The Pairing(27)

But every so often, after an eight-hour shift and an all-night gig, I’ll stumble home to a pile of dishes and think, Kit would take better care of me than this. And for a second, he’ll be there. Putting the cereal bowls away, waiting up with a book, kissing the tension from my shoulders, picking up my slack.

“Theo?”

The real, present Kit is watching me, one headphone out, his book face down on his lap.

“You okay?”

I shake my head.

“Yeah! Yeah, just thinking,” I say. “What, um, what are you listening to?”

“Oh”—Kit glances at his phone—“you’ll laugh.”

“Probably not.”

He gets this tender look on his face, the way he used to when he’d look up at the very top of Mount San Jacinto from the valley floor.

“So, before the trip, I had this idea to make a list of composers who wrote music in each of the tour stops. Because I—” He pauses, searching for the words. This is new. He used to talk in long, breathless sentences until he chiseled down to his point, but now he sifts through his thoughts. “Everywhere we go, I want to experience it entirely. All the way out to its edges. I want to touch it, taste it, drink it, eat it, climb it, swim in it. You can hear a place by walking down the street or sitting next to the ocean or opening a window, but I think if you want to listen to it, it’s in here. Like how bread can taste like the kitchen it’s baked in. Or—”

“Or how wine can taste like the barrel.”

He smiles.

“Yes. Yes, exactly. So, I’m listening to Ravel.”

Without another word, he hands me a headphone. I put it to my ear, and he starts the track over.


I’ve never seen a movie set in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but I’ve seen sandcastles and dollhouses and ripe white peaches, so, close enough. The buildings cuddle together around narrow streets, some made of pink stone and others crisscrossed with bright red timber and matching shutters. Lazy morning sunlight drips from the pink-orange roofs to the promenade curving around a huge crescent-shaped beach, which Fabrizio says is simply called La Grande Plage. In the hazy blue distance, the Pyrenees rise toward endless sky.

We start our day at the village’s central market. In winespeak, Les Halles has a robust, varied nose, with high intensity aromas of the sea—salt water, abalone shell, wet stones, seaweed, fatty fish. Notes of brined pork and smoked sausage, yeasty bread and burnt crust, fresh clover and geranium and bird of paradise, wild sage. Another elusive note slips in between, something juicy and sharp, like lemongrass or verbena.

That’s the one I follow.

I weave around cheese cases and pans of steaming brioche, past an old woman ordering lamb from a mustached butcher, to a vibrant fruit stand. It reminds me of my go-to frutería back home, except there’s a type of pear I’ve never even heard of, which is rare when you spend your spare time tasting wine with guys competing to name the obscurest berry. These fruits can teach me something. I pick up an apricot and press my nose to its skin.

“Bonjour!”

I startle up from the note I’m tapping into my phone (orangé de Provence: intense, sweet, tart) to see a shopgirl in an apron.

She’s pretty the way Saint-Jean-de-Luz is pretty, breezy and sensuous, her brown face soft and relaxed. Her dark hair is in an informal knot at her nape, and the loose bits have the crispiness of sun-dried seawater. She’s holding a speckled green-red pear and a paring knife, a slice balanced on the blade. She has an air of wife about her. Maybe not my wife, but certainly someone’s.

“You want?” Fruit Wife says.

“Oui.” I nod eagerly. “Wow, yes, please.”

The petal-pink flesh of the pear melts on my tongue like butter with a kiss of cinnamon, and the woman watches me suck juice off my thumb. If my French were better, this is the part where I would go, Are we about to make out?

She points to a sign over the bin of pears.

DOYENNé DU COMICE.

Hiring a hot girl to feed fruit to customers is an excellent business model, because next thing I know, I’m being rung up for two pounds of cherries as Fruit Wife waves goodbye.

“Lining up number three already?” asks Kit, who has apparently witnessed the whole thing.

I shake my head. “I think I just got hustled.”

“Understandable,” Kit assesses with a nod. “She’s lovely.”

“What’d you buy?”

“Fromage de brebis,” he says, holding up a chunk of wrapped sheep’s milk cheese. “The guy at the stall was hot too, but I can’t sleep with any more cheesemongers. Trying not to pigeonhole myself.” I open my mouth, but Kit has a hand raised. “Theo.”

“Don’t use words that end in ‘hole,’ then.”

He huffs out his oh Theo laugh. I’d forgotten how nice it sounds.

“There’s a sexy fishmonger,” he says.

“Ooh, show me.”

We loop the market, admiring glossy pastries and dishes of stuffed peppers, ribbing each other. Kit’s laughing, I’m laughing, the air between us is fresh and light. We feel like friends. My sex competition idea is fixing us. I am, I decide, a genius.

At the back of the hall, the fish counter is as pungent and glistening as an oyster shell and as busy as the Grande Plage. Bins of ice brim with gleaming prawns, scallops in brick-red shells, deep ruby cuts of tuna, slender little silvery-pink fish and flat fish and fish with stripes. Customers line up three bodies deep and point at squids.