by Daniel Riley
Will had spent every summer of college at home, at the beach. Where he could cut lumber and pound nails with his shirt off, and get back to something tangible, something he knew he could start and finish with pride. He got tan in summers. He had flings with toasted bunnies who sold sunglasses in downtown Sela del Mar. He rented and re-rented his favorite DVDs from their video store, and bought the scripts that the clerk recommended. But it was also during each of those long sparkling summers, in a sun-daze of contentedness, that Will grew convinced of what he suspected to be true when he was away at school: that being from Sela del Mar was the single most interesting thing about him. He longboarded around campus. He played club volleyball. He surfed warm weekends out on barrier islands. And as he struggled to find his footing in the classroom, his association with California became his primary antidote to anonymity. Still, the fact of having found no clear passion or path forward had become a singular fixation for Will, like a pulse in a rotten tooth. He was happy to go home for every hour of every break, to disappear into the luxury of that escape—and for a while, it was enough. But as the finish line crept closer, he knew he needed a real plan for the exit.
It was during that final fall, on a trip to the chain bookstore outside town to pick up scripts for Taxi Driver and Rocky and Chinatown and Jaws, that Will spotted an LSAT prep book on his way to the checkout counter, and dispassionately added it to his stack for good measure. The morning of the exam, he assured those he recognized that law school wasn’t something he’d actually pursue, it was just to see, just to cross his Ts—just like everybody else was probably doing there, right? But at Christmas, after returning from an early-morning surf beneath the flight path, he logged in to the test portal and discovered he’d scored a 174.
He knew at once that it was a mistake. That his exam must’ve been exchanged with someone else’s. He’d never sniffed 174 on the practice tests. He’d never approached the ninety-ninth percentile in anything in his life. Some poor someone out there was scratching his or her head, wondering what he or she had done to deserve such an inexplicably compromised fate. As compared to Will, that walking embodiment of the benefit of the doubt, who tempted himself in that instant to believe that maybe, just maybe, he’d earned it—and that he was maybe even destined to succeed in life after all.
He had been blessed from the beginning, he knew. Born at the beach. With the salt, the light, the perpetual glory. The three-bedroom house with the stucco veneer, a ten-minute walk from the ocean. That little house. That little porch. The screens on the windows and the screens on the doors. The brown carpet. The yellow kitchen. The shed with the tool bins. The work truck parked out front. The drawers stuffed with VHS tapes. The video-store membership card like a key to the kingdom. They had spring, summer, fall, and winter. Rain, Camp, Fire, and Fog—their seasons, his seasons growing up. His father worked outside year-round in Red Wing boots and Gramicci shorts. His mother lived in a comfort zone of three or four degrees Fahrenheit. He built houses and she sold them. They had one child. Lucky him. Lucky Will. It had been the case all along.
And now, after so much searching, he had found his escape pod. No more failed attempts at the things that were too hard—that he had no business trying, that he was just too not-good-enough at. He knew enough about movies to know that they were simply the dreams of a naive teen skater with a camcorder and a video-store card. And he hadn’t even yet met the someone whose knowledge—whose understanding of what it really took, of what it really was to be great—would put him and his knowing-ness to further shame. He felt fortunate then, so early on in life, to understand the difference between what was possible for him, and what wasn’t. He felt fortunate that even at twenty-one he could see himself the way he truly was. He would go to law school. He would be a lawyer. And he would be good at it.
Those were the last days before Whitney. The days before love and law school and internships, and the public defender in New Haven, and the First Amendment firm in Washington, and then ultimately back to New York. He worked in magazines now. Or at least for magazines. Advising on libel and defamation, but mostly processing contracts. What must we do to not get sued? was the question often presented to Will—along with an attached contract and a claim by a contractor, or a manuscript and a quote from the litigious founder of a sham start-up.
He had liked it fine at first. The stakes. The peripheral yet critical work helping to prop up a fragile American institution. And he had had a handle on it for a while, too. Steady. Cool. Californian. But two and a half years of pressure and volume had squeezed him, deadened him. Heat and acid congealing right there between his throat and his heart. He’d been in the job for just thirty months. Not long enough to quit—he couldn’t quit. But it had been longer than he could remember since a day at the office had not placed that anvil on his chest. The braided symptoms of anxiety and rage.
On recent working weekends, Will had marveled emptily at the uncanny scale of the computer-generated splotches of color on the lobby mural. Standing there slack, with a tossed salad in a plastic trough, Will would slip deeply into the mural while the jaw he inherited from his father pulsed tensely in his cheeks. He would just hang there, hating every inch of the fucking thing, then crash through the mechanical arm near the security desk before it chirped wide. Which direction was it all flowing? Was his work making him hate the art? Or was the art making him hate his work?
Will stood before the Miró now, contemplating these questions, and heard sharp, audible breaths from somewhere. It took him a moment to realize they were his own. He had been so relieved, that seeming eternity ago, when he’d found law as a warm and friendly way station, that he never once considered the long-term implications of a career in contracts. But that fucking mural—sensing it even where it wasn’t—confirmed for him his most private concern: that his thoughtless career choices had led him into a trap of inescapable dullness. He must quit. But he couldn’t quit. He needed the money badly. For loans, for living. No one who had been hired right after the crash threw away a job so hastily. He needed to keep up with Whitney, anyway. He needed to stay above water and not plunge into the deep end with all the people around him who had even worse debt than he did. There wasn’t anything he could do just now.
And so he would wait. He would wait for feedback on the screenplay. The thought of his script provided instant relief. He’d sent it out before the trip. It was a secret; Whitney knew nothing about it still. He would hear back soon from the producer. And the new escape pod would present itself. A new life that moved just a little slower. A life of more cafés, more afternoon naps. He couldn’t quit just yet. He couldn’t succumb to the provocations of the mural. He would be patient for now. He would persist.
At the other end of the museum, Whitney smiled as she turned another corner. She loved being inside museums. She believed they could change your chemistry, if even for a short spell. After visiting a museum, she felt civically lifted, the same sensation that flooded her after voting. She felt at home with the generous width and limited depth of her knowledge, with the undergraduate’s foundational base. She kept up with reviews in the Times and The New Yorker. She paid full price at the Met and took advantage of her MoMA corporate membership. She felt comfortable confirming her best guesses with the labels on the walls. There were connections that went back.
Her father told people she’d been named for a mountain, but her mother insisted she’d been named for a museum. Her mother would drop little truths like that, as though she were the only one who knew the real story, as though her version of their shared life superseded his. Her father flew commercially, the reason they’d wound up in Dallas in the first place. He was bighearted but unconditionally deferential, conceding any fact—including the origin of his daughter’s name—in order that he might get out the door faster, his head still clear for flying. His stretches away meant Whitney’s mother was often alone with a messy house and a full-time job and a shy but self-sufficient daughter and a handsome but hell-r
aising son, who sucked up the lion’s share of her attention, the energy of a solar system. Whitney’s mother had had a life before them, she made sure they knew. A life that reared its head with the names of museums in far-off cities, and a habit of going alone to the movies once a week, and an insistence to Whitney that she not waste her time on a liberal arts degree, as she had, lest Whitney find herself trapped in the same endless cycle of dissatisfaction.
They’d moved to five different pockets of Dallas–Fort Worth by the time Whitney was even thinking about college. Her mother switched schools more than football coaches, searching out new teaching opportunities for herself, but claiming all the change was on behalf of Whitney’s brother, who could never seem to find the right “situation,” whose violence on the playground would rear its head “unexpectedly,” even though physical fighting was the only way he communicated with Whitney for years. But for all the focus on her brother, Whitney knew even from a young age that it was her mother who necessitated the sudden ejections, the hard pivots, the whiteboard wiped clean. She’d never stopped wanting the better something for herself that she was certain she was owed for all the sacrifice. She told Whitney all her life that everything she did was to make her and her brother’s life easier. But the effect of her rule—for Whitney, at least—was almost always to make it harder.
At schools in Euless and Arlington and Richardson and Haney, Whitney navigated toward the unobtrusive middle, tacking neither too high or too low, leaving knots of near-friendships in her wake. Daylight hours, then, were devoted to schoolwork and soccer. And in the evenings, on the personal television that her parents gifted her as an alternative to the 24/7 live-sports marathons her brother insisted on, Whitney could commune nightly with the wisdom of MTV, of the lives lived out there, away from the Webers and the Whataburgers and the overwatered yards of her cul-de-sac. Growing up, she’d never given herself entirely over to home. She’d never even let the accent in—choosing to mimic her mom and dad and MTV VJs instead. Her parents had only landed there eventually, she reasoned. They didn’t have it in their blood, and so why should it be required of her? But New Orleans and Chicago and Paris—her favorite seasons of Real World—what would it be like to turn herself into not a cast member necessarily, but an extra in a city like one of those someday? A young woman in the background reading a book in a café? A slightly older woman in monochromes clacking down a sidewalk in heels? There was something grand out there, she knew, something her mother and father had seen in their prehistory together, in their years stationed overseas, that she must experience herself. She’d had the flushing sensation, even before she could name it, that she must not get sucked down, that she must make something of herself.
Whitney turned another corner in the museum. There was a detonation on the surface of one of the Mirós. She approached it slowly and mouthed the word “Pow!” She’d seen this one before—maybe in a textbook. Maybe in one of the many courses she’d taken near the end of college. Her mother’s insistence that she not study liberal arts hadn’t guaranteed that Whitney would do so, but it hadn’t exactly had the effect her mother intended, either. Literature and classics and art history and film. There were things that could happen to you with art, she knew. Things it could do to your body.
It started for Whitney with the sparse illustrations in the Bibles in the backs of the pews. As much as they moved house in the sprawl, the airport and the church were the sole fixed axles around which their life revolved. At DFW, her father was unburdened. At St. Luke’s, her mother was able to sit still. From the illustrations, it progressed for Whitney to the stained glass that stretched from the altar to the narthex. And then, of course, to the sculpture of Saint Teresa that rooted itself beneath the bleeding Christ on the cross. Teresa in ecstasy. Teresa in religious elevation, the sort all boys and girls at Sunday school were instructed to aspire to—through study, through practice, through prayer. After taking the wafer and the wine, Whitney would, for years, steer wide on the way back to her seat to extend her glimpse of the face of the woman whose heart was pierced by the news of the angel, his sharp little golden spear.
At first, there was fear. It looked as though Teresa was in pain—scared, even. When Whitney had asked her mother about it, her mother showed her the photo they bought from the top of Splash Mountain on a family trip to Disney World. Whitney looked terrified, but her mother reminded her how she’d felt at the bottom, the fit of giggles. Whitney lived for that feeling. If that feeling was findable again by focus, by willing it through prayer, that was something worth pursuing. That was something she could think really really hard on before bed each night.
For a time, she’d convinced herself that she’d found glimmers of that ecstasy in MTV, her oasis, her own little golden spear to the heart. And then, for years, she thought she felt flickers on the soccer field—rapture in a boomeranging cross from the wing, in a blistering strike from outside the box. But the shards of light that the older women had promised were gradually lost on her, as many of them later confessed they had been lost on them. Her effort faded. It had been a silly pursuit anyway. It wasn’t until a stopover in New York on their way to a club tournament one spring in high school that Whitney’s faith in the promise was restored.
It was her first trip to New York. She was intimidated by the assault of stimuli, suffering a blizzard of sound and light. She liked the pizza and the pretzels and the dogs that looked like their owners. She liked the hotel and the room service and the bellhops in the lobby. But after just the first day, she was eager to escape. Which was when her mother took her on a walk through the park and up to the museum that was claimed as her namesake, depositing Whitney inside all alone for an hour while she met a friend Whitney had never heard of before. All alone, Whitney wandered the concrete floors, as chilly on the inside as outside, until she came upon a room containing a series of paintings by two American women that did to her body the thing she’d long abandoned hope for. Her blood beat in her wrists and her ankles. Her throat flushed. She felt her pores open and a scrim of slickness on her skin. She loved whatever these things were, loved them absolutely. She wanted to cover the walls of her room with those paintings as soon as she got home. She knew they were made by women the instant she’d spotted them.
After that trip, she started searching for those surges of reverie in more accessible places—like the back seats of Pathfinders and basements with Cowboys pennants. She pursued them at sleepaway soccer camps and parties after school plays, in the hot tub at Jake Devine’s and in leaf piles behind Nick Harris’s grandma’s. And still, it was never all the way what she was looking for. She’d steadily, incrementally, mapped a transition away from Sunday school to occasional encounters with boys, but she couldn’t quite find the feelings in her body that she craved most intensely.
It wasn’t until she went to Paris her junior fall that she rediscovered art, rediscovered museums, rediscovered what it could do—led back into it all by a beautiful new friend. After landing awkwardly on campus, after leaving the soccer team unceremoniously, after making a mess of her second spring and summer, she’d just never fully locked in. But the experiences abroad elevated her into the milieu she’d been searching for all along on campus—this castle of sorts she’d known had existed, but hadn’t known where the door was. She moved from painting and sculpture to literature and film, schooling herself in classic narratives and then contemporary, in emotional beats, in beginnings middles and ends, in the craft of tension and satisfying payoffs. These works of art, these stories, were the places, it turned out, where she finally found the reveries she’d been searching for since she was old enough to take communion. She could have a hand in creating for others those sorts of emotional and physical responses, an alumna told her at the arts-and-media fair senior year. And so it was in the long afternoons of reading at the museum café on campus that art fused with books fused with movies and TV—and then ultimately with a boy named Will. And just like that there was a whole new galaxy of feelin
gs worth pursuing, feelings that might hopefully never run out.
But it just wasn’t happening for her here today. She was too distracted, maybe even drunk still. Whitney turned the corner to find a class of elementary school children spread out across the floor, hunchbacked and crane-necked, fixated on the paintings, working hard at their own works. Handprints, sparrows, suns with faces. The children were making a real effort to see something special on the walls, even if they didn’t fully understand. She looked at the paintings with them. She waited. She concentrated. It was like she was being muted. By plastic. By glass. By ashcloud. She watched their little faces searching. She felt trapped suddenly. There were no windows in the corner where she’d wandered. It was boiling hot. The light was stale and the tiles were brown. She needed air, even volcano air, even air filled with fire and smoke.
She stepped out onto the terrace with the sculptures. Play-Doh colors, the pinched-form figurines. She looked out over the bowl of the city and tried to imagine the basin soaked in a golden light. Her eyes found the water. They found the unfinished cathedral. Everything was bathed in a blackness of shadow. She coveted nothing more in that moment than a crack in the clouds, even the briefest glimpse of the city in its full radiant glory. She even tried praying—what was she doing? It was dark still. She wasn’t important enough, powerful enough, talented enough to affect things like that. She knew. And so she slipped into a familiar spiral. She thought back to several mistakes she’d made at work this year, several people she perceived she’d disappointed recently, all the people she’d failed to let herself get close to growing up. She thought of the disappointment her parents had expressed when she quit the soccer team, the financial burden it had brought upon all of them when she forfeited her scholarship, all because she couldn’t stand playing a single day more. She thought of the ways in which she’d wasted those first couple years on campus, hobbling around on her bum knee, failing to fit in, fearing nothing more than being found out by the young women who so very much belonged. She thought of the errors she’d made back then—the blinding fuckups, the miscarriage—and the subsequent escape abroad. She thought of Paris, she thought of the pivots she’d engineered, the reorientation to the heading that finally made sense, that had led directly from there to here. She thought of all the things she was responsible for now, and how she wasn’t qualified to be responsible for any of them. She thought of all she’d never be able to achieve.