Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  He checked his personal email, willing a response. He’d been waiting all week, and still nothing. Before the trip, he’d submitted the script he’d finished during the month of 1-2-3. He’d been working on it on the sly for a year now, a side project for his own sanity, a pressure valve for when he needed it most. He was certain Whitney still knew nothing about it. He’d made a pact with himself to do it this way. He must prove himself worthy on his own before asking her to help fix everything that needed fixing, which of course she would. Last year he’d run into a classmate from law school who’d become a producer. They got coffee, they caught up. The guy even offered to read the script Will had written in that college course his senior year. He enjoyed it, he told Will, before crediting ideas to the movie that Will hadn’t even intended. The feedback shocked Will. He hadn’t expected anything. And now the producer wanted Will to write something new.

  Will wasn’t an idiot—he knew every person in Hollywood with money fancied himself a producer. But this guy had a real job, a real office he went to, and everything. So it wasn’t just a pipe dream when he sent it along. But now Will had been waiting ten days, and nothing still. He checked his email again. It was a holiday back home. Relax. He’d just never allowed himself to want something quite like this before. He needed out so badly. Away from everything that was transpiring in that other email box of his. But he needed the money. He needed the dignity. He couldn’t let Whitney leave him further behind just yet. As ever, movies were his island, his salvation. But all he could do for now was tinker meaninglessly. He opened the software he’d downloaded for free. He read: INT—BAR—NIGHT. Then he changed it to something better: INT—BAR—DAY.

  “Jesus, sorry,” Whitney said, emerging from the bedroom. “That was an hour longer than it was supposed to be.”

  “All okay?”

  “I can’t stand it when executives misuse words. Exegesis. Enervate. Epigraph.”

  “Exigencies,” he said. “Equal pay.”

  Whitney smiled. “You get it. Will gets it. And that’s the point of keeping him around…” she said. “The last twenty minutes was just Karen describing her house search, anyway.”

  “What neighborhood?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. They’re playing a much greater game than Westside-Eastside. They’re looking for something that’s architecturally significant.”

  She was stripping down to take a shower. Off came her shirt and her bra and then her pants. He stood and pressed up behind her. She could feel him through his jeans.

  “You’re not so architecturally insignificant yourself,” he said.

  She looked at him with real or feigned disgust in the reflection of the hallway mirror.

  “Are you calling me sturdy?” she said. “You’re saying I’m what, a brick house?”

  He dropped his hands from her hips and rolled his eyes and returned to the couch, to the fresh beer he’d just cracked, and she moved to the bathroom for a quick rinse-off since the moment was gone.

  They were out the door by seven. They crossed Diagonal and zagged through the Eixample, the big corners, the wide intersections with their plane trees. They passed the 1-2-3 restaurant, set back on the chamfered corner beneath a black awning and black glass, no tables on the sidewalk, no invitation to come in without a reservation, as they’d done forty-eight impossibly long hours ago. They passed a Gaudí. They passed another Gaudí. It was the only thing they could count on in this neighborhood. The tree-trunk curves, the twisted wrought iron, the jagged colored tiles. Never more than a few blocks without a reminder of whose city it was.

  They were up out of the Eixample and into Gràcia, squares with classical guitars and fathers dancing with young daughters. There were pedestrian alleys with empty restaurants and businesses with gibberish portmanteaus and big transparent windows framing two or three employees, younger than Will and Whitney, working on laptops with a single shared desk and a single shared printer, late on a maybe-local-holiday. They passed another couple their age speaking English, and both Whitney and the other woman did it to one another: They looked each other up and down and then in the eyes. Do I know you? Do I like you? Do I hate you? Do I work with you? Did I go to school with you? Do I owe you an email? Do you owe me a call? Are you pretty? Are you famous? Are you a stranger? You’re a stranger. You’re nobody I know, goodbye.

  The slope grew steeper. They passed a man seated on a bench with a Walkman who was singing along with a heavy accent to the Beach Boys. The alley kicked back steeper still. If they followed it into the hills they would hit Parc Güell, the escalators that carried tourists to the top, to the palm trees and the salamander and the dreamscape and the view.

  Instead, though, they found the restaurant, a stand-up thing with a stand-up counter and stand-up tables. Leonard had picked it. Whitney had cross-referenced it with their email guide, and there was indeed a consensus. The room was tight but the ceiling was high, and the walls were packed with wine and tins of fish. Golds and grays and strangely appetizing browns. The walls of liquor bottles appeared illuminated by a warm yellow source, shining through the vintage labels. They were on the early side, so there was still space to stake their claim. They spotted Jack and Leonard in the back. They already had glasses of wine. But they weren’t speaking to one another as Will and Whitney approached. They were staring straight ahead. They had space between them, and Leonard’s arms were crossed until she noticed Will and Whitney.

  “Hola,” Leonard said. Their standing up made her seem all the smaller, all the wronger in scale. Jack was wearing an oversize dark-blue shirt, an oversize collar spread like wings. The sculptedness of his hair made his head seem even smaller than the night before. Leonard was wearing a bright blue dress. In contrast with the dead laundered dark of Jack’s shirt and jeans, the dress was alive with light. Whitney didn’t know for certain, but she suspected it was Valentino. It reached her shins and was carved up in front, Miró shapes cut from the strained bust. Her hair was pushed back high on her forehead again, and fell exhaustively over her shoulders and down her back. There was so much blonde. She’d added hoop earrings and red lipstick since last night, and the whole picture made her look at least twenty-five.

  “You look cute,” Leonard said to Whitney, sizing up her shirt and jeans.

  Whitney smiled politely and leaned into Leonard’s kiss as Will and Jack shook hands. Whitney moved her mouth to Leonard’s other cheek. Will always ribbed her for it at home. The way it’d catch people off guard. But it was natural here. Leonard took the second kiss like a pro, had in fact pushed it there herself. She’d spent the year in Paris, after all. Whitney moved to Jack and he bent over to receive one cheek and another. It occurred to Whitney in the instant she leaned toward him that she’d dreamed of Jack last night. She searched his face to see if he’d had the same dream, if he’d in fact shared in their shared experience. She kept tocking her head in strange ways on approach, trying to make knowing eye contact, to see if he remembered what they’d done together. From a few feet back, Will wondered if the moves weren’t just a ploy to graze noses with Jack, to catch a corner of his mouth.

  Leonard told them she’d been at the airport all afternoon, doing her best to get on a plane. But nothing had gone out. Not one flight. “It looked like a refugee camp,” she said. “Some families had already been there for two full days. People with tickets were at least let into the terminals so that security could clear out the check-in and give the stranded folks access to bathrooms. The restaurants expanded their hours to stay open twenty-four-seven. Military guys were bringing in cots and water.”

  “What did they say?” Whitney said. “Did they have any guesses?”

  “Now that it’s at least stopped erupting, they just have to wait on the winds. It sounds like the week prediction is less likely, but it still may be a few more days. All they could really say was almost certainly not tomorrow. But I may go back again anyway.”

  “They changed my flight to Wednesday,” Jack said. “But I
have my apartment as long as I need it. I realize that’s more than you all can say, so if anyone needs a place eventually…”

  Leonard smiled without baring any teeth. It was a smirk that Whitney read to mean that she had already been there, that though she might be an anyone at this table, she’d already taken him up on the offer.

  “We didn’t even try today,” Will said. “Which was maybe stupid. I got an email when we woke up that said our spot was still being held in line. That we’d be notified when there was anything new to report.”

  “Probably a smarter way to spend your time,” Leonard said. “I just, well, you know…I’m ready to get out of here. I need to get home.” Jack shifted his weight weirdly from one leg to another. “But!” Leonard bit at the silence. “In the meantime…”

  She explained how the menu worked. There were forty items in two columns on a single laminated sheet. You placed orders at the counter and they prepared the dishes on the fly right in front of you. Toasts with cream cheese, brined salmon, and honey. Toasts with canned anchovies and peppers. Salted tuna. Sardines and urchin. A squid-ink something, black as a chess piece. The three behind the counter poured wine and prepped dishes and recorded orders in a dog-eared leather-bound book without looking customers in the eye. Everything was served cold.

  “They ever screw up the tab?” Will asked, returning with wineglasses for himself and Whitney, and nodding with his head toward the vicinity of the bookkeeping system.

  Whitney shook her head, and leaned into his ear, and slid him a big bill: “It’s on me.”

  “Since everything’s cheap, maybe nobody can tell when there’s a mistake?” Jack said.

  “Who likes what?” Whitney said. They pointed. They all pointed to the salmon, in particular. It was poppy-bright and looked to be the only fish that didn’t come canned.

  “Even though Jenna and I went to a sushi place for lunch,” Jack said.

  “Jenna?” Whitney said, looking at Jack, looking at Leonard.

  “Well,” Jack said, smiling at her patiently, “which is it tonight?”

  “Today is a Jenna day,” Leonard said.

  “Well, pleased to meet you,” Whitney said.

  “Enchantée,” Jenna said.

  “What makes it a Jenna day?” Whitney said.

  “I didn’t wake up at Gram’s,” she said.

  Jenna smiled softly at Whitney as though that explained something, or everything, or at least a couple important things at once.

  “And so in spite of the sushi for lunch…” Will said.

  “I know I should be used to it by now,” Jack said, eyeing the grayer fish on the table adjacent to them, “but I still don’t totally love the tins.”

  “It’s no grilled chicken,” Whitney said.

  “Exactly,” Jack said, smiling widely at her.

  Jenna lifted her glass and puffed a low laugh, an at, not a with. Jack noticed and his cheeks showed that he’d been drinking for a while.

  “Look at this shit,” Jack said, a little loudly, to Will and Whitney. “Nothing is cool enough for the coolest chick in town.”

  “I’m gonna get a refill,” Jenna said, ignoring him, already edging toward the bar. “Should I just grab a bottle?”

  They watched her squeeze between two sets of male shoulders and place her elbows and the top half of her torso, the loosely trestled window of the chest of her dress, on the counter. Behind the bar were a woman who looked like she could’ve fought beside Orwell in Will’s book, and two men as tall as Jack, each with dusty hair and glasses. One of them was quick to take Jenna’s order, quick to take a generous glance at what she’d presented on the other side of the partition.

  “So just…Jenna, then,” Whitney said to Jack, when she was still out of earshot.

  “I’ve been going with the flow,” Jack said. “There’s a lot to get with, turns out.”

  “Oh yeah?” Whitney said.

  “I mean, that’s probably no surprise, given all…given all this and that. But even more than you’d think,” Jack said, stooping a little to conspire, then catching himself and laughing. “What am I doing? Two drinks in and I’m blah-blah-blah-ing already.”

  “Did you guys stay out much later last night?” Whitney said.

  “Probably an hour after you. I was dead by the time we left. I don’t know how anyone can do that. This week’s been so surreal.”

  “And was it a good rest of the morning after that, then?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jack said, innocently.

  Whitney held fixed, arching her thick eyebrows like a gossip columnist.

  “We walked around for a while.”

  “Us, too,” Whitney said. “We walked home.”

  There was an unnatural lull, the sort that can derail a group of relative strangers. They sipped their drinks and then perked up in unison at the sight of her.

  “Well that was fast,” Will said as Jenna fell back in with the bottle and four fresh glasses.

  “I cut the line,” Jenna said.

  “Saw that,” Will said. “They hopped right to.”

  “You do what you can to survive,” Jenna said.

  Will poured the wine. They clinked. They swallowed big swallows.

  “Jenna, what’ll you do this summer?” Will said. “Summer before senior year.…Internship? More travel? L.A.? New York?”

  “I have this job,” Jenna said. “I did it last year. You’ll actually appreciate it, knowing what you know about the Westside.”

  “Elbow model?” Whitney said. The first sip had gone straight to her head.

  Jenna examined Whitney’s face to see if she was amused with herself, then turned back to Will and said, “I buy books for people to put in their house.”

  “Like a personal shopper?” Will said.

  “More like an art adviser, but for bookshelves,” Jenna said. “Pick books that make people seem like the sort who would actually read those books.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” Whitney said. “Somebody was telling me about it when I was out there last month. I’ve just never met anyone who—”

  “These people with, you know,” Jenna said, cutting her off, “the six-thousand-square-foot homes, and the countless rooms, and the miles of shelves—they need decorating help. It’s not like it’s my business. I just work for the woman who does it. She finds the clients. She conducts this personality test. She prepares the lists: mix of classic and contemporary, used and new. And then I go shopping.”

  “Local booksellers must love you,” Will said.

  “They always insist on taking me out to lunch,” Jenna said.

  “I bet one big client’s enough to float a store for a month, right?” Whitney said.

  Jenna shrugged and poured herself another few fingers of wine.

  “I helped deliver boxes to students when I was home for summers in college,” Will said. “A friend of mine from high school ran a dorm-moving business. I thought that whole thing was rich L.A., as far as seemingly unnecessary services go—pick up the boxes for you, stick them in storage, bring the boxes back to campus in August—but yours has got it beat by miles.”

  “She gets five bucks a book,” Jenna said.

  “Same as what an author gets,” Whitney said, laughing.

  “And some of these guys—and they’re obviously mostly men—they’re in it for thousands and thousands of books.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jack said. “If they’re just for decoration, what does it matter which books they are?”

  “Simple Jack,” Jenna said. “You sweet, beautiful boy. So sensemaking. So pure.”

  “All right, all right,” he said.

  “The clients study up to have passing familiarity. She forces you to memorize the title and the author, to be able to move among them. So that if some guest browsing at your party says, you know, ‘Oh, White Teeth!’ he can get in a ‘Zadie? I love Zadie.’”

  “Does she give them flash cards?” Whitney said. “Slides?”

/>   “Spreadsheet included,” Jenna said. “PowerPoint for another buck a book.”

  “It’s like an art history class!” Whitney said. “Painting to artist. Artist to painting. Incredible.”

  “So what’s your cut, then?” Will said.

  “I get a dollar a book,” Jenna said. “Plus lunch and gas. Lunch, if the booksellers don’t bribe me first with a sandwich. I made a couple grand one week last summer. I buy, I deliver, I buy, I deliver. Sometimes it’s less specific. Sometimes it’s: Pick fifty at random from the New Releases tables at the front of the store.”

  “And then you just swing them by the house, one box at a time?” Will said.

  “However they please. She gives them choices for arrangement. Author name. Country. Language. Era. Color.”

  “Obviously color is an option,” Whitney said.

  “One guy last summer wanted a thousand blue books—that was it.”

  “No significance beyond blue?” Jack said.

  “It’s the easiest of all. No personality tests. No manufactured taste. Just blue. And hardcover…the older the better was the preference. I went to twenty stores. I picked up the final hundred from the Used bins at Vroman’s.”

  “Maybe I move to L.A. instead of going home,” Jack said. “Learn the real ways of the world.”

  “You can live with my dad,” Jenna said. “He’ll love it. Someone to watch Lakers games with. Someone to play golf with.”

  “It’s settled, then,” Jack said. “Cali, here I come.”

  “Ugh,” Jenna said.

  “What now?” Jack said.

  “Never say that,” Jenna said.

  “SoCal?” Jack said.

  “Will: Cali? SoCal?”

  “California. Southern California,” Will said.

  “Got it?” Jenna said to Jack.

  Will smiled and Whitney squinted. There were shifting tethers, fluid alliances.

  “But it won’t get you in trouble like how San Franciscans feel about San Fran,” Will said.

  “No good, either?” Jack said.