The Wine Who Didn't Leave Her Number

This is the wine you won't write home to mommy about. It's the wine with the slight French accent you met at a discotech - some throwback to an age when discotech was cool. It's the wine you were looking for but didn't even know it. It's the wine you danced with all night and then found yourself cooling off at the bar against and realized when she smiled it was actually quite a lovely smile, besides which you can't remember much about her except the way she moved against you and the mellow scent of her perfume on your sheets, the texture of her hair; her size; the shape of her face; the red-pink-purple of the lights. You realize it's the wine who found you - not the other way around, as it usually happens. You remember much more than you should now. Maybe you were more assertive and maybe she was paying you more attention. You didn't say very much and she didn't ask you very many questions. (No that's not right. That's not right at all. Right now in the blurry half-morning you cannot impose yourself upon this memory. You must allow it to surface on its own.) What is true is you didn't understand her at all. You didn't understand why and maybe that was how she drew you so completely in.

You don't remember leaving the club but she was the one who hailed a cab and you found yourself in the back seat when she looked at you it was all eyes. You were in Chelsea traveling west and then south. When you got out of the taxi you looked up at the old elevated train tracks, overgrown now and much too dangerous at night. She was talking animatedly and you were smiling like a child and she found this very funny. Now you are standing in front of a gallery and she pulls your arm tight against her side, and there it is, in low level lighting, near the end of the Hudson River Drive. It is a painting on display in the rear of a gallery of which you have never heard. It is well past midnight and if you woke up now it would have been a perfect night. Later, you are in another taxi, traveling much too fast around the tip of Manhattan, up the FDR, and across the Brooklyn Bridge, the semi-lit docks and Governor's Island in the distance.

This is the wine that left nothing behind when she left except this memory and this scent and this empty bottle. This fuzzy image. 2006 Paul Jaboulet Aine Chateauneuf du Pape "Les Cedres" ****     Now, in the grey light on the snow covered streets in Chelsea you wonder where she is, what she is thinking, what she is doing right now, and it occurs to you, you know exactly where to find her.