The pairing, p.11
The Pairing, page 11
“Oh yeah? Tell her I’d buy anything from her.”
He does, and when she answers, he translates, “You should come back to the market tomorrow, then.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow, but I have all night.”
Kit translates, and Juliette answers, but he doesn’t take his eyes off me for the entire exchange. It’s almost like he’s asking for himself when he translates, “What do you want to do that will take all night?”
I look directly into his eyes and say, “Something I’m very good at.”
For a second, Kit’s face goes completely immobile. Then he lets out a laugh that’s all breath.
“You know what, I don’t think I’m needed here anymore,” he says, holding his hands up.
Juliette and I laugh, which doesn’t need any translation. As everyone begins to collapse into the sand, I find myself sideways on a flower-patterned towel with my head in Juliette’s lap. Kit falls on the other side of the circle with Paloma, talking quietly in the lantern light and sharing the last mouchous.
It feels so natural here, like we’re among our people. Right now, I can imagine us here forever. Theo-and-Kit side-by-side in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. A perfect hyphenate daisy chain. We could have neighboring apartments down the street from Paloma’s and lunches of cheese and fruit from the market. I would swim in the bay every morning, and Kit would go out to the mountains every weekend to sketch plants. We could become best friends again, spend the rest of our lives together.
I realize I’ve never felt this comfortable before, outside of the Valley. I didn’t know it was possible.
My phone buzzes from my hip pack: another email from Schnauzer Bride. I ignore it and open my texts instead, replying to Sloane’s message from this morning.
you know all those times you said i need to get out of the valley? I type. maybe you were onto something …
When I’m done, I look up in time to see Kit take Paloma’s face in his hand.
It’s a gentle, exploratory touch, his fingers lacing into the hair at her nape. His thumb brushes her jaw. She’s still for a moment, and then her hand covers his.
His gaze shifts away from her face, to mine.
It’s fleeting, but I catch it. The question in his eyes. The genuine need. It’s a fair trade for earlier, with Juliette. He wants me to watch.
He leans forward and kisses her.
I go under.
In the moment of suspension after the plunge, we’re everywhere. A hundred thousand memories of a hundred thousand touches circle like shoals of little iridescent fish. Kit’s lips against the bridge of my nose. Kit holding the side of my face in the laundry detergent aisle. A slice of cake on a bad day and Kit’s apron smeared with buttercream, a grateful kiss to each of his fingertips. Passed dishes, stolen covers, a thumbprint of strawberry juice on my chin. My hand pinning his shoulder to the wall, his mouth livid and wet and starving. The way he kissed me at the kitchen table the first morning we were honest.
Air runs out. I kick to the surface.
Up here, he’s still kissing Paloma, and my head is still in Juliette’s lap, and we’re friends again. Just friends, just barely.
I sit up and pull Juliette’s mouth to mine.
It’s easy to kiss her. So smooth and sweet and uncomplicated. She puts her hand on the side of my neck and kisses back, and I slip my tongue into her mouth and taste nectar and buttery bread. There’s nothing hidden here, just pure curiosity and desire, no sense memories to flood my body or ghosts to stick in my throat, and it’s nice, isn’t it? Is this what Kit felt? Is he watching the way I watched him?
I open my eyes to see for myself, but his spot in the sand is empty. When I scan the beach, I can’t find him or Paloma anywhere.
I break the kiss and try to remember the French words for Where the fuck did they go?
“Où—” Shit, I only know present tense. “Où est—” Wait, that’s singular. “Où sont Kit et Paloma?”
Juliette gives the group a perfunctory once-over and shrugs, her dress falling farther down her shoulder.
“Je ne sais pas,” she says, kissing me again.
I kiss her for four seconds, five.
“Sorry, I just—do you think she took him home?”
Juliette chases after my mouth.
“Je ne sais pas.”
I close my eyes, trying to focus on the feeling of her breath on my skin, but—
“Do you know if she likes him? Like, really likes him?”
She pulls away this time, sitting back with a sigh. She regards me from under her long lashes with an expression that’s soft and almost sad, almost kind, with a bitter finish. The crease between her brows reappears.
She calls out to the bartender, who crawls over to kiss her cheek and listen as she tells him something in French. He looks at me with that same strange expression and says, “She wants you to know you don’t have to do this if you love someone else.”
The words land like a sprained ankle.
“What? I—” I glance between them, a laugh bubbling up from my chest. “Oh, that’s—no, it’s not what you think. Kit’s my friend.”
Juliette and the bartender exchange a look.
“She says you’re lovely, but she doesn’t settle for second place.”
I try to argue, but it’s useless. Whatever Juliette saw between Kit and me, whatever broke inside my brain when I saw him kissing Paloma, whatever was cut loose when my skin touched his in the water—Juliette has decided it’s love. It doesn’t matter how much I insist it’s not.
She presses a kiss to the back of my hand and gives me a pitying smile, and the bartender passes me a bottle.
SAN SEBASTIANPAIRS WELL WITH:
Txakoli poured high above the glass, tortilla de patatas
The short version is, I’m pissed at Kit.
The long version is, we’re on a pintxos crawl through glorious, sun-soaked San Sebastián, and everything is sumptuous and salty and soaked in oil and piled atop the most delectable morsels of crusty bread, and Kit looks happy, and I’m pissed.
I’ve read the San Sebastián portion of World Travel five times, so I know exactly what Bourdain said about this place. He wrote that it might be the greatest culinary destination in Europe, and that he imagined himself living a perfect life here. I get it—I feel it in every corner of this city, every sand-dusted tile and fuzzy green stone, every brick in every Gothic arch, whiffs of saffron and clove and guindilla at every overstuffed pintxos bar.
We’ve arrived on the last day of Semana Grande, the city’s end-of-summer festival, and the streets are fucking alive. Street performers balance on milk jugs with puppets on their hands, cooks under tents pound balls of dough into pans, giant-headed mascots chase screaming children through the squares. The chaos is incandescent and overwhelming and viscerally of its own place, like a cava waterboarding.
And still, I’m pissed at Kit.
I don’t want to be pissed. I want to feel the way I did yesterday. I want to be here, on the small peninsula of San Sebastián’s Old Town, in a dim bar with ham hocks hanging from the ceiling, slurping buttered clams and enjoying the company of my friend Kit.
“Oh my God, Theo,” Kit’s saying, passing me a skewer of pickled olives, peppers, and anchovies on a slice of baguette. “You have to try this one.”
Fabrizio pops up beside us in an even more spectacularly good mood than usual. I’m surprised his shirt’s still on.
“La Gilda! Excellent choice! This is the first Basque pintxo in history. Do you know the film Gilda?”
“With Rita Hayworth?” I ask.
“Yes! This is named for her, because it tastes like how she was in the film. Green, salty, and spicy.”
We find ourselves sharing a little table with the old Swedish couple Kit befriended on the first day. Plate after plate of pintxos pour from the kitchen—slices of tortillas de patatas, mushroom croquetas, velvety goose liver and herb-flecked anchovies on bread topped with duck eggs—so many that Fabrizio sweeps in to help the waiters. Kit sits sideways in his chair and laughs at everything, his body loose with the unmistakable contentment of the recently fucked.
It’s all so easy for him. Leaving me for a shiny new life, kissing sexy fishmongers and abandoning me to be cockblocked by my own unresolved feelings. Even when we were together, I could see the vines of potential spiraling out of him, reaching for taller trellises in bigger fields. He gets everything he ever dreamed of, and I’m where I’ve always been, one step behind.
It would be such a relief to create a problem for him, even a small one.
Fabrizio drops off a plate of croquetas and compliments Birgitte’s blouse, and when he saunters off, Birgitte says, “Den där Fabrizio, he is like a painting we have in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.”
“Which one?” Kit asks.
“I think I know,” says her bespectacled husband, Lars. With the jolly mischief of a man wearing a straw fedora indoors, Lars pulls up something on his phone and shows it to his wife.
“Ja! This is him!”
She shows us an extremely horny painting entitled The Youth of Bacchus, featuring a bunch of naked, nubile, wine-drunk revelers in a forest, either dancing or warming up for an orgy.
“Oh, yeah, I definitely see it,” Kit says. He zooms in on the central figure, a muscular, bronze-skinned man with a tambourine-waving child on his shoulders and a leopard hide barely concealing his dick. “Especially his, uh—his—”
He points at the grooves of abdominal muscle near the figure’s hips and takes a sip of wine, trusting me to choose the appropriate phrase. Iliac furrows? V-line? Adonis belt?
I say, “Cum gutters.”
Kit chokes.
“Kümgütter?” Birgitte asks. “What is this word, kümgütter?”
I thump Kit between the shoulders, smiling beatifically. “Kit, care to explain?”
“I—” Kit shoots me a look that’s half glare, half terrible delight. My smile widens. “It’s, ah, American slang for the lower muscles on the stomach.”
“Oh!” Lars exclaims. “We call this bäckenspåret! In America, I should say kümgütter?”
“No no no,” Kit says, distressed, “it’s vulgar slang.”
“Is it?” Birgitte asks. She leans in with a twinkle in her eye. “What does it mean?”
Kit looks to me for help. I open the translation app on my phone and press the mic button until the digital bleat sounds.
“Cum gutter,” I enunciate loudly enough for the next tables to hear. “Huh, no results.”
“Please, you will not embarrass us,” Lars says. “Go on!”
Kit takes a breath. “So, during sex, when a person with a penis finishes on their partner’s stomach, and—”
“Ahhh, I see,” Lars interrupts, alight with glee. He says something to his wife in Swedish, and she nods knowingly.
“Cum and gutter! Two words!”
Despite my best efforts, this seems to have permanently endeared us to Lars and Birgitte. They ask us so many questions that I’m half expecting a Christmas card from Sweden this holiday season.
“And you two,” Lars says, gesturing between Kit and me, “you are—?”
“Friends,” I say.
“Old friends,” Kit elaborates.
“Very good! And how did you meet?”
Kit and I exchange a look, waiting each other out.
“We went to grade school together,” I say.
Kit weighs this answer, pushing an olive across his plate. He’s not letting me off this easy, not after the cum gutters.
“That was where we met,” he says, “not how we met.”
I remember the day Kit showed up. Second grade, a skinny little changeling trying to explain to a bunch of California kids named Josh and Taylor how to pronounce his name—his real, French name, not the one he goes by. He was different. He had big, daydreamy eyes and a gentle accent that none of us had heard, and he spent every recess reading books in trees.
I was different too, a tomboy in the extreme, always wearing cargo shorts and insisting on being let into the boys’ games. One day I found Kit in a stairwell, cornered by two of the boys who wouldn’t play with me and trying not to cry. Maybe if he had been crying already I would have just gotten a teacher, but he was biting his lip, holding the tears back. Those little assholes didn’t deserve the satisfaction.
When I was called to the principal’s office that afternoon for fighting, he was there, waiting for his mom. She called him a different name than the one on the classroom roster, a family nickname. Kit. I asked him if I could call him that too, and when he said yes, I told him to call me Theo.
The Swedes adore this story.
They reward us with their tale of meeting each other at a ski lodge in the Alps, where they were celebrating their respective divorces. After three nights of discussing art by the lodge’s fireplace, they realized they’d met before on a hiking trail in Croatia in their early twenties. They married within months, and they’ve been inseparable for fifteen years now.
“I was a fool the first time we met,” Lars says. “Proud, crude, always one woman after another.”
“And I was married!” Birgitte adds. “It was the wrong time. But he was the right man.”
Lars wraps his hand around hers. “Still, I wonder what life would be if I had asked her to run away with me that day at Jezero Kozjak.” He looks at us intently. “Learn from an old man. Take care of good love when you find it.”
Kit glances at me with something soft in his eyes, like we could still be those kids in California.
The Somm once told me how he came to love wine. Everyone has that one bottle, he said. His was a red that sat in his mother’s kitchen window for twenty-seven years, until one day he looked up the vintage on the sun-bleached label and discovered it could have been worth forty thousand dollars if stored properly. Instead, it’s a window decoration, a precious thing that spoiled because nobody thought to take care of it.
I do, despite everything, want to take care of this. There’s never been another person who could fill Kit’s place, and I know there never will be. I’ve been living around that gap, never looking at it, always feeling the draft it lets in. Yesterday was so warm, though.
I want to be his friend—not because it’ll make the trip easier, but because I want to. But I can’t do it like this. If I’m going to do it right, there are things I have to say.
* * *
The green peak of Monte Igueldo towers over San Sebastián, and a little amusement park sits on top. In the packed crowd of Semana Grande tourists, I feel my first moment of gratitude for our navigational beacon of butt-fucky Pinocchio puppet. At least when it’s time to regroup in an hour, I’ll only have to look up.
Before Kit can be swept away, I grab the strap of his sling bag. I point to a sign advertising a children’s boat ride with once-in-a-lifetime views.
“Wanna be my co-captain?”
“Yeah,” he says, smiling. “Yeah, let’s go.”
At the front of the line, a teenaged ride operator waves us into a miniature boat and pushes us off down the long, winding flume. Greenish water carries us forward, alone together, Kit in the front seat, me in the back.
At the first big curve, the trees fringing the flume give way to open air, and the view spreads into panoramic widescreen. It’s as spectacular as promised: water glistening for miles into the horizon of the Atlantic, the distinctive seashell-shaped bay of La Concha, small white sailboat triangles, jutting green islets, lush mountains cupping the city and fading off into distant blue-gray shadows.
The boat rounds another corner and floats into a rocky cave, and then, as if to wake us up from a dream, our boat bangs into the one in front of us.
The river is stuffed bumper-to-bumper as far as I can see, each boat full of confused tourists and cranky children. Another boat collides with ours, and when I turn to check, it’s Stig waving at me apologetically.
“Hey buddy,” I say.
“Hallå,” Stig replies. His boat is sitting dangerously low in the water.
“I think we’re stuck,” Kit says.
We wait, sitting in silence except for the rush of water and the conversation of the Portuguese tourists in the next boat. Stig hums to himself. I study the inside of the cave.
It appears to have been decorated to appeal to children sometime in the late ’90s, but not in any way that makes sense. In the recesses of the cavern, someone has propped up plywood cutouts of a random assortment of Disney characters—Peter Pan, Quasimodo, Hercules flexing his biceps, all looking conspicuously un-trademarked. Between them are a few topless mermaids, a stuffed stork, and a plaster crocodile with glowing red eyes.
“Interesting decor,” I comment, eyeing a mannequin dressed as a pirate and a hauntingly out-of-place skeleton.
“Sort of Disneyland meets Willy Wonka’s nightmare tunnel,” Kit replies.
“‘It’s a Small World’ on ayahuasca.”
Kit laughs, and I think, fuck it. There’s no good place for this conversation. Might as well have it in a cursed mermaid-nipple dimension.
I take a breath and say, “Kit.”
He twists in his seat to face me like he’s expecting another joke. I can see the moment he registers the serious look on my face, and the quarter second after, when he calculates how rarely I look serious about anything.
“Oh.” He pushes a piece of hair behind his ear. “Are we…?”
We are.
“I know I said I didn’t want to talk about what happened,” I say. “And I honestly don’t see the point of getting into what we said on the plane, or the Paris thing, because I haven’t changed my mind, and you obviously haven’t either.” I pause. He doesn’t contradict me. “But I do have to talk about what came after, if we’re going to be friends.”
Kit absorbs that.
“Okay,” he says, nodding thoughtfully. “After. What do you mean? Heathrow?”
My face flashes hot. I’m already irritated on reflex.
