Champagne
- Oct 28, 2022
- 3 min read
by Jacqueline Doyle
I remember what I was wearing that night: a tight, short, sleeveless white dress embroidered with blue and yellow flowers. Espadrilles, smudged with sand. Gold filigree hoop earrings that he’d bought me in an expensive jewelry store that afternoon. I had a rare tan. The candle on the restaurant table flickered as we gazed into one another’s eyes. His smile lit tiny fires all over my body.
It was my last night after a year abroad in Europe. I was nineteen years old, and I was in love. I’d never had champagne before. I’d never been camping in a VW bus before. I’d never made love on a beach before, gazing up at the night sky, listening to the gentle crash of the waves. So many more stars in Greece than I’d ever seen at home! There were so many things I’d never done before. I kept touching my new earrings. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.
I’d learn, soon enough, that he was prone to extravagant gestures. Like tossing aside his life in Germany at a moment’s notice to follow me to the U.S. after he’d followed me to Greece. It was love at first sight! Like carrying me up the stairs in front of my housemates when he arrived. Like marrying me on the grounds of a German baron’s castle and abandoning his studies to follow me to grad school. Like spending our meager savings on a BMW motorcycle without telling me first. The gas tank was teal blue, “the color of your eyes,” he said. Like leaving me to follow a coworker to Taiwan, and leaving her to become a Tai Chi instructor. Like leaving his next wife and two children.
He fancied himself a romantic. I suppose he was a romantic. How many times did he surprise me with gifts and roses? Ordering a bottle of champagne was clearly unusual in this modest restaurant by the ocean. I don’t remember where we were that night, somewhere on the coast heading south to the airport in Athens where I’d catch a plane to the States.
There was a ritual in the restaurant for the rare occasions when they served champagne, and the waiter was nervous. He brought over a number of champagne glasses and built a careful pyramid, glasses stacked on glasses, four or five rows high. Uncorked the champagne. Began to pour champagne into the topmost glass with a trembling hand. The champagne was supposed to cascade like a fountain down the rows. But one of the glasses tipped and the entire pyramid collapsed.
We were ready to clap, but instead the waiter slunk away, ashamed, like a magician who’d botched a trick on stage, reaching behind his back for a bouquet of roses that turned out to be: Voilà! Something else entirely. Five wilting balloons leaking helium. A worn pack of cards. A sheaf of overdue bills. And so it was with the boyfriend, whom I would later marry, unable to see beyond the promises he made to what was really behind his back. Roses that died too soon. Betrayals revealed too late. A packet of apologies on thin air mail stationery.
Jacqueline Doyle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to her previous publication in Trampset, she has published flash in Wigleaf, matchbook, and Gone Lawn, and a flash fiction chapbook with Black Lawrence Press (The Missing Girl). Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter @doylejacq.
