That night we had a big dinner with a number of winemakers whose properties we didn’t get to visit. Our group said good-byes afterward. The parting words were gracious and sincere. There in the Sofitel lobby was talk of domestic reunions, maybe in upstate New York. A Greek viticultural roadshow was making a Chicago stop in May, and there we’d get to see George and some of the winemakers and marketers we’d gotten to know here. I felt immeasurably grateful to George for not disinviting Izzy to Greece when he learned she’d been fired from Bistro Dominique. She’d planned to keep it a secret. But Izzy had, I found out tonight, confessed to him when he called her as we shuttled on the Blue Line with our suitcases and a bag of sandwiches to O’Hare almost ten days ago. In spite of the fact that Izzy had lost her wine program, George knew she wasn’t going to be out of the business forever. He wasn’t going to let her—or me—pass this up. That afternoon, we had airline tickets to Munich and a connection to Thessaloniki awaiting, but beyond leaving the country, we were still largely uncertain about where we were truly headed. And tomorrow we’d return home. So much and yet so little had changed.
We wandered into elevators and upstairs to the rooms. Izzy was already beginning to fade. I followed her to bed. Then the phone rang. It was George, dialing up from the lobby. He needed back the power adapter he’d lent us for the charging of our numerous American-voltage electronics. Back on went my shoes.
George stood downstairs in front of a glass display case containing wine bottles, which incongruously included an old Condrieu. I gave him his adapter. We shook hands and hugged, as though we hadn’t done so shortly before.
“I’m glad to know you, Peter Hapworth,” George said. “You’re a rare breed.”
“Thanks, George,” I said. “You have a lot of energy. I really admire what you do here. These wines deserve a voice outside of this country, and you give it to them.”
He laughed tightly. “I don’t know if I give it to them, but I guess I help them get heard.”
“I’d say you do.”
“Well, now you have to tell everyone you know about Assyrtiko and Agiorgitiko, my friend.”
“I want to do more than just talk, George,” I said. “I think that’s the biggest discovery I’ve made here. I’ve spent too much of my life just talking about things.”
“It’s time you started pouring,” he said. He grinned like he knew something I didn’t. “Anyway, speaking of time, it’s changing tonight, you know. Spring forward.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me.”
Sunday, March 30
The child wailing rows behind us on the Aegean flight to Munich provided a reminder the next morning of just how disagreeable being uprooted and entering into the confining situation of air travel was. We’d gone to sleep late and gotten up very early—even earlier than the clock read, technically, because of the time change. The undigested aftermath of my last battle with the continental buffet glut bounced around inside me. The crying and screaming also externalized the perplexing intersection of my conflicting emotional states. I was eager to get back to Chicago, to sift the junk mail that had accumulated at our doorstep, to watch cooking shows and new Vintage Attractions I’d DVRed, to reunite with the pug I longed to see, to be with Izzy. Also part of me was dreading our return. In Greece, Izzy and I had become a real couple again. But because of almost-but-not-quite resolved domestic disturbances, I feared things could once more become just as fractured as before we left. We also lacked resolution in matters of our future, and economic means of having one. Takeoff only drowned out the unceasing caterwauling by a negligible degree. I appreciated the escalating sonic competition nonetheless. As the plane gradually ascended, the familiar landscape left focus and effectively came apart. It rendered itself vaguer and vaguer and less and less ours with each kilometer we amassed. The mountains became hillocks and then black smudges of earth. The city turned into small white boxes as we climbed some more. Then it was blue and white and nothing else.
The wailing faded away. Now only the engine rumbled. Izzy was tired and wanted to sleep. I talked her into one last drink in Greece (so to speak, anyway, in case we’d already unknowingly crossed into Italian airspace) when the first beverage service rolled through. We shared a split of Greek sparkling wine. It was Moschofilero done in the Charmat method. We toasted and I sipped my small portion gradually. The wine, Izzy said, bore a similar tart lemoniness to Asian apple pear and quince.
“Chef Dominique would have liked this one,” I returned. Our first conversation at the Metropolitan Club before he and Izzy took the stage came to my mind.
She agreed. “But he would have gone insane if you called it Champagne.” She did an impression of the chef berating a waiter. Her cheeks were distended and her upper body swayed to simulate his waddle. Maybe because of sleep deprivation, I found it hard to stop laughing.
“Do you miss him?” I asked.
She nodded shyly.
“He wasn’t so bad.”
She turned, first to the clouds, then to me. “You really think we should do it? You really want to change your entire life and run a wine shop with me?”
“Izzy, of course. I’ve been changing my entire life since the night we met.”
“It hasn’t sucked too badly, has it?”
“No. It hasn’t.” I started to cry. “I’m whole because of it. Because of all of it. Because of you.”
“Hapworth.”
I took off my glasses to blot my eyes on a sleeve. “So, you’re going back into the wine business.”
“We’re going into the wine business.”
“We’re going into the wine business.”
“I guess there’s only one more thing we have to discuss.”
I sniffled, heart stuttering. “Okay.”
“What’s Ishiguro going to think?”
Vino
16
With Izzy’s oversight, I accepted the stock deliveries. I organized the inventory. I’d found on eBay several used poster-frame marquees to announce purveyors’ “new releases” and wines “coming soon.” The frames were festooned with lightbulbs to maximize their attention-grabbing powers—and they still worked. A colleague of Ari Marks’s, from the Daley Machine art department, volunteered to spearhead the store’s graphics effort for wine movie–poster ads and other point-of-purchase signs. We’d retained, for the most part, the original wooden wine shelving around the perimeter of the space. We had also acquired several double-sided, mobile, wire-mesh displays of the kind used in video stores. The same fixtures that once accommodated rows of VHS rentals, when that sort of thing still existed, could now, after a bit of adjusting, be used, quite splendidly, to feature varietals. I embarked on a long project arranging the product out on display in the store for optimal customer browsing by style and region.
One morning, I was finally finished arraying. Izzy surveyed the surroundings with a wary (but amused) shake of her head. “Wine shop meets Blockbuster.”
“Hey, be kind, re . . . wine,” I replied.
She followed me over to a perpendicular bank of shelves we’d designated the Greek corner. It was embattled with gleaming bottles. We admired the spectrum of grape varieties we now carried. Athiri, Malogousia, Roditis, and, below, Agiorgitiko, Mavrodaphne, and Xinomavro. We also had Greek cava and some ready-to-go Assyrtiko and Moschofilero in the cooler.
The decision to sell a lot of the wines we’d discovered on the trip had been difficult for Izzy to make. She’d spent days with the numbers, contemplating financial and logistical realities. Our wholesale cost for the few cases we were able to keep on hand at any one time were higher than the margins would have liked. A Corked4Less-scale big-box store operation this was not. But I held fast. It was important to me that one of the cornerstones of this undertaking was to pay homage to the country and its products that had gotten us here. The usual three-time markup applied to these wines would result in
a retail price that would discourage those customers unfamiliar with the grapes. They’d end up purchasing cheaper bottles they already knew they liked. Izzy, after a period of industry knowledge–induced balking, eventually agreed with my logic. It didn’t make business sense. It would be easier for us to generate income selling a lot of Pinot Grigio and California Chardonnay. We might even lose money by taking risks on the boutique and the daring. But it was, I intuited, a calculated risk. The only way to get people to set aside their provincial consumer fears and explore and discover was to just bring them the wine. And wasn’t learning something new the ultimate goal?
I could tell Izzy was impressed with what I’d—what we’d—accomplished in a relatively short period.
“I love it,” she said.
“I think Ishiguro’s bed should go here. It’s a perfect corner, out of the sun, near the wine bar.”
“You know he’s not going to lie there,” she said. “He’s going to want to help sell. And this ‘wine bar’ you mention? You really plan on holding tastings at the counter?”
“Of course,” I said. “And not just eyedropper portions of old wine we opened days earlier and want to be done with. I want people to have a glass while they shop.”
“Isn’t that a lot?” she asked.
“They’ll buy if they’ve been drinking.”
“True. A sober browser comes in and, buzzed, leaves a customer.”
“My theory exactly.”
“Well, you and Ishiguro get to do the dishes.”
“Deal.”
Vintage Attraction opened, in preview mode, with little fanfare, a couple of days before the publicized grand celebration. It wasn’t as though I expected an influx of shoppers to come spilling into the store the moment I turned the Closed sign around. But couldn’t even a solitary drunk transient working on delirious memory have inadvertently stumbled in for a lottery ticket? I took a deep breath and went about my business as though I had some. I arranged a few glasses on the counter. I opened a bottle of Moschofilero and poured myself a small amount to smell (I had to make sure it wasn’t corked, after all). I emptied the Xinomavro I pulled the cork from next into a crystal decanter one of the reps had given us as a gift. The wine was relatively young and the tannins were still aggressive. Decanting, as I recalled observing when we were at Alpha Estate in Amyndeon, would help relax this one and open it up a bit. As I watched the dark purple—almost black—color of the wine sheet down the distended sides of the glass, I couldn’t help thinking about how different I was now that I knew about things like age and tannin and the powers of aerating wine. Even though I was still learning, and probably would forever be learning, I took here a measure of pride. I was on a course to having purpose, a direction. These were the makings of a real life.
“Is that Cabernet Sauvignon?” Izzy quipped when she came in. “Because I only drink Cabernet Sauvignon. Please, sir, a bottle of your finest Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. I simply won’t settle for anything less.”
“Very funny.”
“Good idea decanting the Xinomavro,” she said.
“You want some?”
“I think I’ll start with your white.” She took the Moschofilero from the refrigerator and poured herself a modest glass. “Mmm,” she said after a sip. “I think we’re going to have a hard time keeping that in stock.”
I noticed something flat and square and brown extending from her handbag. “What is that?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said. She lifted out a framed portrait of a relatively youthful, jaunty, and only moderately overweight Chef Dominique. “It’s the photo from when Chef was featured in Chicago magazine in 1995,” she said. Here, before a pastel-and-geometric-patterned backdrop, sat immortalized the restaurateur at the zenith of his powers. This was about five years or so before he’d become the embittered, resentful profiteer with whom Izzy had had the fortuitous misfortune of becoming entangled. “Schwartzstein gave it to me.”
“Why?”
“I wanted it. I thought the store should honor him in some way.”
I pointed to a narrow space between the end of one display case and the “coming soon” movie poster frame. “Let’s put it over there.”
She looked at me gently, gratefully. “It means a lot to me.”
“To me, too.”
We hung the picture up. Ishiguro barked at the beaming chef. This was his first design disagreement in the renovation process. The pug and I studied the photograph. In 1995, the chef was estimable. He was likely optimistic about his future. Just as I was right now about my own. I’d never thought we’d had much in common, besides Izzy, but maybe we had shared similar hopes and dreams, just not contemporaneously. Ishiguro declared, in his characteristic shake, exhale, sigh, and sneeze manner, Dominique was free to remain, as long as I made sure not to pattern any of my professional ethics after the chef’s, to never take for granted the person because of whom there was a shop for me to stand in now. I silently assented. Then the pug returned to the ledge to resume his nap.
Predictably, the door chime sounded shortly after Izzy went out to get us lunch. I was making a last-minute revision to the order of chilled bottles and had my back to the store. Adrenaline cinched my throat. But there was no way out. This was real now. I turned bravely to face my first guests. It was T. Stoddard and The Pregnant Lady, my erstwhile UIC English Department drinking buddies. I immediately relaxed.
“What are you guys doing here?”
“I think the question is more like, what are you doing here?” T. Stoddard’s words slurred. True to character, my old friend, with one more class to teach ahead of him today, was hammered well in advance of cocktail hour. He produced a silver flask. Then he turned to The Pregnant Lady and offered it to her. “Something to go along with your Diet Coke?”
She looked at him strangely, though kindly. “But . . . I’m not drinking a Diet Coke.”
He nodded, a grave expression on his ruddy, lined face.
The Pregnant Lady unwound her scarf. From an eye-level shelf, using the glass between an Egly-Ouriet’s front labels as a makeshift mirror, she handed a slight restoration to her windswept, spiky blonde hair. “So, Peter Hapworth, of all the liquor stores in all the towns in all the world, we walk into yours?”
“We prefer the term ‘wine shop.’”
T. Stoddard choked a little on the whiskey he’d slugged. “‘Wine shop,’” he repeated in a British accent.
“You look like you’ve gotten some color,” The Pregnant Lady said to me.
“We were in Greece.”
“It is the color of someone living his life out in the world,” T. Stoddard said.
“How are things going at school? I miss my students.”
“They ask after you,” The Pregnant Lady said. “Schultz has me covering your 161.”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing, really,” she said. “You know how stoic undergraduates like to pretend to be.”
“Until you tell them they’re waitlisted,” T. Stoddard added. “Then, let the melodrama floodgates open.”
“God,” I said, eyes pointed at his sneakers. “I can only imagine how Shelley’s been badmouthing me since she let me go. Did she circulate a memo about my ‘breakdown’?”
“I’d call it a ‘breakout,’” The Pregnant Lady said, “and you needn’t worry about any of it. Nobody really pays too much attention to her gossiping and general dithering. People were shocked at first, but, ultimately, only thrilled for you, that you escaped.”
“Way to go, Hapworth,” T. Stoddard said. “A rare University Hall refugee.”
The Pregnant Lady gave me a hug. “You definitely look good here,” she said.
T. Stoddard, it seemed, had just about all the mawkishness he could take. He asked me, “Where is this celebrated spouse of yours, anyway? She leaves you here alone?”
&nbs
p; “With a pug, in point of fact,” The Pregnant Lady added.
“That’s Ishiguro,” I said. “My new boss.”
“Fair enough,” T. Stoddard said. He paced the aisles like a trial lawyer. “So, let me ask you something, and please excuse the, er, indelicacy of my syntax: between the former English teacher and the furry novelist, who the fuck is supposed to help customers differentiate between”—he reached up two bottles, additional Greek wines I’d opened and put out on the counter—“this one and this one?” He handed me the Athiri and filled an empty stem with Agiorgitiko. He drained the glass before even stopping to smell it.
“I guess cocktail hour is over and wine service may commence. I hope you’re not lecturing today,” I said.
“In-class writing. And a lot of it.” He blotted his mouth with a tattered corduroy blazer sleeve. “The prompt is:”—he cleared his throat—“‘Describe, in no fewer than five hundred words, the meaning of life.’” He paused to pour more wine. He then drawled, “That oughta keep ’em busy until the Ritalin wears off.”
“Please excuse Leaving Las Douglas Hall over there.” The Pregnant Lady spoke in an exasperated register.
I refilled my own glass with Moschofilero. I swirled it. I raised the wine to smell, but suddenly could only detect the store scents: musty wood, dust, Ajax, new paint. “He has a point,” I said. “About me running this place. What am I supposed to do when Izzy’s not here? How do I tell people the difference between Pinot Grigio and Pinot Gris?”
“What is the difference?” T. Stoddard asked.
“It’s like Shiraz and Syrah.”
He beckoned with index and middle fingers. “Meaning?”
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