Page 16 of Grape Juice
I laugh, run my tongue over the compliment, savoring the perfect symmetry of his delivery. Ruby was right: There’s nutritional value in being looked at in certain ways. It’s nourishing, the way he witnesses.
“Oh yeah? You into that? Dish-doing?”
“I guess I’d watch you do most things.”
I laugh, louder now.
“Sorry... too much?” His eyes dart across my face, searching for some legible reaction.
I nod, doing my best to keep my face neutral, to weigh down the corners of my mouth.
“Do youwantme to look at you?”
Again, I nod. But this time I don’t suppress my smile. It arrives both because of and in spite of him.
The space between us is so narrow, I can see the gapsbetween his teeth. It’s almost as if we could transfer air in some closed-loop system, breathing each other in.
“I’d like to kiss you.” His voice is not quite a whisper. Some in-between decibel. I can feel the kinetic force of the acknowledgment. I don’t dare lean in, however desperately I want to. If there is a line, it’s his to cross.Stay still, stay still, I will my feet, repeating the directive like some protective omen. He runs his hand through his hair, bites his lip again.
As if on cue, out of the dense silence: the sound of a glass shattering, sharp and briny. A light switches on in the kitchen, leaking yellow into the dark void where we stand.
“I’d like to kiss you too,” I say, and I turn to walk back toward the house.
IX
I wake up and nudge the debris from my eyes, wondering how much time has passed since I crawled into bed. In New York, I often tossed and turned anxiously, anticipating whether or not sleep would wade in, would last. Here, I tend to lie down only to blink awake at the sound of my alarm moments later, as if the hours between have been nothing but a jump-cut. Two separate days spliced together.
I stumble downstairs, barefoot, for coffee. The espresso machine makes a deep, guttural sound, something like a stomach whining, while it grinds beans and siphons liquid into the thimble-size cup. I bring it to my mouth, and it’s hot enough to burn—just a small singe like some branding of the tongue.
Having woken before Ruby, I dress in the dark, choosing garments suited to the task of pigeage—or my understanding of it, at least. Outside the bedroom window, the sun is just beginning to leak over the vines, and its nascent light is yolky and thin. I tiptoe outside to finish my espresso on a wooden bench that’s flush with the back of the house, and I revel in the quiet. There is something I’ve alwaysloved about waking up first in a house full of people, sampling the day before it’s intended for use. Borrowed time.
As I empty my coffee, a long shadow falls across my lap. Standing there, unapologetically tall, is Antoine, with an espresso of his own balanced atop a saucer. Briefly, I feel a certain nakedness at having gone saucer-less.
He sits beside me and takes a long, drawn-out sip before addressing me. “I love this time of day.” I wonder if he’s selected me for the task of pigeage with intention, sensing we might share some strange affinity for the day’s preamble.
“Me too. It feels so private.”
“It’s true. You know, harvest is quite social, isn’t it? I’m used to being here alone—or mostly alone—for so much of the year.” He set his drink down on the bench. “Then, for this little stretch of time, the whole place feels so alive.”
“Which version do you prefer?”
“Thisarrangement gets a little exhausting—I like my solitude. But then I have moments when I look at all of you at the end of the day. You’re all tired, laughing, enjoying one another. That’s good for me. There are phases when I get so focused on the vine work, the soil, all the technical stuff in the cellar. Tasting, sugar densities, blending, racking. Sometimes I forget what it looks like to enjoy wine.”
“Really?” I’m not sure why it surprises me that a man so gifted in his technical craft might be just as commendably thoughtful in more nebulous ways.
He smiles softly, gazing down into his cup. “At the start of a meal, I watch you all taste something—you pay attention, you notice, you listen. Then, you forget. You talkto one another with so much enthusiasm. The wine is just there as background noise—that’s how it’s supposed to be. An accoutrement, not the main event.”
I can’t help but grin in that unabashed, anything-but-coy way I seem to do so much here. “That’s really good. You should write that down.”
“Why are you smiling so big?” He nudges my shoulder.
As I consider, I rest my eyes on the yellowing horizon. “Because it’s true. When I got here, that was the first thing I noticed—how layered and loud and rich it was to sit and watch people at a table like that. How it gives the wine a certain taste or, at least, some memorable quality.”
What I mean is: It’s begun to seem to me as if thirst presents in its own extraordinarily palpable ways here—not for wine but for everything. A near-biological yearning for conversation, physical contact, intimacy. Grammatically, in French, you “have thirst”:Tu as soif. As if that kind of desire were something you could hold, a souvenir. As if it were real and essential enough to exist in some three-dimensional form atop the table.
I continue, attempting to convey the vivid desperation and near-violent satisfaction this place conjures for me. “Every day here, by lunchtime, it feels like I have never been hungrier, have never wanted food with such desperation. I don’t think I’ve ever drank—water and wine, both—with such enthusiasm, felt so enrapt in conversation, or so eager to crawl into bed. It’s like this constant rhythm of longing and satisfying.”
Antoine nods slowly, a smirk of his own growing. “Ithink that’s why people come here. It makes them feel very human.”
