The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

  This morning I had to substitute a new roll of toilet paper for the exhausted old one. For a short time I found myself vainly fumbling with the simple spring mechanisms that fit the roll into the hollow right and left spaces. I felt frustration, cursed my ineptness, felt ashamed and inferior. But—suddenly I succeeded in inserting the roll properly. I felt at once a triumphant satisfaction that would be denied the sighted person.

  And:

  Every blind person becomes a Thoreauvian. “Simplify, simplify!” lay at the heart of Thoreau’s message to the world. For the blind, the message has no moral implications. It represents an entire and compulsory way of life. He cannot afford, because he cannot handle, even the slightest excess or profusion of objects, movements, even social relationships. His salvation lies not in multiplicity, but in simplicity. (Develop with examples.)

  “Develop with examples.” What a characteristic Clifton Fadiman imperative! He hoped to assemble a short collection of essays on blindness, to be called When I Consider: the first three words of Milton’s sonnet, which continued to be much on his mind. He never developed this passage with examples, and When I Consider joined his stack of unfinished books. But that turned out to be no tragedy. He found other and possibly more essential fish to fry.

  The trickiest lines in Milton’s sonnet are “And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless.” As I knew from Miss Carnes’s twelfth-grade English class, Milton was referring not only to his literary talent but to the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25, the story of a harsh master who, before leaving on a journey, entrusts his three servants with silver talents, an ancient unit of currency. The first two double their talents and are rewarded, but the third buries his in the earth, and when his master returns, he is cast out into the darkness. My father had spent his life being one of the first two servants: a money-maker. He was never going to submit meekly to the prospect of being the third.

  Six years earlier, he had heard that the Book-of-the-Month Club’s board of judges was about to be dissolved or restructured and thought he would be out of a job. This turned out to be a false alarm—he was not among the judges who were asked to resign—but for several months he was in a swivet. He asked me what I thought he should do. Well, I said, aquiver with youthful idealism, perhaps he could volunteer as a writing teacher in a prison. A look of distaste and incredulity passed across his face. It took me years to realize that the question of whether he would have wished to spend his days Sharing with criminals was the least of it. The real deal-breaker was that he wouldn’t have been paid.

  Which meant that even if he could dictate his thoughts to an amiable secretary, even if he could continue to dine with his wife in expensive restaurants, even if he could change a roll of toilet paper without help, even if he could listen to Trollope all night, he was not going to be satisfied. He wanted to work. (I will remind the reader of my father’s age: eighty-eight. Most eighty-eight-year-olds, even those without acute retinal necrosis, are not fretting about buried talents. They’re retired. But to my father, retirement would have felt like being cast out into the darkness.)

  And that led back inexorably to the Book-of-the-Month Club. (His Book-of-Lament Club pun was not a reflection of his true feelings. Lamentation was the last word he would have associated with his esteemed employer of forty-nine years.) Vetting eight or ten manuscripts a month seemed an unlikely job for a blind man. A Miltonic system of live readers wasn’t feasible, since he often preferred to read after midnight. But what if the Club took the money it had previously allocated to his monthly trips to New York and spent it on taping the manuscripts?

  I wrote a letter suggesting this to my father’s boss, who was extremely fond of him, and she immediately assented. Friends helped us scout out-of-work actors with home tape recorders and exemplary enunciation who were willing to work for twelve dollars an hour. My father listened to audition tapes and chose a Juilliard graduate in New York. She ended up reading about half the books; the other half were read by my brother Kim, who had won speech contests in high school and had a mellifluous voice. (Kim also taped the entirety of my first book.) The completed cassettes, their sides marked with inch-high numbers, were FedExed to my father in Captiva, and his assessments, dictated to Anne Marcus, were FedExed back to New York. (The Book-of-the-Month Club’s board of judges was eventually disbanded, this time completely, but my father was retained as “Chief Editorial Adviser,” and the interstate cassette traffic continued for the rest of his life: proof that not every American corporation has a heart of stone.)

  Six months came and went. My father never mentioned the subject of suicide again.

  If he hadn’t stuck around, he would have missed the opportunity to co-edit a 1,338-page anthology of world poetry. He listened to the poems on tape, developed an unanticipated interest in medieval Persian literature, and reported that if he’d gotten the job ten years earlier, he would have done it less well because he would have paid insufficient attention to the sounds of the words.

  He also would have missed receiving the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a prize that had previously been won by Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty, among others. Getting to New York was a logistical feat, but, gripping my mother’s arm firmly above the elbow, he managed. At the awards dinner at the Plaza Hotel, he enjoyed the roast rack of lamb; the Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon; the conversation with Stephen King, who asked me to bring him to our table and gushed as sweetly as a teenage fan; and the envelope that contained the ten-thousand-dollar check. In his acceptance speech—delivered, of course, without notes—he developed, with examples, the similarities between the wine trade and the book trade. He also remarked that although he knew he should say he’d like to share the medal with his six great-grandchildren and the man who fixed his refrigerator, in fact he planned to take it home and use it to stroke his ego at regular intervals.

  After he returned to Florida, he added a note to the folder of items he planned to discuss with me on my next visit: AMERICAN FREQ FLIER MILES TRANSFERABLE? He knew he’d never fly again and didn’t want an unnecessary penny to be wasted.

  Although his ambit was limited to Captiva, where he had no close friends, he was hardly a recluse. Using his Maxi-Aids phone, he called me several times a week. He called his brother Bill every Sunday. (A frequent topic of conversation was their brother Ed, who had died in a car accident twenty years earlier. My father still missed him.) And he spoke to Sam Aaron. When my father was eighty-six and Sam was seventy-eight, they had collaborated on a revised edition of The Joys of Wine in which my father declared himself still in love with wine, even if he was “now a Philemon rather than a Romeo.” (Philemon and Baucis were a devoted old couple in Greek mythology who, when Zeus stopped by one evening, quenched his thirst with wine from a magical jug that was continually replenished. My father assumed everyone would know this.) Since then, Sam had developed glaucoma and become nearly as blind as my father. They commiserated on the phone, but mostly they talked about wine. Sam died of spinal cancer three years after my father lost his sight. I called with the news. My father wept, said goodbye, and called back twenty minutes later to dictate two hundred words he wished me to send to Sam’s family. He said that Sam had taught him almost all he knew about wine, and that although most people keep their enthusiasm in a bank account, making withdrawals only when necessary, Sam “carried it with him and gave it away and yet the total sum was continually replenished.”

  Me, my mother, my father (to whom she is a blur), and my husband, George Howe Colt, at the National Book Awards reception, 1993

  When he was fifty-three, my father wrote:

  Our muscles give way at last to gravity’s quiet, resistless pull; the best, the most joyful of our glands, in the end withers; the eye, the ear lose some of their fine quick power to seize upon the world; the limbs begin to ask What’s the hurry? But I know men of eighty whose infirmities for a brief space of a bottle’s emptying vanish as they s
ip their wine, their taste buds as lively as when they were one-and-twenty—nay, livelier.

  Eighty sounded old to him then. When he was ninety, these words were even truer. He had had his share of losses: his brother, his best friend, his youth, his vigor, his influence, his sight. He had, in fact, lost everything, and more, that he had anticipated nearly four decades earlier when he turned the pages of his Cellar Book and thought about the two dark lines from The Waste Land that had puzzled me as a child:

  London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down …

  These fragments I have shored against my ruins …

  London Bridge had fallen down. But the fragments shored in his wine closet in Captiva (an even more modest depository than the one in Santa Barbara) were his purest source of pleasure, which was something he hadn’t lost at all.

  I once had a conversation over a good dinner with an elderly doctor who was writing a book on the factors that contribute to a satisfying old age. We agreed that the capacity for pleasure—especially the pleasure of taste—was high on the list. Gusto! Joie de vivre! The ability to eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow you really are going to die! Brillat-Savarin wrote that taste “invites us, by arousing our pleasure, to repair the constant losses which we suffer through our physical existence.” He also wrote that it is “mathematically proven” that gourmands live longer. (He neglected to mention the mathematician.) My father had learned at VIP that the loss of one sense does not make the others more acute; he was annoyed by the popular assumption that every blind person has the nose of a bloodhound and the palate of an Escoffier. However, he valued his remaining senses more—sound and touch for utility, taste and smell for joy. Food was good. Wine was best: a miracle, because it was as good as it had ever been, which made it better. Anyone who wished to see wine truly being appreciated had only to watch my father oh-so-carefully convey a glass—a wavering blob of maroon or gold that got larger as it approached but never came into focus—to his nose, and then to his mouth.

  I believe that the period between my father’s first class at VIP and his final illness was in many ways one of the happiest of his life. This was in spite of his age; in spite of his losses; in spite of the moment every morning when he awoke from a dream in which he was invariably sighted, and then remembered he wasn’t. It is said that old people can keep their minds agile by learning how to speak Italian or play the oboe. My father learned how to be blind. In the process, he may also have learned how to think of himself as a little less counterfeit, a little less like a seven-year-old who would never be as tall as his older brother. He had always worried that if he’d been the right age to serve in either world war, he would not have acquitted himself with honor. He had considered himself a coward. Now he knew he wasn’t. Mod sceal þe mare / þe ure mægen lytlað.

  And that’s why I like to picture him sitting at his desk at ninety, without his glasses but with his blue checked shirt, his laugh wrinkles, his partially extant pompadour, and his beatific smile. He is probably wondering whether some of that good pâté de campagne is left for lunch, or whether the doorbell will be the FedEx man delivering a box of cassettes that might contain the next Great American Novel, or whether tonight, with the cheese tray, he and my mother—she’ll have to uncork the bottle, but he’s gotten used to that—should have the Simi Cabernet or break out the Chapelle-Chambertin. Hotsy totsy!

  20

  Impotence

  Things don’t always work out. Susannah Lescher, who relished the drop of Château d’Yquem that was placed on her tongue when she was six weeks old, is now a grown woman who realized long ago that she would never appreciate wine as much as her father did and now drinks only an occasional glass. Margaux Hemingway became an alcoholic, then a recovering alcoholic; three years before her suicide, she changed her name back to Margot. I was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine.

  Improbable as it may seem, I didn’t see it coming, but then I’ve never been good at noticing things right in front of me (keys, glasses, the black pants I am certain are not in the closet even though they must be in the closet). There was no single moment when I gave up for good; my hope just sort of faded away, like Gene Tunney’s ectoplasmic wines or the fizz from a bottle of champagne with a crumbly cork.

  I spent decades concealing the privileges of my childhood: the eight bathrooms, the varsity swimmer from UCLA who was hired to teach us the crawl, the servant-summoning bell above my mother’s knee. I told people our family had lived in Westwood. It was really Bel Air. There. I’ve said it. I can never say Westwood again. I concealed my indifference to wine in similar fashion. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses of wine: not a difficult feat, since I could toss around the terms I learned as a child at the Fadiman dinner table (pétillant! phylloxera! Nebuchadnezzar!)—and then painstakingly direct the Bordeaux or Burgundy straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity. But those days are over. Now that I have outed myself, I worry that no one will ever serve me wine again.

  So I was happy to be invited not long ago to a mildly bibulous celebration at a friend’s house in New Haven. Such formal occasions are rare. George and I left New York seventeen years ago, for more or less the same reasons my parents left California, and now live in rural western Massachusetts—not the swanky Berkshires but a farm town that produces apple cider, maple syrup, and parsnips. We have an old house and a couple of ramshackle barns with peeling paint. My anti-Arcadian father would have hated our place. But he would have loved that dinner: first-rate minds, first-rate food, enough WASPs to make him feel he’d crossed the river, enough Jews to make him feel he was not an outsider looking in.

  The Far Niente Chardonnay ’82 that accompanied the lobster ravioli was greeted with murmurs of quiet approbation. I found it … not unpleasant.

  To accompany the glazed short ribs sous vide, my host brought out a Bordeaux. Before he removed the frail cork and decanted the wine, he showed me the bottle. It was an Haut-Brion ’81.

  An Haut-Brion?

  We were about to drink one of the greatest wines in the world: one of the five Premier Cru Bordeaux, the only one made from grapes grown in the gravelly soil of Graves rather than in the nearby Médoc. I’d often noticed its label in one of the Joys of Wine gatefolds, embellished with an engraving of a château whose towers looked like witches’ hats.

  Haut-Brion is generally considered the first wine ever to receive a review—by the diarist Samuel Pepys, who visited London’s Royall Oak Tavern on April 10, 1663 (one of at least six occasions that year on which he’d broken a wine-abstinence resolution), and, as he noted in his journal, “here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.”

  Haut-Brion appears in the wine cellar ledgers of King Charles II.

  Haut-Brion was drunk by Dryden, Swift, Defoe, and Locke.

  When Thomas Jefferson was the American minister to France, he bought six cases of Haut-Brion and sent them back to Monticello.

  If ever a wine was a droplet of the river of human history, it was this one.

  My host had bought the bottle twenty-five years earlier, at an end-of-term token price, from the Harvard Society of Fellows. The primary obligation of the junior fellows, of whom he was one, was to dine every Monday night with the senior fellows. The purpose of these weekly dinners was to bevel the young scholars’ rough edges with conversation and buff them to a gloss with good wine. Wine as a civilizing agent: my father’s credo.

  My fellow guests took their first sips. Several broke out into a susurration of mmmmms and aaahhhs and little grunts of pleasure.

  I later looked up tasting notes for this Haut-Brion vintage—not a Great Year, but at the very least a good one, and in some estimations, very good or even magnificent. I read that other people had smelled coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, tob
acco, roses, violets, sour cherries, dried currants, star anise, white pepper, blue cheese, autumn leaves, saddle leather, iron filings, hot rocks in a cedar-paneled sauna, and earth. They had tasted pencil shavings, sandalwood, lavender, strawberries, plums, cassis, tea leaves, goat cheese, beef bouillon, green peppers, chocolate, vanilla, caramel, licorice, mint, peat, twigs, and toast.

  I sniffed the wine. I couldn’t smell any of those things, except earth.

  I swallowed a drop.

  It tasted—or so I imagined—like a muddy truffle that had been dug up moments earlier by a specially trained pig.

  There are many things I don’t want, but I don’t want to want them. I wanted to want this. If I may transcend gender for a moment, there was only one word that came to mind: impotence. I felt the faintest stirrings of desire. I could tell I was in the presence of beauty—something complicated, intelligent, smoky, subterranean—but I could summon only the fragile ghost of a response.

  When the next course came, half an inch of Haut-Brion was left in my glass.

  If my father could read that sentence, he would weep.

  21

  Taste

  In the months that followed the dinner in New Haven, I brooded about why I had left that half inch of Haut-Brion in the glass.

  One day, during a phone conversation, a friend happened to mention that cilantro tastes different to different people. I looked it up and learned that cilantro-abomination is at least partly genetic. I happen to abominate cilantro. A surge of fellow feeling rose in me when I found a website called IHateCilantro.com, on which one of my gustatory brethren had posted the following admirable haiku: