“You may ring for me,” the bellboy said as he nodded his assent, “If you have need of me. Or for my colleagues, should you require more than one.”
As he exited, Zoe tried very hard not to stare at the seat of his tight pants. No wonder Paris was called the city of love, the people here probably couldn’t ask for directions to the bathroom without it sounding like a proposition.
The cold shower was now more needed than ever and Zoe took a long one until she felt the tension drain out of her. She then relaxed in the room for a bit before getting dressed for dinner. She had agreed to meet Nick just before eight.
The knock at the door came at seven fifty and Zoe opened it to reveal Nick, resplendent in black tie and dinner jacket – he looked as if he had been born to wear the get up. He looked her up and down and Zoe felt sure that the look of wide-eyed wonder on his face was genuine.
“Wow. You look absolutely incredible.”
“Thank you.” The dress was one of the stupidly expensive ones Nick had bought her during their shopping spree and, while she might not have admitted it out loud, Zoe had chosen it because it was by far the sexiest of the dresses they had bought. She was not quite sure how it did what it did to her body, but boy, did it do something!
Nick held out his arm. “Shall we go?”
Despite herself, Zoe had been looking forward to this evening and to spending a bit more casual time with Nick, but Nick seemed to have other ideas. He was not one to let an opportunity to teach pass him by.
“You order,” he said, passing her the menu.
Zoe stared. “I don’t know what any of this is.”
“You said you could speak French – can’t you read it?”
“Of course I can,” Zoe snapped back. “But if this was in English then it still might as well be in Greek!”
“What?”
Zoe sighed. “If you read out just these descriptions, without telling me they were from a menu, then I wouldn’t have even guessed that you were talking about food. Why can’t they just say what something is? Why write a novel just to describe sliced ham?”
Zoe had expected Nick to roll his eyes about her shameful ignorance of quality food, but instead he just smiled.
“Try the wine list.”
Truth be told, and it was something that Zoe hadn’t really had the courage to bring up yet, given the nature of her assignment, Zoe was not really a wine connoisseur. In fact, she was not really a wine drinker. In Zoe’s town there were only four types of a wine; there was red and white of course, and they could be divided again into wine that comes out of a box, and the ‘good’ stuff that came in a glass bottle. Those were the only distinctions she knew. She was aware that such things as Shiraz, Chardonnay, and Prosecco existed, but had no idea what they meant beyond the fact that they were gaining increasing popularity as girls’ names.
She picked up the wine list with trepidation. She had read books that were shorter than this. The names and descriptions flooded over her in a tide of curly handwriting and florid descriptions about body, depth, sweetness, dryness and on into more perplexing words: toasty, crispy, impudent, savage. How the hell could a drink be savage? Or crispy for that matter? Or how could something wet be called dry? It was a mystery to her.
She scanned the list hopefully in search of a wine with a little thumbs up sign or perhaps a smiley face next to it, denoting that it tasted good (a factor that all the descriptions seemed to ignore!). But such prosaic concerns as how the drink tasted were clearly beneath this list. Zoe realized that she was starting to imbue the list itself with human qualities – she considered it to be looking down on her with a sneer– but if a wine could be impudent then surely a wine list could be snobby? In desperation she looked for a price, reasoning that the most expensive was the best and Nick could probably afford it. But the list included no prices, working on the basis that if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.
On reflection, and very aware that Nick was waiting for her to make a choice, Zoe reasoned that, since these were all wines, then they must all be at worst drinkable – a place like this was hardly going to stock inferior wine. Therefore, it mattered very little what she actually ordered, it was all wine, it was all of a good enough quality – she could just pick one at random. Besides, she knew how this worked, she had been to restaurants in New York with Vanessa and with the more ambitious of the men she had dated since leaving home – you made your selection and, regardless of what you picked, the wine waiter said ‘excellent choice’, because customer service was more important and he cared about his tip.
The wine waiter approached, looking down his nose like a cartoon stereotype. “’Ave you made your selection?” His accent was stronger than that of the bellboy, and less sensual. He definitely had a sneer.
“A bottle of this please,” said Zoe, pointing – she was not yet prepared to negotiate the minefield of actually saying the name.
The waiter looked at the list, then back to Zoe, and shook his head somberly. “Non, Mademoiselle. Non.”
“No?”
“Non.”
Apparently the system in France worked slightly differently to the one in the good old US of A. In France the wine waiters were there to prevent you from making a terrible, life-shattering choice and to shame you for even considering it.
“Okkkay,” said Zoe, starting to look at the list once more, wondering how many random selections she could make before finding one the waiter liked (and wondering why him liking it was any sort of a big deal!).
“Non.” The waiter snatched the wine list from her hands as if her touching it affronted his finely honed sensibilities. “You are – ‘ow do you say? – ‘orribly ignorant.” He passed the wine list to Nick. “Please, Monsieur.” His voice had taken on a plaintive tone, desperate for Nick to end the torture that Zoe’s poor selection had inflicted upon his unprepared body.
Nick selected a wine and the waiter’s lip twitched in moderated approval. “Satisfactory choice, Monsieur.”
Apparently Nick had room for improvement as well, but he would do.
“What a jackass!” hissed Zoe, as soon as the man was out of earshot.
“They take wine very seriously here,” said Nick.
“Doesn’t mean you have to be a dick about it.”
“This is the world you have to fit into.” He spread his hands before him with a shrug.
Zoe nodded in glum acknowledgement. “I think I’ve got to tell you something, and I hope you won’t think any less of me for it.”
“Go ahead.”
Zoe took a deep breath. “I don’t know the first thing about wine. I think it all tastes the same, pretty disgusting, and, frankly, as long as it gets you drunk, who the hell cares?”
There was a crash and a thud from behind Zoe. She turned to see their waiter, passed out on the floor, clutching his heart, the shattered remains of a ‘satisfactory’ bottle of wine around him.
“Some people care,” said Nick. “When you’re around Monsieur Jourdan, you might want to keep those opinions to yourself.”
While, privately, Zoe remained sure that her own opinion on the relative importance of wine – that it did not remotely matter - was correct, it was obviously important for the sake of this important mission that she not only keep such opinions to herself, but also that she cultivate some better understanding of the stuff. To that end, they were to spend the remainder of Zoe’s period of training at a vineyard in the South, and they set out early the next morning in a car that Nick kept at his family’s Parisian house (of course the Rothbergers had a Parisian ho
use).
“For the record,” said Zoe, staring at the car, “this impresses me more than the hotel, the wine, the whole rest of it. If you’d wanted to sell me on the sophisticated lifestyle, you definitely should have started with the car.”
Nick smiled and shook his head. “Chicks dig the car.” He patted it lovingly.
It was a great a car.
Not one of the modern hyper-cars, all horsepower and flared wheel arches, not even a modern a super-car, but a Ferrari Daytona from the days when the South of France was the playground for stars who were not just rich and popular, but also cool. There was nothing, nor could there ever be anything, that was even half as cool, as driving in a Ferrari Daytona with the top down through the South of France on a sunny day, especially if you were as handsome as Nick Rothberger and had a beautiful girl on your arm (Zoe wondered if she would do). It didn’t matter if you had money, connections or a rambling chateau, you had the car, you had the girl (sort of) – that was enough. You can’t put a price on cool.
There were quicker ways to get from Paris to wine country, but there could not be any better ones. Cars had never really interested Zoe before – she was aware of them as a practicality and her Dad had taught her basic automotive engineering, enough to change a flat tire, she was aware that some looked better than others but had never really considered that a measure of their worth. But if you have never cruised through the French countryside in a Ferrari Daytona, then you don’t know what real driving is. You also don’t know what real envy is.
To her surprise, Zoe found that she quite enjoyed being envied by everyone else on the road, perhaps because that envy came with surprisingly little malice. If you drove past people in a Porsche or even in an Aston Martin, then they would hate you for having that car while they toddled along in a Hyundai. But in a Ferrari Daytona, the people might have envied you, but they couldn’t hate you, because you brightened their day just by driving past. You couldn’t look at a Ferrari Daytona without smiling.