The Pairing(47)

There aren’t words for Sagrada Familia.

Maybe, if you could fold everything a person can see and know and experience in on itself, every face, every feeling, if you could max out all the bars on how much a thing can exist, it would be this five-hundred-foot-tall church. Millions of stone details on its facade. Figures and foliage and symbols and painstaking wrinkles of cloth. And somehow, inside, there’s more.

Every last inch has a complex, deliberate geometry, no straight line or unadorned surface. Groves of columns spiral up, transforming from squares to octagons to sixteen-sided shapes to circles, splitting into a canopy of bursting stars. Immense stained glass panes pour rainbows of light through the naves, fiery reds and oranges to one side and drowning blues and greens to the other, tunnels of color deep enough to swim through. Every feature is one detail on top of another and another, strange curves and jagged edges and joining corners that seem impossible.

We’re led around with little transmitter boxes on lanyards, Fabrizio filtering out through tinny earbuds, voice sweet as ever. But I listen instead to the echoing murmurs of hundreds of voices in a hundred languages, the slaps of sandals against marble.

Kit lags behind, and I let myself fall to his side. His earbuds are loose around his neck. The look on his face is pure, slack, sparkling wonder.

I think of the museum in Bordeaux, the painting of the woman on the rubble. How I told myself he’d answer if I asked about the painting.

“Hey,” I say, quiet as the group moves on without us. “Tell me what you read about this place.”

Kit smiles.

In a low, gentle voice, he tells me everything. How the columns and their branching vaults are meant to evoke the feeling of walking through a forest, their double-twisted design inspired by oleander branches. He talks about Gaudí, the artist and architect who devoted forty-three years of his life to building this church, the only love of his life and his great unfinished project, how he lived on the grounds and is buried in the crypt below to be with her forever.

There’s no pretense in his voice, no arrogance, only naked joy and generosity. Happiness to open up a world and share it with me. I turn away so he won’t see me blink the sudden wetness from my eyes. I left that room in Bordeaux specifically to avoid this: the terrible, undeniable, shattering fact of his goodness.

When the rest crumbles—the worst angles, the meanest versions of events, the lies I told myself—what’s left is only Kit. Only the great unfinished love of my life, and a floor I’m still lying under.


“You can’t use a whole dish as an ingredient!” Kit says, gesturing so expansively that his vermouth almost spills. “That’s cheating!”

“Not even if I buy it prepared and incorporate it?”

“That’s against the spirit of the exercise. On the Fly is for raw materials.”

“Then you shouldn’t be allowed to use chocolate,” I counter. “You should have to march your happy ass down to the shops and crank up the bean grinder, baby.”

Kit’s smile blooms even brighter, color splashing into his cheeks. He’s always loved when I get belligerent for his entertainment.

“You know that’s not the same—”

“Do you churn your own butter too? Do you have a chic little Parisian butter churn? Does it have a holder for chic little Parisian unfiltered cigarettes?”

“Okay!” Kit says, showing me his hands. “Okay, you can use crema catalana to make a milk punch! And I’ll take the only the orange zest from it—”

“Boooo.”

“—and I’ll mix it with ricotta to fill cannoli, and—” He sees the look on my face. “What?”

“Did you make the ricotta, Kit?”

He looks like he might scream, half frustration and half delight, all Theo-and-Kit.

“Yes, Theo, I rode my bike down to the village sheep farm, and I made sweet, tender love to the farmer’s wife all night long so she would let me milk the sheep, and then I carried the pail home and made the ricotta.”

“Then I’ll take the salty tears of the sheep farmer whose wife leaves him for the village hole—”

Kit gasps theatrically. “Hole?”

“—and use them to make a salted Negroni, with a tangerine twist.”

“Campari tangelo marmalade,” Kit says instantly. “Glazing a tangelo-and-five-spice pound cake.”

“I’ll take the Chinese five-spice and steep it in rum and then use the rum to make a Cable Car.”

Kit sets his glass down, still smiling.

“Cable Car. That was . . . that was what we drank that time we drove to San Francisco for your birthday, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, at that dive in North Beach,” I say. “It was cash only, and we were out of cash.”

“And I pretended to propose so they’d comp our drinks.”

We were only twenty-three then, and we always joked about getting married, like it was so obvious that it wasn’t worth taking seriously. I laughed when he did it. But after, he told me he’d marry me that night if I wanted. That he’d have married me the night we first kissed.

“I’m definitely not beating that one, then,” Kit says. He tips his chin up at me, and I want to press my thumb to the center of it. “You win. I’ll drink the absinthe.”