Rooftop Exchange

I am forty-six years old and I had somehow reached the middle of a writing retreat in the Swiss Alps without anyone learning my name. That is not quite true. The instructors knew it. The roster knew it. But the other attendees, a bright chattering flock mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, knew it the way you know the name of a bus stop. They were kind to me in a distant, institutional way, the way you are kind to a coat rack.

The retreat was held in a converted chalet in Alpstein, a small resort town that smelled like woodsmoke and cold stone. My room was on the third floor, at the end of a hallway that creaked. The mornings were for workshops and the afternoons were supposedly for writing, though most of the flock used them for hiking and comparing notebook brands. I stayed at my little table by the window and worked on a novel I had been circling for two years, and I told myself the solitude was a choice.

It was not entirely a choice. I had divorced seven years ago, and since then my social life had shrunk to the size of a saucer. At the retreat I sat through dinners listening to people argue about point of view, and I felt like a ghost at my own table. A man named Dario, twenty-eight if he was a day, once explained to me, slowly and with great patience, what a chapter break was for. I thanked him. I still think about that thank you with some regret.

So it was a strange week all around, and it got stranger on the Monday morning when I went to pack for the excursion to the monastery library and found the passport missing. Not missing in the dramatic sense. Missing in the sense that I had put it in the top drawer of the dresser, I was sure of it, and the drawer now held only my reading glasses and a lint roller.

I tore the room apart in a mild professional panic. Suitcase emptied, mattress lifted, bathroom bag dumped on the towel rack. Nothing. Then I remembered the night before, sitting out on my little balcony with a glass of wine, reading the retreat handout and wedging the passport in my jacket pocket because the wind kept flipping the pages. At some point I had hung the jacket over the railing. In the morning the jacket was back inside, or at least I assumed it was, and the pocket was empty.

My balcony was small, a railed terrace really, and the buildings in that row of chalets were packed close the way old mountain towns pack everything. The railing had a gap at the bottom, a wide gap where a board had been removed for repairs and never replaced. I looked down through it and saw, directly below and slightly to my left, another terrace. And lying on the flagstones of that terrace, pale blue against the grey stone, was my passport.

The problem was the drop. Three floors. The problem was also that the terrace below was not empty of evidence of life. There was a folding chair, a small table, a pair of leather boots by the door, and a door that belonged to the ground-floor flat of the building next door, or possibly to the annex of the lodge. I had no idea whose terrace it was. I only knew that my passport was down there like a message from God, and that I had no ladder, no pole, and no dignity left to spend.

I considered knocking on doors. I considered asking the retreat staff, which would have meant explaining the whole sorry sequence of events to Dario or someone like him. Instead I did something slightly absurd. I tore a page from my notebook, wrote a note, and waited for the hallway to empty before I slid it under the door of the ground-floor flat, which I had reasoned must connect to the terrace in question.

The note said that I was in room three-oh-four of the chalet, that a passport had fallen from my terrace through a gap in the railing, and that I would be enormously grateful for its return. I signed it Julianne and added the word desperate, underlined. Then I went to the excursion and looked at illuminated manuscripts for four hours while thinking about almost nothing else.

* * *

That evening I came back to my room and went straight out to my terrace with the lamp on, hoping for a sign. The terrace below was dark. The boots were gone from beside the door. I leaned over the railing like a fool, one hand on the drainpipe, and saw the flagstones empty. Either the person had found the note and taken the passport inside, or the note had gone somewhere else entirely and a stranger now owned my identity.

It was while I was hanging over the railing in this undignified posture that I heard the sound. A cork coming out of a bottle, that soft leathery squeak and pop, unmistakable to anyone who had ever spent time around wine. It came from below and to my right, from a terrace I had not yet inspected, attached I think to the lodge annex. Then the scrape of a chair. Then a low unhurried voice, murmuring to itself, the words lost in the distance but the tone easy and content.

I should mention that I know wine. Ten years ago I took a sommelier course in the valley town, a night class for restaurant people and ambitious hobbyists, and I was the ambitious hobbyist. There was a man in that course, a working sommelier already, named Chris. He was older than the rest of us, quiet, with a way of holding a glass up to the light that made the whole gesture seem like a sentence he was about to finish. We flirted for eleven weeks. Nothing ever happened. He had some situation he never explained, and I had a husband at the time, and the class ended and that concluded the matter. I have thought about him more times than I would comfortably admit, always in the same way, always with the same small ache of an unfinished sentence.

The person below could not have been Chris. Chris lived, as far as I knew, somewhere else entirely, in some city with a wine cellar and a life. And yet the sound of a cork on a quiet evening in the mountains, and the murmur of a voice enjoying its own company, did something to the air. I stood at my railing in the cold with my empty hands and felt, for the first time all week, that the world contained a specific other person rather than a general public.

The next morning the passport was on my doormat. It had been placed in a small padded envelope, the kind you can buy at any stationer, and on the envelope someone had written in block letters, careful and slightly formal, FOR JULIANNE, ROOM 304. Inside, along with the passport, was a note on the back of a wine list. The wine list was from the lodge, and the note said only this: found on my terrace. Next time, cork the bottle before you lean over the rail with a passport in your pocket. C.

So he had seen me. Not just the passport on his flagstones but me, the woman hanging over her own railing at dusk like a besotted stork. I sat on the edge of my bed and read the note four times and laughed, actually laughed, alone in a chalet room in the Alps. It was not a flattering image he had of me and it did not matter at all. Somebody had looked. Somebody had looked closely enough to see what was in my hand.

C. I turned the wine list over. It was the lodge list, the one from the restaurant where the retreaters had eaten on the first night, and the sommelier listed on the staff page was C. Renner. I am not a woman who believes in signs. I am a woman who believes in coincidence, mostly, and in hard work, and in the general indifference of the universe. But I sat there with a wine list in my hand and my heart doing something unprofessional, and I thought, well.

Here is what I knew, or thought I knew. There was a sommelier at the lodge named C. Renner. There was a man I had once known named Chris who could hold a glass to the light. The odds against them being the same person in a town this small were, I told myself, not actually worth calculating. The town had one lodge. The lodge had one wine list. I put the list in my top drawer, next to the lint roller, and went down to breakfast and let Dario explain something to me about dialogue tags.

That afternoon I wrote the worst chapter of my novel so far, two thousand words of nothing, because half my mind was downstairs composing replies to a note I had not yet decided to answer. That is the trouble with feeling invisible for seven years. When somebody finally looks at you, even through a gap in a railing, even without seeing your face, the whole apparatus of wanting comes back online at once, creaking like an old machine, and it is very hard to get any work done.

By evening I had composed, discarded, and recomposed a reply eleven times. Too grateful and I sounded pathetic. Too witty and I sounded like I was performing. In the end I wrote it plainly, because plain was all I had left in me. Thank you for the rescue. The passport and I are both grateful. I am told the lodge pours a decent pinot. J. I slid it under the annex door at nine, waited until I heard no footsteps, and retreated up to my terrace to listen to the evening and feel like a woman of forty-six passing notes in a school she had not attended in decades.

The reply came the next evening, and it came under my door, which told me he knew which room I was in and had known all along. Of course he knew. He had written ROOM 304 on an envelope in his own hand.

The note was on the back of a page from a magazine this time, torn neatly along the fold. The pinot is decent the way my mother's cooking is decent. Come Thursday and I will pour you something that will ruin pinot for you forever. The bar stays open until eleven. C.

I read it standing in the hallway in my socks and then carried it inside and laid it on the desk next to the wine list, so that the two of them could keep each other company. Then I sat down and thought about Thursday, which was a day away, and about the word come, which was probably innocent and probably was not.

I was married then, and I remembered that fact the way you remember a fence, something that simply existed and shaped where you could walk. Now I was a divorced woman of forty-six, holding a magazine page in a mountain town and treating it like a letter from a war.

I did not answer his note right away. Instead, that night, I heard him on his terrace again, the small sounds of a man alone with a bottle, and I did something out of character. I leaned over my railing into the gap where the board was missing and said, into the dark, "I got your note."

There was a pause. A chair scraped.

"Julianne," he said, and he said it as a man might check a word against something he had memorized. "So it is you."

"You sound disappointed."

"I sound as if I have been composing notes for two days and find out I could have just talked." He laughed, a short low laugh. "The gap in your railing, is that deliberate?"

"It's where a board came off. The chalet owner says he'll fix it. He has been saying that since spring."

"Don't fix it," he said. "It's the best postbox in Alpstein."

We talked for ten minutes like that, me leaning into a gap in a railing and him somewhere below in the dark, two voices in the cold air, and it was ridiculous and I enjoyed every minute of it. He asked what I was writing. I told him a novel, two years in, and he asked what it was about and I gave him the honest answer, which is that I did not fully know yet, and he said those were the only books worth finishing. I asked how a sommelier ends up in a town with four streets and one cable car, and he said, "Bad navigation, good wine cellar," and would not elaborate.

When I went in, my cheeks hurt from the cold and from something else.

The next day was Thursday, and I wrote three hundred bad words. The retreat ran its morning workshop and I sat through it with half a mind, and the afternoon produced, I am sorry to report, three hundred words, all of them bad. Dario, who is twenty-eight and writes the way young men talk, with enormous confidence and no punctuation, cornered me at coffee and read me a paragraph about his protagonist's mother, and I nodded and thought about a padded envelope.

The elevator incident happened that evening, and I want to get it down accurately because afterwards I could not decide how much of it had been planned by either of us and I suspect the honest answer is none of it.

The retreat chalet has one elevator, old, wooden-paneled, slow as a sermon. I had come down from room 304 to post a letter at the box by the gate, and on the way back up I pressed three and the doors were closing when a hand came through them and a shoulder followed, and there he was. Chris, out of the restaurant whites, in a grey sweater, holding two glasses of wine by the stems in one hand like a man carrying eggs.

"Oh," I said.

"Oh," he agreed. He handed me one of the glasses. It was a red, something soft and dark, and he did not say what it was, which I understood after a moment to be a test.

I held it to the light. "Pinot noir," I said. "Burgundy, not local. Older than it looks. And you're checking whether I've retained anything."

"Ten years is a long time to retain anything."

"Ten years," I said, and then the elevator, which had been grinding upward through its shaft with the sound of an old man climbing stairs, stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. Between the second floor and the third, in the middle of the dark throat of the building, with a lurch that put me a half step toward