Vintage Attraction Read Free

terminal, we pushed our bags through customs and got our passports hastily inspected and stamped. Then we met George. George was the trip’s coordinator from the Greek Wine Council, and our tour guide. He led us to a sputtering, rusty blue taxi. Our driver smoked cigarettes as leisurely as he sped the seventeen kilometers on A25. While I stared at the sprawl of wild shrubs and renegade trees, the interspersing tan, rectangular industrial buildings, and the aging but fuel-efficient cars that we passed, George gave some introductory remarks about the island. Thessaloniki, known for its culture, home to museums, universities, and of course, numerous delicious restaurants, was in the northernmost part of the country, three hundred kilometers from Athens at the opposite end down south.
    My wife, across the ramshackle taxi’s warm vinyl backseat, ignored me and talked about wine with George, who sat in front. Then, with her eyes trained on the landscape ahead, she reached for my hand.
    As much as it felt like the contrary, the evidence I’d amassed against her really wasn’t proof of anything at all. I could hear my mother’s defensive lawyering: Maybe the young man merely had too much to drink and passed out. It’s possible, Peter. It was true; I’d need more than a sole shirtless sommelier in our bed to convince a jury.But life wasn’t a courtroom. My heart, the venal partisan jurist that it was, could hand down a conviction on the basis of a lot less. Here in Greece I’d learn the answer to a lately persistent question: Was what Izzy and I had together also just as much as my heart needed to acquit?
    In vino, veritas.
    Even though I was pretty much the last person anyone would have expected to end up the guest of an international government touring wineries five thousand miles away from home, let alone married to someone famous, I still loved Izzy. When did you first fall in love with me? she’d memorably asked. When I first saw you , I said. It must have been later, she said, like on our first real date , when I had my hair down . Then, too, I said. Also the first time I heard you laugh. This Grecian expedition would have to be about undoing what she’d done, what we’d done. It was our only chance.

Vino
    1
    The Metropolitan Club members and their guests—men in chalk- and pinstriped suits and women beneath coruscating black and gold—mingled around charcoal-jacketed waiters bearing trays of drinks and amphitheatrically arrayed cocktail shrimp that they circulated in step with the rhythm of a combo’s Miles Davis and Benny Goodman renditions. Meanwhile, I, in my campus regalia consisting of a blue button-down shirt and jeans, ersatz Princeton Club tangelo-colored tie, and a well-worn but adequately presentable blazer, stood in a narrow space between a round table and an expanse of Sears Tower windows overlooking the lesser skyscrapers and the city sixty-seven floors below. I sipped a glass of Champagne and waited for Isabelle Conway, someone I’d never met but had seen many times on television, to arrive.
    Above the din of banter and languorously jazzy instrumental, I could hear Izzy’s and my final e-mail exchange of the afternoon parrying and riposting in my ears. All this talk about wine is making me thirsty. Might you be interested in having a drink with me tonight? I asked. Two hours and fifty-nine minutes later, her reply: Tonight I will be hosting a tasting. It sounds much fancier than it really is, but we can hang out there if you like. I could use the entertainment. I’ll be there at 6. This invitation is all based on the assumption that you are not a psycho killer stalker with unmarked graves in your backyard. It was now five fifty-seven.
    Before long, I felt a presence inhabit an empty space to my left. The new arrival accepted, in a familiar-sounding voice, the glass a waiter offered her. With numb fingertips and a pounding heart, I took this