Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  We passed over a river through which water tumbled. “Do you want to stop?” Mike called out in Greek. The first words he’d spoken the entire time.

  After an uncertain pause, and without consulting anyone, George yelled back in English, “No, they don’t want to.” I stared out the window in the same direction George peered. Black signs with faint white arrows lined the curve we were chasing.

  When we reached the town of Metsovo, the storm began to recede. It didn’t appear we were anywhere close to the winery. After a turn here, and a climb there, before long, we were pulling off the road again. Mike lit a cigarette. The smell in the cold reminded me of taxis I took on the Upper West Side growing up, or piloting the Mustang around the slick Hyde Park streets in college, late in autumn.

  In the driveway of what looked like a ski lodge, we got off the bus. We clambered, snow engulfing our shoes, into the Katogi winery, which was also our hotel. We settled at tables around a small bar behind the check-in desk. Helen, a Katogi employee, began preparing coffee, Nescafe, and cappuccino to order.

  The desk clerk gave Izzy a castle skeleton key, though the room we unlocked with it was quite the opposite of antiquity: flat-screen Sony television, aromatherapy candles, IKEA lamps, and other Scandinavian-inspired furnishings. Izzy washed her face and reapplied her eye makeup. I changed into a black T-shirt and a blue hoodie, lay down on the bed, and closed my eyes. I felt a hand shoving my shoulder a millisecond later.

  “What?”

  “We have to go, Hapworth.”

  “Already?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and inspected her silver watch. “It starts at three.”

  “Okay,” I groaned.

  Helen, the staffer who’d first greeted us, gave a tour of the facility’s lower levels. She described the history of wine production here in Metsovo. In the late 1950s, Evangelos Averoff, an admired intellectual and onetime prominent politician, had planted their first Cabernet Sauvignon vines on the slopes of the Pindus Mountains, down the Balkan Peninsula. These inaugural grapes were crushed and fermented and bottled in the cellar—katogi—beneath Averoff’s house. Given the region’s low-temperature climate and consistent humidity, the basement offered effortlessly ideal conditions for aging. It continued to do so for its current armament, consisting of hundreds of French oak barrels. The winery here also served as a local resort hotel.

  Following the tasting, we had dinner in town with Sotiris Sotiropoulos, the winemaker, and Katogi’s managing director, another Sotiris, who also happened to be Averoff’s son-in-law. The wood-paneled restaurant was decorated with iron and copper plates and brown tapestries, and reminded me of a Viking meal hall. From there, we went to see Averoff’s house. It had been turned into something of a Metsovo history museum. We strode, single file, past sculptures and paintings, animal pelts and primitive tools, a medieval kitchen on one floor, a room containing a desk staged with pens and papers and a telephone on another.

  In the Katogi hotel lobby bar, Helen brought out a large bottle of ouzo. She seemed to have an infinite supply of energy, despite the late hour and the long day we’d shared. The sight of the tray of small glasses she presented next prompted Dick and Maddie to say their goodnights. George, Barry, Izzy, and I sat at a rounded booth and drank and chatted with Helen. She shared enthusiastic anecdotes about Averoff and Katogi. I was touched to see how moved she was by the lore. After she poured the digestifs, she asked about my line of work. I told her about some of my sillier restaurant concepts, like the Quiet Café.

  She was clearly intrigued. “So people, they do not speak?” she asked.

  “Exactly,” I said. “That way guests can concentrate on what they’re reading.” I could see Izzy shaking her head in my peripheral vision. Thanks to the ouzo, I didn’t register it as hostile and continued forth.

  “How do they make their orders?” she asked.

  “In a separate part of the café.”

  “And nobody hears them?”

  “No. It’s, like, across the hall.”

  “We’re still working out some of the details,” Izzy interjected.

  Wednesday, March 26

  Oia, Santorini

  Breakfast at one thousand six hundred sixty meters was an alluring and jeopardous bounty. There were spanakopita rectangles and slices of breads and cakes and flaky pastries on one table, ham and sausage and cheese and hard-boiled eggs and an assortment of teabags on a second adjacent. That afternoon we had a flight to Athens, where we’d board another plane that would take us to the island of Santorini. With a few free hours this morning before travel, we could dine here at the hotel, for once without stint, and later, do some things that didn’t involve tasting wine.

  When we finished, we got on the bus, which lumbered into Metsovo’s town. There we lazily toured the Averoff Art Museum. The museum had a collection of ancient-era Greek paintings, as well as a number of rooms displaying the work of modern artists. I was struck by the skillful strokes and poignant symbolism of an oil depicting a male figure bowing his head to a healthy green tree, which leaned toward him. Between man and tree there was a bond, electricity moving in both directions, a communing between intellect and nature. It seemed to aptly convey my connection to this Mediterranean land that I was discovering. The Averoff staff gave us catalogues to take home, thick, bound coffee-table volumes that we appreciated receiving, even if our oversubscribed suitcases wouldn’t.

  At the foothills of the snow-blanketed mountains, we dawdled while Mike the driver, in a proper gentleman’s hat and long coat and small black gloves, affixed chains to the tires of the bus. The hulking vehicle had no chance of making it back up the hill without some reinforcements. To while away the time, we wandered souvenir shops. I browsed a store’s magazines. There were a number of English titles, in addition to the primary Greek offerings, on the spinning kiosk: Truck and Machinery, Business Week, Playboy, Art and Decoration, DVD and CD Mag.

  George disappeared for a while and came back with exciting news.

  “The Olympic torch relay is coming through the square.” He pointed at a makeshift stage at the top of some stairs leading to a park. “The lighting’s in ten minutes.”

  This explained the throngs of people that had been gathering since we got to the museum. They’d filled in the open cobblestone-paved areas around the parked cars and lined the pedestrian paths police kept clear for the proceedings. Dozens of children waved plastic Chinese and Greek flags. I had an unobstructed view of the cauldron that the traveling canister of flame was to kindle.

  Everyone watched silently, triumphantly. Izzy put her arm around me, and we stood together while the ceremony took place. Every step was carried out meticulously: the coterie of runners behind the torchbearer moved in time, paused synchronously. I struggled to hold back tears. I couldn’t even comprehend exactly what was so profoundly affecting. And there it was. The cauldron lit up and the flame had made its first official stop.

  After an hour and a half on the road, we reached the Ioannina airport. We gathered our brochures and tasting notes and other accumulated detritus from the in-cabin stowage compartments of the bus. Mike returned to us the luggage he’d stacked neatly in the rear hold. Then it was time to say good-bye to our driver. We’d been together so long that it was a little sad to know we’d have to go on without him. I, of course, could only communicate how crucial I felt he’d been to the journey thus far by shaking his hand. Once Mike had finalized some details with George, he got back into the bus. He pulled the Sprinter out of the small airport driveway and was gone.

  We checked in and passed through security. The plastic tub-seated chairs we took looked like leftovers from the 1970s. I was still thinking about Mike. “I wonder if he’s going to miss us,” I said to Izzy.

  She smiled at me. “I’m sure . . . he’s off to his next tour group. You know?”

  I looked around. There were Dick and Maddie, a few ro
ws away. They worked at reorganizing their parcels, which had been disrupted during the security screening. There was Barry, who stood by the pay phones, holding a bag of oregano-flavored Ruffles. He appeared incredulous as he counted the coin euro change from his snack bar visit. There was George, on his cell, a vision of equanimity, our leader.

  “We meant more to him than just any old tour,” I said.

  When we landed in Athens, we claimed our baggage from Aegean, checked it once again, and settled into an Olympic Airlines flight to Santorini. Izzy put her head on my shoulder. I leaned my head against hers. We both closed our eyes. We got in around eight and reunited with our things. Outside, George hailed two taxis. A BMW with a more capacious trunk took Barry, Maddie, Dick, and their profusion of baggage. Izzy and I got into a Mercedes. George gave both drivers the name of the hotel, Laokasti, in Oia, and climbed into the front seat of our car.

  “Ee-yuh,” George corrected, after I mispronounced the name of the village. “The ‘o’ is silent.”

  Our driver added that Oia was considered the most beautiful of the Santorini villages. It was situated eleven kilometers away from Fira, the capital, at the top of a cliff. Oia offered visitors an impressive view over the Palia and Nea Kameni volcanoes, which sat in a geological formation known as the Santorini caldera, as well as of the Thirassia island.

  Across a cracked tile veranda and through a garden of olive trees and fragrant herbs, we located the seafood restaurant where we’d have dinner, Saltsa, which sat along the water. Our reservation was for a perfectly locally acceptable nine p.m. Izzy and I took places in the middle of a long table that had been set for fourteen. It stretched from one end of the restaurant, beside the bathroom, to, nearly, the other, by the main entrance. I sat facing the kitchen’s window, which was festooned with flogged octopi that dangled from brass hooks. The winery we’d visit the next morning, Sigalas, had sent reps to greet us. Some of our Boutari friends, whom we’d met last Friday night in Thessaloniki, were also here. They’d brought with them some local sommeliers and wine spectators.

  The party emptied several bottles of Boutari Santorini while the courses came out and circulated. This Santorini wine was made from Assyrtiko grapes, and—perhaps heightened by our new geography—tasted lush and rich, like ripe pear and apple and cream, with spicy and smoky notes. Izzy remarked that the wine was a perfect match for the foods we had, the charcoal-grilled seafood specialties for which this region was famous. I ate octopus risotto; grilled sardines; cod in a cornflower crust, done with caramelized beetroot and fava beans in garlic; and fillet of bream with crawfish sauce. For dessert, there was panna cotta with strawberries; chocolate mousse; and loukoumi, an ice cream served with caramelized rose petals.

  Back at the hotel, Izzy took off her clothes in the bathroom. She lay on the made bed in a white terrycloth robe of unknown provenance.

  “What do you think of Dick?” she asked me. Her voice was a little tremulous, shaky from drink.

  “I don’t know. He’s growing on me, I guess.”

  “You realize if I went to work for him, we’d move to New York.”

  I said nothing.

  “And you don’t want to. I can tell.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to, Izzy, it’s just—”

  “Do you know how much money I could make with him? Way more than from that stupid restaurant and the TV show. No Chef Dominique to take seventy-five percent of everything because he was under the impression that he was the most important part of the equation.”

  “I still don’t know how you ended up with that shitty of an arrangement.”

  “Because I was an idiot,” she said in monotone. “But I’m a different person now. I’m smarter. I’ve learned. And Dick is a success. He doesn’t need to exploit me. He needs me.”

  “You could make Corked4Less a real thing. With you, their wine would become significant. They’d be known for more than just the chain shop to go to for cheap Sauvignon Blanc housewives serve with before-meal cheese and crackers.”

  She giggled. “Dominique would flip out when he would hear people ordering cheese as a first course.” In the chef’s comic accent, she asked, “‘Cheese is for after dinner, no?’”

  “Did you tell him they weren’t dumb, just American?”

  She snickered. “Something like that.” She took a deep breath of the sea air that permeated our little parti-colored hotel room. “So what if he wants to hire me? Do we pack up and go?”

  It was a good question. I’d never dreamed I’d end up back in New York. I’d resisted the pull of the city, which mainly came in the form of my parents’ nudging, for so long, for so many years. I’d gotten the sense from the occasional conversations we’d had in recent months that now they finally conceded I had a legitimate excuse to live a thousand miles away. They’d read the newspaper and magazine articles they Googled about my wife. I had Izzy, and she had a significant life in Chicago. But this was something completely different to consider. If we moved, Izzy and I, together, it wouldn’t just be a regression, a capitulation, going back to Mom and Dad. It wouldn’t be an admission that they’d been right about the lunacy of my academic choices and the pathologic impracticality of my resulting career as an adjunct, and that I’d been wrong. This would be a change for both of our futures. It would be a chance for Izzy to become an important buyer for a major corporation. Her name and face would be in Corked4Less shops throughout the Northern Hemisphere. People in dozens of countries would serve the wines she’d have selected—wines like those from Santorini—at myriad dinner tables. It would also be a chance to start anew domestically. We could sell the terrible loft in Pilsen and never have to worry about our noisy and meddlesome neighbors again. We’d be so far away from all the text that was unpleasant in our lives. And Pacer Rosengrant. We’d be chapters beyond him, too.

  “There has to be a reason,” Izzy said, “that we’re on this trip at this particular junction, that Dick’s here and his company’s expanding and that he needs someone like me so badly, at this particular moment. I know we like to say everything’s random and things just happen . . . but an opportunity like this . . .”

  It had to mean something. This was not only the right time for us to move ahead. This was probably the only chance we’d ever have to pick up and start all over again. It was fate.

  “So, we’ll go. We’ll go to New York.”

  “You really would?”

  “Yeah. All I’ve ever wanted is to make you happy,” I said. The line echoed in my head like someone else had said it and I’d merely overheard a platitudinous remark.

  “It’s not just about me, Peter.”

  “You always sound so serious when you call me ‘Peter.’”

  She laughed a trill. “I am being serious. What’s good for me may not be right for us.”

  I asked a question I’d been putting off for some time. It seemed like the right thing to do just then. “So you still want me to be part of your us?”

  “Don’t be silly. And it’s not just ‘my us.’”

  Gently, I spoke. “I remember talk about separating, Izzy.”

  “Well, I don’t always mean what I say.”

  “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

  She growled at me, but playfully. “You know what I mean.”

  And to this end, after we got in bed and I turned out the lights, I found Izzy, a few moments later, climbing on top of me. I’d closed my eyes, but, wordlessly, she began to cajole the decision-maker into keeping the rest of my body awake a little longer. Neither it nor I made protest. It felt good to be this close to her again, no longer adversaries, after what seemed a decades-long disconnection. The moves were our same old choreography, yet it was somehow different enough in this context to surge my limbs with the adrenaline of unfamiliarity. It was as though she were someone with whom I had never before been intimate. Her body seemed no longer indecis
ive, torn. In this bed, she pleaded for me and me only. And she was the only one I wanted. For the first time in a while, I was with Izzy, not wondering when the Laheys were coming home or agonizing over teaching assignments or how we were going to pay the mortgage, not fantasizing about former students, or missing Talia, once again restored to virility, once again a man. The electricity between us cleared my mind of anything beyond sweaty skin and grating foreign sheets and taut ligaments. We were plunging further into the depths than, quite possibly, we’d ever been.

  Thursday, March 27

  Oia, Santorini

  I got up before Izzy and explored our room. I opened each of the cabinets in the kitchenette. I took out plastic plates that had been washed and rewashed so many times their glaze had been reduced to a shine barely perceptible. The small refrigerator, standing against a column that matched its width, was empty, just humming away. In my mind, I transformed it into a proper minibar. I filled the shelves with imaginary single-serving bottles of Assyrtiko and Moschofilero and ouzo. It occurred to me that some of this might be worth documenting. Who knew when I might come up with a restaurant, the décor of which needed to replicate that of a Greek island villa? With Izzy’s camera on auto-timer, I snapped a photograph of me standing in the little bathroom brushing my teeth over the sink, the wall-mounted hair dryer holster millimeters away from my ear. After I dried my mouth on a tiny gray towel, I logged more digital exposures of the rattan love seat in the sitting area and its dusty cushions encased in floral print. Out on the veranda, I took pictures of our twin chaise longues.

  Izzy caught me lying on a chaise with the camera lens trained on the tip of my nose. “What are you doing?” she asked. She stood in the doorway and rubbed her eyes.

  “Nasal gazing,” I said. I stood up and dusted off my jeans. I set Izzy in electronic sights and shuttered the tiny shutter.

  “It’s pretty here, huh,” she said, looking out into the murmuring blue.

  Against the idyllic backdrop, Izzy was astonishing. Beneath the blue sky painted here and there with cumulus humilis, standing high above the glittery, intensely dark Aegean water, she was absolutely angelic. She smiled at me when she caught me fixing her in my viewfinder and zooming in and out for the perfect balance of sky and white buildings to comprise her background.