“Try getting out of here, so I can get dressed.”
“Okay. Of course.” He gave her a fragile smile as he buttoned the shirt. “I’m asking for an insult here, and I deserve it—but I’ve got to say I hope you won’t leave. I hope you’ll stay, somehow.” He stepped toward the hallway door. “I’ll be in the kitchen, making some coffee.”
At least she didn’t say anything as he walked out.
At the kitchen sink he filled the glass coffeepot with water and poured it into the back of the coffee machine; the action reminded him of that Mavranos guy pouring beer down the back of the Star Motel TV set, and he remembered that the room had been on Nina’s credit card. Five nights, plus a wrecked TV set. God knew what it would cost.
As he spooned ground coffee into the filter he wondered who Tiffany might be, how complete a person—whether she was anything more than the Plumtree sex function, with no character details besides the sketched-in tastes for More cigarettes and Southern Comfort. Maybe she had been provided with one or two other props he hadn’t discovered—some surface preferences in movies, or food. The ideal girlfriend, some sophomoric types would probably say with a snigger. He wondered if he had ever been shallow enough to say something like that. Well, he’d been shallow enough to act on it, today, which had to be worse.
He slid the filter funnel into the coffee machine and clicked it on and opened the cabinet to snag down a couple of cups. His hands were still shaking. Sugar was on the table, and he opened the refrigerator and took out a half full carton of milk.
Plumtree was like a family of sisters—with a scary, seldom-seen father, and a crazy mother. Cochran had been initially attracted to the nice sister, and now he had gone to bed with the nymphomaniac one; but the one he had come to rely on and even admire was the…the tough one.
He tweaked open the milk carton and sniffed the contents. The weeks-old milk smelled cheesy, and he sighed and poured it down the sink. There was a jar of Cremora in the cabinet, he recalled.
The coffee machine had just started to sputteringly exhale air when Plumtree stepped into the kitchen from the hall. She was wearing her jeans and white blouse again, though she was still barefoot, and she was tugging one of Nina’s hairbrushes through the disordered blond thatch of her hair.
“Coffee sounds good,” she said. “I think spiking it would be a bad idea.”
“I think we’ve had enough to drink for today,” Cochran agreed cautiously.
“Well,” she said, pulling out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sitting down heavily, “as for the whole day I don’t know. I kind of picture a glass or two of something at around sundown.” When Cochran had set a cup of steaming coffee in front of her, she added, “Bring that milk over here.”
“It’s empty,” he said, turning back to the cabinet. “I’ve got Cremora, though.”
“Cremora,” she echoed, stirring sugar into the coffee. “What do you keep the milk carton around for?”
“I just now poured it out, it was bad.” He glanced at the milk carton, thinking he might save it for the garden. “At the vineyard we put half-gallon milk cartons around young vines,” he added absently as he poured his own cup. “It keeps the rabbits from getting at them, and prevents sunburn, and makes the shoots grow straight, up toward the light at the top.” He carried his cup to the table and sat down across from her, and stared out the window at the roof of the greenhouse as he sipped it. “They’ll be putting out the new seedlings soon, at Pace, in the couple of acres down by the highway.” He used the Italian pronunciation for the vineyard name, pah-chay.
At last he looked at her. Plumtree seemed to be listening, and so he let himself go on about this neutral topic. “And,” he said, “the malolactic fermentation will be starting up soon in the casks of last year’s wine—that’s a second fermentation that happens at about the same time that the new year’s leaves are budding out, as if they’re in communication; it’s bacteria, rather than yeast, and it converts the malic acid to lactic acid, which is softer on the tongue. You want it to happen, in the Zinfandels and the Pinot Noirs.” He smiled faintly, thinking about the vineyard. “When I left for Paris, the grape leaves were all in fall colors—you should see it. The Petite Sirah leaves turn purple, the Chardonnays are gold, and the Cabernet Sauvignon leaves go red as blood.”
“You miss the work,” said Plumtree. “Do you make good wine there?”
“Yeah, we do, actually. These last few years we’ve been having ideal marine-influence weather, and we’re picking later in the season, and our ’92 and ’93 Zinfandels, not bottled yet, are already showing perfect old-viney fruit, with tannin like velvet.” He shrugged self-consciously. “But, hell, since 1990, everybody in California’s been making good wines, it seems like. Not just the names you’ve heard of, like Ridge and Mondavi, but Rochioli in the Russian River Valley and Joel Peterson’s Ravenswood in Sonoma; everybody’s producing spectacular harvests and vintages, in spite of the phylloxera bugs. It’s almost as if the world-scale has to stay balanced—Bordeaux, all of Europe, in fact, have been getting way too much rain in these growing seasons, and they’ve been consistently mediocre since ’90.”
“Well, Scott Crane became king in 1990. I bet ‘95 will be a terrible year.”
“That Kootie kid might be a good king. Maybe we’ll be able to tell if he’s okay, by how the wine turns out.”
Plumtree tasted the coffee and grimaced. “Did your wife like wine? Just because I’m talking to you doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking you’re a heartless dickhead.”
He gave her a constricted nod to show that he understood. “Nina,” he said, clearing his throat. “Actually, she seemed to resent the big, vigorous California wines—”
Plumtree’s mouth opened. “Why should the god favor this coast on the wrong side of the world? Where none of the Appellation Controlee commandments are even being observed! Here you are free to mechanically irrigate, if no rain comes! And you may produce…three, four, six tons of grapes per acre, with no penalty! In the Médoc our vandangeurs hold to the god’s old laws, making no more than thirty-five hectoliters of wine from each hectare of land, and we nurture the sacred old Cabernet Sauvignon and supplicate the god to make it into his forgiving blood, as he did in the centuries before the Revolution—and for our pains we scarcely get a wine that’s fit to drink with dinner! It’s rejected like Cain’s sacrifice. Here in barbaric California the desecrated Cabernet is turned into wines like, like cathedrals and Bach concertos, and it’s not even the wine he blesses—he consecrates this unpedigreed upstart interloper Zinfandel.”
Cochran had stopped breathing, for this was Nina’s voice. He could see his shirt collar twitching with his heartbeat, and he hardly dared to move, fearing that any motion might startle her ghost away.
He realized that he should speak. “Uh, not always,” he said in a quiet, placating tone, peripherally reminded of poor Thutmose with his rusty grail full of Zinfandel that he craved to have transformed into the pagadebiti. “Most Zinfandel is just red wine.”
“You called me,” said Nina’s voice. She looked around at her own kitchen. “When I was on the lit marveil, the jumping bed, in the room with all the people in it.” She shifted her chair back from the table and peered out the window at the midday glare on the greenhouse roof. “When was that?”