Dead in the Dregs Read Free Page A

she was gorgeous. Beautiful hair, eyes that went on forever, and a mouth—I’d never seen a mouth like that. And she was smart. She was in premed, studying molecular biology, and doing an internship on the human genome project. I never did understand how they did it, even after she explained it to me on a series of coffeehouse dates at Le Bateau Ivre and Caffe Mediteranneum in Berkeley. My childish notion of genetics dated to high school biology: DNA composed of colored ribbons twining around each other. Janie was deciphering code, letters scrambled into what we had thought were an infinite number of variations and then, to our astonishment, learned were not infinite at all.
    I moved to Seattle to attend grad school in comparative literature at U Dub and lost touch with her, but my obsession with wine and my postgraduate career soon declared they had irreconcilable differences, and I dropped out. I began to do a little bit of everything in the wine trade, starting at a retail shop and then putting in a short stint as a distributor’s rep, a position I secured with a single flourish of Wilson’s pen. But I wanted to go deeper, like a root searching for nutrients. Problem was, I wasn’t a salesman, and I’ve never fooled myself that I was a farmer.
    Wine jobs were few and far between in the city back then, and the siren song of restaurant work beckoned. Wilson and I remained in touch, and I asked him to write a generic letter of recommendation. He wasn’t that well known yet, but a food and beverage manager at a major hotel was an early subscriber to his newsletter, The Wine Maven, and a nod from the Great Palate got me the job. The hotel’s budget afforded me the opportunity to taste extensively, and I devoured every book I could lay my hands on.
    I watched in fascination as Wilson’s readership grew and his influence increased, and even though I knew that his reputation rested squarely on the very real foundation of his talent, I was envious. My own impulse to excel, I admit, was fueled in part by an unconscious desire to compete with him.

    Eventually, as his success began to demand more of him, and as I developed my own reputation and contacts, our stream of communication dwindled to the odd postcard or hurried phone call. He was too busy traveling, writing, basking in acclaim. He’d morphed from my onetime tasting pal into a feared critic, one perfectly capable and willing to wield his power and influence without compunction.
    Janie hadn’t wanted to leave the Bay Area, but after finishing her doctoral work, she was offered a job at one of the fashionable companies that had spun off the genome project as scientists chased the pot of gold that lay hidden somewhere within the coils of the double helix. The company was headquartered in Seattle, and she looked me up once she was settled. Within a few months, we were living together.
    We worked like maniacs, putting in crazy hours. A beautiful, manic relationship, it worked, for a while at least. But once I started pulling five shifts a week, ten till midnight, and Janie was getting up at six each morning and in the lab by seven-thirty, the fun wore thin. The few moments we shared together were more like collisions.
    If people had told us we were going to have a child, we’d have told them they were nuts. We had no plans to get married or to raise a family, but in one of those collisions she got pregnant, an accident that should have been impossible but never is. I rationalized our new reality, silently praying that our child would heal the wounds we were inflicting on each other and make everything right. Anyone could have pointed out that having a child will never make an imperiled couple whole—I’m not sure we would have listened, anyway—but it was too late for that.
    They were quiet, brooding months. Janie resented her pregnancy, believing—quite justifiably—that having a baby was going to interfere with what promised to be her stellar career path. The