Vintage (33 page)

“It never is.”

Bruno watched the candle flame flicker on the rim of his glass, his palms cupped around the bowl as if in prayer.

*      *      *

Bruno didn't return to his loft apartment above the garage that night, but instead shared Sylvie's bed. They made love and then
he fell into a restless and fitful sleep, but when he awoke it was just before dawn and his head was in her lap as she sat up in bed, smoking with one hand while combing his hair with the fingers of her other.

A plan began to form, and he discussed it only in part with her, but it seemed perfectly reasonable, simple and attainable. Here, in this tiny village in Burgundy, he'd written his first novel all those years ago. He had been able to do so only because of the simplicity of life. To work in the vineyards all day and then stumble bone-tired to his empty room where it was all he could do to hover over his notebook—these were the conditions under which he'd crafted his best words. Back in the city there would be distractions. There was too much shame. Guilt over his poorly lived life. He could never write there. So he would stay here. He'd cook for Sylvie and help her around the vineyard and winery as he could and provide as much companionship as she'd allow.

He'd finish his book and sell it for what he could and then give all of it to Anna, Claire and Carmen, and then he would hire on with a restaurant in Beaune and work at the bar or wait tables until they trusted him enough to help out in the kitchen. And then next year during the bacchanal, he'd stand off to the side with the other vignerons instead of mixing in the churning mass of revelry.

He looked up from Sylvie's lap, between her breasts to her absent smile and the mess of morning hair. They made love again after she finished smoking, and then they walked down to the village for a coffee, stopping at the
boulangerie
to pick up
pain au chocolate
and bread for later in the day. She spotted a flatbed truck pulled to the side of the road in the first terrace of vineyards, and she cut through the vines until she found an old man
stooped and slowly pulling leaves to allow more light to reach the grape clusters. He looked up and smiled and they talked for a long time about the weather, reviewing what the season had given them while the sun climbed and drew the damp warmth from the earth and began to cook on the back of Bruno's neck. He watched a moth flutter between the rows and a dragonfly buzz past on the hunt. Back in the direction of the village, a cat slunk along a stone wall, then sat abruptly to clean its paws. He knelt and picked up a golden, chalky stone, putting it in his pocket. On the way back to the house, Sylvie took his hand and listed everything she wanted to accomplish that day. “Then after that we'll go out,” she said. “My friend Agnès serves
lapin à la moutarde
in her restaurant on Tuesdays.”

In the evening Sylvie drove her compact Opel aggressively, grinding the clutch, slamming the gearshift and squealing around corners so that Bruno gripped the dashboard and she laughed out loud. The bistro was a comfortable room off the Rue des Tonneliers, and Agnès came from the kitchen and hugged Sylvie while they chatted like sisters and Bruno was introduced, much to the chef's pleasant surprise and also a few winks and raised eyebrows.

The waiter pulled out a table, and Sylvie sat along the wall and she and Bruno talked about their favorite books and writers from when they were younger, both lamenting that they hardly seemed to have time to read. Sylvie also confessed that she hadn't been to see a film in more than ten years, so after the amazing rabbit and a spectacular bottle of Montrachet they walked to the Cap Cinéma and selected a comedy with Pascal Légitimus. The forty percent of the film that Bruno could actually understand seemed somewhat inane, but what he enjoyed was Sylvie's easy laughter and the way she absently put her hand on Bruno's
leg without looking at him as if she could transfer some of her mirth.

On the way back they stopped at a café and drank Kronenbourgs, not talking because they didn't need to. Bruno felt comfortable and satisfied being near her. That night it began to cool as a front was moving through, pushing dark clouds past the moon.

In bed he lay close to her under the covers, warm where their skin touched as the night air slipped in through the open window. He couldn't sleep again because he was excited by the notion that he was happier now than he had been at any time in his life.

Searching for the lost vintage had not been so much a universal story as it was a personal question. He knew that now, which made it all the more wrong to expect Anna to finance it, and doubly so now that he knew it had been Claire's money all along. But he'd found happiness, and this happiness was lying right next to him. He could feel her heartbeat through the back of her rib cage.

He suddenly wanted to write and he needed a walk to compose his thoughts. He kissed Sylvie's bare shoulder and she sighed and turned and he got up and took her pink robe and walked out into the brisk night. Clouds slipped over a crescent moon and a haze blanketed the valley between the village and the pale glow of Beaune.

He walked across the grass and then into the soft and stony earth of the vineyard. He tried to think when he'd been so happy before. As a young man he'd graduated college with no idea what he would do with his life, but a need to see the world he'd read about in his literature classes or on the backs of jars in Ma's deli, far beyond the blue-collar streets of Chicago.

He scraped together some money he'd been saving and took it to Woolworth and bought an external-frame backpack, then a plane ticket to Amsterdam and a rail pass.

He'd somehow wound up in Burgundy out of money during harvest, and winemaker Michel Leroux hired him on for the vineyard crew and kept him around that winter for odd jobs. Living in France without a television was all the education he needed. The winter was slow, so when Leroux gave him a hardbound notebook for Christmas, Bruno started rewriting the journal he'd been keeping on cheap spiral pads. That rewriting had somehow turned from a diary into a semi-autobiographical novel, and the next thing he knew he was almost famous, with a fledgling literary career.

He'd been happy then, he now understood, as a young man in France sitting in his bunk room emptied of the harvest crew, huddling near an electric space heater, gripping a pencil in a hand sore from pruning. Finally, after so many years, he was back, and now had Sylvie to keep him warm.

And he'd never been happier.

Bruno stopped short as the clouds disappeared and the moonlight now shone unobstructed over the silver vines.

He was fooling himself.

There'd been other moments.

Like when he'd looked up from his table at the steakhouse and first spotted Anna in her apron and she smiled at him.

And then a few weeks later when she invited him into her semi-private apartment in the basement of her parents' town house in Skokie, and she took his hand, leading him down the steps, the stirring feel of her skin for the first time, the innocence of it all.

And then the terror of Claire's birth, the glorious mess of it
all, this slick little wailing pink bulb of a child, Anna's elation and exhaustion as the nurse handed the newborn into the trembling hands of the new mother.

And then Carmen's somewhat more dubious initiation into the world of the breathing. The umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck, so it was a cesarean, and this little blue beetle of a creature was extracted rather violently through the incision, and as she sucked breath and the warm color of the living began to seep into her flesh: in that instant, he'd been happiest.

And then that last dinner with his family, before he'd come to Europe this time, where they all sat around the table and the awkwardness of the estrangement had melted, the tension between Bruno and Anna abated ever so slightly so that it felt, for an instant, like any meal they'd had together as a family. Then, also, Bruno had been happiest.

Bruno felt that he was falling in love with Sylvie. And though she was hard to read, he could see her falling for him, too. And this life, here on the vineyard, was what he wanted more than anything. But he did the math, and there were four women whom he loved back in Chicago when he counted his mother, and here there was only one.

He thought of old Clement Trevallier, who allowed pride and ego, and perhaps fear, to remove his family name from the wine his wife had made and sell it as cheap swill rather than give her the credit she deserved. And how he had regretted what he'd done and had changed afterward. What was it that Sylvie had said?
Great men learn from their mistakes.
Bruno would never be a great man. But perhaps he could become a better one.

The notion of what he had to do brought him to his knees, the dry stones clacking. He clutched at the trellis and sank into
the moonshadow of it and then he began to weep; hot tears, profuse and swollen, dropped to the thirsty soil.

He pulled himself together after a few moments. His cheeks were tear- and dirt-streaked. He went back to the house and had a shower and then as the sun began to rise he went through the kitchen planning a breakfast. They could at least share another meal together before he told Sylvie that it was time for him to go home.

B
runo sat on a stool in the corner behind the counter of the deli just as he had as a boy. He wrote on the back of a receipt pad, his face scrunched in thought, tongue pressed between his lips as he concentrated, searching for just the right word, when the bell above the door rang and an elderly man wearing a raincoat and a tweed fedora shuffled in.

“You still open?”

“Just barely, Klaus,” Bruno said, hopping off the stool and wiping the counter next to the cash register.

“Good, because I need your help,” Klaus said, blinking at Bruno with pleading eyes magnified to an absurd degree by glasses with lenses as thick as his German accent.

“What did you do this time?”

“Went out with the boys and had a little too much to drink. Gertrude found me passed out on the couch.”

“That doesn't sound so bad.”

“It was our anniversary.”

“Oh.” Bruno paced behind the counter. He was thinking that a roasted squab would fit the bill, but that would likely be too difficult to prepare for poor old Klaus.

“And you know I'm not much of a cook. Unless I can throw it on my Weber.”

“Ah! I have something for you!” Bruno said, suddenly stabbing the air with his finger. He raced through the deli. He cut slices off a pistachio-and-duck terrine. “Serve this cold first, with a slice of orange.” He then wrapped a pair of wedges of a
tourte aux pommes de terre
that he'd made the day before. “Just warm this in the oven, two-fifty for ten minutes.”

He disappeared into the cooler and emerged with two half duck breasts. As he wrapped them, he scribbled notes onto the paper. “Here's where it gets tricky. Score them, salt them, pepper them and then render the fat side on a very low flame for twenty minutes. Then when the skin is gold, clear and crispy, grill it on both sides just long enough to cook through. You want it rare. Can you handle that?”

Klaus blinked and nodded. Bruno could see that he was a little bewildered, so he gave Klaus a friendly sock on the shoulder. “Don't worry, you'll do fine. I'll fetch some Black Forest cake for dessert, right?”

“And the wine?”

“Absolutely!” Bruno slid his ladder along the wine shelf and reached for a bottle high up in the corner. “Here's where I keep the special stuff.” He pulled down a Riesling from the River Nahe. It was valley floor, low alcohol, and the sugars were balanced by an acid backbone. That particular wine turned out well maybe one out of every three years, when the region received more than a hundred days of sun in a season. It was ten years old and deep rich gold in color, and when the cork was pulled a faint whiff of diesel engine would emerge ahead of the more floral bouquet. He explained as much to Klaus.

“It's expensive. But you haven't steered me wrong yet,” Klaus
said, pulling off his glasses and pressing the label to his nose, squinting at the Gothic lettering. “One in three, eh? Seems like this wine is all about looking past the bad years.”

“Precisely.”

“You know, Bruno, I think a great wine is all about forgiveness.”

Bruno, who was punching numbers into the register, stopped short and looked at Klaus. “What did you say?”

“Great wine . . . is about forgiveness.”

“You're brilliant!” Bruno reached over the counter and pulled Klaus's hat off, and then planted a kiss on his bald forehead. He scribbled the phrase on the receipt pad, then rang up the order, ushering the old man toward the door.

“Tell your mother I hope her retirement is treating her well,” Klaus said as Bruno held the door open.

“Good luck with Gertrude!”

As soon as Klaus was gone, Bruno switched off the light in the window and locked the door. He pulled out the register drawer and took two twenties off the top, stuffing them into his hip pocket. He scooped up the rest of the cash and carried it back to the cramped office.

The simple desk had a ledger pad, a calculator and his father's typewriter in front of a stack of manuscript pages. He raced through his tasks: the balancing, rounding the daily deposit, rolling the coins haphazardly and then zipping it all in a bank bag and tossing it to the side.

He turned his attention to the typewriter. There was a half-written sheet in the carriage and a facedown stack of pages behind the machine. He took the slip of receipt paper out of his pocket and read Klaus's words a few times over, thought a moment, then began typing. He typed a line. The bell rang.
He pushed the carriage over, shifted down two more lines and typed,
THE END
.

He smiled and laughed to himself. He wanted to uncork one of the nicer wines in the shop to celebrate, but he restrained himself. He was already running late.