Tasting

I don’t usually tell people this part, but I didn’t recognize him at all when we passed on the street that morning. Even after he had tapped me on the shoulder and I had turned to see his face, smiling at me in the knowing, incredulous way that old friends did, he was a stranger to me.

He had the kind of long, thin body that was sometimes unnerving. He caught me off guard with the way that he towered over me, blocking out the sun above like a skyscraper.

“David,” he said, pressing a firm finger into my chest. He revolved his hand and his thumb made a hard thump against his sternum. “Jack, remember?” I stared at him. “Syracuse?” His smile faltered. “Phi Psi?” And then, finally, “You made me drink laundry detergent during hell week. I went to the hospital?”

“Oh—Jack.” I was embarrassed. That’s the only reason why I agreed when he asked me to come over for a wine tasting that Friday.

His house was tall and skinny like he was. It was in one of those neighborhoods with a gated entrance, and as I punched in the code, Lorraine raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, Who are these people? It was December of that year, and everything was covered spectacularly in sparkling, yellow Christmas lights and blanketed with mushy, half-frozen snow.

His wife had laid out goat cheeses and gruyeres and bries, and I ate them sparingly to hide my growing, ravenous hunger. His house felt brighter and clearer than anywhere I had ever lived. Even at night, the rooms were filled with warm, yellow light from lamps littered across every surface. A colossal bookshelf was built into the living room wall, and it was overflowing with textbooks and memoirs I had never heard of. Little sculptures and decorative ceramics surrounded me. Everything was grand and worldly.

Jack was different than I remembered him. All of the aspects of him which had, at Syracuse, turned him in on himself, quiet and reserved, now were worn about him like heavy, purple drapes. His staggering height, something he used to slouch and hunch and bend away, now drew your eyes to him, a lighthouse beacon in the middle of the room. His patchy, unkempt facial hair was now shaved into a clean five-o’clock shadow. When he spoke, I was brought to attention. He had authority.

And he would neg me, now.

Is that something you can say about another man? I would walk into the punch without realizing it.

“Do you know anything about wine, David?” Jack would say, and I would look at my hands embarrassedly and squirm in my seat.

“I was a server for a while, in college,” I would reply, and everyone would look at me. “The place was kind of fancy, I guess. I learned some stuff about wine. I mean, I had to. For the job.”

“Oh, yes!” Jack would say. “The little bistro off-campus, right? You got fired from there, right? That was a funny story, wasn’t it?”

“Not really,” I would say.

“No, it was! It was!” he would squeal, and bounce around the room, standing up and sitting down and punctuating his sentences with dramatic hand gestures. “What was it? You almost killed a woman?”

“I didn’t almost kill her,” I protested.

“Imagine this,” Jack said, laying his hands out in front of him like a mini-stage. “You’re poor, twenty-year-old David, and you have this job you absolutely cannot lose. And then this cranky, despicable old woman walks into the restaurant and is seated in your section. She’s a pain the entire night, asking about the specials and the wine list and the market prices, and you start thinking to yourself, God, what I would do to get rid of this woman. Unbeknownst to you, she has this horrible allergy—”

“She had celiac disease,” I explained. “I thought wine was safe for her. Grapes don’t have gluten in them.”

“He’s quite the expert, isn’t he?” Jack smirked.

“But, I guess the one I upsold was fermented with a gluten yeast—”

“Yes, yes, and then she got violently ill right there at the table! She’s crying ‘You’ve poisoned me! You’ve poisoned me, goddammit!’” Jack laughed, and the sound was so booming that it eclipsed me entirely.

“It’s not funny.”

“Well,” Jack would say. “I think it’s hilarious.”

I filled my stomach with wine to ward off my appetite, and I grew lethargic and dumb throughout the night. I left and came back to the conversation. I was swimming in my own thoughts, sticky and thick like stale water.

I liked him. I couldn’t help it. He laughed, and I wanted it to be because of me.

He was so loud, so boisterous, so happy and jovial and relaxed. Everything he said felt significant and clever, and he felt immediately so much bigger than me, more important.

And I wanted him to like me.

“David,” Jack said. “You have to try this Sauvignon we got on our Paris trip last summer. We’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. Lorraine looked at me with a hard expression I didn’t know how to read. Her eyes were intense, like she was trying to zap a message into my forehead. “This isn’t really a special occasion, is it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, David, come on,” Jack said, standing up. “I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. I need someone with actual taste to tell me if it’s good,” he chuckled. His wife smiled at me with such earnestness that I was briefly shocked, a live wire. I remember thinking she had beautiful teeth.

“Well, I guess… If I really can’t refuse…”

“Oh, you truly can’t,” he laughed. He turned so sharply towards the wine cellar I reached out and touched his arm, thinking he was falling. He glanced down at me when I touched him, and his expression was so blank that it sent my hand flying back into my lap as if repelled by magnetic force.

“Lorraine, are you working?” Denise asked when he was gone.

Lorraine gave me a hard glance. My wife was more introverted than anyone else I had ever met. Often, people asked me if she was able to speak at all. My wife isn’t mute, I would snap. She’s just not wasteful with words. I was defensive because even I couldn’t get her to talk sometimes. I gave up trying when I proposed, and she nodded solemnly. So, Lorraine said, “No, I’m… I’m at home right now. With the kids, you know?”

“Motherhood,” Denise said, and her eyes sparkled. “Ever since I was little, all I’ve ever wanted to be was a mother. I wanted lots of them, running around, getting in trouble. A full house.”

“I had the same dream,” Lorraine said.

“How many do you have?”

“Four,” Lorraine replied. “All under the age of seven.”

“Children can brainwash you,” I warned Denise. “Everytime it started to get difficult with one, we thought having another one around would make it easier. They’re like gremlins. You feed them after midnight and they start multiplying.”

“Oh, children are such a gift,” Denise said as she laughed. “But, anyway, I guess it was never in the cards for me and Jack. He’s sterile, you know, now. After the laundry thing.”

I burned a hole into the carpet with my eyes.

“And gremlins multiply when they get wet,” she added. “Not if you feed them after midnight.”

I knew he had returned because it showed on Lorraine’s face. Her lips twitched, and the usual lively pink of her cheeks had drained into a paper-white. But I think the most startling thing was that she reached over and took my hand.

I turned, and like an apparition of death he had reappeared in front of me. He handed me a glass, and I took it like a dog.

“I wish I could have given you something more aged,” Jack said, reclaiming his spot on the leather couch, next to his wife. He smirked at me, and for a second I believed it completely. “I’m afraid the vintage is only nine months old.”

I looked down, and in my hand was the big, plastic cap of a Tide jug. He had filled it to the recommended line with detergent.

“Go on,” he urged, gesturing wildly with his hands. “Take a sip. Give us the review.”

I tried to laugh politely, but I was starting to feel nauseous looking at the sticky, blue soap. “That’s funny, Jack. That’s a funny joke.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I’m not kidding.”

In that moment, his face transformed. His eyes narrowed into tiny, screwed-in nails. His nose was long and sharp, and cast a dark shadow over the right side of his face. His hands were clenched into tight, white fists, and his whole body seemed to shake in anticipation.

I laughed. “You’re not serious,” I said, and I ran my eyes across the room, waiting for someone to smile, or jump out behind the couch and yell Punk’d! “You’re not serious, right?” Lorraine squeezed my hand, but her head remained bowed. “Jack, you’re not serious, right?” Denise picked absent-mindedly at her cuticles. “Jack.”

He didn’t say anything. He lounged, his arm draped across the back of the couch. He slouched. His eyes burned into mine.

“I’m not drinking fucking detergent.”

“‘What are you so afraid of?’” he pushed out from behind clean, white teeth. “That’s what you said to me. Do you remember that?”

He stood up, and began to pace the room with heavy, angry steps that reverberated through the wooden floors and into the soles of my shoes.

“‘What are you so afraid of, Jackie?’” he said as he paced, his voice growing louder. “Seizing in the middle of the frat house, with everyone watching? Getting your stomach pumped without anesthesia? Having to explain to your dad that you drank Downy Fabric Softener because some guys two years older than you told you to?” He was screaming at me.

“Look, I’m sorry!” I yelled back. “I’m sorry! Is that what you want to hear? I’m sorry I made you drink detergent in college. I’m sorry you almost died! I’m sorry you can’t have children anymore! I was stupid! I was just a kid!”

“I was just a kid!” His voice was so loud it echoed around the room and repeated again. “I wanted friends. I thought if I just listened, and did what I was told, I would make it through and I would be okay. So, I did the push-ups and I drank all the shots. I put on the blindfolds and I cleaned toilets and I ran miles across town to pick you up from class. I did everything, even when it felt wrong, even when I got sick, because I never thought you would do anything truly damaging to me. I trusted you guys to keep me safe. I didn’t know any better.” My heart was beating so fast my fingers began to twitch. “You ruined my body. I trusted you, and you ruined me.”

He was different now. Him, the lanky, fat-faced freshman who would get teary-eyed when he drank hard liquor. Him, tossing his payphone quarters in the air and catching them, waiting patiently to call home. Standing in front of me, he seemed larger than ever. I was scared.

“Jack,” I pleaded. “Please, don’t make me do this. Please.”

“I made this decision a long time ago,” he said, sitting back down. His hands were tented in front of him as he hunched over himself. We sat on opposite sides of the table, littered with half-empty wine glasses and expensive cheese. The room was so quiet I could hear the neighbor’s television. They were watching Frasier. “Drink it.”

I looked at my hands, shaking and chapped from the cold. The detergent pooled and swam around itself in the little cap, thickly sliding up against the sides and down again as I turned it around in my grasp.

I lifted it to my lips, and drank.