Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  Before they left the bar, they made a list on a napkin of things to do with their bonus time. The Miró museum. The van der Rohe pavilion. A stroll up to Gràcia. That wine bar in Poble Sec they’d tried to drink at the one night it was closed. The restaurant in Sant Antoni they’d failed to get through the doors of when they stopped by without a reservation. Maybe even return trips to Parc Güell, La Boqueria, and that beach bar at the far point of Barceloneta, the one that looked to serve only orange spritzes and pink langoustines. But would establishments even be open during the volcano days? Would it be appropriate to lounge down by the beach? It wasn’t as though the city had been hit by an attack or flooded with protests, but would anyone want to be out? It was the question they wondered aloud once they’d stalled their list and popped their last almonds into their mouths: Would the ash make it more like a city during a storm or a city during a war?

  Whitney recalled hearing about a Sunday evening party that she’d been bummed they hadn’t had the opportunity to attend. Something that had been recommended to her by a TV writer she’d met through work. It was a dinner, hosted by an American artist who’d lived in Barcelona since his flying days in France, that had taken place almost every Sunday—rain or shine or ash—for forty-five years. There was a website and everything. All you had to do was send him an email RSVPing, and bring twenty euros a head to cover the cost of the booze and the home-cooked meal. Guests apparently came from all over. It was a deliberate gathering of strangers, Whitney had heard, and the whole thing was to mingle with new people. The artist was some kind of functionary of the sexual revolution in Europe, she recounted to Will at the bar. He’d started porno mags in Amsterdam and Edinburgh. If you go, Whitney had been warned, show up on time and head out early; it gets weird when the regulars reach the witching hour.

  “So, what do you think?” Whitney said.

  “Sounds like a lot of talking to people we don’t know,” Will said.

  “Yes, that’s the point.”

  “And they don’t care that we won’t know anyone at all?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re being deliberately thick. That’s what it’s about. All these travelers from all over. A few locals. Some expats—if they still call them that. It’s a couple hours, nothing crazy.”

  “If you want to go,” Will said.

  “But do you want to go?” Whitney said.

  “I’m sure it’ll be great. These are the things I’m always suspicious of but never regret having gone to. Just to be super clear, though: You want to spend a whole night making small talk with strangers?”

  “You didn’t seem to have trouble making small talk with strangers when they were first-year associates in pencil skirts.”

  “That is true, yes.”

  “…when they were all paralegals buzzing hot in the cheeks, on X and Y and Z.”

  “Are those your names for party drugs?”

  “…on E and F and G.”

  “You’re right,” Will said. “No problem then, no problem now.”

  “…ready to walk right up and put their sticky little mitts on your arms and chest, presuming without a doubt in the world that a guy like you’s not hanging around unless he’s ready to get down right then and there.”

  “Desperate times called for desperate blah blah. Though you realize this is a little different. This is talking to people just because.…No best-sex-of-my-life at the end.”

  “No bloody noses,” she said. “No tits in armpits.”

  “What makes people get up in the morning if at least the possibility’s not there at the end of the night, right?”

  “Maybe this is the same sort of idea,” Whitney said. “I hear all the old people are there to fuck each other anyway. All those aging free-love swingers.”

  “Good, then,” Will said. “I’ll get to see you in action. Now that I know you’ve got a taste for vintage.”

  She could’ve smiled, and she may have tried, but it faded in the same instant. Last night was important for them. They’d survived it. But it was raw still. It wasn’t quite all the way to lightness. At least not like it had been at times the night before, and not like it might be down the road. There was serious trauma still. But they were okay. They’d survived the dinner. And then they’d gone home, and taken it out on each other.

  He’d been rough with her. He’d wrapped his fingers around her throat and held on longer than he knew he should, reminding himself at the critical moment to slacken his grip: easy.…He made sure to mark her up. Surfaces. Cupped palms, smacks that stung. He stuck his hand in her mouth and hooked her teeth and lips, unhinged her jaw. He pulled, he pressed. She’d done the same to him. Used him like she’d used her pair, let herself be used like they’d used her. They brought strength into it. Made sure there was a hairline fracture of uncertainty about whether they maybe hated one another. Pressed and pulled. Over the line. To the point of stop. To the point of not so hard. The windows were open and it was warm out. The ash had created a vacuum seal, a sheet over the city. But they hadn’t known it yet—the ashcloud had slipped in under cover of darkness. Their bodies were wet when they were through. There was heat in their hair. Dampness at the neck and forehead. Sweat sliding down the pane of her stomach, around the well of her belly button and the risers of her hip bones. Her pubic hair was dewy. Her crack was damp. They grew slicker as they lay there. He’d finished inside her. Not the way they normally did. But she’d fastened him in with her legs and practically made it end on command. She could make him do what she wanted when she wanted it done. Not like the others. She knew how to do things to him and he knew how to do things to her. They fell asleep above the covers in a locked, logical tangle. A tessellation. They hadn’t bothered to set an alarm.

  They went to the party. It was a fifteen-minute walk, in the vicinity of La Sagrada Familia. Across palm tree–lined boulevards, beside fountains and light-rail tracks, up narrow alleyways with bars and tabacs and copy shops and pet stores. The grinding of espresso machines, the upshift of motorbikes, the steady laughter of large groups drinking at tiny tables on the sidewalks. The sky was low and lit up yellow. The core of the cloud cover was dark, but the smothered presence of a late-spring sun persisted gauzily into the early evening.

  The entrance to the party was through an iron gate in a narrow archway that opened onto a courtyard shared by the building. It was like a secret park. There was a small pool for children and dogs. Benches beneath palm trees. A modest garden and a faded soccer goal spray-painted onto the brick wall at the far end. The courtyard was teeming, but it was difficult to tell if everyone was there for the dinner. The apartment nearest the street belonged to their host, and enough nice-looking people were spilling from his atelier—out the doors and down the steps into the courtyard—to convince Will and Whitney they’d found the right spot. Each guest had a plastic cup of wine in hand, a plastic cup or a bottle of beer. Drinks were in buckets of ice. Whitney led Will by the hand.

  “Do we check in, then?” Will said, and Whitney shrugged like how would she know.

  They walked around slowly. The courtyard was such a surprise, the sort of thing they never would have noticed if they’d been simply walking by, if they hadn’t had reason to dip in. So many of the buildings they’d strolled past in the previous four days, especially in the planned sections of the Eixample, had an identical footprint. Four sides and four chamfered corners—perfect octagons—taking up one block each for the entirety of the vast neighborhood. The heavy diagonal corners were matched by diagonals on the sidewalks and streets, creating exceptionally wide intersections. It was inconvenient for pedestrians, but the plan was beautiful, and the buildings looked even better, Will and Whitney knew from their maps, from above.

  Inside many of the buildings was a hollowed-out center, a courtyard with a range of attractions. This one had its garden and pool, but also enough space, evidently, to accommodate a hundred strangers. There were lemon trees. There was a pea-gravel pit. There was a squeeze bag of wine res
ting on someone else’s steps. The signs on those steps—in Catalan, in Spanish, in English—asked that guests respect the private property of the neighbors, that Sunday was a day of peace and quiet for everyone else. The weekly dinners, it occurred to Will and Whitney, must’ve been a nightmare for the neighbors.

  An English woman with long gray hair and blue glasses asked if they were part of “the Gram Thing.” When Whitney said she didn’t know, the woman explained she meant the thing that she herself had resisted for years before attending a lecture of his at the university and falling in easily with his congress of former students. Whitney explained that they hadn’t met Gram yet, that they were merely stuck here because of the volcano, that they weren’t aware that Gram possessed a following of note. And so the woman introduced Will and Whitney to some others, who, like her, were British developers or architects or artists who worked primarily in Spain. Personal homes in Barcelona and Madrid and Valencia, et cetera. Who, too, professed to be very much part of the Gram Thing, if they caught their drift, which Will and Whitney still did not. Will asked a middle-aged man with a brand-new baby how he was coping so far. “The baby’s fine, but the birth part, that was like watching your favorite pub burn down,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his wife’s vagina.

  The couple introduced Will and Whitney to a restaurant owner with a French accent, and identical male twins with matching Scandinavian hair and glasses, and a Catalan separatist with a yellow-ribbon lapel, and a short, curly-haired Italian classics professor who talked excitedly at Will and Whitney about their university years in the American South, how he’d long fantasized about taking a road trip to mythical jazz and blues destinations, to New Orleans, to the Delta, to the Mississippi crossroads where Robert Johnson made his deal with the Devil. An older man with hair like soap suds crashed in and introduced himself as Josep, then shooed anyone inside who hadn’t yet checked in with Gram. There was the business of saying hello and verifying attendance, but also soup was being served, the first of three courses. They squeezed past several small groups, strangers clearly getting to know one another, based on the biographical details they picked up. They all seemed at least twice Will and Whitney’s age.

  The atelier apartment was up a half flight of stairs from the courtyard, and the door was a retractable wall of glass that ran on runners like a gate in a loading dock. The main room was overstuffed. Several queues competed for space. To the right ran a line to a kitchen island with a checkered tablecloth, where a younger man ladled white-bean-and-kale soup out of an industrial-size pot into wooden bowls. To the left, a shorter bathroom line pressed against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with titles in countless languages. And in the center of the room was the line to check in with Gram. From Will and Whitney’s position, only glimpses could be caught of Gram, the edge of his generously follicled head, a free arm gesturing with a golf pencil in hand.

  Above the main room was an open loft—the bedroom, they presumed. Another set of stairs led to a basement. Will and Whitney kept tucked into themselves, their faces scouring like a pair of searchlights. They pointed out dozens of unframed paintings hanging over the edge of the loft, floating there above the gathering in the kitchen. They squinted from distance at the books on the shelves. Fifty feet of travel guides. Sicily and Bordeaux and Yugoslavia. Lapland and Baden-Baden. Thick and thin spines, West and East. There was conversation all around in Spanish and French and German and a brightly colored collage of heavily accented English.

  The couples peeled off. The line grew shorter. They were nearly up.

  “Genevieve, François, meet Lily and Tomas,” Gram boomed to the couple before them in line. “Lyon meets Dortmund. You must know someone in common, right?”

  Then it was their turn. The mustache was thick and white and wide, wider than his wide face, wider-seeming than the hips that spilled over the edge of the stool. He leaned back against the stool, wrapped in an apron that matched the tablecloth, checkered red and white, with a loopy I Love Lucy script that said Screw Me, I’m the Chef. His cheeks were red, his skin was tan, his hair was gray in spots and yellow at the edges—the color of a used cigarette filter. He watched Genevieve and François disappear into conversation with Lily and Tomas, then turned his half-moon glasses on them.

  “Two under Will Granger,” Will said, holding two twenties outstretched.

  “Put that away,” Gram said. “I’m not a whore. You don’t need to pay me up front.”

  He peered down his nose at them through his glasses.

  “It’s a joke,” Gram said. “It’s a joke that I’m too lazy to make funnier. There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t recognize you. First time?”

  “If we haven’t made that clear enough yet,” Will said, smiling cautiously.

  “Well, there are plenty of folks here who can show you the ropes. But it’s not meant to be a night of strict rules. Just one rule, really.” Here he pointed his pencil at Whitney. “You must always be talking to a person you didn’t know before tonight. If I catch the two of you off in the garden by yourselves, I’ll ask you to leave. Or Josep will. Or Caterina. Easiest rule there is. Make friends. Drink drinks. Soup, then chicken, then dessert, courtesy of…Curtis.” He screwed up his face. “How cute.”

  Curtis was behind Gram in the kitchen, and he lifted his wooden spoon at the sound of his name. He had jean shorts on and a white V-neck T-shirt and hair down to his shoulders, tied back with a red bandanna.

  “Curtis is from Brisbane and staged in Perpignan last season. He’s crashing here while he writes away for his next internship. Lucky us. Anyway, you’re all set, and it’s a pleasure to have you in my home, Will Granger and Whitney Cross. Will and Whitney, young blood, did you meet Genevieve and François when you were in line? Or better yet, I see him coming up the steps, the tall American, the basketball player. Jack! Jack, come here. Jack, meet Will and Whitney…”

  Will couldn’t believe it. There, ducking beneath the bottom edge of the retractable door, was a face he’d known and loved, but hadn’t thought of in years. There, scanning for something essential, attempting to distinguish among the three competing lines in the room, was none other than JJ Pickle. Star of the basketball team during their time at college. Three-time first-team all-conference. Breakout of the first weekend of the NCAA tournament Will and Whitney’s senior year. Top scorer in program history. And here he was, with an empty 250ml beer bottle that looked like wax candy in his hand, searching for another drink, searching for the bathroom.

  It was as though he didn’t hear Gram at first, so Gram called out again: “Jack!” And JJ lit up at the realization that it was he whose attention the host was seeking. “Jack, my boy, this is Will, this is Whitney.”

  JJ was trapped by two bald men with rimless glasses and dark jackets. JJ, who towered over them, mocked a fake handshake across the divide. Will turned to Whitney and said, “Unreal.” And she said “What?” like she really didn’t know.

  When the men with the glasses cleared out, the three of them were body to body. JJ was five inches taller than Will, a head and neck taller than Whitney. He took her hand and said her name again and he said “Jack” and their hands bobbed between them like one or the other might ask another question. Whitney squinted like she maybe recognized him from somewhere, and he squinted like he maybe knew her, as well. But at the word volcano behind them, Whitney cleared her throat and dropped his hand, and he eventually turned to Will. Will didn’t say his own name, but rather, “Believe it or not, we went to school together. All three of us.”

  Jack’s mouth was open like a cave, eyes slit and turned down like a tickled baby’s. “No way!” he said, emitting a low roll of uncomplicated joy. He squinted again at the two of them and put his hand on Will’s shoulder, then took another long lingering look at Whitney.

  “Hold on,” Whitney said.

  “We graduated a year ahead of you,” Will said.

  “I love it!” Jack said.

  “You’re…” Whitney said.<
br />
  “And you’ve been playing here ever since college, right?” Will said.

  “Well, not here the whole time,” Jack said. “Norway, then Germany, then…” He trailed off and stooped his dark-haired head. “And, weird as it is, I guess I can’t claim that anymore. It’s all through, as of last night. It was supposed to be my last game, but it was canceled ’cause the other team couldn’t get in on a plane.”

  “Last game of the season?” Will said.

  “Of everything. Of all basketball, forever. Twenty-five years and done.”

  “As of last night?” Will said. “You’re kidding.”

  “We weren’t gonna make the playoffs, so they just decided to call it. No makeup game. Over just like that.”

  “You’re on a team right here in Barcelona, then?” Will said.

  “Not the big one, not the one like the soccer team. The smaller one just north of the city.”

  “And so, what, as of twenty-four hours ago, your career is over?”

  “You play professional basketball in Europe…” Whitney said, still lagging.

  “Did. Six years. I was scheduled to fly home in the morning. But with all this, who knows?”

  “We were supposed to fly out this—”

  “So how’d you end up here?” Whitney said, cutting Will off.

  “Well, I guess…I’ve been in Barcelona for two years. I was thinking this morning, and realized I’d done basically the same thing every day for my entire time. Even when my brothers visited: practice and games and practice and games.…Once, I was supposed to go on a weeklong trip with some of my boys, but Coach decided to cancel our days off. Emergency practices after a couple bad losses. So my buddies stuck around town, and actually came to this party and had a fun time. I just felt like I was always missing out, so figured one last Sunday—why not?”