CHAPTER FOUR
Vianza, 1947
Bisol Brut Bobbing Bubbly
And was there ever wine in the valley.
Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. But sparkling wine was the most delicious of all, creamy, nutty, fruity, exploding with flavors of green apple and citrus, its bubble trapped in the bottle for maximum fizz and maximum joy.
It was the Italians that drew them in, the Sebastianis, running their tiny California winery on a foggy, winding, tree-canopied, hilly road nestled between other vineyards stretching from the Mayacamas Mountains to the east and the Sonomas to the west. The Sebastianis ran their winery as if they lived in Tuscany. Their yellow stucco Mediterranean house looked like something out of Alexander’s mother’s old country. Alexander could barely whoa the horse and drop the reins, before he was hired on the spot by Nick Sebastiani, who whisked Alexander away at four in the afternoon. It was late August and harvesting season, and the grapes had to come off the vine instantly or something terrible would happen to them, some overripening acidity. They had to be “cooled,” “threshed,” “separated from their skins,” “crushed in steel drums.” That’s what Nick told Alexander as Tatiana remained with Anthony in the unpaved parking lot, trying to figure out what to do next.
Holding his hand, she ambled over to the winery and said hello to Jean Sebastiani, and fifteen minutes later found herself not only drinking and admiring the unfamiliar but pleasant tastes, but accepting a job as a wine server for the outdoor patio area!
Tatiana muttered something about Anthony, and Jean said, “Oh, no, the boy can be your helper. We’ll get even more customers, you’ll see.”
People indeed loved the little helper—and were not entirely averse to the mother helper either. Tatiana continued to constrain herself in vests one size too small while her white limbs peeked out from her white sleeveless dresses as she hurried from table to table. While Alexander worked the fields picking acres of grapes, making seven bucks a day for his twelve hours of trouble, Tatiana was tipped like she was working for the emperors.
Short of quitting, there was nothing Alexander could do—there were too many men willing to work for even less. So Alexander continued to work like he worked and when Nick Sebastiani saw it, he gave him a raise to ten a day and put him in charge of twenty other migrant hand harvesters.
Temporarily they stayed in their camper near the barracks to use the shower facilities. Sebastiani wanted Alexander to live in the barracks with the rest of the workers. Alexander refused. “I’m not staying in the barracks with my family, Tania. What is this, Sachsenhausen? Are you going to be my little labor camp wife?”
“If you wish.”
They went off site to live, renting a room on a second floor of a bed and breakfast two miles down the road. The room was expensive—five dollars a day—but very large. It had a bed the size of which they’d never seen before. Alexander called it a brothel bed, for who else would need a bed this size? He would have been happy with a Deer Isle twin bed, it had been so long since they’d slept in one. Anthony had his own rollaway in the far corner. There was a bath with a shower down the hall, and the dining room downstairs served them breakfast and dinner so Tatiana didn’t have to cook. Alexander and Tatiana both didn’t love that part.
Alexander said as soon as it got cold, they would leave. September came and it was still warm; he liked that. Better still, not only was Tatiana making them a little money, she was drinking some sparkling wine, some Bisol Brut, for which she developed a bit of a taste. After work, she would sit with Anthony, have bread and cheese, and a glass of sparkler. She closed the winery, counted the money, played with the boy, waited for Alexander to finish work, and sipped her drink. By the time they drove to the B&B, had dinner, chocolate cake, more wine, a bath, put Anthony to bed, and she fell down onto the goose down covers, arms flung above her head, Tatiana was so bubbled up, so pliant, so agreeable to all his relentless frenzies, and so ceaselessly and supernally orgasmic that Alexander would not have been a mortal man if he allowed anything to come between his wife and her Bisol Brut. Who would do a crazy thing like quit to go into dry country? This country was flowing with foaming wine, and that is just how they both liked it.
He started whispering to her again, night by night, little by little.
Tania…you want to know what drives me insane?
Yes, darling, please tell me. Please whisper to me.
When you sit up straight like this with your hands on your lap, and your breasts are pushed together, and your pink nipples are nice and soft. I lose my breath when your nipples are like that.
The trouble is, as soon as I see you looking at me, the nipples stop being nice and soft.
Yes, they are quite shameful, he whispers, his breath lost, his mouth on them. But your hard nipples also drive me completely insane, so it’s all good, Tatia. It’s all very very good.
Anthony was segregated from them by an accordion room partition. A certain privacy was achieved, and after a few nights of the boy not being woken up, they got bolder; Alexander did unbelievable things to Tatiana that made her sparkler-fueled moaning so extravagant that he had to invent and devise whole new ways of sustaining his usually impeccable command over his own release.
Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want, Tania. Tell me. What can I do—for you?
Anything, darling…anything you want, you do…
There was nothing Gulag about their consuming love in that enchanted bed by the window, the bed that was a quilted down island with four posters and a canopy, with pillows so big and covers so thick…and afterward he lay drenched and she lay breathless, and she murmured into his chest that she should like a soft big bed like this forever, so comforted was she and so very pleased with him. Once she asked in a breath, Isn’t this better than being on top of the hard stove in Lazarevo? Alexander knew she wanted him to say yes, and he did, but he didn’t mean it, and though she wanted him to say it, he knew she didn’t want him to mean it either. Could anything come close to crimson Lazarevo where, having been nearly dead, without champagne or wine or bread or a bed, without work or food or Anthony or any future other than the wall and the blindfold, they somehow managed for one brief moon to live in thrall sublime? They had been so isolated, and in their memories they still remained near the Ural Mountains, in frozen Leningrad, in the woods of Luga when they had been fused and fevered, utterly doomed, utterly alone. And yet!—look at her tremulous light—as if in a dream—in America—in fragrant wine country, flute full of champagne, in a white quilted bed, her breath, her breasts on him, her lips on his face, her arms in rhapsody around him are so comforting, so true—and so real.
You want me to whisper to you, Alexander whispers on another blue night on the quilt, blue night now but heather dawn already much too near. She is on her back, her arms above her head, her gold hair smelling freshly washed of strawberry shampoo. He is propped up over her, loving her taste of chocolate and wine, kissing her open lips, her throat, her clavicles, licking her breasts, her swollen nipples.
Maybe not just whisper? she moans.
He moves lower, happier, presses his face into her stomach, on his knees in front of her; he kisses lingeringly the femoral flesh, listening to her whispering pleas. To draw out his time with her, he caresses her as lightly and arhythmically as he can. When she starts to cry out, he stops, giving her a breath to calm down. She is not becalmed. He pours a little bubbly wine on her—it fizzes, she curves—and licks it off her, softly kisses it off her, softly sucks it off her. She is gasping, she is clenching the quilt. Please, please, she whispers.
His palms are over her inner thighs, so exquisitely open, so alive. Do you know how sweet you are? He kisses her. You’re so soft, so slippery…Tatia, you are so beautiful. His mouth is on her, adoring her.
She gasps, she clutches, she cries out and out and out.
I love you.
And Tatiana cries.
You know that, don’t you? Alexander whispers. I love you. I’m blind for you, wild for you. I’m sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I’m telling you now. Everything that’s happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through. The way I hold you, the way I touch you, my hands on you, God, me inside you, all the things I can’t say during daylight, Tatiana, Tania, Tatiasha, babe, do you feel me? Why are you crying?
Now that is what I call a whisper.
He whispers, she cries, she comes to him in unconditional surrender and cries and cries. Deliverance does not come cheap, not to her, not to him, but it does profoundly come at the price of night.
And in the gray-purple morning, Alexander finds Tatiana by the basin in the bedroom, washing her face and arms. He watches her and then comes to stand behind her. She tilts her head up to him. He kisses her. You’re going to be late, Tatiana says with a small smile. His chest is bursting with the night, aching for her. Saying nothing, he hugs her from behind and then slips her vest down from the shoulders, lathering up and running his wet soapy hands over and around her breasts, cupping them, fondling them. Shura, please, she whispers, quivering, her raw pink-red nipples standing straight out, piercing his palms.
Anthony’s awake. Alexander pulls the wet vest back over her, and she says, well, now that’s useless, isn’t it. Not completely useless, says Alexander, stepping away, watching her in the mirror as she finishes washing, the breasts full, the vest see-through, the nipples large and taut against it. She dances all day in his heart and in his drunken, unquenchable loins.
Something has awakened in him here in the wine valley of the moon. Something that he thought had died.
Perhaps a young woman who was being made love to so thoroughly in the night, who was lavished with such ardent caresses, could not walk around in daylight without all the pores of her skin glistening, exuding her nocturnal exuberance. Perhaps there was no hiding her small sensual self, because the clientele sure beat against her wine trays. They came from everywhere and sat outdoors at her little patio tables, and she, with Anthony by her side, would shimmy up to them, her perpetually pulpy, slightly bruised mouth smiling the words, “Hi. What can I get you?”
Alexander didn’t think it was his son that the city dwellers kept creeping back to in their gray flannel suits on weekdays. Alexander knew this because he himself crept up from the fields one day to have lunch at one of her tables. Actually what he did was sit down at one of her tables, and Anthony came running to him and sat on his lap, and they waited and waited and waited and waited, as their mother and wife flitted about, humming like a hummingbird, laughing, joking with the customers like a comedienne—particularly with two men in pressed suits who took off their trembling hats to speak to her, gawking open-mouthed into her bedroom lips as they ordered more wine. Their expressions made Alexander look down onto his son’s head and say carefully, “Is Mommy always this busy?”
“Oh, Dad, today is a slow day. But look how much I made!” He showed his father four nickels.
Alexander ruffled his hair. “That’s because you’re a good boy, bud, and they all see it.”
Anthony ran off and Alexander continued to watch her. She was wearing a white cotton sheath tank dress, straight, sleeveless and simple, empire-waisted and hemmed just below the knee. One of the men in the flannel suit looked down and said something, pointing to the pink bubble gum toes she had painted, naked for Alexander last Sunday afternoon while Anthony lay sleeping. Tatiana jingled out a little laugh. The flannel man reached up and brushed some strands of hair out of her face. She backed away, her smile fading, and turned to see if Alexander noticed. Oh, he noticed, all right. And so finally she made her way to his table. He sat cross-armed in the round metal chair with spindly legs that scraped across the stone tiles every time he moved.
“Sorry, I took so long,” Tatiana murmured sheepishly to him, with a smile now even for him, in his dungaree overalls, not in a suit. “See how busy I am?”
“I see everything,” Alexander said, studying her face a few moments before he took her hand, turning it palm up, and kissed it, circling her wrist with his fingers. Not letting go, he squeezed her wrist so hard that Tatiana let out a yelp but did not even try to pull away.
“Ouch,” she said. “What’s that for?”
“Only one bear eats from this honey pot, Tatia,” he said, still squeezing her.
Blushing, bending to him, she said in a low mimicking sing-song voice, “Oh, Captain, here’s your apple cobbler, Captain, and is my dress going to blow above my head because you’re going so fast, Captain, and have you noticed my bobbing boobs, Captain?”
Alexander laughed. “Bobbing boobs?” he said quietly, delightfully, kissing her hand again and releasing her. “Oh, I’ve noticed those, babe.”
“Shh!” She ran to bring him food and then perched down by his side, while Anthony climbed on his lap.
“You have time to sit with me?” he said, trying to eat with one hand.
“A little. How’s your morning been?” She brushed a grape twig out of Alexander’s hair. “Anthony, come here, sit on Mommy, let Daddy eat.”
Alexander shook his head, eating quickly. “He’s fine. But I’ve been better. We were getting a shipment of grapes from another vineyard, and half a ton of it fell off my truck.”
“Oh, no.”
“Ant, do you know how much half a ton of grapes is?” Alexander said to his son. “A thousand pounds. I went over a bump in the road.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? If they don’t want the grapes to fall, they should rebuild the road.”
“Half a ton! What happened to the grapes?” Tatiana asked.
“I don’t know. By the time we noticed and came back for them, the road was picked clean, obviously by unemployed migrants looking for food. Though why anyone would be unemployed is beyond me, there’s so much work.”
“Did Sebastiani yell at you?” asked Anthony, turning around to look at Alexander.
“I don’t let anybody yell at me, bud,” replied Alexander, “but he wasn’t happy with me, no. Said he was going to dock my pay, and I said, you pay me nothing as it is, what’s to dock?” Alexander looked at Tatiana. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. Reminds me of that sack of sugar my grandmother found in Luga in the summer of 1938.”
“Ah, yes the famous sack of sugar.” Dipping a small piece of bread in olive oil, Alexander put it into Tatiana’s mouth. “Not very pleasant, what happened to your grandparents, but I’m suddenly more interested in the truck driver who dropped the sack of sugar in the first place.”
“He got five years in Astrakhan for being cavalier with government property and helping the bourgeoisie,” she said dryly, as he got up to go.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she asked, lifting her face to him.
“In front of the flannel lepers so they can see your lips open? Never,” he replied, running his hand lightly down her braid. “Stay away from them, will you?”
As he was walking past the two men, he knocked into their table so hard their glasses of wine spilled.
“Hey, man, easy!” one of them said, glancing up at Alexander, who slowed down, stopped, and leveled him with such a stare that the man instantly looked away and called for the check.
October warmly came and warmly went. Though foggy at the day’s edges, November remained mild. Alexander didn’t work in the fields anymore or drive trucks; now he was down in the cellars. He hated being in the dark basement all day, for when he started work it was barely light and when he finished it was just after dark. He worked at the steel fermenting drums or the oak barrels, riddling the sparkling wine behind closed cellar doors and dreaming of sunshine. The night visions still ground him down. He stopped trying to figure them out; their mysticism was beyond his scope and his mystic guide was busy navigating through her own unstill waters. Anthony still crawled in next to her toward dawn.
The three of them looked forward to Sundays when they had a whole day to themselves. On Sundays they drove around the Bay area. They saw Sacramento and Montecito, and Carmel by the Sea, so blissful and briny—which was a good way to describe Tania also. It was there that she asked him if he wanted to leave Napa and go to Carmel, but Alexander declined. “I like Napa,” he said, taking her hand across the table as they sat in a small café, eating New England Clam Chowder out of a bread bowl. Anthony was having French fries, dipping them into Tania’s soup.
But Tatiana liked Carmel. “It has no weather. How could you not like a place that has no weather?”
“I like a little weather,” Alexander said.
“For weather we can go south to Santa Barbara.”
“Let’s just stay put for a while, okay?”
“Shura…” Leaving Anthony to her soup, she got up and moved to sit close to Alexander in the booth, holding his hand, caressing his palm, kissing his fingers. “Husband…I was thinking…maybe we could stay in Napa for good?”
“Hmm. Doing what? Harvesting grapes for ten bucks a day? Or,” Alexander said with a small—very small—smile, “selling wine to men?”
Tatiana’s grin was wide. “Neither. We sell our Arizona land, we buy some land here and open our own winery. What do you think? We wouldn’t see any profits for two years while the grapes grew, but then …we could do what the Sebastianis do, just smaller. You already know so much about the business. And I could count the money.” She smiled, her sea eyes foaming. “I’m a very good counter. There are so many little vineyards around here; we could grow to be successful. We’d have a little house, another little baby, live above the winery, and it would be ours, all ours! We’d have a great view of real mountains, like you want. We could go a little north to a place called Alexander’s Valley”—she kissed his cheek—“see, it’s already conveniently named after you. We could start with two acres; it would be plenty to make a living. Hmm? How does that sound?”
“So-so,” said Alexander, his arm going around her, bending to her exalted, turned-up face.
Vanishing Dreams of the Valley of the Moon
Alexander left every morning at six thirty. Tatiana didn’t have to be in until nine. She and Anthony walked the two miles to the winery. After he left, Tatiana sat by the window, paralyzed with fear and indecision. She desperately needed to call Vikki. But the last time she called, Sam had picked up Vikki’s phone.
This morning Tatiana was bent over the sink, retching. She knew she had to call, she needed to know if Alexander was safe, if they were safe—to stay, to begin to live their little life.
She called from a public phone near the common dining room downstairs, knowing it was still five thirty in the morning in New York, and Vikki would be asleep.
The voice on the other end of the line was groggy. “Who is this?”
“It’s Tania, Vik.” She held the phone receiver so tensely in her fingers, she thought it would break. Her mouth was pressed to the mouthpiece, and her eyes were closed. Please. Please.
There was scrambling, dropping of the receiver, sharp cursing. Vikki didn’t say what happened, but the things she did say when she finally got back to the receiver were quite sharp and cursy themselves.
Tatiana backed away from the mouthpiece, seriously contemplating hanging up before she heard another word. She could tell that everything was not all right.
“Tatiana! What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing, we’re fine. Anthony says hello.” But this was said in a low, defeated voice.
“Oh my God. Why haven’t you called Sam, Tania?”
“Oh, that. I forgot.”
“YOU WHAT?”
“We’ve been busy.”
“They sent Federal agents to your aunt’s house in Massachusetts! They’ve been talking to her, to me, to Edward, to the whole hospital. They’ve been looking for you in New Mexico where you called from, and in that stupid place you bought your stupid land; Phoenix, is it?”
Tatiana didn’t know what to say. She was losing her breath.
Federal agents on the path called Jomax.
“Why didn’t you just call him as you promised?”
“I’m sorry. Why was he there last time I called?”
“Tania, he’s practically moved in. Where are you?”
“Vik, what do they want?”
“I don’t know! Call Sam, he’s dying to tell you. Do you know what Sam said to me when I told him I was going to change my telephone number? He told me I’d be arrested for conspiracy because it could mean I was protecting you!”
“Conspiracy to what?” Tatiana said in a small voice.
“I can’t believe Alexander is allowing this.”
There was silence from Tatiana.
“Oh, my God,” Vikki said slowly. “He doesn’t know?”
Silence from Tatiana. Her choices were narrowing. What if there was a wiretap on Vikki’s phone? They’d know where she was, at which B&B, in which valley. Unable to speak any longer, she just hung up.
She called Jean and said she wasn’t feeling well. Jean complained—money talking—and insisted that Tatiana come in regardless of how she was feeling. They had words. Tatiana said, “I quit,” and hung up on her, too.
She couldn’t believe she just quit. What in the world was she going to tell Alexander?
She and Anthony took a bus to San Francisco, where she thought she would be anonymous, but as soon as she heard the streetcar’s stop bell, she knew the sound would be pretty distinct, even to someone living in Washington DC. She went to a wet cold park on the shores of San Francisco Bay, where there were no rails and no clanging, just screaming seagulls, and from a payphone during the late morning called Sam who was still at home.