Page 9 of Grape Juice
“New York, be careful with that thing.” I feel a touch on my elbow, and I nearly drop the bowl.
But of course, I know who it is. Henri smells like bitter lavender and clean cotton. Something about the smell, the palm against my elbow, makes me want to sleep next to him. Not with him, exactly, but beside him. Perhaps on an airplane—a long, overnight flight.
I look at him over my shoulder. His hair is wet and glistening where it slouches over his forehead. “Sorry, did you want to comment on my whisking technique?”
“No, no, great form. Very sturdy. Don’t let me interrupt.”
“OK, OK, enough,assez,” Bea interjects, peering into the bowl and removing it from my hands. “You two: The figs. Enough for everyone. Henri, you show Alice.”
“OK, Alice, follow me! Much to teach you!Allons-y.” He pronounces my name at a slant—Ah-lease—with a thin, trailingssssat the end. It’s a sound I want to follow.
Outside, he leads me past the edge of the house, where Antoine is rinsing buckets from a spigot. Tucked just out of view, beyond the pasture, is a garden so bright and verdant, it seems like something drummed up by the Disney overlords. Low plots studded with cabbage frame walls of tomato vines that have knotted themselves around lean wire structures. Herbs in tight rows feather the edges, and squash and eggplants lay plump and heavy, splayed out lazily in a way that verges on glutinous. Early evening sun streaks in like something poured.
“What, they don’t have gardens in New York?” Henri teases, looking at me askance.
I realize I’m grinning in that stupid, slap-happy waythat comes with forgetting yourself. “Honestly... no. Not like this.”
He reaches an arm around my shoulder, carrying his musky male scent with him, and I can sense the proximity of his fingers where they dangle above my collarbone. “Awe-struck looks good on you. Makes you seem more gentle.”
Gentle. I turn the word over in my mouth. It’s not one that’s usually ascribed to me, and it feels out of place, like some small bone stuck in the windpipe. Part of me wants to protest: I am cold, aloof, unknowable. But in spite of myself, I like his assertion, like how it registers in his voice.
By some magnetic instinct, I feel myself lean into him—or I stop leaning away—unthinkingly resting my head on his shoulder. He props the angular dip of his chin on my head and uses his other hand to brush the hair behind my ear. We fit. The shape of him feels sturdy, like scaffolding, something vines can grow around. He exhales, and I notice his muscles tightening around the unit of us, that we’re both working hard to stand still.
Behind us, Antoine drops a bucket with a loud, rolling thud, and we both pull away rubber-band fast, unbraiding ourselves sloppily.
As I lean out to extricate myself from Henri completely, he grabs my hand and pulls me forward. “Bet you’ve never picked your own figs before. Come with me.”
He shows me to the back of the garden, where a tree with long, zealous arms drips fruit that dangles like braceletcharms. The branches stoop low enough for us to pick without climbing, and Henri models the way to pull the figs free, collecting them in the gathered hem of his shirt. Together, we pick until our T-shirts sag. Each fruit looks, to me, like a light bulb. The cartoonish depiction of some miraculous realization.
“Have you ever had a fresh fig? As in,just pickedfrom the tree?” Henri asks, and I shake my head.
Carefully, he frees one of his hands, resting his load on the other forearm, and holds one out to me just in front of my lips. “Bite.”
I lean in, open my mouth, and sink my teeth through the leathery skin to the pulpy-textured insides. It’s sweet and sticky in the way of still-young things. When I pull back, I see the constellation of tiny seeds dotting the jammy interior and Henri watching me intently, searching for a reaction.
“Well? Queen of tasting notes, tell me.” There’s hardly a foot between us, and both of us cradle our bounty like some insurance against getting closer.
“Hmm. Like honey, grass, currant jam.”
“No, no.I wantAlicewords.”
He bites down on the other half, chewing methodically and tossing the stem on the ground, looking me dead in the eyes as he swallows. A smirk tugs at his jaw.
I laugh, move my tongue along my teeth. “Tastes like... the prologue to something. First pages, a preamble.”
He contemplates briefly and then reaches to take another bite of a fig at the top of his pile. “You’re either agenius, or you’re completely nuts.” He tosses the remainder of the fig into a compost pile on the ground.
We turn to carry our harvest back to the kitchen, the two of us beaming quietly as if cherishing something far richer than a bounty of figs.
V
Dinner arrives without time for reflection. I sit beside Pietro, and he delights in recounting some late-night saga—ostensibly for my benefit, though it seems that any willing audience would do. “Untz! Untz! Untz!” he yells, pumping a fist in the air. “Really, the DJ wasso good. But, listen, it got crazier after that!”
Something about €200 and a man with a forehead tattoo. A trip to his grandmother’s to locate an emergency cash stash. “We took the money, then when we went back, we couldn’t find the guy... and when we got back to the club, we were both rolling on molly, and we had all this money, and it was just about to be sunrise, so we’re thinking, What now? And of course, the only thing to do is to meet some pretty girls and go watch the sunrise somewhere—”
I laugh, mostly awed by the joy he’s deriving from his own tale. There is a certain purity, a detectable youth, in his enthusiasm. I’m not so much older than him—six years, maybe—but his particular dialect of mischief feels far away. “So,” I prod, “did you? Meet girls?”
“Oh, yes,” Pietro smiles contentedly. “Yes, we fell in love, my friend and I. We never saw these girls again, but they were perfect—that was the most in love we ever were at the same time. We both fall in love a lot, but not usually at the same time. Anyway, I think they might’ve stolen our money... or maybe we gave it to them.”
