The Pairing(36)

We find ourselves sharing a little table with the old Swedish couple Kit befriended on the first day. Plate after plate of pintxos pour from the kitchen—slices of tortillas de patatas, mushroom croquetas, velvety goose liver and herb-flecked anchovies on bread topped with duck eggs—so many that Fabrizio sweeps in to help the waiters. Kit sits sideways in his chair and laughs at everything, his body loose with the unmistakable contentment of the recently fucked.

It’s all so easy for him. Leaving me for a shiny new life, kissing sexy fishmongers and abandoning me to be cockblocked by my own unresolved feelings. Even when we were together, I could see the vines of potential spiraling out of him, reaching for taller trellises in bigger fields. He gets everything he ever dreamed of, and I’m where I’ve always been, one step behind.

It would be such a relief to create a problem for him, even a small one.

Fabrizio drops off a plate of croquetas and compliments Birgitte’s blouse, and when he saunters off, Birgitte says, “Den d?r Fabrizio, he is like a painting we have in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.”

“Which one?” Kit asks.

“I think I know,” says her bespectacled husband, Lars. With the jolly mischief of a man wearing a straw fedora indoors, Lars pulls up something on his phone and shows it to his wife.

“Ja! This is him!”

She shows us an extremely horny painting entitled The Youth of Bacchus, featuring a bunch of naked, nubile, wine-drunk revelers in a forest, either dancing or warming up for an orgy.

“Oh, yeah, I definitely see it,” Kit says. He zooms in on the central figure, a muscular, bronze-skinned man with a tambourine-waving child on his shoulders and a leopard hide barely concealing his dick. “Especially his, uh—his—”

He points at the grooves of abdominal muscle near the figure’s hips and takes a sip of wine, trusting me to choose the appropriate phrase. Iliac furrows? V-line? Adonis belt?

I say, “Cum gutters.”

Kit chokes.

“Kümgütter?” Birgitte asks. “What is this word, kümgütter?”

I thump Kit between the shoulders, smiling beatifically. “Kit, care to explain?”

“I—” Kit shoots me a look that’s half glare, half terrible delight. My smile widens. “It’s, ah, American slang for the lower muscles on the stomach.”

“Oh!” Lars exclaims. “We call this b?ckensp?ret! In America, I should say kümgütter?”

“No no no,” Kit says, distressed, “it’s vulgar slang.”

“Is it?” Birgitte asks. She leans in with a twinkle in her eye. “What does it mean?”

Kit looks to me for help. I open the translation app on my phone and press the mic button until the digital bleat sounds.

“Cum gutter,” I enunciate loudly enough for the next tables to hear. “Huh, no results.”

“Please, you will not embarrass us,” Lars says. “Go on!”

Kit takes a breath. “So, during sex, when a person with a penis finishes on their partner’s stomach, and—”

“Ahhh, I see,” Lars interrupts, alight with glee. He says something to his wife in Swedish, and she nods knowingly.

“Cum and gutter! Two words!”

Despite my best efforts, this seems to have permanently endeared us to Lars and Birgitte. They ask us so many questions that I’m half expecting a Christmas card from Sweden this holiday season.

“And you two,” Lars says, gesturing between Kit and me, “you are—?”

“Friends,” I say.

“Old friends,” Kit elaborates.

“Very good! And how did you meet?”

Kit and I exchange a look, waiting each other out.

“We went to grade school together,” I say.

Kit weighs this answer, pushing an olive across his plate. He’s not letting me off this easy, not after the cum gutters.

“That was where we met,” he says, “not how we met.”

I remember the day Kit showed up. Second grade, a skinny little changeling trying to explain to a bunch of California kids named Josh and Taylor how to pronounce his name—his real, French name, not the one he goes by. He was different. He had big, daydreamy eyes and a gentle accent that none of us had heard, and he spent every recess reading books in trees.

I was different too, a tomboy in the extreme, always wearing cargo shorts and insisting on being let into the boys’ games. One day I found Kit in a stairwell, cornered by two of the boys who wouldn’t play with me and trying not to cry. Maybe if he had been crying already I would have just gotten a teacher, but he was biting his lip, holding the tears back. Those little assholes didn’t deserve the satisfaction.

When I was called to the principal’s office that afternoon for fighting, he was there, waiting for his mom. She called him a different name than the one on the classroom roster, a family nickname. Kit. I asked him if I could call him that too, and when he said yes, I told him to call me Theo.

The Swedes adore this story.

They reward us with their tale of meeting each other at a ski lodge in the Alps, where they were celebrating their respective divorces. After three nights of discussing art by the lodge’s fireplace, they realized they’d met before on a hiking trail in Croatia in their early twenties. They married within months, and they’ve been inseparable for fifteen years now.