Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  During the years Will had been in law school, Whitney had found herself floating up to ceilings but failing to break through. She had, however, at least survived the gauntlet of the earliest days. There were so many assistants who’d been at the cable network when she started—each feeling lucky to have merely gained entry in the wake of the crash, and each to a number inevitably squeezed out. But she’d stayed aloft. Because of her brain, because of her conviction, because of her taste.

  Also: the red dots she placed on her calendar. Three weeks was the max it ever was between red dots, and anyone could survive three weeks. Red dots meant a party. Red, as in carpet. Up-fronts in the spring, with the creators and cast. A celebration for the premiere of a season and a celebration for the finale. A celebration for the Emmys, a celebration for the Globes. Often in L.A., occasionally in New York. They were the carrots at the end of a long, hard stick. She stayed organized because of them; she never dropped a spinning plate. She took good notes. She gave good notes. But most of all—most essential to her survival—she just relished occasional proximity to a mid-list star. And a red dot on the calendar was never so far out that it was worth walking away.

  Eventually, the gamble paid off. She’d been headhunted by a startup streaming service of an online marketplace that was suddenly in the business of developing new shows. She’d been recommended by one of her bosses, a woman who’d been helpful to Whitney for years but who had, Whitney knew, begun to resent Whitney’s ideas, Whitney’s ambition. The men asked for too many lunches, too many drinks out late. The women didn’t like that Whitney spoke freely about wanting their jobs. So the move worked to everyone’s benefit. And now was prime time for Whitney to make TV.

  She was still on hold, a loop of the songs that scored the opening credits of a hit show. She googled JJ Pickle and scrolled through pictures of him in college. She googled Leonard NYU, but the only images that emerged were of bearded adjunct professors. She went to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water and found Will passed out on the couch. The terrible, familiar shape. Slung way down in the seat of the sofa, head balanced on the backrest and mouth gaping like a Pez dispenser. She’d never understood why he didn’t just lie all the way down. It was the same resistance that made him believe he could stay awake later than she could at the end of the night. It didn’t bother her except when he’d insist he could make it through another episode of whatever they were streaming, only to pass out minutes in, leaving her with the high-moral conundrum of whether to press on without him or not. She hated being out front alone with a series. She watched everything for work, and so only a few for fun. It was nice sometimes to just have something to share in, to mete out casually with him. She knew the inside word on the successes and failures of every show on every network, as seen through the eyes of the industry. She knew the fate of a show months before civilians had had the opportunity to rate it for themselves. So to have just one, every now and again, to experience purely, alongside someone who knew nothing about the takes of the trades, was a treat for her. But then each night: that dead face, that retired mass next to her in bed. He looked, in sleep, like every photo she’d ever seen of him as a child. Most people looked different over time, changed, but all of those people were not Will. That strange quality—that perpetual all-Will is now-Will—returned her frequently to a sort of lineage of their love, a proximity to the whole story of it, which flattened out the spikes and kept close for Whitney all the good from before.

  When Will had moved back to New York from Washington, they’d picked out a place together: a second-floor studio apartment on the corner of 10th and A, across the street from Tompkins Square Park. It had exposed beams and high ceilings and it was a better deal than anything else they’d seen in the neighborhood. It didn’t make sense, except that the owner was practically dead and wasn’t concerned with market value. It was unlisted. Whitney worked with someone who lived in the building. Will liked the location fine, but loved especially that it was cheap, an outlier, a ninety-ninth-percentile steal.

  The studio was a studio, but they rhetorically broke the space into the component parts of a larger home: they called the three shelves in the closet that held the scissors and thank-you cards the office; they called the corner near the park-facing window with the free weights and yoga mat the gym; they called the three-foot halo around the queen-size bed the bedroom, and treated that imaginary border like the line between territorial and international waters. It seemed like no time had passed since they’d been scattered across the city that first summer after college, surfing couches and subletting rooms without air-conditioning, sweating through sheets in four out of the five boroughs. Texting one another from hundreds of blocks away some nights and from within the same neighborhood on others. They’d lived apart for the first years, with roommates and then in other cities. But when they got to the same place again, they were ready for rootedness. Ready to read books and watch movies and roast chickens together. To receive the quarterly alumni magazine in duplicate. It was easy, at first, riding that conveyor belt of domestic life, easy and pleasurable and fun. When it wasn’t, they fought hard with each other, but they forgave easily, too. The secret to making it work was that they were in love. They’d known each other since they were practically children. Three and then five and then seven years elapsed. They ended most nights beside one another in the bedroom. They’d never lived alone in their lives.

  Whitney just hung there in the living room of the Airbnb, on hold, listening to Will breathe, the familiar faint wheeze from the twice-broken nose. She hated that unconscious mass, especially on nights when she couldn’t sleep herself. And yet the thought of him passed out in their bed was the first thing that made her cry during the early days of 1-2-3. At eight or nine Pacific Standard, she would imagine the worst: Will with any of the thousands of young women in the neighborhood, with their elastic skin and flexible hips, every last young hopeless striver living life in the sliver of a chance that they might go to a bar after work and meet someone like her boyfriend. A good guy with a decent apartment and a little cash and white teeth and a Goldilocks cock—the mix of checked boxes those bees had been scouring the city for during happy hours since they’d graduated a few Mays ago. Whitney, alone, imagining all the possibilities, but knowing in her guts that Will was more likely than not propped up in their bed, trying to catch up with a show she’d long left him in the dust on, doing what he could to make a good-faith effort to get back in the game now that he had all this time to himself. Whitney, alone in L.A., checking their shared streaming account and seeing it had been used by another laptop, the elapsed-time bar frozen just after the opening credits, right where he always dropped off. It would melt her like microwaved butter; the relief was absolute. By 8:46 or 8:23 or 7:46 PST, the check-in would confirm it for her: he was Pezed out, exhausted and alone, hopefully missing her a little bit in his dreams, despite the experiment they’d designed to break the bones of their seven-year relationship in order to help it heal right. When she wanted to make sure he was asleep, when she wanted to confirm it beyond a doubt, she’d text him something stupid—a dog that looked like its owner on the sidewalk in front of her hotel, maybe—and wouldn’t hear back, and so could lay her head to rest with that sleeping pill of certainty.

  One evening, a week into 1-2-3, Whitney sent a text to no response, but that time, surprising herself, she cracked. Her face went haywire without warning, she wanted to be physically next to that sleeping potato sack so badly. This was after a long day of a read-through, a few days after Adrien Green. There was probably some fatigue, certainly some guilt. There was that thing where her brain had been split in two along the cleave between her desire for Will to even the score and her desire for them to pack up the enterprise altogether and never exist in that idiotic in-between again. To make a date at City Hall and take care of things the easy way, the way they should have all along, and just get on with it, the way it was supposed to go. But she knew she couldn’t do it. Not at that
point. It wasn’t fair if it wasn’t even. And she knew it was too early for him, it’d take him longer than it had taken her. She knew she’d have to wait for the month-long prescription to run its course. It was dangerous to cut off medicine midstream.

  So she busied herself making plans for their Memorial Day trip instead. They considered maybe Rome or Berlin or Mexico City or Peru. But they were ultimately pretty set on Barcelona. Neither had been before, and Whitney had just been forwarded an email guide written by someone she’d never met. Early one morning, after a few hours of sleep, she’d flipped over in bed and whispered to Will that her knee was throbbing again, that she’d run too hard that day, would he help her stretch her legs in the morning? But Whitney was in L.A. and Will was in New York. And at the moment of realization, emerging from sleep, her mind split again like a fault line in a California quake. She imagined herself on the wrong side of the chasm from Will—her fate of being alone until her dying days. She imagined him gone. She imagined him vanished. She imagined a lifetime of calling out to someone across the room about her clicky hips and busted knee, and the list of toiletries for him to order off Amazon, and her ideas for new shows—did he think it was a good concept for a half-hour comedy? That was the night she cried hardest, heavier than about anything since her mother’s cancer scare, and then she fell asleep again with swollen eyes on a damp pillow that left a rash on her cheek.

  “Whitney, you still there?” the call came back through the speaker into the bathroom in Barcelona, and she retreated to the bed to finish up her work.

  Will woke up to Whitney’s voice. She was on the call still. The afternoon news had turned over to a variety show with sequined dancers, and he reached for the control to cut the signal. He went to the kitchen sink for a fresh glass of water and crashed into the corner of the counter. He felt the disorienting face-fuzz of a daylight hangover and popped a new beer to sand off the edges. He halved the bottle and walked to the bedroom, where Whitney rolled back her eyes and stuck out her tongue and slashed her throat with her finger.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said into the phone. “We can one hundred percent try that.”

  Will passed the closet on the way to the bathroom. Whitney had unpacked the entirety of her suitcase again, just as she’d done their first day of the trip, hanging her dresses and folding her shirts and jeans and underwear into stacks in the drawers. Will, by contrast, had left all his clothes in his duffel, into which they’d been carelessly shoveled from the floor near the radiator the morning before. They lived together. They shared spaces and money and a projection of a future. But they lived differently still. Especially when left to their own devices or their own coasts or their own sides of a rental apartment.

  He stood before the closet and ran his eyes over her clothes. They were expensive but they would last. They met the standard of what Whitney considered a justifiable cost-per-wear. She piped in on the call every thirty seconds or so. “That’s exactly right. That was the plan all along, but we can hit that note harder.” He strummed the edges of her dresses like a harp. He brought a cream linen hem to his nose. She’d left the dresses in New York during her month in L.A. She’d taken more casual clothes—jeans, and button-downs, and sneakers. She said it was more appropriate. She said it would be a waste to bring anything else along. And so these, the vestiges of functional and fashionable New York City professionalism, they’d stayed put. Will would come home after striking out at a neighborhood bar, and he’d just hang there in their shared space, their shared studio. He’d pour their shared bottle of olive oil into their shared frying fan. He’d boil their shared tap water in their shared teakettle. He’d strum the dresses in their shared closet and kick back atop their shared comforter to watch a TV show he’d fallen behind on. There was no escaping the togetherness. Temporarily untangling that inextricable life of theirs, for three discrete encounters, seemed an impossible proposition. He intended to marry her. What were they doing? He lived with her clothes.

  He’d think about calling her before he’d jerk off. Why, though? It was earlier there, the workday still. They rarely talked dirty on the phone. And so he’d carry the buzz from the bars to the bedroom, settle in with the usual clips from the usual sites. He’d watch for five minutes, ten minutes, and then he’d find himself drifting. Imagining Whitney after work, Whitney after a run at sunset, the golden light of his home state pressing against the glass of the hotel room. Whitney riding the night where it went and finding herself like the girls on his laptop screen. With bosses or coworkers or neighbors or deans. Whitney being undressed slowly. Out of those familiar clothes, first off the shoulder, and then unzipped. Whitney down to very little material, to matching white or matching red or matching blue. Whitney on her knees, with something to prove to someone strange. Whitney on her back, Whitney with her clicky hips slung wide, and her eyes closed, and her body feeling the same old things but in new ways, maybe. And Whitney, ultimately, on her palms and her knees, her head between her arms, her hair spilled off her head into a puddle in the sheets. Whitney, from behind, always from behind, the way she most preferred. Whitney’s face lifting when the pace shifted, when the force escalated. Whitney’s face in the foreground, eyes tight in a centered-ness, 1-2-3 as a mental retreat, sure, but as a physical exhibition above all else. Devoid, for Will, of the specifics of feelings, of names, of thoughts. Just the image of 1-2-3 at its basest, Whitney as the lead actress, the whole thing transpiring in real time, right then and there, with Will at home and Whitney on the road. It made him sick. It always worked.

  After he’d finish, he’d text. She wouldn’t be able to talk. Always busy, always late. Hardly bothering herself with his same fruitless pursuits: bars in the neighborhood, bars at happy hour. Maybe they wouldn’t go through with it, after all. He’d look around the apartment—the shared everything, intertwined for all time, maybe. Bureaus and books and lamps and framed posters that were uncuttable-in-two. But they were down this path already. There was no turning back. He’d smell her dresses. He’d smell the perfume. He’d reply to her reply. She was still working—didn’t he understand it always ran late? She was working from the restaurant of the hotel, there was no one else around. It was quiet, she was alone. She would go to bed soon. He would probably pass out before she could talk. Everything in the closet in Barcelona reminded him of those nights.

  “Of course, of course,” she said into the phone. “You fold six into five, thread in the stuff about the sister beginning in four. So that when you reveal it, people feel like they knew there was something worth paying attention to there, even if they can’t quite figure out how they sensed it coming all along.”

  Will returned to the couch and opened his email and was surprised to find forty new messages since he’d fallen asleep. A writer at one of the magazines was threatening a lawsuit. Will had been looped into the situation weeks ago. But they’d just learned that the writer was going public with accusations of coercion. The editor-in-chief needed to know what their options were to make sure it didn’t become a big public mess. The first several messages in the chain were to Will’s boss, asking him to advise. But Will’s boss had snipped at the chain earlier in the weekend, complaining that he had already wasted “too much of his alleged ‘vacation’ on this garbage,” and that he wouldn’t be checking in again until Tuesday. Will knew his boss well enough to know that he’d meant it, that nothing would get him on the line from Nantucket, no matter how much money the media company paid him as lead counsel. Will felt the familiar pulse in his neck. A coursing of poison to his extremities. It was the feeling of the lobby mural all over again.

  Will couldn’t drown out Whitney’s voice in the other room. She was still on her call, sounding impossibly enthusiastic, offering recommendations that would make a thing that was actually being made better. He clammed his laptop shut. He hated this. He hated the pitch of anxiety. The work was often meaningless and only ever had downsides, but at least he was underpaid for it, too. He needed the money. They’d been
spending like assholes lately. And now the extension on the Airbnb. They’d budgeted for a specific length of trip, not days and days longer. He listened to Whitney’s tone, that pleasant authority. She made 50 percent more than he did, and now she was beginning to produce, too. The apartment wouldn’t be a problem for them, collectively, but they’d booked it on his account, and these extra days would go on his card. He couldn’t leave his job. How had he put himself in this position? How had he allowed it to take control of his life? He wanted more than anything on earth to snip the line of his contacts, to change his email address by a single letter so that all correspondence would bounce. Maybe he would never emerge from beneath the cloud. Maybe it would be best to stay stuck in Barcelona for good.