Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  “Fucking motion sickness,” she said.

  “Is your stomach okay?”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t mean me. I wanted to talk to Dick, and now that opportunity’s shot.”

  “Well, maybe once we get to the hotel.”

  “I’m starting to get the feeling that he doesn’t really want me, not seriously. He just wants a free consultant.”

  “You’ll never know until you ask.”

  “You make it sound like my not saying anything is the only thing standing between here and there.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What if we don’t really want to move to New York?”

  “I don’t think we can decide until there’s an offer around which we’d have to make a decision. You know?”

  “What if we can’t go?”

  “Can’t? Why couldn’t we?”

  “If Dominique is suing me. Maybe there’ll be a long trial. An injunction. A lien on the loft. He has money and lawyers. They could bankrupt me and make it so that I never work in wine again. Not to mention the public backlash.”

  “That’s another thing we’re not going to be able to discuss intelligently until we have all the facts. You need to get in touch with that Schwartzstein guy. First thing when we get to Athens, you have to e-mail again.”

  She heaved a sigh. “My voice of reason.”

  It was raining in Athens, too. We emptied out into a chaotic, wet port. Fewer taxis were lined up here than weary travelers who wanted them. Fortunately, George had secured two cars ahead of time. Our drivers stood now holding signs for the Airport Sofitel.

  We were probably an hour away from the hotel. It sounded like an intolerable length of time to spend in another vehicle, but what else could we do? The driver looked like an amply disheveled Oliver Stone. He plowed through the sloping rain-slicked avenues. It was dark. There were few streetlights. The only real road illumination came from the signs above stores.

  “It’s hilly here,” Izzy remarked. “And the cable car lines. And all these little shops. It reminds me of the Bay Area.” It was true. It felt like we were headed up Market Street.

  “I love America,” the driver replied. Even at this late, sodden hour, he wanted to chat with his exciting American charter. “I’ve been to United States, three, four time. I’ve been to Floreedah, San Francisco. Like to travel. See world. When I was eighteen month—year old, I go to Avanah, Coobah.”

  George said Cuba with an American accent. The driver echoed the “cue.” Then he reverted to his initial pronunciation when he repeated it. “I am eighteen-year-old and I get thrown in preeson and they think I am spy because I go to Avanah.” He wasn’t an agent, just a young navy petty officer with a taste for adventure and a healthy disregard for the staid codes of off-base conduct. He continued, “They ask me each day why I go to Coobah. Every day they ask me. Finally, I tell them, ‘You wanna know why I there? I go to make sexy.’”

  In the backseat beside me, Izzy was cracking up. She squeezed my hand. I, too, was amused, but more reservedly. The odometer distracted me. One hundred kilometers, one-hundred-twenty an hour it went. We moved so fast that the water pools on the highway splashed high enough to cover the windows when the taxi’s tires dove into them.

  He went on, “I like America. I like America women. Greek like all the ladies. Dutch, the French, German, the Spanish. Except the Chinese.”

  George caught the driver’s attention and used the opportunity to inquire about our route. It seemed a course that deviated from the one he’d expected us to take. The driver spoke to George in Greek now. He gestured wildly and looked at George more than he did the highway. Good thing the lanes were mostly empty. George translated, “This is a ring road.”

  The driver, in English: “Fifty, fifty-five-kilometer, circles Athens. You can’t go else, just around Athens. Is the most fast.” He was quiet for a moment and managed to remain focused just long enough to catch the exit for the airport.

  Izzy looked panicked when the driver swerved into the sharp part of a slippery bend. He’d had his eyes in the back of the cab, talking to us during a treacherous turn. He, too, sensed her discomfort. “Miss, do not be concerned,” he assuaged. “I have twenty-two year experience driving cab. Eleven as personal driver.”

  Still, it felt as though we might slide off the earth at any moment. Izzy breathed deeply. She stopped watching the road ahead. Her window had clouded with gray condensation and she rolled it down. The driver looked back, concerned. “Are you haht?” He pronounced the “ha” like the slightly constricted, throat-clearing sound of the Hebrew “ch.”

  “No,” she explained. “I just wanted to clear the fog.”

  Driver: “Fhag?”

  “The mist,” George added. It only served to further confound.

  “Fag? Fhag? Fuck.”

  Izzy and I started laughing, which encouraged the driver. “Fuck, yellow fuck,” he chortled.

  Around curves we went. The driver ignored cautionary lights. Exhaustion heightened my anxiety, but I did my best to will myself into a relaxed state. I let the recognizable shapes of billboards, supermarkets, and gas stations comfort me with their evocations of ubiquity, despite their bearing strange text. We were spinning into the Airport Sofitel before long. The location was immediately familiar to me. This was the airport we flew into, and then out of shortly after, to get to Santorini. Now that trip felt like a lifetime ago.

  Saturday, March 29

  Athens

  The next morning Izzy was quiet. Her spoon surfed a cup of coffee, and she spent most of our meal staring at a terrible framed hotel print on a long, mauve wall across the dining room. Meanwhile, I had smoked salmon and eggs and tiny chicken sausages in the grandest version of the complimentary hotel continental breakfast we’d encountered yet. When we were through, she obtained from the front desk an access code for the public Internet station off the lobby that would afford her a fifteen-minute free pass. With nervous hands, as though racing against dwindling time, she logged into her e-mail.

  “He wrote back,” she said.

  “So, read it.”

  Her mouth gaped at the screen. I kept asking, “What happened?” but she didn’t respond. Finally she said, “Dominique is dead.”

  I was aghast. “Dead?”

  “Dead.” She looked at me. “He had a heart attack. I guess it happened very quickly.”

  “At the restaurant?” I envisioned a chaotic scene in the dining room. Maybe it occurred upstairs in the office where he and I had our own blood pressure–escalating exchange.

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, what’s the lawyer want?”

  “He left me a cellar in his will.”

  “A cellar? Where? In his house?”

  “In a liquor store. I guess he had a part-ownership in this seedy place on Chicago Avenue.”

  “The one with the lottery tickets and forties of Mickey’s?”

  “That one. With all the neon.”

  “It’s kind of a wine shop, right?”

  She shook her head. “I guess. Holiday Liquors is the name of the other half.”

  “And you get the whole store? Or just the inventory?”

  She thwacked the mouse button to advance down the page. “I can’t really tell.”

  “What about Dick?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What about Dick’?”

  “Well, now that . . .” Even though I broke off, she looked at me like she knew exactly what I was reluctant to say.

  “It’s not like I—we—could run a store.”

  “Why not?” I paused. “Wine not?”

  She laughed. “I still can’t believe he had a wine shop I never knew about. Fucking Dominique and his vintage attraction.” She logged out of her e-mail and closed the browser window.

  “Vintage Attraction would b
e a good name for the store.”

  “There’s not going to be a store. I just won’t accept it. When we get back home, I’m going to see this Schwartzstein and tell him I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

  “And then go work for Dick in New York?”

  She rubbed her ear contemplatively. “It’s a possibility.”

  “But running this together isn’t.”

  She looked at me tenderly.

  “Just don’t rule anything out, okay? No relinquishing of inherited property yet, okay?”

  Possibly the word inherited reminded her of the reason for the discussion. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  “Izzy, he weighed close to four hundred pounds, if not more. I’m surprised his heart held out as long as it did.”

  She shook her head slowly, as though the stun of the news was viscous, physically hard to move through.

  “He was the first person who really took a chance on me, Peter. He saw something in me. What we did . . . in the restaurant, the television show.” Her eyes went glassy. “I just wish . . . I wish things hadn’t ended up like they had. You know? Having him spend eternity thinking I’m a thief and a horrible person. That’s not what I want.”

  “Not that I believe in shit like eternity, but what if running his wine shop is how he wanted you to make it up to him?”

  “It could have just been an oversight. He probably forgot he even had that in the will. God, this is going to kill his wife, if it hasn’t already. She always thought we were screwing.”

  I winced internally, and tried to elicit a good-natured chuckle. “You should call the lawyer. I’m sure George would let you use his cell. Or do it down here with my credit card.”

  “Later,” she said. “I just want to think about this for a minute.”

  But Barry was thrumming his knuckles on the glass door of the Internet station, conveying, in an ungainly charade, that it was time for us to go.

  “Where are Dick and Maddie?” I asked, when I didn’t see them in the lobby.

  “Skipping out,” Barry said. “I guess Dick’s still not a hundred percent.”

  We sped along to the center of Athens in another yellow Mercedes taxi. Mountains with low-rise complexes and houses jammed into the cliffs thronged the highway. The satellite radio played Red Hot Chili Peppers and Greek pop.

  Above the music, Izzy and Barry made brief geographical conversation. George debriefed us about the next day’s departures. I pictured my final breakfast buffet and tried to plan the most efficient way to consume the largest quantity of smoked salmon before we’d have to go. The mood was somber until George pointed out the exit for Papagou, a residential area in the northeastern part of Athens, where he and his wife, Sofia, planned to live. He remarked proudly, “We’re building a house there.” The topic instantly cheered us. The glimpse into a bright future brought with it a contagious feeling of hope, at least for a gray moment.

  From Fidippidou Street and Mesogeion Avenue, we took King Constantine Boulevard and swung over to Queen Olga Boulevard. The city was clean because of the rain. We passed through the old royal park, Zappieon, and saw the huge columns at the ancient Temple of Olympian Zeus. George showed us the moldering stadio, Kallimarmoro, which was the home of the original modern Olympics. Motorized bike riders pulled in front of the taxi, without even turning their heads. Beyonce sang “Crazy in Love” as we drove the Pagrati neighborhood. It was, as we’d first noticed last night, a lot like San Francisco here. The residential streets were lined with eight- and ten-story buildings. Narrow shops and stores cluttered the main avenues. No space was wasted between commercial and residential. Everything had to nearly overlap in order to fit in as much as possible.

  The Acropolis guide we met at Hadrian’s Arch was an affable elderly woman, Athena. She’d been giving these tours for centuries. A pair of Londoners on holiday with expensive digital SLRs swinging from their necks asked if they could tag along with us. Athena looked to George for permission. He didn’t mind. They paid her twenty-five euros each. A stray golden hound also followed along our climb up the stairs.

  We saw the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and the Erechtheum. All the ancient, crumbling structures were imperial and majestic and conjured eons. These were scenes from old canvases and heroic couplets and frames from Richard Burton and Rudolph Maté studio system epics and childhood crayon-and-charcoal coloring-book lore. Athena circled us around the site of the old Acropolis Museum, where a future museum was now under construction. It was being built of period-correct marble and bronze. At each tour interstice, the Brits frantically fired dozens and dozens of haphazard shots, shuttering and flashing away as though Santa Monica paparazzi with mere seconds to immortalize a dazed actress before she’d stumble out of their OVFs and into Starbucks refuge. The dog happily offered to pose in the pictures the tourists took of the monuments.

  As we straggled, Athena told stories about the Golden Age and Greece under the rule of Pericles. We learned of developments under Mnesicles in 437 b.c. The Peloponnesian War brought an interruption in progress. Our guide gave us an overview of the Roman Period. We contemplated the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and sympathized with the Greeks when we heard of the Venetians’ seizure of their art and valuables during the Morean War in 1687. But it wasn’t until Athena concluded the tour that she spoke perhaps the most resonant information. As we looked out over Dionysus’s theater, ruined, yet still stately, Athena told Izzy and me Dionysus was the god of wine and words.

  “One god for both of us,” Izzy said. She smiled at me with eyes I hadn’t seen since the day we got married. All at once I felt closer to her, figuratively, and literally, as she stood a little nearer to me. The back of my right hand and her left swung in close proximity at our respective sides. “How do you like that?”

  The exit route was lined with tour groups. Italian girls in pastel, hooded zip sweatshirts giggled and elbowed and texted. Spanish families and Russian college students waited on line to claim our places. Older Japanese women queued up in a harrowed huddle. They had surgical masks over their noses and mouths, as though fearful of catching any contagious antiquity.

  Izzy, Barry, and I followed George down cobblestone streets. More unaccompanied dogs chased each other. We passed scoundrel taxi drivers looking for unsophisticated tourists to exploit with tantalizing off-meter fares for “a bargain.” A gray-haired pastry cart vendor who wore a blazer and tie looked toward our tourist patronage hopefully. In town, the graffiti and its range of expressions impressed me. I saw sparse, perfunctory Greek messages in purple and gray on the walls of residential buildings with motorcycles parked outside. Closer to the restaurants, the messages were brilliant, passionate rebellion in myriad colors. We proceeded up Metropolis Street, a path that contained a cathedral fronted by a marble square. George told us, “Nearly every stone used to make this church came from an older church or other ancient building. The stone from Galilee, where Jesus changed water into wine, is supposed to be here.” Agios Eleftherios was the Byzantine church to the south of the cathedral, a Thorne room in comparison.

  This road turned into Pondroussou Street, which emptied us onto Monastraki, the area known for its flea market and profusion of shops. For sale were sunglasses and calendars and maps and sea sponges and worry beads in yellow and orange and blue and black and pink and aqua and playing cards and baskets full of ouzo miniatures and ceramic busts of gods and kilned, glazed pottery bearing mythological scenes and marble chess sets and leather purses and plastic purses and women’s sweaters and jackets and pornographic illustrations of ancient copulating figures and T-shirts. Carts teemed with bunched bananas, pyramids of oranges, apples, pears, a billion loose strawberries. Alongside the carts, men hawked silver and gold rings from boxes that hung in front of their chests on embroidered neck straps. Izzy bought a small bust of Apollo at a narrow trinket stall. She thought he looked a little like me.

 
Then it was time to go. George met us and led a speed walk to the Metro. At times he was just a dark leather–jacketed blur with a backpack. We swept through the immaculate marble-walled and granite-floored neoclassical facility. A sign boasted it had been built at the end of the nineteenth century.

  The Metro station, like most of Greece, had been overhauled before the last Olympics descended. It now presented various artifacts encased in glass. George, though hurrying so we wouldn’t miss the train, couldn’t resist stopping to point them out to us.

  “What is that?” Izzy asked.

  “Relics,” George said. “Bits of columns and archeological finds. They discovered all of this when they were digging down to build the subway.”

  Here there was, literally, an underground museum. Pieces of antiquity were juxtaposed with modern works. Izzy and I wandered over to a tactile mosaic fashioned out of petrified earth and stone. It resembled a relief map. “That’s the bed of the Eridanos River. It’s twenty-five hundred years old,” George told us. “Hard to believe we can look at it, just like that. But there you have it. Anyway.”

  “I can’t believe there’s art down here,” Izzy said. “In Chicago, the only things on display in our Red Line stations are crumpled Cheetos bags and chicken bones.”

  Down another escalator and through another long corridor we went. We reached the platform two minutes ahead of schedule. George could relax.

  A half hour later, a Sofitel desk clerk begrudgingly issued Izzy another fifteen-minute free Internet pass. She checked her e-mail in the lobby. There were more details from Chef Dominique’s lawyer. Chef Dominique had bequeathed to Izzy the fifty percent he owned of the liquor store, the wine cellar, and all his wine-related assets, including the name “Vintage Attraction.” She could, if she desired, run that side of the business. There was nothing stopping her, or us. It was what Chef Dominique would have wanted.