The Melody of Merlot, Randomness, and Honey

“What would the gentleman like to drink?” The club’s Armenian waiter asked the man in a navy-blue suit and light brown leather shoes.

“I will have what she is having,” The man shifted his focus to the women in the black dress with silver pinstripes.

“Something tells me you are the expert when it comes to wine.” Her voice was like honey slowly dripping from the comb as bees hum around it.

“Something tells me you know how to deal with people who think they are experts,” the man replied searching for her answer like shelling open a chocolate bar or like a bullet as it leaves its casing.

Luckily, the women seemed to prefer chocolate over full metal jackets. Simply choosing to see the statement as a butterfly shattering its glass cocoon. “A glass of merlot.”

“Of course.” The well-dressed waiter smiled and began to leave.

“Waiter, how about we start with the 2008 and see if we can’t find our way back to the future?” The man held his excitement with the rest of his head on the open palm of his hand.

He was smiling at the women who was tapping the table to the beat of the music.

They drank from their glasses, “Why the 2008 Ron?”

“Why merlot Lilia?”

“Every meaningful man in my life had a taste for dry red wine, I thought I would give you a head start.”

“2008 is not only an incredible year to have a glass of wine from but it is an incredible year to pick out music. I saw you tapping your foot to the song while we spoke to the waiter and I figured the complexities would mix well together.”

“Is it terrible I can’t remember a single thing from 2008? I mean I know it happened, I'm sure they were both worthwhile and there were wild things about it. But if someone said pick your favorite song from 2008, I think I would just start making up words to my own little song.”

“2008 was the year artists from the late nineties finally started figuring out how to incorporate their sounds into what would later be the pop of the twenty-tens.” As the man with the empty glass trailed off into the final words of his sentence his eyes locked with the red-haired beauty queen of the here and now. “I’m sorry that wasn’t what you were looking for.”

“And what was I looking for?” The girl’s hazel eyes, like sprouts in the dirt, intensified their gaze toward him.

“I didn’t mean to say I don’t relate to you.”

The waiter brought two more glasses of a 2010. The girl relaxed from an upright view to a slouched position in the chair. She spoke with a relaxation of speech and of the situation “I’m not here with you because I want to sculpt you into myself. I’m here because I find you brilliant and unlike myself. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Ron replied.

“If you’re one of the Michelangelo angels then I am Dante’s inferno. If you are an impressionist painting of Monet or Renoir, then I’m the hands of the peasants by Van Gough. I will never know what it is like to give birth to genius. But if I get to be a memory in the landscape of your accomplishments, that’s enough for me.”

Two tears dropped from Ron’s eyes. “May I buy you another glass of wine?”

They were two whales swimming in the celestial skies balancing the weight of their words and the infinity of each other. “What am I supposed to be tasting?” Lilia asked.

“Music,” Ron answered and reached for her hand. “The last time I had a glass of this wine I was a concert by myself.” Lilia lowered her almost empty glass. “I watched as the pianist banged on the piano. I mean just absolutely slammed it. It sounded like chaos. Like nothing, certainly not music. But after so many slams he would evolve them into melodies. He had complete control over the lines of random nonsense and how they birthed the harmonies I had never even begun to imagine before.”

“That’s beautiful,” Lilia replied to the small anecdote.

“That is what you should be tasting in the 2012 a blur between the randomness of any other drink and pure melody.”

“Have you ever been in love before?” Lilia asked, her eyes glazed from the wine but still completely coherent in the conversation and dreading its end.

“What an absolutely insane but completely appropriate question to ask on a first date,” Ron laughed.

“Well?”

“Yes, I have been in love before,” he answered directly and comfortably.

There was a pause. Ron laughed again “How interesting, it’s completely okay to ask if someone has been in love on the first date but impolite to ask what happened.”

“Do you consider yourself a genius?”

“I consider myself a drunk.”

“Well, what happened?”

“As you put it, we tried to sculpt each other into ourselves. We suffocated each other with kisses, we cracked each other with words of affection and shattered into ten thousand pieces. Until eventually the only way to become whole was to find our own ways to the sun and melt back into two separate pieces again.”

“Have you made it?”

“To the sun? Yes,” he reached across the table and kissed Lilia on the cheek.

They stumbled out of the club and started to walk home together. “We never make it to our current year.” Lilia’s face was blushed with redness from the alcohol. She kept laughing at Ron as he would take a couple of steps then stumble, a few more steps then, stumble.

“Well, the night’s not over yet Lilia,” Ron pointed to a sign for a gas station. He seemed to have perfect control over the blur of randomness and the harmony of the night.

“You’re joking, no?” Lilia gigged at Ron as he pulled a bottle from a brown paper bag with a clown on the front of the label.

Ron smiled smugly “It was the only merlot they had.”

Lilia erupted in smiles and amusement “We just spent over a grand drinking some of the best merlot available to us and you want to finish it with that?”

“I forgot to buy paper cups so we’re gonna have to swig it out of the bottle.”

“It doesn’t even have a cork!” Lilia squealed as she watched Ron screw the cap off.

Ron handed the bottle to Lilia as they went to go lie down near the parking lot. “Oh my god,” Lilia broke down in tears.

“Lilia, what happened?” Ron felt his entire world sink into itself

“This is the greatest wine I’ve ever tasted,” she handed the bottle to Ron and nestled herself into his chest.

“Oh my god,” Ron repeated. “I paid five dollars for this.”

Lilia laughed through her tears “I can taste everything.”

“Like what?” Ron asked.

“I can taste the flora that grew despite the rocky soil, I see the aromas like multi-violent reds and yellows fighting for existence, and feel the warmth of the oak barrels as they nurtured something even as it was rotting away.”

“Will you sing for me?” Ron spoke mesmerized by the beauty queen as her mascara ran and her hair became mangled.

“What song would you like to hear?”

“Something from 2008.”

“You want me to be embarrassed and drunk?”

“No, I only wish to hear your own little melody. So when I’m standing at the gates of heaven and the angels refuse to sing for me for all I failed to do in this life. I may sing them your song and they might think I’ve been blessed by one of Michelangelo’s angels instead of only having the hands of a peasant.”

Lilia wiped away her mascara and combed her hair in between her fingers. She took Ron’s hand, walking him home, and hummed like a bee around honey. She finished her song with a kiss that was the certainty of the end to a night.