my head again, as it had been doing about every five minutes. I concentrated on the idea, tried to make it real, but it wouldn’t conform. It remained abstract, along with my hiding out in Fred Jackson’s garage, how aspirin works, and the grassy-knoll slant to the JFK assassination.
After a long silence she said, “Someday you’ll have to tell me why.”
“Why I’d never do it again?”
“No, why you did it in the first place.”
“Someday I may know myself. Bubba factor is my guess.”
“You, my dear, are underendowed in the bubba department. I’m guessing midlife crisis.”
“Well, it’s better than growing a ponytail and buying a Corvette.”
She laughed. “No, it’s about the same.”
“Actually, I think I went prebubba.”
She gave me a kiss behind my ear. “Men shouldn’t waste calories on thinking.”
“Underendowed,” I said, shifting my shoulders and hips to create more contact with her. “You know what that kind of talk does to me.”
She slid her hands back down over my belly, then lower. “Yes, I do.”
CHAPTER
THREE
I’m the wine steward at the Franklin Heights Deli. I started off hating the title because it sounds pretentious. Wine steward. We’re not a cruise ship, and I don’t wear a uniform. When I had business cards made up, the woman—I’d guess she was just a few years younger than me—got out a form and asked what my job title was. I said, “Wine guy.” Her pen stopped.
“Wrong.”
“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”
She stared at me through her Elvis Costello glasses and said, “Look at it.” The space was still blank. “You have to capitalize something, and you can’t capitalize ‘guy,’ like ‘Wine Guy,’ unless …” she pointed at me, “what if you don’t capitalize anything, like an e. e. cummings poem?”
She was making me feel a generation older, the way body piercings do.
I said, “I thought about ‘Wine Manager,’ but that makes it sound like I’m trying to keep from calling myself a wine steward.”
“Plus it’s too corporate. How about ‘Wine Czar’? You could wear one of those hats—”
I said, ‘ “Wine Steward’ is sounding pretty good about now.”
She gave a matter-of-fact nod. “I think you just have to face it.” So my card says I’m a Wine Steward. It’s a fussy term, and it’s fussy of me to make such a big deal of it. My only defense is that we’re talking about two different kinds of fussiness. People whose jobs allow them to dress casually for work often poke fun at those who have to wear a suit, but most of them work as hard to achieve that casual appearance as the suit people do to spiff up. Fussy-casual. That’s me.
The Deli is John Harper’s operation—he owns both the building and the business—but he lets me run my end of it pretty much however I want. The only part of my duties I don’t like is that when it gets busy I have to help with the lunch rush. I like immersing myself in one thing and resurfacing on my own—like waking up without an alarm. But just about every day around noon, when the line at the ordering counter gets long and I’m not taking care of a wine customer, I get called over to scrub up and ladle soup or throw a few sandwiches together. It’s not that bad, and, as they say, labor is good for the soul. My real point is that if this is the worst of it—having to fix a dozen lunches for familiar customers—I have a pretty nice setup.
John let me choose my computer when he took me on, and he hired someone to help me design the wine page of our website. The only part he got serious about was the money. I was to assume we would be audited every year. I must have given him a puzzled look because he said, “Keep perfect books. I would rather go broke than get in trouble with the tax man.”
I make all the wine-purchasing decisions, work out the pricing policies, and set up the displays. He tells me when he needs something done a certain way, but if he offers a mere suggestion I’m free to ignore it. Owners can be too hands-on, making them difficult to work for, but John delegates well and keeps focused on the big picture. Still, trusting a quarter million dollars’ worth of stock annually to someone who previously worked only one year in a supermarket wine section has got to be tough, even with his Eastern philosophy. I think he saw where I was headed in life and, because it would in turn help him, helped me get there.
We first met in the aisle of the supermarket. I was sitting on a case of wine, drawing up display tags—weekly markdowns, Parker ratings, and how this or that had wowed’em at whatever wine show—when I felt someone pause behind me. Asking if I can help often drives off the timid shopper, so I simply turned, offered him a nod of acknowledgment, and kept at my work with the colored marking pens until the tag was done.
When I turned again, I found a man in his comfortable fifties, head tilted, studying me. His shopping cart was half filled with romaine lettuce. Nothing but the lettuce. He saw me notice and smiled.
I said, “May I help you?”
He looked around at my wines. “Yes, by coming to work for me.”
“Come again?”
“You like your work, I like your work, I would like you to work for me.”
“I’m pretty comfortable here.”
“Obviously, but is that it? End of story?”
“I think so.”
“But you don’t know what I’m offering.”
He had a point. Somewhat defensively I said, “We have good benefits here and good pay, and I get along with my manager, which is huge.”
“That’s because of your work.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“It’s because of your work.” He was sure. “I can top what you’re getting here, both in pay and benefits. I would be your manager, and I think we would get along.”
“I don’t think so. I mean, yes, maybe you can offer something better, and maybe we would get along, but I don’t think I want to change. I just got things where I want them here. And I have seniority, which I would have to give up.”
He chuckled. “No, you’d have seniority. That I guarantee.” He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and said, “Well, I shouldn’t push. When you’re ready to swim, you’ll let go of the dock.” He handed me the card. “My name is John. It might be worth your while to drop by.” He looked around and said, “Less of a corporate feel where I am.”
I glanced at the card as a courtesy before putting it in my pocket.
He said, “And think about what you said just now, about having things where you want them here.”
I honestly believe I would have let the matter drop if he hadn’t added that last remark. I chewed on it all evening, about what it had taken to organize the wines on the shelves and make up a Rolodex of contacts at import companies and distributors. Eventually I realized that the difficult part of organizing the wine department was complete, and though I got great satisfaction from having succeeded in this regard, I felt a certain disappointment in knowing that I would be coasting from now on. If I were a character in a comic book, I would have said in my superhero voice, “My work here is done,” and flown off into the sky in search of another wine department in distress.
As it turned out my flight would have been a short one. The address on John’s card was just eight blocks west, a shoebox lunch stop recently closed due to illness in the family.