Nora didn’t push it. In fact, she was quite relieved. It made it easier to watchLast Chance Saloonwithout any further awkwardness. And the Newfoundland stopped licking her ear and rested its head on her knee and Nora felt – well, not happy exactly, but not depressed either.
And yet, as she watched Ryan Bailey tell his on-screen love interest that ‘Life is for living, cupcake’ while simultaneously being informed by Dylan that he was thinking of lettinganotherdog sleep in his bed (‘He cries all night. He wants his daddy’), Nora realised she wasn’t too enamoured with this life.
And also, Dylan deserved the other Nora. The one who had managed to fall in love with him. This was a new feeling – as if she was taking someone’s place.
Realising she had a high tolerance for alcohol in this life, she poured herself some more wine. It was a pretty ropey Zinfandel from California. She stared at the label on the back. There was for some reason a mini co-autobiography of a woman and a man, Janine and Terence Thornton, who owned the vineyard which had made the wine. She read the last sentence:When we were first married we always dreamed of opening our own vineyard one day. And now we have made that dream a reality. Here at Dry Creek Valley, our life tastes as good as a glass of Zinfandel.
She stroked the large dog who’d been licking her and whispered a ‘goodbye’ into the Newfoundland’s wide, warm brow as she left Dylan and his dogs behind.
Buena Vista Vineyard
In the next visit to the Midnight Library, Mrs Elm helped Nora find the life she could have lived that was closest to the life depicted on the label of that bottle of wine from the restaurant. So, she gave Nora a book that sent her to America.
In this life Nora was called Nora Martìnez and she was married to a twinkle-eyed Mexican-American man in his early forties called Eduardo, who she had met during the gap year she’d regretted never having after leaving university. After his parents had died in a boating accident (she had learned, from a profile piece on them inThe Wine Enthusiastmagazine, which they had framed in their oak-panelled tasting room), Eduardo had been left a modest inheritance and they bought a tiny vineyard in California. Within three years they had done so well – particularly with their Syrah varietals – that they were able to buy the neighbouring vineyard when it came up for sale. Their winery was called the Buena Vista vineyard, situated in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and they had a child called Alejandro, who was at boarding school near Monterey Bay.
Much of their business came from wine-trail tourists. Coachloads of people arrived at hourly intervals. It was quite easy to improvise, as the tourists were genuinely quite gullible. It went like this: Eduardo would decide which wines to put out in the glasses before each coach load arrived, and hand Nora the bottles – ‘Woah, Nora, despacio, un poco too much’ he reprimanded in his good-humoured Spanglish, when she was a bit too liberal with the measures – and then when the tourists came Nora would inhale the wines as they sipped and swilled them, and try to echo Eduardo and say the right things.
‘There is a woodiness to the bouquet with this one’ or ‘You’ll note the vegetal aromas here – the bright robust blackberries and fragrant nectarine, perfectly balanced with the echoes of charcoal’.
Each life she had experienced had a different feeling, like different movements in a symphony, and this one felt quite bold and uplifting. Eduardo was incredibly sweet-natured, and their marriage seemed to be a successful one. Maybe even one to rival the life of the couple on the wine label of the bottle of ropey wine she’d drank with Dylan, while being licked by his astronomically large dog. She even remembered their names. Janine and Terence Thornton. She felt like she too was now living in a label on a bottle. She also looked like it. Perfect Californian hair and expensive-looking teeth, tanned and healthy despite the presumably quite substantial consumption of Syrah. She had the kind of flat, hard stomach that suggested hours of Pilates every week.
However, it wasn’t just easy to fake wine knowledge in this life. It was easy to fakeeverything, which could have been a sign that the key to her apparently successful union with Eduardo was that he wasn’t really paying attention.
After the last of the tourists left, Eduardo and Nora sat out under the stars with a glass of their own wine in their hands.
‘The fires have died out in LA now,’ he told her.
Nora wondered who lived in the Los Angeles home she had in her pop star life. ‘That’s a relief.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asked him, staring up at that clear sky full of constellations.
‘What?’
‘The galaxy.’
‘Yes.’
He was on his phone and didn’t say very much. And then he put his phone down and still didn’t say much.
She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of notneedingto talk. Of just being together, oftogether-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.
But still, she wanted to talk.
‘We’re happy, aren’t we?’
‘Why the question?’
‘Oh, I know we are happy. I just like to hear you say it sometimes.’
‘We’re happy, Nora.’
She sipped her wine and looked at her husband. He was wearing a sweater even though it was perfectly mild. They stayed there a while and then he went to bed before her.
‘I’m just going to stay out here for a while.’
Eduardo seemed fine with that, and sloped off after planting a small kiss on the top of her head.
