The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  “It’s a big responsibility, Jess.”

  Frustrated, I cut the conversation short and considered other options. It was ridiculous to even think about asking Darlene. My Aunt Teresa wasn’t exactly hale herself. Leaving him alone was flat-out unthinkable, especially after what had happened the night before.

  As absurd as it seems, I don’t think I fully realized how much I had taken on by having my father move in with me until that very moment. I was practically chained to the house. I could get out for a while for a business meeting or a night at Marina’s, but anything beyond that would be subject to the mercies of my siblings. And they weren’t going to be especially forthcoming with those. Did this mean that Marina and I could never go away for the weekend? Did this mean that I would only be writing articles I could research from home for the rest of my life?

  Did this mean I was going to have to turn down the hottest assignment I’d ever received?

  I was beside myself. I was feeling claustrophobic. I envisioned my entire career dissipating before my eyes. I saw my fifty-year-old self sitting with my hundred-year-old father, the two of us staring blankly at a television screen, his verve dimmed by time, mine dimmed by the lack of opportunity.

  I needed someone to vent to, but there was no one available. My siblings were less than sympathetic. I didn’t have a single friend who would be able to relate. Marina was teaching. I knew instinctively that I had to avoid seeing my father while I was feeling this way, because I would almost certainly say something hurtful to him, and he didn’t deserve that. I didn’t call Aline right away because the idea of making that call was devastating to me. I tried to continue filing, but my thoughts were so clouded that I could barely remember the alphabet.

  Marina called a little after noon. A few weeks back, she had taken to calling me during her lunch break, and it was a welcome way to make the transition out of the morning. The moment she said hello, I dumped the entire story on her.

  “I can’t believe I have to make this phone call,” I said toward the end of my tirade. “I did a five-thousand-word article on butter for her once just so I could get an opportunity like this, and now I have to call her to say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

  “I’ll stay with him,” Marina said when I took a breath.

  It took a second for the words to register. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll stay with your father. You don’t think he’ll have a problem with that, do you?”

  “He doesn’t get a vote.”

  “He definitely gets a vote. Why, do you think he’ll have a problem with it? He seemed to like me.”

  “He loves you. I think he wants to marry you. You would really do this?”

  “Of course I would. Unless you think his being alone during the day will be an issue after what happened last night.”

  I thought about this for a moment, but the image of his being his clear-eyed self this morning (not to mention a significant amount of my desperately wanting this not to be an impediment) persuaded me.

  “No, he’s been great today. I have no idea what that was last night.”

  “So talk to him and make sure he’s okay with it, and then book your flight to San Francisco.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this for me.”

  “Why can’t you believe it? You’d do it for me, wouldn’t you?”

  I didn’t have to think about this, even though I had never thought about it before. “Yeah, of course I would. I guess it just seems funny that you’re coming through for me when my brother and sister couldn’t be bothered.”

  She chuckled. “Well, he was very nice to me when we had dinner.”

  “Just make sure you keep your distance from him. He’s pretty slick and I don’t want to have to worry about the two of you while I’m away.”

  “Hey, you never know what might happen. But I’ll try to remain faithful as long as I can. I guess it depends on how much of a commitment he’s willing to make.”

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all.”

  “Sometimes you just have to take a chance.”

  I laughed. Marina’s lunchtime calls often gave me a lift, but never before had one catapulted me like this one.

  “This is world-class great of you, you know?” I said.

  “I’m sure you’ll think of some fabulous way to thank me.”

  “I guarantee that.”

  We got off the phone a few minutes later. I called Aline to follow up and confirm plans, but she was out to lunch. I went out to see my father. Given how dumbstruck he had been about Marina the first time he met her, I figured this news was going to make his day nearly as much as it had made mine.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Northern California – particularly the wine country – simply does “quality of life” better than anyplace in the Northeast does. Food and Living put me up in an inn that was relatively modest by the luxe standards of some lodging available in the vicinity, but still there were aromatherapy bath beads for the tub, a collection of herbal teas on the sideboard, fresh fruit and chocolate-dipped strawberries, and a CD player with a selection of recordings from local musicians. I hadn’t been in the area in several years and yet from the moment I touched down in San Francisco, I felt a rare sense of comfort. I felt like I belonged here.

  I landed in the early afternoon. As soon as I hit the freeway, the combination of topography, sunlight, bright music on the radio, and excitement about my assignment inspired me. Rather than go directly to the inn, I decided to take a couple of side trips. I walked along the waterfront in Sausalito for an hour, eating an ice cream cone and exploring different stores. Then I remembered a craft shop in Yountville and drove to see if it was still there. I bought a coffee mug for my father (assuming that his drinking coffee in a handmade mug would be the next step in his coffee-drinking evolution) and a pair of silver earrings for Marina.

  I’d been to the area four times previously. The first was with friends while Georgia was in Europe. I gained my appreciation for California wine on that trip, and learned that it was possible to feel more sophisticated while stumbling around if you got drunk on the better stuff. The second was with a fellow journalist in an attempt to drum up business with West Coast magazines. I came away with a pretty clear sense that I didn’t have the voice to write for them, but the experience subtly altered my writing style, making it more sensory and less narrative (which of course was particularly useful when writing about hedge funds). The third was with Karen and like everything else with her it was a bacchanal. Prodigious amounts of food and wine, lovemaking on a beach, in a garden, in a Jacuzzi, even a wicker chair. (It dawned on me that there was a very real possibility that Karen was somewhere within a hundred-mile radius of where I was lodging on my current trip. I didn’t attempt to look her up.)

  The fourth was a few years ago. Having a bit of a crisis in terms of where my professional and personal lives were going, I headed out there on my own. I stayed in a tiny bed-and-breakfast and drove and walked for hours every day. The trip was restorative beyond all of my expectations. I made many discoveries in terms of shops and restaurants, and nearly as many in terms of where I was headed in my life. This was the first time I became genuinely comfortable with my solo-ness. I could go to a concert unaccompanied. I could spend an entire day talking to no one. I could do something that I had previously enjoyed doing only in the company of others, and still enjoy it. I returned from that trip feeling for perhaps the first time in my life that, while having friends, lovers, and relatives was welcome, it wasn’t a prerequisite to living well.

  It was the memory of the last trip that suffused the first day of this trip, undoubtedly because I was there by myself. There was a lightness to my mood as I wandered around, remembering the things that I did and the things that I thought. Just before going to the inn, I took a drive to Calistoga and walked up to the playhouse there. On my last trip I had bought a ticket to the Edward Albee play being performed. It was the first time I had ever felt comfo
rtable entering a theatre by myself, the first time I didn’t have any concerns about other people seeing me alone and thinking, “Poor guy, can’t get a date.” It was a significant turning point, and since it was Albee, the play was profound as well.

  I eventually got to the inn and settled down. The next morning, I made my first trip to the vineyard where Hayward was putting his New Collective together. The company and the wine were not going to be called “New Collective,” but Hayward liked the idea of keeping the name a secret until the first bottles were released in two years. Everything about this winery differed dramatically from the Hayward image. I’d been to Hayward Vineyards on one of my previous trips and recalled it as a buffed monument to the triumph of winemaking for the educated masses. Hayward wines were quite good mid-level wines, the kind of thing I might have served (and had) at a dinner party. I thought they deserved most of their popularity. It was clear from the look of their operation, though, that their goal was to put a bottle or two in the wine rack of every home in America. It was a Machine.

  The new setting was stripped down and unpretentious. Of course, they wouldn’t be receiving the public for another couple of years and they had plenty of time to get their façade in place, but one would have thought that if Grant Hayward, The Rock and Roll Winemaker, was going to be spending any time here at all, he would have insisted that the trappings be flashier. I of course leapt to the conclusion that the spartan environment was all very consciously designed by Hayward and his PR people. I assumed they had spent months deciding how stripped down to make the place in order to suggest the proper level of monk-like dedication to craft.

  There were very few rules governing the piece I was writing, which surprised me given how controlling Hayward tended to be with the media. I have to admit that, as excited as I was about the prospects of doing this article, I was also more than a little dubious about the way I expected my interviews to proceed. I fully expected Hayward to spin this into ten thousand words of promotion. I assumed that my first meeting (or perhaps even my first several) would be with publicists and gatekeepers who would explain to me not only what I would be allowed to observe, but also what my observations were going to be. Instead, on that very first day, Hayward himself came out to greet me.

  He was much smaller in person than I expected him to be. At the same time, he radiated much more presence than he did on a television screen or the pages of a magazine. I had only begun to stand when I saw him enter the reception area, and I swear he lifted me to my feet when he gripped my hand. Looking him in the eyes (which required looking down, as he was actually a few inches shorter than me), I could see that he did not perceive my arrival as a burden but that he in fact seemed to be glad to have a representative of Food and Living here. He led me through a door and we walked off at a brisk pace.

  “We’ve set up a home base for you –” He stopped and looked around and then shook his head. “– somewhere around here. But if it’s okay with you, I thought we’d walk the vineyard first.”

  “Yeah, fine. Lead the way.”

  We stepped through another doorway and out toward the grapes. We were walking at a pace I’d reserved exclusively for midtown Manhattan, far brisker than the one I’d set for myself the day before.

  “I like your work,” Hayward said.

  “Thanks. Aline mentioned that you read the pancake story.”

  He nodded. “I did. I’m a bit of a pancake junkie myself. I’ll have pancakes for dinner sometimes. Name a major American city and I’ll tell you the best place to get pancakes.”

  “I guess I could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d just called you before I wrote the article, huh?”

  “Nah, you always want to do the work yourself. Besides, you were absolutely right about Detroit, and I would have given you bad information there. And I didn’t even know about that place outside of Portland. I completely disagree with you about Kansas City, though.”

  “I’ll leave room in this article for a rebuttal, if you’d like.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. I’ll keep that in mind. I like your other stuff, too. That grandmother piece was a knockout.”

  “You read the grandmother piece?”

  He threw me a knowing glance. “I like to be informed about the people I grant interviews to.”

  I nodded. I was impressed. Of course he had his staff pull the articles together (unlikely they gave him any of the searing investigative work I’d done on wallpaper), but he’d still bothered to read them himself. And he even liked them. Like the vast majority of the population, I find it incredibly endearing when someone thinks highly of me, and I was already starting to like Grant Hayward.

  Once we got to the vineyard, Hayward’s pace slowed considerably. We spent more than an hour there while he explained to me the Collective’s choices in fencing, their approach to irrigation, the various sub-strains of grape chosen to grow in different locations, even the subtle decisions they’d made regarding the spacing between rows of vines. The entire time, at Hayward’s request, my tape recorder stayed off and my notebook remained in my backpack.

  “Not that any of this would be easy to steal,” he said, “but as you can imagine, it’s all rather proprietary.”

  “You know, you probably could have glossed over this and I wouldn’t have had a clue about any of it.”

  “I figured that. But it’s important for you to know. If you’re really going to write about what we’re doing here, you need to understand what goes into what we’re doing here.”

  A short while later, Hayward brought me back inside and introduced me to his assistant, who showed me the office they’d set up for my visit. He excused himself, saying that he had some things he needed to attend to. It was only then, while talking to his assistant, that I learned that Hayward was located at this facility full-time, having turned the day-to-day task of running Hayward Vineyards over to his COO. He’d even given the management of his annual summer concert series to someone else.

  I spent much of the rest of the day on the premises, meeting with various members of the staff and conducting interviews with groundskeepers, designers, even the receptionist. At around 3:30, I packed up my laptop and headed out. Hayward caught me in the hallway as I was leaving.

  “Hey, Jesse. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you more today,” he said. “The working life, you know? We have a bunch of people lined up to sit down with you tomorrow.”

  “That would be great. I got some good stuff today.”

  “I’m glad. What are you doing for dinner tomorrow night?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t made any plans.”

  “Great. I think I can pull the entire Collective together. We’ll go into town and you can get to know everybody.”

  After that, he turned, throwing out something about “details,” and heading off at his sprinter’s pace.

  ~~~~~~~~

  I got back to the inn around 4:15 and figured it would be a good time to call home. My father answered the phone.

  “Hi, Dad. Everything going okay over there?”

  “I don’t know, Jess,” he said softly. “Didn’t you say that your girlfriend was going to come over here again today?”

  I felt a chill and immediately began wondering about flights back to Newark.

  “What? She’s not there? Did she call?”

  My father laughed and then answered in his normal booming voice. “Are you kidding? Do you think Marina would ever abandon me like that? I just wanted to see how you’d react. Yeah, everything is great here. I was just finishing up the dishes.”

  “Finishing up what with the dishes?”

  He spoke to me as though I were seven. “Washing them, Jess. They tell me that it’s nicer to eat off of dishes after they’ve been washed.”

  “You’re doing the dishes?”

  “Do you think I can’t handle the job?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re great at the job, Dad. Keep up the good work.”

  He chuckled, for
a reason that escaped me. “So? Are you getting anywhere out there?”

  “I think I’m doing okay so far. I had a lot of good interviews, and I have a bunch lined up for tomorrow. This is going to be an interesting story.”

  “Hey, you travel across the country for a story, it had better be an interesting one. Want to talk to Marina?”

  I told him I did, and a moment later she got on the line.

  “He’s doing the dishes?”

  I could feel her smile across the line. “Yes he is. I didn’t have to bribe him or anything. He got up from the table when we were finished eating and told me to go relax while he cleaned up.”

  “I just realized that I’ve had it all wrong. You’re the alien. You’ve blasted him with your hypno-ray, haven’t you?”

  “Found me out.”

  “Is it permanent?”

  “We haven’t perfected the technology yet.”

  I settled back in an overstuffed chair and brought a box of potpourri to my nose for a sniff. “So I guess asking if everything is okay is superfluous, huh?”

  “He seems to be enjoying himself.” I could envision Marina pulling her hair back to expose one side of her neck while she spoke. She did it all the time when she was on the phone, and I found it ridiculously sexy. “He’s eating. And I think he’s sleeping okay. We haven’t had any events.”

  “That’s great. Have I told you how much I appreciate your doing this?”

  “The eighteen times you said it before you left for the airport got the message across.”

  I played with the dried flowers in the potpourri box. “I just want to make sure you know.”

  “It’s nothing. When my mother comes to town again, you can live with her for a week to make up for it. So how’s it going out there?”

  “I think it’s going great. I really like Hayward, which is nearly as much of a surprise as my father doing housework. He’s nowhere near as slick as I expected him to be, and he didn’t drop a single name the entire time I was talking to him today.”

  “Will you get a good story out of this?”