The Vineyard

Gwen walks around her house on the mountain side. The house her ex-husband picked out. The house he left behind; the house that was to be their fixer –upper. At one point when Richard felt the need to start on the interior of the house he had ripped out all of the old gray carpeting and started laying down stilo tiling. He got half way through the living room and stopped and then began to work outside on his vineyard. After six years, the vineyard was finished but Gwen now lives with cement floors and half painted rooms.
He calls weekly to check up on stuff to make sure that Gwen is keeping up on watering his vineyard. He never calls to ask if she is keeping up with herself. He never asks if she is doing alright alone in the house that he bought. She waits the day she no longer has to keep it up. The day she no longer has to water his garden and maintain his vineyard. She wants to let the vineyard die. She watches now as the birds eat the grapes she did not bother to pick this fall. She lets them wither on the vines. She lets some vines die, not from neglect, but more from not realizing that before her ex-husband left, he hadn’t bothered to properly weed his vineyard. Some vines weren’t getting enough water. She was just told by her ex-husband to water three times a week during the summer months and once a week when fall came.
Even with all of her watering, some of the leaves on the vines were shriveling up and dying, turning brown before the summer’s end. That’s when Gwen decided to take a walk around the vineyard, and that is when she noticed the weeds and grass around the bottom of the vines. “Water them more,” her ex-husband suggested when she had called to tell him that is vineyard was dying. She did, but some still died. She hadn’t even thought of offering to weed the vines. It hadn’t even crossed her mind because he hadn’t suggested it. Plus, she didn’t want to be bothered to weed his vineyard and deal with the goat-heads, and tumbleweed. She let some die, blaming it on him, blaming him for not properly weeding his garden before he packed –up his things and left, breaking the back gate to their property when he backed out and forgot to look behind him.
A week after he left, she dyed the gray out of her hair. She was keeping her hair long now, long hair always made her feel younger. And recently, she was seriously considering making an appointment with the dermatologist her friend had recommended, knowing she really couldn’t afford a face-lift, knowing she really wasn’t ever going to get toxic injections in her face. But it helped her think about the possibilities of erasing the lines that were taking over her face, which made her feel like a stranger to her own image.
Gwen watches now how the mourning doves that live on the roof of her ex-husband’s studio, swoop down and pick at the grapes and then perch on the wire that hangs between the folds of the vines. She thinks when they had first moved up to the mountain; one of the locals had said that having mourning doves living on your roof tops was a sign of luck and prosperity. She wanted to ask this weathered looking local what it meant if you also had a band of pigeons living on your roof as well and what it meant when every morning Gwen found one half eaten by one of her dogs.
Her friend Anne, the one that suggested she start thinking about Botox injections, just got large amounts of neurotoxins injected into her masseter, the primary “chewing muscle.” The injections are supposed to slim the jawline. Her friend also suggested an electric facial to help make her face appear plumper—“youthful fullness is all the rage,” she clucked, as she continued to lecture Gwen about now was the time to consider a filler session in the attempt to regain some of her youth back. But, what if she didn’t want her youth back? What if she wanted to try and grow old gracefully, and if that meant she was never going to find love again, well, maybe she didn’t want to invest so much money into the game of finding love again. Why couldn’t she just let time take its course of action, and deal with it? She had whined.
“You will die alone, and unhappy, her friend had said. “And nobody wants that.”
Gwen didn’t take her friend comment seriously. She knew that this was Anne’s way of dealing with “emotional crisis,” a term she had pegged years ago, when Anne’s husband had died prematurely at the age of 45 from a heart-attack, not doing what he loved, she had joked, but working late at the office when he dropped dead.
“Not on the golf course, or making love to his mistress, the way he wanted,” she had sobbed.
Gwen, trying to be funny, interjected, “I didn’t know your husband played golf?” And they had both laughed, Anne asking Gwen later, why she hadn’t been shocked to find out her husband had had a mistress.
“Does it really matter, in the end,” Gwen said, “playing golf, working late at the office, fucking his co-worker, in the end, does it really matter? He’s dead.”
Anne, after the anger had settled and the remorse set in, had tried talking with a therapist about her fear of growing old without finding love again, but all he wanted to do was load her up on anti-depressants. She had yelled at him, “Of course, I am fucking depressed my husband just dropped dead.” She didn’t need a therapist to tell her that she was lonely, and heartbroken, and sick with the need of finding someone to hold her. Wasn’t that enough to justify depression. The therapist had suggested a long vacation, and some valium. Anne took both, and then found her dermatologist, who introduced her to her plastic surgeon. She had confessed to Gwen just the other day that she is feeling better with each injection. She feels with each surgical procedure it erases the memories, which in her mind helps with the grief.
Gwen had made an appointment with Anne’s plastic surgeon. It would cost Gwen $4,500 to have a mini-lift, and the results would last for 15 years, and she would be back to work within two weeks after the in-house procedure. The thought of someone cutting in her face, and possibly making a huge mistake terrified her. She decided that morning instead of a face- lift; she would start to weed the vineyard after Richard called to tell her that his new wife was pregnant.
Gwen wonders now as she examines her face in her bathroom mirror with her right ear pressed to her cell phone as she listens to the man that always made her feel sexy; when did her jaw began to sag a little? When did the lines around her eyes appear? And when did she feel so alone with herself?
The creases around her mouth make her feel old, makes her feel as if she is running out of time. When had they formed? And, why had she not noticed them until now? Or hadn’t she bothered to notice them until her ex-husband had confessed to her that he wanted out of their marriage because he had fallen in love with someone else, who could give him a baby.
“You know, Gwen, I’ve known Beth for some time, and we both want the same thing,” he had flippantly said standing in their living room, not looking at her, folding and unfolding his hands, a trait he did when he was nervous, and something she always found annoying.
“And when did you contact her?” Gwen demanded, not wanting to really know, but felt she should ask, more out of a formality, a reason to still care. He never answered the question. Three days later, he was gone. She laughs now, as she listens to the man on the phone who is not her husband, but a man from her past, a man that she had contacted more out of curiosity than loneliness.
She walks around her house that now only holds her memories. Her childhood trinkets line the shelves, her pictures of her life before she got married line the walls of her living room. She listens to Ray tell her about his life in last twenty years, filling in the blanks of time and yet she does not really care what he has been doing for the last twenty years. All she wants to really know is if he has ever thought of her in the last twenty years. If he ever stopped from what he is doing and thought of their first encounter. Did he ever wonder about her like she had wondered about him? She does not ask this question. She’d rather him confess it to her. But as he rambles on about his life with his music and how he never got married, she knows by the tone of his voice that he is more shocked that she called, than interested in commiserating about their youthful past.
Why had she called? To reconnect to something she thought was so special, and yet, as the time past and the lines of age began to appear on her face, the event that once held so much promise, no longer really meant that much. It was a moment, a space in-between, nothing that would have equated to longevity. And yet, as Gwen listens to his voice, she tries so hard to remember what it was she had held on to for all these years: the possibility of something. But that something had been lost when she found out later, years later that he had slept with her best friend.
“You should come out for a visit,” he says in between pauses in the stained conversation, asking her if she ever talks to Wendy, and had they kept in touch after college.
‘Don’t worry, you didn’t break us up,” she says, lying. He had broken them up, but Gwen was too naive and young to know that her anger was not really about Wendy being a complete slob when they tried living together, but more so about the white elephant that was never discussed until years later when Wendy confessed she had been in love with Ray, and Gwen had only been a curious encounter because of her red hair.
Only recently after her divorce had Gwen contacted Wendy, and only then had she realized that her experience with Ray was more about the senses, and the imagination, and not about love. But, it still meant something even if it was short-lived. “It was not insignificant,” she had explained to Wendy over a couple wine induced conversations.
“O please, Gwen, it was a fuck, a nice sweet fuck, nothing more and nothing less.”
‘But, not any one person can give you everything, she had argued. It could have been love, she had whined, the experience could have developed into love.”
‘My ass, love is built upon trust,” Wendy had slurred.
“Love is a feeling, not a thing,” Gwen had argued back.
“Why the hell do you still want to be friends with me after what I did,” she had asked.
And what had she really done, fallen in love with a boy that Gwen had fallen in love with when she was twenty, thinking love was forever. Nothing is exclusive in this world, Gwen cried. “Look around you Wendy, people cheat on each other every day. It is human nature, and what is the big deal?”
There was no real explanation why Gwen was talking to Ray at that moment in time. Maybe she was bored, lonely, searching for his voice to bring back that specialness that can only be created when two people have nothing better to do then get it on, and enjoy the moment of youthful glee. No worries of house payments, divorce, or fatal illness. What were their worries back then: To get through college, to get laid and possibly find a summer job? She smiles to herself as she remembers what she was like back then. So self-assured, so knowing what she wanted out of life. She was going off to England to study at Cambridge. She was going to get her Ph.D. She was going to write books, and marry an Englishmen. And Ray, what were his big plans? He wanted to get his band to tour out west. He wanted to be a Rock star. And did he become a rock star, and did she marry an Englishmen when she studied at Cambridge? No, he still does music but has a real job, as he said on the phone, with a laugh. Gwen had not married an Englishmen, and never completed her Ph.D. in English history because she had fallen love with an ordinary guy who she had known most of her life.
When Gwen told Wendy she was going to call Ray, Wendy had confessed to Gwen that after her divorce she had called him too, and he had asked her to come for a visit as well. Gwen doesn’t tell Ray that she knew he had also invited Wendy out as well, but instead she said, “Why don’t I come out with Wendy and we can have a reunion, like old times.” He hadn’t laughed; in fact, he changed the subject completely, and asked her why she didn’t have any children. She skirted the issue, saying it had to do with timing, and her career.
Gwen knows, too that her recent obsession with her sagging jaw line and its recent appearance has to do with her divorce. When she was with Richard she didn’t care much for her appearance. Richard talked of beauty as geometry of lines, because he was an artist, who looked at faces, more for symmetry then for beauty. She never worried about her face and its imperfections when she was married. She was pretty but not beautiful, but, her eyes were striking he would say. “You have movie star eyes,” he would joke.
Richard could never really draw her face, he never got it right. She complained to him when she sat for him that he made her nose larger, and her face rounder, and she wanted him to soften her look on his canvas, make her appear prettier, for posterity. Because in her mind, later when she was old, and wrinkled, she could look upon the paintings of her youth, and think back and believe that at one point she was beautiful, and would always be beautiful on that piece of canvas and for a brief time Richard saw her as being beautiful, not deformed or a failure because she was barren.
And yet, the only painting that Richard had ever done of her hangs in the spare bed-room. She likes her lips in that painting. It is a pastel. Her lips are full. She is smiling, a whisper of her youthful face. There are no lines of despair to tell the truth, the dust of color dispels the truth. Her eyes are shaded, but her lips show a playful smile, wanting the viewer to know that something at least for the moment was captured for posterity. She clicks off the phone with Ray. They had nothing in common, and the moments in bed that they had shared together years ago where just that—moments, to be savored, to be stored away in the vortex of her mind, but not to be relived because frankly she always found him boring.
Gwen weeds the vineyard each morning, a ritual, after her morning coffee. She dons her big sun-hat, puts on a long sleeved shirt and layers her face and neck with sun screen. Richard had always said he never wanted to be married to a weathered-looking wife. He never wanted Gwen’s face to turn all leathery and brown like and old worn out horse bag, like most of the women in the southwest. The sun out here dries up the face and neck and arms like the adobe brown land. It also makes it dusty and chapped. It sucks all moisture out of the pores, kind of like how her soul feels right now as she pulls at the weeds around the base of the grapevines. Her neck is arched over. She is on her knees as if she is praying. She likes the smell of the soil of juniper and fermented grapes.
She likes how she can hear the doves purring above, watching her work. She likes how her body feels stretched out. She is still limber despite the constant ache in her lower back. She has taken on a younger lover now. He was born the year she graduated high-school. She could have been his baby sitter. She laughs at the thought and has joked with him about it. And yet, they come together, coupling like two teenagers, hoping to find something meaningful after the first kiss. She thinks of him as she tugs and pulls at the weeds around the base of the one of the vines. He is young and eager to please her, finding amusement with her, and in the beginning bringing her flowers. He had explained that he liked older women because they knew what they wanted out of life, and he could talk to them. She is always puzzled by him for they don’t really talk about anything of importance, and she hasn’t a clue what she wants out of life at this juncture of her life.
She pats the soil smooth, evoking memories of when Richard had begun to plant the vines and tried to explain to her the different types of grapes that would be produced. They stood out in the middle of their stark land, hugged by the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and she had asked him if grapes would grow in such infertile soil. “Anything is possible,” he said continuing to dig his holes. She had not been interested in knowing back then what types of grapes he was planting, but now as she looks at the brown vine so rooted in the adobe soil, she wants to know what it will produce next year. She wants to know what makes it so tough to take root in infertile soil, and spurt something so beautiful. She wants to know the secret and then transplant into her own body.
Standing there together, neither she nor Richard knew she was barren. Months later, with another failed attempt, it was explained to her that she had a double uterus, and that is why it was difficult for her to have a baby. She felt relived at first, that it was not her fault. And when she asked what it meant to have a double uterus, the doctor had explained that there was a membrane down the middle of her uterus which caused the split. Like a vine, she had thought, like a strong grape vine, except hers was unable to bear fruit.
Her lover likes how at her age her belly is still flat, and her breasts still firm. He compliments her shoulders, and strong arms, and her butt. He says she is aging well, and instead of thinking about Botox, and facelifts, she should think about buying a new phone that can text message, and take pictures. He says most of all, he likes her laugh, and he doesn’t notice her jawline sag.
In her mind something is missing. It is not a lack of affection, but a lack of common ground. She feels misplaced in his bed, overshadowed in his bed. She is feels restless when she leaves him; wanting something he is incapable of providing, and yet every fortnight she receives a call from him, and she always returns the call.
She feels the heat of the day upon her back. She feels a sense of accomplishment from tending to the vineyard. She checks the water lines to make sure all grapes will get their needed water supply, so next year they won’t wilt and brown before the end of the summer. She thinks when she was younger, it was all about how love intruded upon her every moment of her waking hour, and how she lived off the intoxicants of falling in love. She laughs at herself for calling Ray, and she laughs at herself for thinking that she has the power to stop time from making little notes upon her face. Let the lines tell a story, let the lines be her coat of arms, her vineyard to herself, a testament to her journey.