We found Izzy in the kitchen upon returning.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making coffee,” she said. It didn’t appear as though she’d made much progress beyond boiling water.
“Let me.”
She smiled and put down the bean grinder cord. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Izzy, Ishiguro, and I lay together for the rest of the morning, piled up like a triple-decker sandwich on the couch. I got up to get Izzy water when she asked for it. We watched TV. The general state of pleasant inactivity in which Ishiguro’s humans found themselves was apparently contagious. The pug took long naps. In between, he occupied himself on the floor with a blue plastic duck and a length of multicolored rope.
That afternoon, Izzy, still in her pajamas, baked peanut butter cookies. She served them to us with two small glasses of tawny port. We watched more TV. The emotionally overwrought complainants sought what they imagined to be justice in the parodic courtroom sets of Judge Mills Lane, Judge Mathis, and Judge Judy. The low-budget commercials for debt consolidation hucksters and attorneys in search of clients for bankruptcy and mesothelioma class action suits between the acts got us laughing.
“I feel better,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“It’s nice spending time with you like this.”
“I agree.”
And, as she’d done for a significant portion of the week, she even ignored her BlackBerry for most of the day.
But in the evening, after she’d exchanged coffee and water for vodka and wine, she became restless. This domestic reverie no longer appeased her. She checked her messages, all at once capitulating to what—or, more precisely, whom—I knew she’d been working intently on staving off.
“Pacer Rosengrant?” I asked.
“I have to go get a drink with him. He has a job prospect for me.”
“Where?”
“He wants me to meet the people who are financing Atom Bomb.”
I groaned. “You really want to go from being a sommelier in a fine-dining restaurant to . . . I don’t even know what you’d be doing in a nightclub. And plus, how is he even involved?”
“He’s doing mixology consulting for them. They’ll serve wine, too, you know. They need somebody to buy it.”
“They don’t need someone of your caliber.”
She snorted. “Please. I lost my ‘caliber’ almost four days ago. I don’t have any ‘caliber’ left. Someone has to make money.”
It was a conversation I once would have done anything to get out of having. Now, somehow, I could stand up to it.
“Look,” I said, almost pleading. “I don’t want you to leave. You have to get a hold of yourself. Okay, you’re not screwing around. But you just can’t run when he calls.”
“You still don’t believe me that nothing’s going on, do you?”
“Can you honestly say you don’t feel anything for him? That he’s not feeling something for you when he calls to help you plan out your future in the nightclub wine-buying business with him?”
She turned her head.
“Just stay with me.” I took her arm.
And she remained right there, for a moment. A long moment. Long enough to make me think she was willing to go along with me. But then, as though a contrary spirit blew into her, she wrenched her arm away and stood up.
“What if it’s my only chance?”
“It’s not.”
“I’m scared, Hapworth. Goddamn you. You don’t understand. I can’t even count on you now, now that you’re not bringing in any money.”
She sighed and took the seat farthest from me on the couch. Ishiguro had become alarmed and now went over to her. He jumped in her lap and revolved himself several turns before condensing. Izzy smoothed out one of his velvet ears. He was too adorable to resist even in the most emotionally freighted of moments. I moved closer to them. She didn’t accept the hand I offered her to hold. She jerked her knee when I attempted to touch it. I retreated without hesitation.
“Things would be different if you had a job,” she said.
“I’ll work again.” Doing what, I had no idea.
“I don’t know if I can shoulder the burden of supporting this entire family,” she continued.
“We can make some changes. Take out the cable. Buy inorganic. There are things we can do to save money.”
Without obvious impetus, Ishiguro dismounted the couch. He took off for a distant corner of the living room with the speed of the chased. I gathered he’d been following the conversation and didn’t want to end up a budget-tightening casualty.
“This just sucks,” she said.
“It may,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean you need his help.”
“I need someone’s help.”
“You have mine.”
She smiled weakly. “For what it’s worth.”
I chuckled. “For what it’s worth.”
Even this late in the season, winter still had a stranglehold on Chicago. Hard snow; slick, muddy ice; and abrasive wind hadn’t yet surrendered the city to the felicities of spring. Izzy refused my offer to drive her to the Atom Bomb space. She bundled up and left for the bus to meet Pacer Rosengrant. I let her go without much protest, but followed behind, in my Mustang.
Instead of ending up at an under-construction bar in Bucktown, Izzy’s destination turned out to be an apartment building in Lakeview. In front of my disbelieving eyes as she went toward it was the penultimate installment of the e-mails Izzy and I had exchanged over the better part of an afternoon just five months ago. I’d always said that series of messages had effectively launched us. One could argue, given what was unfolding here on Kenmore Avenue, that really it had ineffectively launched us. The concluding line in my mind as she got closer to the building and farther from me was This invitation is all based on the assumption that you are not a psycho killer stalker with unmarked graves in your backyard. And ever since then I’d been careful. I’d measured my steps. No matter how close we got, I’d kept my distance, to an extent. And I’d done it out of fear. I didn’t want to come on too strong in the beginning. I never wanted to crowd her. Once things had taken a turn for the bleak after we eloped, I was especially reluctant to. I’d followed her lead because I didn’t want to lose her, then or now.
As she treaded the gangway, heading to what I suspected and would later confirm was her old boyfriend’s newest residence, I wondered if her disassociating words had really just been an instance of sublimating repression. Her hard-hearted conduct recently could very well have been an expression of Freudian wunscherfüllung. She had a wish I wasn’t fulfilling. She’d really wanted me to trail her, to protect her, to save her, hadn’t she? She was mine now, my responsibility, my love, so why the hell was I just sitting here watching her fall apart from afar?
I got out of the Mustang and shouted, “Izzy,” before she touched the intercom. “Stop.” She turned around, hands in her coat pockets. She began to come in my direction, but she wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t see if it was out of fury or regret. I went on, in a lower voice, “You don’t want to do this.” Then she got in the car. I drove her back to our apartment, but she said nothing, not one word to me, the entire way. After we got home, I walked Ishiguro. Twenty minutes later, she still wasn’t talking to me. It wasn’t until I’d gotten the dog out of his gear that Izzy finally spoke.
“How do you expect me to live like this?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I returned. “Let’s not even try to have this discussion right now.” But I couldn’t help myself. “Do you think this is right? Do you think behaving like this is fair?”
“When you say ‘behaving’ it makes me feel like a child. Like you’re one of my fucking arrogant foster parents. Like I’m sixteen and stayed out past curfew and now you’re threatening to send me �
��back,’ even though there’s no ‘back’ willing to take me.”
Ishiguro made for his water bowl.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “Maybe we should just split up.”
She didn’t pack the suitcase I expected her to then. And when I went to bed, instead of taking a pillow and blanket to the living room, she climbed in also. She wrapped her arms around me. The pug drilled himself between. We slept like that until the following afternoon.
Even though she had feelings for someone else, I didn’t want to split up. We didn’t need to. Separating wasn’t going to solve anything. Whether what was going on between Izzy and Pacer Rosengrant was personal, whether it was professional, whether she’d slept with him since we’d been married, or whether she’d just hovered around the regressive temptation and had been inching closer and closer to cheating on me without yet doing the deed, I just couldn’t accept that what Izzy and I had together needed to end simply because of his presence in our lives, because of him. This wasn’t a soap opera. We were married. We had a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, for Christ’s sake. In making promises to each other, we’d also made certain implicit pledges to a certain furry foot-and-a-half long pug novelist who depended on us to remain united in emotional sickness and in health. Tumult aside, I didn’t hate our life. Rather, I was quite fond of it. I ate and drank well. I dressed in suits and ties for occasions that weren’t funerals or job interviews. This was the only reality I’d ever know, aside from reading other people’s novels. This was the only chance I’d ever have to experience something real and true, something that existed outside of myself, beyond the conceptual. Breaking up couldn’t possibly be the answer. Whatever the solution was, I was sure coming to it would be the result of careful consideration. The solution would require interpretation from myriad angles. The end result would be a product of dispassionate (albeit still passionate) deconstruction. This was just like spending a semester analyzing a dense and unyielding passage of text and, at long last, unlocking its wisdom. It was just like tasting wine, when everything seemed to suddenly click.
“Greece,” I whispered, mainly to myself.
“What?”
“We should still go. On the trip. Together. I mean, we can take separate rooms or whatever, if you want. Regardless, we could use the time away.”
“You think?”
“Well, it’s not like we have jobs to keep us from doing it. Besides, you did already book the tickets.”
She smiled, in spite of herself. “Go get my bag.”
“Why?”
“Just get it.”
I brought over her Timbuk2. She withdrew from the front compartment a folded set of stapled pages. “You want to hear what we’re doing?”
We sat there together, in bed, discussing the plans. We Googled wineries. We looked up the indigenous grape varieties on Wikipedia. It all sounded so foreign to me. I’d never even considered a trip to this part of the world. Usually when polled about dream European vacations, predictable destinations came to mind. I’d planned to return as an adult to places I’d dimly previewed as a teenager on holidays with my parents and older sister, like Paris and Barcelona and Rome. My dreams never were set in cities called Thessaloniki, Naoussa, and Metsovo. I’d never heard of them. I knew nothing about Greece. I could only vaguely picture it on a map. Was the country part of the EU? Google confirmed it was, and that the national currency was the euro, which was an exchange rate conversion relief to me. The math involved in turning francs to dollars in 1986 was more than my verbal brain could handle.
Izzy had been on wine tours before, in Australia, in France, and regaled me with a preview, stories of sorting machines, bottling lines, fermentation tanks, barrel samples, and tasting rooms. We became delirious with information and imagery. In so doing, the bitterness and animosity between us seemed to fall away. If it didn’t disappear entirely, at least it got for the moment relegated to the background. The more facts we amassed, sitting there, taking turns reading from the MacBook screen, the more we lost ourselves in this mythical land of myths and, apparently, ideal viticultural conditions. In Greece grapes could grow as they did in the celebrated regions of the wine world. Yet since the country was largely overlooked in the marketplace consciousness (an ironic state, given vinification’s ancient Mediterranean origins), the varietals needed to be hand-sold. Via a trade trip, like the one on which she and I were about to embark, powerful international sommeliers, like Izzy, could potentially be able to turn the wine-tide and lead the charge. At the very least, taken for granted in America, the wines Greece exported were affordable. That fact resonated for both Izzy and me. In our stupor, we forged a truce.
“I really want to go on this trip,” she said.
“So do I,” I said.
“I want to go on this trip with you.”
I nodded solemnly, took her hand, brought her close to me and kissed her forehead. “Me, too.”
“This is going to be so useful for your restaurant concepts.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t even considered that. In all the craziness, I’d failed to make the connection. She was absolutely right. A new culture’s customs, habits, private and public idiosyncrasies, not to mention their food and beverage—it had no choice but to inspire me. It had been a long time since something had. I’d almost given up on conceptualizing, without even realizing it.
Veritas
15
Friday, March 21
Thessaloniki
The Thessaloniki thoroughfare was busy in the afternoon. College students traversed on scooters and in compact cars. The taxi let us off on Monastiriou Street, in front of the Capsis. The hotel fronted tenement apartments that had laundry dangling from their windows. I steered our rolling suitcases. Our new friend George went ahead to the desk to check Izzy and me in with his Greek Wine Council credit card. The hotel lobby was foggy with cigarette smoke, and covered in mirrors. It had a long bar off to the side. A white-shirted bartender brewed espresso. There was also a jazz lounge behind the narrow elevators. The place seemed something out of the early twentieth-century French Riviera I’d often read about in novels. I could imagine Scott and Zelda staying here.
The forms Izzy signed at the desk had been prepared on a typewriter. The key she received to our room was founded of old-fashioned brass. But I was pleased to discover when I powered up my MacBook, the hotel had free WiFi available. While I logged on, Izzy washed her face in the bathroom. I did the same after she’d finished. The soap was harsh and unscented. The towel I dried off on was starchy. Abraded, dazed, we fell onto the low-standing full-sized bed.
When the dinner wake-up call came through, I answered it at the room’s corner desk. I remained to check my e-mail and Facebook. No messages. The only update was one made on Talia’s profile. She’d changed her affiliation status from “it’s complicated” to “in a relationship.” I hadn’t before realized that the two categories were mutually exclusive in her life. More important, I was relieved she hadn’t tried to contact me.
I showered and shaved. The beach-town humidity and late-day warmth made hair styling difficult. I stepped into the room with a towel wrapped around my waist.
Izzy sat on the edge of the bed. “How are you?” she asked.
“Out of sorts. But the shower helped.”
“We’ll feel better after we eat something.”
I flipped through the TV channels while Izzy got ready. I bypassed the English cable news station. The local offerings included movies in Greek, weather reports in Greek, Greek infomercials. I settled on a soap opera. The actors seemed even more maudlin when you couldn’t understand their words. Izzy came out with a turban on her head. She cracked up when she saw what I had on the screen. “What?” I said, feigning offense. “I’m trying to immerse.”
“You’re crazy,” she told me.
In the lobby, we sat on a rattan love seat and conv
ersed with George, now our tour guide, who had also taken a shower and shaved. He’d changed into a dark-blue button-down shirt, which was tucked into faded jeans. We were soon joined by a large, rosy-faced man named Dick. Dick was a franchiser, he explained without anyone’s needing to prompt him. His background was in fast food and convenience stores, but he had recently made an enological foray. He’d built up a bottle-shop chain that spanned one-hundred-fifty wine stores in twenty-six states and several locations in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Dick’s wife, Medea, shortly arrived from their room and took a rattan chair. “Call me Maddie,” she told us. In contrast to her imposing husband, Maddie was a petite, delicate woman, with dark hair and dark eyes. She’d been raised in New Jersey by Greek immigrants. Dick and Maddie now lived in Florida. They weren’t having any trouble adjusting to the Mediterranean heat.
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