Redolent

As in:

Bradley couldn’t explain his career to anyone, not even to himself. He’d graduated from Milton College with a degree in literature and quickly found himself working in cranberry bogs. Then it was on to Alaska to make real money emptying crab pots. Then he was the editor of a weekly newspaper in Nevada. Then a doorman in Manhattan. Then a cab driver in Sacramento.

Now he wrote copy for a specialty marketing service that sold prose to upscale niche marketers who traded in the romance of chocolate and jewelry and wine.

I have trouble with commitment, he had been telling his therapist. “I’m 38 and I’m not sure I’ve really started living yet.” He said that too.

But he was wrong. He hadn’t cried when he lost his father, but the day he heard that Joli had died from a fall to the tracks at a Metro station, he felt like bursting into tears. She had been the love of his life when he was 26 and the only person who knew this was his therapist. It was not even a secret that Joli could take to her grave. Because he never told her, figuring he could tell her, when the time was right.

So there he was, still trying not to weep, at his desk with the brilliant view of a ridge lined with frost-covered spruce and tamarack, and he wouldn’t even admit to himself or his boss that he had to go home for the day. That would be too honest. That wouldn’t do at all. For reasons that he hated about himself, it was just better to pretend that still nothing was sinking in.

“TenTrestle Creek Shiraz/Cabernet, hints of black cherry and Fuji apple. Suggestions of liberation theology, redolent of love in a French elevator.”

That’s what he’d written with his fountain pen on the legal pad, just in the shadow of those five minutes when his heart was breaking.