Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  She thought, then, of Will. Of Will fucking other women. It sent a hot shock down the length of her esophagus. She hated him just then, but he’d done nothing wrong. It had been her idea. She imagined Will fixated on the tops of their blonde heads between his legs, Will’s mind in those moments filled with every thought but a thought of Whitney. She thought of being naked with the strangers of her own. She thought of the openness of her body those evenings and afternoons, the ease with which her clothes had come off, how much she’d worried about being naked with someone for so many years, and then one day how ordinary it had become.

  The city was frozen still beneath the ashcloud. She turned on her roaming and checked her email. She had several. She read them. She felt her nipples pressing against the padding of her bra. And then she felt a searing shame that she’d been growing aroused on the terrace all alone in the grim ash. She wandered back inside holding her head, her hangover suddenly chirping like a smoke alarm.

  When they found each other inside, they inferred that they were both through with their museum-going experience, and wandered into the courtyard café without either suggesting it. Whitney said she was growing queasier by the moment, so Will ordered a couple beers. He popped the caps and stuffed the bottles in his jacket pockets and the two of them spilled into the dense-shade park that adjoined the museum. Cypresses and palms and damp mud, damp without a concession by the ashcloud to some drying light. They sat on a bench in the park that had softened with the weather to the texture of a cashew. The mud near their feet had a skin like ballpark cheese.

  “What do you think happened to them?” Whitney said.

  They’d resisted until then. Neither had acknowledged the resisting, but it had been present in their silence all afternoon. They had bangings in their brains, they had dry tongues and fatigue. They hadn’t minded the lack of small talk on the walk up, since each was focused merely on completing successive footsteps, on suppressing nausea, on following their slow-rolling shepherds in cardigans. But they’d known that the other had been thinking about the question and the likely answers.

  “What happened to who?” Will said.

  Her face forfeited nothing and made it clear she wasn’t in the mood to be teased.

  “I mean,” he said, “it was probably going where it looked like it was going, right?”

  “Whose place?”

  “Well, I doubt they went back to Gram’s at six in the morning.”

  “What do you think his apartment is like?”

  “Probably not that different from the place we’re staying. Those guys don’t make so much money. He’s living alone. He’s not there half the time. A big bed and a big TV? Some chicken in the crisper and a tub of protein powder on top of the fridge?”

  “They make me feel old,” Whitney said.

  “You and JJ are practically the same age.”

  “But he still has that thing where, I dunno, he’s been playing a game since graduation.”

  “That sounds like a mixed bag, though, doesn’t it?”

  “I just mean he’s still functionally twenty-two. Did you see the way he held his spoon? Did you see the way he looked up at the buildings and the trees on the way to the beach? It’s like he’s been in college for a decade.”

  “So what?”

  “So we’re too old for them.”

  “I didn’t realize we were auditioning for something.”

  “Just, don’t you ever think about how quickly we’re getting older?”

  “How ’bout we don’t have to talk about them anymore?”

  “It just gets under my skin. I don’t get it in the winters, for some reason. But every spring, there’s a new neighborhood I feel out of place in. Don’t you? First it was the Lower East Side, then it was Williamsburg, now I don’t even feel like I can eat dinner around our fucking apartment, everyone’s such a baby. The ever-replenishing supply of fresh-faced models in the neighborhood.”

  “We get older, they stay the saaaaame age…”

  “All looking at me like I’m the one who’s lost. I fucking live here!”

  “Who gives a shit? You don’t get some relief from it? Every year, as more things are shut off, as there are more things we’re not meant to do? At least it’s clarifying. Think about it: we’ll never have to check the Lower East Side box on StreetEasy again. That’s not so bad. I like knowing there’s stuff I can’t even fantasize about anymore. Pro surfer—gone. Lead guitarist, hedge-fund dipshit, wunderkind of any sort—gone gone gone. Makes me at least come to terms with what’s never ever gonna happen.”

  “That bums me out. I wish you didn’t feel that way.” She sat on her hands, stared off into the bowl again. She didn’t say anything else. And so he tried it out for the first time in a while.

  “In that case, maybe I’ll finally write a script.…Put all that dumb prep work to use. I realize it goes against what I just said about knowing what you can’t do, but maybe it’s, I dunno…”

  “You sound like Jack.”

  It slapped him, and it surprised him that it stung.

  “How’s that?” Will said, flinching.

  “That’s his big next plan, so he says. That’s his second act.”

  “Aren’t we all a bunch of cliché assholes?”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

  Will snorted and twisted on the bench. He hated her. “You’re telling that to me or you’re telling that to him? It better not be to me.”

  “It’s more than just downloading Final Draft, is all I’m saying.”

  “Are you taking it out on me because a petite blonde twenty-two-year-old made you feel twenty-nine last night? Is this your pressure valve for all that?”

  The beers had gone straight to their heads, resuscitating the booze still sloshing around their soft pink brains.

  “So you’re agreeing that I’m old,” Whitney said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “What are you doing?” Will said, squinting through burning eyes. “Is this fun for you? I don’t know how we found her in a random-ass park in Barcelona, but I’m thrilled this Whitney decided to show up. Self-loathing Whitney. Envious Whitney. My favorite Whitneys through and through.”

  “No bags under her eyes, no veins in her hands? Water balloons that sit up on her chest like she’s wearing a bra when she isn’t? Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what anyone would want? If that’s what you want, go for it—you have my permission.”

  “You forgot all the to-the-manor-born elements of her upbringing, too,” he said. “All the easy thoughtless connections to art and culture and money and moviemaking. Friends with the sons and daughters of Hollywood royalty. We didn’t even talk about all that stuff yet—everything she told me in line for dinner. All your favorite old buttons. This explains a lot, actually. This at least explains the silence on the walk over here—”

  “You weren’t talking, either.”

  “—feeling nice and good about yourself after a night out with a girl who was raised with everything you weren’t. Here I thought you were just hungover.”

  “I feel fucking fine now, thanks. Maybe you don’t, but I’m—”

  “Then what are you talking about?!”

  “They barely even blinked when we left,” she said. “In that club we were nothing more than, like, a breeze that passed through the place. Nothing changes whether we’re there or we’re not. We don’t change anything for them or anyone else.”

  “Thank you for joining the party, Insecure Whitney! We were wondering where you were hanging out. Jesus, Whit, who gives a shit?! We’re not even supposed to be here. This isn’t our place—you get that? We’re here on bonus time. We’re not meant to make some big impression that changes the fucking lives of some strangers. And if being the coolest kids at four in the morning at a nightclub in Barcelona is important to you, I think we’ve been living the wrong life for a while—working the wrong jobs, hanging out with the wrong friends, and certainly dating the wrong people.”

>   She squeezed her eyes tight and held her hands up in concession.

  “You’re right, you’re right.…I know that. This isn’t our life. But isn’t that the point? We are in bonus time. We aren’t supposed to be here. Which means it isn’t like real life, it doesn’t have to be precisely the same as it always is, you know? It’s this parallel thing happening. And it’s, like, a test, or something. The universe telling us: Go do the things you wouldn’t normally do. Find out if there’s a version of yourself you like more. It’s seeing if we’ll take up the offer.”

  “I actually have no idea what you’re talking about. I hear the words, but it’s like your brain has gone scrambly. You’re saying: Drink one more drink at the club? Stay out one more hour? You’re saying: Follow those two home and watch them fuck?”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “All I mean is here we are in bonus time and we’re, you know, going to museums. It’s not the most excit—”

  “It was your fucking idea! You wrote it on the napkin yesterday!”

  “I should’ve known better. I should’ve known it wouldn’t be what I needed it to be. We should’ve deviated from the plan. We should’ve followed one of those old men down a path somewhere, wherever they were going, wherever that led.”

  She closed her eyes again, touched her longest fingers to her temples and rubbed clockwise.

  “This is so dumb,” he said. “You sound like a fucking study-abroad pamphlet: ‘Get lost in Florence.’ ‘I just love losing myself in the alleys of Toledo.’ Whatever, man—do whatever you want.”

  “Maybe we bump into them again tonight.”

  Her eyes were still shut. He turned his body on the bench again and looked at her, disbelieving, waiting for her to return to the time and space where they were sitting.

  “Is this jealousy?” he said. “Is that what’s going on? You’re jealous that the chick with the famous feet gets to go home with the basketball star, too?”

  “Please don’t put it in those terms,” she said. “I wasn’t until now.”

  He smiled. “God, you’re so easy. You’re almost thirty years old and you’re easy as ever. And I can tell you’re not even actually bothered by it. You just want to be bothered by it, because it’s more interesting. Let’s wrap this the fuck up, all right?”

  “I’m sorry. I know. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know what’s going on right now. I woke up drunk and buzzing in the face and my whole body’s fucking throbbing. And I got this chill out on the museum terrace. My mind started wandering to some unhelpful places. I’m just…feeling anxious. Like: You’re wasting an opportunity. Like: You’ve been granted something spooky, and you’re in a museum while the world’s waiting to see how you respond to its big provocation.”

  “Maybe we should’ve stuck together in there. I didn’t realize how perilous it was gonna be. I saw a painting that made me want to quit my job, if that makes you feel better. It started speaking to me and said that I could never set foot in my office building again. It convinced me that I need to look for a job that traffics in less fine print.”

  “Or maybe you just need to work somewhere that doesn’t require you to go in both days on the weekend.”

  “I can’t do it yet,” he said. “I need to do it, but I can’t do it without the money lined up.”

  She nodded and leveled her eyes out at the basin. “Think about it, really.…She’s here for twelve hours…she gets one man off with her feet, then she goes home later that night with a nice tall handsome guy who also happens to be a pro athlete. What is that? What are we being told here? What is the volcano saying to us?”

  “I think the volcano’s saying that sometimes real-world shit goes down. Sometimes volcanoes erupt. Sometimes events transpire and consequences are imparted. This isn’t biblical, as much as you want it to be. This isn’t a bulletin from the heavens.”

  The sky was brightened by a light source deep in its recesses. It gave the impression of an El Greco seen through sunglasses.

  “But what if it is?” she said. “Maybe this is a sign that we should be paying more attention to something.”

  He shook his head again.

  “Like, what if we’re stuck here until we come to terms with some implicit truth about ourselves and change something essential?”

  “Ah, right—trapped here until we live a day being kind to everyone we encounter,” he said. “We should keep our eyes out for Phil Connors.”

  “I love that tone. I love that dismissal and that fucking smirk when you say it.”

  “Your eyes aren’t even open. You can’t tell whether I’m smirking. I just don’t have a clue what you’re talking about still.”

  “Maybe what I’m talking about is that our twenties are over, and what did we do? What did we miss? How did we behave? Who did we become?”

  “All over an arbitrary number?”

  “It’s not arbitrary. At thirty you’re basically halfway dead.”

  He shook his head again, but didn’t address the math. Her mother had had a cancer scare at fifty-three. “What am I holding you back from? What am I not letting you be? Let’s go do it. Let’s get it out of our system today. Let’s get it done this afternoon so that we can maybe go back to something standard-issue, seeing a fucking Gaudí park or whatever, without a crisis of life choices.”

  “Maybe I’m just hungry. Maybe this is just my insides talking. Maybe this is why we don’t stay out late. Why I don’t drink like that, ever, and why we don’t do these things. This is why I’m no good at being young or fun or interesting anymore.”

  “We get older, we try to feel better about it, not worse. We live our lives. We do our best. We’ve never tried to keep up. Not so pathetically, at least. I don’t get it. Why now?”

  “There is just something going on up there,” Whitney said, serious as the sky. “I just have a sense for these things. All I’m saying is there’s something strange that it happened when it happened, after everything we’ve done. The timing is just—”

  “That what happened?”

  “The volcano.”

  “The volcano ‘happened…after everything we’ve done’?”

  “I’m saying it’s a strange coincidence, and maybe there’s something to it.”

  “You’re saying, what, exactly? That the volcano is somehow related to last month? You’re saying there are ties between our sex life and earth science? You’re saying: It’s a global response for 1-2-3? A ruling from the gods?”

  “I know you think that everyone who believes their life is tied up in something bigger is full of shit. But it would be a mistake not to at least consider it, just this once—what we did before we got here, and what happened once we confessed. And why it is we’re trapped in the first place…”

  “This is Sunday school talking? This is everything that was branded into you as a kid?” His mouth was tight, incredulous. Her eyes were open and fixed in the middle distance. He licked his lips waiting for her to snap out of the ancient logic, but she sat there patient. “There are more powerful forces in the universe than 1-2-3,” he continued. “That’s all I know. I want to make that knowing-ness super clear, okay? We are but specks of dust who decided to have sex with a couple other people before we got engaged. We even told each other about it. On the wide spectrum of humanity’s transgressions, that’s pretty fucking boring. That is inconsequentially boring. But not so boring that you should feel anxious about it! We’re not being singled out for 1-2-3! You breaking your record with Adrien Green did not make an Icelandic volcano erupt!”

  She pulled at the down on her arm. “I know that intellectually.”

  He laughed and her face held fixed. Then his smile faded. “But there’s still a small part of you, on account of Sundays at Our Lady of Guilt, that makes you sometimes believe you’re gnawing on the actual body of Christ, and that a series of record-smashing orgasms might serve as a catalyst for a natural disaster.”

  “It sounds dumb when you say it out loud
.”

  “Yes it does.”

  “But the volcano, it erupted before we talked about it, you know? Before our dinner. When I was just holding it in, to myself? The secret. Everything that happened.”

  “But there was nothing to feel guilty about! There was nothing to be tied to it even in the most theoretical sense. The sex was the point! Fucking strangers was the point!”

  “Look,” she said, closing her eyes again, “my body did something it hasn’t done before.”

  “We don’t have to relitigate this.”

  “But I’m sounding crazy without you understanding what I’m trying to say.”

  “You’re right.”

  “At one point, though—”

  “Really, please, we did this already.”

  “—it wasn’t that different from any other time, I just…felt something happening. Something from a different place in my body. I don’t—”

  “Like what?”