THE WINE MANAGER AND I

The wine manager and I picnicked endlessly. He organized it all in a large basket manufactured expressly for the purpose, with special slots for the cutlery and a long, tubular compartment to snug the bottle. He selected a different vintage for every meal and carefully chose the foods to best enhance its flavor.

He was slightly older than I, with thin white hair and a body that might not be disagreeable. I had been styling my hair suggestively for years. These days, I wore it in the traditional crop of the elderly. Before that, I’d spun it ’round and ’round like a silken cone—wrapped in an airy scarf.

Here at last was the calm life. On his checkered blanket, spread across the grass of some park or other, we would sit until the large plants around us began to cast man-shaped shadows.

Try this, he said. What he offered was refreshing—something dry, cold, deeply pink, lightly bitter—slightly spitting. It crackled in my ear like a big black fly can.

TA-DA!

A child was talking, or trying to, on the other side of the garden fence, yet the child did not sound like a child. This must be a man, I thought—a sad, tired, sloppy drunk of a certain age, attempting to express his disappointment with life.

Buh buh buh buh, said the child.

I passed a man a little later on a tall ladder near a robust tree and there came a sudden noise from him—a rough heave-and-ho, a rhythmic panting, huffing. What this man was doing was making loud sexual sounds. But when I looked up, I saw that the man held a saw, and that the sexual sounds were the sounds of the saw’s blade cutting the wet orange flesh of the tree. As I walked away, the noise changed again—this time becoming the comical splutter of several forceful farts.

On my way back down the street, the dusk was darkening the houses and shrubs from the ground up, like dye climbing a cloth. This was the shaded side of the hill and on a bright day would be ten degrees cooler than the sunny side.

Below me, in a yard that sloped steeply into a deep gulch, I heard the pronounced rustle of disturbed underbrush, and I saw that a large shrub was shaking dramatically. I was reminded of the dream I have from time to time, wherein a German shepherd tears off an arm of mine. Then I thought of the old tale of some bush that had once shuddered with the spirit of the Lord—or had it burned?

Slowly, from the shrub’s thick, dark leaves, a bare arm emerged. Then a denim-clad leg struggled forth, attached to a foot housed in a white athletic shoe. It was clear by now that a difficult birth was under way.

I’ve always been a sucker for origin stories, so I held my breath and waited to see how this one might begin.