Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  “Well, how are your wines selling?”

  “It’s all over the map. We have a couple of core products—Pinot Grigio, for example—that sell consistently well, year-round. Other wines are seasonal, heavier reds in the winter, for example, and lighter styles in the summer. But I think we’re limited to . . . a roster of very typical, very safe choices.”

  “Safe and typical are the least interesting wine descriptors.”

  “I know. I know. And that’s why I wanna get someone in to help out.”

  Izzy was silent during a turbulent stretch of highway. The road leveled, and she spoke again. “I think I might have some contacts for you.”

  “Good,” Dick said. “Give me their names and e-mails when we get back. Or, you know, before the end of the week.”

  “I will,” she said. She spoke obliquely, as though she were thinking about other things.

  At the hotel, we said good night and went to our rooms. Izzy washed up. I lay on the bed and flipped through the leather-bound hotel information binder. When she came out of the bathroom, she looked at me with such a serious expression that it caused me to sit up. That her face was disconcertingly pale without makeup heightened the trepidation.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What’s that?” Her gaze had snagged on the information binder.

  I read to her from the “Electricity” chapter. “In case of interruption, luminous lamps lit up sufficiently all the communal spaces until the generator of hotel is placed in operation. During this time it is not allowed to use electronic equipments (TV, P/C). The generator does not provide constant tendency and exists danger of their serious damage.”

  “Sounds foreboding.”

  “I think we’re safe as long as we don’t use the computer or expect any sort of constant tendency.”

  She smiled, but I could tell a rival emotion assailed her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked then.

  “I think I should work for Dick.”

  Monday, March 24

  Amyndeon

  After her announcement, Izzy had stood up and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. I hoped when she completed her ablutions that she’d pick up where she left off and explain her thinking. I wanted to know exactly what had brought her to this. Instead, when she came back to bed, she worked her way onto me. It was awkward because of our unfamiliar surroundings and unfinished conversations, to say nothing of the as-yet unresolved matter. I could still feel Pacer Rosengrant’s ghost haunting every overture. My trouble getting into it only magnified the trouble. The night of dreamless sleep that followed had done little to restore my equilibrium or bring me closer to feeling the optimism, the sense of abundant hope that I’d had when Izzy and I were drinking on the hotel’s terrace.

  I didn’t need her to explain it. I could see why she’d choose Dick as a partner over me. Dick had a corporation. Dick had millions of dollars. Dick could snap his fingers and empty out an entire vineyard’s annual yield. I may have had imagination, I may have had the vision, but an unfunded vision with no real hope of gaining any financial backing was pretty much worthless. Especially considering the fact that Izzy was out of work. If she went off and developed the Corked4Less wine program, we’d be able to make our mortgage. We could continue to buy groceries, and rawhides for Ishiguro. I couldn’t exactly stand in the way of that, even if it left me with bleak future conceptualizing prospects. With Dick, we’d be certain to have a life. Or at least she would. Who could say for sure if she was still planning on keeping me a part of her life? After all, she had pronounced our marriage over before we left Chicago.

  At Boutari, a short drive from the hotel, we began with a 2007 Lac des Roches. It was a regional white of the Peleponnese that was well balanced, uncomplicated, and easy to drink. “Perfect for Pinot Grigio people,” Izzy whispered to Dick. He had sat beside her, likely for this very benefit. He circled the wine on his spec sheets.

  Next came the 2003 Cambas cava. It was a nutty, more oxidized vintage of the wine Izzy had on the terrace last night. When the cork popped, the sound triggered a deluge in my brain. I wasn’t going to let my wife, or Pacer Rosengrant, or both of them, end this. If Izzy and I could just get past whatever was fucked up right now, we’d emerge at the end of the storm—our vinification—stronger than we could have been if we’d decided to go off separately. Winemaking was like love, if you thought about it: sort of improbable, at least in its earliest evolution, really fucking difficult sometimes, schizophrenically rewarding and punishing, deifying and humbling to the point of humiliating, and yet those truly meant for it had never given up on it. Now look at what was going on here, and all around the world.

  And if Izzy wanted to work for Dick, so be it. I just wanted her happy. We’d eventually be able to build a restaurant together. I didn’t know how it would happen, but we’d find a way. Maybe I’d have to start ahead.

  Amplified brain or not, some of what I thought, some of what I felt, made sense.

  Didn’t it?

  So as Izzy and Dick continued to discuss marketing strategies, I started to really pay attention. These delicious and interesting wines would have made for excellent list additions even without the shockingly low retail price points Dick’s circumventing outside distribution afforded Corked4Less customers. The only thing that stood in their way in any US market was their obscure and difficult-to-articulate grape varieties and trade names. I nodded when Izzy and Dick lamented how big a role the fear of the unfamiliar played in the driving of most consumer choices, especially where wine was concerned. After all, it would be an issue of consequence for me if I planned on getting into this business someday.

  As we traveled again that afternoon, the sky swallowed the day’s sun in imperial swaths. It rendered our already treacherous highway route even more so because of the added factor of darkness. Despite appearing to be only millimeters away from Naoussa on my brightly colored, toddler-complex map of Greece’s wine regions, Alpha Estate was, in 1:1 scale, far. Amyndeon, located to the north and east, was almost three hours away. Rain began to fall, and kept falling.

  Mike the driver remained stolid, imperturbable. He knew little Greek and no English, and thus didn’t speak. It was hard to get a read of his emotional landscape. I had no idea if he was pleased we were moving along on schedule, frustrated because of the weather, bored, annoyed with the ever increasing quantity of spec sheets and brochures and kitschy promotional detritus from the winery visits that accumulated in the bus’s overhead storage area, on the empty seats in unused rows, the discarded water bottles rolling down his once tidy aisle. When rain arrived in a blast, he acted as though it was no big deal. That the massive windshield turned translucent for long seconds before the wipers could catch up and restore visibility (even so, the view wasn’t that much to speak of) didn’t seem to bother him at all. He was, I decided, a paragon of fearlessness. That was comforting during this spell, and would be in others ahead.

  We tottered back to the bus after Alpha Estate. I’d had way too much of the verticals they presented us of ripe, fruit-forward Syrah and full-bodied, yet juicy, Xinomavro. The wines were so good I felt I needed to finish several glasses of Izzy’s share of the vintages as well. I longed to lie down at the hotel. The landscape that lined the road was a vast expanse of fallow ground. The wild weeds and grasses were dotted with decaying structures. Here were dingy balconied low-rise apartment buildings and ramshackle garages with walls that appeared poised for inward collapse. New constructions were frozen in early building phases. They’d likely remain nothing more than exposed concrete, projects never to be completed, untenable results of financial crises. The desolation eventually gave way to the inhabited and cared for. We passed modest houses of tan and pink with blue Twingoes and red Fiats parked on the steep streets in front of them. This signaled we’d reached the charming little town.

  It was six thirty when we arrived at the Aethirio.
Izzy got a key to our small country bed-and-breakfast-style room. It had a four-poster bed in the corner. The sink in the bathroom was so compact that I wondered if I could fit both my hands under the faucet at the same time. There was also complimentary WiFi. Izzy hopped online and checked her e-mail.

  “People are already writing in to complain I’m off Vintage Attraction,” she said.

  “How does anyone know? Aren’t new episodes you already did running?”

  “Gossipy PR assholes,” she said, eyes on the screen, “and then bloggers who recycle their ‘exclusives.’”

  “I bet you Dominique will keep replaying all the episodes you hosted. He’s not going to make any new ones. His beloved Vintage Attraction is over. There’s nobody on TV in the city he could replace you with. The investors will take their money out the minute he tries. Viewers would never stand for it. They’re fans of yours, not the show’s. I think it’s going to be you on that program, virtually, forever.”

  “Yeah, and I won’t see a dollar for it.”

  “Well, at least you’ll be out there.”

  “You say that as though it’s a good thing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.” She closed the laptop with a sigh.

  We showered together, as best we could without a dedicated stall, glass, or curtain to keep the torrent of warm, soapy water that ran off us from spilling out of the bath and into the room. Even though it was only Monday and I still wanted to ration my clothes for the rest of the week, I put on a clean white button-down shirt and a navy-blue blazer. Along with my dark jeans, this formed an outfit identical to that which most of the Alpha Estate staff wore at our earlier tour.

  As Greece-usual, I was a dinner table profligate. I refused nothing anyone offered to eat or drink, and took as much more as I could get away with from every dish and bottle within reach. Shortly after Mike brought us back to the hotel, Izzy and I crawled into bed and passed out. I woke up suddenly at three forty-five in the morning. It wasn’t because of a sound. I didn’t think it was the result of a bad dream. My bedmate, known well to me for her own fractious sleep, had not, as far as I could tell, thrashed out at an acetylcholine villain and conjured me in the process.

  My throat burned from the previous day’s higher acid wines, and it kept me from falling back to sleep. I went to the bathroom for water to try to neutralize the uprising, since I had no Zantac. Above the vanity, Izzy’s BlackBerry hung from its knotted cord. It siphoned power from the razor and hair dryer outlet. I picked it up. Several trivial and theretofore unopened text messages from Pacer Rosengrant lay underneath the previous date’s header. The texts ranged from the insipid (“watchin the bachelor cant believe he gave ashlee the rose”) to the suggestive (“if u here wouldn’t need tv”) to the disturbingly knowing (“this dick doesn’t sound like one ha ha maybe it would be cool to work for him”). I selected the lot and deleted them all with one click of Izzy’s convenience key, which she’d recently programmed to perform this efficient eradication.

  I stood there in the dark and wished I hadn’t done that. If I wanted to address the matter, to confront her effectively would require the actual evidence. Now it had vanished into the Greek night. Would telling her I knew have even done any good? She’d have found a way to evade. She’d draw attention away from her indiscretion by focusing on my misdeed: spying on her. No. The proper course of action seemed inevitable to me now. I returned to the bedroom and sat down at the desk. My ears filled with a hiss of wind outside forcing itself through microscopic fissures in the walls of the hotel as I depressed the spacebar to light the screen of the laptop. The thing to do was to appropriate their chosen medium of surreptitiousness and circumvent, reroute. How hard could it be to fool a guy who watched the fucking Bachelor on his Monday off?

  I can’t do this anymore, I typed. I love Hapworth. I’m sorry. This just isn’t right. Please don’t contact me again.

  Not bad, I thought. For a first draft. I went back and exchanged the capital letters for lowercase ones. I removed the apostrophes and periods. I replaced the stilted “contact me” with the more contemporaneously pedestrian “txt.” I considered the implications of “please.” In the end, I decided to include it. I hoped that Pacer Rosengrant might read undesirable pangs of desperation into the word.

  I hit send.

  Izzy had claimed that she was only responding to his advances, not initiating their dialogues. If that was true, this puerile intervention was precisely the way to go to decisively rid our lives of this uninvited guest.

  Tuesday, March 25

  Metsovo

  An alarm clock blared a herald of the new day, except it wasn’t an alarm clock. It was like the morning was being strangled and calling for help, to no avail.

  “What the hell is that?” Izzy said. Her eyes were closed. She still clung to sleep but allowed herself to step far enough across the threshold of consciousness to acknowledge the baleful cries.

  I finally comprehended what the hell it was. “A rooster.”

  She sat up in bed. “Tell it to stop.” She combed her hair with her hands, as though attempting to prove to the animal that couldn’t even see her that he could consider his mission accomplished, that she was awake. When this failed to elicit any cessation, she said, “Fine. I’m up.” Izzy then decamped for the bathroom.

  She was already too far into the shower stall to hear me, but I said out loud anyway, “I had the most delightful dream last night.”

  As had become something of a custom, we got dressed and rolled our packed suitcases to the dining room. We had coffee and a little bread and ham and cereal and strained yogurt with honey at Dick and Maddie’s table. George read a Greek newspaper and took several calls on his cell phone, each announced by an idiosyncratically Eastern European disco ringtone. Barry, under sunglasses, met us in the driveway after Mike had begun his stowage ritual with our baggage.

  We took our usual rows on the bus, and the tour set off for Metsovo. Izzy slept against the window. I was tired, but couldn’t keep my eyes closed for long. As we went, I tried to get the highway asphalt or the unfurled green that surrounded it to hypnotize me. When I got bored of staring, I leafed through spec sheets and brochures Izzy and I had been stuffing into the seat pocket in front of me each time we boarded the Sprinter after a winery visit.

  The mountains got bigger and the ravines more cavernous. The peaks were blanketed with white. Winter still clung to Metsovo. I’d visited Colorado once with Jessie, my grad school girlfriend who had penchants for skiing and pot brownies. I thought it looked a little like Breckenridge here, but without the prodigious gleam. These peaks were drier, more weathered. The roads curved and narrowed. The turns Mike provoked the bus to make became increasingly treacherous. Fewer and fewer cars chased behind. Only the heaviest of vehicles dared to pull alongside us.

  I’d rolled up my sleeves before we left, and now it was cold enough to warrant having them back. The temperature was dropping by the minute. The bus struggled up the slopes. If we slipped, if we slid down from here, we’d die for sure. The drop distances on either side of the miniscule road were easily kilometers. It was pretty, though, and so quiet. As we climbed higher still, houses began to appear. There were barns, shacks. I made out something that resembled a bus stop, which surely couldn’t have been in service now. Mike followed a red tarp–covered pickup on the two-lane road until the truck driver got ballsy enough to pass the vehicle that crawled along in front of him. Fortunately no cars were headed down in the time it took him to swing back over right again. I was glad I wasn’t helming our bus. My stomach lurched as my body weight involuntarily leaned with shifting gravity. Izzy was still asleep beside me. My balled-up coat functioned as a pillow in between her head and the frosting glass.

  The cabin warmed again, with the bright sun streaming in. More snow piled on the mountains and the exponentially enormous pine trees and rendered the
road perilous. Yet the Mercedes bus wheeled along, like a dutiful German, indifferent to the fluctuations. As we pitched and pulled, I had to press my right shoe into the plastic footrest to keep myself from falling out of the seat. We’d definitely driven back through time and into December. There was enough snow now to ski. The copy of Proust Was a Neuroscientist Izzy had discovered in a compartment of her suitcase and brought along for the four hours we were scheduled to spend on the route fell from her hands. The slam startled her awake.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Winter,” I said.

  “Where the fuck do they grow the grapes?”

  Trucks headed downward in the left lane came close—very close—yet Mike impassively persevered. I tried to push the phrase too fast for conditions out of my mind.

  In the back, Maddie, Dick, and Barry whistled “Sleigh Ride.”

  “When were you going to wake me up, Hapworth?” Izzy asked. Her digital camera snapped away our vantage of the mountains, which was filtered by frozen and melting ice and snow on the window.

  Another rig almost sliced off the left side of the bus. A small car zipped by in a blink. An orange salt truck lumbered ahead. Aside from the exteriors of vehicles that hadn’t been already covered, the color was completely drained from this landscape. Everything that wasn’t moving was white and gray. The windows began to fog. It was like we drove in an avalanche now. The brightness up here became surreal. We were pushing deeper and deeper into a white, soundless dream. The climbing had us level with the snow on the tops of trees we’d passed at their roots roadway rungs below when we’d begun plunging. Soon I couldn’t see anything on either side of the bus.

  Mike downshifted. The bus felt unsteady. It rocked a bit beneath us. A spray of ice brushed against the right side. I wasn’t certain that the wheels were actually making contact with the slippery ground.