Page 19 of Grape Juice
“I’m thinking about mouths,” I reply, and he laughs and presses a finger against my temple.
“Wish I could rifle around in there for a bit.”
“You wouldn’t survive five minutes up there. It’s absolute chaos.”
“Just like New York,non?”
This nod to my real life, my real context, rattles me. My ears prick at the clank of silverware coming from outside—a reminder that we are not, in fact, exempt from the passage of time down here. “We should get back... before...” I say, trailing off reluctantly. He nods and kisses me hard on the mouth, then switches on the flashlight, pulls two more bottles from the same shelf, and guides me back toward the door.
When we exit, the sky has a slippery, before-dark quality—the richness of proper nighttime diluted with eggshell primer. In the filmy soft-focus, the vines ahead seem to taper into both sky and earth at once, as if they don’t know where they end and the rest of the world begins. Henri’s hand is in mine, and something about his grasp feels that way too: I can’t quite distinguish where our perimeters live, where I end and he begins.
Once more, he pulls me toward him, and our bodies arch away from each other where we cradle the wine in the crooks of our elbows. I press my mouth to his, and already, the taste of him is familiar. I can imagine waking up to it with the lacquer of sleep still on his teeth. As he pulls away, our noses brushing, the light of the emerging moon flashes across his eyes, and his mouth sets in a goofy grin. How large it feels to actualize a thing I want—the ways it satisfies and the ways it merely spawns more hunger.
We turn back toward the house, and I feel Henri halt suddenly. He drops my hand, reestablishing our perimeters—and then I see. There is Antoine, arms folded across his chest, unmoving. I clutch tighter at the bottles in my possession, like some kind of useless armor, and I clock the ways anger—perhaps disappointment or merely sternness—contort his jaw, tempering the rise and fall of his chest. I feel some old, familiar flash of childhood shame—as if I’ve just been caught passing a note in class or hacking away at my own bangs with a pair of safety scissors. I look at Henri, but his attention isn’t with me anymore. He’s with his uncle, engaged in some silent discourse I can’t even pretend to access.
“Dinner’s ready. Bea is waiting.” Antoine approaches only to remove the bottles from Henri’s arms and turn back toward the group. I follow him dutifully, leaving Henri in the dark, feeling like poison matter.
When I arrive back at the table, depositing bottles on either end, Pietro skips over enthusiastically. “Ragazzi, at long last!” He reaches an arm over my shoulder, and inhis oversized, floppy enthusiasm, it is more headlock than anything else. “You’re covered in dirt! You crazy girl.”
I look and see my arms are coated in the dark, ashy debris of the cellar—my T-shirt now far from fresh. “Oh no!” I say in mock horror and wipe filth affectionately from my own shirt onto his forearms.
“Terrible! How could you! My beautiful arms!” he shrieks, giggling. “Lucky for you, you’re still my favorite. Go clean your hands and I’ll save you a seat.” He frees me from his grasp, and I traipse into the kitchen, trying to steady myself. The hum of my own panic runs through me like the cool, unwelcome rush of IV fluid. While I watch the soap bubble up over my fingers in the sink, I remember that bit about the “Happy Birthday” song—from start to finish, precisely the time it takes to wash one’s hands properly. Precisely how many musical bars kill toxic matter. I imagine the suds having some sanctifying power, rinsing me clean and absolving me.
I don’t regret kissing Henri, exactly—at least, I don’t think so. But Idoresent the concreteness of it. We’ve changed our state of matter. With Antoine as our witness, we are no longer a charged, dreamy plausibility. We’ve dipped our toes into something else.
After rubbing my palms raw and chanting my way through “Bonne anniversaire” silently, I dry them with a dish rag and then return to Pietro, who has already loaded a plate of pasta for me. I thank him with a squeeze of his elbow and lift a forkful to my mouth, chewing slowly.
All through dinner, I am careful to offer appropriatenods, to engage without engaging, and at some point, just as the wine bottles are verging on empty, I hear Ruby call my name from across the table.
“Alice, honeybee, where’s Henri?”
I look around, mimicking surprise at his absence—as if I haven’t spent the last hour registering the lack of him so potently that he’s occupied more space than the living, breathing bodies at the table.
I shrug. “Haven’t seen him since we sat down... maybe he went somewhere with Antoine?”
“Humph, their loss.” She twists a final bite of pasta around her fork.
XI
Tonight, for the first time since arriving, my bodily needs—eating, sleeping—refuse to take full-throttle priority. Lying in bed, I wonder if I might hear Henri pass in the hallway. If he’ll knock at my door, usher me outside, offer some reassurance that he wanted this, whatever it is—that hestillwants it (me) now that we’ve exited the territory of the theoretical. Then I berate myself for agonizing.You’re not like this, I chastise myself in my head, rolling onto my back. He and I are adults; kissing is small, and plain, and human. Anyway, the allure of Henri is—or was—tied up in his inviability. We are impossible, contextually hopeless. Perhaps we’ve just gotten the thing out of our systems. Now, we’re free.
I consider pulling out my phone to send him a WhatsApp message. We all have one another’s numbers—Antoine had started a group thread for the vendangeurs when we all arrived. But for as long as Henri and I have known each other, our rapport has been three-dimensional, face-to-face—well, face-to-vine, really. We only exist in each other’s company, in the flesh—with all the stumbling,rambling, mistranslated inconveniences that presents. Texting feels like it might rupture something. Like breaching another dimension.
All night, I toss fitfully, feeling the swell of fatigue tighten around my eyes. At the sound of my alarm, I throw off my covers and, pining for some tangible kick start, meander downstairs for a coffee before changing. Waiting by the espresso machine—with a sly, chipper grin on his face—is Julian, pulling a coffee of his own.
“Well, someone’s not looking her best,” he says with a smile, and I grimace in response.
“A bit early for compliments, no?”
“Americans and their compliments. Don’t you all ever get tired of saying nice things to each other?”
“Coffee, Julian. Need coffee.”
He reaches into the cupboard over my head for a cup, sticks it under the machine, and punches the button, urging the gears into motion. We watch with rapt attention as the murky brown liquid flows in dual streams, settling with a frothy scrim across the top.
“Coucou, how did you all sleep?” Bea’s voice greets us from the doorway, where she’s already clad in kitchen clothes and a flour-dusted apron, flanked by Henri in his standard workwear. “Vous avez bien dormi?”
Julian, Henri, and I nod in unison. I look at my feet.
