The Pairing, page 5
I’m beginning to suspect that a flirtatious smile and a genuine love of food and drink might get me anywhere.
The tour meets back up for lunch on a gourmet sightseeing cruise on the Seine, and I talk to Fabrizio for an hour about spaghetti Westerns while licking caviar off a spoon. We’re served an Irouleguy Blanc so carefully sculpted, I write down built like Swayze in 1989 in my notes. I’m in such a good mood, I don’t care when my eyes meet Kit’s across the dining room. I don’t even think about his pity cake or new relationship. In fact, I decide I’d be more concerned if Kit wasn’t dating anyone. He’s so good at it, it would be a waste for him to stay single forever, like Meryl Streep quitting movies.
I, personally, am single by choice, not lack of opportunity. I get plenty of opportunities. At my last wedding gig, I pulled a bridesmaid and a groomsman, and we gave one another so many opportunities that I had to have Gatorade for breakfast.
For the evening, we have tickets for the Moulin Rouge dinner cabaret, so I change into the nicest outfit I packed, a sleeveless black linen jumpsuit that plunges down my chest in a deep V. I turn in the mirror, pleased with the clean, subtle lines of my chest. I look good, strong, androgynous. Like someone who’s not afraid of this city and never has been.
My luck runs out under a glittering chandelier. Inside the theater, the space arches in lush, carpeted tiers with crisp white linens and lamps with opulent silk shades on endless tables. We’ve been divided into tables of six and eight, and as Fabrizio hands us off to our maître d’, I realize who I’m seated with.
“Hello again,” Kit says.
I bite the inside of my cheek. “Hi.”
He does clean up nicely. Or, he’s always clean, always neatly groomed and preternaturally fresh-smelling, but he knows how to make himself look like art. A cream linen shirt with a Cuban collar and delicate accents of embroidered flowers, tapered trousers cinched at his narrow waist, some of his hair twisted back into—did he braid it? Did he sit in his little room and lovingly braid his hair like he used to braid his sister’s?
To add insult to injury, dinner comes with one bottle of champagne for every two people, and we have to share.
Across the table, Blond Calum eyes his champagne. “What, no absinthe? We don’t get to meet the green fairy?”
“I reckon Kylie Minogue was booked tonight,” Ginger Calum says.
Kit and I let out identical, simultaneous laughs. Both Calums look at us with eyebrows raised.
“Got that one, did ya?” Ginger Calum says. “Most Americans I’ve met don’t even know who Kylie Minogue is.”
“Heathens,” Blond Calum adds.
“We’re—” Kit says. “I’m a massive Moulin Rouge fan. It was my favorite movie growing up.”
I’ve been trying not to think about it, Kit at thirteen, obsessed with a high-camp, high-saturation tragedy about forbidden love and dying of consumption. He’s always been so completely himself.
“Once,” I say, “in the eighth grade, he made me watch it four times in one night.”
“I didn’t make you,” Kit teases, and then he flinches, like he doesn’t know if this is allowed. His voice softens as he adds, “You were the one who wanted to learn every word of ‘Elephant Love Medley.’”
“And you were a full-grown adult when you convinced me to do it with you at someone else’s karaoke birthday.”
“Crikey,” Ginger Calum says. “That’ll kill the party.”
“Oh, tanked it,” I say.
“Very poorly reviewed,” Kit agrees, beginning to smile.
“We pulled it out, though, with—”
“‘Can’t Stop Loving You,’” we finish at the same time.
Our eyes meet, and I feel my mouth slipping into a smile. God, we got some mileage out of that song. So many nights in smoky bars or house parties, the two of us laughing into squawky microphones over an instrumental track. I haven’t been able to think of it in years, but strangely, it doesn’t hurt the same right now.
“Phil Collins,” Blond Calum says with a sage nod. “Good lad.”
“Good lad,” I agree.
When the lights go down and the curtain rises on the luminous heart-shaped stage, I remind myself not to get sappy. I don’t watch Kit’s reactions from the corner of my eye. I choose the loveliest dancer on stage, and I focus only on her. It helps.
But it doesn’t prepare me for the way Kit catches my elbow as we stand for the final bow. I find him gazing at me, golden in the chandelier glow.
“Do you still want to make up for last night?” he says under the cheers of the audience.
“What?”
“When I couldn’t go out with you,” he says. “Do you want to have that drink now? My favorite bar is around the corner, if you want to see it.”
It’s the fault of nostalgia, of my surprisingly successful morning, of blurry memories of Ewan McGregor’s earnest belting and Kit spinning me under a disco ball, that I hear myself say, “Yeah, why not?”
* * *
We head off from the Moulin Rouge’s red windmill, down the wide Boulevard de Clichy, past sex shop after topless bar after sex shop. Girls grasp their heaving bosoms in portraits over shop fronts full of mannequins in lacy red chemises. Flashing displays advertise vibrators in every imaginable shape and size, and some I’ve never even thought to imagine.
“I hope that’s where we’re going,” I say, pointing at a three-story emporium, ominously emblazoned with the name SEXODROME in neon red letters. I’m nervous and searching for jokes. “I’ve always wanted to go to”—I drop my voice to the guttural register of monster truck announcer—“THE SEXODROME.”
Unable to resist a bit, Kit replies, “You need a Parisian mailing address to get into THE SEXODROME.”
“Canceling THE SEXODROME for discriminatory business practices.”
He laughs and takes a left at a violet-painted club called Pussy’s, down a sloping side street with ivy-covered apartments and fenced private gardens. At a bright red door beside a window promising pints for four euros, he stops.
“This is it.”
Kit’s favorite bar is the width of my room at the hostel.
“Are we gonna fit in there?”
Kit just smiles and pushes inside.
My love of cramped dives is extensive and well-documented, but I don’t see anything unique about this one. Standard-issue scuffed bar top and sagging liquor shelves, the usual worn barstools. Maybe Kit has cultivated a sentimental attachment to absinthe drippers. It’s too loud to hear each other, so he has to lean in and speak right into my ear.
“I’ll get you a drink.” His breath hits my neck, tangling in my hair. “Still the same?”
I do want my usual whiskey ginger, but I don’t want him to think he can use the same old map to navigate me.
“I’ll have a boulevardier, actually,” I say. Kit pulls away, blinking. “Are there tables in the back?”
“Ah, yes, should be,” he says. “Go through the doors at the end of the hall.”
I squeeze past the bar and down a crowded little hallway, where an antique wardrobe stands against the back wall, its doors carved with scrolls of leaves. These can’t be the doors Kit meant, but they’re the only ones here. At the risk of looking like I’m raiding coat check, I grab both handles and pull.
Oh.
The back of the wardrobe has been cut out, revealing a hidden room decorated like a hotel suite Oscar Wilde would have done opium in. Violets and palms fan out on the peeling wallpaper behind red-shaded sconces. Two men drink cognac on armchairs draped with dustcloths. Beside them, a group of women gossip atop nightstands piled with cushions, coupe glasses glinting on a battered travel trunk. A couple toasts champagne in a sawed-open claw-foot tub. And at the center of it all is a huge antique bed.
It’s exactly the kind of place I love, the kind of place Kit knows I love. I’m a speakeasy person. I love a brilliant secret.
The only open seat is a corner of the bed, and when I sit, my ass plummets into the downy mattress. Kit finds me wriggling out of the abyss, elbowing cushions to pull myself upright.
“Oh, you got the bed,” he says, setting the drinks down on a nearby stool. “I’ve never gotten to sit here before.”
“I should warn you, it’s not very supportive—”
Too late. Kit sits, and the mattress collapses under his weight, dumping him backward and sideways until we’re piled on top of each other.
Except for the collision on the bus and our cease-fire handshake, Kit and I haven’t touched. Now, he’s everywhere. All of his body covers all of mine at once, his body heat and the scent of lavender surrounding me. His knees crash against my knees, his hips pushing mine deeper into the bed, and the only way out is for him to twist around and plant his hand on my other side, bracketing me in his arms. He’s so close, I can almost make out the threads of the flowers on his shirt.
“Ah,” he grunts, eyes dark and unfocused. “Hi. Sorry.”
He exhales a short puff of air that ripples the hair around his face. An evil part of my brain tells me to tuck it behind his ear.
“I like the bar,” I say conversationally.
“I thought you might.”
“Almost as exciting as the Sexodrome.”
“It’s actually pronounced THE SEXODROME.”
“Oh, really? Is that the local tongue?”
“No, the local tongue is what you get when you go in.”
My laugh comes out as a hoarse bark, and Kit finally pushes up and away from me. For good measure, I grab a pillow and shove it between us. We both reach for our drinks.
“Corpse Reviver?” I ask, watching the liquid disappear between his lips.
He swallows. “Necromancer.”
“So, the same thing, but with more absinthe,” I conclude, pleased that his drink order hasn’t changed much. My boulevardier swishes across my tongue, perfectly bitter.
Kit watches me over his glass, lashes lowered, almost smiling and almost not. It’s a look he’d get when he was building a recipe around one ingredient, like he was rotating it in his mind and imagining it as part of a whole. He’s seeing me in a scene from his life in Paris and deciding whether I complement the flavors.
Immediately, intensely, I don’t want to let him reach a conclusion. Instead I say the first disruptive thing that comes to mind.
“So, how did you break your nose?”
He blinks. “Sorry?”
“Your nose. You said you broke it a couple years ago. How did it happen?”
“Oh.” He lowers his glass. “On a water taxi in Venice.”
I have feelings about two parts of his response: the part that means he’s already had his first time in Italy without me, and the part where he was on a water taxi, which is objectively funny. It’s easy to choose which to focus on.
“Let me guess,” I say. “The boat passed under a window and you were struck by a falling wheel of Parmesan.”
Kit laughs. “I wish.”
“Turf dispute with a gondolier.”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I hooked up with a water taxi driver while I was staging at a restaurant in Venice for a few weeks. He was distracted while driving and overestimated the height of a bridge.”
“Oh my God. Please tell me the distraction was the hooking up.”
Kit’s eyes sparkle. “It was my birthday.”
“Incredible. Wow. So glad I asked.”
“What about you? Any broken bones?”
“No, but check this out.”
I hold out my right hand, palm up, showing off the thin ridge of a scar from thumb to wrist. “Longboarding accident. Heard an ice cream truck and hit a curb. Stitches and everything.”
“Longboarding? I thought you stopped skating when we were sixteen.”
“That was until I got rid of the Soobie,” I say. My old silver Subaru hatchback, may she rest in peace.
“No!” Kit gasps, genuinely aggrieved. “The Soobie? When?”
“A few years ago. Traded it for a Volkswagen bus.”
“Now that I can see,” Kit says. I flip my hand over, and his eyes land on the tattoo on my forearm. “That’s new too.”
“Oh, yeah.” Neither of us had tattoos when we broke up, but I’m so used to mine now, I forget I haven’t always had them. The one on my right arm is a kitchen knife, spanning from elbow to wrist. “I got it year before last. It’s—”
“The knife from Halloween, right?” Kit guesses, with the deadpan delivery of someone forced to sit through the movie with me every October. He’s the first one to ever get it right on the first try.
“Everybody assumes it’s a chef’s knife because I work at a restaurant. Like, what if I just love cinema?” I point to his left wrist, where a tiny whisk is inked in fine black lines. “Is that your first?”
“Third, actually,” he says. “A bunch of us from my pastry school year got them together when we finished.”
“Cute. I have three too.” I pull up my left sleeve to show him the saguaro on my bicep. “This one was my first, for my twenty-fourth birthday.”
We both know that my twenty-fourth was a month after we broke up, so he can probably guess how this one happened. Late night, empty apartment, twenty-four-hour tattoo shop with a flash sheet of cactuses in the window.
Kit looks at me with something like sympathy, then pulls up his own sleeve on the opposite arm.
“I got my first in the same spot, kind of.”
The tattoo on the outside of his upper arm is a woman’s hand holding three violets. He doesn’t explain, and I don’t need him to. Kit is the middle child of three. His mom was named Violette.
“Oh, Kit,” I say. I have to stop myself from reaching out to touch it. “I love it.”
“I think she’d like it,” he says with quiet satisfaction. He tugs his sleeve down. “Where’s your third one?
“Oh, uh.” Abrupt pivot. “I’d have to take off my pants to show you.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I say. A thought solidifies behind his eyes. “It’s not an ass tattoo.”
“I didn’t think it was an ass tattoo.”
“Really?”
“Okay, I thought it might be an ass tattoo.”
I roll my eyes. “Come on, it’s on my thigh. Where’s your other one?”
“Under my shirt.”
Under his shirt. Where his body is, of course.
“Hmm.” I take another sip. I don’t think about his body. “This is like the scene in Jaws where they compare scars.”
“Does that make me Quint or Hooper?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m clearly the deranged shark man. You’re the fancy research boy.”
“Well,” Kit says, raising his glass, “I’ll drink to your leg.”
“I’ll drink to your leg,” I quote back.
Is this—Kit and me, sitting on a bed, clinking glasses—how peacefully coexisting exes should feel?
It took so long to stop wanting him in my life. That feels like such an important, hard-won thing, and I don’t know how to protect it from this moment. But I also don’t know anyone else in the world who could have had those last ten minutes of conversation with me.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” Kit says back.
“Bonsoir, kiddies,” says a third voice, and we look up to see Maxine, dressed in black silk and holding a chambord martini.
“Maxine!” Kit says, standing so fast to greet her that I almost tip over again. He kisses her on each cheek, then turns to me, smiling wide. “I told Maxine where we were going and she wanted to come say hi.”
“That’s awesome,” I say, trying to mean it. “Hi, Maxine.”
Maxine kisses my cheek and sits down between us. Kit mutters something to her in French, and I catch a few of the words I know from growing up around his family—thank you and the best. She does an inscrutable hand gesture and hooks her ankle around his.
I like Maxine. I do. But now I’m wondering if the point of this whole outing was to remind me that Kit is with someone else now.
“The bartender is hot,” Maxine declares matter-of-factly. “Did you see how hot the bartender is?”
“Kit got our drinks,” I say.
“They’re hot,” Kit confirms. “Very hot.”
Something twinges in my gut, a memory gone sour.
When Kit and I were together, our favorite bi-for-bi pastime was pointing out hot people to each other. It was silly and fun, but it meant something to me. It made me feel close to him, like all my incomprehensible, hidden feelings and wants were totally clear from his specific point of view.
Maybe the problem is that he can have the same thing with Maxine, someone who’s a woman in all the ways I’m not. Kit likes boys, and he always liked my most boyish qualities, but every now and then, a worry crept in. When he kissed his flat-chested best friend with bitten-down nails, did he think of someone with plush curves and shiny hair, someone who touches with only the tips of her manicured fingers and leaves a lipstick print in the exact same spot on her glass with every sip? Someone who could be his girl? Someone like Maxine?
I look down at my own glass, covered in smudgy, oily fingerprints.
“I need to see this hot bartender for myself,” I announce, suddenly in need of a break.
Back in the front room, the bartender is as hot as promised. Sharp jaw, broody eyebrows, androgynous. They’re wearing a half-buttoned shirt and pleated gray trousers, and their hair gives the impression of a classic men’s cut growing wild. They work with a cool efficiency I have to admire, as someone intimately familiar with handling a late-night full house. I hope that’s how I look when I do it.
“Whiskey ginger,” I half yell when they lean in, thankful they serve enough tourists to know the English.
I let my eyes drift, scanning for a distraction. Then the door opens, and in she floats: the dancer from Moulin Rouge.
Her hair is down, and she’s swapped her costume for a simple cotton dress, but it’s her. Her face is a dewy, freshly scrubbed pink, red stain lingering on her lips. I turn my body sideways to open space at the bar, and she goes right to it.
“Hi,” I say, before remembering what country I’m in. “Parlez-vous anglais?”
