by Peter Lewis
“Hey, kiddo.”
He walked past the bar to the pool table. Janie and I regarded each other from a distance. The luminous brown eyes were the same, but the splash of gray silvering the wave of dark hair that fell across her back had grown, it seemed, and I discerned a line, a tension shaping her upper lip, that I hadn’t noticed before. Even so, her mouth possessed the old, familiar sensuality.
I got down off the barstool and gave her an awkward hug.
“Thanks for bringing him up.”
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, slipping out of my arms.
“Enough for an espresso?”
“Sure.”
I stepped behind the bar, turned the grinder on, filled the group, and tamped it down. As I pulled her coffee, I said, “How’s your dad doing?”
“He’s babbling in French now.”
“I didn’t know he even knew French.” I set the demitasse on the bar. “I saw your brother yesterday,” I said. “He swung by.”
“Richard? Here?”
“Like a ghost out my past.”
“He stood me up the other night,” Janie said.
“He told me.”
“Did he give an excuse?”
“Not really. An appointment, I guess. He said he’d try to call you tomorrow.”
“Why didn’t he call to tell me he couldn’t make it?”
“He’s very busy, Janie.” Why was I making excuses for him? I didn’t care what Wilson did. “Anyway, he said he was going to call me this morning.” I glanced at my cell on the bar and lifted my hands in the air. “Still waiting.”
“Do you know where I can reach him? Our father’s getting worse. This whole thing is costing me a fortune.”
“Call him on his cell,” I said.
“I did. He won’t pick up. And I left messages at the apartment he keeps in town. I get the feeling he’s avoiding me.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I have no idea.” She sipped the coffee. “Delicious,” she said, offering me a grudging smile.
“Dad!” Danny called out from the pool table. “Did you see that?” He held the cue stick over his head in a gesture of victory. It was nearly as long as he was tall.
“I missed it. Try it again,” I said.
He set up the shot he had just made and craned his little body over the table. He was biting his tongue as he took aim; he made a pretty clean stroke but missed the shot.
“Let me try it again,” he said, running to the end of the table to fetch the balls. “Keep watching.”
Janie and I looked at our son from across the room—a distance of ten feet and the unbridgeable distance of our separate lives.
“Would you like me to find him for you?” I said to Janie, letting the question hang in the absence of a common vocabulary that married couples share.
“You know where he is?” she said, facing me.
“I think so.” I had no interest in telling her that her brother appeared to be having an affair with the office help at a certain winery. “It shouldn’t be all that hard. I followed him to Norton late yesterday afternoon. He asked me to. There was something he wanted to talk about.” She examined me, waiting for me to divulge her brother’s confidence. “Sorry. We never got around to it. He was too preoccupied.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Look, I have to go. I’m already late.”
“That’s funny. That’s just what your brother said.”
I called Mulligan and asked if he could spell me for an hour. He said he’d be down in time for the lunch rush, a standing joke between us during harvest. A little before ten, Tony, the resident pool shark who practically lived at Pancho’s, walked through the door.
“Hey, Tony!” Danny cried. Tony had taken to giving him lessons when the place was dead, and his game had improved noticeably.
“Look after him for an hour, will you?” I said. “If you get a victim, have him suit up in the kitchen. Ernesto can put him to work.”
I explained to Danny that I had to run an errand for his mom and that I’d be back soon. He didn’t seem to mind a bit.
“Rack ’em up, Danny,” Tony said, “and go easy on me.”
I stood in the parking lot, called directory assistance, and was put through to Norton. No one answered.
Traffic was already stacked up on 29, the tourist buses crawling behind the tractors that were bringing in the first fruit of the day, so I cut across on Lodi Lane to avoid St. Helena. The Silverado Trail wasn’t any better. I settled in for the drive.
Richard Wilson and I had tasted together regularly for nearly a year before he introduced me to his little sister, Janie. I guess I’d proven myself to him. God, she was gorgeous. Beautiful hair, eyes that went on forever, and a mouth—I’d never seen a mouth like that. And she was smart. She was in premed, studying molecular biology, and doing an internship on the human genome project. I never did understand how they did it, even after she explained it to me on a series of coffeehouse dates at Le Bateau Ivre and Caffe Mediteranneum in Berkeley. My childish notion of genetics dated to high school biology: DNA composed of colored ribbons twining around each other. Janie was deciphering code, letters scrambled into what we had thought were an infinite number of variations and then, to our astonishment, learned were not infinite at all.
I moved to Seattle to attend grad school in comparative literature at U Dub and lost touch with her, but my obsession with wine and my postgraduate career soon declared they had irreconcilable differences, and I dropped out. I began to do a little bit of everything in the wine trade, starting at a retail shop and then putting in a short stint as a distributor’s rep, a position I secured with a single flourish of Wilson’s pen. But I wanted to go deeper, like a root searching for nutrients. Problem was, I wasn’t a salesman, and I’ve never fooled myself that I was a farmer.
Wine jobs were few and far between in the city back then, and the siren song of restaurant work beckoned. Wilson and I remained in touch, and I asked him to write a generic letter of recommendation. He wasn’t that well known yet, but a food and beverage manager at a major hotel was an early subscriber to his newsletter, The Wine Maven, and a nod from the Great Palate got me the job. The hotel’s budget afforded me the opportunity to taste extensively, and I devoured every book I could lay my hands on.
I watched in fascination as Wilson’s readership grew and his influence increased, and even though I knew that his reputation rested squarely on the very real foundation of his talent, I was envious. My own impulse to excel, I admit, was fueled in part by an unconscious desire to compete with him.
Eventually, as his success began to demand more of him, and as I developed my own reputation and contacts, our stream of communication dwindled to the odd postcard or hurried phone call. He was too busy traveling, writing, basking in acclaim. He’d morphed from my onetime tasting pal into a feared critic, one perfectly capable and willing to wield his power and influence without compunction.
Janie hadn’t wanted to leave the Bay Area, but after finishing her doctoral work, she was offered a job at one of the fashionable companies that had spun off the genome project as scientists chased the pot of gold that lay hidden somewhere within the coils of the double helix. The company was headquartered in Seattle, and she looked me up once she was settled. Within a few months, we were living together.
We worked like maniacs, putting in crazy hours. A beautiful, manic relationship, it worked, for a while at least. But once I started pulling five shifts a week, ten till midnight, and Janie was getting up at six each morning and in the lab by seven-thirty, the fun wore thin. The few moments we shared together were more like collisions.
If people had told us we were going to have a child, we’d have told them they were nuts. We had no plans to get married or to raise a family, but in one of those collisions she got pregnant, an accident that should have been impossible but never is. I rationalized our new reality, silently praying that our child would heal the wounds we were inflicting on each othe
r and make everything right. Anyone could have pointed out that having a child will never make an imperiled couple whole—I’m not sure we would have listened, anyway—but it was too late for that.
They were quiet, brooding months. Janie resented her pregnancy, believing—quite justifiably—that having a baby was going to interfere with what promised to be her stellar career path. The silences between us were excruciating.
By the time Danny was in day care, the marriage was a lost cause. I was asleep when Janie got our son out the door and was gone by the time she picked him up. On Sundays—the only day we had as a family—I was too exhausted to notice.
One morning Janie announced out of the blue that she’d been having an affair with a guy at work. In fact, it had been going on for months. What could I say? Whatever physical intimacy we’d known had long since evaporated. She moved out a month later. She’d been offered a job back in the Bay Area, a real promotion as head of her own research division, with serious money. And, of course, she took Daniel with her.
What seemed at first to be a trial separation turned out to be a divorce, and I followed them to California. I wanted to purge myself, to pare down, to do penance. I needed to be closer to my son, to prove something to myself and to Janie. I just wasn’t sure what it was or when I’d get the chance.
I hitchhiked down the coast as far as Eureka and found a faded pink Ford pickup that I bought for $600 and christened Bandol because its color was a ringer for a fine rosé. On the Pacific coast north of Mendocino, I spotted a ’57 Airstream marooned on the side of Highway 1 with a FOR SALE sign taped in its rear window, its aluminum skin pockmarked by the salt air, and hauled it across the Coast Range to the wine country in search of my Garden of Eden, as Woody Guthrie had sung.
An old friend from Berkeley found me moorage on a lot behind a ranch house on the eastern slope of Howell Mountain. I hooked up electrical and tied into the septic tank. I loved the trailer. It was like a space capsule hurtling through the void of my life, a monk’s cell on the wind-blasted slopes of Mount Athos. My hermitage, I called it.
Life stripped down to its bare essentials: one burner, a sink, the toilet; turquoise appliances that had peeled over time; twin beds, a table, a bookshelf; a lantern on gimbals and a ship’s clock. I was hiding out, letting the torrent of events break against the shore and wash over me. I adopted a stray tabby I named Chairman Meow, a sorry substitute for a child. It was a simple life, but I didn’t mind. You need a good dog paddle in the back eddies every once in a while.
I needed to earn a living but wanted to avoid the trendy bars and restaurants. Miraculously, I landed at the one last place in Calistoga that possessed a modicum of grit. It was a real bar with a community of regulars who’d been beating a path there for years to escape the tourists and tasters and collectors, the second-career winery owners and real estate developers who’d descended on Napa and spoiled it since I first knew it as a Berkeley undergrad. Then Pancho, who hired me, took off one night, proclaiming that he’d had it with gringos and was returning home to spend the rest of his life with his wife and kids, his brothers and sisters, his ailing grandmother. He tossed me the keys, bellowed ¡Mucha suerte! and disappeared into the night. A week later, when DEA agents in emblazoned vests turned up, their weapons drawn, I learned that Pancho had been dealing keys of grass across the bar and somehow managing to stay one step ahead of the law.
Suddenly I was the patrón of my own place.
At that point the green baize of the pool table was nearly as threadbare as my bank account. The SIERRA NEVADA PALE ALE sign, emblematic of my life, flickered as if lit by its own personal lightning storm. The solid oak bar was pitted and the linoleum torn and jagged, revealing patches of bare concrete. Like me, the place was beat to shit, and so I felt at home. Little did I realize that it would suck me in just as surely as had my previous career. If anything, I now had even less time for my kid. Though the court had granted me regular visitation, there’s nothing regular when you own a bar. Weeks and months went by without a visit. I wasn’t sure if or how I’d ever find a way back.
But I wanted to. I loved Danny. He was sweet and funny, sensitive and as smart as a whip. What I found tough to take were the looks he’d throw me: doubt, suspicion, and a mistrust born of endless disappointment. He stood on that odd cusp between childhood and adolescence where the consequences of our affections and disaffections first begin to take hold, and we both could see that a distance had crept up on us. There were moments when he’d look at me as if he barely knew who I was.
My guilt over my child was only exacerbated by the example of Frank Mulligan, whom I’d worked with in Seattle. We were an odd couple. His mom lived in Santa Rosa with his stepfather, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A few months after I left Seattle, his stepfather died, and Frank called. He wanted to move down to keep an eye on his mother, and asked if I could find him work in the area. I told him he could split shifts with me at Pancho’s and that we’d figure it out.
I was intent on making a go of it. I knew the game, its lingo and tired rituals, so I put my knowledge to good use, drawing on the contacts I’d made while working in Seattle to assemble an offbeat collection of odd bottles for the bar—old-vine Mataro, funky Zin, the first cracks at Viognier made in California—to roll out value for friends in the biz. Soon we had a following, Frank and I.
I’d wanted to return to a life that felt real, to hit some rock-bottom authenticity that smacked of integrity, to beat a path back to my son. But all I had really done was flee my life as a sommelier to set one up in Napa, mistaking it as an escape to reality. Had I wanted to escape—really escape—I’d have been better off moving to Detroit.
3
The parking lot at Norton was empty, save for an old Ducati leaning against a stanchion. The front door was locked, and I walked around back. Barn doors stood open, waiting for the tractors to arrive, and I wandered inside.
It was a mammoth structure that held the fermentation tanks, a dozen luminous stainless steel cylinders that suggested a modern dairy more than a winery, and two giant oaken fermenters, what the French call foudres. The wine press was state of the art.
I heard something rustle and called, “Hello! Anybody home?”
The young Frenchman I’d seen the day before stepped from behind the press. He looked startled to see me. He was tall and lanky, his head topped by a nest of brown curls, his chin dusted with an immature Vandyke. He had watery eyes and a nose that he might grow into in a decade if he was lucky.
“You’re Jean, right?”
“Sí.”
“We haven’t met. My name’s Babe.”
“Babe. Comme un bébé?”
“Yeah. Funny, huh?”
He didn’t respond, just looked at me and waited for me to explain myself.
“How’s it going, your stage?” I used the French word for internship, hoping to put him at ease.
“Fine, simple.”
“How’d you end up here?” I asked.
“Colin did a favor for the man who imports his barrels. He knows . . .” he hesitated for a second, then said, “our family.”
“Your family are vignerons?”
“Yes, of course.” The idiocy of the question irritated him.
“Where?” I asked.
“Nuits,” he said tersely. It was shorthand for Nuits-Saint-Georges.
“How long are you here for?”
“Just one harvest. To see how you do things.”
“And? What do you think of American winemaking?”
I could tell he was sizing me up, trying to figure out how much to say.
“Well, you know, you Americans, you make one wine, maybe two. A white and a red. Chardonnay, Cabernet.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“And you put everything into oak,” he added.
“Not everything.” I was feeling defensive. “Some of our wines are terrific.”
“Perhaps,” he offered.
“You don’t like our style?”
“They taste fat to me—how do you say, clunky. The fruit is thick, like syrup. Stupid wine.”
“Some of them can be a little coarse,” I admitted, but it was hardly surprising that a young man from Burgundy whose family made Pinot Noir would dismiss Napa Valley Cab.
“Aggressive, non? Cowboy wine.” He drew two phantom six-shooters. “Bang, bang,” he said, blowing the invisible smoke from their barrels. “Even Davy Crockett makes wine.”
“Yeah, Fess Parker. Pretty goofy, huh?”
He didn’t laugh. “You are looking for Colin?” he said.
“Uh, no, actually I’m looking for a woman I met here yesterday. She was at the reception desk.”
“Carla,” he said.
“Is she around?”
“No, I have not seen her. I think she has the day off.” He turned, anxious to get back to work.
“Anybody else around?” I said.
“They are picking. But they should be here soon. Any minute,” he said, impatient to get rid of me.
“They’re probably running late. Traffic’s hell.”
We stood there in a meaningless version of a Mexican standoff.
“I must get ready for them,” Jean said.
“Sorry, I know you’re busy. Bonne chance,” I said, extending my hand. He took it reluctantly. “Hey, you wouldn’t know Carla’s last name, by any chance?”
“Fehr,” he said and turned, disappearing behind a fermentation tank. He pronounced it fear.
I sat in the front seat of the truck and tried directory assistance again. I struck out in Napa and St. Helena, but she was listed in Yountville. The phone rang only once.
“Where were you last night?” she said.
“Excuse me, Carla? This is Babe Stern.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I thought it was Richard.”
“You didn’t see him last night?”
“He was supposed to come straight here from the winery. I waited for hours.”
“And he never called, obviously.”
“Obviously,” she said.