Twenty-seven

Leah tried to luxuriate in the natural beauty of her surroundings, to find peace in the moment. Sitting poolside, she turned the pages of the paperback copy of Chances she’d bought to replace the copy she couldn’t find. Up above, the evening sky was streaked with pink and gold. It looked like a painting, like something Leah had conjured by sheer force of longing. Next to her, Sadie curled up in a chair, staring at her phone.

As much as the book kept her turning the pages, she found herself underlining passages that got under her skin.

Gino was just going to have to realize the fact that he was no longer boss. No sirree. She wasn’t about to give it all up. Power—the ultimate aphrodisiac. She was in control. She planned to stay in control. And he was just going to have to accept that fact.

Reading this, Leah couldn’t help but think that she was no Lucky Santangelo. She wasn’t going to usurp her father. She couldn’t even get him to take her seriously in a conversation. She should just go home to her husband. Her husband, who was freezing her out. Or maybe he was just busy. Either way, it had been almost twenty-four hours since she and Steven had talked.

“I was wondering where you two were.” Vivian walked out carrying a glass of wine and . . . the copy of Chances that Leah had been looking for.

“Mom, is that my book?”

“No. It’s my book,” Vivian said.

“Yeah, but I asked you if you’d seen it . . . Oh, never mind.” She was just happy her mother took her suggestion to heart. “Mom, I forgot to ask you before: Was the book club your idea?”

“No,” Vivian said. “If you must know, it was Delphine’s.”

Leah hadn’t heard that name in a long time. Delphine Fabron was the niece of her father’s former business partner. She’d come from France to live with them for a while when Leah was in middle school. She’d worshipped the woman—it was like having a beautiful and slightly naughty big sister. Now that she thought about it, she did remember Delphine at the book club. But then her father fired Delphine. Her parents argued about it. And it was around that time that the book club seemed to end.

“Did you stop hosting the book club because she left?” Leah said.

“Oh, who remembers,” Vivian said, suddenly very busy examining the book cover.

“That’s what the journal was for—to keep track of things,” Sadie said. “Right?”

Leah shot her a warning look. Vivian turned to them both.

“Okay, you two: Who went through my things? You had no business invading my privacy like that!”

Sadie bit her lip. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I was just looking for more photo albums.”

“How did you even get the compartment open?”

“I picked the lock with a mechanical pencil,” Sadie said, glancing at her.

Vivian glared in her direction.

Leah held up her hands. “Yes, I knew about it. Guilty as charged. But in my defense, I only read a few lines of the journal. In fact, we lost track of it. I only saw it once.”

“And that’s the last you will see of it; I have it now, safe from you savages,” Vivian said. Leah could tell from the relaxed set of her mouth that she wasn’t truly angry—just mildly annoyed.

“Gran, I’m sorry for going through your stuff. But the truth is I’m really interested in your thoughts on the books,” Sadie said.

“Whatever I thought of the books was a lifetime ago. It hardly matters.”

“Well, there’s just a lot of stuff in here that’s sketchy to me,” Sadie pressed. “All that violence against women . . .”

Leah leaned forward. “You’re reading Chances, too?”

“Sort of. On my phone. I was curious about what had you so excited,” she said sheepishly. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Bad? The story is ambitious—Gino’s entire life,” Vivian said.

“I thought you said you didn’t remember what you thought,” Leah said.

“Well,” Vivian said, “I might have reread a page or two after you practically forced the book on me. Okay, maybe more than a page,” she added primly at Leah’s knowing look. “And the sweeping nature of it . . . it’s like that Donna Tartt novel. The one with the bird painting.”

“The Goldfinch? Gran, you’re comparing Chances to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Goldfinch?” Leah could practically see her high-minded daughter’s head exploding.

“I’m just saying, it’s epic in its own right.”

“It’s long, but I don’t know if I’d call it epic. And I have no empathy for Gino, and so much of the book is from his point of view,” Sadie said.

“He’s an antihero. But he means well,” Leah said. Except when his son was born, a year after his daughter, and he thought, A son was a direct extension of himself. A daughter could never be that. It was just a novel, but the words stung.

“I love the flashbacks to the 1920s and the 1970s. She really brings the drama of those eras to life,” Vivian said, abandoning all pretense of disinterest. “And as for violence against women . . . that’s a reflection of the world, my dear.”

“But I think this book glorifies it, in a way. Especially the sex scenes. A lot of it’s nonconsensual,” Sadie said.

“There is a lot of sex,” Vivian conceded. “I didn’t remember so much of it being nonconsensual. Or so graphic.”

Neither had Leah.

Ironically, now that she was apart from her husband, she found herself thinking about sex. Maybe even wanting sex. It couldn’t be a coincidence that she was also now reading these books. Still, she was afraid that the minute she returned to the city, she’d go right back to forgetting all about it.

“The thing that strikes me about the sex scenes is that sometimes they don’t seem written by a woman,” Sadie said. “It’s more like female sexuality as written by a man’s fantasy. And all the gay characters are villains. Or at least devious. Did you talk about that at your book club?”

“I can’t recall it coming up for discussion. Readers weren’t as sensitive back in the day,” Vivian said.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of sensitivity.” Sadie crossed her arms. “It’s just common decency.”

“Okay, I think we can all agree the book wouldn’t be written that way today,” Leah said to defuse the tension. Talk about a generation gap . . .

Vivian looked at Sadie. “So you don’t like the book?”

“I didn’t say that,” Sadie said. “But it’s not exactly great writing.”

“Isn’t it, though? Look at how all the plotlines came together. The way Leonora’s daughter came back into the story? Brilliant,” Leah said.

“That was amazing,” Sadie conceded.

“I will admit the author went a little far with all the abuse on poor Carrie,” Vivian said. “That final turn as a prostitute was perhaps too much.”

“Oh, my god, that scene where Whitejack pimps her out again? My heart just broke.” Leah paged through the book to find the scene and read aloud.

“I gasped at that,” Sadie said. “Like, I literally gasped. But that’s what I mean. So much of this book is just abuse heaped on women.”

“Well, not all the women. Clementine Duke is sexually powerful—maybe even sexually predatory,” Leah said.

“But as soon as she sleeps with Gino, he has the power. He always has the power,” Sadie said.

“Except when it comes to his daughter,” Vivian pointed out.

“Lucky doesn’t always challenge his power. What about the scene where he’s forcing her into an arranged marriage? And then he hits her.”

“It’s terrible, of course,” Vivian said. “Inexcusable. But for the whole book, she’s the one person who makes him feel completely out of control. And it’s also fear—the fear all parents feel for their children.”

It was also, Leah realized, the fear all children eventually had for their parents. She’d long heard about the role reversal that took place later in life, when the children became the caretakers. Her parents, thankfully, still had their health. But they were losing their life’s work, and that was going to be a tough transition. It was for her, too.

She’d suggested the book to distract her mother from the impending sale of the winery. And maybe it was helping. But reading it herself was making her own powerlessness that much more apparent.

---

Sadie. With those questions about her old journal! As if Vivian would ever admit to her feminist granddaughter that she’d been so desperate to feel productive, to have something of her own to manage and perfect, that she’d turned the casual book club into a project.

There had been years when she’d forgotten how to have something of her own—something that wasn’t about pleasing someone else. And then Delphine reminded her.

Delphine had been grateful that Vivian believed in her enough to give her an important job within Hollander. She said it changed her entire outlook and that she wished she could return the favor.

“I have everything I need,” Vivian had said.

“You need to have more fun,” Delphine had said. “It’s work and kids, work and kids. Where I grew up, women know how to play.” Her own mother, she said, spent weeks and weeks every year island-hopping. Delphine knew that Vivian didn’t want to actually get away from her family or the vineyard. But she needed to do something.

“What do you do just for yourself?” she’d asked her.

“I like taking the kids to the beach. I love harvest, when it’s so busy everyone is included in the work. Making apple cider in the fall . . .”

“Vivian, something aside from all that.”

“I like to shop. And I like to read.” She especially liked to read books about women who did a lot of shopping.

And so the book club was born.

Ultimately, it had all been short-lived. She didn’t have the heart to continue the book club after Leonard fired Delphine. And the journal languished, locked away where she didn’t have to think about it and no one would discover it. Or so she believed.

“Mom, are you still with us?” Leah said. She and Sadie looked at her expectantly.

“Sorry. I was just thinking,” Vivian said.

“I asked who your favorite character is,” Leah said. “Mine is Lucky. Since I’m also a woman whose father never saw her as an equal—who was marginalized from the family business.”

“Is that true?” Sadie said, snapping to attention.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Leah,” Vivian said. It hurt to hear her daughter express the sentiment. Even if it was the truth.

“What happened? You wanted to work here?” Sadie said.

“I think this is a conversation for another time,” Vivian said, shooting Leah a look. The last thing she wanted was the conversation to devolve into a prolonged attack on Leonard. Even if he deserved it. She still felt protective of him. And, perhaps, she felt her own sense of culpability in letting Leah be pushed aside.

“Well, I didn’t identify with anyone in this book,” said Sadie. “And honestly, I find it shocking that this book was a New York Times bestseller.”

Vivian sipped her wine. “Why wouldn’t this book be a bestseller? It has it all: passion, a business empire, love. This is what storytelling should be. Personally, I liked Clementine Duke. She had fabulous parties.”

Clementine Duke, a high-society dame who had a penchant for lovers of a different class, summoned Gino Santangelo to her mansion. Vivian couldn’t help but think about the summons to a mansion that had completely altered the course of her own life.

For weeks after their trip to Château de Villard, she’d thought about the baron. Ironically, once she wanted to be around him, he all but disappeared. The remainder of the weekend was segregated, with Leonard and the baron walking the fields and discussing their new business venture while Vivian and Natasha lounged around the estate, drinking wine and talking about the royal wedding. They both had been obsessively following every bit of news about Princess Diana (whom they both still called “Lady Di”) and both agreed her wedding gown was a bit busy. Vivian felt they might very well become friends. By the time the chauffeured Mercedes whisked them back to the airport, she could almost pretend the surge of nearly violent desire for the baron had never happened.

But back on Long Island, tucked away in her own bed, alone with the thoughts roaming free in the secret corners of her mind, her feelings for the baron were more vivid than they had been in the moment. In her fantasy, the weekend unfolded differently: the horseback riding had not seen them innocently cantering through the fields of Bordeaux, but instead ended with him ravishing her in the stables. Every time she imagined the scenario, she became so worked up she was in a sweat. She lost sleep at night and during the day was plagued by an unease and guilt for betraying her husband even in her imagination. For the first time in a long time, she was the one to initiate sex, and through intimacy with Leonard she was ultimately able to excise his new business partner from her thoughts.

In the days that followed, Vivian thought long and hard about the way she was raised. She thought about her marriage vows. She thought about her children. She asked Leonard to go with her on a “date” to see the movie The Four Seasons.

By the time the holidays rolled around, she got her emotional equilibrium back. She could pretend the baron didn’t even exist. Until the day Leonard announced that the baron’s niece, Delphine Fabron, was coming to live with them.

“We are an ocean apart,” the baron said. “And I’m not inclined to spend much time in your country. This is a gift for my American wife, you understand. So having a member of my family on the ground will give me peace of mind. I’m sure you understand.”

Leonard did not understand. And he certainly did not want one of the baron’s representatives “on the ground” with him. But he knew it was a small price to pay; their association with the hundred-year-old Château de Villard gave their fledgling vineyard an instant boost in credibility. The request that they welcome his niece to Hollander was not irrational. And it would have to be accommodated. He would simply have to do his best to keep her from interfering with the way he managed Hollander.

When the baron’s chosen representative arrived on that freezing day in February, it became clear Leonard didn’t have anything to worry about: Delphine was twenty-one years old and, curiously, seemed to have absolutely no interest in the business of winemaking.

Delphine Fabron was a beautiful girl, with long, lustrous dark hair and big blue eyes that were unmistakably sad. The only thing that seemed to lighten her mood was spending time with nine-year-old Leah.

Leah, who was always squabbling with Asher and wanted a sister, was equally as delighted with their exotic new guest.

“She’s so pretty,” Leah kept saying to her mother. “And her accent! Do you think she could teach me French?”

That seemed doubtful; that girl appeared to struggle just to get through each day. Vivian felt badly that their guest was so unhappy, but she and Leonard had their own problems: while they were selling strong on-site and in liquor stores, they were still making very few inroads with New York City restaurants.

Their wholesale rep quit. He was burned out. The obstacles were insurmountable: Sommeliers didn’t know that New York State produced wine, and when they did learn, they were skeptical. Some buyers had tried early vintages and had not been impressed. Part of this was Leonard and Vivian’s fault: they had rushed to market in the early years, their learning curve creating a barrier to quality. Their first season, birds attacked the budding vines, so they picked early to preserve the fruit, but they didn’t allow the sugar content to get high enough.

They made errors with grape varietals: Zinfandel grew wonderfully in California—where Leonard had learned everything he knew—but it did not like the climate on the East Coast. Instead, they needed to focus on wines like Malbec.

Meanwhile, after a month of Delphine hiding in her room or listlessly wandering the house, Vivian finally insisted she accompany her on a trip to town to run errands. The girl slumped silently in the car’s passenger seat, staring out the window like a convict being transported to prison.

“I thought you’d like to see the market and main street,” Vivian said. “When we first moved here—”

“Did you invite me out today so you could break the news that you’re sending me away, too?”

“Sending you away? No. Why would you think that?”

It all came out with a burst of sobs: Delphine’s love affair with her father’s friend, a member of French Parliament. The newspaper article. The press camped out on her parents’ front lawn. Vivian realized Delphine had not been sent as the baron’s representative on the ground. She had been exiled.

Vivian immediately felt empathy for her. Since her marriage to Leonard, her parents had cut her off financially and barely been in touch except to see their grandchildren. It didn’t feel good to be punished by the people who were supposed to love you just because of your choices—good or bad.

“Delphine, we’re happy to have you here,” she said. “For as long as you’d like to stay.”

When Vivian relayed the information to Leonard, he just shook his head.

“We have to give her something productive to do,” Vivian said.

“She can help Joe out in the field,” Leonard said. “I don’t see what else she could possibly do except get in my way.”

But the more time Vivian spent with Delphine, the more she realized the girl had a surprisingly deep knowledge of wine. Her mother, the baron’s sister, Marie-Élise, had married into another wine family, and Delphine had been raised at her knee, walking the fields and hanging around the tasting room, absorbing every nuance of the art and science of producing great wine.

When she confided in Delphine about the problem with the New York wine market, Delphine said, “The wine managers at these places are all men, right?”

“Of course,” Vivian said.

“Let me try to sell your wine. In my experience, men have a very difficult time saying no to me.”

Delphine had made good on her promise that men could not say no to her; she began visiting Manhattan’s top restaurants in the spring of 1982. With her pedigree and beauty, there were few doors that would not open for her. Within a month she had landed accounts with the Four Seasons, the 21 Club, the Rainbow Room, and Delmonico’s. Only Lutèce said no.

With each Manhattan restaurant account she landed, Delphine’s ethereal glow radiated more strongly, her blue eyes bright and jewel-like in her porcelain face. She always wore her thick curtain of dark hair loose, and she never cut it.

Even Leonard, who had balked at the imposition of the baron’s niece, who had resisted letting her work in sales, was impressed with their rising star. Leah, an impressionable preteen, followed her around like a puppy, insisting on growing out her hair, asking to straighten her curls. She gave up her brightly colored Ocean Pacific shorts and tube socks in favor of pale linen dresses. While most girls her age were tying bandanas around their heads, trying to look like Madonna, Leah was trying to look like a sophisticated French girl. Vivian had found it adorable.

By the spring of 1985, the girl the baron had sent to them as a depressed wallflower had blossomed into a confident, vivacious young woman.

But then, the evening when all hell broke loose. Vivian had been on the veranda with her friends for their book club discussion. It was a night eagerly anticipated all month long. She’d just been about to begin when Leonard came running out of the winery in a tizzy after finding a slew of messages from their restaurant reps. Apparently, Delphine had not only been knocking on doors in Manhattan, she’d been breaking hearts. She’d slept with several wine buyers, and with the New York City restaurant world being small, word got out. The bruised egos got together and called Leonard, canceling their orders.

“I always told you women don’t belong in the business,” he said to Vivian. “This is what happens!”

Vivian made the point that their restaurant accounts were up ninety percent since Delphine started working for them. Fine, the accounts were dropping them—but she was the one who’d brought them on in the first place. Leonard could not be reasoned with. He felt she had brought shame upon Hollander Estates and couldn’t be trusted to work for them any longer.

Leonard fired her, and that triggered a visit from the baron.

Vivian moved Chances off her lap, onto the table and facedown. It had been a bad idea to revisit the old book. She didn’t want those memories. Not now.

The door to the house slid open, and Bridget emerged, her wild auburn hair loose around her shoulders, the strap of her tank top falling off one shoulder. She carried a glass of white wine in one hand and a vape pen in the other.

“Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know you were all out here.” Her expression shifted, as if she realized she had been excluded from something.

“Where’s Asher?” said Vivian.

“He’s in Amagansett. But he’s coming back soon. I was just going for a swim.” She looked around the table. “You’re all reading the same book?”

“Sort of,” Leah said.

An awkward silence fell over the group.

“Well, I’m off to bed,” Vivian said, standing up and tucking her copy of Chances under her arm.

She’d had enough togetherness for one evening.