Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “It was like…I came, but, you know.”

  “I don’t know. Either explain it or don’t.”

  “It was…it’s never gone that way before. And it happened three or four times in a row. And then not again.”

  “I still don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying you squirted?”

  “Oh God, it’s so gross!” She buried her face in her hands. “It’s so, so gross! It’s so embarrassing. Don’t say the word.”

  “I didn’t know that was something you wanted.”

  “It’s not about wanting. I didn’t know my body could—”

  “And you’re saying it’s better, it feels better, and that’s why the whole thing made you feel worse about it.”

  “It’s not even better. It’s just different. It’s just a different spot or something. It’s so embarrassing. It’s just…it was intense. I don’t know, but that’s not—”

  “I know some women squirt, I just didn’t know it happened with you.”

  “Please don’t say the word. It’s so gross.”

  “A new record. And a whole new way of coming. This is kind of important. I take it back—the case apparently isn’t closed after all. What else did you leave out?”

  “Stop it,” she said, swallowing heavy. “It was something I was embarrassed by. I wasn’t happy about it. I just wanted you to understand where my mind was at. The connections it was making.”

  He was hot in the cheeks. He’d forgotten how they even got on the topic. And then his mouth opened wide.

  “Ohhh,” he said. “I get it now. What you’re saying is you…erupted…and that caused the volcano to—”

  “Will! Don’t be a dick about this. I shouldn’t have fucking said anything. You’re right, my brain is mush. And I don’t even know what I’m—”

  “But isn’t that your point? And because it was so impossibly pleasurable, you’re being punished by the universe? By the volcanoes of Iceland? Everything’s sending a sign to you and to me, an imperative: You two need to talk about this…”

  “I never should’ve said it. We should’ve gone home and gone back to sleep, and started today all over again.”

  “…because for the first time in your life your body let down your ultimate barriers of inhibition and you gave yourself over to someone completely? Finally, so deeply, so un-Catholically, over to Sin, that you feel like your feet are being held to the fire for it?”

  She sat there silent, her arms folded across her chest. She pressed her eyes shut again, and she licked her lower lip with a ticking compulsion.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she said. “Just please stop hitting me for it. I’m exhausted, and the whole thing obviously makes no sense. It just gives me a pit in my stomach when I play back what happened, that the whole thing happened in the first place, that it wasn’t with you, that you were off doing the same thing with…It makes me fucking want to throw up. And then we get trapped here after I didn’t come fully clean the other night…that I didn’t mention this particular detail, I mean—”

  “Consider yourself absolved,” Will said, cutting her off and making the sign of the benediction. “And know, please know, deep in your soul, that you, Whitney, did not cause the volcano.” He watched the lines in her forehead smooth over as she released all the tension she’d been holding in. “That your squirting did not cause—”

  She threw herself at him across the bench and clapped her palm over his mouth. He made the muffled sounds of a bound hostage. He raised his arms in surrender. She wouldn’t let go of his mouth. He pulled her hands from his face, finger by finger, until he could finally speak again. He opened his mouth wide and worked out his jaw with a heavy click. She waited for him to harangue her again. But all he said was: “Let’s go eat. I’m starved. Let’s go back to the Boqueria.”

  They stood and he shook out his body like a dog, snapping himself back into the logic of reality. He kissed the top of her head and they walked the crown of the mountain, through the parks and past the other Olympic venues. They took the tiled steps beneath the plane trees—the “Europe trees,” as Whitney called them—to the base of the Palau Nacional. The palace was high on the hill, well back from the highway, with views of the bowl from several vantages. They passed through gardens and beside waterfalls, each with royal proportions, the three-times-too-great scale. They watched the mighty fountain gushing, and Will nudged Whitney and peaked his eyebrows. She understood and she covered her face and collapsed on the ground into a cross-legged pretzel. “I should’ve never ever ever ever…”

  “Just one more thing for me to shoot for,” he said. “Another new benchmark.”

  He lifted her to her feet again and they gazed back up the hill toward the palace. From that perspective, there was a stark desperation to the grandness. Here was a structure built to say: From this day forward, we, Catalonia, will be a country all our own. That its architecture alone hadn’t won the Civil War meant it now said something more like: Please visit the gift shop so we can further explain our intentions.

  They passed the old bullfighting ring, long abandoned, now a mall.

  “Did you know that Catalonia was the first place in Spain to ban bullfighting?” Whitney said. He knew what her knowing meant, the implication of it. It was her way of raising the idea of adopting a dog. She spent most weekend mornings reading scripts beside the dog run in Tompkins Square Park. Iced coffee from Ninth Street Espresso, eyes on the sporting breeds that wouldn’t last a week in their studio.

  “Dogs are for people in their thirties,” Will said. “Dogs are for people with bedrooms and money.”

  “I didn’t say anything about a dog,” she said, smiling, and crossed the boulevard against the light. “All I said was that people here saved the bulls.”

  They zigzagged through Sant Antoni, past a couple of the other restaurants that Gwyneth had recommended and that they hadn’t been able to get into. They pushed into El Raval and crossed the skateboard-infested plaza in front of the Museu d’Art Contemporani. Will promised no more museums for as long as they were stuck. They crashed into La Rambla and got swept into its raging current, downstream in the direction of the harbor, before turning into La Boqueria and finding their way by feel to the vendor where they’d had their favorite meal of the trip earlier in the week.

  It was midafternoon and the late-lunch rush was on. Stalls on all sides. The silver steam of seafood and oil on griddles. Fresh fish mounted on walls of ice. Fruit juices spiked into ice mounds of their own. Nuts and seeds and berries for sale by the gram. There were gray birds cheeping in the vaulted roof that rose to the center of the marketplace like the canvas cover of a big-top tent. Their spot was smack in the middle. They didn’t know the name of it and wouldn’t have been able to find it if they hadn’t retraced their steps precisely. All the stools at the counter were taken, but they spotted a middle-aged couple who looked to be paying, and hovered at their backs. They ordered two beers. They sipped slowly and did their best to keep out of the way. When they sat, they had a view through the glass partition that separated them from a bucket of baby squid, lavender and spilling slowly over the container edge like a lava slide. They ate shrimp, they ate razor clams, they ate seasoned mushrooms from the hills. They drank until their headaches were gone, instead dialing into the frequency of the cooks’ meticulous operations, slipping into the day’s first awe of post-confessional calm. They loved each other again.

  On either side of them, English was being spoken. Beside Whitney was a family with Russian accents, calling for the attention of a server and failing to receive it. They clapped and waved their hands over the partition, and with each display of mounting impatience, they grew more invisible to the servers. Beside Will was a couple who he and Whitney discerned had arrived by train from Madrid that very morning and rolled straight to the counter because Jacqueline In Her Office had suggested it. Will felt the specialness of the spot diminish in big gluttonous gulps, even though he and Whitney had heard of
it only because of their own email guide—a guide that seemed to have been forwarded over and over again, originating with somebody they and the person they received it from didn’t even know personally. In fact, the guide had gone so wide that Will and Whitney had each received it independently from coworkers. Which meant there was but a single comprehensive email of suggestions from one unknown New Yorker that dictated the Barcelona experiences of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands in their set. Will wondered if the guide had reached this couple beside them, too, or at least Jacqueline In Her Office. Will could’ve asked them, but he and Whitney had fallen into a private silence in face of all the English. They weren’t like these tourists, they told themselves. They were return customers, after all. They understood how the menu worked. They knew how to order. They could pronounce the words by parroting them. They were practically locals.

  They were also getting drunk. They’d done nothing yet to catch up on sleep. Their heads were full of static, and the impossible suggestion of sunlight was blasting in overhead through a crack in the roof. It was a beam from the sky like they hadn’t seen in days. Whitney pointed and they squinted, wondering aloud if the clouds were breaking. But when they paid and found their way through the maze of vendors back outside to La Rambla, the ashcloud was baked over again—darker than ever, in fact—and Whitney and Will wondered if it hadn’t been sunlight at all, if it was perhaps just another inexplicable sign from the heavens meant solely for them and their transgressions.

  It looked ready to rain and they got within a couple blocks of the apartment before it started to dump. The initial downpour was of the heavy-dropped variety that they worried contained the worst of the chemical compounds that had been produced by the volcano. Black ash, black rain, dark spots on their clothing.

  The doors to the apartment building were enormous—fifteen feet tall and ten feet across. But in one of them was cut a miniature door, through which their key permitted entry after-hours and on weekends and holidays, which maybe this was, at least for the superintendent of the building. It was Memorial Day back home, and a local holiday for at least some here. A volcano holiday. Catalan flags were hung proudly from every other balcony across the street.

  They took the stairs, the four flights, and Whitney was in bed, facedown, before Will had locked up behind them. She flipped onto her side and opened her laptop and let out a resigned “Fuck…” A conference call had been scheduled for late morning, East Coast. She had an hour to sleep things off and sober up before dialing in.

  It was an intrusion from the outside. A sign that the volcano wasn’t cause for concern at home. And neither, apparently, was Memorial Day. She checked her personal email too, and sat up when she saw it.

  “They want to know if we want to get dinner tonight.”

  The words disappeared into the living room and Will didn’t reply. Whitney couldn’t see him from the bed, couldn’t see if he’d heard, couldn’t read the reaction in his face. There was more silence. Will wanted her to stake out the first position.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  “What do you want to do?” he said, from what sounded to Whitney like the farthest corner of the apartment.

  She was rereading the email. “One night and it’s already this we and us bullshit…”

  He emerged in the doorway and waited still for her to show her hand.

  “I need to take a nap and then take this call and then we don’t have plans,” she said.

  “Right. But do you even want to see them again?”

  They were good to each other. They were often happy to shift to new positions to meet the other where they were. But Will had been mystified by Whitney’s meltdown outside the museum, couldn’t have articulated whether the ultimate thing she was asking for was more or less of Jack and Leonard in their volcano days.

  “We just ate,” he said, drifting back to the living room. “I feel disgusting. I can’t even think about dinner. But if you—”

  “I’m getting so gross,” she said. “I got so soft this winter. These extra meals are only making things worse.”

  He let it linger, then tried again: “But we probably won’t be mad about going, right? Isn’t that the point you were making earlier? That you wish you and I wouldn’t be so old and lame?”

  He’d turned the television on and Spanish-language news suddenly filled the apartment at high volume.

  “Jesus. Turn it down.”

  “What—you don’t want to listen on full blast?”

  “I didn’t hear what you said.”

  He used it as an opportunity to soften the explanation. “It’s totally up to you. But I feel like what you were just saying is that you might want to fill the rest of our time here with some things you might not ordinarily…”

  “So what do you want me to say, then?”

  “Why don’t you decide if you want to—”

  “I just can’t believe they’re still together,” Whitney said.

  “If she bugs you so much, maybe that’s a reason to definitely not go?”

  Will appeared in the doorway again.

  “I could care less about her,” she said. “The only thing that bugs me is your inability to say the words yes or no.”

  “Yes or no.”

  “The place they suggested is about a thirty-minute walk from here. I just looked it up. It’s in the email guide, too. It’s one of the places we talked about going the other night. We might want to try it before we leave, anyway, with or without them.”

  “Then let’s just go, okay?” he said. “If it’s a place we should try, what’s an hour or two?”

  “So, yes?”

  “If you’re not gonna be super fucking weird about things again.”

  “I’m asking them when,” she said, typing on her laptop.

  “If you’re gonna sleep, I’m gonna read out here.”

  “Can you turn the TV off, or turn it down at least? It’s not like you can follow what they’re saying.”

  “Check this out,” he said. “I found a station that’s solely coverage of the soccer club. Like, 24-7. They have one of the kids’ teams on now. I can’t believe they televise the Under-11s!”

  “You’re just gonna watch little-kid soccer?”

  “They all have haircuts like the players on the big team.”

  “Close the door, please,” she said. “I’m fucking dead.”

  He did as he was told, then started for the kitchen to grab a glass of water. On the way, he noodled out a few notes on the acoustic guitar in a corner of the living room, then returned to the couch and put his feet up. He reached for the book he’d brought along on the trip. A copy of Homage to Catalonia he’d picked up at The Strand. He cracked it in half and made it two pages deeper before he heard an excitable pitch on the TV and lifted his eyes to watch a shot go wide.

  He was exhausted. His eyes burned. He butterflied the book on his chest and flipped the channel and found the news. There was an auto accident in the hills above the city. There were eyewitness interviews. There was white-and-yellow police tape and officers who looked confused by the paths in life that had led them to this horrific crime scene under this morbid sky. There was a teaser for updates on the volcano—the promise of photos out of Iceland. Will sat through the commercials and, resting there in the lapping pool of language, felt himself almost comprehending. The coffee ads. The cars. The food processor. It was either fluency by immersion or the onset of delirium. The photos of the volcano had been taken from a helicopter. The plumes of smoke and ash looked like cole crops from every angle. The volcano had apparently ceased emitting ash. But he knew that had little to do with the clearing of the cloud over Europe.

  The news moved to updates on the fresh American crisis. The removal of the FBI director, the appointment of the Special Counsel—those flashed by as old headlines. But now, here was a potential exit from the global climate accord. Things had escalated all over again in twenty-four hours. The press secretary had been marched out to defen
d the tweets. Will couldn’t follow entirely. He didn’t have his daily dose of podcasts, the river of news that had made his commutes up to Grand Central assume a little more consequence since the election. According to the images on TV, the republic looked ready to implode at any moment. But he knew there was nothing he could do from this couch or this city. There was hardly anything he could do from home, either. He opened his laptop and donated twenty bucks to a congressional candidate who’d said something smart last week. They were all captives of the same machine. It had been a bad year. He panicked and then he calmed. He knew his body didn’t dictate world events the way Whitney’s apparently could. He just hoped there was an America to return to when his hiatus from American news was through.

  The next story on the television was about a murder in Paris. The way the images cycled and the way the newscasters’ faces spoke the facts, it looked like a breaking story. It seemed a young German woman had been killed by her boyfriend. They were students and the boyfriend was being questioned. Like an Amanda Knox thing, Will intuited. The days abroad were helping—he had a thimbleful of comprehension. Will was proud of what he understood to be true.

  The windows of the apartment were unobstructed, waist to ceiling, but the light was pitiful and the rain outside gave everything inside the apartment the blue-gray hues of napping. He read another page of Orwell, about his training with the socialists, then fell asleep with the paperback bookmarked by his knee. He was drunk and stuck in Barcelona. He dreamed of the volcano and of the world spinning uncertainly around the fixed point of Will.

  Whitney was put on hold and so snuck into the bathroom to pee and then hazarded to flush the toilet and wash her hands before the line clicked back over to the conference-call audience of six. She ran her wet fingers over her crown and threw her mass of hair over her shoulder. She put the phone on speaker and massaged the skin of her face, tightening, turning back the clock to two and then four and then seven years ago. She stretched the skin around her eyes, she frosted over her forehead like a Zamboni. She thought about her friends and colleagues at work who spent an hour a day with products, who were already getting injections. She’d always had good skin. But they were doing so much now, earlier than ever, the first leg of the long race. They avoided the beach, they avoided the sun. She shuddered to think of the afternoons of her youth out on her father’s boat, the long lazy summers on man-made lakes, baking like a hooked trout. They all wore SPF 50 now. They bought machines for needling and sonic shocks. They worked out their bodies once or even twice a day. They rotated through eating trends. There was so much to know about and execute on. There was so much to do in addition to everything else. Whitney had assumed that they’d draw the line at anything involving a scalpel, just as they’d refrain from any food philosophy ending in an ism. But when just last month they told her about their injections, it had panicked her. She’d figured she might have another ten years before she’d have to wade into those waters. But now it was just another thing to stuff cash away for, another secret expense to add to the series of secret expenses that promised to eat up every incremental gain in income she’d make as a successful young woman in a growth industry.