Page 36 of Cava with My Colleague

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.