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Beatrice arrives late, which is her way of arriving on time. She stands at the edge of the tent and surveys the scene, not unlike a criminal investigator. White lights are strung through the rafters. A jazz trio plays something that sounds like it’s apologising for what it’s playing. Hero, at the centre of it all, wears cream silk, along with a smile that has not faltered in three hours. Claudio keeps touching the small of her back, the gesture both proprietary and tender, like he’s checking for his wallet.
“You came!” Hero exclaims, detaching herself from him.
“I said I would.”
Hero gave her a side eye. “You said you’d rather drink antifreeze.”
“Well.” Beatrice accepts a glass of champagne from a passing tray. “Tastes change.”
The vineyard belongs to Leonato, Hero’s father, though tonight it belongs to the event — the launch of his memoir, Grafting. The book is, in fact, about grafting: of trees, of families, of his own late-in-life conversion to something he calls ‘intentional fatherhood’. Which does make one wonder if he’d been coasting on unintentional fatherhood up to that point. The book is dedicated to Hero and, in smaller type, to his late wife. Beatrice has not read it. She has, however, read the review in The Atlantic, which described it as ‘earnest to the point of unction’.
“Benedick isn’t here,” Hero says.
Beatrice raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t ask.”
“I’m just observing.”
“Observe quieter.”
Hero smiles. She has always been too kind, Beatrice thinks, or else too wise to waste her energy on anything else. They watch Claudio accept a handshake from an older man, who grips his elbow with both hands and says something that makes Claudio nod gravely. It does not usually take much to make Claudio nod gravely.
“He’s very handsome,” Hero remarks.
“Claudio? He’s a Ken doll with a wallet.”
“I meant Benedick.”
Beatrice drains her glass. “Then your observational skills remain excellent. And your choice in males, mysterious.”
She finds him twenty minutes later. He stands alone near the bar, scrutinising the wine list with the expression of a man reading his own autopsy. She almost smiles at that. His hair is shorter now, grayer at the temples. He looks, she thinks, infuriatingly like himself.
“Beatrice.”
“Benedick. I see you’ve decided to grace us with your ambivalence.”
He sets down the list. “I was invited.”
“Oh, I know. You’ve never done anything you weren’t invited to do. It’s one of your defining qualities.”
“I also breathe. And metabolise. Shall I list the other biological functions?”
“Skip it,” she says, and yet she does not leave. The jazz trio oozes into something by Gershwin. Benedick watches her in his peculiar way — not quite looking, not quite not — as though she were a painting he is trying to decide whether to buy.
“I read your piece,” he says at last. “The one about the wildfires.”
“You hate it.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You hate everything I write.”
“I hate that you’re better at it than I am.” He says this without apparent effort. “The prose is clean, and there is an actual argument in there. I particularly enjoyed the part where you eviscerated the insurance lobby. It was — how do the kids say it? — chef’s kiss.”
He mimes a small smack of his lips against his fingers, and Beatrice feels something in her chest loosen, then tighten again. “You’re only saying that because you want something.”
“I want another drink. But I’m also saying it because it’s true.”
She allows this to hang between them. A waiter passes, and Benedick flags him down with a single gesture. He has always been efficient, she remembers. With movement, with words, and with the pruning of his affections.
“How’s the novel?” She asks.
“Unfinished. Aggressively, belligerently unfinished. It’s starting to feel like a hostage situation.” He pauses. “I think I may have to kill it.”
Beatrice scoffs. “That seems dramatic.”
“I’m a dramatic person. You’ve said so yourself.”
“I’ve said many things.”
“And I’ve remembered them all.” He says this lightly. “I keep a file. ‘Beatrice on Benedick: A Comprehensive Index of Disappointment.’”
She stares at him. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
Beatrice looks away, finds Hero laughing at something Claudio has whispered in her ear. Finds Leonato holding court by the oak barrels, his hands moving in the expansive gestures of a man accustomed to being listened to. Finds, past them, a man she doesn’t recognise, standing very still at the edge of the light.
The man is watching Claudio with neither longing nor resentment, but something else, something more clinical. He holds his phone against his thigh, screen dark. When he senses Beatrice’s gaze, he turns, smiles briefly, and disappears into the crowd.
“Who is that?” Beatrice asks.
Benedick follows her sightline. “No idea. Friend of Claudio’s?”
“Claudio doesn’t have friends. He has admirers and obligations.”
“Cynic.”
“Realist.” But something has shifted in her chest, some low-frequency vibration of alarm. “He was staring at Claudio.”
“Everyone stares at Claudio. He’s very stare-able. It’s his primary attribute, in fact.”
“This was different.”
Benedick is quiet for a moment. “You think something’s going to happen.”
“I think,” Beatrice says slowly, “that things are always happening. We just don’t see them until we are forced to.”
The night deepens. The jazz trio packs up, and a DJ takes their place. The crowd shifts from literary to louche. Claudio and Hero dance, or something like dancing — his hands at her waist, her head on his shoulder, both of them moving to a beat entirely off-sync with the dance floor. Beatrice watches them from the bar, nursing a whiskey she doesn’t want.
“You used to dance,” says the voice beside her.
She doesn’t need to turn. “I used to do a lot of things, Benedick. I used to smoke.”
“You still smoke. I saw you behind the press tent.”
“Then why ask.”
Benedick settles onto the stool next to hers. He smells of gin and something clean and specific — soap, she decides.
“I didn’t ask,” he says. “I observed. It’s what I do.”
“No,” she says, turning to him. “You document. Observation actually requires presence, and you’ve always been very careful to remain elsewhere.”
He considers this. His profile, in the low light, has softened. Sleepy, almost. “That’s fair,” he says. “I’ve been elsewhere. I’ve been so elsewhere that I forgot how to be here.” He looks down. “I’m trying to learn.”
Beatrice sets down her glass. Her heart is being rather unprofessional. “Benedick.”
“Aye aye, captain.”
“What are we doing?”
“I think we’re having a conversation. I’m told it’s what people do, when they want to communicate without the use of intermediaries. Or passive-aggressive op-eds.”
“We don’t have conversations.”
“Then this is a ceasefire to not-conversations.” He holds up his glass. “Truce?”
She should not. She really should not. What she should do is walk away, find Hero, compliment her dress, inquire about honeymoon plans. She should reclaim her car from the parking lot, and drive back to the city, where her apartment waits in tidy solitude, where her work waits in clean paragraphs, where no one waits at all.
She picks up her glass.
“Truce,” she says. “But I’m not getting on that dance floor.”
Later, after the cake has been cut and the toasts have been made and Claudio has kissed Hero with the careful reverence of a man who has been told that this is his last acceptable public display, Beatrice steps outside.
The air is cool, smelling of eucalyptus and the distant salt of the bay. She finds a bench and sits, her phone dark in her hand. She should check that email, or draft that piece on urban development. She should do literally anything other than sit here, thinking about the way Benedick said I’m trying to learn.
Footsteps on gravel. She doesn’t look up.
“You left,” he says.
“I needed air.”
“You needed to be alone.”
“Same thing.”
He sits anyway, leaving a careful distance between them. The vineyard stretches out below, rows of vines silver in the moonlight. An owl calls.
“I read your novel,” Beatrice says. “The first one. The one about the war.”
Benedick goes very still. “You never said.”
“You never asked.”
“I assumed you hated it.”
“I did hate it. It was beautiful and brutal. I hated it the way I hate the flu, or the way my father looked at me when I told him I was moving to New York.” She pauses. “I’ve read it four times.”
The silence stretches. When Benedick speaks, his voice is different. “I wrote it for you.”
“I know.”
“Every word. Every sentence. I kept thinking, What would she say? What pitfall would she pounce on? Which passages would she underline with no explanation?” He exhales. “It’s been ten years. I’m still writing for you. I don’t know how to stop.”
Beatrice closes her eyes. The owl calls again, closer now. She thinks of the man at the edge of the tent, with his patient stillness and his dark phone. She thinks of how quickly things can shatter, and how obediently catastrophe can wait.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she says.
He turns to look at her. In the moonlight, his face is stripped of its usual irony.
“Beatrice, what are you trying to say?”
She opens her eyes. The vineyard spreads before them, orderly and patient, each vine drafted to a rootstock that will never bear its own fruit, but will feed another. It is, she thinks, a certain faith — to believe that something can take root and thrive, through every season, every permutation.
“I’m saying,” she says, “that the ceasefire is temporary. I’m saying that that I reserve the right to resume hostilities at any moment. I’m saying that you owe me a drink, and also an explanation of why you wore that jacket, and also — also, Benedick —“
She stops. He is watching her with something like wonder.
“Also?” He prompts.
“Also,” she says, “I’m saying that I’m pissed. Pissed that I missed you. Unbelievably pissed.”
He smiles. He smiles like he has never smiled before, and never will again.
“I can live with that,” he says.
Inside, the party continues. Claudio and Hero are saying goodbye, with Leonato’s hands on both their shoulders. The man at the edge of the tent has vanished, his purpose unknown, his presence already dissolving into memory. Tomorrow, there will be emails, and deadlines, and the ordinary machinery of life will churn on.
But tonight, on a bench overlooking a vineyard, two people are elsewhere. So elsewhere they are right where they are meant to be.