Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “It’s just on for, what, this afternoon? A weekday afternoon?” Will said.

  “You know how it is here,” Jenna said. “Weekend, weekday…”

  “Where is this place?” Will seemed genuinely interested.

  “The Fòrum’s, what?” Jenna said to Jack. “Forty-minute walk, twenty by metro?”

  “Yeah, it’s closer to where I live, down on the water. It’s this big weird concrete park. Not far from that club we went to the other night, actually.”

  Will received his espresso and drank it as he stood up.

  “Is it the sort of thing where they maybe still have tickets?” Will said.

  Whitney froze at the question, at the notion that he might want to tag along.

  “Oh,” Jack said. “Probably? The tickets were all her. She bought a couple last night, but I’m sure there’ll be people selling more at the—”

  “It’s sold out, but there’ll be scalpers,” Jenna said. “You coming?”

  “I don’t want to, you know…” Will said, looking at Whitney. “We have some stuff we were trying to do, and I don’t want to butt in. It just sounds…”

  Whitney held neutral-faced and steady. She didn’t want to overreact, and so forced herself to consider the alternative. Maybe this wasn’t such a big deal. Maybe this was exactly the sort of thing they were meant to do, exactly the sort of impulsiveness she’d asked for in the park yesterday.

  “I guess we can at least head down there with you and see something new,” she said.

  They took the metro. The subterranean station was gleaming. The tiles were scrubbed. The sides of the escalator issued crisp reflections. The tracks were free of rust and garbage. The electronic signs on each platform announced the time of the next arriving train down to the second.

  They moved as four in a comfortable quiet. They clustered there in equilibrium, surfing the smoothness of the ride. Eight stops, twenty minutes. They talked about their glimpses of the news—the president, the special counsel—and Jack read updates to them off his phone about the latest on the ashcloud. They could expect rain again soon, but a clearing following the rain. Meteorologists were predicting flights could be up and running as early as tomorrow now.

  They exited the station at the base of Avinguda Diagonal. A light-rail tram split the boulevard the way the trolley in New Orleans split St. Charles. The streets hummed like trees in summer, taxis and buses carrying workers to and from indistinguishable glass office buildings. Down this way, things clipped commercially. There were trim suits and Bluetooth earpieces and frameless eyeglasses and pointy shoes. Down here, it was less Barcelona, more Brussels—or any other European city that didn’t have Gothic buildings and beaches and mountains on the water.

  Jenna led them in the direction of the gate, and was at once in negotiation with a scalper. It was forty euros apiece, Jenna told them. She’d talked the man down from sixty. Will and Whitney exchanged a wordless look that neither could read definitively, and so, one beer deeper into the day, and sick of Whitney’s unhelpful indifference, Will stepped forward and opened his wallet and before thinking through the consequences of what he was about to do pulled out his last hundred-euro bill, a bill he’d tried and failed to rid himself of at any tapas bar or café—and, in exchange, received the tickets, printed out on real-live ticket stock, printed with red and black ink, like the kind he’d received in the mail all through high school for the shows at the Troubadour and the Palladium and the Hollywood Bowl he’d attended with the pink-haired girls of his early-driving years. The scalper gave him his change. He reached back for Whitney’s hand, who took the pair of tens like someone neither pleased nor displeased, like someone with nothing better to do on a trapped afternoon.

  They were at the edge of the continent. The sea and sky were gray. The Parc del Fòrum, Jack said, was only maybe fifteen years old. It was a reclaimed industrial slip on the waterfront that had been transformed into a provocation of concrete planes and angles. It looked to Will like the models he sometimes spied in the windows of the Cooper Union on his walk to and from the subway. There were primary colors and blocks, cement and steel the way Olmsted used grass and trees. It reminded Will of the few days he spent in Berlin during a summer of law school, the concrete that had been poured after the Wall fell, the concrete Oz of the government buildings on the river.

  At the water there was an enormous solar-power panel soaring above the Fòrum like a pergola. It rose at a disconcerting angle, summoning the sun through the blackness of the ash veil. It looked built to power an entire city. Before it, made miniature by the scale, was the band shell, around which were gathered the masses, the flashing signs of underemployment and of endless summer. Life went on beneath the volcano. There were thumpings of a DJ beat all around.

  Will handed his newly purchased tickets to the attendant at the gate, and a pit fixed itself in his throat. He never trusted scalpers. He always presumed that he was getting screwed. But the pleasing green sound of go followed the scanning of each of his tickets, and he and Whitney filed through the turnstile.

  Jenna handed the attendant her printouts and waited for the same sound. Whitney watched Jenna’s face hold its lineless liquid form while the moment distended and the attendant fumbled around, spraying the red laser on the bar code over and over. Whitney moved her eyes between the tickets and Jenna’s face, and saw Jenna’s lips part uncertain and her eyes flutter scared.

  The attendant said something quickly in Spanish and Jenna had to ask her to repeat herself. The attendant was holding out the tickets as she said it again. And all Whitney and Will heard Jenna say was: “Qué? Qué? Es imposible.”

  “She says they’re counterfeit,” Jenna said, incredulously. “She says they’re no good.”

  Jack put his arm on her shoulder and she flinched.

  “Fuck,” Jenna said. “I guess we’ll go see about those guys back there, see what else they have. This is fucking insane. This has never happened before.”

  She stretched the elastic straps of her leotard off her neck and shoulders, as though her clothes were beginning to squeeze too tightly. She turned and had taken a marching step in the other direction when Whitney said, “Wait…wait, Jenna. Just take our tickets. It’s your thing. It’s not worth spending even more money. Just take—”

  “No, no, don’t be ridiculous. I mean, thank you,” she said. “But that’s not—”

  “How ’bout this, then,” Jack said. “I’m in the same boat as you guys, you know? I mean, I don’t need to go. I’m behind on packing, anyway. I have plenty else I should be doing. How ’bout you three go, and I’ll meet you afterward?”

  Jenna stared at him. Whitney’s face was stony.

  “Or in that case, what if, Jenna, you just take mine?” Whitney said. “A one-for-one swap.”

  Whitney didn’t want to be here. She wasn’t at all interested in the music and she was still a little sick of Will. She felt a rush of relief at the prospect of getting out of it.

  The attendant asked Jenna and Jack to move to the side so that she could scan the tickets of the kids behind them in line.

  Whitney looked at Jack, and Jack smiled at her, proud that the two of them had arrived at the same simple solution.

  Will looked at Jenna, and Jenna jutted out her plump lower lip, in recognition that it wasn’t such a bad idea if everyone was on board.

  Will looked at Whitney, and Whitney’s face betrayed nothing. He smiled disdainfully. He loved her still. She was so predictable. She would give him zero to go off.

  “I’d pay for my ticket,” Jenna said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Will said. “You already did. This is just a lame situation. But this is a nice solution. We’ll go for a couple hours and then meet you guys at…”

  “Yeah, I mean, there’s only a few hours left anyway,” Jenna said. “We can meet you around here, or near wherever? It’s not like it’ll be too late. The ones I was hoping to see are up soon.”

  Will and Whitney looked
at each other again, and Whitney could tell that Will would never be the one to make the definitive call—he wouldn’t give her that, it was his way of giving it back a little. He knew better than to gift her anything that could be held against him later, given every last misstep lately, given last night and this morning and all afternoon now. So Whitney put an end to it herself:

  “Sound good to everyone?”

  Jenna waited for the catch and they held there one last long moment, the two women communicating at their own encrypted frequency. Then, when there was nothing but static—no trap, no nothing one way or the other—Jenna nodded gratefully and explained to the attendant what they were doing, and the attendant said she’d have to explain it to her boss, who would have to explain it to her boss. But after five minutes they were finally at an exit, swapping Jenna for Whitney and thanking the hordes of employees who had been required to approve the ticket exchange.

  And that was how it happened. How they’d broken the links and re-paired. How Whitney wound up watching Will and Jenna lean back ever so slightly as they took the low concrete slope toward the band shell, and how Will turned to see Whitney and Jack disappear over the high hill of asphalt in the direction of the city where Jack had once appeared on a billboard looking as handsome and famous as the most handsome and famous Americans sometimes can in advertisements in European capitals.

  Whitney and Jack found their way back to the base of Diagonal, to the metro stop, to the stairs that led underground.

  “Does this get you home?” Whitney said. “Or, more relevantly: Does it get me home?”

  “It all sorta, you know—” He threw both hands forward like airport ground crew, up Diagonal, back into the heart of the city. She was already on the steps, but he stood there squinting up the road, toes pointed toward the beach.

  “But it looks like you’re maybe not coming down here…” she said.

  “I don’t know quite how far it is,” he said. “But I thought I’d maybe try walking.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “It’s a lot of this,” he said, indicating the walkway with the trees and the tram.

  “I might come with you, if you don’t mind?” she said, casting her eyes up at him.

  “Of course. Sure. I wish I was a better guide…” he said, as the tram approached. “This thing here is kinda cool.”

  “Are you sure you want to walk? I feel like you’re maybe not all that close,” she said, smiling.

  “If it starts raining, we can grab a cab.”

  Whitney still had a foot on the first step. “Doesn’t it seem like it’s gotten darker?”

  “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll give you a ride home if it gets bad.”

  They found the walkway, the canopy of plane trees and palms.

  “So the team or whatever, they’re helping get you out of here?”

  “They say they’re working the angles. But everyone’s in the same boat. It seems silly to push too hard until the all clear, until they start sending the first flights out. They take care of shit.…I just still can’t believe it’s over!”

  “I can’t imagine…” she said as a thing to say.

  “But you can, right? I mean, what was it like for you—you said you were on the soccer team?”

  “Uh, hardly…” A little shock ran through her. She was surprised he remembered. “My knee exploded in the second game of the season freshman year. I spent the whole semester on crutches. Sat on the bench for spring workouts. And then, I dunno, I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Just like that.”

  “I’d never loved it like it sounds like you love it. There were years there, for sure. But it was mostly a way to get out, you know? It was a way to get way away from home and have it paid for—at least until I pulled the plug.”

  Jack nodded. “I knew some of the soccer girls my year. I must’ve seen you at parties, or overlapped at some point, right?”

  “I mean, when I was out, I was really out. I just kinda disappeared into the stacks. I’d never had that kind of free time before. I couldn’t believe what it felt like to use my brain without soccer, too.”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t know a thing about it.”

  “Without the scholarship, I had to work a lot. It was pretty full-on. Not much time for…just really busy…”

  “Still, I can’t believe we didn’t cross paths at all. I mean, who were your friends?”

  Whitney stiffened at the question. “I—I kinda kept to myself, you know? Like, Will and I were the same year, and we didn’t even meet each other till the last six weeks of senior year.”

  “The gardens.”

  “Right.” She felt a little beat in her temples. “But, I just…I guess if I’m being honest, I think I kinda missed the boat on a lot of friend groups because of what happened with the team. Like, by the time I quit, everyone had found their people. I was the odd duck out. The team had the team. Other people had… It’s not like I didn’t have fun, or whatever.…But by the end, it was mostly me and the museum café and a bunch of old movie scripts.”

  Jack nodded. She looked up at his face.

  “I’m sure you can’t relate,” she said. “Given that you’re the king from jump.”

  “It’s weird, though. You’re never really a part of it for real, you know? You’re taking classes during summer, you’re missing absolutely everything on campus during the season. It’s not like I got all that close to anyone, either.”

  “I don’t want to make it sound like I was this pathetic…” she said, trying to force a laugh. “It’s weird, we just moved around a lot when I was young, never in the same school for, like, more than two or three years. So I just never found a super-close group of girls, you know? It never felt like it was ‘worth it’ or something. I just knew we’d move on. That’s what I liked most about soccer at first, I think. The club team, at least. That I was gonna be with those girls for years and years. I think it’s why I gave so much to it. I didn’t want to lose those new friends…”

  He was thinking about himself as she spoke, she could tell. She could see it in the drift of his eyes. He shook his head and then sniffled and then laughed at his sniffle. “You know it has to end. That’s been the case forever. It ends in high school and college and in Norway and Germany. But they don’t tell you about the real end, where, like, your body and soul are put on fucking ice.”

  “It was who you were for a really long time.”

  “Who I was, but also just what I did. How I spent my time, you know? Every day since I was six years old, I’ve woken up knowing that the goal of today is to get a little bit better. I took it for granted, that even without anything else going on, there was always that main thing to turn to. If plans fell through like back there, I’d go steal a few hours in the gym. Now, though, I’m…”

  “Well,” Whitney said, teasingly, “it seems like you’ve found plenty to do with your days this week…”

  “You know what I mean,” he said, pink-cheeked. “She’s…she’s fun. But she’s a girl I probably won’t see again after we leave here. I don’t see her making it out for Christmas in Chicago.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “I didn’t say it was. You’re the one with that grin on your face, like you know something, like I have to explain myself.”

  “No grins. No explanations required.”

  “You don’t like her much, I can tell.”

  “I like her. She’s fun. She’s just young. She can be kinda needling. To me, to you. Which is ridiculous. She has that attitude that maybe I had at her age? But I dunno, it’s a little extra with her,” Whitney said. “At her age—like I’m a hundred fucking years old.”

  “So you were a Jenna in college, then?”

  “Hardly. I just, I got caught up in some stuff. I started reading some heady things and watching some good movies and thinking I had my finger on something. I’m sure I was insufferable.”

  “You probably hung out at that coffee shop, huh? Wha
t’s that one off campus? I had to go there for a class once, a documentary class with that one professor who actually makes documentaries?”

  “That’s funny. No. No, I wasn’t much in that crowd, either. I really was pretty solo, just kinda figuring stuff out for myself. But sophomore year, I found this boy. Really, the one and only serious one before Will. And I glommed on. Became obsessed with his thing. He was from New York and looked like he was in the Strokes and all his friends were in college film festivals and things like that, and the one time I went home with him, he knew all these…He knew this taco shop where you’d go in the front door, then down the stairs and through the kitchen and into a dining room…”

  “Sounds like Goodfellas.”

  “Exactly! That’s what it felt like. And, anyway, I was pretty much ready to marry him on the spot. We were inseparable for a bit. And I was counting on spending the summer up there with him. Staying at his mom’s apartment. Waitressing like I had back home. Making movies for fun. I dunno, it was just, like, this thing I’d never wanted but suddenly very very much wanted. Then he broke up with me on the last day of classes and I spiraled pretty hard, and ended up having to go back home for the summer. I was…I was really down, like scarily down. I was humiliated. I was drinking too much. I was hooking up with anyone who looked at me. I was just a total fucking mess. I didn’t think I could go back to school in the fall. Truly. And so I basically called the study-abroad office every morning, trying to squeeze my way into a program. I would’ve gone anywhere. But nothing. And then as I was packing for the semester, I got a call that some kid had broken his leg in a boating accident and a spot was open in Paris. It was…very important for me just then. It was, like, life-alteringly important for me to have a place to escape to, where I could figure myself out all over…” She looked up at him. “And so, anyway: voilà. That’s how my Jenna phase began in earnest.”