Authors: Renee Manfredi
“That is an amazing story,” the older man said. “You must be an exceptionally strong woman.”
Anna murmured noncommittally. “Would either of you like some wine?”
“I actually need to get out of this hot water,” the younger man said. “I need to push on to L.A.”
Anna poured herself another glass. She really shouldn’t, but the warmth of the water and a new lightness rising up in her made her want to celebrate a little, get a little giddy.
“I’ll try a little of that wine, if you’re still offering,” George said.
“Sure,” Anna said, then realized she had nothing to pour it into. “You can share my glass, or there’s the Bowery method.”
“The Bowery method?”
“Right from the bottle.”
“Oh.” He laughed. He reached for her glass. His warm hands brushed against hers. “Ah, a French wine. Let’s see. Chardonnay. Probably a ’97.”
Anna tipped the bottle in the path of the moonlight. “That’s right. How did you know? Are you French?” There was an echo of an accent in his speech. Something vaguely European.
“I am a vintner. Born and raised here in California, but of Italian descent.” He took another sip. “Nice. A nice choice. Bracing, but elegant. Assertive and tender at the same time.”
“You have a vineyard?” Anna looked at him intently in the weak light. He was handsome, as far as she could see. His profile was strong, classically Roman.
“Well, I have part of one. My family has had part ownership for three generations now.”
Anna poured the rest of the bottle, moved a little closer to him so they
could share the glass. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me about yourself.”
He was sixty, a widower with three grown children. An immigrant’s son whose father had had a vineyard outside of Siena, in central Tuscany. “In a little village next to Montelocino, where my father was born and raised among the vines, wine in his veins. He came to this country at the age of twenty.” George described the summers of his boyhood in Napa Valley, sitting at a long table in the arbor with the newly harvested grapes, a feast for his family of thirteen, and a hundred of the vineyard workers and their families—in those days, his father hired nearly all Italian immigrants, which was how it remained until he made a bad choice with a Merlot in ’62 and had to sell part ownership. “Anna, you wouldn’t believe how perfect those days were. It was like being back in Italy. We had three feasts a year in the orchard. One after the harvest, one on St. Joseph’s Day and another on Easter. Of course every wedding, and there were a lot, was held there, too.”
Anna listened as George described the dancing, the tarantellas and waltzes, the day he met the girl who would become his wife. “She was seventeen. I was nineteen. My father had just hired her father as a taster. He was right off the boat, one of the best tasters in Tuscany. There is a word in Italian. A phrase.
Assaggiare luce del sole
. To taste the sunlight, though that doesn’t translate so well. My father used to say Alberto knew which vintages had had too much western sun. They were moody.
Doloroso
.” George laughed. “And the sun-drenched southern Cabernets.
Arrabbiato con luce del sole
. Angry with sunshine.”
Anna laughed at George’s impression of the self-important wine taster and saw him exactly: a little man with a perpetual wine glass in his hand, a golden tongue and a beautiful daughter: his twin blessings and twin curses. Even from this distance, in a memory not even her own, she felt the warmth of the people, the bonds of a tribe. Through his vivid descriptions, she saw George’s mother with the ever-present rosary beads in her hand, his sisters crowded six at a time in the bedroom, the excitement of each courtship, wedding, and baby.
“Of course, Alberto took one look at me and knew right away what I was about. He had come over from Italy with his two brothers, who my father put to work in the presses. Alberto had them follow me everywhere. Every move I made had a witness. This, of course, gave me hope. If I were
not a serious contender for his daughter’s affections, nobody would notice where I happened to spend my Sundays. Serafina, the girl who would become my wife, was under the maternal eye.”
“Were you deterred?” Anna asked.
“Was I deterred? I am an Italian male. Only death could have deterred me.”
Serafina refused to even speak to him, wouldn’t meet his eye. “Though I’d seen the
dio lampo
, the divine lightning strike her the same time it struck me. I knew. I felt her heart turn toward me.” Finally, at a St. Joseph’s Day celebration, he insisted that she dance with him. She agreed after this night to go walking with him the next day. The whole family came along, trailing the couple like pages behind a royal court. This was how they dated for two weeks. One night, miraculously, George got her father’s reluctant permission to take Serafina with him to the city for a movie. Two maiden aunts rode with them on the trolley, sat two rows behind them in the theater, muttered in Italian, and knitted their way through
The African Queen
. He hadn’t so much as kissed her. He hadn’t held her hand. But he said he knew that she was to be his wife. He would not take no for an answer. Not from her father or the flatulent aunts behind him, not even from Serafina’s own modest reluctance. After the movie, they strolled along the streets, came upon a jewelry store, closed for the night. In the window were diamond engagement rings. He cupped her elbow and drew her forward. “Pick one out,” he said, his heart pounding so hard that he could barely hear his own voice. He held his breath. The wheezing aunts, having finally caught up, were silent. It seemed to him that they, too, were holding their breath.
“That one,” she said, and pointed to one in the back, her answer and her choice in one smooth motion. She turned to him and smiled. And he kissed her, without any interference from the
tias
. A month later, they were married.
“Wow,” Anna said. “Wow. And are you still together?”
“She died two years ago. We were married thirty-eight years.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and fell silent.
A few seconds passed. “So, tell me, Anna. Where are your loved ones now? Jack and…I forget the name of his partner.”
“Stuart. They’re in Boston.”
“Boston.” It sounded to Anna’s ears like a reprimand. She laughed.
“Will you reestablish with them?”
“Reestablish?”
“I mean, reconnect.”
Anna said certainly, just not right now.
“What are your plans? What will you do now?”
“I can’t tell you that. I simply don’t know. This, anyway, wasn’t the life I was intending to lead.” He was silent. She felt him watching her. “Well, it was a good life. But a whole phase has ended,” she said.
“For me, also. For everybody, eventually,” George said.
Anna murmured agreement. She tipped the bottle to the wineglass they’d been sharing, but it was empty.
“Would you like some more wine? I have some in my car. My vintage, of course.”
Anna almost said yes. There was something about this man that she found comforting and comfortable. But she felt tipsy as it was, light-headed from the hot water. “That’s really tempting. But, unfortunately, I think I’ve had too much as it is. I’ll have to take a raincheck. Are you camping here tonight?”
“Sadly, no. I’ve been coming here on the weekends to soak, but I have never camped. Had I known there would be a beautiful woman here tonight, I would have transformed myself into an outdoorsman.”
“Well,” she said. “It’s been lovely talking to you.” She held out her hand. He took it and kissed it.
In an awkward moment, she realized that she was going to have to walk the three or four feet to the tree to get her robe. She half-stood. “Look at that moon up there,” she said.
He laughed, and she got out when he turned his head.
“Anna?” he called.
“Yes?”
“I am going to ask you to have dinner with me tomorrow night.”
“Well,” she said. “Then I am going to say yes.”
“Do you know the area?” She said that she didn’t. “There’s a good French restaurant. I’ll come and get you at seven. But of course maybe you want the option of changing your mind. You might think later I am some sort of
pazzo
, a crazy man.”
“No,” Anna said, “I’d like to share a meal with you.”
“Yes?” He paused. “Then here’s what I will do. I’ll give you directions to the place, and you can drive yourself. That way, you can decide. Naturally, I am hoping I’ll see you, but I’ll understand if you think twice. How about that?”
“That sounds good. I look forward to it,” she said.
“And as I said,” George said.
Anna turned back. “Yes?”
“As I told you, I am an Italian male. So if you say no, I’ll just have to pursue you more intently. If you want my advice, you should show up. Even if you’re not interested.
Especially
if you’re not interested.”
Anna laughed, and said he’d just have to wait to find out.
Later, after she heard George drive off, she lay awake in her tent a long time. She got up finally, took out her microscope and her favorite slide of Flynn’s. There was a good moon tonight, bright, nearly full. She looked up at the stars, then down through the lens at the milky galaxy of her granddaughter’s white cells. She ran her eyes over the monocytes and nutraphils, the basophils and leukocytes until it seemed as though she were moving through them, the white cells as dense and impenetrable as a blizzard. She stared at a cluster of monocytes in the upper left corner until she felt herself relax among the familiar configurations. She had memorized this particular slide the way others memorized passages of poetry. She let her mind wander, remembered the afternoon she checked Jack’s T-cells and tested Stuart for the virus, the golden light of that day and the three of them driving through its path. She saw George’s devout mother with her rosaries; the beads, too, Anna imagined, saw the old woman’s gnarled fingers moving over each mooth cool stone, round as globes, dark as planets, turning now into the jade beads of a broken bracelet that fell to the floor, one by one. Anna looked away for a moment, then repositioned the microscope so that the slide under the lens caught the moonlight. Next to her granddaughter’s blood cells was the reflected galaxy, the stars and planets and everything in the night sky. In this way, Anna thought, everything was connected. The carbon in the stars was the same carbon found in human bones. The true shape of everything was a circle. The moon and earth and the cells of a body, a bowl full of berries and a cluster of grapes. Even the future curved back through memory. She watched, in the corner of the slide, as the clouds drifted by, thought of Jack and Stuart and Marvin,
Poppy and Hugh, and of course the girl she cherished above all others—everyone in her past, those still with her, and the people yet to come. She felt the tidal tug of her granddaughter’s body in her own pulling her toward some shore, the sea both inside her and out. This, maybe, was Anna’s blessing for now: Flynn’s cells, little light-years, illuminating the ancient time of stars, the constellations above and below, and the heavens that were everywhere.