Valley Fever (30 page)

“Do I smell like Fresno?”

“It's hard to tell when we're both there. You'd have to come down here and I can tell you.”

“I'm enjoying myself here.”

“I saw that. It alarms me.”

“What's happening with New York?”

“What would you think if I sold this house?”

“I would think that's genius.”

She
tsk
ed. “I thought you loved this house.”

“I do love your house. But I think you should get out of there. How could you continue to live there?”

“If I sell the house, Charlie will never be able to come back.”

“Your marriage wasn't built on a house, Annie.”

“He won't know where to find me.”

“You're being very dramatic.”

“I'm going to sell the house and go to New York.”

“Now?”

“Come to New York with me.”

We would have these conversations while I drove around in the truck. I had pulled to the side of the road near one of the cabernet vineyards in Madera. I could tell from the road the grapes were nearly ready. I walked into a row and tasted one off the top of the vine: plummy and tart, but too taut yet. The grapes would taste and feel like jam by the time they were ready to come off the vine, probably a week from now. “I like it here,” I said. “And what am I going to do, abandon Dad?”

“I mean after the harvest,” she said.

“I might like it here then, too.” I went back to the truck to get the refractometer.

“No, you won't. Of course you won't.”

“I really like grapes, Annie.”

“You have an incapacity to stay any one place for too long. Your mother made you that way.” I could hear her suck on a cigarette. “I mean, we all like grapes.”

“Staying here to run the ranch could be the most rebellious thing I've ever done.”

“If you did decide to stay, you'd be a grave disappointment to your mother.”

“She's made that clear,” I said.

“Nothing you have ever done has made you happy. Why is the ranch going to make you happy?”

“Why is New York going to make you happy?”

“God,” she said. “Answering a question with a question.”

“You are like the personification of a question answered by a question.”

“What does that even mean? Have you been drinking?”

“I'm looking at grapes, Anne.” The soil in Madera reacted like powder—fluffy and explosive. I stepped lightly.

“You're being very sharp-edged,” she said. “You're getting a little hostile.”

“I have very little patience these days.”

“Well, you need to get out of there. You are, you know, a very patient person by nature.”

“I'm not. A patient person is what I am not.”

I could hear the cigarette and the tongue suck through my mobile. “Something has made you impatient.”

The grapes, though beautiful, had all that powdery dust on them. “I love you, Annie, but you don't know me very well.”

She laughed a laugh that said
I know
. “And I know you so much better than I know myself.”

I think many people assumed that I would, once harvest was done, move on to someplace else. Annie assumed this, and Mother and Felix and Wilson. I may have assumed this, too, but now everything is harder for me to remember.

*   *   *

Annie did sell that house in Beachwood Canyon. She and Charlie had owned it for ten years. By the end of the year, Anne bought herself a West Village studio, a fourth-floor walk-up on Bethune Street with two double-hung windows and a built-in china cabinet along the length of the entire back wall. “Can you imagine I could have missed out on this?” she said that winter. “I could have spent my entire life in that dull house with that dull Charlie.”

“You would have never married someone dull.”

“He was dull at the end,” she said. “We were both dull at the end.” I could hear her heave a window open, to climb onto the fire escape to smoke. “But now I have this, and it's my own, and it doesn't have any of Charlie's furniture.”

“And nothing is dull.”

“No, nothing will be dull ever again. Now I'm going to be you, and I'm going to run around doing whatever I please.”

I could hear the New York sirens far off through the phone, and it did make me itch with a restlessness and a hunger to move. So I got in the truck, and I drove. I drove a lot that winter, aimlessly, not even checking on crops. I drove to Firebaugh and back, or all the way to Merced, and sometimes as far south as Bakersfield, always on the country roads, where all I passed was fallow land and someone else's dormant vines.

*   *   *

George wore a white cotton button-down and sturdy khakis and folded his elbows on the bar. He was freshly clean, closely shaved, his hair still damp from the shower. His hands were smooth with the glycerin cream he kept in the center console of his truck.

I said, “How's the book coming along?” I was still dusty from the fields but I was hungry and anyway I had to go right back out there after dinner, to a small field west of Fresno in Rolinda, where the crews were picking overripe sauvignon blanc.

“Don't taunt me.”

“I'm not taunting. I'm asking.”

Elliot kept our glasses full. By now I had stopped drinking the frozen mojito and had adopted as my regular drink vodka with a splash of water. I couldn't have gone on drinking that sugary mojito three nights a week. I ate at Bootsie's a lot that season, because I didn't want Mother to be bothered cooking for me and there was no question, after being in the fields all night and all day, of cooking for myself.

“Well,” he said. “The idea is to get the book done before we shake the trees.”

“How are the trees?”

He smiled at me. He laughed. “The trees are fine,” he said. “The crop looks good.” In front of him was a bowl of mussels and clams in a spicy tomato broth. “Share this with me,” he said, handing me a slice of grilled bread.

“I've ordered the burrata.” I had gone back to the kitchen to ask Arturo what to eat. For the burrata, he was roasting tight, dense bunches of pinot noir straight from the vines in Bootsie's yard.

“I'll share the burrata, then,” he said.

I tore off a piece of the bread and sank it into the chunky broth. “Thank you.”

“I went to see your cab today.”

“You did? Where?”

“North Friant.” The grapes off Friant ripened the quickest—they'd be the first off the vine.

“What do you think?”

He pulled each mussel from the shell with a smaller mussel shell, like pincers, and arranged the empties neatly one inside another. “I think you'd better start picking.”

“We're still trying to get Felix to pick the last of the white grapes. I'm picking sauvignon blanc tonight that looks like raisins.”

“Never mind the white grapes,” he said. “Focus on what's best now. It's the right time for the cabernet.”

“I need the money for those colombards. There are two thousand acres of colombards alone.”

“How do you know what money you need?” George said. “You never know until the season is done.”

Bootsie said, from the end of the bar, “You never count your money until the dealing's done. No one tell you that, Palamede?” There were only a couple tables full that evening. Bootsie kept her eye on the door.

“Felix was only ever going to pay what he wanted for the white grapes,” George said. “I thought you knew Felix.” He poured tap water from a tall glass into his scotch.

“I do know him.”

“Then you should have known that Felix never intended to pay what he said. He never intended to pay market for those white grapes at all, and I'll bet he doesn't intend to pay market for the cab.”

“You're making me feel dizzy,” I said.

“Consider it one bad year,” Bootsie said. “I'm sure that's what your dad is thinking.”

“I'm not sure Dad can afford another bad year.”

Bootsie came around to the other side of George and scratched the back of his head. “You should grow out these curls,” she said.

Elliot leaned against the back of the bar and polished a polished rocks glass. He watched the glass, as if looking for spots to appear. The restaurant was too quiet; anything could happen.

Bootsie, like beauty itself, couldn't really be trusted. She was the same girl now who'd slept with Hasso, the same callous Bootsie who wrecked sweet Linus, who was telling the truth when she said she could never love someone for more than ten years. Poor Elliot, she had loved him for no more than ten months. Ten minutes. More likely, she had not really loved him at all.

“My curls aren't like yours,” George said.

“Better,” Bootsie said.

Bootsie's power came from knowing that when her beauty ran out, her money could take over. Bootsie knew loss and sadness and an absence of love, but she'd never known a crisis of confidence.

“How do I make him harvest the cab?” I said. “What do I say?”

“You say what you said last time,” George said. Bootsie continued to run her hand through his hair, measuring it. He paid no attention. He pinched one mussel after another, deliberately but with ease, as only George could manage. “You did it once before.”

“How could he not have noticed the grapes need picking?” Bootsie said. “He wants those grapes. He needs them to make his nasty wine palatable.”

“He uses sugar and oak chips and whatever else for that,” Elliot said.

“Not for this wine,” Bootsie said. “He's been very vocal about doing something new, stepping it up a bit, and I know he needs those Palamede grapes. I don't think much of Felix, but I think a hell of a lot of his business acumen.”

“It's possible he forgot about the Friant vineyard,” I said.

“That is in no way possible,” said George. “Felix knows every parcel of land your father owns. And even if he had forgotten, he pays people to follow those fields.”

I looked at Bootsie. “It's not nice to use the word
nasty
, Boots. That's not necessary.”

“I'm not saying your grapes are nasty,” she said.

“It's just the word,” I said.

“I do think Felix's wine is nasty,” she said. “And I think he's a vile piece of work, too.”

“Bootsie,” I said. “It's not necessary! He's my friend, he's closer to me than you are.”

Elliot said, “Come on, Bootsie.” He put down his towel and reached over the bar to put his hand on her forearm.

She chewed on a cocktail straw, really gnawing on it. She had stopped smoking, it dawned on me then. “Could one of you boys tell Ingrid that she's in big trouble if she thinks Felix Griffith is her friend? Because she doesn't listen to me. She doesn't think I'm very good at friendship.” She slapped the bar and turned away, heading toward the two tables of customers, straw clenched in her teeth, wild hair being wild.

The chef brought the burrata to me himself, because there was almost no one else in the restaurant and because Elliot had failed to notice the dish on the shelf behind the service bar. Tiny roasted wine grapes dissolved into their own sauce beside the cheese. “Taste it right away,” the chef said. “Before the grapes cool.”

“It's magnificent,” I said.

“Is good,” he said.

“I need another one,” I said. “Because I have to share it with George.”

“You don't have to share,” George said.

“I want to.” I nodded to Bootsie's chef. “I'll eat two,” I said.

George pushed his empty bowl away and pulled his scotch closer. He took my fork and ate a bite of the burrata. “Just tell him you're picking. It doesn't have to be complicated.”

“It seems all very complicated. I'm exhausted.”

“It's harvest,” George said. “Half the valley is exhausted.”

No one else sat at the bar, and Elliot retreated to the kitchen. Arturo delivered another plate of burrata and we washed it down with our cocktails.

 

24.

Felix disagreed about the grapes. Red grapes, green grapes. He wanted to wait until the sugar was dense. Every other green grape in the valley had been picked. Every green grape but ours. We had colombards drying on the vine.

Mother said, “Don't tell your father more than he needs to know. This whole thing has made him sick.”

“A fungus made him sick,” I reminded her.

“No, no. This year has been a disaster.” She slapped her playing cards on the table in seven neat piles. “Why do you always disagree with everything I say?”

“It's not a disaster yet,” I said.

“You always contradict me,” she said. “You will probably stay here forever just so you can blame me.”

“What do you mean ‘here'? I'm not moving in with you.”

“It feels like you've moved in with us.” She wouldn't look up. She spanked the cards down.

The oaks along the river had begun to droop. This happens in the California fall: old trees start to look old. Not like in New England, where fall trees look vibrant. Not like in a proper East Coast winter, where leafless trees look absolutely dead. Fresno's autumn leaves begin to sag and wither, straight from green to brown. It's due to the cool, wet mornings and the hard, hot afternoons.

Mother said, “Marianela says in Bakersfield the leaves have already started to drop from the vines.”

“She's exaggerating,” I said. “That's not possible.”

“I don't know,” Mother said. “Anything is technically possible.”

“Not bare vines in October. Not even in Bakersfield.”

She smacked one card on top of another, looking for matches.

I said, “I'm not moving in, Mom. I thought you wanted me here. I am trying to help.”

“I do want you here,” she said. “But I don't want you to stay.”