'If you call this number again, or if you show up at my house, I’ll call the police. Is that clear enough?'
The phone slammed loudly in Jeff’s ear as she hung up.
He’d been given the chance to relive most of his life; now he’d trade it all for another shot at this one day.
The Mirassou Vineyards teemed with pickers working the slopes southeast of San Jose, great buckets of fresh green grapes atop their heads as they wound their way like harvest ants down to the crusher and the presses outside the old cellar. The hills rippled with wide-spaced rows of trellised vines, and here among the masonry buildings the oaks and elms were a splendor of October colors.
Diane had been angry at him all day, and the bucolic setting and arcane intricacies of the winery had done little to appease her. Jeff never should have taken her along with him this morning; he’d thought she might be fascinated, or at least amused, by the two young geniuses, but he was wrong.
'Hippies, that’s all they were. That tall boy was barefoot, for God’s sake, and the other one looked like a … a Neanderthal!'
'Their idea has a lot of potential; it doesn’t matter what they looked like.'
'Well, somebody ought to tell them the sixties are over, if they want to do anything with that silly idea of theirs. I just don’t believe you fell for it, and gave them all that money!'
'It’s my money, Diane. And I’ve told you before, the business decisions are all mine, too.'
He couldn’t really blame her for the way she’d reacted; without benefit of foresight, the two young men and their garageful of secondhand electronic components would indeed seem unlikely candidates for a spot on the Fortune 500. But within five years that garage in Cupertino, California would be famous, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would prove to be the soundest investment of 1976. Jeff had given them half a million dollars, insisted they follow the advice of a retired young marketing executive from Intel they had recently met, and told them to make whatever they wanted as long as they continued to call it 'Apple.' He had let them keep forty-nine percent of the new enterprise.
'Who in the world would want a computer in their house? And what makes you think those scruffy boys really know how to make one, anyway?'
'Let’s drop it, all right?'
Diane went into one of her petulant silences, and Jeff knew the matter wouldn’t really be dropped, not even if she remained silent about it from now on.
He’d married her a year ago, out of convenience if nothing else, soon after he’d turned thirty. She’d been a twenty-three-year-old socialite from Boston, heiress to one of the country’s oldest and largest insurance firms; attractive in a reedy sort of way, and able to handle herself quite well in any gathering where the individual net worths of the participants exceeded seven figures. She and Jeff got along as well as could be expected for two people who had little in common other than their familiarity with money. Now Diane was seven months pregnant, and Jeff had hopes that the child might bring out the best in her, forge a deeper bond between them.
The young blond woman in the tailored navy suit led them inside the main winery building, to the tasting room in one front corner. Diamond-shaped racks of bottled wine lined the walls, broken by softly lit recesses in which photographs of the vineyards were displayed, along with cut flowers and standing bottles of the Mirassou product. Jeff and Diane stood at the rosewood bar in the center of the room, accepted ritual sips of Chardonnay.
Linda had, apparently, meant everything she’d said after that disastrous meeting on the beach seven years ago. His letters to her had been returned unopened, and the gifts he’d sent were all refused. After a few months he had finally stopped attempting to contact her, though he added her name to the list of 'Personal/Priority' subjects to be kept track of by the clipping service to which he subscribed. That was how he’d learned, in May of 1970, that Linda had married a Houston architect, a widower with two young children. Jeff wished her happiness, but couldn’t help feeling abandoned … by someone who had never known him, as far as she was concerned.
Again he had sought solace in his work. His most recent coup had been the sale, at enormous profit, of his oil fields in Venezuela and Abu Dhabi, and their immediate replacement with similar properties in Alaska and Texas, plus the contracts for a dozen offshore drilling rigs. All deals completed, of course, just before the OPEC sword had fallen.
The women whose company he sought had all been similar, in most respects, to Diane: attractive, well-groomed companions, versed in all the most rarefied of social skills, accomplished, and, on occasion, enthusiastic in bed. Daughters of fortune, a sisterhood of what passed for the American beau monde. Women who knew the ground rules, had understood from birth the boundaries of and obligations attendant upon the holders of great wealth. They were his peers now; they constituted the pool from which he should in all rationality select a mate. His choice of Diane among them had been almost random. She fit the appropriate criteria. If something greater were eventually to grow of their pairing, well and good … and if not, then at least he had not come to the marriage with unrealistically high expectations.
Jeff cleansed his palate with a bit of cheese and sampled a semisweet Fleuri Blanc. Diane abstained this time, patted her swollen belly by way of explanation.
Maybe the child would make a difference, after all. You never knew.
The plump orange cat skittered across the hardwood floor in a headlong broken-field run good enough to match the best performance of O. J. Simpson. His prey, a shiny yellow satin ribbon, had suffered crippling damage and would soon be shredded if the cat had his way with it.
'Gretchen!' Jeff called. 'Did you know Chumley’s tearing up one of your yellow ribbons?'
'It’s O.K., Daddy,' his daughter answered from the far corner of the large sitting room, near the window overlooking the Hudson. 'Ken’s home now, and Chumley and I are helping to celebrate.'
'When did he get home? Isn’t he still in the hospital in Germany?'
'Oh, no, Daddy; he told the doctors he wasn’t sick and he had to get home right away. So Barbie sent him a ticket for the Concorde, and he got home before anybody else, and as soon as he walked in the door she cooked him six blueberry muffins and four hot dogs.'
Jeff laughed aloud, and Gretchen shot him the most withering look her wide-eyed five-year-old’s face could muster. 'They don’t have hot dogs in Iran,' she explained. 'Or blueberry muffins, either.'
'I guess not,' Jeff said, keeping his expression carefully somber. 'I suppose he’d be hungry for American food by now, huh?'
''Course he would. Barbie knows how to make him happy.'
The cat darted back in the other direction, batting the tattered ribbon between his paws, then settled on his side in a patch of sunlight to gloat over his conquest, kicking at it in sporadic bursts with his hind legs. Gretchen went back to her own games, absorbed in the alternate reality of the elaborate dollhouse that Jeff had spent more than a year building and expanding to her specifications. The miniature trees in its green felt front yard were now festooned with bright yellow ribbons, and for the past week she’d been following news reports of the end of the hostage crisis with a depth of interest most children invested only in the Saturday-morning cartoon shows. At first Jeff had been concerned about her fascination with the events in Tehran, had wanted to protect her from the potentially traumatizing effects of watching all those rabid mobs chanting 'Death to the U.S'; but he’d known the episode would have a peaceful, upbeat conclusion, so he chose to respect his daughter’s precocious grasp of the world and to trust in her emotional resilience.
He loved her to a degree he had not thought possible, found himself simultaneously wanting to shield her from all darkness and share with her all light. Gretchen’s arrival had done nothing to cement his marriage to Diane, who, if anything, seemed to resent the constraints on her life that the child represented. But no matter, Gretchen herself was source and object of all the deep affection he could encompass or imagine.
Jeff watched as she took another ribbon from one of the doll-house trees, taunted fat old Chumley with it. The cat was tired, didn’t want to play anymore; it put a soft paw entreatingly on Gretchen’s cheek,
