For the rest of his life, K would allow himself to be haunted by the events of that night, by the minutia that had led up to the moment he put the bottle too close to the edge of the table. Dissatisfaction creased his face whenever he thought back to that ugly red stain left by that pretty red liquid; and while this had some to do with the ghastly embarrassment of the whole thing, K was primarily and rightly haunted by the disappearance of his wife.
For her part, she had been resistant – for over a decade– to opening that particular bottle in the first place, claiming that its opening required a special occasion and nothing less. K had tried to counter her argument by insisting that the opening of a bottle of wine is its own occasion. But she had been a stubborn woman who would not be swayed by K’s relatively decent assertion. In fact, their whole romantic courtship had revolved around the ebb and flow of this call and response. That bottle, ever unopened, had been how they made sense of their world. And after a few years’ time, the very idea of opening it was something neither party had dared consider with much seriousness; the discussion had become a signifier emptied, and nothing more. Just something they would talk about over candlelight or at sports events between the action.
Though K’s family loved to recount among themselves the hardships and trials of his relationship with his wife, the events surrounding the spilled bottle of wine were never discussed. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two – mother and father, or sister and brother. And this was unusual, because family matters, great and small, were everything. Even the cruelest and most random moments were routinely discussed, but not that bottle of wine.
Nobody in the family rushed to blame K for what happened; everybody knew that he was a gentle, timid soul. Still, some distant cousins just knew he was guilty of some crime. Others were more sympathetic. It could have happened to anybody, they said.
But it happened to K. For his part, he blamed his dear wife. He often thought to himself, She just had to have that fucking special occasion. If she just let me open the wine like I wanted to, none of this would have happened.
But no. A special occasion had been required. And by that, she didn’t mean their eleventh anniversary or her birthday or his promotion. She didn’t mean any of that mundane specialness. She meant a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. Such was the grandeur of their prized bottle of wine.
Neither party could place exactly where or why or how the bottle of wine had come into their possession. Over the years, the woman who had given them the bottle began to fade from collective memory. Eastern European with big white teeth and heavy eyelids, she had been the proprietress of a bar they would frequent. And, on their fifth anniversary, she presented it to them after much fanfare. It had no label. And this, the eastern European woman had said, guaranteed the authenticity of its contents, which, she had said also, haled from some eastern European country. It was less wine than elixir, the ingredients for which had been smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Poland. Or so the East European woman had said. But she was given to hyperbole often.
So the couple decided to wait for an occasion, and at some point the process of waiting suplanted the idea of opening the bottle of wine. K and his wife would revisit the topic sometimes and reminisce fondly over the yarns told by the Eastern European woman or the quirky literary types who patronized her bar.
Indeed, bottled up with their wine were memories great and small. K’s wife, before her disappearance, was afraid that uncorking the wine would uncork the memories, which would slowly drain from their lives like water after a bath. She hadn’t realized – or at least didn’t want to admit – that memories fade anyway, like artwork on a wall that gets too much direct sunlight.
Bottled up with the Eastern European were other citizens, events, and occasions. The bottle of wine itself was a repository, a bank, an archieve – at least for K’s wife. To keep their memories safe, then, she had foreclosed the opening of the bottle. She said to K once, not in jest, “Do something great, something out of this world, and I’ll let you open it.” K obeyed because he was never able to disobey a beautiful woman, especially not one he was married to.
So K gave her her special occasion, tenfold. He cured cancer and HIV. He solved intense and blood conflicts in the Middle East. He convinced prominent Republicans that black lives matter. He fixed poverty and socioeconomic inequality. He occupied Wall Street, successfully. He thawed the Arab Winter. He cloned a sheep and then a baby boy.
K’s wife was proud of her husband. She commended him and lavished him with verbal accolades and whorish sexual favors. Then she agreed to open the wine. “One last thing,” she said in bed, raising a manicured nail to her lips, “make me dinner?”
K made something impressive – laboring in the stainless steel kitchen for hours. He didn’t need to do that. But upon reflection, he shouldn’t have needed to open the wine either.
The town would say that it was his masculine pride, warped and unseemly, that did in his wife. The town would say that he had been enraged, that the police missed something in their investigation, that he should get the death penalty because certainly he killed her. But if the town had been there, they would have seen that all K was guilty of was trying to please his wife. And, of course, of being clumsy.
How was he to know that his wife had been right? I mean, what were the odds that that bottle of wine would, in fact, contain every last thing that mattered to the both of them? When it toppled from the table, both K and his wife cried out – but only because they foresaw the ruination of a newly purchased rug from Restoration Hardware. “Shit,” they exclaimed in tandem, helplessness in their eyes.
“Sorry,” K said with a sigh. Then he added, “So much that.” His wife shook her head affably. “It’s fine. I didn’t like that rug anyway.” Then she laughed. Then she said, referring to the shape taken by the spilled wine: “Look, it looks like a face.”
It did look like a face. To K, it looked like the face of the woman he had had an affair with several years ago. To his wife, it looked like the face of the man she was still in love with.
Wine continued to flow from the bottle. Too much, in fact. It was unnatural. “I’ll get a rag,” K spat. He sprang to his feet and dashed to the kitchen. Returning to the dining room, he found a deluge of red wine that, he would insist to anyone and everyone who asked, swallowed his wife.
He tried to save her. He charged into the vast sea of wine like a lifeguard. He thrashed around, ran his hands frantically through the wine. He called out. But she was gone. He found, though, in that flood, all that he had sought to keep bottled up. Shards of the world’s imperfections. Shards of his own imperfections. Shards of those of his wife. Glimpses of tragedy, betrayal, clandestine rendezvous, hookers, drugs – it all swirled around him.
K would decide later on, much later on, that what claimed his wife was not the wine itself, but rather the burden of the past, sharp and threatening. K had been able to swim to safety somehow, probably because he was the primary perpetrator of all that had threatened their union.
He would also decide that the spilling of the wine, the spilling of his sins, had granted him a perverse form of absolution. He would buy a bottle of wine to celebrate his rebirth. He would uncork it. Then he would recoil in terror when he his wife climbed out of it.
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