Page 5 of Grape Juice
He sighs his consent, and through the vines, as we clip, he explains that he’d been living in Lyon with his girlfriend, tending bar at a small spot he’d opened with a childhood friend. A proper dream come true (“Not to be sentimental about it,” he says). Regulars, his own wine list, a record collection. Walls he painted himself, tiles he cemented into place, a chalkboard smudged with rotating menu items. Tragically, however, the bar had closed earlier this year for all the usual reasons, and in a justifiable stupor, he’d come back to Alsace as a bit of a palate cleanser. This is where he grew up, and working the vendanges with his uncle was meant to mark the end of something. “Or perhaps the beginning of something else,” he says. “I’m not sure which. Either way, a balm.”
“Uncle?” I ask, doing my best to ignore the sour flinch in my throat the wordgirlfriendprovokes.
“Ah yes, you didn’t know? Antoine’s family.”
“No wonder he likes you so much.”
“Blood lineageandmy winning personality.”
“Of course, of course,bien sûr.”
“Anyway, I’m here for medicinal purposes. That’s the story.”
I understand. “Je comprends,” I tell him. If I subtract the mental image of the partner, it’s easy to picture him in his own amber-lit bar, apron tied around his waist, refilling the glasses of patrons he knows by name. I like it—like conjuring him in the architecture of the real world, even knowing I’ll never encounter him there.
Relatively speaking, our motivations are similar. I, too, had been in the market for something hard edged—some capital-letter Experience to slap me awake—when I left home. The antidote to ennui, whatever that tasted like. Pinot gris, I hoped. “Comment dis-tu‘jaded’?” I ask him. How does one say it in French?
“What does this mean?”
“It’s hard to explain—boredom about things that are not particularly boring. Beingtoo cool, I guess.”
“I don’t know if we have this word.” Through the greenery, I can make out Henri rubbing his chin. I can almost hear him mining his own mental thesaurus. “Maybe it’s just that we enjoy boredom more than you do.”
By now, the sun has clicked into place overhead. Henri flings off his jacket among the vines, and I do the same with my sweatshirt. It feels like peeling off some protective membrane, and in turn, we start picking faster, speaking more freely. I am somewhere between switched on and ignited with the arrival of true daytime.
“Americans—you’re not so good at sitting still,” headds, and it’s as though his words are italicized with accent. “If you give it a different name, boredom can be poetic too.”
“It’s a nice thought, but I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Well, tell me about your boredom, then. It’s your turn.”
“Maybe I’ve never properly diagnosed it myself.” I feel warm, and I don’t know if it’s the rising temperature or the continued interrogation. “My job—it’s a lot of shmoozing about things that feel so distant. I develop a script and I perform it—it’s well-informed lying. And it gets exhausting. The whole wine-sales thing. And...” I pause, unsure how to frame the next bit tactfully.
“And? Come on... it’s a boyfriend thing, isn’t it.”
“Am I so devastatingly predictable to you?”
“Go on!”
“Yeah, OK, fine, you’re right. I concede. Until recently, I was in this relationship—this relationship-adjacent thing—kind of by accident.”
“You ended it by accident?”
“No, I mean... the relationship itself was an accident.”
“How, exactly, does that happen to a person?”
“I guess I just never resisted. I kind of feel like it happenedtome.”
“That’s cold.”
“Is it?”
“Very.”
We both go silent, and I consider it. Technically, I’d been seeing Jameson for months—long enough to be employing more committal verbs thanseeing. He was the GM at a restaurant downtown that charged $12 for buttered bread,and he substantiated my theory that all women are obliged to spend 60percent of their dating lives with men whose names begin with the letterJ.
He was algorithmically handsome in a way that suggested he’d never had to work terribly hard for positive romantic results. In the greater context of our slice of New York, we did the same things, knew the same people, drank wine in the same rooms—places where we could send texts under the table or whisper suggestive things over our Zalto glasses. We made sense together like certain salad toppings or discordant garments—but I never thought about him when he wasn’t there. There was some bizarre, invisible-ink quality to my affection. At times, his name would pop up on my phone screen and I’d realize I’d forgotten about him entirely.
