How many should I cancel, Tootsie?” he asked.

“You're the expert. What about half? I don't know. Don't cancel the ones where we get into the vineyards,” I said, thinking about my dirt question to Rémy Gresser.
Maybe if I can plunge my hand into that dirt, into the roots, this stuff will come to life
.

I shuffled around the room, picking items up and putting them down. I flicked a light switch on and off.
Maybe if I see the grapes, the actual grapes, I'll understand the transformation, like when you meet babies and see how their vague personality traits—the way they chuckle, their aversion to raisins but not currants—will become amplified and crystallized in later life. I want to meet the babies—wine babies
. I flicked the light on and off again. My father and I had a nice bonding moment over a human baby once, in California. Nico was working in San Francisco for a boutique company that designed Web sites to make corporations like Nike seem as though they were interested in art. My dad was keen on tooling around some of Sonoma's vineyards, while I was keen on perpetrating a tan while eating large bowls of Caesar salad poolside. We drove north and stayed in the Fairmont Hotel there. The director of the hotel's operations, Matt Sterne, had worked with my father when he was younger—he was a protégé, of sorts. When we visited, we all had a drink in the hotel lobby with Matt, his blond wife, and their fresh baby. The baby was being passed around like a spliff; my father and I both declined when she came our way. I was sitting on my hands, silently battling the social vertigo I tend to experience around babies and animals, knowing that I have the power to change the course of my entire life by following through on one deranged impulse. The words
Don't pick up the baby and throw it against the wall
had just begun scrolling through my head, like the ticker tape at the bottom of the CNN screen. Moments later, my father leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“
Tootsie
,” he said.

“Hmm?” I replied.

It was a beautiful moment.

I looked at him fondly as he flipped to the glossary of phone numbers at the back of the itinerary. He perched his glasses on the bridge of his nose and dialed the first number. He dialed and chatted and thanked and apologized, then ran his pen along the itinerary, crossing off names. With every drag of ink that appeared on the page, my chest sagged with relief. We would slow down. I would take stock. I would take stock, and have time to take notes. I would remove the corks from my ears and absorb.

When he was finished, he threw the itinerary at my head again. This time he missed and the document dropped at my feet. “There you go, Toots.” I lifted it and read the name of the winery at which we were expected. Recognizing the name, I exclaimed, “I know one thing!”

My father took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You know more than one thing. You know many things,” he responded.

“Yes, I
do
,” I said in violent agreement. I'd seen bottles from this winery on liquor store shelves. I couldn't remember whether I liked this wine, but I knew it. I even knew the typeface that was used on the label.
I know two things!
The typeface was Palatino, or something like it. I didn't know exactly.
I know one and a half things!
But I knew it was akin to a wide, bold Palatino. I even knew when I last became intoxicated on this wine: at a fake Italian restaurant where the chef had overcooked the seafood and the pappardelle components of my seafood pappardelle. A friendly acquaintance was spending her evening complaining to me about her condominium association and how they were demanding that she paint her expensive plantation shutters white because all street-facing units' windows were to look identical. This winery was vital in providing my mind with a slippery layer of alcoholic lubricant, so that anything this woman told me about plantation shutters was unable to achieve a permanent toehold. By the end of the meal, I was so drunk that the pasta was a joy to eat.
Perhaps I will thank the winery's president for this! Perhaps not
.

The 50-kilometer drive from the mini-village of Dieffenbach-au-Val to the more southern mini-village of Riquewihr—where our target winery, Pfaffenheim, was located—was a delight, a golden-green, pastoral, sun-showered delight. We did not let ourselves become distracted by tri-syllabic German town names that threatened to throw us off course at any moment: Ammerschwihr, Ingersheim, Wintzenheim, Wettolsheim, Eguisheim. No, we blasted right by those signs with my father lucid, mindful, eagle-eyed, and tracing the colored map printout with his hairy finger like a Paris–Dakar rally pro. We managed not to veer into Germany or Switzerland; we stayed right inside the boundaries of France. He did not moan or convulse, and there was absolutely no pulling over of the car for him to coat the Alsatian countryside with gut brew. It was amazing. We were laughing, entertaining ourselves with fake stories about our childhood accomplishments.

“Tou Tou, you know, when I was a child, I was a composer.”

“For real?”

“Yes. When I was just six, I wrote
zees
composition. Da da da DUH, da da da DUH.”

He sang the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth.

“Wow, Dad. Duly impressed. I had no idea you were behind that piece of music. Well done! What do you think about this? I wrote this song with a friend of mine when I was about eight.”

Again, I sang “La Mer,” with all the
da da das
instead of real words.

“I was under the impression that this song was by Charles Trenet.”

“Oh, well, yeah, see, that was the problem. Charles and I wrote it together, but when the time came to record it, he passed it off as his own.”

“How miserable,” he said, concerned.

“Life's a real whore sometimes.”

“True, so true.”

“Painting was also a forte of mine.”

“You don't say?”

“My best work was of a landscape at night, a starry night; my technique was to apply thick, swirling coats of oil paint….”

Somehow this game kept us enthralled for the duration of the trip. By the time we pulled into the parking lot at the Pfaffenheim headquarters, we were relaxed and bleating laughter with big open mouths. A dribble of saliva cascaded off my lower lip and down my neck. My father noticed and clamped his paw on my chin, swiping away the drool and rubbing it on his pant leg. I clamped my hand over his whole face, pressing the meaty part of my hand into his nose until it squished, then bolted out of the car before he could retaliate. I ran over to his door and did a little jig. He got out and stretched.

“Pull it together,” he said, and cuffed me upside the head.

“Ow. Too hard.” I took a boxing stance and punched him downward, on the edge of his scapula.

“Heh. Good punch. Solid.
Ow-shh
,” he said. French for ouch.

When we were escorted into his office, Alex Heinrich, the general manager of Pfaffenheim, was on the phone. His assistant, a nameless, jumpy man in his early forties, wearing a snappy gray suit, ushered us into plush wingback chairs and proceeded to stare unflinchingly at my chest. I looked down at it to make sure there was no moisturizing cream or coffee or bits of breakfast on it. I was clean. I looked back up at the jumpy man, quizzically. My father's eyes were ping-ponging back and forth between my face and the face of the man who was fixated on his daughter's chest. On each person's face was a smile. Jumpy Man's was perverted, mine was pinched, my father's was amused, with a slight trace of
schadenfreude
. Normal fathers—fathers who barbecue in King of the Grill aprons—would say something vaguely threatening in a situation like this. Not mine. I wondered if his entrenchment in certain Old World values makes him appreciate these humiliating moments; maybe he regards them as a tonic for the soul.

Five hour-minutes passed, and finally Mr. Heinrich, a puckish silver-haired man with a perfect furry arc of a mustache, clunked the handset down in its cradle and apologized for the call.

“Bienvenue!”
Heinrich's merry greeting snapped Jumpy Man out of his boob-trance.

“Did you have trouble finding us?” he asked.

“Non,”
I said.

“Pas du tout,”
my father echoed.

Heinrich asked where we'd been yesterday.

“Chez Rémy Gresser,”
I answered.

“Et alors? Ça c'est bien passé?”
He wanted to know how it went. He'd directed the question at me. My father, respectful, waited for me to respond. I flushed and paused, suddenly nervous again. I could feel Jumpy Man's eyes all over me.

“His wines taste like gas!” I exclaimed.
How did my father make gasoline sound like an attribute?

Heinrich stared at me for a beat, then motioned toward the door. “
On est prêt a commencer?
”

I tailed Heinrich's car through quaint yellow-and-red Riquewihr. We parked in front of a short stone enclosure, facing a château atop a hill that was flanked on all sides by long rows of curly vines, heavy with black-and-violet clusters.

Alex Heinrich weaved his short body deftly in and out of the plants, plucking ripe berries and putting them into my hand. He seemed to recognize on what level I was operating.
His wines taste like gas!
I wrinkled my nose at myself and peered at my handful of purplish red orbs.

“Mange ça,”
he urged.

I obeyed, popping them one by one in my mouth, piercing them with my left canine so the honeyed juice trickled out slowly, like air from a floppy pin-pricked balloon.