by Daniel Riley
Home was “as weird as it sounds” and school was “filled with the names you’d expect,” which made her feel “like even more of an outsider than I already was,” with an absentee mom and a dad who “probably loved Riviera more than he loved me—and neither of them even worked in the industry.” She rattled off her GPA and test scores and the places she got into and the places she didn’t, and said “the one exception was that I was exceptional at French.” But they “never went to Europe, never went to Paris,” she said. So she spoke French on just a couple occasions only in the wild, on a trip to Vietnam, “in some cafés in Hanoi— it was literally life-changing.”
College was a way to “get out of the canyons,” she said, and “finally get to France.” She’d gone to school with “the same people for thirteen years,” she said, and summer camp in Malibu with “the same Westside Jews since middle school.” At NYU, though, everywhere she looked were “the same kinds of JAPs, and in many cases literally the same exact ones from home.” She read French. She enrolled in the school of individualized study. She listened to hip-hop out of the banlieus. She could move easily, she said, between “the clip of Parisian and the slang of North African immigrants.” It went on and on and Will nodded along, wondering at times what Whitney and Jack were talking about so happily.
Life in the dorms, Leonard said, was an extension of everything she’d already experienced back home, only set in “the miserable winter grays of lower Fifth Avenue.” The heat never worked in her suite. Her roommate fucked her boyfriend in the room while they thought she was asleep. When she complained, the roommate had her boyfriend build a shower curtain around her bed, hanging a contraption from the ceiling that collapsed on them “while he was pounding her in the ass one night, and I was on the other side of the room, wearing headphones and—get this—reading Madame Bovary.” The other two members of the suite lasted only until December (suicide attempt) and March (midterm scandal), granting her the opportunity to move alone into the cursed room, “with its stench of bong water and depression, and its view of the Empire State Building.”
She lived the next year with a girl from the Valley, in an even more destitute suite, “giant by lower Manhattan standards,” but with “a seemingly direct pipeline for bugs from the boiler room.” She found a first-year analyst at Morgan Stanley to spend time with, mostly so she could “be alone at his apartment.” He worked “twenty-eight hours a day and full-time on weekends.” He required “three blow jobs a week, that was it.” But if he was stressed about something at work, he might “try and fail to make me come…”
It was the line on her lips as she reached the carving station. They’d covered a lot of ground in the distance from the door to Curtis’s chicken.
And so, she said, she would go to Paris for a year to “figure things out.” It was her escape, she said, the only thing that had “made life tolerable.” Arriving in Paris in September and walking around on the first afternoon was “the only time I’ve cried over something from feeling good.” Her apartment was near the Canal, “near enough to the classrooms, near enough to the good places.” She’d lived with two foreign roommates, “a German couple,” she said. She went to clubs at night. She chose “a nom de fête.” She met “a boy.” She met “another boy.” She followed his band on tour to Brittany and then Bordeaux. She felt her interests “coming into focus in ways they wouldn’t have back home.” The place was “alive to me,” she said. The place was “filled with my people.” And it was affordable, she said, “half the cost of New York—New York truly is the worst.” She could “never go back.” But then the year ended. It was time to leave. She just knew. Suddenly, she said, she “couldn’t spend another day there.” So she boxed up her apartment and fled, “chased down here by the ashcloud, like I said before.”
“Et bien,” she said, wiping her nose manically, clearing the rim of a nostril, and joining Whitney and Jack back outside on the steps: “Me voilà, donc.”
The four rearranged themselves in a different shape than before, and they ate quickly. It wasn’t much food, after all that time in line. Jack’s legs ran like handrails down the steps. Leonard contorted herself between them like an ampersand, and flipped her hair so that it spilled onto the lap of his jeans.
An older couple wearing silk scarves approached the steps, and the man lowered his glasses to ask, quizzically: “Je ne sais quoi?”
Leonard stared back at the man, then turned to Whitney as though he might mean her. Leonard looked back at the man and said, “Me neither.”
“From Le Grenier,” the man said, in French-tinged English. “Jenna Saisquoi, no? We talked for some time maybe a month ago, after one of your shows. My wife, Celeste. And I’m Maxime? We shared a drink at Le Grenier…”
“I’m…sorry…” Leonard said. “I think you must have me confused with someone else.”
Maxime turned to Celeste and chuckled, not in confusion, but in clear comprehension.
“No, no,” Maxime said. “I’m sorry. Carry on. You know what they say: Once you turn fifty, anyone under forty looks the same.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Leonard said, and smiled without unsealing her lips.
“Well aren’t you a sweetheart,” Maxime said, grinning widely at having caught her out. “Can we take your plates in for you? We’re heading inside now, anyway.”
The four waved them off graciously, and the couple disappeared into the apartment.
“Well,” Leonard said, and everyone seemed to understand, and they stood, and they followed her in. As they passed into the light, Will pinched Whitney in the ribs, an acknowledgment that whatever this was, and whoever all these people were around them, they were part of the thing they’d noticed before, only now they were getting deeper.
Back inside, there was more wine. And Curtis had disappeared the pots of roasted chicken and replaced them with new wooden bowls of ice cream and berries. They sat beneath the bookshelves, their numbers dwindling now that it was creeping later. Curtis emptied another box of beer into the bucket of ice. Will and Whitney found themselves talking to the British architects again. They talked about politics, about the exit negotiations, about the new American president, about the elections in Holland and France and the Continent’s swift lurch to the right.
But all conversations in the room seemed to eventually return to the volcano. You obviously couldn’t return to London, the architects said, but there were still trains running east. They thought they’d head that direction for a few days until it cleared, go somewhere they hadn’t been before. Bosnia, maybe. Serbia. They’d disappear into the mountains for a while, wait for the skies to clear. Gram overheard them and declared it a marvelous idea. He parted the crowd and stood on the couch beneath one of the grand shelves, and selected a slim volume in a blue jacket that looked like it could’ve been printed in the copy shop they’d passed on the walk up. It was a guide to the Balkans, to old Yugoslavia, written by Gram himself. The book had been published, he explained, by Likken Zuigen, the Dutch publishers who’d put out his first magazine. The borders might be different, he said, but the particulars no doubt held true. They could have the book, so long as they brought it back someday, he said. It would ensure their attendance at a future dinner party.
The first overt things Will and Whitney noticed were the hands. It may have started earlier in the night, but it caught their attention when Gram gave the British woman the guidebook. His hands fell to her hips. His hands traced around her lower back and he shifted behind her like a golf pro, giving a full-body demonstration of how best to flip the pages. His arms spread over her arms, showing off the maps, showing off photos of Gram in grainy black and white. His hands lay upon her hands. His face was in her hair. Her hips pressed back into him. Her husband watched, pleased.
All around them, unlimited wine, plastic cups in long supply, Will and Whitney drinking to speed things up, as a way to get through the ice-cream course quicker. There was music now. Rock ’n’ roll in Italian. The convers
ations turned up to drown out the guitars. Jack and Leonard were in line for the bathroom, ignoring the books and photographs, locked into each other instead. Standing there like two different species, one practically twice the size of the other. Will and Whitney stood silent, watching them. They couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Jack had Leonard laughing. He was acting out something physical, hands in the air, up on his toes—the saddest slam dunk in history. She pointed to a book on a shelf. He turned and looked, but instead of reaching for it himself, he lifted her at the waist. She was featherweight. Her legs dangled like soda straws and her shoes slipped to the floor. Her park-stained feet, nails painted the requested color of the session, hung there like prized hooves. She reached for the book and the inner edges of her breasts announced themselves to the room. They fell straight down, concealed only by the indifferent fabric of her dress. She pulled Jack’s ear and he brought her back to Earth. She opened the book and showed him something. He laughed and she laughed, and then, as though forgetting about the bathroom, they disappeared up the stairs to the loft.
What had just been hands in the room was fully bodies now. No one was crossing the line yet, but there was a coziness all around, in the couches beneath the bookshelves, against the counter in the kitchen. New friends who’d spent a glorious gray evening together beneath the ashcloud, humming pleasantly with wine, buzzing ceaselessly with conversation, and the promise of being trapped in the city forever. It was time for Will and Whitney to go.
They approached Gram cautiously, wanting nothing less than to spark a fresh lecture. Will offered him the forty euros again. This time, after a brief and half-hearted protest, Gram handed him an envelope and asked him to write their names on it. There were already dozens of names, crossed out, Sundays for months, maybe years. Names of every nationality, like one of those posters with all the ways in the world to say hello. While Will filled out the envelope, Gram took his turn with Whitney. He wrapped an arm around her delicate, freckled shoulders. He complimented her eyes and her brows and her skin. Gram was still wearing the apron. He’d long lost his glasses. He told Whitney to come back anytime; Will, maybe one out of three of those anytimes, ha ha. It was a joke that prompted Whitney’s polite laughter, which led to a heartier embrace. She made a final appeal with a smile that meant goodbye, and Gram kissed her on the cheek, and then the other cheek, just as anyone would bid farewell to a friend at a party in a city such as this one.
As they made their way to the entrance, they heard a soft “Hey” and then a louder “Yo!” They turned to the sound, up to the loft that hung over the main room. Jack and Leonard were waving at them. “Are you leaving?” Leonard said. And they nodded and waved goodbye and Whitney blew a kiss.
“Hold up,” Leonard said. “We’re coming with.”
Which is how they found themselves through the iron gate and out onto the street, mere hours after entering, but with seemingly a shift of seasons in the air.
“Where to?” Leonard said. She seemed recharged again, loose-jawed.
“Don’t know,” Whitney said. “We were just gonna head home, I guess.”
“Walk with us, at least,” Leonard said. “I needed out.”
“It wasn’t so bad, was it?” Jack said.
“It was only beginning,” Leonard said. “It was going to get weird so fast. It’s a nice night. No need to be stuck there as the party really gets going for the olds.”
They walked three blocks in the wrong direction at first, and they were at the edge, suddenly, of one of the parks at La Sagrada Familia. It was already later than they’d realized, eleven-thirty, and the church was closed for the night, but bathed in the golden spotlights that kept the drip-castle spires visible at all hours. The cathedral was, Whitney had read, Gaudí’s dying obsession, his lasting appeal to God to look after his one true love, Catalonia. A dark familiar feeling seized Whitney, as rarely happened anymore—a vestigial reminder that Sundays were meant for appeals for salvation, for family, for laundered skirts and blouses, not for getting drunk and staying out late with strangers. The feeling lasted only as long as a nervous tic, and then it was gone. Around the cathedral were Costa Coffees and Burger Kings. Open late for different travelers than the ones they’d just spent the evening with. The brightly lit vacant chains gave her an altogether different sense of dread.
“Wrong way,” Leonard said, course-correcting to the Passeig de Sant Joan. The pedestrian walkway led toward the water, ever so faintly downhill. It was a long way, but they all seemed to have a sense that it was the where worth heading to. The passeig saved them from the pedestrian-unfriendly corners of the blocks in the neighborhood. Instead, they had a straight line to the sea. When the walkway disappeared, they looped around the Plaça de Tetuan to the wide boulevard leading to the Arc de Triomf and the entrance to the parks. Whitney took a picture of Will in the glow of the red-brick arch. Jack and Leonard were cozy shapes at the edge of the frame. She was pleased to have something to remember them by, to remember the night by, when it was all just a surreal story that Will and Whitney laughed about one day in the future.
They caught up to Jack and Leonard on the stone avenue of the park, lined on either side by sodium lights. They crossed into the Parc de la Ciutadella and happened upon several Sunday-evening dinner parties stretching later even than the one they’d escaped. There were balloons tied to lights and crepe paper in the trees. There were children still playing soccer in the low yellow light. There was no quit. Not yet. There was so much night left.
They passed beside the zoo. They heard animals rustling the trees, scraping their sides on the stone partition that kept the big cats out of the park. They crossed the train tracks—the heavy cargo rails that led into the Estació de França, that divided the planned part of the city from the old-world beach tenements of Barceloneta. They found stairs to a burned-out clearing and a modest pedestrian footpath buried beneath fresh spring foliage. At least three of them had no idea where they were going, yet they worked like a platoon, unquestioning, pressing collectively onward, ten steps at a time in the direction forward.
On the other side of the tracks, they smelled the ocean. There was a breeze in their faces, a breeze that was doing to Whitney’s hair what appeared to have been done to Leonard’s earlier. It punched Will in the gut when he realized just how close the water was: hundreds, not thousands, of feet from them now. They crossed the street and there, in the darkness—a gradient of blues, of midnights and Yves Kleins—were the sky and the sea. Immediately before them, palm trees stitched into the concrete of a promenade at even intervals. Between the palms were long flat backless benches. And then a railing before a modest drop-off to the sand and the water. There were bodies huddled up on the beach, clusters in the few skeins of knotted moonlight that permeated the ashcloud. Will and Whitney stood at the rail, watching them, breathing in the breeze, but Leonard was already on her way up the promenade, Jack in tow, heading toward the enormous gold-scaled sculpture, the fish, the peix, the Gehry.
They marched two by two, up beach, even farther up beach, past a port and some closed fish restaurants. Then, emerging from the blackness as though it were the only place for hundreds of miles, there appeared before them a softly lit cube on the sand, open-air, with windows and doors missing. It looked like what was left when the inessential blocks had been yanked from a Jenga.
Leonard led the way, and without a break in stride they had four seats at a corner of the bar, two and two again, Will and Whitney pointed toward the water, toward the bonfires on the beach, toward the midnight volleyball and soccer games near the surf. The only other people at the bar were a pack of Swedish teens sitting in the corner sharing large bottles of beer and watching commercial-free music videos loop on a projector screen.
Leonard asked what everyone wanted and ordered in better Catalan than the three of them could muster combined. They sat there for a moment in the silence of realizing that they’d covered plenty of ground already. That they’d already imbibed mo
re collective chatter than was responsible for strangers in a first encounter. So they did what was particularly useful in cases of the sort, and they talked about college. Whitney revealed to Jack that she too had been an athlete at school, if only for a season, and really just for a couple weeks. She showed him the gnarled scar beneath her kneecap. She described for Jack and Leonard her final couple semesters, when she’d finally locked into her most effective mode on campus: solo, solitary, script-obsessed. And though she left out what had come before all that, she felt its presence right there, beneath the surface of the bar, like the fat part of an iceberg.
Will told Jack and Leonard the story of the gardens, how he and Whitney had met, as wild as it was to recall now, the night of Jack’s Sweet Sixteen game his junior season. It was the kind of school that was just big enough for that to be possible—for the three of them to have all been there together, but to have never overlapped. Jack couldn’t believe it, but he loved it. He kept slapping the bar.
Leonard looked bored and so they paid up and she led them to a club. Will and Whitney would never have known about such a place themselves. It was a mile down the beach in the direction of the blackness, a twenty-minute walk. They followed the beach and kept the ocean to their right. They passed a fighting couple, then a stray dog, before arriving at a lonely office building sprung from a plain of asphalt. The office building functioned normally during the day, but at midnight it opened its top floor to music and dancing. Leonard spoke Catalan to the doorman. He let the two girls behind the rope but put his palms on the chests of Will and Jack. Leonard hooked the doorman’s bicep and spoke something persuasive into his ear, and then he let them in, too, but with a finger that said: Just this once.