Page 34 of Grape Juice
Suddenly, the grim sound of shattered glass clatters beneath us, and it shocks us back into form. We move toward the edge of the roof to see what has gone wrong: It’s Antoine, a shattered bottle at his feet, his hand bleeding. He sways just slightly, and I register my own surprise. I’d assumed it would be near impossible to get a man of his stature drunk.
Henri and Julian hurry down the ladder, and I watch as they rush to either side of Antoine to guide him into a seat. Bea appears with ointment and a bandage. Julian locates a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the glass. Henri crouches by Antoine, talking close to his ear, offering platitudes I wish I could hear.
When Pietro climbs down to urinate in the bushes, I realize that we have polished off the magnum—and rather quickly, at that. I am drunk. Drunk-adjacent. Ruby and I lay back, staring up at the wide-open expanse of the blue-black night sky stamped with stars. “I’d say we’re quite good for each other. Right place, right time,” she says, leaning her head against my shoulder.
“Right place, right time,” I respond, nuzzling her closer. “I’ll always have been lucky to know you, even when there are oceans—plural—between us.”
“Nothing gold can stay,” she whispers with a certainsingsongy swell. “Some great male author wrote that, right? I think I saw it tattooed on someone at the beach once.”
I laugh. “Robert Frost—good poet, bad tattoo.”
“Isn’t that always the case?”
I stand up and extend a hand to help her. Then together—slowly given our degree of intoxication—we amble down to greet the rest of the world.
At ground level, the party is swelling like an oceanic thing. Empty bottles litter the grass like debris. The tables are strewn with half-eaten plates of tarte flambée, pairs of hands fluttering over squares of rolling paper and pouches of tobacco. The music is a jagged, rumbling form of jazz, akin to the disjointed rhythm of the event.
Across the lawn, I see Henri, now in a blue chore jacket—the kind that you can buy for €5 on the streets in France and $500 in a boutique in New York. He moves through the crowd, the long glide of him, stepping past angled bodies and outstretched hands.
I refill my glass with the first half-empty bottle I spot without bothering to check what it is, then I comb my way through the crowd in search of Ruby, who has gone off to find arealbathroom in lieu of the bushes.
As I wander, I’m pulled into intermittent conversation with the folks peppered throughout the yard—people who want to know what, exactly, an American girl is doing inAlsace. How is harvest treating me? And do I have a visa? Am I married?
I make my way through each exchange inelegantly—though, much to my delight, my French spills out fluidly, void of the stopgap of my sober self-consciousness. Drinking can be useful that way.
By the time I reach the edge of the crowd, my usual compatriots nowhere to be seen, I’m grateful for a moment of reprieve. I lower myself to the ground and gaze out at the labyrinth of vines, the wall of quiet. How unto itself this place is. How far from my own world—and how close too.
I feel a hand come to rest on my shoulder as if I’ve willed it into existence—I don’t need to look up to see who it belongs to. I know his smell, the particular tension in his fingers, the way his touch makes my muscles want to cling closer to my bones.
“Bonsoir,” he says quietly—more to the expanse of vines than to me.
“Bonsoir,” I reply, matching his volume.
“Can we speak yet?”
He is crouched next to me, and I can feel the warmth of his breath on the side of my face. I can’t tell if he sounds drunk—or if, through my own intoxication, the whole world seems that way.
“We can.” I stand up, and he does too. I can’t help but want more proximity, more closeness. More and more and more.
I kiss him, and he kisses me back—the two of us negotiating the space between us trepidatiously this time. Butwhen I reach for the back of his neck, my grip is firm, desperate, pleading, and he presses his mouth harder against mine—a whole conversation of its own.
We pull apart, and he grasps my shoulders, stepping back a footprint to look somewhere deep inside me from arm’s length. “Can you tell me what’s happening in your brain, Alice? I can’t figure out what’s going on.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” I rest my hand on top of his. “All night, I’ve wanted to ask you about... about what happened. And if you’re OK. I just... we haven’t been alone. And I spiraled a little before.” I look up at him, and he raises an eyebrow.
The truth is, I can’t figure out how to contextualize us now. And more hauntingly, the plausibility of anusat all clarifies the size and shape of my feelings. The largeness, the substantiveness. “It just all feels so real now... or at least sopossible,” I tell him. “But also, I don’t know... what if the sense that it’spossibleis an illusion? What if you regret the breakup?” I’m gaining some momentum. “And I know what it feels like to carry guilt around as this thing tethered to romance.” I start to pace. “I spent so long trying to unlearn that—the idea that by loving someone, you’re taking something from them. Causing them pain, offering them false hope. And now there’s no way for me to feel anything other than this impending fear that unless we end up happily married in the south of France, I’ve destroyed your life as you know it. And frankly, even if wewantedto be together in some real way, it’s not viable. We live on differentcontinents, Henri. Different time zones!” The thoughtof trying to reach him via FaceTime from such different vantage points feels vaguely tragic, the idea of constantly adding six hours to the clock somehow heartbreaking.
“Hey, hey, slow down. That’s not what it’s like—you know, I get a narrative here too.” His voice is tinged with urgency. “Who’s to say I just ruined my life? What if it’s quite the opposite? What if my life was drying up? The only happy ending here doesn’t have to involve you and me and a palace in Marseille. My life has some momentum again. I’m making choices, wanting things. And for what it’s worth, something doesn’t need to be eternal to be valuable.”
“You say that now, but what happens when you make it back to Lyon?” I can hear my own heartbeat, can feel it in my kneecaps. “And you’re figuring out what to do with your apartment? And you’re lonely? And Antoine is cold with you? And you’re dividing your group of friends between you and Charlotte? And I’m not around anymore as some kind of temporary balm?”
“Does it matter? You’re here now. We’re both here now. Why do we need to make that so complicated?”
“Because I leave in forty-eight hours!” I shout. “Even less than that now.”
I know this is an unfair way to give him the news. I’ve been treating it like a stubborn infection ignored until it turns lethal, and I haven’t so much as opened the ticket in my email.
A jolt of panic flashes across his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
