Post-Fermentation

There's something about beginnings, first lines, premieres. Tomorrow is opening night at Faux Amis. In French: soirée d'ouverture—each syllable pronounced at the front of the palate.

For months now, I’ve been watching my mouth in the mirror as it contorts to the demands of the French language, slowly settling into the foreign geometry of new nouns and warped conjugations.

Last weekend, I attempted a joke in French—something about anchovies and butter—that made our waiter chuckle. Henri clapped his hands together, beaming, and ordered Champagne. “Ta première blague en français!” he cried. “Your first joke in French! A cause for celebration.” I’d smiled back, shaking my head at the hyperbole of his enthusiasm. “That’s big, New York. Feel proud of yourself.”

But the more time I spend in Paris, the more frustrating all the stilted communication becomes—the accumulation of hours spent muddling through a language not my own; the relentless fatigue of attempting to grasp at some semblance of a personality in words that don’t yet align naturally.

“I feel like I’m diluted. That’s what speaking feels like,” I tell Henri one night. He pulls me toward him on the couch and I lay with my head in his lap

His hands move gently through my hair. “I know it’s hard. But you’re doing so well.”

I groan, growing weary of his optimistic and unpragmatic platitudes.

“It’s going to get easier,” he says. “This is the hardest part, Ali.”

I’m not sure when he started shortening my name, something no one at home has ever done. I can’t imagine hearing it without the aural font of his accent—don’t believe I’d like it nearly as much from an American mouth.

“I’m still so bland in French, though,” I say with a sigh.

“Maybe you’re just different in French.” He tucks a section of hair behind my ear. “Maybe you have an even better personality here.”

There’s something decidedly alluring about the prospect of trying on a new language like a fresh set of skin. Using it to reveal something essential—and devastatingly charming, hopefully—not available to me in English. Responding to Ali in lieu of Alice feels like light-touch reincarnation.

“You didn’t like the old personality, huh? New Yawk Alice didn’t do it for you?”

He laughs, rolling so that he’s on top of me. “Honestly? I like the Alice who’s here. Who sleeps with me above the bar.” His fingers trail my cheek. “But I’m sure I’d be an Alice-fan on any continent.”

Downstairs, the paint is dry, the tiles are cemented into formation behind the bar, and the sawdust is mostly cleared. We’ve spent the past two weeks driving beyond city limits to pick up mirrors, dishware, and ice buckets from flea markets and estate sales. We’ve peeled off the blue tape along the moldings. Now, Faux Amis is ready for the public.

Post-vendanges, I stayed here for three days—then returned to New York while Henri met with countless wine reps, meticulously pulling together a spare but respectable list for opening. We talked ceaselessly while we were apart. So much so that the physical separation felt like some form of withdrawal, made all the more aching for the tender intensity of our conversations, the number of hours we could speak without pause.

So, I schemed my way back: Alec agreed to offer me a small stipend to spend a month or two in Paris to help with French distribution, meet with producers, and visit various wine salons in the area. I knew the arrangement had an expiration date, but it was enough to get me back on a plane.

It’s now been five weeks. I’ve moved my flight three times. I keep on staying—but with an asterisk. It’s like I’m chewing through the gristle of my new context with baby teeth. I’m gnawing in as slowly as possible, one bit at a time.

“I’ll start a tally—if I can convince you to move your flight five times, you have to admit that you love me,” Henri joked the last time I opened the airline app. We were lying on the floor of the construction space that was not yet Faux Amis, gladly inhaling the wood polish fumes and comparing paint samples for the bathroom.

“Deal” I agreed, kissing him, already loving him, not saying so.

Now, my flight departs in a week. This information is no more comprehensible to me than ancient Greek—yet the sturdy fact of it remains, looming oppressively in the distance, just close enough to haunt the narrow edges of my periphery.

This is our last night together at the bar before this place belongs to other people, too. Before it’s inhabited by a cast of friends, and strangers, and paying customers. Until now, it’s felt like our private clubhouse, some secret haven for dinners on the ground, wine from the bottle, sex on the kitchen counter. I’m reluctant to give that up—even knowing my logic is flawed. I still can’t seem to train myself out of the belief that things between Henri and me taste better in a vacuum, play out more blissfully if they live in unreality. It’s a symptom of the harvest universe, the surreal conditions under which we met.

These afternoons spent in painter’s overalls, hanging art, sating ourselves with the glee of our physical proximity—I know better than to believe the image is complete. I don’t live in France. Not really. I don’t have a visa, or proper employment. I don’t have a place of my own. And in New York, there are things I’ve left behind. I’ve got friends, a job, an apartment. For Henri, too, this present routine won’t last. When the bar’s open, he’ll work nights, sleep through the day, meet with reps and investors on days off. Opening a bar is not the same as running one. Neither one of us is living a real life.

Nevertheless, I keep on staying. I can’t help it. Here—well, here there’s this boy. And there’s this bar with my fingerprints all over it. There’s the slow and begrudging improvement of the French language in my mouth. And what if that were to add up to a real life?

“What time does the cleaner arrive?” I ask Henri.

“Not ’til late.” He tugs a picnic blanket from an overstuffed tote bag.

“What are you doing?” I frown, watching him flatten out the corners of his woven cloth over the checkered floors. I gesture around the bar, where booths are lying in wait and stools are stacked in the furthest corner for vacuuming ease. “We’ve got plenty of chairs to sit on.”

“Yeah, but before the bar looked like a bar, we ate all our meals on the ground. Feels like the ideal place to spend our final night before it’s up and running.”

I watch as he rifles through his bag, pulling out fresh tomatoes, a narrow wooden cutting board, a circle of Brillat-Savarin—my favorite of all the French cheeses. He produces saucisson, potato chips, a tin of sardines. Baguette, French butter, sliced radishes.

I seat myself cross-legged across from him, admiring the host of spoils. “How do you say radish en français?”

“Radis,” he says, enunciating with drama. “Basically just the English word with a French accent.”

He draws a Tupperware filled with chipped ice from the bag and peels off the lid to reveal four marled oysters resting. Then he fishes out an oyster knife and a bottle of wine. While he works his knife under the lip of the first oyster, dexterous and slow in a way that makes me want to hold his palms to my face, he nods to the wine. “It’s the first thing you blind tasted at the domain in Alsace.”

“I can’t believe you remember what it was!” I grab the bottle and inspect the label, picturing Ruby and Pietro and Julian beside me, a salad of gleeful voices in varied accents humming together over a long, idyllic table. The memory makes me feel heavy—neither with sadness nor joy. Just holding weight. Held down.

He winks at me, placing delicately shucked oysters on the ice one by one, before maneuvering a wine key from his back pocket.

“So, tell me, what’s it taste like this time?” he asks, filling two glasses and passing one to me.

I dip my nose in and inhale deeply before taking a sip. It’s clean and honeyed, sticky on the palate like hard candy, lacquering my tongue and teeth. It moves slowly, makes me focus more closely on all the minute mechanics of swallowing.

“C’est comme parler français,” I tell him. It tastes like speaking in French.

He laughs, removing the glass from my hand and leaning forward to kiss me, hoisting the full weight of his body onto mine, laying me flat. By now, the feeling of him is so familiar—the grooves of his chest, the curvature of his lips. I wish he’d linger, but he crawls back up, his eyes gleaming.

“That’s a good one. Perfect accent, by the way.” He holds the ice-filled container out to me. “Oyster?”

I grin, downing the closest one and returning the shell to its place. The heat of the wine is still imprinted in my mouth, warm and stubborn, along with the taste of Henri.

Now he’s slicing tomatoes, pulling oil and fresh basil leaves from respective plastic bags.

“You’ve really outdone yourself,” I tell him, marveling at the spread in front of us.

“I thought with enough soft cheese and chenin blanc, I might be able to convince you to move your flight again. I’ve got lots of important things for us to do next week…”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“And what, exactly, is on the agenda?”

“Well, for starters, I bought a very expensive avocado this morning that won’t be ripe until Tuesday at least. I’d been planning to make you breakfast with it, but it’ll be an absolute disaster if I cut it open too soon.”

I laugh, clapping my hands together, and look at him as if staring any harder might freeze us in place here, halt the onward current of time. On the album he’s playing—some quiet and dreamy live recording—a rupture of applause spills out at precisely the right time, like some broader, external validation.

“Oh!” I say, lighting up. “I’ve got one!”

I propel myself onto my feet and into the kitchen, where an old receipt hangs backwards on the fridge. On it, we’ve been keeping a list of “things that Champagne sounds like.” It starts with everything the other vendageurs told me—footsteps on ice, the mechanical whine of a techno song, the din of a restaurant—and ends with two of our own: the sound of freshly cracked pepper and the jangle of keys. In shaky script, I add one more. Applause.

I bring the receipt back with me to show Henri and he grins.

“Can’t believe we haven’t thought of that one before.” He gets up to move the record needle so he can listen to the sound of mass clapping once more—this time with attention.

How funny it is that we’re no longer listening to our glasses to find words for bubbles. Instead, we’re listening to the world, waiting ’til something sounds like Champagne.

“Ok ok, so the avocado.” I perch on my knees on the blanket, leaning towards him. “What else?”

“Well there’s this great exhibit at the Pompidou I thought we could go see. And I made a reservation for two at that little place you’ve been wanting to go to in the 11th arrondissement. It’s for the day after you leave, so we’ll have to rearrange some things to make that one work. And oui, yes, I cannot overexpress the importance of the whole avocado thing.”

I watch as he uses his forearm to nudge the hair off of his forehead, the collar of his threadbare T-shirt hanging limp around the tendons of his neck. All I can think is that I know the topography of his body so well—just like I know the wild flash of energy in his eyes when he’s wound up with enthusiasm about anything at all. I know what he looks like salting tomatoes shirtless in the kitchen or coming home from the bar downstairs with sawdust in his hair and paint primer under his fingernails. I know what he feels like when he sleeps, the specific metronome of his chest rising and falling beneath bed sheets, and the particular octave of his voice when he wakes, speaking his first notes of the day out loud. I know all of this, just like I know that I will move my flight.

He’s watching me intently, waiting to see some surge of clarity in my eyes suggesting that I’ve made up my mind. I can see him searching my face like a book he’s working to explicate. I stroke my chin, miming my best caricature of indecision.

“Well...” I draw out the word, incapable of wiping the obvious glee off my face.

“Yes! Oui! That’s a yes! I know it, I know it is!” He hops to his feet, doubly buoyant and reaching for my hands to pull me up as well. “I have something to show you.”

He squeezes my palm and pivots to face the bar, where he unpacks the stools, depositing them in their rightful places one by one—until he reaches the last one. My stool, the one that lives in my precise corner of the bar. When the shipment arrived, he unpacked this one first. As he stocked the kitchen and the cellar, or took inventory, I sat on my stool, working on my laptop, welcoming the interruption of a kiss on the cheek or a tousling of hair each time he passed.

Now, returning it to its rightful place, he gestures for me to come closer. He points at the seat as if I should be capable of discerning some hieroglyphic meaning from the knots in the wood, but nothing seems particularly remarkable about it—save for all the things that have always made it remarkable.

He flips the chair over, revealing the naked underside of the seat. Then he crouches down, pulling the wine key out of his back pocket once more and sliding its knife into place. I watch as he carves a small line into the wood, before lifting the chair closer for me to see.

“That’s tally number four,” he says—and now, I can make out the quartet of little lines, etched tidily into the wood. “We’re getting close.”