Easy to Like (4 page)

Paying cash for the house was wise. As
its value continued to madly increase, it became a critical asset in Elliot's
continual refinancing of the winery. Now it was mortgaged to its rafters — with
the Los Angeles market tanking, for more than it was worth. The last thing the
bank wanted to do was call it. Elliot was too bad to fail.

There was living and working room
enough for Elliot and, for a brief, happy time, Lucy (to whom he had promised a
cheque) and their son, Mark, and then, for a shorter time, Lisa, followed by
fickle Meryl and then, for a mere six months, Connie. It was a grand spot to
entertain, though Elliot couldn't think of the last time anyone was over for
dinner. The door to Mark's room was closed, and inside was as he had left it.

Elliot had furnished the place in the
same way he'd purchased it, with cash on the barrelhead. The dining room was
airy, with a view over a tangled garden (horticulture becoming a diversion for
Elliot as he learned his viticulture), and so a good setting for his treasured
Charles Rennie Mackintosh chairs and tables. It was the liquidation of these
which he was now negotiating.

The asthmatic lug the dealer sent could
barely squeeze through the front door. Perspiration caused his glasses to slip
down his nose. To better survey the furniture he pushed the specs back up with a
fat finger, whereupon they would steam up and again begin to slide.

“To provenance,” he wheezed.

“Right out of Glasgow, same period as
the Willow Tea Rooms.”

“I can see that! I mean before you.
Where did you acquire them?”

“Oh. From another writer, a countryman
of mine, Lloyd Purcell. Writer's writer, classic
storyteller . . . so naturally he sort
of . . . ran out of luck down here. Also there was a
criminal matter, vice related. No one much harmed but he lost his green card and
had to sell everything quickly. Now that I think about it, Lloyd came to acquire
the set in much the same way . . . another writer fallen on
hard times.”

“Like yourself?”

“Me? No. I'm doing well,
professionally. It's my winery . . . The wine we make is
proving a touch tougher than we expected, needs more bottle age than
anticipated. Besides, the furniture has some bad associations for me.”

“No one died on it or anything?”

“No. Relationships. Failed ones.”

“Oh,” he said with unmasked disgust, as
if Elliot had spilled seed on them. He circled the table, reaching out to finger
the oak of the high-backed chairs. “There is obvious wear.”

“They're going on a hundred years of
age.”

“I mean, recent.”

“I believe furniture is meant to be
used. It wasn't purchased as an investment.”

“Feel the same way about wine?” The
intruder now lifted one of the chairs and studied the underside of the seat.

“Yes. Meant to be drunk,” said Elliot.
This caused his bulky guest to laugh, derisively, as though Elliot had that
wrong too.

“Our house auctioned the contents of
Barry Hart's cellar. There were bottles once owned by Bing Crosby, Vincent
Price, Peter Lorre. Let me tell you, there's money in keeping it.”

“Barry in financial difficulties?”

“No. Converting his cellar into a panic
room.”

“A room hardly seems enough; I would
have thought an actor of Barry's standing would want a full-blown panic
suite.”

“I shouldn't have said anything. The
table would be an exceptional piece” — he laid the chair down and pointed with
his chin — “if it hadn't been repaired.”

“That was done before I got it.”

“Regardless,” he said, taking a showy
breath. “What were you imagining it might fetch?”

“I thought a few hundred thousand
dollars.”

“Heavens, no!”

“I've kept up with prices on the Web,”
said Elliot.

“This set is
not . . . pristine, nor, I suspect, complete.”

Elliot was worried this might
arise.

“Perhaps not. Though no one knew of any
more than the four chairs.”

“Had six originally.”

“Definitely?”

“Absolutely certain,” He looked past
Elliot and proceeded, unbidden, into the adjoining living room. “What about
these?” he asked.

He was hovering over one of a pair of
snooker-room chairs, also Mackintosh, also from the Purcell sale. They had low,
curved backs, the line and ornament of which seemed to anticipate the modern.
The wood was unblemished. They were still upholstered in their original white
calico.

“I wasn't going to sell those.”

“They are much the more interesting
pieces.”

“At auction?”

“Look, I've seen dining sets fail to
meet the reserve. These . . . Are they snooker chairs?”

“Yes,” answered Elliot.

“These will sell.”

“Take them and the dining-room set as a
package then. I won't break up the lot.”

The assayer was still looking at the
chairs covetously. He pulled a cellphone out of his pocket and held it up
between them. “Will I call for a truck to pick it up?”

“What's your offer?”

“With these included, two hundred and
twenty thousand, tops. I'll be honest with you, if you want to wait, get the
word out to the collecting community in the U.K., then more, but right
now . . .”

“No. I haven't the time to wait,”
Elliot said, even though it wasn't nearly enough. “Let's have on with it.”

The fat man placed the call.

Elliot meant what he'd said: wine
was to be drunk. It should be kept until maturity but never “collected,” never
thought of as an asset to appreciate. Nor should it be accompanied by too much
palaver — he was beginning to doubt that tastings, such as the fiasco he'd led
earlier in Bel Air, did much to increase most people's enjoyment. It was great
fun for the fanatics and geeks but a bore to everyone else. Attaching too much
importance or ceremony to wine's service killed its magical agency to spur
conviviality. And above all, wine was culinary, to be taken with food. He
loathed the practice, common in his professional community, of serving heavy red
or white table wines at receptions or post-screening parties. He might allow for
a more frivolous Champagne — better, the lightest Mosel Kabinett — but never
anything built to wash down roasted joints of meat or game birds. Feeling so
strongly about the matter of food's symbiotic relationship with wine was now the
only thing that made Elliot eat at all. He had lost his appetite. (If he did not
consciously force himself to take sustenance, he would waste. Lucy worried that
he was looking thin.)

And so, if he was to have wine, he
would have food. This night he sat at the cedar table in his yard with a plate
on which were some thick shavings of a hard pecorino cheese, a few slices of
beef tongue and salami, a small piece of bread, and some olives. To drink he
opened a tart Barbera d'Alba. He would drink it all, tonight. He would fight and
maybe lose to the desire to open a second. To drink by oneself was to be
contemplative. Or depressed, depending how you saw it. Or lonely — definitely
lonely.

A consequence of Elliot's rudimentary
learning in viticulture was some knowledge of “dry” farming. (He was among those
who held that drip irrigation made for lazy vines, while thirsty plants produced
more intense fruit, fruit with an urgent need to preserve its threatened DNA.)
Elliot had put this wisdom to use when he planted the rear of his yard with
natives and other desert plants. A chapparal with yucca and laurel sumac,
prickly pear and white sage. It was once a retreat, a place where Elliot got his
best thinking done. Now he worried there.

Until Mike stated it so starkly, Elliot
had been able to avoid confronting the fact that he hadn't worked as a
screenwriter for many months. Even then his most recent paying gigs had been
“polishes,” passes at dreadful scripts in a last-ditch attempt to save them —
unsuccessfully, it turned out. His heart wasn't in it. The screenplays were too
poor to inspire interest or hope, and Elliot's changes were forced and
arbitrary, changes made for their own sake, nothing that bettered the original.

The strictures of the pictures, the
heroic leads, the love interests, the reliance on gun violence to up the
dramatic stakes, the damned “inciting incidents,” the three or four or nine
(depending on the current operating theory) prescribed acts, their value as star
vehicles, beginningmiddleend — none of it had anything to do, as far as Elliot
was concerned, with telling stories with moving pictures. The cinema was to have
freed the story, abandoned linearity, cut loose the nineteenth-century novel.

He put his final disillusionment down
to being asked of his screenplay
The Feinting Spell
(blue-balled teen pretends to be vampire to get girls), twice, at different
pitches on the same day: “This is a comedy, right?” But then, what did Elliot's
feelings on the condition of the contemporary film narrative have to do with
anything? His job was to provide a service, and he did not. He'd seen this
problem coming but assumed that by now he would have left Los Angeles and the
entertainment industry for his idyll. There, looking out over his rolling rows
of vines, combed over the contour of his land, he supposed he would continue to
write. Never again screenplays or scripts for television. Prose, he supposed,
maybe something for the theatre. But maybe, just maybe, nothing at all.

The sun drowned in the Pacific. The sky
was Fleurie. The bottle of Barbera was empty. Elliot went to fetch another.

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE
to beat the traffic. Ever. Traffic had won a decisive
victory and held Los Angeles pinned in a triumphant chokehold. The 1, with its
views north along the coast, was less congested than Highway 5 but added an
extra hour to Paso Robles. Those times he'd gone farther, up to the prison in
Soledad in a futile attempt to visit Mark (who continued to refuse to see him),
he'd taken Highway 5 up and, to try to soothe but finally only numb his broken
heart, the coastal highway back.

Elliot found that keeping a fleet pace
on the road, particularly with stirring music played at an injudicious volume,
cleared the head. A sluggish advance had quite the opposite agency and induced
black rumination. He saw the line of cars ahead slowing and gathering.

Mark's trial was the end of Elliot and
Lucy. The excruciating bureaucracy of the proceeding, the dull, grinding
inevitability of the thing, gave them time to consider nothing so much as the
space between them, to notice that even after all these years neither could be
fully and freely themselves with the other. Neither Lucy nor Elliot could let
themselves howl in despair at what was happening to their son and expect
complete and utter forgiveness from the other. They loved one another. But not
enough for that.

There wasn't any courtroom drama.
Everybody knew the ending. It was the slow agony of dying not by a knife but by
a cudgel. When it was said and done, the shocking sentence passed, Mark was led
away and Elliot called to him, “I'll come and see you as soon as I can.” And
Mark turned and said, “Don't bother.”

It was the most horrible thing he could
recall. The memory was so unendurably painful that Elliot felt no shame in
running and hiding from it.

The traffic inched up the coast. One
started seeing the occasional vineyard from the highway a few miles south of
Montecito.

They'd been at it in California from
the time of the Spanish missions, planting vines so they could make wine.
Perhaps it was because of that term, “wine
making
,”
that people imagined the enterprise was by man's hand, that the drink was
created from a recipe. But at its best wine was an expression of the place, not
the ingredients. One wanted to taste the oyster shells in which the Chardonnay
of Chablis grew, the lime in Alsatian Riesling. There was sometimes tinkering,
in Bordeaux — softening a Cabernet-based wine with chocolatey Merlot, seasoning
it with small admixtures of Petit Verdot or Malbec, co-fermenting Syrah with a
dash of floral Viognier in Côte-Rôtie — but it was essentially, when done right,
farming, not cooking. Châteauneuf-du-Pape was unique among serious wines in
being made from so many grapes, but even so, its alchemy was as much in the
agriculture as in the mix.

The primary (and occasionally the only)
grape in the majority of wines from Châteauneuf-du-Pape was Grenache, a black,
hot-climate grape of Spanish or perhaps Sardinian origin (no one seemed willing
to admit it did best in Sardinia) that produced a potent though pale juice.
Easily boozy, most of the Grenache grown in the world became plonk. It did so
well. It was unpretentious; it made a carafe wine, a wine for the people. But
low-yielding old vines could also produce something much more.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape began with Grenache
— to which could be added Syrah, for a shiny pepper pelt and the durability of
reinforced concrete; Mourvèdre, for the funk of blood; and Cinsault, for
volatility and polish. Counoise gave a fermented essence that Elliot called
“raspberry kimchi,” and it brought to the wine what Mick Taylor had to the
Stones. Vaccarèse was a spice: a pinch did the trick. Terret Noir added crisp
acidity. Muscardin's role was an utter and essential mystery.

White grapes, in tiny proportions, were
part of the blend too. Roussanne gave beeswax and honey to the palate and white
flowers to the nose. Clairette, while soft, added alcoholic heat for the tongue.
Bourboulenc kippered; Picpoul puckered against Picardin's sugar.

Beyond the official truth there were
more grapes than these. There were, in fact, several varieties of Grenache, from
black to white; there were spontaneous hybrids; there were mischievous oddities
from faraway corners of the vineyards of the southern Rhône Valley. But nowhere,
it seemed, was there any longer cultivated Matou de Gethsemane — the grape in
the admixture that contributed the critical element that Elliot sought in the
wine.

The Matou de Gethsemane (
Vitis vinifera
subsp.
Golgotha
rutilus difficilis
) was alleged to originate in the Middle East —
from the garden on the Mount of Olives where Jesus suffered his agony, if one
took the name at face value. It was said to have been carted back from the Holy
Land to the south of France by Crusaders, in the belief it had made the wine
that filled the Grail, the very wine that became blood. But given the vine's
traits, this made little sense. Unlike the other hot-climate grapes in the
Châteauneuf mix, Matou de Gethsemane could not bear heat and sun.

They said you could see this in the
pallor of its fruit. Botanical accounts from the nineteenth century, including a
few poor drawings, described a faintly blue skin with amber freckles on any
exposed shoulders. Because the vines did so poorly in the light, they were
planted in the shadiest areas and trained to have heavy leaf canopies. Only in
this relative gloom could the grapes mature in such a way as to produce juice
useful for wine. Those few who, long ago, planted any of it, often did so in the
shade of a stone wall between properties, on the edges of their
clos
. Exposed to the midday sun, the grape, like Jesus
on the cross above, was finished.

The top of the name,
matou
— “tomcat” — tipped one off to its nose,
reminiscent of the spray of just such an animal. In colour it was not at all
purple, but copper. The palate, wrote one monk who grew it, was enigmatic,
having a distinct flavour, something earthy or of metal, that wasn't quite
there. He ascribed to it a taste that compelled one to continue to smack the
lips and roll the tongue, searching. But monks tended to exaggerate the few
pleasures they took.

Among reasons speculated for the
decline of cultivation of Matou was that, vinified on its own, it was thought to
be nearly undrinkable. In concentrations of up to an absolute maximum of 10
percent and in concert with Grenache and Cinsault, there were reports of its
producing rosé wines of simultaneous lightness and gravity. These, the stories
went, “refreshed” like no others. As a component of a beefy southern Rhône red,
it would provide relief against a tendency to be boozy and sweet. It made wine
of only 9 or 10 degrees alcohol with no residual sugar and it was, in all
accounts and with complete conviction, said to add critical “tension.” When
Elliot pressed the oldest vignerons of the southern Rhône, in his Canadian high
school French, for a further explanation, for an expansion, there was a Gallic
shrug and that shaking of the half-opened hand, like the turning of an invisible
dial, that said, “If you cannot understand what I mean by ‘tension,' then you
cannot understand what I mean.”

Lastly, every account, every bit of
geezer-imparted lore, held it a bitch to grow. More than the fussy canopy
management required, the Matou was prone to every disease known to grape —
fungal, viral, and bacterial. It was particularly susceptible to mildew-like
growths that thrived in the same leafy vines necessary to protect the grapes
from too much sun. Its yields were poor, except in those years when the berries
spontaneously shattered. It was impossible to harvest mechanically. Its vines
had to reach fifteen years of age before the fruit showed its characteristic
modesty. It was in need of constant and individual attention, possibly why it
held a reputation for being “jealous” of other varieties.

By the early 1960s only one or two
growers were known to bother with it. The Thibodeau family at Isabelle d'Orange
vinified it with success, as did a secretive group of monks who'd long ago made
wine for the Avignon popes. The monastic order, whose allegiances were suspect
after the Church returned to Rome, was extinguished by papal bull in 1964.

Cultivation gradually ceased. The Matou
was by no means unique in this. Grapes like the Penouille, the Troyen, the
Camaralet, and the Arbane Rouge were almost extinct too. Gone the way of the
Snouthouse apple and the Ribston Pippin: casualties of a globalized marketplace
that could not find a niche for an apple known as “Perfect.”

Elliot drove into Cambria, on the
coast, to get a sandwich for lunch and a cup of coffee. Fog made the place as
damp and chilly as faraway St. John's, Newfoundland, the town in which he was
born. Given the right conditions, these Pacific mists could creep inland to the
most westerly vineyards of Paso Robles, cooling and slaking them. (Vigneron
wisdom in the South of France held that the Mourvèdre grape didn't grow properly
where one could not smell the sea.) But the tendrils of relief that snaked their
way through the Templeton Gap in the Santa Lucias too rarely made it as far east
as his thirsting vines. Standing beside his car, looking out at the surf, he
shivered. In a short twenty minutes, he would be in an inferno.

They were erecting another
building on the grounds of the neighbouring property, Haldeman Estates. (Elliot
called the place, owned and operated by a retired cavalry general — an Apache
helicopter his last mount — “Haldeman Laboratories.”)

Haldeman were, in philosophy and
practice, in direct opposition to Elliot's operation. They believed their
product was
made
in the cellar. Where Haldeman
deployed forward osmosis and microminioxygenation to create their Frankenwine,
Elliot endeavoured to be as non-intrusive as possible. Haldeman raised their
wines in spanking new barrels, specially coopered extra-small so as to impart
the maximum characteristic of American oak. Elliot used
foudres
and concrete tanks to minimize the influence of wood.
Haldeman harvested fruit that was verging on deliquescence to make blowsy,
sugary wine. Elliot harvested early to ensure acidity, austerity, and
minerality. Haldeman called Elliot's wine a “Châteauhuit de Dope.” Elliot
likened Haldeman's wine to a rootbeer float.

The starkest difference between
Elliot's operation and his neighbour's was that Haldeman's was successful.

A crane was in there at Haldeman's,
lifting some machine off the back of a flatbed. Probably an Israeli centrifuge.

There was no sign marking the entrance
to Elliot's winery.

Elliot made his way to the vineyard
offices. His operation was not plush but practical, built into the hill to
facilitate gravity feeding as opposed to rough pumping. Visitors were
discouraged. Winery tours were right out. He thought he could feel the heat of
the gravel coming through the soles of his shoes.

Day-to-day business operations had
fallen to Bonnie Sherow, whom Elliot had hired, originally, as his secretary.
She was greatly overqualified and only took the job because it was close to
home. She and her husband, early back-to-the-landers from the '60s themselves,
ran a biodynamic farm nearby. She hadn't been on the job a month before Elliot
named her manager. He never did hire another secretary — there wasn't call for
one — and so was always uncomfortable asking Bonnie to perform functions below
her station. But the situation was approaching an emergency. Bonnie was worrying
over a litter of invoices.

“Elliot,” she said, “we have —”

“I know, I know.”

“We need thirty-eight hundred bottles.
I have to get them on credit.”

“Cash flow, I understand.”

“That's only part of it. Sales
are . . . The wine cannot market itself.”

“Sure it can. We've been through this,
it's cult.” Elliot hated the term. “Advertising works completely against the
image. Does Rayas advertise?”

“Marketing means more than advertising.
You can't have it both ways, you can't be this cool thing with integrity, that
only those in the know know, and be, like . . . popular. And
the wine you are making . . . forgive me,
Elliot . . . it's no Rayas.”

“Rayas was a bad example. Beaucastel.”
Like Elliot, Beaucastel grew and made wine from many grapes.

“Beaucastel advertise. And you know
what? Locura Canyon is even less like Beaucastel than Rayas. Beaucastel is a
terrific business.”

“I know you're right, Bonnie,
but . . . I think vineyard problems are our priority, I know
what's got to be done. I haven't got much time.”

“You sure don't.”

“How long?”

Bonnie looked down at her desk,
pretending to consult some papers when Elliot could see she just couldn't say it
to his face.

“Without refinancing, we've got two
more vintages. Maybe. With the drop in land values around here, the asset side
makes talking to the banks impossible, even if they were lending. Probably best
to keep our heads down.”

“Then I've got to get on this
immediately. Can you book me through to Paris or Marseilles? First flights
available.”

“Is this a new partner?” asked
Bonnie.

“What?”

“Are you drumming up some investment?
In France? A partner? Because if you are, I think it's great idea.”

“Yes,” Elliot lied, “that's part of it,
it's an ancillary objective of the trip.”

“Ancillary?” Bonnie took a moment.
“What's the primary objective?”

“Matou de Gethsemane. I'm going to make
one last effort to find some.”