by Nadia Gordon
“I’m sure she’s capable of describing her own restaurant without undue strain,” he said, giving Anna a mirthless smile. “Besides, we haven’t met yet. Oliver Seth.”
Sunny stood up to shake his hand, a gesture that always seemed a bit stiff to her and felt utterly ridiculous in a bikini. Oliver checked his Rolex and looked at Anna. “Is lunch late? Aren’t you hungry?”
“Cynthia’s setting it up now.”
“Good. So, your restaurant.”
“It’s called Wildside and it’s in St. Helena. We serve lunch Monday through Friday in an elegant yet intimate setting. Intimate being euphemistic for very small. The food is California-style Mediterranean. Tuscan, Provençal, with Basque and North African influences.”
“What about dinner?”
“No dinner.”
“And weekends?”
“No weekends.”
“What is that, a joke? How do you survive?”
“Modestly. I keep my overhead low.”
“Meaning you do everything yourself.”
“I have some good people helping me.”
“Do we always have to talk business?” said Anna. “It’s Saturday.”
“I bet McCoskey enjoys talking business. Entrepreneurs are obsessed with their work or they wouldn’t do it. Am I right?”
“You’re both right,” said Sunny, in an effort to defuse the tension. “I love my work, and I love not thinking about it for a few hours each week.”
Oliver’s cell phone buzzed and he excused himself to answer it. A man walked up from behind them wearing trim black trunks of the sort seen more in Europe than California.
“Did someone just say something intelligent?” he said. “I thought I caught a whiff of distinctly un-American moderation in the air. But I could have been dreaming.”
“Sunny McCoskey, the Italian accent is Franco Bertinotti, winemaker and eavesdropper,” said Anna.
“Sicilian, my dear. From the belly. Italians talk way up here like their shoes are too tight.”
He lifted his sunglasses, revealing blue eyes so pale and bright they gave Sunny a jolt. She waited while he cast them over her from her eyes to her toes and back again, taking everything in. Apparently satisfied, he nodded to himself and lay down on a chaise, running his fingers through his short white hair and over the tanned skin of his chest and stomach. He wore a gold chain around his neck, which skimmed the top of a patch of white chest hair. The skin of his abdomen was tanned the color makers of fine leather goods call whiskey or cognac. When he was situated, he closed his eyes, idly grazing the upturned pads of Jordan’s fingertips next to him. Cynthia arrived with a bottle of chilled white wine and glasses.
“Charming man,” said Anna, abandoning her Campari and lifting a glass from the tray in front of her. “I wouldn’t invite him if Oliver didn’t insist. He is apparently indispensable at the winery. Can you hear me, Franco?”
“Every word, darling. I am charming and indispensable.”
Sunny decided she would leave as soon as lunch was over.
2
They dined under the wisteria. Cynthia served roast beef, garden greens, and couscous, all expertly presented.
“We’re casual today. Serve yourselves,” she said cheerfully, setting down pitchers of ice water filled with branches of mint and slices of lemon and cucumber. “There’s more of everything inside, so don’t be timid. We also have a chocolate torte with raspberries for dessert. Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Thank you, Cynthia. Everything looks beautiful,” said Anna, looking up at her from under a white straw hat. Midday sun shot through the vines overhead. Anna’s cheeks were pink from the heat and her eyes were green like bottle glass held up to light. It was this Mediterranean light that changed everything in the Napa Valley from mundane to extraordinary, particularly in summer. A slice of lemon glowed. A floppy straw hat transformed a girl from beautiful to breathtaking.
Franco the Sicilian sat down next to Sunny in his swim trunks and gold chain. He had on a linen shirt, open. All three of the women wore the sheer tunics with embellished collars that were the ubiquitous trend of the season, Sunny in Moroccan blue, Anna in white, Jordan in black. Soon they were joined by a very tall, well-groomed man in a linen shirt and baggy linen trousers who plunged in with the confidence of the life of the party. He crushed Franco’s shoulder and kissed the girls on the lips, including Sunny, introducing himself afterward.
“Keith Lachlan. I’ll sit here next to you if that’s okay.”
“Keith is Oliver’s lawyer,” explained Anna. “He spends more time with him than I do.”
“I prefer enforcer. When you have this kind of money, somebody’s always after it,” said Keith, looking over his shoulder. He spoke in a deep, rich voice with a slight accent, vaguely British, mostly American, and something else Sunny couldn’t quite put her finger on. His head was completely bald and covered in smooth brown skin.
“Where are you from?” asked Sunny.
“West Indies, my dear. Barbados. But a long time ago, before you were born.”
Sunny looked at his face. No lines, no beard. He might not even need to shave. At first glance he might be thirty, but now she guessed closer to fifty or even sixty. He leaned around behind her to ask Franco about some business to do with a deposition. Her head felt suddenly heavy, as if she could put her chin in her hand and fall soundly asleep. She stared dreamily at the pitcher of ice water in front of her. The yellow of the lemon rind and the green of the mint leaves and cucumber were as bright and fresh as anything she’d ever seen in her life. She filled her glass. No doubt it had something to do with the mojitos and wine, and the heat of the perfectly cloudless day, not to mention the decadent surroundings and the prospect of being served instead of rushing to cook, serve, eat, and be ready with the next course, which was what she usually did when she tried to relax, since she rarely ate alone. Whatever the cause, the water tasted sublime. The heavy feeling vanished, replaced by what could only be called ecstasy. It was an odd feeling. Things weren’t right between Anna and her boyfriend, that much was clear. And she felt no immediate kinship with the others in their party. And yet the surroundings were so pleasant and her head so dull, she didn’t bother to give much thought to why Anna had called her. She was utterly swept up and engulfed in the sweet and tang of the flavored water, and the scent of garden tomatoes coming off the bowl of couscous in front of her.
Oliver Seth came from the kitchen with a bottle of wine tucked under his arm, hands loaded with glasses.
“Anna says you know something about wine.” He pulled the cork, poured a glass, and handed it to Sunny.
“Like everyone in Napa.” She took a sip. “Syrah?”
“You got it.”
“Very nice. Your own?”
“How’d you guess?”
“I saw the marker on the vineyard on the way in. And you hold the bottle a little too carefully.”
“Oliver would bring cases of the stuff to bed with us if I let him,” said Anna.
“This vintage is our first production after five years of blood, sweat, and tears.” He splashed wine into the other glasses and passed them around. “It’s a bit raw, but it won’t kill us. We have a couple of nice Pinots I’ll open in a minute.”
Keith Lachlan raised his glass in an enormous hand. “When you started consorting with this guy” —he nodded toward Franco—” I thought for sure we’d find you anchored to the bottom of the bay before it was over. But you guys did it. And you’re still here to drink it.”
“We did it,” said Oliver, touching his glass to Keith’s and then Franco’s.
The lawyer quaffed the glass and asked Sunny what she thought. She thought it wasn’t bad. He looked at her, an assessing look she couldn’t decipher. He was taking her measure, but in what context? As a wine expert? A woman? Or simply a conversationalist? The whites of his eyes looked jaundiced next to his white teeth, and Sunny wondered if he was in good health. Like everyone at the ta
ble, he drank too much, and even his baggy linen shirt couldn’t hide the roll above his waistline. His skin was smooth and brown, from his glossy bare head to the big, sharp-nailed toes that nicked Sunny’s ankles under the table.
Oliver Seth emptied the bottle and set it down in front of Sunny, turning the label toward her. It featured a painting of a bull charging into a frothing sea, a girl in genie pants half reclined sidesaddle on its back, holding on to the horns gracefully. The name of the vineyard, Taurus Rising, was written in Roman-looking letters across a stormy sky. Below the illustration it said Estate Bottled Napa Valley Syrah.
Jordan took the bottle. “Is that the rape of Europa?”
“Exactly,” said Oliver. “From the Greek myth. But I’d call it more of an escape. She doesn’t look too concerned to me. This version is nineteenth-century Russian. I have the original in my place in London. It’s better than Titian’s, which is the one you usually see. Besides, I own the rights to this one. The rights to the image come with the painting. Isn’t that amazing? Think of all those museums selling postcards and posters of the paintings they own. The artist doesn’t get a dime. Imagine if you bought a car and the rights to the image went with it.”
“Why Taurus Rising?” said Sunny.
“I’ve always liked the symbol of the bull,” said Oliver. He laid slices of roast beef on each of their plates as he spoke. “I was born under the sign of Taurus. The first time I saw the term bull market, I knew I would make my first million on the stock market. I was in third grade.”
Franco handed Sunny the bowl of couscous.
“We had a class hamster,” Oliver continued. “On weekends, somebody always got to take him home. His name was Roosevelt because he was a teddy bear hamster. I took him home and started cleaning his cage. One of the layers of paper lining the bottom turned out to be the front section of The Wall Street Journal. I read every word, including the advertisements. That’s how I found out about the Robb Report. I sent away for a subscription and my sister had to pay for it with our Christmas money. But I knew it would pay off. I knew even then if you want to make money, you have to understand how rich people think.”
“I read somewhere that a huge percentage of history’s dictators have been Tauruses,” said Anna. “Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot. Saddam Hussein, Machiavelli, Robespierre.”
“And most damning of all, Barbra Streisand,” said a lanky, dark-haired guy approaching the table. He kissed Anna and pulled up a chair next to her.
“Sunny, this is Troy Stevens. Troy, this is my dear, long-lost friend Sunny McCoskey. We used to hang out in San Francisco together ages ago.”
“Delighted.” Troy shook her hand with mock formality, then started dishing up his plate.
“What happened to the hamster?” said Jordan.
“My best friend’s mom made him keep it in the garage and it froze to death.”
Sunny held up her glass to Franco. “Nice work.”
“This one is not technically mine,” he said. “I begin with last year’s harvest. That one is quite good, though not exactly in my style. Too fruity and agreeable. I like more earth, more herb, more gaminess. You should taste a little bit of leather and spice, not just plums and blackberries. We will get there eventually, if Oliver’s grapes cooperate.”
“I don’t care if we ever get a wine we can release,” said Oliver. “If we get something we can drink at lunch and pour on the ground for ablutions to the ancestors, I’ll be happy. My citadel will be complete.”
“Your ancestral sins are your affair,” said Franco. “I will commune with the grapes and see what they have to tell us. You won’t want to pour it on the ground, I guarantee that much.”
* * *
Despite her plan to leave after lunch, Sunny agreed that a digestive nap was in order, then that a dip to cool off was a good idea, and finally that one more glass of wine wouldn’t hurt. Time stopped. The sun never moved. The bottle of chilled wine they’d brought from the table became mysteriously empty. Gradually, the group scattered. Anna went into the house with Troy Stevens on some errand and didn’t return. Jordan lay motionless, her nose in the seam of a paperback copy of Memoirs of a Geisha. Franco the Silician took up his same chaise and closed his eyes. Oliver and Keith went off to Oliver’s office, talking business. When Cynthia offered to give Sunny a tour of the house and garden, she put on her tunic and sandals.
The kitchen had everything any cook could want, professional or otherwise, including natural light from a wall of south-facing windows. There was a full-size wine cabinet, a prep island, a wall of German appliances, a steamer, the definitive ultra-modern Poggenpohl cabinets with refrigerated drawers, and a mysteriously inferior espresso machine defiling one of the sleek countertops. This is what money can do, thought Sunny. She had almost forgotten. Money had the power to make everything beautiful, at least on the surface. With money, she could cook in a shining, perfect kitchen like this, instead of sweating the way she did at Wildside, where the kitchen, an oily sauna by the end of each day, was little more than a maze of stainless steel work benches squeezed into a space so small she couldn’t open the oven door without moving to one side. If it weren’t for the desire to be her own boss, she could stand on a sublimely chalky limestone floor like this one instead of the black rubber mats at Wildside that had to be hauled out and hosed down every night. But they were different animals altogether. A picture-perfect kitchen like this was fine for dinner parties, but it would never survive the fiery mosh pit that was a daily way of life at Wildside.
“I keep asking Oliver to invite more people up,” said Cynthia. “I never get to really cook. He has one or two people in for lunch or dinner on the weekends and that’s it. We put in a full outdoor kitchen down by the pool and we’ve never used it. It only makes sense for a big party.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Did you see the fireplace by the hot tub? The grill and the rest of it are around the back of that stone wall. I put in a garden last year and I’ve been giving away bags of produce all summer. The neighbors are eating well.”
“I’d love to see the garden.”
“We can go down there after you’ve seen the house. It’s my little paradise. We have vegetables, herbs, chickens, and a pig. It will be a pleasure to finally get to show it off to somebody who’s interested in food. Nobody cares much about these things around here, not even Oliver, though he pretends he does. As long as the food is on the table, they don’t care how it gets there. I don’t think Anna knows the garden exists.”
She gave Sunny a conspiratorial smile and led her down a luminous white hallway to the living room, where an enormous Rothko in shades of crimson hung on one wall. Another large canvas—Lucien Freud? Sunny’s knowledge of modern art was limited at best—hung above the couch, offering a portrait of several women, all naked, variously reclined. Cynthia opened a few doors on bedrooms done in spare modernism on a grand scale, executed in wood, stone, and shades of cream, eggshell, putty, gray. One room featured king-size bunk beds with white and chrome ladders.
“He must love houseguests,” said Sunny.
Cynthia smiled and closed the door. She led the way past a staircase leading down. “Sauna, workout room, racquetball court, et cetera.”
They went back the other direction. The north wing of the house was darker, not just because of the lack of southern exposure. It was clearly designed for night games. Another living room looked out on the lawn but was decorated in shades of black and sand, with primitive statues in the corners and canvases of Rousseau-like beasts and eyes peering from jungle darkness. Paradise, written in garish red neon script, covered an entire wall. Other rooms held a pool table, a lounge facing a flat-screen television, a library lined with shelves but no books, more bedrooms, and, off the master suite and adjacent lounge, another hot tub and outdoor fireplace. (By Sunny’s count, the house had at least seven fireplaces, including one in each living room, one in each of two master suites, one in the lounge, and two outdoors.) An e
xtensive glassed-in wine closet held bottles cataloged with the care and precision of treasures at the Smithsonian. A floor-to-ceiling case held Armagnacs and whiskeys arranged by year, some quite old. Across from them was a long, low wall covered with gritty black-and-white photographs of edgy-looking party people doing drugs and making out. Sunny wondered if this was Jordan’s work.
On the way back to the foyer, Sunny detoured into a heavily mirrored bathroom with no windows and the same limestone floor that ran through most of the house. Instead of a light switch, there were at least a dozen buttons on a pad just inside the door. She pressed one and the fan went on. Touching it again made tiny footlights along the wall appear, but did not turn off the fan. She pushed another button and the fan got louder. She studied the pad and the tiny screen above it to no effect and chose another button at random. The lights went out but the fan stayed on. In the end, she closed the heavy door and peed by the murky glow of two recessed halogens over the distant marble vanity. Between the long mirror above the sink and a floor-to-ceiling mirror covering the wall opposite, she had an overly generous view of herself in situ. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sunny McCoskey as though in a movie, flushing the toilet, washing her hands, running her fingers through short hair, hunting in bathroom drawers for hand cream, lip gloss, hair gel, anything to smooth her rumpled post-swim appearance. The drawers were empty except for a blow dryer, its cord still neatly bound by the manufacturer’s tie. The cabinet under the sink held a supply of toilet paper and nothing else. The house seemed hardly to have been used. Earlier in the day, she’d used the same bathroom to change into her swimsuit and left her bra and underwear rolled up in a hand towel on the edge of the vanity. Now they were gone. The work of overly fastidious domestic help, no doubt. Hopefully Cynthia could help her look for them when they came back from the garden. She checked her appearance one more time in the enormous mirror and pulled up the sleeve of her tunic to observe the new scar on the inside of her forearm, a band of purple skin where she’d caught an upset pan of pork loin coming out of the oven. One among many. A few futile punches at the controls on the way out only made the fan louder.
