Chapter 13 #2
“You can taste when it’s been rushed.” He sits back, more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him outside of a work context. The afternoon light suits him. “Most places rush it.”
“I will trust your sofrito instincts,” I say, “and I want that noted in the tally.”
“How many is that now?”
“Three.” I fold my napkin in my lap. “All food-related. Makes me wish maybe I should have been stealing your lunch all along.”
I worry for a moment that it’s too soon to joke about it, but Carlos shakes his head and chuckles in a self-deprecating way, and I like that.
The paella arrives. He was right about the sofrito. The base of the paella—the garlic, red peppers, tomatoes—is practically caramelized and packs a punch of flavor.
He’s also, I realize while watching him eat—relaxed, unhurried, completely at ease in this city and this afternoon—probably somewhere in his mid- to late fifties.
Which I already knew in the abstract. Somehow it hadn’t registered as a real number until just now, with the sun on his face and his sleeves still rolled up and the laugh lines deepening at the corners of his eyes when the waiter makes him smile.
I’ve dated older men before. Preferred them, mostly. But there’s a gap and then there’s a gap, and sixteen-ish years is edging toward the latter.
I pick up my fork and move a whole shrimp from the big pan in the center of the table to my plate. Carlos’s age doesn’t seem to matter, sitting here.
We eat and the afternoon stretches out, unhurried.
He tells me about a visit to Valencia when he was a teenager.
I tell him about a bar in Tokyo where I spent an entire evening with a man who spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese, and we communicated entirely through pointing at menu items and making faces.
“He had very strong opinions about sake.”
“You make it sound easy, making friends.”
“It’s easier than people think.” I take a sip of my cava. Carlos ordered a Merseguera, a local white wine that I’ve never heard of before.
“People are mostly just waiting to be talked to.”
He considers this. “Not everyone.”
“No,” I allow. “Not everyone.”
A small silence, not uncomfortable. The restaurant moves around us.
“Your family,” Carlos says, carefully. “Where are they?”
I look up. He’s watching me with that particular attention of his, the kind that doesn’t flinch and doesn’t push.
“San Antonio,” I say. “Three older sisters, parents, the whole picture.” I set my glass down.
“I haven’t spoken to them in about twenty years.
They didn’t really know what to do with me.
I went to college, which they didn’t like, and made some poor decisions, and we fought a lot about my ‘whoring’ behavior.
No one had ever explained sex to me. My sisters had been coached in abstinence.
My parents just ignored me. Because who would want to marry me? Why bother?”
If I’d been born fifty years earlier—well, I probably wouldn’t have survived my childhood. But if I had, I’d have been sent off to a nunnery.
I hadn’t even known what orgasms were until my early twenties. After a case of chlamydia and many, many lackluster performances from partners, I finally educated myself and swore that I would never let myself or anyone I know feel the way my parents made me feel.
Carlos’s face has gone hard and still.
“I was pretty wild,” I admit. “But by the time I graduated college I realized how toxic they were.” I reach for my cava. “And that was that.”
“That was that,” Carlos repeats, very quietly.
“I’m not angry anymore.” And I mean it, mostly. “They did what they knew how to do. They just—didn’t know very much.” I look at him. “I built my own life. The friends I have now, the career, the traveling. It’s a good life.”
Carlos looks down at the table for a moment. When he looks back up, there’s something in his face I can’t entirely read—not pity, which I would hate. Something more like quiet, controlled fury on my behalf.
“You were a child,” he says. “And they looked at you and decided you were worth less.” He shakes his head slightly. “That is not faith. That is cowardice.”
I sit with that for a moment.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s exactly what it was.”
Neither of us speaks for a little while. The waiter comes and goes. Somewhere behind us, a table of tourists erupts in laughter.
“The pictures,” Carlos says eventually. “The shoeboxes. You’ve been—” He pauses, finding the right word. “Keeping your own record.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that before. “I suppose I have.”
“Because no one else was.”
I look at him across the table, this man I have spent months finding infuriating and opaque and occasionally, against my better judgment, incredibly attractive. He is watching me with an expression that is not pity and not performance. He just understood something real about me and he’s saying so.
“Yes,” I say. “Because no one else was.”
We pay the bill and walk back through the evening city, the light going gold and low, the streets filling up with families out for the paseo—children running ahead, old couples moving slowly arm in arm, the particular unhurried rhythm of a summer evening in Spain.
We’re close to the hotel when I stop at a corner. The light here is warm and lateral, turning everything amber. Carlos stops beside me and turns to look at what I’m looking at, which is nothing—just the street, the buildings, the evening.
I take the Polaroid out of my bag.
He watches as I turn and look at him.
He’s backlit, the low sun behind his shoulder, his white shirt gone warm in the light.
He’s watching me with an expression I recognize from the conference rooms, from the hotel hallways, from every moment he looks at me and then looks away—but he doesn’t look away this time. He watches me raise the camera.
He stays still.
I look at him through the viewfinder—the silver at his temples catching the light, the careful set of his shoulders, the fact that he’s letting me do this. I take the shot.
The film slides out warm. I hold it by the edge and wait.
His face comes up slowly through the gray—first the shape of him, then the light, then that expression, which I am not going to think too hard about.
I look up. Carlos is watching the photograph develop, standing very close, and when his eyes move from the photograph to my face there is a long moment in which neither of us says anything and neither of us moves and the evening continues around us like nothing is happening at all.
“What will you do with it?” he asks. His voice is different—lower, careful.
I look down at the photograph. Carlos, in the Valencia evening light, looking at me exactly like that.
“Keep it,” I say.
I put it in the inside pocket of my bag, beside the one he took of me in the cathedral, and we walk the last half block to the hotel without speaking.
The presentation goes fine. Not as good as Vienna but not as bad as Berlin.
I linger so long afterward with five people who are on the board of a local patient advocacy nonprofit that Carlos leaves before me, giving me an approving nod.
I shouldn’t enjoy that approval so much, but it helps, and I suggest the six of us go out to dinner.
Our train is early the next morning, so we meet at the station with our luggage and our coffee and a comfortable silence.
The AVE takes less than two hours. I sleep for most of it, which I don’t intend to do but the exhaustion of the week pulls me under. When I wake up, the landscape outside has shifted from Valencia’s orange groves to the dry plateau of central Spain—flat and pale and bleached by the sun.
Carlos is frowning at his phone. He’s probably still working, answering emails, but I’m already mentally calculating the time it’ll take to get home, how long until I can shower, whether I have anything to eat.
I watch him for a moment before he notices. He’s turned slightly toward the window, one ankle crossed over his knee, a look of concentration on his face.
He looks up and catches me watching.
“We’re almost there,” he says.
At Chamartín, we collect our bags from the overhead rack and join the stream of passengers.
We are transferring to the commuter rail; the same line that goes to my neighborhood goes through Carlos’s.
This station is newer than Atocha, the regional station closer to my apartment, and has a little less character. But it’s more convenient.
When I mention this to Carlos he studies my face. “I like Atocha better, too,” he admits.
Our bags trail behind us. “Well, it has a jungle in it. Automatic cool points.”
The Atocha station has an old and a new part.
The old station opens up under a great arched roof of iron and glass, and underneath it—impossibly, as if the building swallowed a piece of the tropics and never let it go—a jungle.
Thousands of plants fill the giant space; palms reaching toward the glass ceiling, flower beds dense with things I don’t have names for. It’s amazing.
Carlos gives me a small smile. “I was wondering if you found that.”
“Madrid is full of things like this,” I say. “Isn’t it? Things you wouldn’t expect.”
Carlos considers this. “You just have to know where to look.”
We board the train and take seats.
I think about the photographs in my bag. About the afternoon walking around Valencia. About the way he told me to keep the pictures.
And after the train has arrived at Carlos’s station and he’s disembarked, I reach into the inside pocket of my bag and check that the photographs are still there.
They are.