The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, is located on Stockton Street in Nob Hill, in a magnificent, old, majestic stone structure around the corner from the Stanford Court Hotel, where I honeymooned with Victoria three decades ago. We were young, we were giddily in love, we did what hip literary/film people did in San Francisco: visit City Lights Bookstore; traipse across the Golden Gate Bridge; explore the Haight; dine at Chez Panisse. We collaborated on two movies, and then our marriage soured on the acrimony brought on by failure. It always starts on the top of Nob Hill, I chuckled sardonically to myself, as I lay in my deluxe suite with a view of the city. All alone.
I had flown in late the night before, a brutal fourteen-hour hurtling of my tired body, but Max endured it like a champ, business class our friend thanks to the Cougars of Christchurch. A room had been reserved for me, but according to texts, Milena irrationally worried I was going to be a no-show. The Ritz-Carlton was the headquarters for the wedding. I could only imagine my daughter and her fiancé’s financial situation if they could afford this apotheosis of California luxury.
As I lay in bed, hands interlocked and propping up my head, I thought about my return to the States. It had been two years since I left for New Zealand and its rural beauty to teach, then research and write a book, my first in years. America felt strange to me now. The airports were more congested; its citizens more harried; the brusqueness at the front desk at the Ritz—as if I maybe had cabbed it to the wrong address; i.e., the wrong social class—was different from the absence of circumspection you find in New Zealand. But unfortunately, now that I had gotten on the plane, having overstayed my visa, the probability of my reentering New Zealand was slim. I did it for . . . my daughter. It felt surreal to acknowledge that, that I had . . . a daughter.
A text notification lit up my iPhone. It was from Milena. “You made it! See you downstairs at the JCB Lounge in an hour?”
“Ok,” I texted back.
I rose from the bed and all the worthless articles the media was inundating me with on the internet and crossed the large room to the picture window. What if I had stayed married? I wondered. What if I hadn’t decided to strike out on my own to become a writer and had gone into the coin-op leasing business with my father? What if I had known I had had a daughter? And where was I going to go now that I was back in California? Hollywood didn’t want me with their algorithms and data-driven decisions about what films got made. My antihero books with their unlikable, if roguishly lovable, characters weren’t going to be fodder for their jejune streaming fare.
The JCB Lounge sparkled with quiet, if obscene, luxury. Jean-Charles Boisset seemed to want to marry the idea of a French cabaret with the opulence of Nob Hill and the exquisite taste his brand stood for. It was all dark colors and velour fabrics and an upmarket bar and, sitting on a stool, a beautiful woman: Milena. I don’t know if it was the chic black cocktail dress apparel and the clutch of pearls, or the way her hair was styled, or the perfume that scented timidly from her that unlocked memories of our tangled bodies, or what, but she had grown into a middle-aged woman I wouldn’t have imagined. I felt out of place in a black sports coat, faded jeans, and brown loafers, but that’s the finest I had, the chicest I could afford.
She smiled warmly. “Hi, Miles.”
“Hi, Milena.”
Our greeting casually crossed chasms.
We stood a few feet apart from each other, and then she reached out both arms and invited me into an embrace. I let her envelop me in hers, then slowly reached my arms around her and hugged her, a little more tightly with each passing second, the concatenation of recognition forming a ghost train that bridged the quarter century.
She whispered in my ear, “I’m glad you decided to fly back.”
We let go of each other, nervously corkscrewed onto stools at the bar, and settled uneasily next to each other. Our shoulders grazed. The tasting room manager, a young woman, approached us with a rehearsed smile.
Milena turned to me and whispered, “Should I tell her who you are?”
“No,” I said. “Spare me. Please.”
“Okay.”
“Have you had a chance to look at the tasting menu?” the woman said.
I ordered a glass of the 2019 Puligny-Montrachet, and Milena echoed my selection.
“Good choice,” said the tasting room manager.
“How was your flight?” Milena said, making conversation, marking time, the bigger questions hanging in the air.
“Long.” I looked at her tiredly. “Exhaustingly long.” I smiled. “But I’m glad I came.”
Our wines floated over to us in Riedel crystal. Puligny-Montrachet is perhaps the greatest terroir of all Chardonnays grown in the world. The limestone soils, the destemming without crushing, the sixteen months in medium-toasted barriques, the native yeast fermentation, the beautiful weight and viscosity, it winches one up to empyreal heights, those many centuries of monks honing and refining their vinification methods and making me realize New Zealand still had a long road ahead of it.
“This is a gorgeous wine,” I said, holding my glass up to the light and studying its ambrosial color.
“It is,” said Milena, moving it around in her mouth. “Exquisite.” She turned to me. “I guess you of all people would know.”
I stared into the Baccarat crystal wineglass it was served in. This is the life I could have had if I had forsaken my calling, but once I’d read Dostoevsky, I never had a choice.
“I suspect you have some questions,” Milena said, interrupting my digression.
I nodded, shrugged, still had difficulty meeting her eyes. Our worlds had cruelly bifurcated two and a half decades ago, and it seemed like whatever questions I might have were moot. “You lied to me,” I said in a nonthreatening tone.
Milena turned away and stroked her glass of one of France’s finest. “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. I nodded to myself. “I knew it wasn’t what you wanted, so I made the decision not to involve you.” She raised her fashionable eyewear and dabbed tears forming in her eyes with the back of her hand. “It was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. Under the most intense circumstances.” She turned to me: “Are you angry with me?”
“No, Milena. No.” I stared at a point of nothingness. “Just numb.”
“That you have a daughter?”
“How did Leila find out?”
“After you and I . . . went our separate ways, I started dating another man. He eventually moved in with me, and, naturally, Leila regarded him as her father, and she was too young and innocent for me to explain what she never would have understood at that age. This surrogate father of hers and I broke up a few years back. When she announced she was getting married to Mitul, I decided to tell her, so she wouldn’t go on some internet search and accuse me of keeping her in the dark all these years. I, too, wanted closure.”
I nodded in resignation. “How’d she take it?”
“After I told her who her father is, she surprised me by asking me to implore you to come to the wedding.” Milena glued her eyes on the side of my head. “She wants to meet you, Miles.”
“What does Leila do, Milena?”
Sensing my reservations assuaged, Milena threw out both arms and said, “After graduating from Stanford, she got a job as director of HR for a big wine company here in Sonoma. You two will have a lot in common.”
I snorted a laugh and shook my head.
“She knows who you are, Miles, and she’s proud of that fact.”
“What about her fiancé?”
“He works in product development at Apple.” She flattened her hand and raised it like the mercury on a barometer in a heat wave. “High end.”
“Maybe they’ll buy me an ADU to put on my patch of dirt in New Zealand,” I joked.
“Are you going to emigrate?”
“I don’t know if I can get back in.” I shook my head in self-recrimination. “Overstayed my visa.”
“Do you have someone there in your life?”
I shrugged, didn’t shake my head no, didn’t nod my head yes. I turned to Milena. “I haven’t been successful with relationships. The writing always seems to get in the way.”
A silence fell. Inane wine chatter and bottles being uncorked filled the void. Floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors everywhere wouldn’t let me escape Milena or myself.
“I thought about you a lot over the years,” Milena said, absently examining a painted nail. “When I met you, you were so intense, so at loose ends, so . . . suicidally depressed. I was convinced you had done yourself in.”
I laughed at my youthful cynicism and occupational self-loathing. “Success is a great deodorant,” I quoted Elizabeth Taylor.
“I’m relieved to see you’re doing okay. I didn’t know what to expect, frankly.”
“I’m still at loose ends.” For a moment I thought about bringing up the neoplasm on my groin, the broken teeth in my mouth that had gone unattended to, the book tour from hell, Jack screwing Amanda off a cliff and into the ocean (for a sliver of humor), the grim fate of the written word, and my love for a special needs cat, but I didn’t want to open a Pandora’s box on my personal life and have her start worrying about the father of her child all over again. Besides, there was a wedding tomorrow. Perhaps age had rationed me a smidgen of maturity.
There was a clock-ticking pause, and then Milena turned to me and said, “Are you ready to meet your daughter?”