Nora met Javi when he bumped into her with the still-lit end of a hand-rolled cigarette. At first, Nora thought someone had spiked her with a needle. She had read stories about guys injecting girls at raves or clubs with roofies, and Nora was the kind of person who collected news items like that and constantly reshuffled them in the back of her mind as a pre-emptive shield of anxiety. It was unlikely that someone was going to try and drug her in the rooftop restaurant of a contemporary art museum, but Nora’s worries didn’t concern themselves overmuch with details like that.
“Hey!” She started, and she glared at the boy/man whose table she had just brushed past. Nora was just old enough now to be considered and around adults all the time, but she missed the simplicity of elementary determiners. He looked almost like a boy, anyway, with his soft cheeks and the haircut of a boarding school athlete. Like so many Spanish boys, he wore small silver hoop earrings. It was his eyes, and their creases, and the heavier hold of his skin, that gave his true age away. Nora rubbed her shoulder. She was short enough that her shoulder was just the right height to be an unwilling victim to Javi’s cigarette butt as he gestured wildly, talking on the phone, and she walked aimlessly, staring at strangers’ bread services and the blush of San Sebastian’s skyline. The boy looked back at her, noticed the red mark on her bare shoulder, and hastily stubbed out his cigarette. He muttered something that Nora couldn’t make out (she took biweekly Spanish classes, mandated by her au pair visa, but her class was still on Igualmente and primavera and sin carne, por favor) and hung up, flipping his cell phone over.
“English?” He asked.
Nora nodded.
“England?” He continued.
Nora shook her head and rubbed her arm again. She had a face made for pouting, lips large in a small, vertically leaning face. The sun was warm and undiluted, and Nora felt herself starting to sweat under the boy’s direct gaze.
“American?”
Nora nodded again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his English fluid and with the upward, Anglicised tones of the boys Nora au paired for, who went to a private bilingual school. “I should have been watching my cigarette.”
“I probably should have been watching where I was walking.” Nora felt, the way she always did, the increasing hum of embarrassment of forcing a stranger to speak her language in his country. She wanted to keep walking, to finish her perfunctory loop around the rooftop restaurant before she meandered her way back through the exhibits downstairs. She was running out of ways to stay occupied while the boys had their Saturday morning padel practice.
The man started fishing around in his glass. He sat alone, with an espresso cup, a crumb-covered saucer and a half-empty glass full of agua con gas in front of him. He pulled out an ice cube and handed it towards Nora.
“Here,” he said, and he smiled. Nora felt herself smiling back, almost unconsciously. His round cheeks rolled up against themselves invitingly. She took the ice from him and pressed it to her arm. She could barely feel the burn anymore.
“Are you…fine?” He asked.
She nodded. Again. She was trying to preserve the shared language between them, some canned delicacy in an old glass jar. But it was all moving too quickly. The ice was melting against her sun-warmed skin and dripping down her arm.
“Do you want to sit down?” He gestured to the empty chair in front of him, and maybe it was the fact that the boys would be at padel for another two hours, and maybe it was the relief of not being roofied, and maybe it was the meringue curves of the city below her, but Nora sat down.
*****
His name was Javier but call him Javi because Javier was his father, the painter, and he had work on display at the museum right now, which was why Javi was at the museum café and swinging around a cigarette because, yes, it was his father on the phone and his father was very particular and even if his father couldn’t quite travel now because of an…ataque…well, it didn’t translate well (his mother had lived for thirteen years in London, which was why he spoke so much English) but now his parents lived in the Canary Islands, in a building with three patios and a studio with lots of natural light, but even from paraíso his father could complain, complain, complain about the framing or where in the gallery his painting was and of course he had sent Javi to work it all out before the opening even though Javi had work of his own and it wasn’t like Javi lived close to the city and nothing that Javi did or decided would satisfy his father but…yes. That’s why he was sitting on this rooftop café with a cigarette in burning distance of young American au pairs. He only smoked when he called his father, so he’d have something distracting to do with his hands.
Nora nodded and nodded and nodded. She couldn’t remember ever having nodded so much in her life. The ice cube had fully melted and the lingering cold feeling in her fingertips had long dissolved. She liked listening to Javi talk, liked being so near to someone who could reach behind the curtain of the impressive museum lighting and move things around. She liked talking to someone who wasn’t eight and bored practicing English with another new and rudderless nanny. She tried to remind herself to smile at him.
“Do you want to see my father’s painting?”
Nora nodded again, and Javi paid his bill with a few Euro coins left on the table. They took the elevator down to the second floor, and Nora spent the ride looking at her black leather sandals, twisting an ankle round and round and round. She followed Javi out of the elevator and turned left, slipping past a printed sign that Nora couldn’t quite understand, but which she assumed warned visitors not to enter the unfinished exhibit. Javi grinned at the security guard, and Nora thought she smiled, and then they were through and past and charging towards Javis’ father’s work. Just by the way he moved, Nora thought that Javi was an artist too. Nora couldn’t make art herself, but she could sense who could, which wasn’t enough, but also wasn’t nothing.
Javi stopped in front of a canvas that took up most of the back wall of the gallery. It was neatly framed in thin silver edging and burst with heavy, vining strokes of oil paint in sea glass green and gold and pristine blue and sleepy lavender. He leaned back on his heels and turned toward Nora.
“What do you think?”
And maybe there are a few ways that this can go.
“What do you think?” he asks, and Nora—nervous Nora who lives in fear of obscure news stories and natural disasters and has spent two of her three months in Spain trying not to think about going home and starting clerking for her father’s law firm while reading cheap paperback romances in the basement room of the family she au pairs (the only English books they have on offer at the used book store, a never ending collection of deliciously heaving bosoms)—Nora rolls back her shoulders. She says, “I think it’s perfect.” She smiles at Javi without reminding herself that she should, and she doesn’t pick up the boys from padel practice because she knows they can go home with their neighbor and because she’s halfway to Bilbao, where Javi lives. And maybe Nora will buy cheap moisturizer and scented soap from the grocery store and wear some of Javi’s old clothes and practice Spanish in bed with him, that classic study abroad sepia-tinted dream. And she’ll eventually get a masters in Spanish Comparative Literature for the student visa and she and Javi will marry and she’ll meet his father in the house with three patios and brilliant natural light and Javi will sculpt her profile our of shaved bronze and, every now and again, Nora will think back at a past self who feels so distinct and rub her shoulder and smile.
Or, instead.
“What do you think?” he asks, and Nora—nervous Nora who lives in fear of obscure news stories and natural disasters and has spent two of her three months in Spain trying not to think about going home and starting clerking for her father’s law firm while reading cheap paperback romances in the basement room of the family she au pairs (the only English books they have on offer at the used book store, a never ending collection of deliciously heaving bosoms)—Nora says. “Maybe it’s a little tilted to the right.” And Javi hmmmms thoughtfully and his phone rings and his father’s voice springs tinnily out through the speakerphone and Nora checks her own phone and realizes that she really should be going to bring the boys home from padel on time and prepare their bocadillos and she waves goodbye but Javi is distracted by the angle of the frame and the timbre of his father’s voice and Nora slips away into the sunshine outside of the museum doors. And she spends another month looking for him from the corner of her eyes, her slip of adventure, and then she flies home and buys some pants without rips and starts filing for her father’s injury law firm. And maybe she hates it and quits and starts a pet grooming company. Or maybe she loves it and loves to get a chance to work against the anxiety that has always ruled her and she gets a law degree and cuts her hair into one of those slick curtains that frames her chin and sometimes when she slips into a blazer or prepares a deposition she feels a prick in her shoulder and Nora will think back at a past self who feels so distinct and rub her shoulder and smile.
Or, instead.
“What do you think?” he asks. And Nora, nervous and brave and young, says exactly that.
