Page 17 of Grape Juice
“I imagine it’s very therapeutic.”
“Is it? You tell me. You’re the one living it.”
I chew on my lower lip, tug at the hem of my shorts. “I’d say so. I think I forgot what it felt like to want things. Maybewantingis the opposite of apathy—it’s so vulnerable to want.”
“You didn’t want anything when you got here?”
“I think I was just comfortable at home. Maybe a little numb. I forgot how good it feels to desire.”
“And Henri? Does that kind of wanting count?” he asks. His question is abrupt, but his tone isn’t sharp. My skin prickles with exposure. I feel the anxious groan of shame set in, somewhere in my abdomen, and I wonder if it belongs. Antoine stares ahead, seemingly unfazed, in a way that I hope implies curiosity rather than criticism. I resolve to respond in good faith, treat this as a plainly democratic conversation.
“I... yeah.Oui, ça compte, it counts. But I think the wanting is the important part—sort of a healthy thing for the both of us?” I attempt to take a sip from my cup, forgetting that I’ve already emptied it. I don’t mean to speak on Henri’s behalf—I just want Antoine to understand that there is an odd innocence to our intentions. “I like to think the wanting will have been special. Plenty of reasons to leave things unactualized, and...” I trail off, curious as to whether my spiel has made sense, has translated properly. And I realize, in some small and mortifyingmoment of clarity, that I am telling the truth. There’s something so rich about the longing—all the more savory and outsizedbecauseit’s an impossibility. I have no need to complicate matters by integrating reality.
Or maybe that isn’t true at all. Maybe it is easier to bar myself from believing I can have the real thing. That way, the absence won’t hurt.
“Hmm. I see, I see.” He scratches his beard. “Listen, people are complicated—I can’t say what’s right for either of you. But be careful: Just because you’re both removed from your day-to-day lives doesn’t mean that whatever happens here won’t travel home with you.”
I nod diligently. Fearfully, almost.
By now, the sun is beaming, and the music of morning is spilling out from the house: phone alarms, spoons clinking against glassware, water running, footsteps and footsteps and footsteps.
“Shall we?” Antoine asks, standing and stretching one arm over his head. He presents as stoic, neither generous nor judgmental.
“Oui, on y va,” I respond, and I rush to deposit our coffee cups into the sink before following him into the cellar.
True to its name, the space is cavernous, with concrete floors and high, rounded ceilings. It’s lined in what seems like a random assortment of casks, tanks, and oak barrels so large,barrelhardly seems the proper term. Nestled between, there are enormous steel presses shaped like the tumblers on the backs of cement trucks and designed to squeeze juice from the fresh grapes we pick each day. Theycough out the excess bits—skins, branches, leaves—in a bin beneath.
Antoine shows me how to measure the sugar densities and the temperatures in each separate vessel, marking them down in black marker on a laminated sheet. As the wines ferment, both the temperature and the sugar levels rise. That’s how we know the magic is happening.
I climb into tanks one by one, dragging a rusted ladder with me for access, marching around the surface of each container to press the fermenting grapes gently. Each day, these tanks are pressed by foot, the ever-alluring act of pigeage. Waddling around inside feels like mucking through mud—how I used to imagine quicksand might function when I read about it in novels. At first, the surface feels firm and unyielding—then, as I shift my weight from one foot to the next, I sink slowly until I’m thigh deep. Then I wrench each leg free and go again. Just like that, in circles, fifteen minutes in each tank.
Once the grapes begin to arrive, directly from the picking team in the vines, I stand in empty tanks while the fruit is loaded into each one via a long conveyor belt. The machine is called a giraffe—jhee-raf, Antoine pronounces it—and it does indeed resemble the elongated neck of a zoo animal as it feeds fruit from bins on the floor up over the lip of this enormous cylinder. Inside, my job is to press quickly with my feet to ensure that we are sealing in as many grapes as possible, making room for more.
At the end of the first shift, my legs ache. I crave sunlight. My temples hurt from the darkness and the mentalwork of translation—just as Julian warned, the cellar operates solely in rapid-fire French. I’m flailing about to keep up, faltering with directions given to me at a breakneck pace.
Once afternoon arrives, I begin to hear engines shorting outside, sputtering to a stop to deposit the pickers, and the faint, undulating beat of techno pulses, courtesy of our Italian boy. I have one tank remaining—the day’s final pigeage. It just happens to be a wide, square vat large enough to serve as a small swimming pool.
“Should only take you two hours!” Antoine teases, winking at me.
I’m rinsing pinot noir off my legs with a hose, and he must see the flash of horror in my eyes. “I’m just kidding.C’est une blague—it’s a joke.” He wraps an arm around my shoulder playfully. “I’ll have Julian send someone in to help you with the last tank. With two of you, it’ll take no time.”
Light unfurls across the floor in wide bands as he pushes open the cellar doors and strides outside, calling Julian’s name. I stand, barefoot and damp, in spandex shorts and a sports bra—my skin, from the knees down, stained a rusted-red hue like a drunken shadow. I position the ladder against the final vat and climb it slowly, rung by rung, careful not to slip as I hoist myself into the tank. The grapes feel gelatinous and cool against my heels—aloe on a sunburn.
Then, in the doorway: Henri, shaped like a chess piece or a good omen.
He holds up a hand in a gentle half wave. I do the same, feeling blithely aware of the distance between the cellardoor and where I perch. How many yards—or meters, here—separate us. In painfully slow motions, he reaches down to remove his shoes and socks and picks up the hose to rinse his feet clean. Then, at long last, hands on his hips, he turns to face me.
“You ready for me up there?” he asks, approaching the ladder.
“I don’t know if there’s room for you.” I gesture sarcastically toward the wild expanse of grape acreage in the tank. He laughs and steps from the top rung of the ladder down into the red must with far more grace than I’d managed. The hem of his shorts hangs too low. Already, he is submerged up to his pockets, the cloth blooming red in real time. He looks down, assessing the damage, and reaches to remove his still-untarnished shirt from the equation, pulling the white cotton mass over his head and tossing it lightly over the edge and onto the floor of the cellar.
Thus far, I’ve spent so much time looking at his hands working in vines, his jaw as he speaks. I’ve become so enamored of the smaller appendages, I’ve nearly forgotten about the absolute landmass reality of his body. The tapered shoulder muscles, the ridge of clavicle, the gold chain that hangs like a garnish, twisted so the clasp faces front. His stomach is flat and rigid with muscle, but not so much so as to seem inhuman. Not architectural but alive. A certain softness there too.
“Ahem,” Henri interrupts, evidently amused by my unsubtle assessment of his new half-nakedness. “I’m not a piece ofmeat.”
I laugh, suddenly aware of my own skin—how much of me is on display. “I beg to differ,” I shoot back, wrapping my arms, by some gravitational instinct, around my ribs to remedy the exposure.
“Hey”—he steps forward and unwinds my arms one by one—“ifyouget to look, I get to look too.”
