Corked (2 page)

I look at my father, whose eyes are morphing into flamethrowers, and feel the great heat descend from my earlobes down into the rest of me. It is not the good kind of heat.
Perhaps I'll just scoot over there and fetch the wine list myself! No, no. That's gauche, and will only anger him more. She'll bring it. I have faith. No I don't. She's going to grow wings specifically so that she can pluck a feather and make a quill and she will stab the quill into her own wrist and write an erotic poem of Homeric proportions in her blood. Wine list? The only feasible prospect of her bringing us the wine list is if she hits a main artery and needs my napkin to make a compress wound dressing
.

Doubling over, she laughs at something the Lego man says and coyly puts her hand on his shoulder to right herself.

My dad raises his hand. I intervene before he can say anything disgraceful.

“Dad, please, when she comes over here, just ask her for the wine list. Please don't ruin the evening. Please don't say anything that will piss her off. Please. Please promise me. Do it right now. Say ‘I promise.'” My stomach is feeble.

“Okay. Toots. Relax. I promise.” The words come out with no pauses in between. No pauses means no promises. I am not a fucking dummy. There will be no champagne tonight.

“No, Dad. Look at me and say you promise.”

He glances at me and waves his raised hand once, casually.

“
Excusez-moi, mademoiselle
,” he says, just a
tiny bit
too loudly. The other diners turn to look at the disturbance. With heroic lethargy, she walks over to the table. I look closely at her face. Under all the paint and defiance, there's the face of a girl. She's 18, maybe.

My father drums his fingers three times on the tablecloth and squints. That is it. A wave of premature hurt ripples through me.

“So,” my father begins, “how would you like to proceed,
mademoiselle?
Would you like me to tell you how to do your godforsaken job, or are you so stupid I should simply do it for you?”

“
Pardon?
” she says. Her tone is deliberately offhand. Looking up at her briefly, I see that she is smirking, but with the wobbly mouth of a child. I fixate on the candle again.

“Obviously, my being here is a massive imposition, and your establishment magically keeps itself afloat by treating its patrons like dog shit, am I correct?” My dad raises his voice by several decibels.

“Well, sir….”

Everyone who is eating has put down the cutlery. Everyone on staff has stopped in his or her tracks. All eyes are on us: table dystopia. The Lego waiter's face is grim. A couple sitting at the table behind my father's chair have their heads down. The woman mutters, “
S'il vous plaît
.” I think I hear her husband call my father an ass.

He goes on, arms flagging.

“Well, sir, what? WELL, SIR, WHAT? DO YOU NEED TRAINING? DO YOU WANT ME TO BE YOUR TRAINER? WHEN TWO PEOPLE WALK INTO A RESTAURANT YOU DO NOT DISAPPEAR YOU BRING THEM THE WINE LIST SO THEY CAN HAVE A DRINK. THERE, THAT IS YOUR TRAINING. BUT WHAT I WILL NOT DO IS SIT HERE AND PAY MONEY OUT OF MY WALLET WHILE I TRAIN YOU TO DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.”

I reach for my jacket and stammer, “Dad. Please let's just go.” The room is swimming, cloudy. It is as though my eyeballs have been dipped in Vaseline.

He is still yelling as he rips his blazer off the chair, knocking it over.

The waitress says, “You're welcome to eat somewhere else, sir.” In her hands is the wine list. She drops it accidentally. I pick it up and hand it to her, staring at her belt because I don't want to look at her face. She thanks me in a small voice.

My father storms through the restaurant, passing every table. I follow, wishing myself dead. Couples quickly cast their eyes down and stare at their plates. Two teens, eating with their parents, are muffling laughter.

When we get to the door, my father grabs the handle and jostles it. It is locked. Naturally. Why wouldn't it be locked? He jostles and jostles.
God. Why. Why more of this?
I know people are watching, and this causes jolts of pain to fire through my neck. Seriously. We have to get the fuck out. He has to get the fuck out of my way. His rage is obliterating his motor skills.

“Dad, let me get it,” I whisper. He moves to the side; I unlock the door. We burst out into the cool evening air and I drink it in heaves. All is quiet, and the wind from earlier in the day has disappeared. Merry music continues to wander out from the other restaurants, the wide sounds cheerfully distorted in the twinkly blue night.

I look up at him. Hot tears are pooling faster than they can splash out of my eyes and they make him blurry, as though I am seeing a reflection in a lake.

I want to scream, “What the fuck is the matter with you?” But I can't. I am afraid. I am afraid that he could turn his anger on me. He could just shoot me full of holes with it. Instead, I regress; I can practically feel it happening in my body. It feels like all my insides are being sucked up. I need to get mad at him, but I need him to stay with me, so like a little child I shout, “YOU PROMISED.”

“But Tootsie, I was right. She was wrong.”

“It doesn't matter who was right or wrong. What matters is YOU PROMISED. YOU PROMISED ME. REMEMBER
ME?
” I yell these words as loud as I can, thinking for a moment that my volume will make up for their uselessness. It doesn't work. Not even close.

I storm off. I don't bother to check if he is following. I can hear his clip-clopping gait behind me. He is trying to catch up, but his knee is slowing him down. His poor, poor knee. Well fuck his knee. I speed up and set off down the hill to the parking lot.

“Tootsie!” His voice is far away. “Wait!”

I break into a faster walk, almost a jog, then a pumping sprint until I reach the Citroën, which is sitting shadowy and forlorn in the parking lot. Still sobbing, I turn on the ignition and jam the transmission into first, flooring the accelerator until the engine screams like a chainsaw.
“I'VE ENDURED AND COMPENSATED FOR A LIFETIME OF THIS FUCKSHIT BEHAVIOR.”
I bellow this to myself. I spin around and out of the lot, swerving toward his hobbling figure, which is not even halfway down the hill. The lights flash on him and he cowers a little. I lean on the horn. A thought skitters through my head, like a disoriented chipmunk darting out of a bush. For one searing flash of a moment, I think it would be a very funny joke if I were to hit him.

 

 

T
wo weeks earlier, my father and I had been dancing cheek to cheek.

We were in the presidential suite of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, on the eve of our wine odyssey, and we were joke-dancing across the freshly vacuumed taupe carpet as if we were in a village idiot's version of a Fred Astaire film. When my father dances, he notches up his alto voice to a warbling soprano and in a halfhearted, mumbling singsong croons things like “Ehhh…eeee…we are danciiiiing…Here we are…danc
eeeee
ng…da da da…do do do…cha cha cha…
danciiiiiing
….”

Our cheeks were smushed together indelicately like two old, forgotten oranges shoved in the toe of a Christmas stocking. My hand was on his shoulder, his hand on my waist. His right arm and my left one stuck straight out and were connected at the knuckles. We were a clumsy watering can, shuffling and hopping around the spent room service cart with its leftover Caesar salad smells. We mumbled his da-da-da-dancing song, our voices screeching higher and higher as we tried to contain the laughs simmering in our guts.

“Okay. Enough!” My father let go of my hand.

“Thank you for the dance,” I said, doubling over in a splendid ceremonial bow.

“No, thank
you
for the dance,” he responded, bowing lower.

“No, thank
YOU
for the dance,” I shouted, leaning into the bow until I fell slowly onto my shoulder. I lay there seizing in and out of my now-horizontal bow, a grateful epileptic.

Cackling, my father helped me up. I walked over to the couch and began drawing a two-slice toaster on a pad of hotel stationery.

“Tootsie. Don't mess around. Look at
zees
. Read it to me out loud.” He threw a thin bound document at my head. It hit me in the face and dropped onto my lap. At the top of the cover page, under a cover sheet of plastic were the words “
Safari Vinicole en Terre de France
.” Our itinerary. Picking it up, I noticed the many pages inside.

“You really stacked this trip, huh Dad?” I said.

“Start reading, Toots,” he ordered. He'd gone back to the Caesar salads and was running a crouton along the square ivory plate, ineffectively using it to wipe up smears of dressing.

“Monday, September twenty-sixth,” I read the date at the top of the page using the fake Cronkite-style broadcast voice I'd assumed while goofing around during rehearsal newscasts in the radio studio of my journalism school.

“Not the
dates
, Tootsie. The places.”

“Paris, then Contrexéville….”

“They make water there. It's next to Vittel. There, they also make water. We will baptize ourselves with water before we become soaked with wine.” He sounded like a preacher, even though he is an atheist.

“Good news,” I said.

“It will take three hours to get there,” he announced.

“Then we spend the night in Contrexéville, then we go to Alsace….”

“Which will take another three hours.” He nodded his head, affirming his knowledge of his homeland's geography.

“The next day, we have three meetings. Rémy Gresser, Manou Massenez, and Alex Heinrich.” I looked up from the page and saw that my father was pretending to sleep, chin on chest. Feeling my gaze, he pursed his lips to generate drool. I went on.

“The next day, we are going to the Alsatian baby donkey farm to buy a dozen baby donkeys, each of whom I will name after one step in the Alcoholics Anonymous program.”

“Okay. Sorry. I'm back.” He opened his eyes wide and shot me an open-mouthed grin, like he were coming out of the most restful hypnotic trance.

“We have a tasting at Clos Isenbourg, with Alex Heinrich's sommelier.” I paused to think. I realized I knew nothing about Alsace. Flipping madly through my memory's Rolodex, ripping out cards, throwing them on the floor, I willed myself back to his wine cellar in New Jersey, where we'd lived when I was small. We lived in a house, yes, but on the weekends I was forced to live in the cellar, my father's cellar, the cellar in which I'd stand, feet freezing, nose choking on clammy air, loving my father as equally as I hated that cellar and the oenological lessons he was so pathological about imposing on me there.

Suddenly, in a fit of synesthesia, I remembered something. Alsace has green bottles.

“Go on,” he urged.

“Alsace has green bottles,” I said.

“Uh, yes, my Tou Tou.”

For my entire young adulthood, I'd been pretending. Pretending at most things, but pretending a
lot
in matters concerning wine. He believes these facts he has taught me are latent. I am relatively certain they've been sucked into a parallel dimension. There live my childhood wine lessons, in the same universe as all our lost single socks. And the Krugerrand my great-grandmother gave me when I was eight.

“Tell me something about Alsace,” I said.

“You know about Alsace.”

“Yes, I do. It has green bottles. Refresh my memory with some other stuff. Please Dad.”

“Alsace,” he sighed and scanned his own memory banks for a comestible sound bite for me. “In Alsace, we will drink the highest expression of the Riesling grape. We will be in Colmar, in the north, where they make very different Riesling wines from the ones from the south. You will taste purity—
la minéralité
. Why Alsace? The lovely flowery little villages, the mountains, the confluence of two historical pillars of Europe, France, and Germany that are united, in a way, because of wine.”

“Oh, lovely. And we will eat sausage and cheese,” I stated.

“We sure will,” he said.

Satisfied, I continued reading.

“Then we drive to Burgundy.”

“Which will take many hours,” he said, drawing out the
a
in “many” to alert me of how very many hours it would take.

“Then it's more vineyard visits and tastings. The
domaine
of François Lamarche in Vosne-Romanée. After lunch, the
domaine
of the Nudant family. And then we drive to the Rhône Valley.”

“Oh, so many hours, my Tootsie!”

I flipped to the back of the book and found color printouts of French maps, with some brief driving instructions. I tallied up the kilometers to a number well over 1,000. I looked up at my father again. He had abandoned his croutons and was grimacing as he jabbed one of his omnipresent used pocket toothpicks around his teeth.

“Now tell me something about Burgundy!” I demanded, wanting the information less than I wanted to see him put the wet stick back into his shorts pocket.

“Burgundy is too complex for a little story. You are a Burgundy,” he said.

“Okay, fine. Tell me something about Côtes du Rhône then,” I said.

“Here's a story for you, Tou Tou. In 1972, I was in the Rhône Valley.
Eet
was a vacation.
Eet
was the site of my very first private wine tasting. Things were going well for me, finally, after a very bad time.” He stopped and thought a bit about this.

“What was the bad time?” I asked.

“Forget it.
Ce n'a pas d'importance
,” he said. I wanted to push him, but his face was drawn and he seemed annoyed by the memory. And I didn't want to hear him say the words, “Can I finish my story?” My father can orate for hours on end. When I was younger, I would grow bored and interrupt him. He'd raise his voice, not in volume but in octaves and say, “Can I finish my story?” This would make me feel like an idiot. I'd rather be bored than feel like an idiot.

He continued, “I was the new vice president of Skyline Hotels. I had good clothes, nice things. It was my first return to France in many years. It felt like a homecoming. I arrived in Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the evening, after driving from the north. In the town, I was walking around. I came across a big old farmhouse with a big chimney. It belonged to a couple of cousins who were known in the town. Young men. They were called Fabre-Abeille.”

“What were their first names?” I sounded interested. I was interested.

“I can't remember. Don't interrupt. This is a good story. I am telling you something good. So I walked into this open farmhouse. It was attached to a vineyard, and it was clear I could sample the wines they were making. They were friendly folks, country folks, who had just taken back the family's vineyards from their fathers and were trying to launch their wines. They told me to sit, and for the next couple of hours, they ran back and forth, getting new bottles of wine, opening them, and sampling them with me. They opened 10 bottles probably. We did a lovely
dégustation
. They brought me cheeses, meats, some fresh country bread. By the end of the evening, I walked out of their operation with a couple of bottles of wine, and went back to my hotel. I had a big fight with the woman who ran the hotel….”

“Your fault,” I said.

“Her fault,” he said.

“Of course.”

“I took my bottles of wine and went into the town square. It was dark and late. I sat on the steps and opened one bottle. As I was drinking it, I noticed there were two
clochards
….”

“Hobos.”

“Right,
hobos
, sitting on a bench across the little square. They were staring at me, at my wine, at my bounty. It was getting a little cold out—it was October. The air was chilly. I asked them if they had any kinds of cups or glasses. They both said they did, so I walked over to them, poured my wine into their cups, and we all toasted to friendship, to hope. No one cried, but everyone's eyes were a bit shiny. When I went back to the hotel, I smoked my pipe and thought, “‘We are all
des hommes de bonne volonté
,'” he said, quoting the title of the Jules Romains series he used to make me read out loud to him in New Jersey, after my wine lessons. He'd wanted to make sure my French didn't find itself in the universe of lost socks.

“Tha—”

“I'm not finished. Thirty years later—we're talking 2002 now—Blondie and I take a trip around France. We find ourselves in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, walking past the same farmhouse. The chimney is gone, but the Fabre-Abeille cousins are still there, older, a bit bigger, but what's much, much bigger is their wine house, Mont Redon. The great American wine merchant Frank Schoonmaker had discovered the house and launched them in the U.S. The cousins didn't remember me, but we did another tasting, and they were just as generous as the first. That year, I thought I was going to retire from the hotel business, and it seemed to be the closing of a perfect circle: my first private tasting as a hotel man and my last, with wines from the same vineyard.”

“Killer,” I said.

“What's killer?”

“Me,” I said.

“Yes, you're a killer. You sure are. You're my little killer of men.” He gave me a thumbs-up.

“It's a killer story, I mean,” I clarified.

“Oh, yes. It's nice,
hein
? Anyway, that's it. That's the story. Keep going with the itinerary.”

Tired, I rushed through the rest of the names. There were five more houses in Côtes du Rhône and another week's worth of visits jammed into two days in the Languedoc region.

I put down the open itinerary and took a break to excavate my belly button for lint and other crusty accumulations.

“This is the wine trip to end all wine trips,” he proclaimed.

“Hmm.” I said. I said this, but I had begun to think about my ex-boyfriend, Matthew—gorgeous, shiny-eyed Matthew.

“The most interesting schlep, technically, will be through Languedoc—big up-and-comer. In the past, just 15 years ago or so, winemakers didn't understand what kind of lucky climate they had. The wines made in the Languedoc region were ‘
les vins des plâtriers
,' as they called them. Wine for stoneworkers, who'd sit there breathing in dust and crap all day and were glad to drink even the crappiest of wines.”

Dense fatigue cloaked my face like a goose-down comforter. I missed Matthew. When we split up I became consumed with the narcissistic terror of what life would be like without his admiration. As my father went on and on about Languedoc, I wondered if I had it in me. The big
it
—the intelligence, the ability to remember, the palate, the vocabulary, the
talent
for wine. If Matthew was standing in the corner of the room, he would have wrapped his absurdly long arms around me and said, “You are the smartest woman I've ever known.” And I would have believed the hyperbole. But in that moment, I felt like I knew nothing.
I am taking this trip to prove to my father that I am what he already thinks I am, but I am actually not so sure that who he thinks I am is who I really am
. A yawning panic blasted through me. It was the same feeling that would overtake me in the cellar during his monologues.
Maybe this trip will prove that I am not good enough to be this man's daughter. The wine will call my bluff
.