Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “We’d heard good things too,” Whitney said, “but were supposed to be gone by now.”

  “It’s weird,” Jack said, still lost in what he’d been saying. “I haven’t had a night out without practice in the morning since…”

  “Wait, so this is literally the first night of your retirement?” Whitney said. “Your first free night in years?”

  “I mean, I went home for summers. But it was still every day at the gym then, too. Every day of shooting, running, lifting, swimming in the lake.”

  “Chicago?” Will said.

  “Yeah, exactly…” Jack said, squinting at Will’s knowing-ness.

  “I went to my share of games,” Will said. “I remember the lineup intro is all…”

  “By his share of games he means every game,” Whitney said.

  “What a gym, huh?” Jack said.

  “Are you here with anyone else?” Whitney said. “Teammates? Girlfriend?”

  “Just me,” he said. “Pretty last minute. Looked up the website. Sent an email just an hour ago. But the cook over there, he was manning the list and follows the team. Said he played at uni in Melbourne. So he squeezed me in.”

  “Anything for JJ Pickle…” Whitney said.

  His eyes fell to the crowded floor. “And that’s a thing I’m trying tonight, too, actually.…It’s sort of embarrassing, but I thought I’d give it a go.…Trying it out as Jack tonight. First time since, I dunno, since elementary school.”

  Jack smiled at Whitney and Will saw in her eyes what she was seeing—not JJ Pickle, but a handsome American athlete who had just confessed to being equal parts insecure and famous, at least enough to want to change his name.

  “And did you know it would be an old-people swingers’ party?” Whitney said, brightening with the wine.

  He laughed. “Oh man, you’re the second person to say it. Maybe I haven’t been here long enough. Or I’m talking to all the wrong people. I’ve just been with this girl, who’s the only other young person I’ve seen so far, but she mentioned it, too. I had no idea.”

  “Maybe we’re seeing things that aren’t really here,” Will said. “Maybe they’re all just, like, extra European.”

  “And here I thought I’d come away with some knowledge from my time over here. Some sense of how to tell the difference between Germans and Spaniards and swingers,” he said, grinning again and squirming in place and indicating with a thumb that he still needed to find the bathroom. They each took a sip of their wine as they watched him walk away.

  JJ Pickle. Six-foot-five shooting guard. Number 30 in your programs, No. 1 in your hearts. Will had been to every home game for four years. Three of which included the “Nothin But Netter from the North Shore.” An overlooked prep prospect, jilted by the bigs for his lack of being able to do anything but shoot, and picked up without much fanfare by their little program late in the recruiting process. Coach was from Chicago. He’d played in the backcourt at Immaculata with Mr. Pickle. Coach knew what to say to get Chicago kids down south.

  The team wasn’t supposed to do much. No players over six-nine anywhere on the roster. They played a pro-style small ball before it was popular. Five shooters on the court at all times. Make threes or die. Outrebounded two-to-one most games, but able to beat the best if JJ Pickle got a hot hand. He scored fifty in a conference road game his freshman year. Fifty-five in the home opener the following season. Twelve threes in the finals of a Thanksgiving tournament on a Caribbean island, creeping the team into the top twenty-five for the first time in program history. A perfect game his junior spring: fifteen for fifteen from the field, eight for eight from the line. Will was in The Weevil for that one. Six rows back, standing on the wooden risers, his eyes level with the rims. Packed in shoulder to shoulder—sweating, stuffy—tilting his face to the rafters to breathe cleaner air, lifting the foam pickle he wore on his hand with each JJ swish, just like everyone else in the gym.

  He couldn’t jump. He’d never dunked in a game before. At the end of his junior year, just before the wind-down of a route, JJ took an outlet pass on a fast break and, all alone, planted his feet in the key and leaped straight up, like measuring a vertical, extending toward the rim with the ball on his fingertips and easing it over the insurmountable edge in what would be widely derided on the internet as the saddest slam dunk in the history of basketball. Sliced and diced and made viral. A meme for the weakest version of something awesome. Will had been there. Will had lifted his pickled hand and cheered for the seemingly impossible. It didn’t matter; JJ was a shooter. And they were winning. He led them late into March during Will and Whitney’s senior spring, JJ shooting his way through the opening round of the NCAA tournament, the program’s first tournament win in two decades. Then an upset of the tournament’s top seed in the second round. JJ with eleven threes. Six from the corner, three from the elbows, two—including the game winner—from ten feet behind the top of the arc.

  The buzzer-beater landed JJ on the cover of Sports Illustrated, flipped wrist held high, frozen above his head, the arm posture of textbook form. Inside, the magazine had Photoshopped a foam pickle over his shooting arm; Will knew he had the issue in a cardboard box somewhere at home. They won another game that run—the same night Will and Whitney met, in fact, the game Will had left the gardens to watch downtown. They’d slept together for the first time that night; the two events were tied inextricably for all time. It was a win that would be JJ’s last in the tournament, as teams finally figured out how to guard him, to smother him, to force his middling handle in the double-team. They were antibodies that would neutralize him not just in that Elite Eight game but all the following season—when, with the pressure rising for a replication of their Cinderella success, they failed to be anything but a smudgy Xerox of the magic that had made a brief household name out of JJ Pickle.

  Will reminded Whitney of all of it when Jack went to the bathroom. The parts that Will knew well, the parts before Jack’s time in Europe. Whitney had been an athlete, too—a college athlete even. But the day she’d quit was the day she’d lost interest in sports as anything other than a factory of human-interest narratives or ripe worlds in which to set a series. And so Will explained that to stand even a remote chance of playing basketball professionally in the U.S., you needed more than JJ’s single special jump shot; NBA players were expected to pass and rebound and play defense, too.

  They stood together, just the two of them now, squeezed on all sides by the chatting masses, whose engagement made Will and Whitney only more susceptible to expulsion. They were suddenly worried they might be spotted, flagged, booted for breaking Rule No. 1. They needed Jack to come back at once. They moved across the room to give the illusion of an essential destination. They moved as slowly as possible toward a bookshelf.

  They overheard conversations about the volcano. New predictions that it would be a disruption of six days, or three days, or two weeks. That not only would there be no flights, but no sign of breaking light, either. A sort of hot humid winter was what they all were in for. Will and Whitney keyed into loud theories from the academics who asserted that though nobody would wind up dead, fingers crossed, it would feel like a sort of raid-alert state. Life would go on, but with limited ins and outs, limited exchange between the city and the state, the heart and the extremities. They really believed themselves to be trapped, the conversations made clear. And it would force each country, each metropolis, to act ever more like itself, shaded inward, selfishly, nationalistically. They spoke of it with a panicky catch in the throat, those graying art-adjacent capitalists, those conscientious proponents of liberal democracy, who lived their lives with freedom of food and language and transport, taking for granted the fluid membranes of the Schengen Area. But the ashcloud would bring a temporary halt to all that. The shape and the shadow resembled that of an old-fashioned European crisis, one not so close to them in time but close enough, and with a weight of ever-presence, of psychic occupation.

  As the conversations ev
olved, the guests began speaking of the ashcloud as though it had been in their lives for months. There was a pitch shift—Will and Whitney both heard it—as the talk turned to the logistics of a battening down. There was a raw energy among the guests, nostalgia almost, for the safe parts of the wars that had come before, the wars that they themselves had not experienced firsthand, but that they had dreamed of all their lives. To be trapped on the edge of the sea…no goings and no comings. A packed, pressurized containment. The comforts of claustrophobia. They craved it. It would be like getting stuck in a cabin during a snowstorm, someone said, but with plenty of wine and cigarettes. Which is when Whitney finally whispered it to Will: “They’re getting a thrill out of this.” She said it into his ear: “It’s like how people get before a blizzard at home. They’re literally getting turned on by the prospect of being stuck.”

  Jack made his way back across the room to them. He had updates too, they could tell.

  “You should see the photos in line for the bathroom,” he said. “I recognized some of the actors and musicians. But if the others I didn’t recognize are just as famous, he seems to have met a lot of interesting people.”

  “As a sculptor?” Will said.

  “Sculptor now,” Jack said. “But other things before, I guess. Fighter pilot? Record producer? The whole thing with those porn magazines? That girl I mentioned before was telling me about it.”

  They glanced in the direction of Gram. He was still on the stool, kissing the cheek of a woman his age with streaked hair and roomy skin the color and consistency of parchment paper. He kissed her other cheek and said something in Spanish, then kissed the first cheek again and said something in German. Then he kissed her deeply on the mouth. They both laughed and he checked something off his list.

  “I guess he’s still sculpting,” Jack said. “That girl I mentioned, she actually models for him. She’s around somewhere. I think she maybe stays here while she’s visiting.”

  “Like a nude model?” Whitney said.

  “What she said was that she was picked because of her feet.”

  “A foot model!” Whitney said, tipping the rest of her wine down her throat.

  “Said she stays here and gets her days and her nights to herself, aside from a few hours in the afternoons, when she has to sit in the studio and let him sculpt her feet.”

  “C’mon…” Will said, smiling. “Which one is she?”

  Jack stood up straighter and scanned the room like a lighthouse.

  “She must be outside,” Jack said. And they settled into a conversation about other people they’d met at the party, their interesting jobs, but how Jack’s was obviously the most interesting of all to anyone, though he was ready to stop talking about it. This ending for him was all pretty fresh, he said, and if he let himself think about it too hard he might puddle up right there on the floor. They got in line and grabbed their wooden bowls of soup and then settled outside on some stone steps in the garden. Which is when they heard a voice behind them in clean California English.

  “Drink, big boy? Anyone need another glass of wine?”

  She was the youngest woman at the party, anyone could see. And the first part was meant for Jack, they confirmed, when they saw her neck craned in the direction of his face, half of her mouth in a torqued suggestion of a smile, the other half flat with indifference.

  “There you are,” Jack said. “These two, they’re from the States, too. We actually went to college together, believe it or not.”

  “Not,” she said, and her face was blank—still and uncompromising. Her hair was long and white and fell practically to her waist. It was pushed way up off the top of her head and down her back. It gave the impression that she’d just faced down a heavy breeze. Her eyes were a sparkly cool blue that seemed almost sensitive to light. Her cheeks were full like a child’s, baby fat around the eyes and jawline, smooth as spread butter. She had a nose that was an afterthought on her face, the sort of thing a sketch artist might render with a flick of the wrist. She was wearing a white terrycloth something that was either a bathrobe or a kimono or a dress. It plunged at her chest and it was very possible she was wearing nothing else. Will’s eyes fell to the soft folds at her neck, to the missing collarbones beneath the thickness of her throat, and down the lines of her robe. Whitney’s eyes fell immediately to the girl’s feet, to the pair-of-interest in their leather slippers, to those twinning points of contact with the courtyard bricks.

  “Me neither,” Will said, finally. “I don’t believe it, either.”

  The young woman smiled and then shifted the empty plastic wine cups she’d collected to a single hand, in order to free up the other to shake.

  “Leonard,” she said.

  “Will, actually,” Will said.

  “No, I’m Leonard.”

  “And I’m Whitney,” Whitney said.

  “Leonard’s an unusual name,” Will said.

  “I’ve met a number,” Leonard said.

  “Well, for a woman, I mean. I’m sure you’ve heard that before.”

  Leonard shrugged with her lower lip. “Wine, anyone? I’m making the rounds.”

  “Sure, thank you, if it’s not too much trouble,” Whitney said. “Another white.”

  “Two,” Will said.

  “Three, please,” Jack said.

  And she took the stairs into the apartment.

  “Okay, then,” Will said.

  “It’s her last name,” Jack said.

  “Leonard?” Will said.

  “She introduced herself to me as Jenna. I’m pretty sure it’s her last name.”

  “She must like you more,” Will said, and he felt Whitney shift beside him.

  “How old is she?” Whitney said.

  “She said she just finished her junior year abroad.”

  “Of course,” Whitney said.

  “A year in Paris,” Jack said.

  “But you said she models for him?” Will said.

  “Takes the train down here sometimes, I guess,” Jack said. “I didn’t ask too many questions.”

  “What a baby,” Whitney said, scanning for her inside the apartment, finishing another cup of wine. “Still in college. And wearing a Prada dress and Gucci slippers.”

  “She’s gotta keep the moneymakers safe,” Will said.

  “Do you think she has sex with him?” Whitney said, her eyes still inside the atelier.

  Jack’s mouth slackened, like he hadn’t really considered it before, and then he laughed into his soup—a single snort.

  “I mean, that must be what’s going on,” Whitney continued.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Jack said. “That’s…that’s an age difference. That’s one way to meet someone, I guess…”

  “What about you, then?” Whitney said, hypnotized almost, still waiting for Leonard to reemerge in the cracks between the guests in the crowd.

  “Hmm?” Jack said.

  She snapped her attention back to him, the spell broken, and teethed the edge of her cup. “How’d you find people to pair off with? I mean, while you were playing, if you weren’t coming here every weekend?”

  Jack still looked confused. But Will knew where this was headed. He could see that her eyes were glassy, and greedy for juice.

  “In Norway, in Germany, in Barcelona—how did it work with…how did you pick up women?”

  “Oh, I don’t…” His eyes dropped again, uneasy as a child under interrogation. “I didn’t spend too much time going out to bars or clubs or anything like that, if that’s what you mean. Sometimes I met people, you know, the normal ways, I guess?”

  “Groupies? Dating apps?”

  “I’m not gonna lie…my life has been pretty boring. Gym in the morning, nap at one, practice in the afternoon. Two meals a day at the facility. Pretty beat at night. I’d tag along with some of the local guys every once in a while, and there were girls here and there, but—”

  “Nothing serious in all those seasons?”

  “Summ
ers, sometimes? Back in Chicago, when I had a little more time.”

  “Old high-school flings,” Whitney said, grinning again. “The prodigal All-American…”

  “Jesus, let the guy breathe,” Will said, flinching his eyebrows.

  “I’m just curious how it all works when you’re a famous basketball player, is all.”

  Jack smiled sheepishly. “Life’s mostly the same as anyone’s, I guess. You work out, try to get better every day. You travel. Some locals really care, but most don’t have any idea who you are and don’t give a shit about the team. One thing, though, is that no matter where I went, I always seemed to find myself involved with some girl or another passing through from Evanston or Winnetka, ’cause how else could it go for me?”

  “See, here I was fishing for the difference between Scandinavian girls and Bavarian girls. But you’re talking the gradations between Lake Forest and, what, Wilmette?”

  “Hey, look at you,” he said, smiling, his cheeks flushed more than even a moment ago, out of practice with his drinking. “Definitely can do that. But maybe I can do the other ones, too…” He had a big mouth that stretched wider than his teeth were set. And his head was undersize for his body, for his shoulders and his legs. “Actually, here’s one thing I learned from all my travels, if you really wanna know.”

  “I do.”

  “After a couple vodkas, after some dancing to remixes of ‘Sorry,’ every girl everywhere apparently wants the same thing.”

  “Gelato?” Whitney said. Will shook his head and stared into his soup bowl.

  “Even better, though? My best trick? A big bed. A big bed to head back to. Each new place I lived. I never had to say much, just kinda said it because it was true, but it was always good enough.…I’d say, ‘I’m gonna head home because I’ve got practice in the morning. And I especially can’t wait to get home’—and leave you, fill-in-the-blank-beautiful-lady, here at the bar—‘because I’ve got this bed, it’s the most comfortable bed on earth, and it’s calling my name, lo siento, good night, señorita.’ And guess who was interested in checking it out just to, ya know, confirm the claims?”