Vintage Attraction (27 page)

“Because I was an idiot,” she said in monotone. “But I'm a different person now. I'm smarter. I've learned. And Dick is a success. He doesn't need to exploit me. He needs me.”

“You could make Corked4Less a real thing. With you, their wine would become significant. They'd be known for more than just the chain shop to go to for cheap Sauvignon Blanc housewives serve with before-meal cheese and crackers.”

She giggled. “Dominique would flip out when he would hear people ordering cheese as a first course.” In the chef's comic accent, she asked, “‘Cheese is for after dinner, no?'”

“Did you tell him they weren't dumb, just American?”

She snickered. “Something like that.” She took a deep breath of the sea air that permeated our little parti-colored hotel room. “So what if he wants to hire me? Do we pack up and go?”

It was a good question. I'd never dreamed I'd end up back in New York. I'd resisted the pull of the city, which mainly came in the form of my parents' nudging, for so long, for so many years. I'd gotten the sense from the occasional conversations we'd had in recent months that now they finally conceded I had a legitimate excuse to live a thousand miles away. They'd read the newspaper and magazine articles they Googled about my wife. I had Izzy, and she had a significant life in Chicago. But this was something completely different to consider. If we moved, Izzy and I, together, it wouldn't just be a regression, a capitulation, going back to Mom and Dad. It wouldn't be an admission that they'd been right about the lunacy of my academic choices and the pathologic impracticality of my resulting career as an adjunct, and that I'd been wrong. This would be a change for both of our futures. It would be a chance for Izzy to become an important buyer for a major corporation. Her name and face would be in Corked4Less shops throughout the Northern Hemisphere. People in dozens of countries would serve the wines she'd have selected—wines like those from Santorini—at myriad dinner tables. It would also be a chance to start anew domestically. We could sell the terrible loft in Pilsen and never have to worry about our noisy and meddlesome neighbors again. We'd be so far away from all the text that was unpleasant in our lives. And Pacer Rosengrant. We'd be chapters beyond him, too.

“There has to be a reason,” Izzy said, “that we're on
this
trip at
this
particular junction, that Dick's here and his company's expanding and that he needs someone like me so badly, at
this
particular moment. I know we like to say everything's random and things just happen . . . but an opportunity like this . . .”

It had to mean something. This was not only the right time for us to move ahead. This was probably the only chance we'd ever have to pick up and start all over again. It was fate.

“So, we'll go. We'll go to New York.”

“You really would?”

“Yeah. All I've ever wanted is to make you happy,” I said. The line echoed in my head like someone else had said it and I'd merely overheard a platitudinous remark.

“It's not just about
me
, Peter.”

“You always sound so serious when you call me ‘Peter.'”

She laughed a trill. “I
am
being serious. What's good for me may not be right for us.”

I asked a question I'd been putting off for some time. It seemed like the right thing to do just then. “So you still want me to be part of your us?”

“Don't be silly. And it's not just ‘my us.'”

Gently, I spoke. “I remember talk about separating, Izzy.”

“Well, I don't always mean what I say.”

“That's not exactly reassuring.”

She growled at me, but playfully. “You know what I mean.”

And to this end, after we got in bed and I turned out the lights, I found Izzy, a few moments later, climbing on top of me. I'd closed my eyes, but, wordlessly, she began to cajole the decision-maker into keeping the rest of my body awake a little longer. Neither it nor I made protest. It felt good to be this close to her again, no longer adversaries, after what seemed a decades-long disconnection. The moves were our same old choreography, yet it was somehow different enough in this context to surge my limbs with the adrenaline of unfamiliarity. It was as though she were someone with whom I had never before been intimate. Her body seemed no longer indecisive, torn. In this bed, she pleaded for me and me only. And she was the only one I wanted. For the first time in a while, I was
with Izzy
, not wondering when the Laheys were coming home or agonizing over teaching assignments or how we were going to pay the mortgage, not fantasizing about former students, or missing Talia, once again restored to virility, once again a man. The electricity between us cleared my mind of anything beyond sweaty skin and grating foreign sheets and taut ligaments. We were plunging further into the depths than, quite possibly, we'd ever been.

Thursday, March 27

Oia, Santorini

I got up before Izzy and explored our room. I opened each
of the cabinets in the kitchenette. I took out plastic plates that had been washed and rewashed so many times their glaze had been reduced to a shine barely perceptible. The small refrigerator, standing against a column that matched its width, was empty, just humming away. In my mind, I transformed it into a proper minibar. I filled the shelves with imaginary single-serving bottles of Assyrtiko and Moschofilero and ouzo. It occurred to me that some of this might be worth documenting. Who knew when I might come up with a restaurant, the décor of which needed to replicate that of a Greek island villa? With Izzy's camera on auto-timer, I snapped a photograph of me standing in the little bathroom brushing my teeth over the sink, the wall-mounted hair dryer holster millimeters away from my ear. After I dried my mouth on a tiny gray towel, I logged more digital exposures of the rattan love seat in the sitting area and its dusty cushions encased in floral print. Out on the veranda, I took pictures of our twin chaise longues.

Izzy caught me lying on a chaise with the camera lens trained on the tip of my nose. “What are you doing?” she asked. She stood in the doorway and rubbed her eyes.

“Nasal gazing,” I said. I stood up and dusted off my jeans. I set Izzy in electronic sights and shuttered the tiny shutter.

“It's pretty here, huh,” she said, looking out into the murmuring blue.

Against the idyllic backdrop, Izzy was astonishing. Beneath the blue sky painted here and there with cumulus humilis, standing high above the glittery, intensely dark Aegean water, she was absolutely angelic. She smiled at me when she caught me fixing her in my viewfinder and zooming in and out for the perfect balance of sky and white buildings to comprise her background.

“What do you think about all of this?” she asked.

“I really like it here,” I said, “on this side of paradise.”

She chuckled. “Listen to you. You've become F. Santorini Fitzgerald.”

I patted my belly, which seemed poised to overhang my belt. “I'd say more like Santorini Claus.”

“I told you not to eat so much last night.”

“I didn't want to be rude. And everything was so delicious.”

“Nobody held an octopus to your head.”

“I kind of wish somebody had.”

After breakfast, we moved through the mall of souvenir shops. Collarless brown-and-white shaggy dogs sauntered alongside us. In front of several neighboring agencies that offered hourly, daily, and weekly rental rates on everything ambulatory from donkeys and bicycles to watercraft and SUVs, two taxis awaited. Down and down the volcano we went. We traversed the plain of Oia for two kilometers.

In an area called Baxedes, we reached the Sigalas property. Unassuming winemaker Paris Sigalas met us at the gates and took us around. The Assyrtiko vineyards (like most of the other Greeks, Sigalas pronounced them “veen-e-guards”) were in character markedly unlike the others we'd seen. Instead of walking aisles between wire-caged vertical canopies trellised to heights nearly our own, here there lay on the ground rows upon rows of tangled vine nests. The vines had defensively wound around themselves in order to capture the moisture they needed to thrive. There were hundreds and hundreds of these baskets. They extended all the way from the edge of the road to the green side of the volcano in the distance. The vulcanized rocks in the deeply sulfuric soil crunched under shoes as we tried to find a vine coil that had the beginnings of some grapes. A leafy basket revealed a bunch of green fruit smaller than my thumbnail. I imagined its trajectory, starting out here, maturing, going through its vinification. And that resulting Assyrtiko bottle could end up anywhere in the world: on a grocery store shelf in London or an Abu Dhabi hotel room service tray; on a Union Square wine studio by-the-glass list in New York; at a Corked4Less in a Peoria, Arizona strip mall; in the refrigerator of a rural Midwestern shared apartment in which resided a young waitress with big-city sommelier dreams, working to learn as much as she could at her chain restaurant's staff trainings and beyond.

In an understated room of long wooden tables with plenty of light streaming in through the windows, we tasted the Sigalas '07 Assyrtiko-Athiri first. It was a good balance of the two grape varieties. Their association yielded a crisp green-apple flavor, with very light minerality. The '06 vintage that followed was a little sweeter, and somewhat more aromatic. Next they poured us a vertical of Sigalas Santorini, which was one-hundred percent Assyrtiko. This was the same wine we had with the octopus risotto last night. The 2006, Izzy said, would go well with a lobster roll.

The '03, when it came, was too cold. The colder the wine, the less of its components and aromatics could be detected by tasting. Temperature was a common problem with white wine served in the United States, not just with reds. As the 2000, an appreciably darker gold from the additional years of oxidation, warmed, the nose began to resemble a gas station. Dick grimaced and pushed aside his glass, but I found the note intriguing.

“Petrol,” Izzy told the balkers on the evaluating panel. “I know it's a little weird, if you're not used to it.”

“And people buy that?” Barry asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “Wine geeks love it. The scent actually gets stronger as the wine ages.” She swirled and sniffed her pour again. “This varietal reminds me so much of Riesling.”

“It must be an acquired taste,” Dick said. “But I'll trust the sommelier.”

Izzy smiled for the room and pressed her hand against my leg.

At the end of the line came the Sigalas Apiliotis. It was made completely using Mandilaria, a grape variety we hadn't yet encountered. The 2004 vintage tasted like maraschino cherries, acidic but sweet. “Welch's grape juice,” Dick said. He seemed, more and more, to find his tasting voice in the final bottle or two we were shown at each winery.

“Cherry Heering,” Izzy said. “The Danish liqueur.”

“‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks,'” Dick said. “I'm kidding. You got it.” She laughed, and they pantomimed high-fiving each other across the room.

“Nice work,” I said. I patted her knee. “I bought a bottle of that stuff on a dare in grad school. I think I might still have it. There was a war over whether or not it was pronounced ‘hearing' or ‘herring,' which went on for two semesters.”

“This is a crazy wine,” she said.

Izzy's cheeks were rosy with alcohol, her eyes big. She never failed to get a charge out of having a crowd like this, with their rapt gazes and unselfconscious murmurs of approbation. They really, truly, cared about everything she had to say, and wanted to listen, to learn from her. Just as I always had. And I liked seeing her happy.

A Bob Dylan song started playing on a shelf stereo behind the wine bar while we gathered our things. “
You say you're looking for someone
/
Never weak but always strong
/
To protect you an' defend you
/
Whether you are right or wrong
.” The marketer said Mr. Sigalas was a big fan.

We reconvened, after lunch and a nap at the hotel, for a short trip to Gaia, a boutique winery also on Santorini. The sparse facility was housed in a converted tomato-canning factory that resembled a parking garage or remote book warehouse. There was a small tasting room in the center of it that was lit by dim fluorescents overhead. Candles were on the easeled old barn door that served as a table. Their small but elegant portfolio didn't take long to get through. At the end, Leon, the enologist and co-winemaker, drove us into town for dinner. The empty restaurant had plates displayed on the wall above the window to the open kitchen and shelves of local gourmet products decorating the dining room of green tables and chairs. Eleven familiar and unfamiliar dishes Leon had ordered ahead arrived in rapid succession. I filled up before many of them made it to our end.

Izzy, too, it appeared, had begun to feel the deleterious effects of our furious consumption. I poured her a glass of Thalassitis, which she didn't drink. She sipped bottled water and ate some of the fava puree on a slice of baguette but little else. I ended up finishing the ladder of octopus and island of
taramosolata
and dismantling the “meet pastie” statue that remained on her plate.

“Are you stuffed?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied absently. She was looking at something in her lap that was shining a digital light on her expropriated eyes. Damn it, I thought, Pacer Rosengrant got to her again. Had he informed her of, or had she deduced independently, the text “she” sent? It had been days since she'd even picked up her BlackBerry. I'd been hoping she'd left it in her suitcase and stopped caring about it.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“Just e-mail.”

“Anything good?”