Page 6 of Grape Juice
When Alec had emailed me with my departure instructions, annulling my pseudorelationship had been my first order of business—and evenIcould acknowledge that I’d been all too eager for an “out”... especially one that involved a clean, intercontinental exit.
As I finished packing, I’d recounted the details of my so-called breakup to my roommate Emma. “Maybe you’ll fall in love with someone you actually like now. SomeoneFrench,” she mused. She’d spent the morning handing me dresses and ballet flats, all of which I’d promptly returned with the reminder that I was not, in fact, heading off to drink pastis by the Canal Saint-Martin with men named Pierre-Yves. I was going to crawl around in dirt, picking grapes with aging, bitter farmers, most likely—ones whospoke in dialects of French I’d find even more difficult to parse than the Parisian version.
“I’m not sure my French is good enough to seduce anyone,” I’d countered.
“You’re pretty enough to be bad at grammar.” She sat on top of my suitcase while I struggled to yank the zipper shut.
“Sometimes you sound like someone wrote you,” I replied, knowing that was just the sort of thing she loved to hear.
“To the baquet?” Henri asks, reasserting his presence. I lift my bucket with one hand and pat my brow with the back of the other, feeling my skin go warmer by the minute.
III
Lunch in Alsace bears no resemblance to the flimsy notion of the meal I maintain in New York, pieces of string cheese and complimentary office pretzels inhaled while drafting emails.
Around noon, Bea arrives at our post in the fields in a truck and begins to unload a swath of folding tables, dead-straight down the vines. We all stand in a line, washing dirt and grape debris from our hands at the spout of a gallon water jug, rinsing our tools and stacking our buckets before helping her shepherd unmarked bottles of chilled wine, silverware, and trays of bread to the tables. Then we line up again, clutching our plates, waiting as she scoops enormous, entirely implausible quantities of lentil goop onto each of our dishes. I’d have thought the whole tableau was some kind of glimmering mirage—this apparition of a feast set amid endless greenery—if I couldn’t smell the food myself.
Instead of queueing up with the rest of the throng, Henri takes a seat and starts methodically rolling a cigarette, seemingly immune to the human ache of hunger.Watching him, I feel some pang of grade school fear—if we don’t enter the line together, we can’t sit together, and I’ll spend the whole of this meal entertaining a lengthy speech about Milanese rave culture from Pietro, or perhaps an evenlessamusing anecdote from one of the elder Frenchmen.
“What? Not hungry? Too proud to wait in line?” I taunt Henri, circling around the table, taking the long route to pass by him.
“Saving us seats.” He smiles and places his grape-stained palm on the plastic bench to the left of his leg.OK, OK, OK, I think.Even better.
“Ah,merci.” This boy is like a tooth gap. The relentless, curious tug of him.
As Bea fills my plate, I contort my neck to see what, exactly, it is that she’s doling out in such hearty quantities. I make out carrots and sausage in the stew, and my stomach revs with a frantic whir—a reminder that I am not used to spending my mornings like this. I’ve performed more than my standard share of manual labor, and I amhungry.
Walking back to the table, I see Antoine approach Henri, speaking quickly at a low volume close to his ear. They both look up at me in unison before Antoine knocks Henri’s cap to the side playfully and strides off to the opposite end.
“What?” I whisper to Henri, sliding into my seat.
He leans in close and puts out his cigarette in an empty water glass. “He said, ‘Be careful; she’s your type,’” he murmurs through his exhale, and I forget to breathe. He goes tofetch his food, leaving his statement hovering in his wake, shrouded in smoke, and I can feel his words lingering up by my ears.What, exactly, constitutes his type?I wonder.And does that give more or less weight to this fluency between us?
We drink Gewürztraminer out of small juice cups, and I fall into conversation with Marc, the septuagenarian day laborer to my left, who keeps suggesting I might be interested in meeting his grandson. The steady scrape of forks against plates undercuts the murmur of conversation like a bassline.
Once we’re through eating, we help return the table and its accoutrements to the truck, and Antoine redistributes us into the vines. Admittedly, I am tipsy, just ever so slightly, ill-adjusted to the daytime wine—and the beating sun, the shade of the vines. All of it lends a soft-focus, film-grade effect to the afternoon.This is not New York, I think to myself, grinning.This is something else.
As soon as we reassume our positions, Henri picks up precisely where we’ve left off, wasting no time. “OK, so, have you ever been in a relationship thatdidn’tbore you?” He clips with a renewed, postbreak fervor.
“Of course! It’s not like I’mimmuneto romance.”
“Prove it.”
I smirk at his unabashed prompting before I realize I’m meant to tell him a story. “Fine... well... a few years back, there was something. Someone,” I begin, twisting thesinew of a grape stem between my fingers, urging myself to press through my typical brand of reluctance. “Long before the nothing-guy, I had a muchlargerthing end. And I think, in some ways, I haven’treallyfelt anything since.” As I say this, I realize how true it is. I hadn’t bothered to pit the relationships so neatly against each other until now.
“How long were you together?”
“Six years, almost. A long time. It was the right thing—I mean, I think it was the right thing. The separating.”
I rarely talk about Max and try to think about him just as infrequently. I’ve devoted a considerable amount of time to building a life that functions entirely independently of his, thus absolving me of this particular breed of conversation.
“But...?”
“But... I don’t know, I’m always scared that that was mybest thing. I’m glad I got to have it for a little while, but I’m not sure you’reallowedto have it twice.”
“Well, that’s not a very optimistic thought.”
“Maybe everyone says that about the last person they loved? I don’t know.” I fiddle needlessly with a knotted stretch of vine. “After that, I started working in restaurants, and then in wine—these really social, shiny, public-facing jobs. Things I was good at, things I could be entirely absorbed in,” I continue. “And at the same time, I think something switched off, or malfunctioned in my brain. It was like I’d spent too long feeling everything in caps lock, so instead, it all went mute. And it hasn’t gotten loud again yet.”
