Eight Hundred Grapes

Which was, precisely, what was required of wine.

Which was precisely what I had lost. Any cooperation. Leaving only opposition.

Jacob wanted to avoid downtown, so we wound up Sullivan Road into the hills—into the deep remoteness of the old apple orchards, stunning farmhouses, renovated barns. This route exemplified the very quiet I had run from as a teenager. It suddenly felt comforting to be back in it. It felt comforting and completely unchanged. Which maybe, at the moment, was the same thing.

I’d taken this walk with Ben one of the first times I had brought him to Sebastopol. Ben had immediately fallen in love with it—the hills, the crisp quality of the trees and the faltering terrain, farmhouses harboring stories.

Jacob and I walked quietly, neither of us anxious to talk, at least not to each other. Then, Jacob broke the silence.

“This is going to be a long walk if we don’t call a temporary truce,” he said.

I motioned toward the hills, the naked landscape around us. “It’s going to be a long walk anyway.”

Jacob nodded in agreement, which was about as close to a truce as we were getting. “It must have been weird growing up here,” he said.

I turned toward him, startled to hear out loud the opposite of what Ben had said.

“Most people assume that it was idyllic.”

“Because it’s so pretty?”

“Something like that.”

Jacob put his hands in his back pockets. “Growing up is never idyllic, is it? Or it’d be called something else.”

I turned away, not wanting him to see how that made me smile. “My mother would say you had to use your imagination raising kids here because there wasn’t much going on. It would force us to make our own fun. Turning the old apple orchards into mazes. Doing a weekly relay race that would end at the ice cream shop and with two scoops of their homemade ice cream. At ten in the morning.”

“I grew up in New York City. Our relay races would involve a nanny. And end on the 4 or 5 subway heading downtown for a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya.”

“Sounds idyllic.”

He smiled. “It wasn’t bad.”

Jacob bent down, picked up a handful of rocks. He started throwing them, one at a time.

“I remember coming to visit my grandparents when I was a kid. Of course, they lived in Napa, but they had this barn and I’d lie there staring at the stars,” he said. “It’s weird to live somewhere where you can’t see the stars. I told myself when I was old enough, I’d get my own barn.”

“Your own stars?”

He nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “Kind of how you want your own skyscraper. You’ll have plenty of those in London.”

“Or if I stay in L.A.”

It was the first time I had said it out loud. What I might do if Ben and I couldn’t get past it, in a world that went on for me Ben-less.

Still, I felt my breath catch in my throat, thinking of London. My new office was in a small building near the Chelsea Arts Club, a short walk from our house, a short walk from Ben’s architecture firm. Ben had done the walk when he had been in London the month before—in the morning and the evening—noting the places we’d most want to stop together. A coffee shop in a converted garden, a rooftop art gallery, every theater on the West End.

“Why would you stay in L.A.? I mean, if you didn’t go to London. Would it be for your job? I only ask because I hated being a lawyer. I really hated it.” He paused. “The five minutes I was one.”

“I thought you said you didn’t practice,” I said.

“No, I practiced. After I left Cornell, I moved to New York and joined a law firm in the corporate restructuring division. But it was literally five minutes. I quit before lunch.”

I nodded. I had friends from law school who felt like Jacob did, who absolutely hated the law. I didn’t. That wasn’t the same as saying I loved it. Suzannah loved it. She loved it because she loved confrontation and she loved being right—and law allowed her both of those things on a daily basis.

I didn’t love it, but it had always felt like the right path. And when I doubted it, I thought of my law school graduation. My parents had driven to L.A., proudly treating my then boyfriend, Griffin Winfield, to dinner after. At dinner, my father made a toast saying that he was glad I was going to have an easy life. Griffin had given him a look, as if deciding how rude he wanted to be. Then he decided he wanted to be very rude. He told my father that climbing the legal ladder was hardly easy. Though he hadn’t understood what my father meant. My father meant that law provided a path. If you worked hard, you’d be rewarded. You’d have a career you could count on.

Griffin didn’t agree with that either. He thought it was talent that separated out the most successful lawyers. Though that was the main thing he didn’t understand. My father never measured success the way he did—reaching the tip-top of something, as if there was an objective tip-top. My father measured it by how well you figured out what you wanted for your life—what you needed to be happy.