“This is my room?” he says. “We’ve been over this, Theo, we’re on the same tour.”
I roll my eyes. Someone’s in a mood. “No, I mean why aren’t you at home with Maxine?”
“Why would I be with Maxine?”
“Because she’s your girlfriend.”
“What?” he says so loudly that a passing housekeeper shushes him. He lowers his voice. “Youthink— Theo. Maxine is not my girlfriend.”
They—
No. What about last night? What about the flower in her bag? Why is he wearing his sincere face? How can he have his sincere face on at a time like this?
“But . . . you live together.”
“No, she’s plant-sitting for me while I’m on this trip.”
“You went home with her after dinner.”
“I walked her home because it waslate,” he insists. “I don’t think of her like that, Theo, she’s my best friend.”
“Yeah, so was I.”
The words are out of my mouth before I realize what I’m saying, and we both wince. Kit looks like he’d have preferred a punch in the face.
Before I can recover, a rumpled person in an unbuttoned shirt and gray trousers appears in Kit’s doorway. I watch, dumbstruck, as they bid Kit a cheerful farewell in French. Then they slap his ass and stroll off toward the elevator.
I stare at Kit. Kit stares at the ceiling.
“Was that—?”
“The bartender, yes. Like I said. Nothing between Maxine and me.” He turns for the stairs. “I need a coffee.”
He leaves me there, alone with my croissant and the realization that I’ve made an absolute rollicking ass of myself.
If Maxine isn’t his girlfriend, then—then he gave me a cake out of genuine kindness, and he invited me out because he wanted to show me his favorite bar, and Maxine really did want to see me again, and I acted like a rude little freak for no reason when I ditched them. I was supposed to be showing Kit how much I’ve grown without him, and instead I got jealous of the first person he smiled at and decided she must be sleeping with him. Maxine probably only sleeps with low-level royalty.
I wasn’t like this before we were together. There were so many years of wanting him and thinking I could never have him, of watching him date other people and hearing about every fuck, feeling every complicated feeling you can have for a person, and I still managed to be his friend.
Maybe I can’t do peacefully coexisting exes. Maybe it only works when we’re friends.
I can try, I think. We’re adults. I can set my anger aside and try to be his friend.
I dropped out of college two months into my first semester.
It was supposed to be fun, going to college with Kit—and the Kit partwasfun. UC Santa Barbara had a good art history program for him, and their swim team had scouted me, and I missed him. I’d tried so hard to get over him, but I missed him like tea misses honey, boring without him.
It had been easier than I expected to have him back. I’d anticipated the gut punch of our first reunion, how New York had made him taller and surer and even more sparkly, but then he had just been Kit. As much a part of me as the rest of me.
Lectures were boring, and I kept forgetting exams, but I could stick it out as long as I got to keep swimming. The pool was the one place I was really, truly great, so great that my coaches threw around words likecollege recordandOlympic trials.Then I wrecked my shoulder at invitationals and the doctors benched me for good, so I didn’t see the point anymore. I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving; I just cleared out my dorm and silently moved back into my parents’ house in the Valley. That was the closest Kit and I ever came to a real, adult fight, when he found out I’d made the decision without him.
(You’d think he’d have known better about the apartment in Paris after that, and we could’ve avoided the breakup altogether. But here we are.)
All to say: Higher education didn’t work for me.Wineeducation, though. I was fucking mint at that.
It began with aggressively befriending the chef sommelierat Timo, a mystifying sixtysomething man with a collection of leather dusters and a psychosexual obsession with Chablis. I was bar manager then, but I pestered him into putting me in charge of the cellar map and inviting me to spit in buckets at his after-hours blind tastings. Then there were flash cards and wine-encyclopedia audiobooks and almost setting myself on fire practicing decanting, and it turns out I’m great at learning things I actually want to know.
Now, I know what it means to stand here on the Pomerol plateau, on the right bank of the Gironde estuary. I know about its pockets of rare blue clay, and that when my boots crunch through the crumbly marl, a million little merlot babies drink from the dense earth beneath, ripening navy and opulently sweet so fast they’ll never lose their newborn zing. We follow Fabrizio down a tree-canopied road through the most fuck-off magnificent morsel of southwestern France, grounds sprawling in green and green-gold and copper, orderly rows of vines in one direction and fringes of ancient trees in another. The whole sky wants to climb in when I open my mouth. Tasting notes: clay, plums, the sea.
