The Pairing(33)

The shutters of the window above Paloma’s rattle open, and a bearded old man’s head pops out. He looks at us, then calls down to Paloma in a language that sounds like both Spanish and French and also nothing like either.

“What’s he saying?” I whisper to Kit.

“I think he’s speaking Basque.”

“Isn’t your mom’s family Basque?”

“Yeah, on her mom’s side, but she didn’t speak the language.”

“This is my great-uncle Mikel,” Paloma says to us. “He wants to know if either of you are fit for marriage.”

“Uh—”

A much smaller but equally curious face appears in another window, a girl around twelve with a flute in one hand and a cookie in the other.

“What’s Papa Mikel yelling about?” the girl yells to Paloma. “Who’s here?”

“Just some friends!”

Paloma’s cousin squints at us. “They don’t look like any of your friends!”

“They’re visiting! I met them at the market! Stop being nosy or I’ll tell your mama!”

“Tell me what?” says a middle-aged woman in the window beside Great-Uncle Mikel.

“Léa isn’t doing her flute practice!”

“Palomaaa!”

“Léa!”

“I’ll come down,” Paloma says to us, closing her shutters. The only one left in a window is Great-Uncle Mikel, lighting a cigarette.

“I love this fucking town,” I say to Kit, who shakes his head, breathless with laughter.

Paloma bursts out of the street-level door beside the bakery wearing short-sleeved coveralls identical to the ones from this morning, sans fish guts.

“Sorry for my family,” she says. “We have lived in this building for seventy-five years, so it’s very interesting when someone new comes around.”

“I guess you won’t be impressed by these, then,” Kit says as he shows her the bakery box.

“No, these are my favorites!” Paloma says, touching his arm. “And we must enjoy them while we still can.”

“Is something happening to the shop?” I ask.

“Not yet, but the owner is a thousand years old, and she has no children to pass it on to. I think I’ll die when she finally stops baking.”

Paloma takes us away from the ill-fated patisserie and soon enough we’re at the port, air brimming with salt and seagrass and the eye-watering smell of fish. We bob like buoys behind her as she shows us around red-and-green fishing boats, stopping to banter with a fisherman and help a deckhand heave a sack of ice off the pier. It’s deeply dreamy.

I should be bringing her my A game, but Kit’s presence—the scent of salt water on his skin, the faint stain of cherry juice on his lips—is disrupting my process.

Paloma has family throughout southern France and northern Spain, all married to the sea. Her parents met at this very port when her mother was working on her family fishing boat and her father was pulling fish for his family market stall. She says she was born smelling like anchovies.

“I speak five languages in all,” she tells us. “French and Spanish were always my best. My Basque is okay. My Catalan is awful. English I learned in school, and then I lived in Sydney for a while.”

“Sydney, Australia?” Kit asks.

“Yes, I went to culinary school,” she says. “I thought I would be a chef at a famous restaurant, but I hated it. Every day I wanted to come home, until I did. I like it better here. Nobody ever tells me what to do.”

Finally, as the sun begins to set, Paloma asks, “Do you have plans now? I’m meeting friends on Plage de Ciboure, if you want to come.”

Kit and I exchange eye contact.

Tour dinner is optional tonight, I say with my eyes. Skip it?

Skip it.

“We’d love to,” I say.

Paloma lights up. “Quelle chance!”

On a small, secluded beach away from the Grande Plage, one with big rock outcroppings and a view of an old fort on the water beyond, Paloma’s friends make a loose circle in the sand. We’re not the only ones to have brought an offering of food or drink—at the center of the circle, a blanket is spread with plates of oil and soft cheeses, brown paper parcels of jambon and saucisson, loaves of bread, round golden-brown cakes with burnt edges, jugs of lemonade, and a jumble of half-drunk bottles.

Paloma introduces her friends in rapid succession, each lifting a glass from atop fraying pillows or beach towels or sling-back chairs. There’s a bartender, a surf instructor, a butcher, the cheesemonger from the market, a few beachside hotel staffers, a line cook, a bookseller, and a gardener.

“Ah,” Paloma says, “and here is Juliette!”

A woman appears from the direction of the water, her dark hair falling damp and loose around her shoulders. Her sundress is darkened in patches, like she threw it on over her wet swimsuit. She’s carrying a mesh bag of oranges over her shoulder.

Fruit Wife. Her name is Juliette.

I turn to tell Kit, but he and Paloma are already chatting in French with the cheesemonger. Maybe I should institute some kind of weighted system in our competition, like a half-hour head start if only one of us speaks a mark’s native language. Kit should have to sit quietly and let me make the first run at anyone who speaks French, or at least take a disadvantage. Maybe an ugly hat.