“The one I was brandishing as a weapon when you got home?”
“The very one.”
“I’ll get it.” A few minutes later she meets me back in the kitchen. I have three bottles tucked beneath my arm. They should be cold enough.
Her eyes widen. “Wow. Are we having a party?”
“We’re celebrating you scoring your first investor, and we’re doing it the way I know best.”
“By drinking a lot of expensive champagne?”
“By using the saber you’re holding. Come on. Let’s do this on the balcony.”
“Outside?” But she’s smiling, leading the way through the living room. Two champagne glasses dangle from her left hand. “I’ve never sabered champagne before.”
“I’ve done it enough times for the both of us. Come on, I’ll teach you.”
“You will?”
“Yes.” I open the door to the balcony and we step out in the fall air.
She pulls her jacket tight around herself, the wind playing with curls around her face. The evening air is cold, but I feel warm, watching her looking with open curiosity at me untwisting the screw caps of the champagne bottles. “How do you do it?”
It’s been too long since I’ve done this. Too long since someone looked at me like that, with openness and ownership.
“Peel away the foil like this, exposing the neck… unscrew the cage. Remember to keep your thumb on top of the cork. Now, hand me the saber.”
She does, apprehension in her eyes. It makes me grin. New York with its glittering high rises as the backdrop and a beautiful woman looking at me. I feel fourteen again, showing off in front of a girl.
“Then you run your finger along the neck. See the seam in the glass here? You need to slide the saber along the seam, toward the head, and strike at where the cork is. The spot where the two seams meet is the weakest. Pressure on that point will make the glass crack clean and the cork will fly.”
“Are you sure this is safe?”
“Yes,” I say. It mostly is, anyway. “I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
“So that’s why you got it as a wedding gift.”
I shrug. “Yeah. It was probably from one of the guys I went to boarding school with.”
“Boarding school? I didn’t know you went to boarding school.”
“Yes, I was at Andover for a time. It was better for both my grandfather and me. We did this a lot, there. You can even do it with a kitchen knife, or if you’ve an appetite for risk, a credit card.”
“Wow.”
The wind whips at my clothes and lifts her hair from her face. “Ready?”
Her eyes widen. “You’re going to do it out there?”
“Yes.” I angle the bottle at forty-five degrees out toward the dark city beyond. It’s been years. But I slide the saber along the neck once, twice, tighten my grip, and then strike.
The glass breaks clean and the cork shoots out into the cold New York air and into the darkened park.
“Oh my God!”
I laugh and pour out an inch of champagne onto the deck. It had been a clean hit, but the practice is ingrained into me. Removes any glass splinters.
“Can I try?”