The Sommelier's Scene

The shoot wrapped at seven, and by eight the stage was mine, or at least it felt like mine, one big empty room dressed as a 1970s wine bar somewhere that never existed. I stayed. I told myself I was checking the wine props for the morning call, and that was even partly true, but mostly I just didn't want to go back to my apartment where the silence has learned my name. So there I was, forty-five years old, widowed two years this spring, polishing a prop glass with a bar towel like I had somewhere to be and someone to pour for.

The glass was resin, I knew that, the whole bar was foam and paint and tricks of the trade, but under the work lights it caught the light the same way a real one would, and I caught myself doing the thing I used to do at the restaurant, the little wrist roll, the tilt of the bottle that isn't there. I was narrating to nobody, actually saying it out loud, "you'll notice the legs on this one," when the door at the back of the stage opened and a woman came in.

She was forty-something, good height, work boots and a canvas jacket over a blouse, and she stopped dead when she heard her own echo, because that's what a soundstage does to your voice, it hands it back to you bigger than you gave it.

"Oh, God, I thought everybody was gone," she said, hand on her chest. "I lost an earring somewhere on this set and I've been looking for an hour. You're the wine guy, right? Jerome?"

"Guilty," I said, setting down the glass. "And you're the one who built this whole bar, aren't you? Tammy?"

"Tammy Jenson," she said, already crouching to look under a barstool. "Forty-two, and don't ask what I'm doing crawling around a fake bar at eight at night, because the answer is one earring my mother gave me and I will tear this stage apart for it."

I held up a hand. "Found one earlier, by the register. Been sitting in the till like a tip."

She came around the bar fast and I put it in her palm, a little gold hoop, and she closed her fist around it and let out a breath that had been held for an hour, I'd bet money on that.

"You are my favorite person alive today," she said. "Seriously. What do I owe you?"

"Nothing. It was in my till," I said, and I don't know where that came from, the till, like I actually worked here, but she laughed, a real laugh, and looked at me a second longer than strangers usually do.

"Okay, barkeep," she said, hopping up onto a barstool like it was the most natural thing in the world. "You poured for me when I wasn't looking. That deserves a toast. Pour us something. There's got to be a bottle of prop Château Something back there."

"Every bottle on this shelf is full of colored water," I warned her, "but if you want theater, I can do theater."

"That," she said, "is exactly what I want."

So we invented it right there, no negotiation, just two adults deciding to play. She was a mysterious patron who came in at closing time, she said, a woman with no name, and I was the barkeep who knew things, all the things, about every bottle and every guest who ever sat on that stool. She took off her canvas jacket and hung it on a prop hook like she was checking it at a real cloakroom, and I have to tell you, watching a woman commit to a bit that hard does something good to a quiet night.

"A glass of your best," she said, low, chin up, some old movie living in her voice. "And don't tell me the price. Money is boring tonight."

"Money is always boring," I said, and pulled a bottle of grape juice with a hand-painted label off the back bar, because that's what it was, and poured a measure into the resin glass, and I did the wrist roll again, and this time somebody was watching.

I held it up to the work light and let it glow, that fake burgundy going bright at the edges, and I heard my own voice drop into the register I used to save for tables I liked. "You'll see it's almost black in the center," I said, "with that garnet rim, which tells you it's older than it looks, and patient. There's violet in it, and something like a cellar after rain, and on the finish, and I apologize for saying this about a beverage, there's a little bitterness, the good kind, the kind that keeps you thinking about it after it's gone."

She was watching my mouth, I noticed, not the glass. "Say the finish part again," she said.

"There's a little bitterness," I said, slower, "the kind that keeps you thinking about it after it's gone."

"Well," she said, and hopped off the stool, and walked around the bar like she owned the deed to the place, and stood close enough that I could have counted her freckles if I'd been counting, which I was. "Here's my problem, barkeep. I don't actually drink. Prop wine, real wine, any of it. But I came in here tonight wanting the taste of something anyway."

"That is a problem," I said, and my voice did not sound like my voice, it sounded like a man in a movie, and I let it.

"So taste it on me instead," she said, and her fingers went to the top button of her blouse, and she undid it, one button, just the one, and tilted her head like she was offering me her neck as a tasting pour. "Behind my ear. I put on real perfume this morning, oak and something dark, and nobody's noticed it all day. You notice everything about wine, so notice me."

"Tammy," I said, dropping the bit for a second, because I wanted to be sure, "you're asking me to taste your neck."

"I am asking you to taste my neck," she said, plain as a call sheet. "And I'm asking if you want to. You can say no and we go back to pretending to pour wine, and that would still be a good night. But I came back for an earring and stayed for the company, and I'd like to be noticed, properly, by somebody who knows what he's doing."

"I know what I'm doing," I said. "It's been a while, but it's like the glass. You don't forget the wrist roll."

"Then stop rolling your wrist," she said, grinning, "and put your mouth where the vintage is."

I set the resin glass down on the bar first, careful, because you always set the glass down before you touch the guest, that's the rule, and I put one hand light on her waist so she'd know where I was, and she leaned her head aside and said, "Well? Closing time, barkeep," and I bent to her throat, and the perfume was exactly what I'd promised the fake wine was, oak and something dark and a finish I was not going to stop thinking about after it was gone.

I stayed at her throat longer than a tasting calls for, my mouth working down from behind her ear along the line of her jaw, and she made a small sound above me, not a performance sound either, just a woman breathing when something finally touches a place that has been waiting all day. The work lights gave everything a warm stage color, and I remember thinking that this was the first set I had ever been on where nobody was acting except the two of us, and we weren't really acting either.

Then I went down on my knees in front of her, right there on the painted concrete, because it felt appropriate for the scene and because I wanted to, and I pressed my mouth to the hollow of her collarbone, that little shelf of bone under skin, and she put her hand on the back of my head, not pushing, just resting it there like I was something worth keeping steady. "That's good," she said, quiet, "you can keep going, that's good." So I kept going, kissing across her collarbone and then down over her sternum, one slow press of lips after another along the gap the open button had made, and my hands found her hips and held on light.

The bar had a big mirror behind it, the kind the props people had aged with Vaseline around the edges so it would look forty years old on camera, and because I was on my knees with my face at her chest I