Читать книгу The Descent of Man - Kevin Desinger - Страница 8

I’m the wine steward at the Franklin Heights Deli. I started off hating the title because it sounds pretentious. Wine steward. We’re not a cruise ship, and I don’t wear a uniform. When I had business cards made up, the woman—I’d guess she was just a few years younger than me—got out a form and asked what my job title was. I said, “Wine guy.” Her pen stopped.

“Wrong.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

She stared at me through her Elvis Costello glasses and said, “Look at it.” The space was still blank. “You have to capitalize something, and you can’t capitalize ‘guy,’ like ‘Wine Guy,’ unless …” she pointed at me, “what if you don’t capitalize anything, like an e. e. cummings poem?”

She was making me feel a generation older, the way body piercings do.

I said, “I thought about ‘Wine Manager,’ but that makes it sound like I’m trying to keep from calling myself a wine steward.”

“Plus it’s too corporate. How about ‘Wine Czar’? You could wear one of those hats—”

I said, ‘ “Wine Steward’ is sounding pretty good about now.”

She gave a matter-of-fact nod. “I think you just have to face it.” So my card says I’m a Wine Steward. It’s a fussy term, and it’s fussy of me to make such a big deal of it. My only defense is that we’re talking about two different kinds of fussiness. People whose jobs allow them to dress casually for work often poke fun at those who have to wear a suit, but most of them work as hard to achieve that casual appearance as the suit people do to spiff up. Fussy-casual. That’s me.

The Deli is John Harper’s operation—he owns both the building and the business—but he lets me run my end of it pretty much however I want. The only part of my duties I don’t like is that when it gets busy I have to help with the lunch rush. I like immersing myself in one thing and resurfacing on my own—like waking up without an alarm. But just about every day around noon, when the line at the ordering counter gets long and I’m not taking care of a wine customer, I get called over to scrub up and ladle soup or throw a few sandwiches together. It’s not that bad, and, as they say, labor is good for the soul. My real point is that if this is the worst of it—having to fix a dozen lunches for familiar customers—I have a pretty nice setup.

John let me choose my computer when he took me on, and he hired someone to help me design the wine page of our website. The only part he got serious about was the money. I was to assume we would be audited every year. I must have given him a puzzled look because he said, “Keep perfect books. I would rather go broke than get in trouble with the tax man.”

I make all the wine-purchasing decisions, work out the pricing policies, and set up the displays. He tells me when he needs something done a certain way, but if he offers a mere suggestion I’m free to ignore it. Owners can be too hands-on, making them difficult to work for, but John delegates well and keeps focused on the big picture. Still, trusting a quarter million dollars’ worth of stock annually to someone who previously worked only one year in a supermarket wine section has got to be tough, even with his Eastern philosophy. I think he saw where I was headed in life and, because it would in turn help him, helped me get there.

We first met in the aisle of the supermarket. I was sitting on a case of wine, drawing up display tags—weekly markdowns, Parker ratings, and how this or that had wowed’em at whatever wine show—when I felt someone pause behind me. Asking if I can help often drives off the timid shopper, so I simply turned, offered him a nod of acknowledgment, and kept at my work with the colored marking pens until the tag was done.

When I turned again, I found a man in his comfortable fifties, head tilted, studying me. His shopping cart was half filled with romaine lettuce. Nothing but the lettuce. He saw me notice and smiled.

I said, “May I help you?”

He looked around at my wines. “Yes, by coming to work for me.”

“Come again?”

“You like your work, I like your work, I would like you to work for me.”

“I’m pretty comfortable here.”

“Obviously, but is that it? End of story?”

“I think so.”

“But you don’t know what I’m offering.”

He had a point. Somewhat defensively I said, “We have good benefits here and good pay, and I get along with my manager, which is huge.”

“That’s because of your work.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“It’s because of your work.” He was sure. “I can top what you’re getting here, both in pay and benefits. I would be your manager, and I think we would get along.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, yes, maybe you can offer something better, and maybe we would get along, but I don’t think I want to change. I just got things where I want them here. And I have seniority, which I would have to give up.”

He chuckled. “No, you’d have seniority. That I guarantee.” He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and said, “Well, I shouldn’t push. When you’re ready to swim, you’ll let go of the dock.” He handed me the card. “My name is John. It might be worth your while to drop by.” He looked around and said, “Less of a corporate feel where I am.”

I glanced at the card as a courtesy before putting it in my pocket.

He said, “And think about what you said just now, about having things where you want them here.”

I honestly believe I would have let the matter drop if he hadn’t added that last remark. I chewed on it all evening, about what it had taken to organize the wines on the shelves and make up a Rolodex of contacts at import companies and distributors. Eventually I realized that the difficult part of organizing the wine department was complete, and though I got great satisfaction from having succeeded in this regard, I felt a certain disappointment in knowing that I would be coasting from now on. If I were a character in a comic book, I would have said in my superhero voice, “My work here is done,” and flown off into the sky in search of another wine department in distress.

As it turned out my flight would have been a short one. The address on John’s card was just eight blocks west, a shoebox lunch stop recently closed due to illness in the family.

On my lunch hour the day after John gave me his card, I walked down to the doorway of the shop. Construction had begun, but, seated at the dozen or so tables, now more tightly grouped back by the cheese and cold-cuts display case, faithful customers were having sandwiches and soup.

I found John at the far front corner of the shop, where the window facing the street met the bricks of the west wall. He was talking to a man in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, an architectural drawing open on the floor between them. When John saw me, he excused himself and came over, and the drawing rolled up toward the other man’s foot.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “If you have a minute.”

“I have forty-five minutes.”

He led me back outside and over to the front window of the law offices that took up the remaining two-thirds of the building on the far side of the brick wall. There was no furniture inside, and no people. He said, “I just bought the rest of the place. After we get the trusses installed I’m removing this dividing wall. But see that door over there?” He was starting to light up like a storyteller about to divulge a magical secret. “That’s where you come in.” Centered on the far wall was a door to what might have been a low, narrow storage room.

“That’s an entrance?”

“No, but it would be yours.”

“It looks like a supply closet.”

“It’s a staircase.” He was almost gleeful. “Down.”

I said, “To the basement?”

He said, “Not the basement. The cellar. It’s where the good wine will live. Do you currently have a room where the good wine lives?” He seemed to know that a cool storage area was the only critical lack at the supermarket. Without a cellar, I (or they) would never be able to acquire any truly special wines. To have—to possess and store and eventually sell—to handle truly great wines is, for some members of my world, more important than anything. I looked at the door to the cellar and suddenly felt that in my current situation I was little more than a box-boy.

“I’ll have to talk to my boss.”

“I can help you with that too.” We went back inside, where he pointed toward a table back beside the lit doors of the beverage cooler. There was my boss, manager of the supermarket, involved with a large, awkward sandwich. Sometimes our city has a small-town feel. He was in mid-bite when he saw me, so he indicated with his head and sandwich together to come over.

I sat across from him. “Hi, Bill. Did you know I would be here today?”

He wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “No, I eat here all the time. Their meatloaf sandwich is a work of art. But I thought you might at some point. If you take his offer I’ll need you for two more weeks.”

It turned out that John had been talking to him for a month, hoping to win me away from the corporate scene with no hard feelings.

Before I went back for the second half of my supermarket shift, John handed me a wine box half filled with catalogs and a pad of art paper. On the first page was a loosely accurate sketch of the law-office wall with the enclosed staircase leading down.

“Start with that and draw me some shelves for wine. You get the whole west wall just as I’ve drawn it, from the front window to the beverage cooler in back, all the way to the ceiling. And think of the top of the cellar staircase as storage space. If you would like, we can put in one of those library ladders that slide along a track. Make it work, and make it handsome. And keep a record of your hours—this will be overtime, mind you, part of your professional day. Try to have something for me by tomorrow or the next day. It doesn’t have to be an artistic masterpiece, but be accurate with the dimensions.”

I agonized over it because my first choice was so expensive. I finished drawing by the end of the first evening and spent the second evening just staring at it, thinking about how much it would cost and how John might take the news. I would be fired before I was hired. Still, I left everything as it was. When I went in, two noons after he had handed me the assignment, he looked over my work, referring to the catalogs where I had bookmarked them. Finally he said, “Looks good.” Just like that. I wanted to hug him.

He went to his office and brought back a check ledger. “How many hours did you put in?”

Because I didn’t want to charge him for the time I’d just sat there thinking about the money, I told him just the one evening. He wrote me a check for both evenings. I said, “Wait. You didn’t hear me.”

He said, “No, it was you who didn’t hear me. I dare you to tell me you didn’t spend both evenings on this.” When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “Thinking is part of the process. Even the big boys sit there and think. Noodle time might be worth more than time of action.”

He looked at my drawings again. “You will have a Wall of Wine.”

I said, “And you will be broke.”

He smiled. “This isn’t the biggest risk I’ve ever taken. I’ll be fine.”

While it was being built, I came to see that it had been a good move on his part to let me design the shelves. The cost was trivial compared to what he spent on the entire remodel, and he was even less experienced with wine-display particulars than I was. And I’m sure he figured I would be happier with my own decisions.

I learned later that he didn’t have as much money as it first seemed. He was generous in certain areas, miserly in others. He kept a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on his desk, using it to inform him on business strategies. He said it helped make the correct decision seem obvious.

Along with the wine shelves he also gave me the island, consisting of a series of high, narrow tables made of butcher-block maple, arranged to form a modular bar. There was enough room beneath the tables to store deliveries and have them be out of the way but still close at hand—more than fifty cases could be stacked under the island tables. If you were to order a case of a certain syrah from the Napa Valley, say, and return the next week to get it, you would find it beneath one of the island tables—a box with your name in Magic Marker on the side, along with the arrival date and the price, which would be 10 to 15 percent below the shelf price. I wouldn’t have to be present; you could take it to the cash register, and John would ring it up.

Perhaps because of the remodel, some older people with a lot of money started gathering in the late afternoon every Friday, sharing pricey bottles, talking quietly. They sat at three round tables pushed together into a clover shape, forming a private wine-tasting group that we called the Elders. They insisted on paying retail for the wine; in turn John insisted on providing a plate of baguette slices and a selection of cheeses to go with the wines. The Elders (who were far more familiar with expensive wines than I was at that point) made suggestions as to what might be nice to have on hand next week, and I was able to respond with a regular turnover of upper-end vintages. John raised a concerned brow when he saw the first order sheet, which included two cases priced at over nine hundred dollars each. I was able to assure him that all but three bottles of the twenty-four were already sold, putting us in the black before the cases arrived.

He bowed modestly and said, “Student become teacher.”

At about this time I formed an open-to-the-public tasting for our regular Friday-evening customers. For my own convenience it ran from seven to nine, an hour past closing. Having people stay past closing turned out to be a good move because it instilled in them an allegiance, the result of feeling privileged to remain after the doors were locked. They took the tasting more seriously than they would have otherwise, which allowed them to make better-informed decisions as to what they wanted for their own cellars. This in turn made them happier with what they bought.

For the regulars each week I would pull six wines of a particular grape of interest from the shelves, trying for a range in price and quality (often not related), and end the evening with a real treat, something from the cellar where I kept the treasures that were no longer in distribution. The cellar bottle was to represent what I thought the other wines were aiming for, the essence of the grape of interest.

At the beginning I didn’t charge but left an empty water pitcher near the lineup of bottles for tips. Ones and fives appeared right away, and pretty soon it was just about all fives. The group remained fairly stable, between ten and fifteen people, none of whom were those difficult individuals who insinuate themselves into social events simply to drink for free.

One Friday evening I was pouring for the open tasting when a man from the Elders approached John, who was having coffee with two friends at a table near the cash register. This was where he usually hung out toward the end of the day, relaxing between ringing up folks on their way out and unlocking the front door for them if it was after eight. The coffee was because he didn’t drink alcohol—evidently he hadn’t had a drop since the first of August 1968, the day he had been discharged from the army.

I’d said, “You must have been about twelve.”

“I’m older than I look.”

“That’s because you don’t drink.”

“Oh, I don’t know. For a while I was way ahead of the game. Now I’m probably about even.” He tended to give all the information he was comfortable giving on the first pass. I could see something in his eyes beyond age, maybe evidence of pain he had endured at one time. I had to learn to not ask for details.

The man’s voice didn’t carry over to where I was, but he talked with his hands, gesturing a couple of times toward the wine shelves. John’s hands replied with an assurance that he would look into it. He came over to the regulars and told me there seemed to be a disagreement concerning a certain Leonetti. I said we had a few in the cellar, and if he’d tend to the open tasting I would go down for one.

When I returned, I handed it to him and said it was a hundred bucks. He looked at me, then over toward the man who had asked for it. I told him a hundred was already less than the customer would pay anywhere else. Still he hesitated. I said, “I’ll bet you a nickel they won’t be bothered by the price.”

“These people aren’t bothered by price. But a hundred bucks?”

“More than fair.” I tapped the label of the bottle and said, “That’s what the cellar is for.”

He went over to the man and his wife and showed them the bottle. As the husband reached for his wallet, he looked over to me and gave me a small thank-you nod. I nodded in return. John noticed this tacit exchange as he opened the bottle, then went back over to his friends and sat back down to watch the rest. The husband poured a small sample for each of the Elders. They all swirled and sniffed, swirled and sipped, chatted, then did it again. Then the couple brought the bottle over to us at the open table.

I said, “Well, who was right?”

She frowned. “I think we both missed the point with that other bottle.”

He turned to her. “And it was a little cool.”

“This or the other?”

“The other,” she said. “A little dormant. We should have let it sit more.”

I said, “Maybe it was the food you had with it.”

She said, “Maybe,” and the husband just shrugged. It was the temperature.

The wife set the half-full bottle on our table and told folks to go ahead; she hoped it was a treat.

I said, “Are you sure?”

“We have these other wines to get through, and some of us have to drive.”

After this exchange my situation with John was secure. Before then he hadn’t been clear that in a few years the value of a twenty-five-dollar bottle can more than triple and people will still buy it. Later I pointed out that he wouldn’t buy a top-of-the-line Mercedes, but that didn’t mean the car wasn’t worth the price to someone else. This was another way I got lucky. He was sketchy on selling something at a price he would never pay, and I’d stumbled upon a simple way of making it make sense to him. His understanding had been theoretical—otherwise he would never have hired me—but now he understood it emotionally.

My personal feeling about this whole business is complicated—probably because I haven’t worked it out entirely. It begins with the idea that some wines sell for three hundred dollars a bottle, and even though I have a very good palate, no bottle of wine can give me three hundred dollars’ worth of pleasure. For some people, however, part of the experience is in the payment itself. It’s as if they’re giving themselves a gift: Please, let me take care of that for you, it will be my pleasure. Paying for it is part of the pleasure.

So I won’t apologize for the price of any bottle we carry, and I respect the decision a person makes in buying it.

One day a guy about my age came in, having heard about a Bandol we stocked. He bought a bottle for thirty-five dollars and left. If you calculate how long it might take for him to drive home, open the bottle, and take two sips, this was how long it took for him to phone back.

“I bought the Bandol?”

“Yes.”

“How much more do you have?”

“Three cases plus the bottles on the shelves. Maybe forty-four total.”

“Cool. How much more can you get from the distributor?”

“Maybe six cases.”

“I’ll take those too.”

“I can’t do a discount on this.”

“That’s okay.”

I sold all of it to him for four thousand dollars. It wasn’t a mistake, but I wouldn’t do that now.

In a narrow sense my job is to sell wine. In a broader sense, however, my job is to have a selection of wines available, to be able to go down to the cellar and return with a bottle, as I had done with the Leonetti. If that same guy were to come in now, I wouldn’t let him clean me out. I would retain at least a case and sell bottles out of it one at a time. Toward the end of the case I would treat the regulars to a bottle to show them something special. In this broader description of my job, I was growing into that pesky term on my business cards; I was becoming a Wine Steward.

It’s my guess that with any industry, gaining gravity is a self-propagating condition—the better you do, the less energy it takes to continue doing better. It wasn’t long before the wine reps from different distributors started calling me, letting me know when they would be coming through with samples of their latest acquisitions.

They usually appeared in the middle of the afternoon, our slow time, wearing either a tweed jacket or the London Fog type of raincoat worn more like a robe, complete with the secret-agent lapels and dangling belt. They’d open what was usually a reinforced nylon satchel and set out samples from different wineries, then politely wait until I finished what I was doing—helping a customer or stocking the shelves. Then we would set out our pads of paper and calculators and over the next half hour work up an order. A few days later a dozen cases would arrive. To the uninitiated I might have appeared to be involved with underworld college professors.

There is something of a pattern to my workweek, but it’s not easily discerned, especially when you consider the periodic afternoon drives I make to regional wineries to talk to the winemakers. I don’t get to do whatever I want, but it may seem as if I do. Someone of a different moral structure might use this apparent lack of routine to arrange something illicit, but I don’t have it in me to cheat on Marla. True, I haven’t been tested, but I’ve never had a wandering eye, and things in general have been so tight with her—even during our crisis—that I can’t imagine the circumstances it would take for me to be seduced into any form of betrayal. If this means I lack imagination or creativity, I don’t mind. There are worse things to be known for. Worse things to know oneself for.

The day after the attempted car theft was Sunday, but I called our mechanic anyway. I left a message on his answering machine explaining what had happened. An hour later he called back. Tim is single, lives a couple houses down from his shop, and is liable to work odd hours. I knew when I called there was a chance we could get things going even though it was Sunday. He said if he could find wrecking-yard parts, we would have our car back Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. The thing about Tim is that when he gives an estimate like this—even over the phone without having seen the damage—you can pretty much count on Tuesday being the day. Over the phone he said, “I’m not doing anything right now, and I have a loaner that’s not doing anything either. You’d be doing me a favor to drive it around for a couple days.”

A short while later I heard a hefty diesel engine rattling out front. It was Tim in his tow truck, maneuvering to hook up to our Camry. He said if I rode with him over to the shop I could sign the paperwork and pick up the loaner. “We’re not talking pretty here. It’s a mule.” It turned out to be a mid-’80s Honda hatchback, after they went from being weightless little toys to having some beef, some actual presence on the road.

Tim disconnected the Camry from the towing apparatus and opened the driver’s door to look at the steering column. “These guys,” he said, shaking his head. Then he said, “Yeah, probably Tuesday.”

On the way home I was thinking about what had led to my driving this unfamiliar car—the entire series of strange events—and toward the end of a string of associations I recalled the envelope in the vacant lot. It would remain there for a limited period. It might be one more day and it might be a year, but at some point the envelope would be gone. Nearing the intersection at Fulton, I realized that I was anonymous in the Honda.

The thing about a loaner is that it’s anycar. An owned car has something of its driver’s identity because he or she has chosen it—less but still true if it’s used. Toyota people never buy Buicks. But a loaner is by definition on hand for use by a spectrum of strangers who have no choice in the matter. Using the Honda as a disguise, I might never have a better opportunity to safely retrieve the envelope.

I felt through the glove box for matches, finding two partially used books. After learning what I could from the papers, I would burn everything. Sergeant Rainey had convinced me that this little adventure might not be over. Whether the threat was from him or the car thieves, I would feel vulnerable in some way as long as the papers were in my possession, which you could say they were, even under a piece of plywood in a vacant lot. When you commit a crime, you replay it again and again. You think about how you might have done things another way. You discover mistakes and omissions. For example, I hadn’t wiped the envelope for fingerprints.

I drove around somewhat randomly, checking my mirrors to see that I wasn’t being followed. Eventually I circled out toward the industrial area, trying to quell a fear that the cops had staked out the road to and from the wrecked truck in case the person who had taken it returned to the scene. There were no other cars around, and I felt both conspicuous and anonymous in the Honda as I approached the vacant lot. A stakeout seemed unlikely, but I didn’t want someone grabbing me from behind, saying, “We knew you’d come back. Your type always does.”

Before reaching the entrance I stopped and sat there, trying to determine whether or not I was about to enter another series of stupid decisions. In the end I felt that this envelope was the only physical evidence linking me to the earlier series of stupid decisions; I had to get rid of it. As Rainey might say, I was already committed.

The lot looked different in daylight. The brush surrounding it was denser than I recalled, and the lot itself was larger, about the size of a tennis court. I pulled in tight to block the entrance, stopping so that my door opened into the lot. Now a person would have to climb over the hood of the Honda to get to me. I left the engine running.

The piece of plywood was undisturbed. Still, I half expected the envelope to be gone, but of course it was there. I removed the papers. The top sheet listed the registered owner as Larry Hood.

His last name was Hood. What a joke: doomed at birth.

I tore off a square inch from the corner of the tire warranty and wrote in the smallest letters I could manage, “Laredo,” which would put me in mind of Larry but left off his last name because I would never forget Hood. The street address was 1424 SE Condor. I wrote, “14” after Laredo, then below this put “Condor 24,” as if it were a football score between two high school teams. The southeast part I would either remember or figure out. I had more space, so I copied the truck’s license plate backward, even though I felt sure I could memorize it.

After checking again for witnesses, I wadded the pages individually and piled them like briquettes in the gravel, then lit an edge near the base. I nursed the flame and stayed with it until nothing remained except hot, then warm, then cold black-and-white ash. I chopped this up with an edge of the piece of plywood, stirred it around in the gravel, then spun the plywood over near some other scrap at the back of the lot.

Now the only physical evidence linking me to the wrecked truck was this little stamp of paper, which I slipped into my wallet behind my driver’s license. After two seconds I realized that the first thing the cops do when they stop you is have you remove your license from that wallet window, exposing whatever is hidden behind it. I moved the slip of paper behind my library card.

Since the Honda was facing that direction, I decided to risk driving past the truck, just to see if it was still there. I was in the area and still had the anonymity of the loaner, so why not?

When I rounded the last curve and saw the truck ahead just as I’d left it—all empty-eyed and beaten—I stopped in the middle of the road. I couldn’t bring myself to approach. It was too real or something, so I sat there, thinking or not thinking, I don’t know—nothing I had in the way of thoughts really registered—then I found myself driving in reverse, turned around in my seat with my right arm locked behind the front passenger seat to look fully out the rear window. I veered into the other lane so that I wouldn’t surprise oncoming traffic as I backed through the curve. On the other side there was a wide shoulder. I backed onto it far enough to get turned around, then headed home.

I regretted wrecking the truck and beating on it with the pipe. It had been violent and pointless, but now that it was done there was no way to undo it. I’ve always wondered why people can’t block out something terrible they’ve done, just put it behind them. I can’t speak for the others (most of whom I admit were characters from books and movies, with the rare instance in the news of people after years of apparent freedom turning themselves in), but for me even the relatively minor act of totaling the truck was the only thing I could think about. You weave a patch of bright color into the muted pattern of your life, and it’s the only thing you look at. Believe me, you can’t tear your eyes away.

If my odd series of spontaneous decisions had been part of a movie, I would’ve started shaking my head when the protagonist ignored his wife’s advice to stay upstairs and let the cops do their work. I’m not sure I would have thought of him as anything close to a protagonist. However, when you’re the actual guy, and you’re caught up in the moment, everything is different. But after the moment passes it seems impossible to explain this difference to someone who wasn’t there, wasn’t in the moment. The cops, for example. Or a jury, if your case ever makes it to court. Or your wife. Especially your wife.