Champagne Baby by Laure Dugas

Author:Laure Dugas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

If you’ve been in love long-distance, you know the mantra that keeps you from abandoning all hope: Everything will be better once we’re in the same place. You say it together out loud and in silence every single day until hopefully it comes true. Even though I knew that New York wasn’t Jules’s ideal city, I’d told myself that our being together would make up for it.

Did I have any inkling that things would get tougher instead of easier? Is that why I had been nervous to tell him how much I’d fallen for New York in the first place? Either way, what made it worse was the fact that I was the one who’d brought him here, and now I both felt bad and resented that he hadn’t been fully honest, either. The truth was that neither of us had known what would happen once we were here. Once we were together.

If Jules were a wine, he’d be a red with a lot of character and depth, intimidating on the outside but soft on the tongue, smooth and supple and a little sweet. The furthest thing from an easy-to-drink, flexible Beaujolais. He’d be a wine that takes time to open up, that isn’t easy to understand when it’s young. I can think of the perfect example: a Bandol from Provence, on the southern coast of France, made from 100 percent mourvèdre—the same moody grape used in Châteauneuf that my uncle likes to highlight (Jules, all-or-nothing to the end, would never be a blend). Mourvèdre can be a hard grape to love, but it blooms with dark fruit, earth, game, and leather. You have to come to a Bandol on its terms, give it space to express itself, but when you do, the rewards are immense.

I’m not very good at giving space, though. Now that Jules was here I wanted and expected to stay in easy reach, like any other couple. For the first couple of weeks at the end of August, when he had no cell phone, it was easy enough to just make a date and show up, but I assumed he would eventually get an American phone and was surprised when he refused.

“What do I need it for? Nobody needs to contact me but you, and you know where I am.”

“I know where you are in general, but not where you are at any given minute.”

“Don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine.”

“What about job interviews?”

I learned the answer to that question the first time a strange number showed up on my phone—he’d given it out as his contact, even though I was at work all day. Sometimes he’d be up early in the morning and on my phone in the bathroom, talking to family or potential employers (who never panned out). Then I began to lose track of him in the evenings. He was spending a lot of his free time with Peter, partially to get away from me and my various frustrations, but also because they had a lot in common I hadn’t recognized until now: fiercely independent streaks above all.

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