The Winemaker's Daughter, page 14
“No, no, and neither do I. But if you folks join me in a show of force in front of the abandoned shell of Hat ’n’ Boots, before the television cameras, it’s a way to talk about forgotten everyday treasures and what they mean to a city that’s in danger of becoming like any other place. That big goofy oversize hat and the twenty-foot cowboy boots—c’mon, it’s a classic of retro whimsy. Nirvana shot their first videos down there. You guys bring some clout: the link with the fight to save the market by all the founders of the firm. Then we use that to talk about Salmon Bay.”
“Have you been to Cannery Row, Brunella?”
“In Monterey. Of course. And before that I was there with Steinbeck: ‘a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.’ I’ll never forget that opening.”
“You know what Cannery Row is now?”
“A theme park, probably. The core has been preserved, hasn’t it?”
“But there aren’t any fishermen. And there aren’t any working canneries. And there aren’t any rum-swilling one-legged old souls who inspired your beloved Steinbeck.”
“So what are you saying?”
“You can freeze a building. You can freeze a pier, a cannery. But that doesn’t keep alive what you’re trying to protect. The surface is there, but the soul is gone—isn’t that the way you put it in one of those No Significant Impact statements that made you such a high-priced ticket?”
“How do you know the soul is gone?”
“All right. How many working fishermen hang out at this pier you’ve adopted, Brunella? I’m not talking old salt mannequins.”
“There’s Duff Almvik, of course . . . and—a lot of rumors. Maybe one other. I’m looking. You’re working for Kornflint, aren’t you?”
“We have several projects. It’s impossible to make a living as an architect in this town and not have something connected to him, as you know. I hear they’re incredibly pissed off at you, by the way. A gutsy move.”
“Yeah?”
“And a disaster for your career. You’re going to be toxic for some time. But do you think I’m saying this because of him—that somehow my opinion has been bought by Waddy Kornflint?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You think I need to get laid?”
Brunella laughs. “Don’t you ever get this . . . itch? This slow-building oh-my-God-gotta-have-it, and then you grab anything with a middle leg and honest eyes?”
“You’re the horny one.”
“There was this pretty boy, Teddy. I knew him as a kid. He’s a couple years younger. I saw him over the summer, and he’d grown into quite a man and . . . he seems like the rare guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously. Do you know how many guys talk about themselves in the third person? They think it’s a way to camouflage their ego or something. Teddy had a terrible pull on me. I can’t explain it.”
“Those are the best kind.”
“Yes! You’re so right. The ones that fit your image never work out. And then—you know this about me, Audrey—I have this habit of trying to tailor ’em to my tastes, a little refinement here and there. And that always ends in disaster. But here this man Teddy—I mean, a beautiful guy, I realize, and maybe I’m making too much of this now because my life is in the hole—but he was so sweet over this long summer weekend. Then— bang—he gets burned in the fire and disappears.”
“Nobody just disappears. The world is too small.”
“But he did. And since then, with Niccolo’s death, I feel disconnected from everything, like I’ll never fit. Sometimes—I shouldn’t admit this—I even want to be back doing what you do.”
“You don’t want my life, Brunella. I know you too well.”
“But it can fill a void, all that deadline work. Let me ask you something. I’m sorry if this seems like prying—”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you believe in heaven? I mean, you’re Jewish, and heaven is a Christian construct.”
“Heaven? With decent food? And no concerns about excessive facial hair?”
“A place you get to after going through an unimaginable series of horrors. The Aztecs called it Tlalocan; it was eternally warm and comforting. But the only way you could get in was by drowning or getting hit by lightning. It was pretty much the same thing for Norse warriors. If you died of old age, after a good life, it was the low-rent district for you.”
“Norse warriors? Where the hell do you get this stuff? Come back to work with me, Brunella. Give Kornflint’s people a half-ass apology, say the whole thing was a mistake, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
“What I love to draw, nobody else wants to build anymore, Audrey. I can’t do swervy, and I can’t do swooshy.”
“And you think that’s what I’m doing, fad-driven crap? Thanks for the dis.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry.”
“What about your big life plans?”
“When I left home after high school I was never going to look back. My mother wanted college for me, a year overseas, then a move to New York or Baltimore. Those are the only two real cities in America, she said. And you know what happened to me in New York, with all the shoe closets? My God. One woman wanted an Art Deco suite for her three dozen pairs of pumps. ‘Can’t you make it more jazzy?’ she said. It’s a fucking shoe closet! And then LA, that New Urbanist village on Fairfax. It was supposed to be a warren of little shops, the kind of place where I could see people taking their passeggiata, even though it’s against the law to walk in America because there’s a plot to make sure everybody stays fat. It turned out to be a front, like a movie set, for the usual mall suspects. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve torn it down to make way for . . . whatever. But the big blow happened in northern California. I spent one afternoon at the home Morris Graves built on the lake. I tell you, Audrey, I close my eyes and I can still see it in all its parts, the way the house seems to drift over the lake, the way the windows open like Japanese screens—house and landscape, one and the same. He and Ibsen Nelsen fought over the thing. They never spoke after it was finished, which is what you’d expect from two masters with excess testosterone. It is perfection. It looks like it sprouted from the earth, like a living thing, not one of these pumped-up trophy houses with the velvet ropes in the living room. I can’t begin to describe the effect it had on me.”
“I remember you talking about it.”
“It paralyzed me. I could never approach that level. And then something else struck me. I was reading about the uncovering of Brunelleschi’s tomb under his duomo in Florence, like, five hundred years after he died. So they open the tomb—right—and there’s nothing left of him. Nothing! The greatest architect of all time. White dust. Skeleton powder. But overhead, the little guy’s marble and sandstone masterpiece is more powerful than ever. He spent his life trying to figure out how to vault that cathedral with a dome at a time when everyone said it could not be done. And the more I think about it, and about Morris Graves’s house on the lake, that’s sort of like what my babbo has in our little coulee in eastern Washington—perfection, as near as a human can craft such a thing.”
“His wine?”
“No ordinary vino, kid. Angelo Cartolano made a Barolo in a place where they said you could never make a red wine for the ages. It will outlive him. And what do I have so far? People say, ‘Why are you trying to save a loopy fisherman and some wormed-out docks?’ ”
“Why are you trying to save . . . whatever it is that’s left down there?”
“Because it’s something! Because you can smell it and touch it. Because we just wipe everything clean that came before us unless it’s some battlefield or a place where George Washington took a pee.”
“Can I get you a beret to go with your rant?”
“I know. I sound like a graduate student, don’t I? Who cares. Listen.” She motions for the check. “You’ll be there at Hat ’n’ Boots with me, Audrey? Please.”
“I don’t think so.”
The cold is starting to gather in her Seattle house, finding the corners. The chill and the longer nights help Brunella sleep, deep under her comforter, deep under the season-changing storms from the Pacific, one lined up after the other. Bring ’em on. More wet, more gray, more night. Hibernation. She has been thinking about Audrey’s offer to go back, but to what? A corner office and a third of her waking hours inside an airplane? America in its 24/7 manic mode held no charm for her. She shudders at the thought of another night in a Travel-More Suite, trudging down to the Stairmaster dungeon to join other sullen serfs pedaling a machine while stock quotes blare or meaningless basketball games play on, all to lose enough calories in order to eat a slab of charbroiled expense-account-priced protein. No, thank you. Take those frequent-flier miles and shove ’em.
Sleep is her escape. She visits with Niccolo again in a dream. He is silly, ice-skating on their pond in the coulee, wearing shorts. He motions for Brunella to join him on the ice. She laces her skates while talking to him from her upstairs bedroom window. Hurry, he says, the ice is perfect. Very fast. He starts to sing as he skates, and she tells him, Shush. I do all the singing in the Cartolano family. Her skates are laced but she can’t get down the stairs and outside to the pond. Jump out the window, Niccolo tells her. She goes to the window and leaps. But the pond disappears and so does Niccolo. She falls and falls and falls and never lands until she wakes. She wants to get back into the dream, to return to Niccolo. As always, she cannot force the dream to let her in again.
Duff Almvik’s boat has not left Salmon Bay. Brunella last saw him ten days ago, when he said he was going to chase a run of coho. Upon his return, Brunella planned to invite television cameras from the local stations to record the seasonal ritual. Even if it was only a handful of fish, it might be enough to excite people. And maybe, she had hoped, the publicity might flush out any fishermen still in the area—enough, at least, to prove that a community of salmon anglers still exists at the pier.
Duff’s chipped and frayed boat, the SoundGardener, is still at anchor, showing no signs of life. For an instant, she is startled by a displacement of air, a swoosh when an eagle alights from the tallest mast of a neighboring ship. It takes her breath away, the predator with the regal head and moonglow tail plying the city’s air currents. Distracted by the raptor, Brunella bumps into a cart full of tools pushed along the dock by a plug of a man with goggles over his eyes.
“Watch where y’going, missy.”
“I’m sorry. I—I didn’t see you.”
“This place has gone t’hell.”
“Are you a fisherman?”
“What do I look like, a fuckin’ software engineer? Out of my way!”
“If you are a fisherman, then please, give me a moment. I think I know—”
“You’re that gal’s been looking for me?”
“Oh, my God—Tork. You must be Tork Tollefson!”
“What d’ya want?” His hands are deep-creased and polished with oil. He wears three coats, though the air is temperate. She cannot quite see his eyes through the scratched goggles.
“I want you to help me. Help us save this heritage. You know Duff Almvik, I’m sure—”
“Do I know Duff Almvik?” He sneers. “The last of the Red Finns. I came back here to make him pay.”
“The Red Finns? But Duff ’s Norwegian.”
“He didn’t tell ya about his mother’s side, did he? Didn’t tell ya how the Red Finns set the sauna on fire in 1937 and killed two brothers of my grandfather. Yeah, fucking burned them to death.”
“I’m not familiar with any of that . . . distant history, Mr. Tollefson.”
“Well, you should be, if you knew what was good for ya. If you’re gonna muck around down here, you should know what the hell kind of waters you’re swimming in.”
“I’m just trying to keep Duff fishing so we can—”
“Fishing, is he?”
“Yes, that’s his boat.” She points down the way to the SoundGardener.
“That’s his?”
“Sure.”
“A fine thing to know. Now get out of my way, wouldja?”
He pushes his cart past her and ambles toward the Purple Door Tavern. “But wait . . . Tork!”
“Stay away from me. I don’t want nothing to do with somebody trying to save a Red Finn.”
Game four of the American League Championship Series. Yanks lead two games to one. The Mariners are home; it’s the hottest ticket in town, and Ethan Winthrop has invited Brunella to join him twelve rows behind first base. She was surprised at the invitation; he says the brokerage house that manages his money gave him tickets, and he wants to make peace with Brunella. The retractable roof is open, a light breeze is out of the north, and October’s retreating sunshine lights up right field.
“It’s a pitcher’s park,” she says, “so we might be able to contain the mercenaries if our starter can get through seven innings.”
“Mercenaries?” Ethan looks at her blankly.
“The Yanks. They’re not a baseball team, they’re a bunch of Hessians in pinstripes. That fireball-throwing ace of theirs, he’s been in and out of drug rehab five times. That right fielder, he’s been arrested for assaulting three of his five wives. That tub-of-lard first baseman, he’s a freak on steroids and Cap’n Crunch. He looks like Mr. Potato Head with all those body parts in the wrong places.”
Ethan’s face is still a blank; she could have been speaking Sanskrit. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, listen, Ethan, I’ll explain: The ball doesn’t carry well at Safeco because the marine air is too heavy. Advantage to the pitcher.”
“And that’s supposed to be a big deal?”
“Usually. Unless the pitcher is psycho on the day he takes to the mound: Roger Clemens throwing a bat, Randy Johnson trying to beanball somebody in the head, that kind of thing. You’ve never been to Safeco Field?”
“I hate sports, Brunella.”
“You don’t mind if I watch, do you?”
“Not if you’re going to talk Hessians and Potato Heads—”
“Off-speed! Did you see that? Piñeiro threw him a sixty-five-mile-an-hour change-up and he missed it by two feet. Here comes that eighty-million-dollar convict the Yanks bought from Cleveland. Hey, felon!”
“Brunella, it seems rude to yell at the participants.”
“You should see Yankee Stadium. They throw batteries at our players.”
“And here?”
“We recycle them. You want some chowder?”
“I brought a sandwich.” Ethan produces a half-squished fold of bread from his coat pocket.
“You’re worth seventy million dollars and you brought your own sandwich?”
“Why not? How long is this thing going to last?”
Ethan chews the sandwich very slowly, masticating through two innings of scoreless play. The Yanks put up a pair of runs in the fourth. In the fifth, the Mariners load the bases but the third baseman hits into a double play: end of inning. In the sixth, the Yanks tag on another one. The Ms come back with a leadoff double, followed by a steal of third, but fail to bring the runner home.
“I like the view,” says Ethan. “As I recall, there was a parking lot here before it was a stadium.”
“Two parking lots, both of them ugly.”
“Tell me, Brunella, before this was a parking lot, what was it?”
“Tidelands, I think. Didn’t they fill it in with dirt from the lopped-off hills of Seattle?”
“You’re the architectural historian, but I believe you’re right. Now let me follow on that point: If we had not filled in these tidelands—an improvement, in my mind, as this nation has no shortage of mud—what would we have here instead of this stadium?”
“Water. And clams at the city’s doorstep.”
“And would you prefer that, Brunella? Or this?”
“I would prefer that this team learn how to stop stranding runners in scoring position.”
“Nature answers to its own rules. I heard that from your father, and it rings true in the way that most of those silly rural aphorisms do not. But we’re part of nature. And using our intelligence, we craft nature to fit our needs. We are constantly customizing.”
“And that’s why Kornflint should be allowed to tart up Salmon Bay?”
“I’m just making an argument, one that you—in a more lucid-thinking former life—would have made yourself.”
“Only baseball arguments allowed in this park.”
“All right. But the least you can do is tell me what’s new with the great crusade.”
“You’re the enemy.”
“But an oh-so-benevolent one.”
“We are all connected by water.”
“Can you be more specific?”
In the ninth, the Ms’ leadoff hitter strikes out. The next batter, the shortstop, sends a fastball over the right-field wall, finally giving the crowd some hope. A walk follows, and then a hitter is beaned in the back. Two on, one out.
“Time to go,” says Ethan. “I don’t want to walk back to my car in the dark.” He stumbles as he tries to rise, falling forward in a lurch. Two fans catch him.
“Let me help you. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Stay. The tying run is at the plate, Ethan.”
“Isn’t that where he’s supposed to be? Thanks for a stimulating afternoon, and the cryptic tip. You see why I still cultivate you as a friend.”
She stays. The catcher hits into a double play to end the game. The teams go to New York, where the Yankees close the series with a shutout.
She bangs on the window of the cedar shack where Duff Almvik often sleeps. No answer.
“Duff! Dammit, don’t you dare disappear on me.”
She calls out several times, walking along the shaky gangplank from the shack to the SoundGardener. All the window blinds on the boat are closed, and the hatch to the small living area is sealed. She tiptoes aft from the stern on the starboard side, and there she comes face-to-face with a teenage girl in shorts and spaghetti-strap top, smoking a mint-smelling cigarette.
“Oh my God. Who are you?”
