“What do you mean, you’re going back to California,” Ella raged. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” We were standing in my half hectare of Pinot Noir adjoining the Prophet’s Rock guesthouse. The air was cold and our exhalations visible, opposable fogs intersecting at the acrimonious space suddenly between us. In Ella’s mirrored Ray-Bans I could make out my hirsute face, flecked with gray. Nests of wrinkles crinkled at the edges of my eyes, making me disquietingly realize I had crossed the tropics of life and was closer to death than to birth. Ella wore a black watch cap over her thundercloud-black hair. She was bundled up in a knobby navy-blue sweater slung over a pair of fitted jeans. When she lifted her Ray-Bans to the top of her head, her dark-brown eyes bore into me with a laser-vectored fury. She snorted air through her nose in an exclamation of reproach. In anger she tore off her watch cap and raked a hand anxiously through her hair, striated with grays—which she blamed on me—that fell over her shoulders in a riot of crisscrossing waves.
“Put that down,” she commanded, referring to the battery-powered electric pruner I was unwittingly brandishing in my right hand.
I lowered the pruner and let it hang at my side. I couldn’t meet Ella’s eyes; I couldn’t bear to confront the contempt protruding from her puckered lips. Staring down at the barren schist soils that mirrored the desolation of my soul at that moment, I shook my head in lieu of an answer to her question. I half expected a stinging slap across the face.
“Huh?” she insisted, hands planted on her hips, rooted to the ground and refusing to go anywhere until she dredged an explanation from the muck of my inscrutable, and seemingly insensitive, words to her about my having to possibly return to California, knowing full well I might not be able to return.
I slowly winched my head up to meet her glowering gaze. Early forties, mistaken for younger, her face was only slightly weathered from years as a vineyard manager before she graduated to the winemaker of her own label. We planned to have her produce my scant few barrels of Pinot Noir from Miles’s Lot in a small facility she shared with the winemaker across the lake at Pisa Range Estate. My Pinot would be harvested by hand, carefully sorted—half destemmed, half full cluster—and lovingly crushed in a new sophisticated computer-operated wooden basket press that had cost me a small fortune, but I would do anything for Ella because I truly loved her with all my heart. She was one of the finest unknown winemakers in all of New Zealand, and I was fortunate to have crossed paths with her at a lecture I gave at the university titled “The Disappearance of the Sui Generis and the Rise of the Low Common Denominator.” Enamored at first sight, both of us lonely and unattached, we collided together like meteors in the sky. But instead of it being a glancing hotel-room affair, as was the case with Milena, she accepted me into her world, heart, body, soul, and wine. My longtime best friend, Jack, who I had reconnected with recently, chided me for my indulgence of Ella’s vintner whims and my special needs cat, Max, arguing they would bankrupt me by educing this generosity from me, but I didn’t care. I wanted both of them to have the best. I wanted my small-batch Pinot to be the most soaring expression of Central Otago, something to be remembered by because I had never had offspring, I was a failure in marriage, my literary fame was fading. At least that was the dream. It was never my intention to hurt Ella. We were passionately in love. True, we didn’t live together, but with my visa running out, we had plans, inchoate as they were, to buy a double-wide or an ADU and mount it above my half hectare. But in the interim, with my writing taking precedent, we had chosen to live facing each other from opposable ranges. Her mornings began when the sun climbed over the hills and engoldened the vineyards, and mine began when its rays slanted through the windows, and my pour-over Gesha coffee and the blank page on my laptop were beckoning me like Lorelei. I wrote; she tended vineyards and vinified grapes into the kind of sublimity I hoped to achieve with words. We both took our ingredients—she what the land and weather had given her; me what the dominion of my imagination had vouchsafed me—made subjective choices and produced, and lived with, for better or worse, our creations. We had much to look forward to together. The new book was done, and the vines were in winter hibernation resting up for spring budbreak, which meant Ella had a lot more time on her hands, which meant she had her full focus on my explaining to her why I had casually dropped, on the eve of a book-tour departure that had been in the planning stages for some weeks, that I might have to return to California at tour’s end.
“Huh?” she barked, standing her ground, waiting for a reply, which I couldn’t find in the skies where a hawk swooped, wheeled in circles, and scanned for prey, and prey was profuse for these raptors here.
I had no reply. That was the tragedy. That was the rift that was about to rive an unbridgeable abyss between us where, hours before, we were a blissful couple, she teaching me how to prune vines, me pointing her to the great literature she always wanted to explore. Now all our plans were shipwrecking on the shoals of my recalcitrance. My stomach churned, the shocking email from Milena recrudescing in my mind, a scar slashed open. When I met her fiery eyes, all I could manage was: “Like I said, I might have to return to the States.”
She shook her head at me with an expression of malign disbelief. “Why?” she said in a rising tone, her cheeks colored crimson with anger and the frigid air.
“It’s too personal, Ella.”
“Another woman?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking,” I pleaded for understanding. “I could lie, but I promised I would never lie to you like I have to other women in the past. I never wanted our relationship to be founded on untruths.” I nodded up and down, hoping this would placate her. It didn’t. Her eyes burrowed into me, still blazing with an adamantine incredulity.
She shook her head again, back and forth as if trying to promote the seed of another way into the buried explanation of my announcement, and stared off at the scenic vista, its splendor marred by my words. “I mean, the New Zealand book tour, great,” she started, seeking footing, “but you realize you’ve overstayed your visa since you gave up teaching, which I advised you not to do?”
“I know,” I said, shamefaced. “But teaching creative writing does not beget creative writing. And I had a book to write.”
“And you had someone new in your life.”
“This is something surreally out of left field.”
“If you fly back to California—for reasons you’d better tell me if you want me in your life!—you won’t be able to return to New Zealand. They will detain you at customs, then deport you!” Her hand gripped her mouth, and she looked away in pain at a landscape growing increasingly desolate in her being. “And I’ll lose you. And you’ll lose me. And all our dreams of . . . of . . . this.” She swept an arm circumscribing my minuscule lot of grapevines, the tortured souls that would produce my first vintage this coming year, the enterprise that bound us together, the half hectare she had brokered with her Kiwi citizenship on our mutual behalf, the cushy arrangement she had negotiated with the owners so I could stay at Prophet’s Rock, finish my book, and then make the commitment and finally move in together and subside into each other’s love. Now, it was all slipping through her mittened hands, and I couldn’t tell her why and reassure her I wouldn’t go unless I could make my way back, because if I did she would crucify me on the cross of a past I’d thought was merely a forgotten marker in a life’s chronology that had numbly found me its victim.
I nodded in resignation at her damning conclusions, my tongue caterpillaring over my upper teeth in a thought bubble not forthcoming with a reply. “I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m going back because there’re issues waiting for me on the other side”—I sounded lame in my equivocation—“and I . . .”
“What? I thought you had resolved your problems with the tax authorities?”
“I have,” I said, fearing she was accusing me of lying. “Uncle Sam and I are like this.” I crossed my index and middle fingers and shook them defiantly, comically, but the attempt at humor was lost on her.
“What is it then?” she said, cocking her head to one side, her anger undiminished.
“I can’t tell you,” I said in an exasperated tone, reflecting back on the email I had read last night whose wound had not subsided, whose arrow was still embedded in my side.
“Why can’t you tell me?” she said, her head telescoped forward threateningly, our foreheads nearly touching, our lips inches apart but a thousand miles from kissing.
“I haven’t even processed this . . . this news, but I wanted to let you know I might have to go back. Might being the operant qualifier.”
“Oh, you were considering not telling me, and then when your book tour ended in Auckland you were going to hop on a plane and jet off, and what? Write me an email?”
“No, Ella.”
“It’s another woman,” she said, convinced. She had speared me with such accuracy my heart raced. Yeah, it was another woman, another woman from my distant past, but how was I to explain why she had written me out of the blue?
I shook my head. As always happens to me in emotionally awkward moments, a smile incongruously disorganized my face, disconcerting whoever was on the receiving end.
“Why are you smiling?” she reproached me, regarding me now with contempt. “That’s when I know you’re lying.”
I shook my head to efface the awkwardness and with it, I hoped, the smile. But like a sudden affliction of hiccups, it wouldn’t leave my face. The news that had landed in my inbox was so absurd that I still didn’t know whether to believe it. Debating confessing, I feared telling Ella. She wouldn’t let it go. She wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t the right time. “I should have flown to Melbourne and gotten my visa extended,” I muttered, hoping against hope to shunt the conversation away from the thorn now lodged in her heart.
“Yeah, you should have.”
“I suppose I figured we would become a legitimate couple when we moved in and that would sort itself out, you being Kiwi,” I said, trailing off.
“Oh, you were going to marry me for the visa?”
“No. Come here.” I dropped the pruner to the ground, stepped closer to her, reached out my arms, but as my hands touched her shoulders she recoiled from me, and in my imagination I glimpsed the fissure widening and the two of us physically, literally, and metaphorically drawing farther and farther apart.
“I can’t believe you can’t tell the woman you love, and have made plans with, and many other promises, you can’t tell why you might have to return to the States, knowing fullfuckingwell we’re finished,” she said, fuming.
“It opens a Pandora’s box I can’t deal with right now. You’ll know in due time. I would have hoped you’d understand. Obviously, I horribly miscalculated.”
“Obviously. You leave me in limbo.”
“You have to trust me.”
She barked a laugh. “From the author of a book that was all about lying men!” She glowered at me. “If you’re not going to tell me why you might,” she mocked, “have to go back to the States, then I’m ending this before you end it in your . . . your wanker Yank way.” Her narrowed eyes signaled a seismic shift in the relationship. It all came unraveling: the happiness I had found at Prophet’s Rock, the untrammeled vistas, the unmolested silence to write, the spiritual beauty that inflamed my being, everything I had wanted, found, put a stake in the ground, was now dying on that selfsame hill, an unspoiled hill that had bestowed on me a serenity I had never known, a hill that was now persecuting me, a team of oxen dragging me inexorably down its dirt switchbacks to its basin and a fateful road back to the US.
“I know you think I’m being unreasonable, and I wasn’t going to tell you,” I started haltingly, “but the only reason I had to bring it up is because if I do have to go back, I’m going to need for you to take care of Max.” That I had shifted the conversation from what this news portended for our future as a couple to Max incensed Ella in a manner that flat-out nonplussed her.
She threw a backward glance to the guesthouse where Max was ensconced. Max’s expression was probably still wide eyed, sensing his world was about to change. Ella turned back to me, shaking her head in disgust. “I love Max, but he’s your cat, and you’re not abandoning him with me and our memories,” she said, clutching a hand to her face to cover her eyes, which, judging by the quaver that had disturbed her voice, I imagined were blurred with tears. In a trembling speech: “When my mother went in for the triple bypass and suffered the awful stroke that plunged her into an irreversible coma, you were there for me every day in the hospital, Miles.” She now openly wept. “And when we had to let her go, you were there. The eulogy you wrote for her was beautiful.” She forearmed tears from her sodden eyes and stared at me angrily. “It’s like you’re a different person now, Miles, someone who doesn’t need me. Cold. Indifferent. Aloof. A monster! You can’t tell the woman you love what this news is that you might have to go back to the US for? I can only suspect the worst.”
I grabbed her elbow with the feeble fingers of a desperate man on the verge of a breakup with an intelligent, one-of-a-kind woman, one I had searched my whole life for, one who got me on almost every level, one who I had used as a sounding board for my new book and who had listened patiently and produced ideas I had implemented. She complemented me in every way, making me better as an artist and human being. “Ella.”
“Let go of me,” she said, twisting her elbow out of my grasp.
“I have a nice dinner planned.”
“Well, now I’m not so hungry.”
“Come on, Ella.”
“Miles, I drive all the way over here to have a nice evening, talk about our first vintage of Miles’s Lot, and you inform me you might have to fly back to California, knowing full well you won’t be able to get back into this country and that we might not see each other ever again. And you say it casually like it’s not the end of the world, like you’ve got a plan to get back, when I know you don’t, because I know you and plans, so I can only conclude you’re in love with another woman and you’ve been doing some . . . some . . . internet whatever, and it’s reached the tipping point . . .” She collapsed into sobs.
“No, Ella, it’s not that at all. It’s not another woman, not exactly . . .” I stammered.
“It is another woman!” She rose up from the headstone of her despair. “I know it, and you’ve gone back to your motherfucking cheating, lying ways. Book tour? You’re returning to Hollywood because you’ve got some lucrative movie deal lined up, and you can’t wait to get back and start whoring all over again!”
The switch had flipped in Ella and she had transited like many distraught and aggrieved partners in a relationship into the intransigent, the irrational, the inconsolable. I had sent her somersaulting over the edge. This was an Ella I had never witnessed before. Her wrath was both uncontrollable and justified.
“We’re done,” she said, red faced and eyes muddled with tears. “You knew this all along when you dropped this on me, and you didn’t care or think about my feelings.”
“No, I didn’t, I just—”
“If you just got it out and got it over with, whatever this news is, we could have talked it out. But, but,” she sputtered in her tirade, “You leave, for whatever fucking reason, I’m done! Forget about moving in. Forget about marriage.” She looked at me with eyes blazing, two miniature conflagrations burning in her skull.
I couldn’t meet her eyes and that spoke volumes of tragic poetry.
She reached down and took possession of the pruner and shook it in my face. “You’re doing it all wrong. I told you we want four canes out of these spurs instead of two for protection. And we want three shoots out of each.” She started pruning the winter vines, attacking my mistakes with a vengeance.
“Ella?”
She stopped a few vines down the row, scowled at me, then held the pruner up at the sky, prepared to shoot whoever it was who had dropped this anguish on her. “I’m keeping these. I don’t want you fucking up these vines.” She spun away from me. “Enjoy your Hollywood whore,” she said as she stormed out of the vineyard in the direction of her SUV. The driver’s-side door slammed. I heard the engine rev like it had never revved before, and the all-terrain tires churned dirt and gravel out of Prophet’s Rock in a pinwheeling fury, spitting them back at me with the ire I had engendered in her. It wasn’t the first time a woman had left me like that, leaving me all alone, standing empty, hands thrust into my pockets.
But Ella I sincerely loved, and this breakup hurt me to the core. The shocking news I had received, and which I had no control over, like the seas rising inexorably because the ice sheets of Antarctica were melting four times faster than even the most pessimistic of climatologists had ever predicted, the news that had twisted a knife into my heart, the news I couldn’t bear to divulge to anybody for fear of judgment or recrimination or, worse, feigned commiseration or, even more pathetic, sanctimonious advice, was the cross I now had to bear, the decisions regarding it all my own. Were Milena’s words even true? I half wondered. My world was in a vortical turmoil.
It was growing bitterly cold, so I returned to the guesthouse and squatted down next to wide-eyed Max slumped on a pillow on the floor with his scent on it. I wanted to deliquesce into his innocence badly. He immediately broke into a calming purr when I stroked his fur. “Come on, little guy,” I said, lifting him up. I carried him over to the couch, lay down, and set him on my chest, hoping for the soothing, painkilling magic of his purring. I nosed his whiskers the way he always craved, and he craned his neck to gain the full effect of my human touch. It didn’t escape me how complicated my life was and how uncomplicated his was, despite his disability.
“I guess I pissed Ella off, little Max,” I said out loud, realizing I was talking to a cat who could only make sense out of my dismay and not the fraught, weblike complications of the source of the dismay. “I came all the way to the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand to find you, my little friend. I bought a lot in a vineyard and started to write the book this Kiwi publisher had commissioned me to write, figuring it would one day wend its way to America and a publisher in my home country, where I had had several book proposals turned down and my agent had gone AWOL. It’s finally coming out and I should be proud of that, right, Max?” I nosed his whiskers again, and he leaned his snout into me so we were pressed together, fused for a heavenly moment, hominid and African wildcat, comrades in the ongoing battle against debilitating anxiety. I kept nosing his whiskers because it comforted me. Ella leaving in a state of rage and unimpeachable hurt had left me with the vacated feeling in my stomach that came when all was lost. That feeling that invades your stomach and retches it. What would Ella do now in her pique of anger? Go fuck the hot Kiwi vineyard manager at one of the neighboring wineries and inform me she had started up with someone anew? If she thought I had another woman waiting for me in LA (laughable as it was to me), a retaliatory relationship could spark up.
We had been together a year and a half, but in that time we had intimated lifelong plans, plans that would be set in motion when I finished the new book and it had set sail. Well, the book—A Year of Pure Feeling, a confessional novel of sorts—was finished, and Ella was no doubt eager to set those plans in motion. And so was I, wary as I was about living with someone for the first time since my marriage. I had found peace in New Zealand, a publisher, a teaching position I could return to anytime, a half hectare of Pinot, a beautiful, soulful woman. What more could a middle-class, middle-aged guy like me want?
“I don’t know, Max man,” I said, shaking my head. “I couldn’t tell her I found out I had a daughter, you know, because this is pretty shocking shit to learn after two and a half decades. I know you’re a cat and your only fear is my leaving the door open and you darting out and some raptor swooping down and attacking you”—I shuddered at the horrific image—“and I don’t know what I would do because, other than Ella, I love you more than anything in the world, little fella.” I drew Max closer and hugged him for dear life. “We’re at the end of the world, little Max man. The polar ice caps are collapsing into the seas. We’re past the point of no return, and then I find out . . . I have a daughter? My own flesh and blood?” I shook my head back and forth, unable to inter my disbelief at the email still impaled in my side, a spear hurled from the darkness of a forest I was forever in danger of growing lost in.
It had fallen cold inside. I considered lighting a fire; however, that would require returning to the cold and fetching more kindling from the woodpile, but I was too poleaxed with grief to be bothered by such quotidian tasks. A yawning ennui had settled over me, paralyzing me, sending me spiraling to suicidal fantasies, which had plagued me since I had awakened to the world with a fierce desire to etch my mark on it. I couldn’t move. Death yawned invitingly. The power of cerebration—once my forte—wasn’t ameliorating this convoluted morass I had suddenly found myself in, as if I had stumbled into an open well on a pleasant walk and was now enveloped in a vast darkness of gloom, a bottomless plummet to an uncertain landing. The prospect of taking Max with me on the book tour, and then across the equator, over the vast expanse of the whole of the Pacific, back to California, suffused me with dread. But I couldn’t give him up either. I held Max closer to my chest and noticeably shivered. I debated hopping in my car and driving around the lake and up to Pisa Range and spilling the truth to Ella—fuck the consequences—because to lose her would be to lose the purest love of my life, the woman I envisioned myself buried next to. But before I could act on that improbable impulse, a notification banner appeared on my phone. It was reminding me of my Zoom with Jack.