The Pairing(67)

It never occurred to me that it would matter to anyone. It didn’t occur to Theo either, and certainly not to her parents, who never cared when Theo asked for haircuts and clothes meant for boys. That was just how Theo had always been. But for some reason it mattered to red-carpet reporters, who wrote breathless articles about how heartwarming and progressive it was for two famous people to let their daughter wear a suit to an event, and what an inspiring gender hero Theo was. They made it into a whole thing. Diversity win! Child wears clothes.

Tabloids didn’t exist in Theo’s household, but if one comes from a famous family, one might look oneself up on one’s best friend’s family computer eventually. We were thirteen. She stopped posing for pictures after that, and she didn’t get a haircut for years.

I’ve always thought Theo could pull off anything she wanted. I liked her just as much in slip dresses and lip gloss as I did in T-shirts and cotton boxers, and I didn’t care if she chose to leave one for the other. But sometimes, when she leaned in to the mirror to put on lipstick or tugged the front of her shirt away from her chest, I would see her eyes go somewhere else, like she wasn’t quite inside the body she was dressing up.

In her photo with the tower, I see someone filling up their body all the way to the skin. It’s in the loose set of her shoulders under her shirt, her broad stance, the jut of her chin, her short hair flying across her forehead in wild, boyish waves.

“I love your hair this length,” I tell her as we walk toward the cathedral. “It’s so good on you.”

“I like it too,” she says, readying her ticket for the guard. Her expression is soft, inquiring. “I feel like I finally look like myself, you know?”

We walk into the cathedral, between huge Corinthian columns topped with acanthus leaves and through Romanesque arches with alternating black and white stripes of marble. Above the central nave is a gilded ceiling, each ornate coffer decorated with flowers and faces of angels. We split at the cross point of the nave and the transept, where the dome is painted with the Virgin Mary gliding toward heaven in a whirlpool of golden clouds.

When I moved to Paris, Dad told me to guard my wonder. He said that the danger of living in a place of dreams is that it can become ordinary. His exact words were, Novelty is half of sublimity, the kind of thing that once made me believe he was a genius and now makes me picture Theo doing a jerk-off hand gesture. Still, somewhere during the long hours at work making the same gelée for three months straight, I lost my appetite for taking in the view on my way home. I stopped noticing all the beauty that once astonished me when I read about it in books.

I was full of wonder when I was studying art. The quality that made me choose Renaissance artists as my concentration so I could write obsessive pages about their attention to human emotion and bodies, the part of me so infatuated with the Baroque that Theo made me put a dollar in a jar every time I brought up Bernini—it left me not long after Theo, but much more quietly. I barely noticed until Bordeaux, when I stepped off the bus at the chateau and felt wonder return like an old friend. Every stop since, I’ve slowly unfolded, opening to it again.

Here at the apse of the cathedral, I remember how it felt to be eighteen and falling in love with a history of art course catalog. I look at the massive oil paintings and recite pigments of the Renaissance palette, azurite and vermilion, verdigris and gamboge. I remember when I learned their names, how I imagined being some sixteenth-century cheese maker seeing paint give off light for the first time. I don’t know if it’s Italy or Theo bringing it all back, but I’m so thankful to both.

I find Theo by a golden casket, reading something on her phone.

“I’m looking this guy up,” Theo says, jerking her chin toward the coffin. “It’s Saint Ranieri, patron saint of Pisa. I feel like we could be friends. It says, ‘He was a traveling musician who played all night and slept all day.’”

I smile, enjoying the way her mind works, and lean in to read the screen. “‘His life revolved around food, drink, and partying.’ I’ve slept with this Italian boy before.”

She scrolls down. “Oh, but then he joins a monastery and gives away all his possessions. But look, one of his miracles is multiplying bread. You’d love that.”

“Depends on the bread. Let’s do the camposanto next.”

We walk on to the long cemetery spanning the piazza’s entire north side. I follow Theo through the arches and thousands of meters of frescos, still thinking of my imaginary cheese maker and those impossible, luminous oil-mixed paints he would have never seen before. They probably looked to him the way Theo looks to me now.

Beside the camposanto is the round baptistery, its domed roof half terracotta tiles and half brown and gray sheets of lead. I read once that the exterior was finished nearly two centuries after it was begun, and it shows in the way the structure literally evolves upward in complexity, starting with simple Byzantine columns and ending in ornate, pointed Gothic arches up top. Inside, it’s almost all empty white-gray marble except for the font at the center of the floor and the sculpted pulpit over it. The rest is open, encircled by two tiers of massive arches holding up a high, curved ceiling.

“Kit, look at this,” Theo says, pointing to a sign about the mathematics of the baptistery’s roof. “What do you think it means by ‘acoustically perfect’?”

Before I can guess, a badged guard steps away from her station and declares, “Silenzio.”