The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2010

The Sea Was Wine Dark

Ray Keifetz

Once a month the three of us meet. Let's call my friends Nick and Jake, not their real names, they don't want their wives to know, the expense, but more to the point the uneasiness, perhaps inevitable whenever one pursues an illicit passion be she a woman or, as in our case, inordinate quantities of wine.

Our gatherings follow a ritual. First we lay out the freshly laundered linen cloth. This is a thick cloth heavily starched, the flexible rendered inflexible for the sake of elegance. Next we place upon it a row of glasses, goblets to be precise with the corresponding evocations of globes, ghosts, goblins, blood red hemoglobin, transfusions for anemic souls . . . Desire, hunger, tremble my hand whenever I fill a glass with red wine poured from a bottle concealed in a paper bag. The wine, which like our blood has its youth, maturity, and death, is so red that I catch my breath and stare into the dark depths for traces of my past, my hopes, my dreams. And while the brown bags from which we pour remind us of less fortunate wine drinkers who meet outdoors, they are also masks which keep us honest. How many evenings have the unsung vintages been favored, the much maligned estates soared? At our table paupers become princes and princes paupers, no emperor wears new clothes. We never know what we're tasting until we have first reached into our hearts. And this alone would be reason to gather.

My wife once asked me, "But what do you talk about?"

"Taste," I said.

"What is there to talk about? It tastes good or it doesn't."

For Jake, Nick, and I good is our starting point. It is all good we say. The Greeks and Jews honor wine as the gift of God, the Christians as His very blood. Wine lifts the burden of work and duty from our shoulders so that for an evening we may straighten and look at life directly. And that is what we try to do at these monthly gatherings, for life, like wine, is a pallid thing till every nuance has been noted, every suggestion tracked down, till everything off setting, stagnant, false or foul, has been detected and exposed.

But I have also heard it said that perhaps some tastes should not be defined, some puzzles left unsolved. What are hints and traces anyhow but the residue of what was meant to be forgotten.

It was Jake who said this.

Tonight is Jake's turn to provide, Jake who has also said, Vote with the Democrats but drink with the Republicans. Jake, despite his investment brokerage, does indeed vote with the Democrats and perhaps for the same reason, some sense of pay back, drinks with Nick who services his car and myself who tutors his children. Wine is a great leveler. Jake has promised us "something out of the ordinary". Last month we tasted Syrahs from around the world, the subject here being climate, culture, and I suppose, as always, expectation. Something out of the ordinary. Apart from Jake's being nearly a half hour late, in itself out of the ordinary, I'm expecting, because it is Jake, something extraordinary. Nick keeps saying where is he, he's never been late before. Strong, sturdy, stout hearted Nick is into yeast. Last year Nick bought six pinots from the same winery aged for the same length of time in the same French oak barrels but each one fermented by a different yeast. I guessed everything from New South Wales to the Willamette Valley. Jake on the other hand said, "It's the same wine. Some subtle change, nothing like a war or mass migration or religious conversion, not even a move from the city to the suburbs; more like a change, I'd say, in the way one parts his hair . . ."

A tapping on the door and Jake appears, tall, lean, and looking tonight positively cadaverous. The box of wine in his arms is not unexpected, but what is that trailing from it — cobwebs?

“Tonight," Jake announces, his usually crisp, staccato monotone somewhat eroded around the edges, "the subject is rusticity."

Jake doesn't ask us how we are or apologize for his lateness. Long ago he informed us that none of this matters. I don't want to hear about your weekend, your ski trip, your problems with your wife. I want to hear about the wine. And suddenly I'm thinking of my wife who has stayed late at her office: "I can see spending a night talking about music, about art, politics . . . I just don't get this wine culture of yours, this whining over wine. I don't see what's in it beyond an excuse for too much drinking. "

"Rusticity," Nick asks, "as in rustic?"

Nick and I exchange a quick glance because what can the word possibly mean to a man whose cufflinks match his door knocker, whose suits and cars appear stitched by the same tailor?

Ignoring the question, Jake sets down five bottles, all bagged to their necks, and begins to uncork. He uncorks silently as if to hear what may be heard from within the bottle. Which is our way. We listen before we sniff, we sniff before we see, and we see before we taste, likewise before we feel. We see so much in this life of ours, yet taste so little. Rather we leave it in the bottle to age —for tomorrow we like to say—though in the end most of us cellar it forever.

Not so Jake and Nick and I. We will drink before the night is over.

Raising the first bagged bottle, Jake says, "Can either of you remember your first sip, your very first taste of wine? What was it like?"

We don't answer, we can't. His question contravenes the rule that we let the wine speak before we do and that of necessity wines to be considered must be containable within the compass of our glasses. The wines of our past are simply too vast a subject for this or any tasting; try better to taste the sea.

"Because," Jake continues, "it is against that first sip we compare all subsequent sips."

Black wine froths into our glasses. Homer's heroes bled this darkly. He called his sea wine dark. As I watch the level in each glass rise, I think of wounds that can never heal and of seas we can never hope to cross but only confront before we drown. Naz derovia malchiki, a votre sante, cheers... Periodically my wife visits a therapist whom she calls a mentor. To this person she confesses everything that went wrong the previous month— with her, with me, with us. She comes home and says, her voice rising,

"Don't you sometimes wish you could make a clean break?"

No, I answer, wishing she drank wine and could understand how hard vines struggle to grow in sterile soils, on limestone cliffs with little water, how the most inhospitable vineyards yield the sweetest fruit. I wish she could appreciate the long patience we call cellaring. Perhaps then she would share our faith in the promise of aging.

The wine Jake has poured into our first glass, forgetting Homer for the moment, really is black recalling a Madiran or Petit Verdot. I swirl. I take a sip. Big, black — and dry. You expect a roar but get only a whisper. So I listen closely and hear, not the wine, but again Jake's voice:

"One of the five wines before you is the first I ever sipped."

Despite everything I know about Jake, I'm astonished. I mean who among us has not a swiss colony, a lancer's rose, or worse hanging in his closet? To be drinking at this level right from the start—

"Any guesses," Jake asks, a little smugly it strikes me, "as to the country of origin?"

"Well if we eliminate France—" Nick says.

"And we can," Jake assures him.

"Then we open the world."

Where don't they make wine these days? They make it even where I was born, though I will swear that Jake's arid red comes from no place near my neighborhood. Grapes called Canandaigua, Catawba, Delaware, grow there. My wife and I loved them for their native names and that they bloomed and ripened, like the people of our dark region, in only a few months of sunlight. We savored them for the musky perfume the educated deride as foxy. Foxy as in fox, and why not? These grapes after all grow wild.

A glass of White Niagara was present at our passion. Overcome with emotion I dropped the heirloom crystal glass my future wife had brought out to celebrate us, but even before I could begin to apologize she stood up and dashed her own glass to the floor. Together we bent down and swept up the shards, mine and hers, the accidental and the willed, the clumsy and the beau geste . But I think we were careless in our sweeping, too drunk on the rest of that sweet, feral bottle. We must have overlooked a splinter, which I fear has lodged in my wife's heart. For where I look back upon an act of great generosity and spirit, she sees only my carelessness, my untrustworthiness. Now she eschews wine entirely and I would drink even with the Republicans if I thought for a moment they would choose feeling over glass.

"Napa," Nick guesses.

I take another swallow. I taste no fields of ripe raspberries, inhale no perfumed, sunburnt air. The wine is gaunt, its ribs are showing. Jake has never cared for California wines. Too flabby, he says. The wine Nick loves Jake derides as being suitable only for outdoor weddings. I would serve this wine of Jake's at an outdoor famine. Yet its very lack of all that we generally seek, keeps us seeking; its reticence demands that we sip again, and again . . . This wine asks its own questions. Whom have I consecrated, whose vows sanctified, whose hopes have I launched, whose despair assuaged?

"Wrong," Jake sighs and pours the second bagged bottle. Immediately a hint of sweetness, like those breezes which come to us in January and smell of spring, fills the room. He pours and the hint becomes a shout. If I were a bee or a butterfly, I would drown.

More than ever I feel cut off from the woman I still love. I take this second glass not as some might suppose to forget, but to make certain that I do not. Over the years my wife has become more and more herself and I have to admit the same could be said about me. Each in our own way has aspired to the lonely, varietal splendor of a Burgundian Pinot and has forgotten what bliss exists among humble, communal Cotes du Rhones. We have indeed become more our selves and consequently less ourself. Last night I dreamed we were sleeping in a strange bedroom and that my wife turned to me and said, "We could have had such a beautiful life together."

"Yes," I answered and wept.

I woke this morning in our own familiar bedroom. My wife was there beside me, still asleep, and so I knew that I had dreamed. And again I wept.

I take this second glass and drink deeply. The complexity, the waves of sweet fruit buttering my mouth, the pepper on the tip of the tongue, the dry tannins following the fruit like a conscientious waiter, and now a final burst of lemony desert— I hold the glass away from me to breathe and then return to the feast. This wine, wherever it is from and at whatever stage in Jake's career, can only be the result of a blend and I must call it, though the components remain mysterious, truly a happy marriage. I stare at the remaining bottles, but Jake appears to have forgotten them.

"Do you find anything in common between these first two?" he demands gripping their necks.

"As between, say, the Clara and I of today," I blurt out breaking all the rules, "and who we were eight years ago?"

Nick looks down into his glass. Jake looks at me.

"You're closer to the mark than you know," he says quietly. "These bottles contain the same wine. The question is which is the before, which the after? Which do you suppose is the younger?"

I want to go with the obvious. But Jake is never obvious. Then go with paradox, I tell myself, except that paradox strikes too close to home. Safety lies in another sip. And another. From bleakness to bounty and back, I'm traveling through time but with no idea in which direction. Through the corner of my eye I watch Nick weighing the options. I wonder if he will reach a decision before he has drained both bottles. For my part I'm remembering the Sphinx's riddle; man being the answer and these two wines being somehow the question.

Finally I say, "This fresh and luscious wine has everything and is absolutely generous. But such generosity can lead in only one direction. Someday it will be destitute. This other wine, this dry, bleak, black wine which you say is one and the same, must therefore be the future—"

"Well put," Jake says, "but wrong. My first taste ever was as bleak and bitter. This first wine that I poured for you tonight, this wintry desert is the first wine I ever poured and against which I compare all others."

"And from where obviously, " Nick says, "you get your distaste for flab."

"This wine," Jake reminds us again, "comes neither from France nor Napa. You two are the first to hear my confession: it comes from my father's bathtub."

"What's to confess?" Nick says. "Boast."

"Tonight is no night for boasting. I used to be ashamed of my father, ashamed that he made bread, that he laid brick for a living, rebuilt car engines, rewove wicker chair seats, that he worked with his hands, that he did anything and everything with his hands. Most of all I was ashamed that he made wine. You've heard the 'appellation' Dego Red. That was the wine my father made. We didn't label it. It labeled us. And tonight we're drinking it. It's become so clear to me that what I've always regarded as a successful life has been nothing more than the deliberate cultivation of utter helplessness. I for one don't make bread, I buy it in a bag. When my clutch wears out I hire Nick here to repair it. And I certainly don't make wine in my bathtub-"

Jake is panting. His pale forehead is glistening—

"My father had the hands of a giant," Jake says. "I used to think that if I were ever to meet him again, no matter how many years had passed, no matter how much he had changed, I would know him by those hands. When I left home I took with me, out of some perversity I suppose, a few bottles of his dego red which eventually got put away and forgotten. I haven't seen my father in twenty years and I can hardly remember the last time I spoke to him on the phone. But last month a card arrived in the mail along with a carefully packed case of my father's wine. I let a month go by, the card and the wine standing just inside my front door. Three nights ago I opened one of the bottles—the same vintage as the one you have in this first brown bag—and poured myself a glass. After all these years I had forgotten what it tasted like and my reaction was perhaps somewhat less polite than yours. God, I said , how can he drink this swill? Then I remembered those other bottles, the ones I'd kept with me since leaving home. I don't know what got into me, what made me go down into the cellar and start searching for those bottles, why after so many years I had to find those bottles which I had never once thought about finding. It took me several hours—you know my cellar—but I found them, three bottles stewarded by spiders, and with their permission I opened one. Well you know what I tasted: you're drinking it now from this second bag. As I poured myself a another glass I suddenly realized that what I wanted more than anything in the world was to sit down beside my father and share with him a bottle of his incredible wine. Why don't I? There's nothing stopping me. The years of meaningless hostility, separation, misunderstanding, they can be redeemed. This decades old wine proves that anything can be redeemed. Next moment I was booking a flight. As I started to pack the phone rang. It was my aunt, my father's sister, whom I likewise had not written or spoken to in years. She said, Jake, your father is dead. Less than an hour earlier she had found him slumped over the kitchen table, a glass of wine, his wine, standing beside his hand. Kind of uncanny don't you think?"

"It's as if you got your wish," Nick answers.

—"The two of you I mean, just like you wanted, sitting down at the same time to a bottle of your father's wine."

"I hope he opened one of the old ones," I say.

"I hope so too," Jake says, "if only so he could see how it all turned out in the end."

"Maybe he knew." Nick says. "Maybe he knew right from the pressing how good it would turn out."

"Or maybe he didn't," Jake sighs filling our glasses one last time, "but was, unlike myself, simply very trusting."

They have left, Jake and Nick. The spattered table cloth is in the machine, the dirty glasses have all been washed, the untouched ones put away. A moment ago I heard the front door open and close and footsteps padding up the carpeted stairs. My wife has come home. Curious, I remove the three untouched bottles from their bags. Even at such a time Jake remembered to provide us a control and a comparison—a pair of five dollar supermarket wines from Albertson's, a Premier Cru from France. Oh Jake. We have drunk far less than usual tonight but perhaps tasted more. We have honed our discriminations to a razor's sharpness; meanwhile we have become dull. Which of us offered Jake a word of sympathy? Our focus was not on Jake's father but on his father's wine. People say the world has grown harder, we need to make more ever more to get more lest we get nothing. I say it's not the world . . . After my wife and I together destroyed her crystal glasses, we went walking along the boardwalk that fronted the sea. We walked in an embrace, in a waking dream, our decaying town on one side, the enduring sea on the other. If life was hard anywhere it was here in this waterfront town battered by storms and recessions. That evening as we walked together the sea went from azure to indigo to wine dark while the setting sun poured down a light so golden it made whomever it touched sweet and a little wild. We passed a retirement home below the boardwalk and stopped to look down. A dance was in progress and we watched silver haired couples fox trotting, cha chaing and tangoing as if for this one evening arthritis and the fear of death had been banished. We

were noticed, and some of the dancers, then all of them began to wave and smile up at us. That evening as we walked along the boardwalk we seemed to pass only lovers. The promise of life as endless and bountiful as the sea itself brought tears to our eyes and we prayed with no prior consultation, no touching bases, no ascertaining where we both stood on this particular issue, that this evening last forever.

Has the world grown so much harder since then? That rickety boardwalk still stands. We can go there today, we can walk its length, and if we do, people will surely wave and smile and the sun so moved will again pour down upon us a golden blessing.

My thoughts have taken me down deep into the cellar. While not as well stocked as Jake, I can still, if need be, retrieve a relic of my own.

Back in the kitchen, giving way to my wife's sensibilities, I rinse off the layers of dust. The cork comes out with a pop, a good sign. I place two glasses—not crystal—on a tray along with the bottle. I read the label aloud:

"New York State, White Niagara."

I know Clara is still awake, the lamp on, reading. She fears, as I do also, the night. Carefully balancing the tray, I mount the carpeted stairs towards the sliver of light escaping from beneath our door. The wine sloshes in the bottle and I get whiffs and glimmerings. Though still steps, miles from my destination, already I see myself seated on our bed pouring out a glass each of the very wine that witnessed our love. After all these years I wonder if either one of us will be able to bear it.