Chapter XIII
XIII
By the time we return to the house, the masses are humming around the kitchen. “Need some help?” I ask Ruby, who is pitting a mountain of peaches at the counter.
“No, but you can surely pretend to help me.” She bumps me affectionately with her hip, and I pull a knife from the drawer below me. “And where’ve you been?” She lowers her gaze and inhales deeply, performatively. “You smell like sex.”
I try to ground the corners of my mouth, project some semblance of nonchalance, but the distinct euphoric bliss of having just fucked a beautiful man in a thicket of pinot noir in rural France—well, that is hard to dilute.
I lose my battle to restrain my glee. A smile widens across my chin, and I wink. Ruby laughs and touches a finger to my nose. “You absolute minx!” she exclaims in a half attempt at whispering. “Where?”
I shrug, flashing her a guilty smirk. “The vines.”
She beams, clapping her hands together enthusiastically. “Cheeky!” This time, she doesn’t feign trying to keep her voice down.
Henri brushes past me to shuck corn with Julian and pulls at my T-shirt gently as he passes.
I look at the floor to temper my eagerness, mask my grin—or at the very least, to render it less obvious.
But I feel Ruby’s pupils laser-focused on me, and when I gaze up to meet her stare, we both burst out laughing in full-bodied heaves.
“You’ll give me proper details later,” she says in my ear and goes back to halving peaches.
I stand beside her idly, clutching my still-clean knife like a baton.
At dinner, I feel flayed in a good way. Skinless, exposed to the world.
Like I’ve never experienced anything this up close before.
We eat white bean salads, corn, enormous vats of coq au vin that Bea has been cooking all day—a row of deep red Le Creuset pots dotting the table like steaming bullet points.
Henri sits beside me and holds my hand under the table, his thumb against my wrist. While we eat, I listen to Pietro wax nostalgic about women’s feet in flip-flops on the beaches in Sicily.
Ruby laughs so hard she snorts and spills wine down her front.
Hands move across the table like birds, toasting glasses, passing food, gesticulating in maniacal waves.
The whole meal is like white Burgundy—tastes like a million dollars bottled right up.
Like all the forgivable clichés about decadence and rarity manifest.
Feeling Henri’s pulsing palm against mine, I remember something Emma once told me about proper, full-on romantic affection.
That at its absolute best, it makes everything else richer and more salient: jobs, friendships, apartments, bowls of cereal.
More Technicolor, better seasoned. And on this matter, Emma is an expert: For her, romance is the gasoline that propels life.
She once told me that she’d let a crush pull two of her baby teeth out in the third grade, and the absurdity of the thing made me want to know her forever.
Now it doesn’t strike me as so ludicrous.
I might’ve offered Henri an incisor too if he’d asked.
For dessert: fresh peaches, basil from the garden, vanilla ice cream, Henri’s palm moving in slow circles on the small of my back.
When the time comes to clear plates, Pietro pinches my cheek tenderly. “You look like you’re on party drugs, amore,” he says, then giggles. “Lucky girl.”
Inside, Ruby and I dry the dishes side by side, bubbling over with the buzz of not-yet-shared gossip.
When at long last we can excuse ourselves, we leave the stacks of glasses and trays balanced on the countertop, skip upstairs, and sit cross-legged on Ruby’s bed, both of us clutching our respective plastic Nalgene bottles.
I tell her everything in sloppy soliloquy. The kiss in the cellar, sex in the vines, the Charlotte of it all. I hadn’t realized quite how badly I’d wanted to share—as if I needed to hear it, speak it aloud, to confirm that I’d lived it in the first place.
She listens carefully, bouncing between buoyant, empathetic glee and measured, contemplative acknowledgment.
Each fragment of story spills out of me faster than the last: pinot noir, his jaw.
The taste of Henri. I hear myself repeat his name again and again, like a spell.
“When is it actually good the first time?” I guffaw. “That doesn’t happen.”
When I finish, I start fidgeting at the hem of my shorts, and Ruby reaches over to grab both of my hands.
“For one thing, can I just say that’s fucking hot?
People spend, like . . . forever looking to feel that way for even a second.
So . . . goddamn, how lucky.” She squeezes my palms. “But now that you have it—this rare thing—dare I ask . . . do you want it?”
There are so many ways to want. I hadn’t realized how many ways.
She levels her gaze to look me in the eyes, prompting, and for all my eagerness to narrate the last twenty-four hours of plot development, I realize I am not prepared to answer even this most essential question. The answer is: I do want it. This. Henri. In a certain way.
There’s an asterisk: I want to live in this precise moment via some Groundhog Day fever dream.
I want the passage of time—and thus any consequences of my present-tense actions—to disappear.
I want to talk to Henri for three days straight without breathing.
I want to come with his fingers inside me again and again.
I want to ask what posters hung in his childhood bedroom, his best friend’s first name, his last twenty-eight birthday wishes.
I want to see what he looks like when he cries, when he folds sheets.
I want to come home to find him plating spaghetti in a sauce-stained T-shirt, asking precisely the right questions about my day.
Or maybe what I want is to want less. To live in the holy shelter of this sentiment without any of the pragmatic details of our real lives threatening that house-of-cards infrastructure I’ve constructed purely of desire.
“I guess . . . I don’t know if it makes sense to want anything.” I squeeze Ruby’s fingers.
“Honeybee, no shot in hell there’s nothing you want.”
“It feels so good in this particular moment . . . it kind of hurts to think about how impossible it is, though. It has to be a fling, or else it doesn’t work. I’m at least grounded enough to know that.”
“Listen, you know my feelings about romance: Everything is justifiable in context.”
“I’d needlepoint that on a pillow if I knew how.”
“It’s true, I mean it! And for me, that even includes infidelity—I just have to be OK with the fact that the context has bounds, with knowing that calls will be dropped or plans will be changed instantly if the wife demands something more pressing.
I’m choosing this right now, but the limitations that come from being kept a secret?
Pretty profound. A kind of coffin, if you will.
For you, there’s no world-altering transgression here.
You’re not ruining anyone’s life, but either way, the truth is, sometimes romance is contextual.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, though—happy ending or not. ”
I chew on my lip apprehensively. There is a certain pleading in her voice. “Do you guys talk about the wife?”
She unfurls her crossed legs and lies on her back, depositing her head in my lap.
“We didn’t at first—but now, it sort of makes me feel better.
I’m well aware that what I’m doing is selfish, and sometimes knowing that she’s still real—that her whole life is still intact—is comforting.
It means that when I’m ready to leave, I’ll leave .
. . and they’ll continue to operate without me.
Nothing in their tidy little universe will be shaken, not really.
It’ll be a bit like slipping out the back door, I imagine.
” She sighs as if exhaling something much denser than air.
“I knew what I was getting myself into. I wanted intensity so loud and so addled with romance, it couldn’t possibly be sustainable.
So I found it in something that was never going to be sustainable in the first place.
But, honeybee, in your own way, you’ve done the same thing, whether you intended to or not.
You’ve chosen an impossible thing on purpose. ”
She is right. Of course she’s right. But what if I do want the impossible thing? What if impossibility has its loopholes? “You know, you’re full of sage wisdom,” I say, cauterizing my train of thought.
“Sleeping with older men has really done great things for my philosophical inquiry.”
“OK, Kierkegaard, here’s a question for you.
” I keep my voice bright. I don’t want the gravity of my line of questioning to feel apparent—larger than the scope of our little adult summer camp universe.
“Even with all the ways you can live in your little intellectual coffin and enjoy the hyperbole of your tryst, knowing full well that it can only take up so much space, how can you . . . not want it to be bigger than that?”
“Oh, I’m certainly not immune to wanting.
” She flops toward the edge of the bed, letting her cascade of red curls hang over the edge like a waterfall frozen in place.
“But the alternative is apathy. I didn’t choose this thing just so I could be desired, or ogled, or put on a pedestal.
I chose it because I wanted to want something so much it hurt too. ”
“If and when this thing ends, will you be OK? What will you do?”
“Oh, it’ll ruin me. But better that than nothing.”
I try to assess our dual predicaments, our tangled romantic plotlines, objectively.
For the sake of girlhood, I want them to align.
But some deeper, dumber part of me believes we aren’t necessarily ambling toward the same fate.
There is a glimmer of hope, some plausible alternate ending for Henri and me that I can see if I squint. “You absolute masochist,” I joke.
She prods me with her knee. “Well, I guess that’s the question for you, isn’t it?
Are you willing to let something like this ruin you—even on the smallest scale?
Even if it leads to nothing but some glaring absence?
Even if Henri never leaves Charlotte for good?
Even if he goes back to his real life after harvest and you go back to yours? ”
“Is that my only option? Ruin?”
“Either he picks you, and dismantles his own world as he knows it, or you restructure your life on his behalf—but more likely, neither of you choose each other, and you both disappear from each other’s worlds.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It’s just that the universe makes all kinds of demands, and romance is just one among them. ”
I am far too pragmatic for this to register as a surprise. And yet. “Even the idea of that makes my stomach hurt.” I drop my head over the back of the bed too.
“I know what you mean.”
When I left New York, I’d wanted an experience. I came here in the hopes of feeling. But I assumed I could have that big weighty catharsis . . . and then leave it here. I assumed that the end would be inevitable and thus tolerable. And I was wrong.
I can’t explain to Ruby what, exactly, I want—but the undeniable thing is that I want. And I lack the discipline to put an expiration date on something that feels so rare, so sincere. That tastes so good.
“It’s not like I have solutions here.” Ruby sits up with a labored heave, her hair swinging behind her. “But I can tell you that if you can stomach whatever happens next, maybe this little bit of time you spend together will be remarkable enough to carry you through all the shit that comes after.”
I sit up and lean into her shoulder, and she wraps her arms around me. The smell of her, the press of her sternum where my forehead rests, the weight of her elbows against my shoulders—they all feel familiar. Like we’ve held this pose many times over many years.
“Thank God you’re here,” I murmur into her chest. “Maybe we’ve been the real love story all along.”
“Oh, of course we are, mate. Isn’t it obvious?”