Penelope looked at Dion, glanced away. “So what are you doing after school?” she asked, not meeting his eyes.
“Why?”
“Well, I thought maybe we could study together. I mean, I’m having a little trouble in Mythology, especially keeping all those Titans and Olympians straight.” She smiled. “Since you’re the big expert, I thought you could help me out.”
She was not having any trouble, and he knew it, but he decided to play along. “Okay,” he said.
“We could meet in the library …” She thought for a moment. “Or you could come over to my house. It’s not as quiet there, but it’s a lot more comfortable.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’d like that.”
“Do you have a car?”
He shook his head, embarrassed. “No.”
“That’s okay. Neither do I. The bus takes me straight home, though, and you can ride with me. I’m sure I can get one of my—I can get” my mother to drive you home.”
“Come on!” Vella called from the sidelines. “We’ll be late!”
Dion smiled. “You’ll be late.”
“We’ll both be late.” ., “So where do you want to meet?”
“Outside the library, after school.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
“I’ll see you then.”
He waved goodbye and watched her hurry over to Vella. The two girls sprinted across the grassy expanse toward the lockers.
He was still staring at the spot where they’d disappeared into the building when the bell rang.
The conversation on the bus ride was not as relaxed and easy as it had been at lunch. Kevin and Vella weren’t there, which put extra pressure on the two of them, and the tension which had been nascent earlier was now full blown and firmly in the forefront, the considerable effort involved in arranging this supposedly casual meeting making it nearly impossible to maintain the illusion that they were classmates simply studying together. Their talk was hesitant, their words infrequent, their discussion consisting of awkwardly worded questions and quick-to-the point answers. Nevertheless, the natural affinity they shared won out over this more superficial unease, and by the time the bus brakes hissed to a stop in front of the winery gates, the two of them were, if not talking as though they were old friends, at, least not acting as though they were terrified of each other.
They stepped off the bus, which pulled slowly away with a rattle of loose gravel. Penelope used a key to open a small black box attached to a low pole next to the gate, and she quickly punched in a series of numbers on the tiny console. She closed the front of the box, and the giant gates opened with a low whirring noise. She smiled at him. “Come on.”
Dion followed her through the iron gates and up the winding paved driveway. The single lane was flanked near the entrance by a line of trees which acted as a natural fence and which disappeared almost immediately, giving way to a field of staked grape vines, laid out in parallel rows and spreading over what appeared to be acres of flat farmland. On the far side of the huge vineyard, he could see Penelope’s house arid the adjacent structures of the winery.
He whistled. “Wow,” he said.
Penelope giggled.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he admitted. He stared at the tall Ionic columns which made up the peristyle separating the winery from the parking lot. Beyond it were three neo-Classic buildings arranged in staggered order. Concessions had been made to modernity—as they drew closer he could see metal heating/air-conditioning units, reflective window glass, clearly marked service doors—but from afar the complex looked like nothing so much as an ancient Greek hilltop city. The plantation style house, while set slightly apart from the winery and distinctly American, also contained complementary echoes of ancient architecture and did not dispel the impression.
Dion thought of the small house he and his mother rented, realized that he had never even imagined living in a place this big or this opulent.
He looked at Penelope. The differences between them suddenly seemed enormous.
She looked at him and smiled.
He tried to smile back, tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t make him sound like a fool. He cleared his throat “I was looking at a tourist map of the wineries the other day, and I
didn’t see yours listed.”
“We don’t give tours,” she explained. “The winery is not open to the public.”
“Really?” Dion was surprised at that. The winery seemed to have been built with tourists specifically in mind. With its pseudo-Greek architecture and distinctive layout, it would seem to be a natural point of interest, much more so than Edinger’s or Scalia’s or some of the other more pedestrian-looking wineries which did offer guided tours of their facilities. He frowned. “Then why does it look so … Why does it look like this?”
Penelope shrugged. “That’s how the women of the combine wanted it.”
Dion looked again at the complex, and suddenly he didn’t like it. The interest and admiration he had felt only seconds before disappeared. A
wave of distaste washed over him, an aversion so strong it was almost physical. He glanced quickly away, but not before Penelope saw the expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
He waved it away. “Nothing,” he said. But he looked again at the winery buildings, and he was afraid. There were goose bumps on his arms, and he was reminded of his equally irrational reaction to the hill last week.
He coughed, tried not to let his unease show. “Come on.”
Penelope nodded, leading the way. They walked past the rows of vines and lines of pickers, through the parking lot, and down the short path to the house. The fear passed as quickly as it had come, and by the time they had reached the front steps it was just a memory.
“Home sweet home,” Penelope said.
Dion looked up at the three-story mansion. “Have you always lived here?”
“All my life.”
“You must have a big family.”
“No. It’s just me and my mother.”
“Your dad doesn’t—?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “Just the two of you in this huge house?”
“Well, it’s not just the two of us. My other … women in the combine live here too.”
Dion nodded, saying nothing.
Penelope stopped at the foot of the porch steps, turned to face him. “I
know what the kids say,” she said, her voice low, “but I’m not a lesbian.”
Dion found himself blushing. “I didn’t say you were—”
“And neither are any of the women in the combine.” Her voice was strong, her expression serious. For all of her shyness, for all of her earlier hesitancy, she seemed much older than her years, more poised and, mature than other girls her age. “Look,” she said. “I know how it looks to a bunch of hormone-enraged teenage boys, but the combine is just a business concern. That’s it. We all live in the same house, but that’s because it’s big and it’s convenient. Our winery is not some sort of sex club or Playboy mansion or anything. Nothing like that happens here or has ever happened here. I’ll admit that the women are all strong feminists, but contrary to what people seem to think these days, there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re aggressive because they have to be.
They’re businesswomen. And everything they’ve done, they’ve done on their own. No one helped them, no one encouraged them, no one would even hire them when they were originally looking for positions in other wineries. They may have made it in spite of men and not because of men, but that doesn’t make them lesbians.” She stopped to catch her breath.
Dion smiled softly at her. “I wouldn’t care if they were lesbians,” he said. “But if I thought you were a lesbian, I wouldn’t be here.”
Now it was her turn to blush.
Both of them were silent for a moment. Dion’s hands were sweaty, and he wiped them surreptitiously on his pants. He had said it
. He had taken the plunge. He had spoken aloud what he had been thinking, and now she knew for sure that he was interested. He licked his lips. What would she say? How would she react? How would she respond? The silence dragged on, and he was suddenly certain that he had made a mistake, that he had tipped his hand too early.
Her response was no response. She chose to ignore his remark. “Are you thirsty?” she asked finally. Her voice was gentler than it had been, filled with an emotion he couldn’t quite place but which for some reason made him feel good. She motioned him up the porch steps, refusing to look at him. “We have some juice in the refrigerator.”
Part of him was disappointed, part of him relieved. If he hadn’t been accepted, at least he hadn’t been shot down. He was still in the running, and that was good enough for now. He nodded. “Sounds great,” he said.
They walked inside.
The interior of the house was less impressive than the outside. Rather than the museum’s worth of untouchable antiques he had been expecting, he saw a hodgepodge of furnishings and decorating styles, most of them contemporary, none which fit with the grandiose promise of the exterior.
The house was comfortable, though, the rooms warm and inviting. In a family room dominated by a large-screen TV, the day’s newspaper was scattered over a low wood and white tile coffee table. On the armrest of the couch was an opened paperback, a Danielle Steele novel. Next to the doorway were two pairs of women’s shoes.
Dion felt less intimidated than he had before. Penelope’s family might be rich, but they lived the same way as everyone else.
“Kitchen’s through here!”
He followed Penelope into the kitchen, where a middle aged woman wearing faded jeans and a plain white blouse was chopping bell peppers on a freestanding butcher block. The woman turned toward them as they entered. She exchanged a quick glance with Penelope, then beamed at Dion. “Hello,” she said.
Dion smiled, nodded. “Hello.”
“Dion, this is my mother. Mother, this is my friend Dion.”
Penelope’s mother looked nothing like her. She was small-boned and dark, whereas her daughter was tall and blond. Her features were plain and nondescript in contrast to Penelope’s stunning good looks. She was also older and more careworn than he would have expected. The one thing mother and daughter did seem to have in common was an innate shyness, a natural reserve, although Penelope’s mother appeared to be more deferential, less strong willed.
“Would you two like something to drink?”
“Yes,” Penelope said. “Juice?”
“We have grape. Fresh squeezed today.”
“That’ll be fine.”
Mother Felice opened the white refrigerator door and drew out a large glass pitcher filled to the brim with grape juice. She maneuvered carefully over to the counter, holding the pitcher with two hands in order to keep from spilling any on the floor. “Where are you from?” she asked as she put the pitcher down and took two glasses from the cupboard. “I know you’re not from around here.”
“Arizona,” Dion said.
“Really? Whereabouts?”
“Mesa. It’s near Phoenix.”
“I know where Mesa is. I used to have a friend from Scottsdale, a girl I
went to high school with.”
Penelope smiled as her mother handed her a glass of juice. Mother Felice had always been able to put people at ease, to make them feel comfortable. Of all of her mothers, she was the kindest, the most solicitous of the feelings of others, and it was she who was always chosen to soothe the waters after Mother Margeaux had bulldozed her way over someone. Penelope was glad to see that Dion seemed to like her mother, and that her mother seemed to like Dion.
The door banged open and Mother Janine stepped loudly into the kitchen, bumping against the frame as she pulled work gloves off her hands.
“Who’s—” she began. She stopped in mid-sentence, saw Dion, and smiled.
“Hello,” she said.
“This is Dion,” Mother Felice explained. “A friend of Penelope’s.”
“Dion?” Mother Janine’s smile broadened. She reached out, took his hand, shook it gently. “I am very happy to meet you.
Very happy. I’m … Penelope’s aunt, Janine.”
“How do you do?” he replied.
Penelope saw her mothers exchanging surreptitious glances, smiling in approval. She reddened, but she did not look away. She was embarrassed but also proud. She had never before invited a boy to see where she lived, and she felt good that the first one she had chosen was Dion, someone of whom her mothers would obviously approve, a boy who was nice, intelligent, good-looking, and respectful.
“Would you like to go on a little tour of the winery?” Mother Janine asked. “I’d love to—”
“We have to study,” Penelope said.
“We could study afterward,” Dion suggested.
“We have to study,” she repeated firmly.
He nodded. “Right,” he agreed. “Right.” He handed the empty glass to Penelope’s mother. ‘Thanks,” he said.
There was silence for a moment. Dion was awkwardly aware that everyone was staring at him: Penelope, her mother, her aunt. He didn’t know what to say and was about to make some sort of generic remark when Penelope saved him and suggested that they go out to the Garden.
“Study in a garden?” Dion said.
She laughed. “I’ll show you. Come on.”
He said goodbye to the two women and followed Penelope out of the kitchen. Though nothing had happened, nothing he noticed, he got the feeling that he had passed some sort of test. He thought of Penelope’s mother and her aunt, and he was not sure if he liked that or not.
He followed Penelope through the library as she opened the sliding glass doors and stepped outside.
Frank Douglas had been a bartender for a long time, for thirty-three of his fifty-six years, and while he might not have had the academic credentials of a sociologist, he had learned a little about reading people in his time behind the counter. Individuals and crowds. He could be pouring drinks, wiping up, engaging in superficial chitchat with {
the more talkative regulars, but at the same time his senses were always open, his antennae out, working, measuring, gauging, sizing up.
And this crowd was weird.
He poured himself a mineral water and downed half of it in a single swallow. The night crowds had all been weird lately. Or at least weird for this bar. The Pioneer usually attracted a steady, stable clientele of after-work drinkers and evening socializers, a solid blue-collar beer crowd. But in the past few weeks the makeup of the bar had gradually shifted. No, not the makeup. The personality. For the people were still the same, and, individually, they seemed no different than they had before. They wore the same clothes, drove the same cars, came and left at the same times. But the configuration of the crowd when these people were together had changed completely, and that had changed the whole tenor of the bar. Gone were the endless public rehashes of the weekend’s sporting events, the petty domestic complaints, the boring shop talk.
Conversations now were quiet, less public, more intimate, more personal, usually between two people. Usually between a man and a woman.
And these days most of his customers were drinking wine instead of beer.
A lot of wine.
Frank finished his mineral water, washed out the glass.
His gaze wandered to the back wall, where the once empty booths were all full, populated with people who sat very close together in the darkness.
That was the strangest thing of all. Many of these people had known one another for years, had been friends or acquaintances, bar buddies, but had always looked elsewhere for love. Now they suddenly seemed to have discovered each other, and they were behaving like high school students in heat.
It didn’t make any sense.
At Josh Aldridge’s high sign, he poured the roofer another wine cooler, placing it on a napkin before him.
What made even less s
ense was the feeling he got that beneath the surface calm there lurked a barely concealed storm. It was a strange feeling, an unfounded feeling, but as much as he tried to discount it rationally, it would not go away. Despite the intimate discussions, despite the quiet nuzzling, despite the lovey-doveyness, he had the impression that it would require only a very slight provocation to stir up this crowd, to bring whatever latent violence lay beneath its thin veneer immediately to the surface.
He had tended bar in a lot of places, a lot of towns. He’d mixed drinks in discos and punk clubs, in cowboy and biker bars. He could sense danger. And though his customers tonight were polite and well behaved, though they seemed to be merely looking for companionship, he could tell that they were looking for something more than that. Something nowhere near as nice.
And it frightened him.
There were buildings on top of the rocky hill, buildings not unlike those that made up the winery. Stately structures with tall Doric columns supporting heavy entablatures decorated with intricately carved friezes. There were three buildings altogether, the largest flanked by two coequal counterparts. Men were standing in line before the middle building, a long line which wound a considerable way down the side of the barren slope. In their hands were baskets of fruit and samples of recently killed game.
He wanted nothing to do with the men. Though he was hungry, he longed for none of the fruit, coveted none of the game. The sustenance he wanted was located far below the temples, in the valley.
Temples. That’s what the buildings were.
He turned away from the line of men and began running down the hill.
Fleet of foot he was, possessing a strength arid agility that seemed natural but at the same time superhuman. He fairly flew over the rough terrain, feet finding purchase and springing from the ground’s inlaid rock.
Then he was at the bottom of the hill, speeding toward the trees. He smelled the sweet frangrance of wine, and the musky odor of women.
He was late. In the meadow, in the valley, the celebration had already started. Vats of wine had been brought here, and two of them were now half empty. Whole and broken cups lay strewn about the grass in scattered disarray. There were nearly a hundred people laughing, screaming, singing. Many of them were naked and most of them were drunk.
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