One, the family email chain. Two, a text from the bar manager at Timo. Three, an email from the Somm. Four, an email from Schnauzer Bride. Five, a text from Sloane. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and put the part of me that wants to ignore them all in a chokehold.
I address the bar manager’s crisis first, even though I specifically told everyone at work not to bother me while I was—and I used these exact words—up to my nips in Brie. It shouldn’t bethat hard for the guy with my old job to read my notes, but I guess an assortment of random sticky notes in the back office isn’t as intuitive for him as it was for me. I remind him that our small-batch-bitters supplier has to get free tiramisu once a month or he’ll stop giving us a discount, and that those two barbacks can’t be scheduled together because one fucked the other’s girlfriend.
In the family email chain, Dad has sent a long-winded update from set in Tokyo, Mom is location scouting in the Texas Panhandle, Sloane is thinking about leaving a horse’s head in her costar’s bed, and Este is meeting an ambassador’s son for dinner in the Maldives via chartered helicopter. I send back a short report about Paris and Bordeaux, leaving out Kit completely.
After is the Somm, asking if I’ve registered for a distributor portfolio tasting next month. Trade events are important for serious sommeliers, but I hate networking and being expected to look feminine, and I really hate listening to men in blazers and dark jeans jerk each other off about Burgundy. And I can’t give up a weekend of bus bar sales to kiss ass in Scottsdale. I tell him I can’t make it, already hearing his lecture, do I really want to make it in this business, et cetera and so on.
Schnauzer Bride is next, wanting to incorporate at least three but no more than five botanicals from her florist’s samples into her menu. My endurance is fading, so I grind out a few cocktail pitches and lock my phone. Sloane can wait until my brain isn’t so hot.
I press the cool glass of the screen to my cheek and breathe out slowly, soothed by the expanse of French countryside rollingpast the window, the funny, skinny trees with puffs of leaves bursting from their tops like dandelions.
Sometimes it’s embarrassing that this is peak performance for me, that I spent the past few years kicking my own ass to achieve twenty minutes of executive function and a fear my life will collapse if I breathe wrong. But most days, I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Everything up to age twenty-five was a series of small-to-medium fuckups, until I decided to get my shit together.
I got my shit together because I had to, because I didn’t like myself or my life. But I also did it because every time I lost my keys or forgot a promise, I missed Kit.
Living with Kit was like living in a pixie nest. Every night, I’d find my phone charger relocated to my nightstand and my water bottle beside it, refilled at the precise temperature I liked. Dates circled themselves on the calendar. Fresh flowers appeared whenever the old ones wilted. And no matter how carelessly I unloaded the dishwasher, when I checked the back of the utensil drawer, the measuring spoons were always there.
I loved and resented how good he was at the parts of life I was worst at, and once he was gone, I let resentment win. I made my love into a power drill and built a life I could keep in order myself, because you can’t miss something you don’t need anymore.
But every so often, after an eight-hour shift and an all-night gig, I’ll stumble home to a pile of dishes and think,Kit would take better care of me than this.And for a second, he’ll be there. Putting the cereal bowls away, waiting up with a book, kissing the tension from my shoulders, picking up my slack.
“Theo?”
The real, present Kit is watching me, one headphone out, his book face down on his lap.
“You okay?”
I shake my head.
“Yeah! Yeah, just thinking,” I say. “What, um, what are you listening to?”
“Oh”—Kit glances at his phone—“you’ll laugh.”
“Probably not.”
He gets this tender look on his face, the way he used to when he’d look up at the very top of Mount San Jacinto from the valley floor.
“So, before the trip, I had this idea to make a list of composers who wrote music in each of the tour stops. Because I—” He pauses, searching for the words. This is new. He used to talk in long, breathless sentences until he chiseled down to his point, but now he sifts through his thoughts. “Everywhere we go, I want to experience it entirely. All the way out to its edges. I want to touch it, taste it, drink it, eat it, climb it, swim in it. You can hear a place by walking down the street or sitting next to the ocean or opening a window, but I think if you want tolistento it, it’s in here. Like how bread can taste like the kitchen it’s baked in. Or—”
“Or how wine can taste like the barrel.”
He smiles.
“Yes. Yes, exactly. So, I’m listening to Ravel.”
Without another word, he hands me a headphone. I put it to my ear, and he starts the track over.
I’ve never seen a movie set in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but I’ve seen sandcastles and dollhouses and ripe white peaches, so, close enough. The buildings cuddle together around narrow streets, some made of pink stone and others crisscrossed with bright red timber and matching shutters. Lazy morning sunlight drips from the pink-orange roofs to the promenade curving around a huge crescent-shaped beach, which Fabrizio says is simply calledLa Grande Plage. In the hazy blue distance, the Pyrenees rise toward endless sky.
We start our day at the village’s central market. In winespeak, Les Halles has a robust, varied nose, with high intensity aromas of the sea—salt water, abalone shell, wet stones, seaweed, fatty fish.Notes of brined pork and smoked sausage, yeasty bread and burnt crust, fresh clover and geranium and bird of paradise, wild sage. Another elusive note slips in between, something juicy and sharp, like lemongrass or verbena.
That’s the one I follow.
I weave around cheese cases and pans of steaming brioche, past an old woman ordering lamb from a mustached butcher, to a vibrant fruit stand. It reminds me of my go-to frutería back home, except there’s a type of pear I’ve never evenheardof, which is rare when you spend your spare time tasting wine with guys competing to name the obscurest berry. These fruits canteachme something. I pick up an apricot and press my nose to its skin.
“Bonjour!”
I startle up from the note I’m tapping into my phone (orangé de Provence: intense, sweet, tart) to see a shopgirl in an apron.
