The Pairing(22)

“Yeah,” I say. It’s technically a lie, but just barely. My exam is scheduled for the day after I get home, and I know I’ve learned enough to pass now. There’s no way I’ll fail a fourth time. And I’m not going to walk it back, not with Kit marveling at me like this.

“That exam is insanely hard, isn’t it?” Kit says. “The somm at my restaurant said he threw up his first time.”

“It’s not that bad,” I say, as if I didn’t serve the table counterclockwise instead of clockwise the first time I failed, or forget the thirteenth German wine region the second time. (See you in hell, Saale-Unstrut.) I drain my glass. “I have some other stuff going on, but sommelier is my day job now. Or, night job, I guess.”

I wave over another refill and ask Florian how many crates of grapes he can carry at once. Kit wonders out loud how far Florian could carry him. When we compare glasses, they’re exactly the same level of two-thirds full.

It goes on like that for the rest of lunch, Kit and Florian and me. We mop up the fig jam and honey and melon drippings with our bread, ask for refills until we’ve lost count, make Florian laugh and blush, turn our mouths purple. I smile at Kit. Kit smiles at me.

And every time we hold our glasses together, every time the lip of his glass almost touches the lip of mine, I try not to think, This is the closest we’ll ever come to kissing again.


We spend the afternoon at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the city of Bordeaux, where I float from room to room, not bothering with most of the plaques.

It’s not that I don’t care about art. I love art. But prestige art is my parents’ shop talk, and eventually, you get bored of it. While my dad was directing contemplative period pieces and my mom was adapting Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I was watching every Friday the 13th sequel. My favorite is the one where Jason is cryogenically frozen for 445 years and goes to space. The day I said that to my dad was probably one of his top ten parental heartbreaks.

The art I like best is unpretentious, highly saturated, and fully committed to what it’s doing even when it’s bad. Especially when it’s bad. I like B movies and slashers and eighties action flicks, anything with a synth music cue and a cocaine-fueled screenplay. I don’t want to analyze the creator’s intentions. Subtlety is for wine; I want to feel what the art wants me to feel and feel it big. Kit got so upset that I refused to read The Lord of the Rings when we were kids, but the movies had all the feelings in them.

For me, it’s enough to look at a painting and think, I like it. Or, This makes me feel sad. Or, This reminds me of myself. Or, That’s a fucked-up looking dog.

When I enter the next room, the first thing I notice is the huge painting of a woman kneeling on crumbling stones. She’s wearing a dark blue coat with a gold sash over a billowing white dress, and her arms are uplifted, her palms out-turned. The look on her face is sad but vengeful. Her tits are mostly out.

The second thing I notice is Kit, transfixed before her, a fountain pen and a little sketchbook in his hands.

I used to always catch Kit like this when I’d visit him at work, back when we lived together after he finished his degree. His front desk job at the Palm Springs Art Museum wasn’t stimulating enough for him, so he’d take extra-long breaks to sketch the exhibits.

Why did I find that so charming? He was just posing, wasn’t he? Too cultured and deep to sit at his desk on his phone like a simple receptionist.

I imagine asking him about this painting. The tragic look he’d give me for not knowing the painter, for not having my eyes turned to the greatest heights of artistic expression. I imagine him explaining it like I’m a toddler, making references that only someone with an art history degree would get. That’s what the version of Kit in my head would do, the Kit who’s an ex I don’t talk to anymore. Pretentious, erudite Kit, always too highbrow for me.

A piece of hair falls in his eyes, and he pushes it back with the eraser of his pencil.

That motion, the way the rubber skids across his brow. I’d forgotten, but I remember it now. Kit-the-ex never does that in my head. But Kit-in-real-life did when I knew him, and this Kit does too.

As far as I know, there are two ways to get over someone: Surrender to the anger that’s already there, or invent something to get angry about. Sometimes it was always wrong, and the only thing to do is stop believing it was good to love them in spite of it. But sometimes they were good to you. Sometimes you go looking for kindling and find that green leaves won’t burn, that the garden was watered too well. Sometimes you have to rearrange the truth into something you won’t miss.

And sometimes, when enough time goes by, it gets hard to remember which one you did.


After, on the museum steps, Fabrizio unspools a list of local recommendations: La Cité Du Vin, the ancient crypt under Basilique Saint-Seurin, the bronze horses of the Monument aux Girondins. A few of us decide that the medieval Saint-Pierre district sounds most interesting.

“Mind if I come too?” Kit asks me.

I’m post-tipsy, relaxed enough that it feels silly for him to ask permission. I roll my eyes and wave him to my side. This feels good, like the picnic shook something loose. Florian gave us a gift: mutual assurance that we’re only interested in fucking other people.

We head past Cathédrale Saint-André and onto a wide, tram-lined street, where Kit asks, “How’s Sloane?”