Page 2 of Grape Juice
She marches over and hugs me effusively, ignoring my corporate, outstretched palm. “I sleep on that bed right there, and we keep a flashlight over by the door in case you need to use the loo in the night. It’s dark, so trust me, you’ll need it. Oh, and it gets chilly in the evenings, but it’s hot as hell the rest of the time so, ya know, dress accordingly. Anyway, glad to have you. Felt like bad luck to have an empty room.”
Already, being near Ruby is like absorbing caffeine through osmosis. I like her instantly. “So glad to meet you! How long have you been here?” I match her enthusiasm as best I can—a fool’s errand, I can already surmise.
“About three weeks. I’d been doing some wine work over in the Adelaide Hills in Australia, so I decided it was about time to spend the summer on a French vineyard or two. Ya know, for context. This is actually the third winery I’ve worked with since June. But hey, enough about me. Ihear you’re from New York, right? Never been! Anyway, how’s your French?”
Her sentences come out like DJ mash-ups, each bit of information delivered in remix form.
“It’s... rusty, but sometimes I surprise myself. It helps when I’m drinking... or I’m in a moving vehicle.” I laugh. “Makes it all sound more fluid.” Really, my French improves any time I stop listening to myself, but that hardly feels worth unpacking out loud.
“Couldn’t understand ya more, honeybee. Mine’s the same. It’s improved heaps since I’ve been here, but most of the Frenchies have decent English, some better than others. And we’ve got internationals too.” Already, she seems so settled here, a fixture of the place—comparatively, anyway.
“Ah, thank God.”
“And you’re here for work? Pleasure? Love? Material?”
“Work.” I drop my gaze. Decidedly the least sexy of her offered options. “My boss sent me. He distributes Antoine’s wines in the US.”
In truth, Alec, said boss, is hardly dull: He, of the famed Alec Golde Selections, spends his weeks marauding back and forth to Chablis and Emilia-Romagna, charming winemakers into offering him custody of their bottles in exchange for the assurance that he’ll make them Burgundy Rich, while I—a “rep” by trade and by accident—hawk his wares in New York.
Nearly two years prior, I’d been Alec’s waitress at a French restaurant in Fort Greene, and at the start of hismeal, he’d asked me the difference between two sparkling options. I’d said that one tasted like unripe clementines and the other like whispering. Whether or not my customersenjoyedthis particular mode of wine discourse, it seemed apparent that few among them truly knew the meaning ofoxidativeeither way.
“The second is saltier, of course,” I’d added.
“Interesting. I don’t think of Pineau d’Aunis as a particularly coy or quiet grape,” he’d said.
“Nobody whispers about boring things,” I’d replied conspiratorially, and he’d offered me a job on the spot.
In my experience, people were always trying to rescue servers from the plight of serving, when in reality, it was a perfectly solid and entirely lucrative profession that did not feel akin to a slow-burn lobotomy in the way I imagined so many others might. In any case, I’d said yes. It’s nice to be rescued sometimes—even if from nothing.
Within the first few months of working for Alec, I learned that he had a sweet, obsessive quality about him: a tendency to carry on with games of backgammon until 3:00a.m., a daily squash regimen, a set of his own pool cues, which he gleefully toted between dive bars. With no sport at hand, he would busy his fingers rolling cigarettes, palming tobacco from a plastic pouch. He’d gladly tell anyone who asked that he’d had a nasty narcotics problem, enjoyed a brief incarceration stint, obtained a handful of lightly regrettable tattoos, then reemerged as the largest natural wine importer in the Western Hemisphere.
“Not a bad boss, eh?” Ruby prods, interrupting my silent, jet-lagged soliloquy.
“Can’t complain,” I say through a stifled yawn. “Sorry, long day of travel.”
“The wine’ll help, don’t worry.” Ruby puts a hand on my shoulder. “You ready for your debut?”
I nod my consent, and she squeezes my arm before skipping down the stairs. I trail behind and hear her mimic a trumpet noise with her mouth: “Hear ye, hear ye.Écoutez! Alice has arrived!Elle est arrivée!”
As I join her, she crosses her ankles, bows deeply, and sweeps an arm out in front of her in a sloppy curtsy. I can’t help but grin as I take stock. Bea winks at me from the stove, where she tastes pasta sauce in a stained apron, looking soen placehere, it’s as if she’s come up through the floorboards.
“Ciao, bellisima!” a lanky boy calls out, loping over in nothing but athletic shorts and a leather vest, several necklaces armoring his sternum. He kisses me on both cheeks then holds me back to look at me from arm’s length. “Youare bellisima! Thank God,” he nearly shouts in a sloped Italian accent. “We need more beautiful girls around if we’re ever going to pick all these grapes withoutdyingof boredom.” I roll my eyes and laugh cautiously.
His name is Pietro, he explains, hardly breathing between clauses, and his father is a rather prominent businessman in Milan. Earlier that year, at the ripe age of twenty-two, he’d been offered a banking internshipfor the summer via his father’s valuable connections... though he’d threatened to run away to Slovenia were he pressed to go through with it. Instead, he’d found work doing vineyard labor here, which was not exactly as good for his CV but might build character all the same—or so his father supposed.
While he speaks, he gesticulates so effusively, he seems to be whirring.
“Cool it,ragazzo. Catch your breath. You’ll scare off the American girl.” Another boy nudges in, holding a stack of cloth napkins. His English is excellent—nimble and well trained even under the tint of his French accent, like he knows how to say what he means. His hair tumbles out from under a navy logo-less baseball cap like cartoon waves, and his shirt, a short-sleeved button-down, is the same color as Bea’s Fiat—a milky weathered blue, shallow like puddles.
“She’s a New Yorker, not an American!” Ruby shouts over her shoulder from the opposite side of the kitchen, sawing away at a baguette.
“OK, New York.” He takes me in from the ground up, his gaze rising like helium, eyes as blue as his collar. “Welcome. I’m Henri.”
I test out theH-less pronunciation in my mouth:Aaaahnrree.
“Alice.Enchanté.” I hold his eye contact.
“Ah, the accent is not so bad, she speaks some French!Elle parle français.” He grins mischievously. “Can she seta table too?” He thrusts the napkins into my arms and gestures toward the door.
