The Boathouse Deal

My name is Noah, I'm twenty-eight, and until last month I thought I was straight. That is the whole setup, or enough of it anyway. Divorced at twenty-seven after three years of marriage, driving a black Cadillac Escala for a luxury car service, and picking up strange confidence from strangers every day. Last Saturday the stranger was a real estate agent named Carlton, thirty-two, and the car ride alone rearranged something in my head.

I picked him up at his office at two in the afternoon. He was waiting on the curb in a gray suit with a wine-colored tie, holding a leather folder like it was a weapon.

"You must be Noah," he said, sliding in before I could open his door. "The service sent their best, I hope."

"They sent me. Same thing."

He laughed and it was a real laugh, not the polite client kind. "Confident. Good. I need a driver with confidence today. I need him to pretend my open house is going to be full."

"How full?"

"Right now? Four RSVPs. Two are tire kickers. One is a reporter. One might actually buy." He checked his watch. "It's a fifteen million dollar house on a private lake. I staged the boathouse as a tasting room. I spent my own money on the wine."

"That seems desperate."

"That seems invested," he said, and smiled at me in the mirror. "There's a difference. You'll learn my vocabulary by end of day."

I had known this man for ten minutes and I already hated how good his vocabulary felt in my head.

***

The estate was all glass and stone, sitting low and long along the water like it was hiding from the road. I parked the Cadillac in the circular drive and got out to help with Carlton's crates of wine, mostly because I wanted an excuse to keep standing near him.

"You didn't have to help," he said.

"I'm billing the company anyway. You're stuck with me until ten."

"Ten? They gave me a full evening escort?"

"They gave you a full evening me," I said. "Try not to wear me out."

He stopped walking with one crate on his hip and looked at me sideways. "Careful, Noah. I match energy. It's a professional hazard."

"Maybe I'm counting on that."

He didn't blink. He just kept walking toward the boathouse, and I followed like an idiot with a crate of Cabernet in my arms.

***

The open house was exactly as dead as he'd predicted. The reporter came, took photos of the kitchen, left. One tire kicker came, drank two glasses of Carlton's expensive wine, asked if the seller would take eight, and left. The whole time Carlton worked the empty rooms like they were packed, narrating the ceiling heights to nobody, and I leaned on the doorframe of the great room eavesdropping.

"Twelve foot ceilings," he was telling the tire kicker, "designed so the light moves through the room twice a day. Morning from the east glass, evening from the west."

"That's a lot of words about a ceiling," I said when the guy left.

Carlton turned around slow. "That's a sales pitch, Noah. I'm aware."

"It's polished. Polished like a bowling ball. Rolls nice, goes nowhere."

"Oh, is that so?" He set down his folder. "And what would you do? Describe the ceiling in your work voice? 'Watch your head getting out, sir, there's a bar of soap in the compartment'?"

"That's a real service voice, thank you. Mine has gotten me four hundred in tips this month."

"And mine has gotten me two point one million in commissions this year, so maybe don't mock the pitch that pays." He came over and stood closer than a coworker stands. "You've been heckling me since the curb. You have a better version? Give it a shot."

I hadn't expected him to actually hand me the stage. I looked at the ceiling for a second.

"It's a ceiling," I said. "It's high. Whoever pays fifteen million dollars for it is buying the fact that other people can't afford it, and you know that, and you dress it up in light language because rich people hate feeling ugly about what they want."

The room got quiet. Somewhere outside a loon called over the lake.

"Okay," Carlton said finally. "That was better than my pitch."

"Don't sound surprised."

"You're surprised." He picked his folder back up but didn't open it. "Here's my problem with you, Noah. You've spent all day in that car being charming at me. Charm is a wall with better lighting. I want to know if you can hold a real conversation when it's not a bit."

"Maybe I don't have anything behind the bit."

"Then I'll find that out too." He shrugged like it cost him nothing. "Either way, one of us learns something today."

I did not like how warm my face got. "You always this pushy with your drivers?"

"Only the ones who flirt with me from the curb onward and then act shocked when I answer."

"I wasn't acting shocked."

"Good," he said, and walked off to greet the last RSVP, and I stood there in a fifteen million dollar great room feeling as though I had brought a knife to a gun fight and the gun fight was flirting.

***

By seven the house was empty and the light outside had gone that early autumn orange that makes everything look expensive. Carlton texted me, from thirty feet away in his own listing, that he'd be closing down the boathouse if I wanted a glass of the good stuff before we drove back.

I wanted the glass of the good stuff.

The boathouse had been converted into a tasting room, all warm wood and low lights, racks of bottles along one wall. Carlton was capping the open bottles and I wandered, because wandering is what you do when your heart is doing things you don't want to discuss. That's when I saw the shelf of vintage Bordeaux, and one bottle in particular with a label that made me whistle.

"Okay, this one," I said, holding it up. "This is a nine thousand dollar bottle of wine sitting in a boathouse."

"Careful with that." He came over and took it from my hands like it was a sleeping cat. "Nineteen sixty-one. The seller collects. That bottle alone is a third of my commission."

"You'd need to sell this entire lake to cover it if I dropped it."

"So don't drop it." He set it back on the rack with both hands. "Also, interesting choice. Most people grab the flashy label at eye level. You went straight for the expensive one."

"I know what things cost. I drive people who buy things like this. They talk in the car like I'm furniture."

"Does that bother you?"

"It used to. Now I bill by the hour so honestly it's fine."

He laughed again, that real one, and poured us each a glass of something from an open bottle that was probably still more than my car payment. We sat on the dock end of the boathouse with our feet hanging over the water.

"Can I ask you a real question?" he said. "Not a bit question. A real one."

"Sure."

"Why does a twenty-eight year old guy with a service voice and good taste in wine heckle real estate agents in empty houses?"

I looked at the lake for a while. "I got divorced last year," I said. "Married at twenty-four, done by twenty-seven. And I guess I've been walking around since trying to prove I still got it. Whatever 'it' is. To everybody. To the mirror. To you, apparently, most aggressively."

"To me specifically?"

"You're the most recent scoreboard."

He swirled his wine. "Well. For what it's worth, you got it. And also you're exhausting."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome." He clinked his glass against mine, a real clink, glass on glass. "For the record, I noticed the flirting at the curb and I liked it. I'm gay, openly, since before you started driving for the service. So when you compliment my vocabulary in a rear view mirror, I know what it is."

"I know you know. That's why I keep doing it." I said it before my brain could file the paperwork on it. "And I've never been with a man, before you start planning anything. Never. I just want you to have accurate information."

Carlton went still for a second, then set his glass down on the dock boards.

"Accurate information received," he said. "And I appreciate it. I'm not planning anything. I'm just sitting here with you, drinking wine that belongs to a man who can't afford his own taste."

"That's not true. You said he collects."

"He does. I also said I match energy, and you've been handing me energy all day like a bartender at last call." He turned on the dock to face me. "So here's my real question, Noah, the real one behind the real one. When this drive ends and I get out of your car, do you want to have given me your number? Yes or no?"

The loon called again out on the water, like a witness.

"Yes," I said.

"Okay." He picked his glass back up like we were talking about tire pressure. "Then finish your wine. I have to lock up the boathouse, and the drive back to the city is forty minutes, and I have some things to say in that rear view mirror that aren't about vocabulary."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It's a preview," he said. "There's a difference. You'll learn my vocabulary."

I looked at my glass, then at him. "Okay, I'm going to admit something now that I've had enough of this to be honest."

"Please. I love a confession."

"I don't know anything about wine. Nothing. My ex-wife picked everything we drank. There were three brands in our house for three years, and I know those three brands like the names of my cousins. That's it. That's the whole education."

"So you've been nodding along all day."

"I've been nodding along all day like a professional. I nodded at the Bordeaux. I nodded at the guy who said the word 'lees' three times. I have no idea what lees are."

Carlton laughed so hard he had to put his glass down on the dock. "Noah. Oh my God!"

"What are lees?"

"Dead yeast sediment. It's a good thing in the right context."

"Great. Wonderful. I nodded enthusiastically at dead yeast."

"You nodded enthusiastically at everything. It's part of your charm. Here." He topped off my glass from a different bottle, one with a plain label and no French on it anywhere. "Try that and tell me one true thing about it. Anything. You're not allowed to say expensive or smooth."

I held it up to the late light like I'd seen people do in the back seat of my car, then drank. It was, well, it tasted like grapes that had been through some stuff. "It tastes like a grape that went to therapy," I said.

"That is the single worst tasting note I have ever heard."

"But is it wrong?"

He took the glass from my hand and drank from it, which felt like a thing that