Page 54 of Blush
With each Manhattan restaurant account she landed, Delphine’s ethereal glow radiated more strongly, her blue eyes bright and jewel-like in her porcelain face. She always wore her thick curtain of dark hair loose, and she never cut it.
Even Leonard, who had balked at the imposition of the baron’s niece, who had resisted letting her work in sales, was impressed with their rising star. Leah, an impressionable preteen, followed her around like a puppy, insisting on growing out her hair, asking to straighten her curls. She gave up her brightly colored Ocean Pacific shorts and tube socks in favor of pale linen dresses. While most girls her age were tying bandanas around their heads, trying to look like Madonna, Leah was trying to look like a sophisticated French girl. Vivian had found it adorable.
By the spring of 1985, the girl the baron had sent to them as a depressed wallflower had blossomed into a confident, vivacious young woman.
But then, the evening when all hell broke loose. Vivian had been on the veranda with her friends for their book club discussion. It was a night eagerly anticipated all month long. She’d just been about to begin when Leonard came running out of the winery in a tizzy after finding a slew of messages from their restaurant reps. Apparently, Delphine had not only been knocking on doors in Manhattan, she’d been breaking hearts. She’d slept with several wine buyers, and with the New York City restaurant world being small, word got out. The bruised egos got together and called Leonard, canceling their orders.
“I always told you women don’t belong in the business,” he said to Vivian. “This is what happens!”
Vivian made the point that their restaurant accounts were up ninety percent since Delphine started working for them. Fine, the accounts were dropping them—but she was the one who’d brought them on in the first place. Leonard could not be reasoned with. He felt she had brought shame upon Hollander Estates and couldn’t be trusted to work for them any longer.
Leonard fired her, and that triggered a visit from the baron.
Vivian movedChancesoff her lap, onto the table and facedown. It had been a bad idea to revisit the old book. She didn’t want those memories. Not now.
The door to the house slid open, and Bridget emerged, her wild auburn hair loose around her shoulders, the strap of her tank top falling off one shoulder. She carried a glass of white wine in one hand and a vape pen in the other.
“Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know you were all out here.” Her expression shifted, as if she realized she had been excluded from something.
“Where’s Asher?” said Vivian.
“He’s in Amagansett. But he’s coming back soon. I was just going for a swim.” She looked around the table. “You’re all reading the same book?”
“Sort of,” Leah said.
An awkward silence fell over the group.
“Well, I’m off to bed,” Vivian said, standing up and tucking her copy ofChancesunder her arm.
She’d had enough togetherness for one evening.
Twenty-eight
The library was bright with sunshine. Sadie blamed the brightness, the reminder of the beautiful day outside, for distracting her. An hour at the library table, immersed in Susan Sontag essays, and no progress on her thesis.
She stood up, crossed the room, and closed the heavy curtains, knowing all the while the light had nothing to do with it. It was that damn book.
No matter how much her mother tried to frameChancesas a story about a woman finding her own power, or how much her grandmother waxed nostalgic for the days when casinos were glamorous and women wore Halston, Sadie knew the book was all about sex.
It annoyed her. She read books to expand her mind, to grow as an intellectual. She didn’t want reading to remind her that her life of the mind had led her to neglect her life of the body. She didn’t want to think about her breakup with Holden or her inconvenient attraction to Mateo.
Maybe the women in the book had it right. Sex could be just sex, and there didn’t have to be a messy relationship, an intimacy doomed to failure. It didn’t have to be all or nothing. This was good news for Sadie, who had failed at her only serious relationship.
There was one element of the book that Sadiedidappreciate: the heroine, Lucky, was fueled by rage. And female rage was a topic that nofeminist reader could ignore, regardless of the package it came in. The heroine ofLace, Lili, was also full of anger and vengeance. Sadie wondered if other books of the era had a similar message. Was that what had attracted women to read them in droves?
She tucked the book back into her tote and carried the bag up the stairs to the second level to see what other 1980s novels were in her grandmother’s collection. She passed the section where the photo albums had been stored, the shelves now empty. In the absence of all those books, she noticed a collection of marble notebooks in the farthest corner of the bottom shelving. She reached for one, sitting on the floor and opening it.
The pages were penciled notes, mathematical equations like 2.46 × 16 = 39.36. Records of pH balance. Dates with annotations like “topped everything in house.” Page after page of numbers and phrases that meant nothing to her—a foreign language: “1984 white wine kegs & CB racked into 1 SS drum. Topped Amphora with CC Viognier drum, balance went to blue drum.”
The notebooks were like the one she’d seen in the bottling room a few weeks earlier, the one where the senior winemaker, Chris, had kept his notes. Except the bottom of these pages were initialed with “LH.”
They were her grandfather’s wine ledgers. The playbook for his creations.
“Sadie, are you in here?”
Her grandfather’s voice boomed from below. What was he doing here? It was as if she had conjured him with her snooping.
“Um, yeah, Grandpa. I’m up here.”
