Thirty-eight
Once Mateo showed up, Sadie didn’t hear another word anyone said. When he looked at her she felt a jolt. For real. After that, she was done. It seemed the height of irony to sit around talking about love and sex instead of, well, actually having sex.
Besides, after reading six-hundred-plus pages about people hooking up in every possible place for every imaginable reason, how could she let a technicality like Mateo’s job get in their way? That was why fiction was romantic and real life wasn’t.
“I have to run to the bathroom,” she said, standing up.
Her mother and grandmother, distracted with their conversation about a vineyard in the novel, barely noticed her slip away.
At eight thirty in the evening, the winery was mostly shut down except for a few people working late in their offices. Of them, the only one Mateo was likely to be seeing was the senior winemaker, Chris.
Chris’s office was next to her grandfather’s, and to reach that area she had to cut through the oak room.
It was eerie to walk through the rows and rows of barrels in the stillness of night. The pervasive smell of wine was even more noticeable. She thought of the juice sequestered away in the individual mini-caves, changing day by day. Like writing fiction, there was no absolute formula for great wine, and like writing a book, a wine was never truly “finished.” In this sense, she found it fascinating, a noble pursuit. Mateo thought it was odd that she didn’t like the outdoors since her grandfather was a grape farmer, but maybe she’d inherited her creative drive from him.
Leonard’s office was dark, the only light shining out from under Chris Kessler’s door. Was Mateo inside, or had he already left? A door in the back of the oak room led to the loading dock. She checked it, but it was locked. No, if Mateo left, he’d probably just go out the way he’d walked in and she would have run into him. So she waited. After what seemed like forever but was actually just a few minutes, the office door clicked open and Mateo appeared.
“Hey,” she said.
He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see her. With a glance behind him, he gestured for her to follow him to the back of the oak room. He unlocked the door to the loading dock, and they walked out into the field, his flashlight guiding their path.
“What are you doing back here?” he asked.
“Following you,” she said.
“Sadie . . .”
“What? I’m an adult, you’re an adult. My grandfather is selling this place. Who cares?”
“It’s not that simple,” Mateo said.
“It could be. Mark Twain said, ‘You’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did.’ Or something like that.”
“Are you seriously quoting Mark Twain right now?”
She could hear the teasing in his voice, and it emboldened her. She moved closer to him.
He turned off the flashlight. In complete darkness, he took her hand. Her heart raced like it was going to explode. And then his mouth was on hers, kissing her like he’d never get enough. It was as if a switch had flipped—in Mateo, and within herself.
If anyone had asked Sadie before that moment what made her tick, she would have said, without hesitation, the creativity and intellectual curiosity she’d felt for as long as she could remember. Now, for the first time, her mind was blank. She was all body.
They tumbled to the ground between two rows of grapevines. When her clothes were off, the grass tickled her skin. She turned over, the soil soft under her fingers as she moved on top of him. She wished it weren’t so dark, that she could look down and see that lush mouth she’d been fixated on for weeks, now hers for the taking. But it was the darkness that gave them cover, that allowed them this spontaneity. She couldn’t see, but she could feel.
And she felt turned inside out.
Mateo gently pulled her down beside him, switching their position so her back was now against the grass. As they moved together, his cheek against hers, murmuring things she heard but did not hear, all of her senses muted except for touch. Deep inside, a spark was ignited and she felt like she could burst.
When they were finally still, they lay entwined, looking up at the stars, framed by the vines. She wondered, idly, if they had consummated their feelings among reds or whites. She would check the next day, and when those grapes were turned into wine and bottled, she would know it was “theirs.”
“Your family is going to wonder where you are,” he said quietly, stroking her hair. “What will you tell them?”
She wished she could tell them the truth: like three generations of farmers before her, she had finally gotten her hands down in the dirt.
Leah and her mother were in no rush to go to bed, even long after Sadie and Bridget had said their goodnights. Back at the house, they lingered in the kitchen.
“We forgot to pick a book for our next meeting,” Vivian said, setting the teakettle on the stove. “Should we ask Sadie and Bridget, or just decide among ourselves?”
“Mom, as much as I’d love to do this again next month, I can’t stay out here indefinitely. And neither can Sadie.”
“Speaking of Sadie: Where do you think she ran off to in the middle of our discussion?”
Leah sat at the marble island in the center of the room and avoided her mother’s eyes. She had a very good idea where Sadie ran off to, but she wasn’t about to share it.
“She went to the bathroom. Maybe she took a phone call. I’m sure she misses her friends.”
It was just as well Sadie had left for a half hour or so. The conversation had turned to Billy the heroine’s second marriage, and Leah couldn’t help but feel that she was pulled into a thinly veiled expression of her own marital woes—not a topic she wanted to explore in front of her daughter.
Reading Judith Krantz, it was tempting to get caught up in the more frothy, salacious elements. They were the parts that had come to define the book over time. And yet the latter chapters of the novel offered a deeper truth. Billy’s marriage turned her from a fantastical heroine to an everywoman. This was where the novel snuck up on Leah, the mindless escapism suddenly turning a mirror toward herself: Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to run almost dry and you just have to keep going on faith?
She asked the group, “Why do you think Billy struggled with her marriage to the movie producer?”
“It forced her to change. At the beginning of the book she’s so solitary, and by the end she has her tribe,” Bridget had said.
“But she ultimately concludes that a woman is always alone in the truth of her own marriage,” Vivian said.
Leah looked at her, and their eyes met in a moment of understanding.
Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to run almost dry and you just have to keep going on faith . . .
Who? Maybe her mother. She waited until the teakettle whistled, until her mother filled their mugs with boiling water, to say, “Can I ask you something?”
Her mother walked over, sliding the mug across the surface of the island. “Be careful—I let it get a little too hot. And yes, of course you can ask me something.”
Typically, her mother tended to avoid difficult conversations. Aside from the recent crisis with the winery, Vivian preferred to keep conversation on the surface of things. Vivian liked things to look a certain way, to be a certain way. And if they weren’t, well, better to just pretend than to bring any conflict or ugliness in the light where it could shine. But after hours of talking about the book, she felt things had loosened up.
“I was wondering,” Leah said slowly, “if there was ever a time in your marriage when it felt like things had just . . . I don’t know. Run out of gas.”
Vivian stirred a small spoon in her teacup. When she finally spoke, it was looking down at her tea.
“You and Steven are having problems,” her mother said.
“I don’t know if ‘problems’ is the right word. It’s more of a . . . disconnection.”
Her mother moved her spoon with unnecessary vigor, making a loud clanking noise.
“Mom—please. You’re going to break that thing,” Leah said. Vivian stopped, startled, as if she hadn’t realized what she’d been doing.
“There’s a time in every relationship when one or the other person is dissatisfied,” Vivian said. “The key to a lasting marriage is that the desire to end it never occurs to both parties at the same time.”
“Wait—you thought about leaving Dad?” She tried to keep her tone even so Vivian didn’t clam up, but she couldn’t hide her surprise.
“That’s not what I’m saying. And this is about you,” she said. “I certainly hope your decision to stay here for so long isn’t causing problems. As much as I love having you here, I wouldn’t want it to be at the expense of your marriage.”
“No, no. I mean, in all honesty, it’s not helping. But the problems started before the summer. Steven and I . . . it’s like we’re roommates. Roommates who love each other, but . . .”
“I see.” Vivian got up from the island and moved to the counter, looking out the window at the pool. When she turned around to face her, her expression was troubled. “You should return to the city. This week.”
“Mom, it’s okay. Now I’m sorry I said anything. Everything’s fine. We’re just going through a phase, I guess.”
Vivian shook her head, her brow furrowed in consternation.
Leah reached out and touched her hand. “Really—it’s fine. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“It’s not that. I need to tell you something, but please don’t say a word to your father.”
“Okay. I won’t.”
“There’s another offer on the winery. I think this time it’s for real.”
She looked more distraught than the first time she told Leah they were selling.
“Mom, you can’t roller coaster like this. It’s not good for you. At some point, you might just have to accept that Dad’s selling.”
Vivian sipped her tea, her hands shaking. “It’s not just that he’s selling. It’s who he’s selling to. It’s someone who partnered with him briefly in the eighties. Delphine’s uncle.”
“Didn’t that business relationship end badly?”
“Yes. It did.” Vivian pressed her hand to her forehead.
“Mom, it’s going to be okay.”
“I don’t know about that, Leah,” Vivian said, her expression pained.
Leah didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. But maybe, just maybe, there was something she could do.