Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “You preyed on their exhaustion!” Whitney said, covering her mouth in case there was kale in her teeth, enjoying it all as much as she’d hoped. “On their lust for soft pillows and a downy comforter and a chance to get to sleep an hour earlier than they’d planned.”

  “Worked since high school,” Jack said. “These long legs? Those big games? It was the only thing I ever successfully negotiated from my parents. A big bed where my feet didn’t fall off the edge. I’d show them pictures of Jordan’s bed, of Longley’s bed. You ever seen pictures of Shaq’s bed?”

  “Round,” Will said, looking up. “Fifteen, twenty feet across.”

  “Bingo,” Jack said. “Big bed, doesn’t take much to get girls interested.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that before,” Whitney said. “Are you sure these women didn’t think you were just speaking euphemistically?”

  Will flipped to her again, as though she might notice, as though her focus weren’t elsewhere.

  “I got a king in eighth grade,” Jack said, missing Whitney’s line entirely. “No one had ever seen anything like it. And our house, we have this big old mess. No one knew where anyone else was most of the time. All six of us could be home, or maybe no one, you couldn’t tell. Even if it was my older brothers’ friends who were around, the girls in their classes? All it took was the curiosity. They just wanted to see what a really big bed looked like in a teenager’s overstuffed little room. To sprawl out and take a breather.”

  “I’m picturing a Halloween party at the Pickles’ and a bunch of cute older girls dressed up like Rockford Peaches and Racine Belles.”

  He laughed hard. “Pretty much!”

  “And you’re sure this wasn’t about something else?” she said. “Maybe, like, the fact that you were the star of the school, on your way to becoming a pro athlete? Might be a causation-correlation mix-up, no?”

  “Is that something we were supposed to learn in college? I think they maybe let me skip that class.”

  “Then again, the more I think about it, the more I can totally picture it: I’m much more interested in my bed than I am in you, the big man on campus says. A classic Big Bed Neg. Make her feel like dirt—but chosen dirt.”

  He shrugged blamelessly. He knew only what he knew. He was getting exhausted, besides.

  “Let me ask you this, then…” Whitney said, holding her soup spoon in front of his face like a microphone, like a beat reporter in the locker room. “Norway, Germany, Spain, Chicago: What’s the difference once you get them in the big bed?”

  “Hey,” Will said, standing now and shading his body so that his back was to Jack. “Why don’t you have another drink, huh?”

  Whitney’s grin faded and Will looked at the sky, the low ceiling dialing darker. Jack sipped what was left of his soup and let the question hang there unanswered.

  “Well,” Whitney said, turning back to Jack, “for the first time in my life, I can safely say my interest is piqued, too: How great can a bed really be, anyway?”

  Will narrowed his eyes and offered to collect the bowls, snipping the thread before it could unspool further.

  “Three whites, then…” It was Leonard again, back down the steps, as Will turned to carry the dishes inside.

  “Perfect timing,” Will said, looking at his fiancée looking at Jack.

  “Can you take a load off?” Jack said to Leonard. He’d grown looser still. He had nowhere to be in the morning, nothing to be up for ever again.

  “But the animals in there are thirsty,” Leonard said.

  “It’s wine,” Jack said. “They know how to pour wine.”

  Whitney scooted over on the steps and patted the bricks beside her.

  Leonard pressed the butt of her robe down, leaned over, and gathered herself into a comfortable-looking assortment on the top stair.

  Whitney’s eyes watched Will’s widen as they fell down Leonard’s dress. She made a face at him like a mother makes at a child who’s throwing food. Will returned an expression that said: You would’ve done the same thing.

  They’d set the rules. They’d lived their lives apart. They’d come back together and then they’d failed to go home. It was either as simple as flipping a switch off or it wasn’t.

  “So,” Leonard said. “What brings you guys here? You couldn’t have come voluntarily…”

  Whitney explained. Will filled in the gaps.

  “I’m stuck, too,” Leonard said. “There are worse places, obviously. But I’ve never stayed here for more than two nights in a row before.”

  “And sounds like you’re not looking forward to it?” Whitney said.

  “I’ve been abroad since September,” Leonard said. “My mom came to Paris for Thanksgiving and my dad came for Christmas. But I haven’t been home that whole stretch. The term ended Friday. I shipped my stuff out. And I decided to come down here to just chill for a minute, before flying back for good. I knew I had a place to stay. Two days. Maybe a night to myself in the uni housing down in Barceloneta. But now this.”

  “Now this,” Whitney said.

  “I just have to get home,” Leonard said. “I never really felt it all year, but now I need it. The first plane out, I’ll pay for it. I told them whatever it takes, I’ll pay.”

  “We tried to bump up,” Will said, “but not enough miles. We didn’t even try to pay our—”

  “I don’t mean to suggest it’s my money that I’m throwing around,” Leonard said. “It’s just…it’s urgent. And my parents understand.”

  “Listen to us,” Whitney said. “Torn up about being stuck for a few days in Barcelona.”

  “No offense,” Leonard said, “but you just got here. I’m dead. I’ve gotta get out of here.”

  “I understand,” Whitney said, blinking, a little wrong-footed. “I get it.…Do you wish you’d stayed up there, then? Do you wish you’d been stuck in Paris instead? I studied abroad there, too, actually…”

  “Mes affaires sont toutes disparues. J’ai nettoyé mon appartement…”

  “Not that I…” Whitney said pinkly. “Not that I ever spoke all that well to begin with.”

  Leonard smiled. She’d tested the fence, and Whitney could tell it had gone just as she’d suspected it would.

  “My stuff is all gone,” Leonard continued. “I’d cleaned out my place. I’d done everything there was to do. I thought it’d be two days down here, then a flight. Turns out the cloud pushed right up behind us off the Channel and followed us down.…I keep picturing the boulder in the beginning of Raiders. I thought there was a chance of missing it. But it was the same down here starting last night. Cancellations on the whole board. Every airline, every flight. I went to the airport, but it was clear no one was going out.”

  “But you have a place to stay, at least?” Whitney said.

  “He and I have an arrangement. But Curtis, the cook…I don’t know, he’s in the room I normally stay in, so I’m in this weird walk-in closet thing. The reason it usually works is I get my room, I get my stipend, he gets what he needs. Everything’s just different this time.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking…you’re a model?” Whitney said, and Leonard turned to Jack accusingly.

  “He’s a sculptor…” Leonard said, when Jack betrayed nothing. “But he has a thing for feet.”

  “A thing,” Whitney said.

  Leonard shifted on her step, yawned, and settled into the explanation: “It’s gone the same each time, pretty much. I pack a bag for a couple days. I show up. He’s either around or he isn’t, but the door’s unlocked. He leaves a key and a note with the hours when he’ll be ready to work. Two to six, say. That’s when I meet him in his studio, downstairs. He’ll start by taking my hands in his hands. He says it to me aloud, so I know what he’s doing, like a doctor. That he’s feeling for the bones and the veins and the muscle. For the way everything comes together. The way the fingers taper. And then he sculpts a hand, maybe. Sometimes it’s an arm. One time he asked if I would remove my sh
irt and I told him I wouldn’t. And he got testy. And then ashamed. And then offered to pay me twice if I’d forgive him. And when I wouldn’t, he offered me five times the usual, and then he asked all over again if I’d take off my shirt, and by that point it was worth it. No touching, though. He understood. But that’s all beside the point. All those studies, all those exercises, they were just a warm-up for the feet. That was always the last part. I’d sit in a wooden chair, wearing shorts or pants or a dress—he’d usually specify in a letter beforehand. Sometimes the letter would have instructions about nail polish. Red or black, or whatever. Sometimes he’d ask for a pedicure and scrubbed feet. Other times he’d say, Walk outside before leaving Paris, walk in the park without shoes on. Don’t wash them. Keep the grass stains and the mud. He’d specify: From Buttes-Chaumont…from Parc Monceau. And he’d do the same thing as he did with my hands. He’d grab a foot, he’d tell me what he was looking for, the bones, the arch, the invisible hairs, the joints of the toes. He’d close his eyes, his breathing would shift. He’d arrive at some sort of understanding in his head and then return to the clay. He’d move back and forth between my real feet and the fake feet. And it’d take not much detective work to see that he was hard the whole time. The way he walked. The way his pants strained. Last time I was here, he had the clay in his hands, and he asked me to rub my feet together. You know, just kinda roll them around like you would to keep your hands warm. He flinched, and right there at pocket height was this giant wet spot.…I don’t know, things changed after that.”

  The three were fanned around Leonard: Will on his feet; Whitney swiveled on the axis of her spine; Jack slung out, legs stretching to the bricks at the bottom of the steps. Their eyes were fixed on Leonard’s mouth.

  “I say all that just to explain why I’d like to limit my stay this go-around. A final little thing for some cash has turned into this indefinite residency with, like, a world-renowned foot fetishist. Anyway,” she said, gesturing faintly, “that bell you hear means the chicken’s ready.”

  “We’ll come with,” Will said, helping both women to their feet. “Stay in line with us?”

  They moved inside. Will dumped the bowls in the dish bin near the retractable door. They found themselves at the end of the snaking line, sipping their wine.

  They were paired, two by two, Whitney and Jack, Will and Leonard.

  “So,” Whitney said to Jack, “what’s next for you, then? Once we’re free, I mean.”

  “I have my plane ticket home. That’s as far as I’ve got. It still hasn’t fully set in.”

  “You mentioned brothers?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s still there. Two older brothers and a younger sister. We have a family import business. Meats and cheeses and stuff. We’re the halfway point between over here and the fine-food stores in the Midwest and the South.”

  “I worked a summer in one of those in Dallas,” Whitney said. “I know the very ‘cheeses and stuff’ you mean.”

  “Nowak’s? Bisset’s?”

  “It was in our little town, actually. Haney…” Whitney said. “You really know all the names?”

  “I’m not kidding when I say it’s everyone in my family. My grandpa started it after the war. Grandma ran it after he died. Dad took over. Now, my older brothers work at the warehouse.”

  “And what about you, then?”

  “I dunno, I just don’t think I could do it. It always seemed like an inevitable thing, but then I left, and now it’s hard to imagine. Plus, I’d be fourth in line. Dad’s not going anywhere. My brothers are already banking their time. They’d start me on the loading dock. That’s the rules. I mean, I’m twenty-eight. I don’t know if it’s my life anymore.”

  “What about your sister?”

  “She’s an astronomer. In grad school at U Chicago. The genius. Works at an observatory most days, up near the state line. Looks at stars. Figures out, I dunno, the speed of the expanding universe, or whatever.”

  “Does she need a lab assistant?”

  “See, you’re making me nervous now…I’m realizing just how unprepared I am for getting home, just how little I’ve thought it through.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry. I’m just—” She held up her wine cup and smiled a smile that said more prying will come. “He gives me a hard time about the questions,” she went on, flipping her head in the direction of Will.

  “I obviously always knew it would end,” Jack said. “I just never knew how to prepare for it. Once you start thinking about it being over, that’s when you’re through for real. No coming back.”

  “So you banish the thoughts for as long as humanly possible.”

  “Till the volcano goes off, at least…”

  “Precisely.” She smiled again. “I wonder if I ever signed for an order from Pickle Imports.”

  “Pickle Products, actually.”

  “‘A Family Tradition…’”

  Whitney’s neck was beginning to hurt. The craning, just to hear his soft voice over the din of the room. A mechanism he maybe employed to stand out less than he naturally did. She smiled up at the giant, up at the strange predicament he’d found himself in. This life in which for years he’d been the very best at a thing, only to be thrust right back into the old way now, with no new experiences, no new degrees, no new contacts in any of the professional worlds that valued valueless things.

  “I need to stop blah-blah-blahing about basketball,” he said. “I know Dallas…Haney…but you don’t have an accent?”

  “It never took,” she said, leaving it at that.

  He smiled, possibly understanding. “Okay, then.…And I know you two are from New York. But I haven’t even asked you about what you do.”

  She explained that she helped develop television shows that were meant to be talked about.

  “No kidding!” He looked genuinely lit up. “I wouldn’t have said it, but the one thing I’ve always wanted to do is write a screenplay, believe it or not.”

  “Not,” Whitney said, smiling.

  “Yeah, me neither,” he said, missing the joke. “I actually tried to write one this winter. Didn’t go well.”

  “Funny, I tried out for the basketball team this spring,” she said. “Same result.”

  “I read some books about how to do it.” He’d missed it again. “Found this guide in this used bookstore in Poblenou. I learned the formatting. I started listening to this podcast these two guys do. I dunno, it’s not like it’s something I really should be able to do.”

  “Sometimes good stuff comes when people don’t know what they’re supposed to do.”

  “This time over here, I watched so many…six years, all alone, I mean. I’ve memorized a lot of movies.”

  “I know the type…” Whitney said, sensing Will behind her, but hearing only Leonard’s voice. “I’m picturing you in all these romantic European cities, sitting in the dark with your laptop watching the same scenes from The Matrix again and again.”

  “More like Inception and Interstellar.”

  “Ah. Should’ve pegged you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You are not alone in your appreciation, is all. It’s sort of become a problem. I don’t know what you’ve been working on, but if you want some unsolicited advice, I’d keep it simple—simpler than those. How ’bout an American athlete abroad, sticking out, sore-thumbing it in foreign cultures, a new team every year? Lost in Translation but with a six-foot-whatever point whatever?”

  “Shooting guard,” he said, smiling. “Go on…”

  “He’s in a new city every season. The American player who’s been traded more than any other. This specimen of physical perfection…”—she watched his eyes flinch—“…trapped inside, hiding from fans, watching movies, and eating…”

  “Grilled chicken. Grilled chicken in every country.”

  “See, keep that stuff in a notebook,” she said. “And then one day, there’s this American woman. She enters his life. Maybe she’s older…like Bill
Murray’s character.”

  “I’ve never seen it. I should admit that now.”

  “Maybe she’s younger, then. Like…” And Whitney flicked her head back toward Leonard, whom she could hear yapping nonstop at Will still. “An American athlete abroad and a young American passing through. An affair…she makes him a worse player. She wants to bring him home with her. Reintroduce him to life’s earthly delights, whereas he’s committed to the sacrifice of training, to that discipline. He has to choose between the commitment he’s made to his sport his whole life, versus the pleasure of giving up, of giving in to her, of just deciding one day to be happy.…So, maybe he does. They run away. They kill somebody. They find the fifth dimension in deep space and learn that time is a subjective construction…”

  His face was carrying a charge. His mouth was slack again with anticipation.

  “Figure out the ending first. Not everyone agrees, but that’s something I’d recommend.”

  “An airplane heading home to America through an ashcloud…”

  “Okay,” she said, “but who’s on it?”

  They were at the serving table. Curtis carved off some roast chicken for Whitney and then for Jack. Whitney forked her slice and held it up to Jack and made a face like: Aren’t you so happy now? He gobbled it off her fork and Curtis frowned and then served her a second helping.

  Behind them, Will and Leonard had been struggling to find a single overlap in their L.A. maps. Something had changed in Leonard since their first encounter outside. She’d disappeared for wine and come back chatty—looser of jaw, sparing no detail, seemingly, of her first twenty-two years on earth.

  She was from the Palisades, she said. Rustic Canyon, she said, which “some slummingly classify as Santa Monica.” Leonard had been in “private school, K through 12,” she said, “near the country mart, near the country club.” Her father “knocked up my mom when he was a caddy there, where she’d bought a membership just to have a quiet place to drink and not be slobbered over by someone without money.…Little did she know,” she said. Her mother did “business in Asia, overseas for weeks at a time, Japan in the nineties, China in the aughts.” When her mother was away, it was “just the two of us, me and Scott.” They were right there, “not far from the Rockingham circus, even closer to the Lewinskys, right smack at the center of the bull’s-eye, circa nineteen-ninety-whatever—or so I’m told. I was, like, a baby.”