“You’ve got my attention,” he said.
• • •
Jacob took his sweet time getting the phone number of the oyster shucker, and Irene took a detour down to the docks, claiming she needed to collect some loose shells and gull feathers that he imagined might find their way into a painting sometime in the near future. George soon saw her walking around with phone out, frowning and trying to catch a signal. But he didn’t care, so long as everyone was happy.
Sara pulled him aside as they approached the car. “Did you see Irene take her Neulasta this morning?”
George hadn’t, but he said, “I’m sure she did. She’s fine.”
“I should have reminded her before we left.”
“I’m sure she remembered.”
“I just have a bad feeling. We don’t even know where the nearest hospital is.”
“Nothing is going to happen. Dr. Zarrani even said a trip would be good for her.”
“She also said Irene should have had the tumor removed.”
“No, she said she thought it would be better to be thorough, but it probably wasn’t necessary, and considering that it would possibly permanently ruin her vision in that eye, it’d be better not to do anything until we know if the chemo is working.”
“I know. I’m just worried.”
“It’s going to be fine. The scans are going to come back clean.”
“Don’t say that!”
“What? You think I’m going to jinx it? That bump under her eye is basically gone.”
“But you told me she said that doesn’t mean anything! I wish you’d take this seriously.”
George sighed. “I am.”
He tried to put his hand on her shoulder to pull her close, but she remained firmly planted just a bit too far away from him, her eyes narrowed.
“How much did you have to drink in there?”
“I thought we were supposed to be celebrating, for God’s sake.”
She crossed her arms—a bad sign. “All you’ve had to eat today are oysters, and you had the two Bloody Marys plus a shot at the bar. Maybe you want to let someone else drive?”
“I’m fine,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Don’t worry so much, okay?”
“I’m just saying Jacob’s a lot heavier than you are. It doesn’t affect him as quickly.”
“He has the tolerance of a nun. He hardly ever drinks unless we’re all out together.”
He realized too late that he wasn’t helping his case exactly by reminding Sara that, in contrast, he had at least two drinks every night, whether they were out together or home alone. He was about to take it back, to try and explain what he’d meant, when he heard Jacob and Irene coming back over the gravel.
“Who does she keep texting?” George asked. “We’re all here.”
“Don’t ask,” Sara said.
“What’s the problem?” Jacob called out.
“No problem,” George said loudly, unlocking the car. “Let’s go.”
• • •
They only had to go around the corner to find the ferry that went to Shelter Island. George drove the car up onto the prow of a beautiful, barnacled service boat that went back and forth across the gray water all day long, buoying Benzes and Lexuses to the otherwise unreachable shore. As they moved out across the water, George stared at the spot their oysters had come from and wished that they weren’t now churning around quite so unpleasantly in his stomach. Fortunately the ride was soon over, and they only had to go a half mile up the hill to reach Luther’s beach house at last.
From the end of the driveway, they could only see how enormous it was. Three stories, shingled in impressive gray wood, with white trim. It had two garages and a kidney-shaped pool on one side. It was only when they got closer that they realized the pool was covered in thick green algae. The yard was scorched dead in patches and overgrown in others, littered from one end to the other with crumpled silver and blue Michelob Ultra cans and the jagged remains of two twenty-four packs of Dos Equis bottles. The cardboard boxes these had come in, presumably, were also in the yard, as were about a hundred red Solo cups, some used BIC razors, half-empty Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner bottles, several cans of spilled paint thinner, and a wheelbarrow filled with what appeared to be the past century’s collection of withered Redbook magazines. A grimy hammock hung limply from a bolt in a leafless tree; the pole that had once supported its other end was, for some reason, sunning up on the garage roof.
“Was there a hurricane or something we didn’t hear about?” Irene asked.
Jacob whistled. “What, was Abu Ghraib all booked?”
Sara had both hands on her cheeks, jaw open. “The nephews,” was all she could say. “The nephews. The nephews.”
George trudged carefully up the walk, leading the way through the shattered glass and scattered cigarette butts to the door, which was slightly open. It was too much to hope that the inside would be unmolested, as it turned out. Everywhere he looked were more empties, more dead houseplants whose pots had been repurposed as ashtrays, more greasy pizza boxes, more melted plastic forks and spoons. Every single inch of the kitchen counter was taken up by liquor bottles. Fat ones, tall ones, green ones, brown ones. Handles of vodka with plastic screw tops. Liters of soda bottles used for mixers. Buckets of dirty water, perhaps once ice. A folding card table lay in three pieces on the floor, streaked with crusted white powder. Chairs were overturned, lightbulbs were broken in their sockets, molding Chinese food containers stood open. Either the cleaning people had never come, or they had arrived and done an abrupt about-face.
“It’s like Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade, and Amy Winehouse hung out in here for a month!” Jacob seemed to be nearly in awe.
Irene reached down into a pile of sheets and pulled out a silver-sequined bra, each cup of which she could have sat inside of.
“Oh. My,” she said. “Looks like the nephews made some friends in town.”
Jacob trudged over to look at it more closely, crunching down on the brim of a straw hat as he did. “Hope there’s not a thong in there too.”
Sara was supremely annoyed. “Luther’s going to think we did this! What the hell? We’re going to have to clean all this shit up.”
Jacob kicked an open can of Spaghetti O’s across the room. “How about we just set the place on fire and tell him it got hit by lightning?”
Sara looked around again. “Why does everything always have to be a disaster?”
• • •
A disaster. Jacob was soon telling them how this word came from the old Greek: dis, meaning “bad,” and aster, meaning “star.” Bad star. From back in the good old days when such misfortune could be attributed to the continual and predictable realignments of the cosmos. It was soon agreed that they’d go wine tasting first and deal with the mess when they got back. Swiftly they were back on the ferry. Sara was trying not to seem furious behind a pair of round retro sunglasses. Jacob hung out the window like a loyal hound dog, his ears all but flopping around. Irene kicked at the back of his seat as she sifted through the bag of shells she’d gathered. George hunted for a radio station everyone liked, which was impossible because Jacob hated everything, so finally they settled on a country station that nobody liked, just to punish him.
The outing at least got off to a decent start. At Raphael Vineyards they did the tasting and then split a bottle of First Label Merlot on the back porch, while Jacob talked to the server about skydiving and ended up with another phone number. After that it was Bedell Cellars, where Sara thought to mention that she and George were looking for a wedding venue, which got them a twenty-dollar discount on a bottle of blanc de blancs. They soldiered on to Shinn Estates, then made one last stab at a nice time at Paumanok, but by then it was midafternoon and they were all exhausted, having forgotten everything they’d tasted except that there ha
d been an awful lot of it. George had felt himself slipping deeper into a fuzzy warmth with each visit, a sense of all being right with the world, with the exception of Jacob, who kept reeling him back into dissatisfaction. At some point they all agreed that lunch was in order, and so they got some cheese and bread and cured meats and set out to have a picnic in the green expanse overlooking the vineyard.
Sara had picked out the cheeses for each of them from a glass-enclosed aging cabinet. As she handed them to George, she explained her thinking. “You get a triple crème brie. For me, an Alpine . . . nutty, but firm.” For Jacob she went with the cheese with the most pretentious description: a Romano the color of earwax and with a “dry, granite texture” with a “saltiness hiding its butterscotch undertones.” Finally, for Irene, an Auvergne Blue—punchy and velvety, streaked with dazzlingly beautiful molds.
George almost regretted that in a few minutes they would all be devoured, except that nothing was making Sara happier than seeing her companions lying on her mother’s enormous old Scotch-patterned picnic blanket—he knew she’d packed it with just this tableau in mind. She took out a camera and began taking pictures of first the cheeses, and then of all of them on the blanket, and then the fields of grapevines beyond. It was perfect.
Except Jacob, naturally, was on about something. “Look at all this old machinery and shit they have on display out here. Like they need to make this place seem more real? Like . . . oh, well now we use giant machines to plow our fields and squeeze our grapes, and our bottles are made for ten cents apiece in a factory in Mexico, and our corks are made of plastic . . . but we’re in touch with our heritage, gosh durn it!”
George looked over at Sara. She looked annoyed again. He felt a heat rising up all around his temples, the warm suffusion of his wine-buzz beginning to feel like real drunkenness, and he shot Jacob a cease-and-desist look. George reached for Sara, wanting suddenly to kiss her deeply and blot out their friend’s forever blathering, but she eased him off before he could do more than peck her quickly on the lips.
“Here it is! Shellacked, of course, to preserve that rusty veneer forever and ever! In a hundred years I wonder what people will stand around staring at, thinking it’s so quaint and authentic? Oh, look at that cute little cellular phone! Look at that funny hybrid car! Just imagine how hardworking and pure-hearted people must have been back then!”
“Christ. Do you have to be such a snob?” George shouted. This came out a bit meaner than George had intended.
Jacob returned the sentiment. “Do you have to be such a wet blanket?”
George was about to reply when Sara tried to grab his hand. “Come take a walk.”
“He thinks because he got one poetry prize, he knows better than other people.”
“I do know better than other people,” Jacob snapped. “Most people can’t do math in their heads, much less write a poem.”
Ordinarily George would have backed down. He knew there was no getting Jacob to apologize. It was just his nature. But George’s head hurt and he knew there was nothing left between him and the inevitable evening spent cleaning someone else’s house.
“You know you don’t get a medal on your deathbed for having been right most often. You just lie there alone because everyone you ever loved hates your superior guts.”
His friend held up his hands to call for peace. George couldn’t remember a time Jacob had ever backed down before. Irene stood up and pulled her phone back out of her pocket again, walking around with it stretched out toward some phantom signal. George was finally about to ask Irene who she was texting when Sara, finished with her cheese, took George’s keys from his jacket and walked over to the driver’s side door without a word. She leaned twice, sharply, on the horn to announce that they were moving on.
• • •
The final stop was Lenz Winery, and it seemed pleasant enough from the front—wide swaths of brown vines being forced to grow straight up, and a building with huge oak doors that hung invitingly open. Inside were a half dozen other visitors, milling about the long bar in the back and wandering off occasionally to sample chutneys, mustards, and vinegars that were displayed along the walls. George bought five tastings for the group, and soon a white-bearded man was easing a bottle over each and pouring out a perfect mouthful of something the color of sunlight. He and Irene both took sips and swished them around in their mouths.
“We’re supposed to taste ginger and apricots,” Sara read.
“That’s ridiculous,” Jacob said, downing his tasting in one gulp.
“It says it right here,” Irene said, pointing to the card in Sara’s hand.
“They just make that stuff up to make it sound fancier,” Jacob snorted. “Wine is wine.”
“Well, it doesn’t taste like any Chardonnay I’ve ever had before,” Sara said, leaning over the counter to catch the man’s attention. “I want to ask him how they do that.”
“Oh, like he’s going to tell you the truth,” Jacob scoffed, before wandering off to admire some salami hanging in a nearby display.
“This one’s wonderful,” Irene said, reading the card, “‘Tastes like bluegrass with notes of honeysuckle and hominy’? Well. I don’t know about that, but I like it.”
George took a sip and was inclined to agree. He was about to suggest they buy a bottle of it when he noticed Sara nudging the silver spittoon toward him.
“This is so good!” Irene sighed.
“Let’s get a bottle of it,” George said, taking another sip and pointedly swallowing.
“It’s only the second thing we’ve tried here!” Sara replied. “Let’s have the others and then see which we like the most.”
“But Irene likes this one,” George said.
“Yeah, I like this one,” Irene agreed.
“But you might like the next one even more.”
Just then Sara finally got the attention of the man behind the counter. “Why does this taste so different? I usually don’t like Chardonnay.”
“Well, you’re used to California Chardonnay,” the man behind the counter answered with a smirk. “It’s much cooler over here, so I can harvest the fruit over the period of a couple of weeks. There’s time for different flavors to develop, and we can mix them together to create a much more complex wine. California is much hotter, so they don’t have time to let the fruit mature in stages. It’s all simpler, more one-note over there, whereas here the wine’s got real complexity and sophistication.”
“Like a true New Yorker!” George quipped as Jacob wandered back over.
The man behind the counter stooped below a low crossbeam as he fetched up a bottle for George. “You’re joking, I get it, but there’s truth to it. The people are part of the wine. The wine is part of the people.”
“It’s the circle of life . . .” Jacob began to sing, before Irene stepped on his toe.
The man continued. “We call it the terroir.”
“That sounds fancy,” Sara said.
“It’s how we speak about the soil it’s grown in. The weather. Out here we’re surrounded on three sides by water, so that affects the vines. We get less sunshine than California, but we also get a greater variety of climates throughout the year. And we’re part of the terroir too, if you get my drift. Let’s say one year I’m standing there in the dirt in New Zealand, and the mud that’s still on my shoes from the Rhineland the year before becomes part of the next year’s harvest. We had this big brass band out here last summer during one of the weddings, and, well, those vibrations carried through the air and got into the soil and the vines. That music is in the grapes now. Everything is connected, and everything has a lasting impact, no matter how briefly it’s here.”
George felt Sara’s hand gripping his tightly as the man finished his speech. Even Jacob was silent as they toasted again. He stayed silent right up until the end, when he approached the man and asked for four bo
ttles of the Chardonnay made from “bluegrass, hogwash, and fairy wings.”
• • •
The sun was heading down, and there was no more avoiding it. For the third time that day, they boarded the Shelter Island ferry and crossed the water. Nobody spoke as they got out of the car and faced the mess, which seemed even more humongous in the waning light.
Sara found some buckets and brooms in a hall closet and sent George and Jacob down to the basement to see if they could locate some trash bags. They climbed down the old stairs together, saying nothing, moving through the dark with George’s cell phone screen up as they hunted along the cinderblock walls for a light switch.
“There’s a pull-chain thingy here I think,” Jacob said from somewhere behind him.
George moved closer with the white rectangle of light in his hand. “Sorry,” he said, “about before. I guess I had a little more than I realized.”
Jacob grunted in what George guessed was an acknowledgment, if not an acceptance, of his apology. George could admit he had crossed the line, but there was no reason anyone had to be worried about him. He always suspected it was because none of the others had ever seen a real drunk before. George had known plenty. Bad alcoholics, back home in Ohio, at the bar his grandfather had owned and where he’d spent a few hours every day after school. Those shapeless men. Hard, but helpless, leaning low down on their stools. Nothing like him.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s not like I have to be drunk all the time. It just makes me happier when I’m already happy, you know?”
This statement hung there in the dark basement for a moment. With a defiant click, the chain in Jacob’s hand snapped down and the basement lights came on. They found themselves standing in front of a network of shelves, where the tiny colored noses of bottle after bottle peeked out from the shadows of perfectly fitted boxes. There had to be hundreds. It was hard to see how far back it went. A fur of dust lay over everything. Jacob’s cries of glee bounced off the high, curving stone ceiling as he pulled bottles out two at a time.
Why We Came to the City Page 14