Sideways Read Free

other side of the partition. He had a large, bowling-ball-shaped face created exclusively to intimidate. “This is a tasting, Miles, not a public service.”
    “Without us, you’d be in Chapter 11.”
    “If you didn’t get so sideways on Fridays you might be on the last chapter of that novel of yours.”
    I smiled and pointed my finger at him. Touché. He returned the gesture.
    “Come on. Open another bottle,” I urged.
    “Yeah,” Carl said. “More people are coming.”
    Graham shook his head in mock disgust. He didn’t like the Friday tastings, but he tolerated them because they were good for business. At their conclusion, the oenophiles, their wallets liberated in direct proportion to the amount of wine they had consumed, were usually in the mood to carry on elsewhere and would ring up extravagant purchases, sometimes solely to impress one another.
    As Graham finished sweeping up the broken glass, arms reached indiscriminately for the remaining bottles. The Farrell rep, realizing that she had lost control, quickly filled a glass of the Rochioli for herself and hoarded it in her corner. Graham, aspiring to be the wine mensch of
    The rep looked stricken for a moment, but she reluctantly reached down and unzipped her wine satchel and emerged with a second bottle. Raucous, but genial, cheers welcomed the sound of its uncorking. Glasses were refreshed all around and the
ooh
-ing and
aah
-ing started all over again.
    Soon, I felt a warm glow spread through me. Voices overlapped and muddled into one another. As evening crept up on us, the light grew soft and the faces shadowed. Then, as if entering through the backdoor of a dream, Dani, a statuesque Aussie with a runner’s physique—graphic designer by profession—came bounding down the back stairs, her braless breasts rising and falling inside a tight, midriff-revealing T-shirt. She circled into The Bullpen, a smile on her ruddy, sunburned face, eager to sample.
    “Dani,” I called out, happy to see my favorite regular.
    “Miles!” She shoehorned her way through the throng and greeted me with a tight hug. With so much woman pressed against me, I nearly fainted. When she finally released me I had the presence of mind to right a clean glass and fill it half full of the second Chardonnay from a new, cold bottle the rep had also uncorked.
    “I’m taking you right to the Allen Vineyard. None of this mediocre wine for you,” I said.
    “Oh, you are, are you?” she said, cocking her head coquettishly. She accepted the glass, took a sip, closed her eyes gently for a moment, and savored the wine. “Thanks, Miles. I needed that.”
    “My pleasure.”
    Carl, inebriated enough now to test the waters, had drifted over and was making small talk with the blond
laughed
at what the dentist was saying. I turned away. A wobbly Eekoo was staring bleary-eyed over Malibu Jim’s shoulder at his laptop, critiquing his wine-tasting notes, stabbing a finger—which Jim kept shooing away—at his screen. The Farrell rep, having long since worn out her function as a pourer and explicator of Gary’s winemaking methodologies, retreated deeper into her corner with a second—full (!)—glass of the Rochioli, resigned now to the pleasurable fact that she might as well get looped with the rest of us. The Bullpen had, in its inimitable way, collectively reduced our zeitgeist to a tribal low common denominator.
    I leaned into Dani’s apple red face. “Do you think it’s unreasonable not to want to date anyone who doesn’t like Pinot? It’s the burning question for me this afternoon.”
    “Who’s that?” Dani asked, her antennae tuned now to the horde in The Bullpen. She grabbed a fistful of my shirt and maneuvered me over to the bottles so we wouldn’t have to keep reaching through the crowd to refresh our glasses.
    “Dark-haired one over there talking to Jerry,” I said, nodding in their direction.
    Dani squinted and glanced over my shoulder. She shrugged. “You’re too