Which happened a lot. He could be morose, while I could be angry.
So angry. In daily life, as a regular student and girlfriend, I wasn’t angry at all. It was only when I drank that the fury rose from some unknown source like the noxious bubbles in the cauldron of a Shakespearean witch.
After college, things evened out. Josh and I found work at a winery in Italy and studied there, and the local culture normalized our consumption. It wasn’t liters every night, just an ordinary two or three glasses of wine before and through dinner, with a set point when everyone just stopped. It wasn’t every night, either, which helped. I was working hard physically and slept hard, ate a lot, and was probably the healthiest I’d ever been.
From my perch beneath the eucalyptus tree, I watch a trio of surfers in wet suits carry their boards out to the line. Josh loved surfing and tried to teach me, but I have a very deep-seated terror of drowning that seems to have no basis in any trauma I can dig up. There are plenty of others with factual grounding—cockroaches and the smell of crack and people driving away from me—but not drowning. It drove him crazy.
Honestly, we drove each other crazy. The only real thing we had in common was our mutual love of sex. It was a very sexual relationship from the start. We shared vigorous appetites, and were compatible physically.
Not so much in any other realm. We didn’t have the same tastes in books or movies or architecture. He liked everything to be extremely tidy, whereas I like things out where I can see them. He liked hearty foods, meats and stews and thick sauces, while I prefer vegetarian fare and fruit and sugar in every form known to man. He didn’t eat sweets and judged me for my consumption. He liked crisp, tailored clothing, while I liked bohemian. He liked baroque architecture, and I loved art deco.
But you know, great sex will take you a long way. We also both loved wine, everything about it. The history and lore, the methods and the bottles, the geeky experiments and the old-school powerhouses. Our talents were as well matched as pinot noir and Syrah grapes. I have a nose so finely attuned that I’ve astonished old masters with my ability to sense almost anything in a wine—a variation, a particularly good vintage, a flaw.
It’s painful on some level I can’t even reach to know I’ll never make it again.
Josh had the business sense. Together, we created a label—Shanti Wines, named for my mother in a fit of generosity that I don’t understand even now—and it gave us the glue we needed when the sex started to flag. For seven years, we built the brand and the wine itself, and at last bottled the best of what we’d done. I could smell its perfection when it went into the barrels, and my instincts were proven right when the wine won a highly coveted early tasting medal, designed to help young vintners find a footing in the crowded market.
That was when Josh was stranded in Provence during the pandemic. For almost nine months, I had time to perfect my alcoholic drinking and nurse my increasing despair and unhappiness within the relationship. I was lonely and in deep denial about how bad my addiction was getting.
When Josh came home after the pandemic, we struggled to get things back on track, at least with the winery. Both of us were excited by the dazzling vintage, and prayed that it might be the thing that would carry us into the big time.
Except that we couldn’t get things right between us. I wasn’t even sure I wanted them to be right. I spent hours talking to Rory, who patiently said over and over, Why don’t you come home for a few weeks? You sound terrible.
But if I went home, they would see what was happening to me. I couldn’t imagine how I’d swim to the surface of my wine habit. On some far, distant level, I knew it was out of control. Some mornings, stirring to yet another doom-filled hangover, I’d swear I’d quit. By the time I showered, I’d already be so sick that I rationalized the grapefruit and wine breakfast cooler as medically necessary. I’d just take it easy the rest of the day. Cut down. Cut back.
For months. Probably years.
I move my hands over the being within me, tears stinging my eyes because I have no memory of who or when she—or he—was planted. Josh and I were not having sex since he’d declared himself in love with his French girlfriend, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible. One of our hallmarks had always been furious sex when we were both drunk and angry and in hate with the other.
My sober, more thoughtful self thinks, Why the hell did you stay in that toxic relationship, Maya?
Why did I do any of it? Who ever makes good choices under those circumstances?