The Sommelier's Last Taste

The interview had gone well. That was the strange part. I had walked into that conference room at four o'clock, answered every question about tasting notes and distributor contracts without tripping over my own tongue, and the woman from the winery group had shaken my hand and said they'd be in touch by Friday. By any reasonable measure, Wednesday was a triumph.

So I could not explain why, at nine that night, I was wandering the corridor of a business hotel in downtown San Diego feeling like a balloon with the air let out of it.

Seven years with Greg, gone as of last month. We had met at a wine tasting when I was twenty-eight, which felt like the kind of meet-cute the universe owed me, and then apparently the universe considered the debt paid. He had been decent about it, which somehow made it worse. Decent men leaving you gently is its own special cruelty.

And here I was at the International Wine Importers Conference, twelve floors above a hall that smelled like stale cheese and cheap Chardonnay, thirty-five years old now, I reminded myself, thirty-five, and acing interviews and feeling hollow anyway.

I pressed the elevator button. The doors opened and there stood Landon, my neighbor from back home, the one who imported the stuff I sometimes poured at work, holding two paper cups of hotel coffee like someone who had given up on finding anything better.

"Jeri? No way!" He grinned at me. "They let sommeliers out of the building after eight?"

"Landon. What are you doing here?"

"Same conference, obviously. I import, you pour, we orbit." He held up the cups. "I grabbed two because the coffee down there is a war crime and I figured whoever got in this elevator with me would need backup. Looks like the universe owes you one."

"It owes me several," I said, stepping in. He pressed twelve for me without asking, which was a small thing that felt enormous.

"Wait," he said, turning. "You had the interview today, didn't you? The Meridian group thing?"

"You remembered that?"

"Jeri, I remember everything you tell me in hallways. How'd it go?"

"I aced it." I heard how flat my own voice came out and laughed at myself. "I really did. And I feel like I got run over."

He nodded slowly, the way he did when he was actually thinking instead of just waiting to talk. "You know what that is? That's seven years of Greg-shaped furniture gone from the house and you keep walking into the empty spots."

"That is the worst metaphor I have ever heard."

"It's accurate though." He handed me one of the cups. "Come on. Let's celebrate properly. I'll buy you a drink."

"The minibar in my room charges eleven dollars for a tiny tequila."

"I'm an importer, I'll expense it. Well, no, I can't expense that, but I'll pay it and pretend it stung."

* * *

The minibar selection was, as promised, tragic. Two tiny tequilas, a gin the color of regret, and a full bottle of Merlot that the hotel cheerfully stocked and charged for.

"That is a crime against grapes," Landon said, holding the label up to the light. "Central Valley Merlot, bottled with contempt."

"It's eleven dollars."

"Then it's the best wine in the room, price-wise." He poured us each a plastic cup, because the glasses were wrapped in plastic bags we couldn't open without scissors, and raised his. "To interviews aced and men decently departed."

"To empty spots in the house," I said, and we drank, and the Merlot tasted like grape-flavored homework, and somehow that made me laugh until I had to sit on the bed.

He rummaged in the drawer under the television while I caught my breath. "They've got a corkscrew in here. A real one, with one of those folding handles. And a Bible, and a stationery folder, and another Bible, in case the first one doesn't take."

"Give me that." I took the corkscrew. It was a waiter's friend, the kind I'd used ten thousand times, the little metal handle curving down from the worm.

"You know," Landon said, settling back against the headboard with his cup, "that handle shape is not an accident. Somebody at that factory knew exactly what they were drawing."

"Landon."

"I'm just saying. You're stressed, you're celebrating, you're single for the first time since you were twenty-eight. And you're sitting there with a hotel-provided object that has a handle shaped like a very sincere suggestion."

"You're out of your mind," I said. But I was giggling, and the two tiny cups of terrible Merlot were doing their cheap, cheerful work, and I turned the corkscrew over in my hand and looked at the handle and thought, well, why not.

"You'd have to wash it," he said. "Even I have standards."

"I have standards too, that's my entire job." I went to the bathroom and washed it with the little hotel soap, hot water, twice, and came back drying it on the hand towel. Landon had moved the desk chair to face the bed and sat in it like a man in the front row of a very small theater.

"This is a dare," I said. "I want to be sure we're clear this is a dare and you're not, like, managing me into it."

"It's a dare. You can laugh at me and kick me out and I'll go watch a documentary about container ships. Your call, entirely."

"And you're just going to sit there and watch?"

"If you want me to. If you don't, I'll take my coffee cup and my terrible opinions next door." He spread his hands. "I've thought you were great for two years, Jeri. I will not pretend otherwise. But nothing happens that you don't want. And nothing about work comes into it, not your Meridian interview, not my imports, nothing. This is separate from all of that."

"Okay," I said, and my heart was pounding with a rhythm that could have been a marching band, which I will admit because this is my story and nobody can stop me. "Okay. Sit there. Don't touch, don't direct, don't do play-by-play like a golf announcer."

"No commentary. Got it!"

I set the corkscrew on the bed and took off the conference lanyard first, that laminated badge with my name and the word SOMMELIER in bold, and dropped it on the nightstand like I was clocking out. Then the blazer. Under it I had on the gray sheath dress I'd bought specifically to look employable, and I reached back and found the zipper and pulled it down slow, more for my own nerve than for him.

Landon stayed quiet. Good man.

The dress came off my shoulders and pooled at my