The Pairing, page 6
She looks me up and down, then smiles and says, “Enough.” Which answers more than one question.
“I’m Theo.”
She takes my hand, brushes a kiss against my cheek. “Estelle.”
I buy Estelle a drink—she wants a white wine, and she touches my arm when I suggest the one I know to be the best in the bar—and we talk. I tell her that I was at her show earlier and how great she was, and she explains that she lives across the city but likes to come here after work. When I tell her that’s lucky for me, she sneaks a finger through my belt loop.
Once I’ve finished my drink and the hot bartender has poured Estelle a second glass, I consider bringing her through the wardrobe and introducing her to Kit and Maxine. It could be a double date. She and Kit could talk art. I could slip my hand around her waist while Kit presses a kiss to Maxine’s throat, and then I could watch Kit and Maxine go home together again.
Instead, I push Estelle’s hair behind her ear and ask if she wants to leave.
She laughs as we climb up the hill to the hostel. I hold her hand above her head for a pirouette, watching her dress whip around her thighs, then reel her in and kiss her. She tastes like cigarettes and Muscadet, smells like hairspray and setting powder.
I take my phone out to let Kit know I’m not coming back, then remember I still have his number blocked.
My thumb hovers over the blue letters of Unblock this Caller.
Not much point to it anymore, is there?
left with someone i met at the bar. good night! I hit send.
In my room, my shirt lands on the floor, Estelle’s balconette bra on the nightstand. I tell her she’s beautiful, because she is, and then I tell her to lie back for me. I like the way she settles herself on the pillows, how everything she does is graceful. I like how her hair falls in her eyes.
I walk her out to her cab after, kiss her good night.
Usually sex helps me sleep, but tonight I’m awake for another hour. I can hear my own heart, and there’s a cadence to its beating, a steadily repeating one-two-three-four.
It sounds unsettlingly like Theo-and-Kit.
* * *
“Have a good night?”
I gasp, nearly fumbling my croissant. The last person I was expecting to see in the hostel hallway this morning is Kit, but here he is, ambushing me at my door. Technically he’s just emerging from his own room looking underslept, but it feels like an ambush.
“What are you doing here?”
“This is my room?” he says. “We’ve been over this, Theo, we’re on the same tour.”
I roll my eyes. Someone’s in a mood. “No, I mean why aren’t you at home with Maxine?”
“Why would I be with Maxine?”
“Because she’s your girlfriend.”
“What?” he says so loudly that a passing housekeeper shushes him. He lowers his voice. “You think— Theo. Maxine is not my girlfriend.”
They—
No. What about last night? What about the flower in her bag? Why is he wearing his sincere face? How can he have his sincere face on at a time like this?
“But … you live together.”
“No, she’s plant-sitting for me while I’m on this trip.”
“You went home with her after dinner.”
“I walked her home because it was late,” he insists. “I don’t think of her like that, Theo, she’s my best friend.”
“Yeah, so was I.”
The words are out of my mouth before I realize what I’m saying, and we both wince. Kit looks like he’d have preferred a punch in the face.
Before I can recover, a rumpled person in an unbuttoned shirt and gray trousers appears in Kit’s doorway. I watch, dumbstruck, as they bid Kit a cheerful farewell in French. Then they slap his ass and stroll off toward the elevator.
I stare at Kit. Kit stares at the ceiling.
“Was that—?”
“The bartender, yes. Like I said. Nothing between Maxine and me.” He turns for the stairs. “I need a coffee.”
He leaves me there, alone with my croissant and the realization that I’ve made an absolute rollicking ass of myself.
If Maxine isn’t his girlfriend, then—then he gave me a cake out of genuine kindness, and he invited me out because he wanted to show me his favorite bar, and Maxine really did want to see me again, and I acted like a rude little freak for no reason when I ditched them. I was supposed to be showing Kit how much I’ve grown without him, and instead I got jealous of the first person he smiled at and decided she must be sleeping with him. Maxine probably only sleeps with low-level royalty.
I wasn’t like this before we were together. There were so many years of wanting him and thinking I could never have him, of watching him date other people and hearing about every fuck, feeling every complicated feeling you can have for a person, and I still managed to be his friend.
Maybe I can’t do peacefully coexisting exes. Maybe it only works when we’re friends.
I can try, I think. We’re adults. I can set my anger aside and try to be his friend.
BORDEAUXPAIRS WELL WITH:
Fourteen-month Pomerol, minimum half dozen canelés
I dropped out of college two months into my first semester.
It was supposed to be fun, going to college with Kit—and the Kit part was fun. UC Santa Barbara had a good art history program for him, and their swim team had scouted me, and I missed him. I’d tried so hard to get over him, but I missed him like tea misses honey, boring without him.
It had been easier than I expected to have him back. I’d anticipated the gut punch of our first reunion, how New York had made him taller and surer and even more sparkly, but then he had just been Kit. As much a part of me as the rest of me.
Lectures were boring, and I kept forgetting exams, but I could stick it out as long as I got to keep swimming. The pool was the one place I was really, truly great, so great that my coaches threw around words like college record and Olympic trials. Then I wrecked my shoulder at invitationals and the doctors benched me for good, so I didn’t see the point anymore. I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving; I just cleared out my dorm and silently moved back into my parents’ house in the Valley. That was the closest Kit and I ever came to a real, adult fight, when he found out I’d made the decision without him.
(You’d think he’d have known better about the apartment in Paris after that, and we could’ve avoided the breakup altogether. But here we are.)
All to say: Higher education didn’t work for me. Wine education, though. I was fucking mint at that.
It began with aggressively befriending the chef sommelier at Timo, a mystifying sixtysomething man with a collection of leather dusters and a psychosexual obsession with Chablis. I was bar manager then, but I pestered him into putting me in charge of the cellar map and inviting me to spit in buckets at his after-hours blind tastings. Then there were flash cards and wine-encyclopedia audiobooks and almost setting myself on fire practicing decanting, and it turns out I’m great at learning things I actually want to know.
Now, I know what it means to stand here on the Pomerol plateau, on the right bank of the Gironde estuary. I know about its pockets of rare blue clay, and that when my boots crunch through the crumbly marl, a million little merlot babies drink from the dense earth beneath, ripening navy and opulently sweet so fast they’ll never lose their newborn zing. We follow Fabrizio down a tree-canopied road through the most fuck-off magnificent morsel of southwestern France, grounds sprawling in green and green-gold and copper, orderly rows of vines in one direction and fringes of ancient trees in another. The whole sky wants to climb in when I open my mouth. Tasting notes: clay, plums, the sea.
I catch Kit craning his neck, admiring the sun through the leaves overhead. He’s wearing washed-out linen. His mouth is soft and happy, parted with wonder.
A frisson of yes-no-yes courses through me.
Kit has always encountered the world with a pure, wholehearted eagerness to be amazed. A cool rock, a dog in a park, a song in a shopping mall, the rolling grounds of an eighteenth-century chateau. My first instinct, the thing I learned before I could find France on a map, is to love how Kit loves.
Then there’s the miserable ordeal of everything else.
But after that comes the second yes: I’m going to try to be his friend.
I fall into step beside him and ask, “What’s that tree?”
His jaw drops when he sees me, which is honestly funny. Like a dumb baby in a Renaissance painting.
“I—I think it’s a Norway maple.”
“Really?”
“Best guess. I thought it was a field maple at first, but the leaves have points.”
It’s a skill he picked up from a childhood running around the French countryside and his mom’s greenhouse. Anytime I saw an interesting flower or a funny-shaped cactus, I could text Kit a photo and have it identified in ten minutes or less. I’ve had to get used to not knowing the names of trees.
It’s nice to know this one.
Neither of us says anything else, but we don’t drift apart either.
The path ends at a massive château with a limestone facade and dark mansard roofs, elegant but unpretentious. Somewhere in LA, a location scout is crying because they shot a wistful French period romance without knowing about it. Ten-foot stone walls separate it from the gardens, and in their opening stands a white-haired man in a chambray shirt and olive trousers. His straw sun hat manages to look jaunty despite also looking like he’s sat on it a bunch of times.
“Amici,” Fabrizio says, “this is Gérard! His family owns this estate for generations. Today, we learn how wine is made in Bordeaux!”
Gérard, who has an accent like a cognac-drunk fiddle suite, leads us through the arching entrance of the château. We glimpse the interior—antique chaises and damask wallpaper and is that a nude oil painting of Gérard—and then we’re in a courtyard framed by the house’s long, narrow wings. Here, a dozen or so wooden worktables are arranged on the packed dirt, bowls of flour and dough set out on each one.
Another man awaits us there. From the way Gérard saunters up to him (and from what I saw of that painting, though it’s hard to tell with his pants on), this must be his partner.
“Before our tour, we have une petite surprise for you,” says Gérard. “Baguettes! My husband will teach you how to make baguettes, and then we will tour the grapes and taste the wines. Et à la fin, we will have lunch in the garden, and you will eat your baguettes.” He leans in and stage-whispers, “And if you cannot make the baguette, you must leave France. It is the law.”
He winks outrageously and leaves us with his husband, who’s draped in a menagerie of floaty earth tones.
“Bonjour!” Baguette Husband says.
“Bonjour!” everyone calls back.
Baguette Husband demonstrates how to form the provided dough into three small baguettes, explaining that they’ll be rested and baked for us during our tour. Everyone divides up, two people to each numbered table. Maybe if I had sat with Fabrizio that first day I’d be sharing his table instead of Stig, but as it is, Kit and I are the only two left.
“Ah, together?” Baguette Husband coos at us.
“No,” Kit says with a readiness that’s almost insulting.
Baguette Husband gets a twinkle in his eye and says, “Not yet, maybe?” and nudges us to the last open table like we’re two fourth graders with a crush. The worst part is, we were, once. He’s eighteen years behind.
We flour our table in silence, and I riffle uselessly through my brain for something to say. Everyone else is laughing and chatting with their table partner, flicking flour at each other or trying to recall the instructions, while Kit and I are pointedly not having a cute time.
The problem is, we’ve only ever been everything or nothing to each other. I don’t know how to start being something to him.
I also don’t know how the hell this lump of gluten is supposed to move through three-dimensional space to become a baguette. The dough and I are in a fight. I fold one edge toward the center, then seal it down with the heel of my hand, then turn the dough around and do it again, and then—fold it? How? Save me, Baguette Husband.
I peek over to cheat off Kit’s work and discover, with no small amount of horror, that he’s already finessing his last baguette. His hands move like a magic trick, precise and swift and certain.
He was always a gifted baker, but he’s gotten staggeringly good at this. It’s like the dough wants to be touched by him. It gives under the heel of his hand, swells affectionately back into his palm, relaxes again at the gentlest pressure. The muscles in his forearms flex with the plain, steady purpose of doing the exact thing they were developed to do, which is when I realize how much they’ve developed, how they taper down to the same elegant wrists, the dusting of flour there, the little whisk inked just under the knob of bone—
“Theo,” Kit says, “you’re overworking it.”
I look at my dough. Half of it is flattened under my fist.
“Oops.”
“It’s okay,” he says, “you can still fix it, you just have to—”
His hands move toward mine and stop, hovering an inch above. A speck of flour floats down from his palm and settles on my skin with the weight of one of Gérard’s antique sofas.
“Like, um, like this.”
His left hand does a funny sort of circular motion, and I catch the hint and mirror it with my right. My misshapen lump of dough starts to resolve into a loose ball.
“That’s good, just like that,” he says. When I glance up, he meets my eyes and gives me a small, encouraging smile. “Don’t stop.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys,” I say, which is an overcompensation, but Kit gives a bright, permissive laugh.
“Keep going.”
I stare down at the dough, at our hands. He expertly guides me through each step without ever touching me, his fingers so close I can feel their warmth. It helps. He moves, I move. He gives simple and patient directions, I follow them. His thumb almost brushes mine, I classify the twinge in my chest as acid reflux.
Together, we roll out three lopsided baguettes.
“Not perfect,” I observe, “but not bad.”
“Better than the Calums,” Kit says in a low voice. At the next table, Ginger Calum’s nose is smeared with flour, and Blond Calum has made the courageous choice to eat a hunk of raw dough.
“How do all of theirs look like penises?”
Kit puts his hands on his hips. “Sometimes baking is about what’s in your heart.”
* * *
Gérard returns, accompanied by a scruffy gray terrier, and at last we amble into the vines. When I realized we’d be touring the vineyard in the first week of August, this was the part I couldn’t wait for: Bordeaux in veraison, when the vines are as colorful and alive as they’ll ever be.
We visit the merlot first, the main grape of Pomerol’s eponymous wine, which we’re allowed to taste off the vine even though it’ll be weeks until they develop their biggest flavors of cherry jam and strawberry and, because it’s been a hot year, lush black fruits. Next, Cabernet Franc in a riot of lavender and fuchsia and the juicy green of a cut-open lime. We hear about warm, dry summers and mild harvest seasons, the life-giving clay and the salty kiss of the Atlantic, how it all comes together to yield grapes with a lot of personality. That’s how Gérard talks about his grapes—like kids he’s trying to raise into strong-willed grown-ups with something to say at a party. Every morning, he plays Édith Piaf for them.
Beside me, Kit is smiling. If there’s one other person in the world who’d get lost in this vineyard teaching plants to love French torch songs, it’s Kit. The yes-no-yes happens again, like that unripe grape bursting sour across my tongue.
“Ah, here is one of our farmhands!” Gérard says. “Florian!”
A pair of work boots tromps down a row of vines, and a young man bursts onto the path.
My God, what a young man he is. Square-jawed and faintly stubbled, with sweet brown eyes and dark curls falling across his sweaty golden forehead. He’s carrying a crate of grapes on one muscular shoulder, straining the fabric of his dusty white shirt. Suspenders hang around his hips, apparently shrugged off to allow full range of motion for cinematic deadlifting.
“Salut!” Florian says, wiping his face with a gloved hand. Soil streaks his cheek. “Welcome!”
On pure reflex, my head snaps toward Kit. His does the same, and our eyes meet in the raised-eyebrow look of unspoken agreement we used to share in moments like this: He’s hot! We turn away just as fast.
Gérard invites Florian to join us, and Florian tells us how his parents met working on this vineyard and let him race around the vines when he was small. He lives in an apartment in Bordeaux proper now, but he happily makes the drive five days a week to tenderly coax vines up their trellises.
Kit leans into my ear and says, “I don’t think we’re the only ones who noticed the Florian situation.”
Dakota and Montana are exchanging conspiratorial whispers, and at least three different brides are visibly contemplating leaving their new husbands. One of the Calums asks if he knows any good bars in Bordeaux. Even the old Swedish lady starts cleaning his cheek with her scarf.
“Do you think he’s always part of the tour?” I ask Kit. “Like, when they know guests are coming, they have him come in to provide an immersive hot farmhand experience?”
“I think they buried a bunch of French romance novels in the garden and he’s what sprang up.”
In the wings of the château, Gérard takes us through the vat room and the aging cellars to a narrow, stone-walled tasting room. Then, one by one, Gérard pours us each a glass of their signature Pomerol.
I give mine a baby sniff, swirl it around the glass and whiff it again, slower this time. Damn, it’s intense. Black cherry, crushed pepper, oak, and something else. Something lower, farther back on the nose. What is that? Is it—
