Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  It had been nothing, it turned out. It had been a little thunder and a little lightning, and then a rush to the bathroom as the band cleared the stage.

  They were at the end of the bathroom line and Jenna acted as though practically zero had transpired, as though there hadn’t just been a terror scare—that it had all been in Will’s head.

  “Fuck,” she said, “I should’ve gone before we went in.”

  The line looked a quarter-mile long. Will was breathing heavily still, body still cold.

  “While we have the time,” she said, “want to get a couple beers and meet me back here?”

  He obeyed. He knew she knew he would. He thrilled to the simple tasks. He was perfect for so many new jobs. He floated to the concession stand dazed. His head was pounding and he was ready for a drink. In line, Will turned on his roaming and checked his phone. Nothing from Whitney. Still, he was grateful to have it in working condition. He noticed his battery was low—he’d forgotten to charge overnight. After everything that had transpired. He quickly tapped out a text saying he loved her, but then deleted it. No need to stoke suspicions. No need to act like the decision they’d made at the gate was anything but ordinary. No need to mention that the object of her envy and scorn had forced a party drug down his throat and that it had made him overreact to a little weather. No need to make her think that there was any reason to worry about Will and Jenna being all alone together in the rain.

  “Let’s hang a left down through here,” Jack said. “You may have been over this way after the club the other night. It’s a little sketchy, but there’s a few places I like. My movie theater’s over here.”

  Off Diagonal, the blocks were gridded but narrow, somewhere between the octagons of the Eixample and the slot canyons of the Gothic Quarter. There were abandoned buildings and operational warehouses. There were Laundromats and cafés serving espresso and Moritz. And there were the standard-issue drying lines and skin-colored stucco of everywhere in Western Europe. Of Avignon, of Bologna, of Porto—and apparently of here, too, in the Poblenou of Barcelona.

  “It really is wild that after three years on the same campus it took meeting thousands of miles away at some random party, right?” he said.

  “‘Fate, man…’ Should I get ready for some of Jenna’s dorm-room philosophy?”

  He smiled, but she could tell she’d embarrassed him. He was so sensitive about his brain. He had reached out, raw-nerved, and she’d swatted down the offering.

  “It is, you’re right,” she said. “None of this makes any sense. I know what you’re doing here, but I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

  “Vacation.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But why? Why these days, of any days? And why here?”

  Jack shrugged. “Memorial Day? And it’s nice?”

  She smiled. “Yes, good answer. Half right. Half point for the half-right answers. But it makes even less sense if I really think about it. You, I get. But why us?”

  He narrowed his eyes, a little suspicious of the rhetorical questions. He obviously didn’t have the answer, and she obviously did. He shrugged again, impatient.

  It was growing darker still and looked very much like it might start raining any moment. They passed beneath awnings that covered the sidewalk and each time they stepped out there was a bit of the thrill of being between seats in a game of musical chairs. Red neon—a Spanish red, the red of muletas and mashed tomatoes and cured ham and rioja—blared from the window of a cheap seafood restaurant, with shrimp and lobsters visible in the tanks through the glass. The red ran over Jack like a highlighter and seemed to lift the Kukoč jersey an inch off his body. His skin was red, the fur on his arms and legs was red. His head of dark hair lit up red, too. Something about the ethereal vision—a break from the monochrome of the ashcloud—made her think it and say it and give into it:

  “Beautiful…” she said, almost without meaning to.

  “Hmm?” he said. Her cheeks went hot. What this vision before her had to do with the forces that had trapped them there she couldn’t say for sure, but she’d connected them, and the picture of this bright beautiful body awash in light had made her say it. She didn’t want to say the word again, though, and so in burying the first slight embarrassment, she offered up another—but one she desperately wanted to share with somebody.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she said.

  He smiled as he’d done with every other silly thing she’d said on the walk, and when he stepped out of the light, they crossed another street into new darkness.

  “I mean, you can’t tell Jenna, or Will, or anyone at the alumni association,” she said, smiling as though there might be a joke coming. “This is just between you and me and the laundry hanging from that balcony, ’cause I think I just need to tell someone, ’cause it’s kinda rusting away inside of me. Besides, it’s the other reason we’re here, the real-er reason, the other half point—and I probably should just say it to make sense.”

  “Okay…”

  “So, as you know, Will and I have been together since the end of college. That’s a great thing most of the time, and not great other times.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And a couple months ago—back at school, actually—we got engaged. Or, rather, Will proposed, and…”

  “Oh!” Jack said. “I hadn’t realized. That’s amazing.”

  “Well, this is the between-you-and-me part, because it goes a long way to explaining…We both, or, I don’t know, that’s probably up for some debate, but we both decided to try something because it didn’t feel quite right. Something wasn’t sinking in the way we thought it would. Something was just not certain.…And if there’s one thing the married people I work with seem to agree on, it’s that if there’s something bothering you, it’s not gonna get better with marriage, it’s not gonna be fixed by marriage, right? Not that I usually care what those people have to say. But we decided to do this thing.…We decided to go on, like, a quasi-break. Not to date other people, but to sleep with other people. I was in L.A. for a month for work while he was in New York. And, so, we each gave each other three freebies. And the idea, then, was to come here at the end of it, to come clean, and then go home engaged, all the better for having, you know, gotten it out of our system.”

  She’d been looking straight ahead, trying to put words to something she hadn’t had to describe before. She turned to Jack. He wore a neutral expression. She couldn’t tell if he thought it was scandalous or boring, or if it reasonably explained everything.

  “And so…” she said, and he looked at her expectantly, searching for a line to guide him to the next part, “that’s what we’re doing here, and that’s what we’ve been sort of dealing with these last couple days. We thought we were getting out of here, we were ready to put everything behind us, and then these days keep on coming…”

  “And so you did it?” Jack said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You went through with it? You had your three each? And everything’s okay?”

  “Is that awful? I haven’t told even my close…I haven’t told a soul. Does it sound terrible?”

  “I mean, I feel about as far away from getting married as possible. But when I’ve dated girls—which, you know…but when I have—I guess I’m the jealous type. The thought of even someone I’ve hooked up with a couple times, if I really like her, the thought of her being with someone else…That’s very mature of both of you, I guess.”

  She laughed softly. “I don’t know. I mean, hearing you say it back, it gets me all tied up in knots again. And it makes me wonder why I think it’ll all be okay now. I never was the jealous type until I met Will. I didn’t die for boys the way other girls did. I didn’t usually get caught up in crushes the same way. I just tried to act above it all. And then things changed. I was so crazy after I met him. I’d finally found this person I could settle into. Then, I don’t know what happened—I mean I do know part of what happened. He hooked up with some girl his f
irst year of law school, that’s what happened. And it short-circuited me. It seems trivial now, but when it happened…Anyway, eventually all that went away. And by the time he proposed, I just, I don’t know, I felt totally numb to it. It didn’t hit me hard one way or the other. It was terrible. And so this other idea, the three, I guess I wanted it for him, but I wanted it for me, too. I wanted to wake up a little. I wanted it to be fair, and that was the only way, even if it would be excruciating. I got tweaked when he told me about his ones the other night, when we confessed everything. But that was something that was missing even a few months ago—me feeling crazy again. That’s actually what got me excited all over. This is how you’re supposed to feel about this. Strongly. It’s like it snapped me out of my whatever. And then we tried to get out of here and put it all behind us. And, yeah, you’ve basically had a front-row seat to everything since…” She looked at him. “Does this all sound totally insane?”

  “I’m just impressed that you were able to go through with it. I know people who’ve gone on breaks, or whatever, but it never works.”

  “Well, I guess that’s TBD. I think we thought we’d reached the end of something, then realized a bunch of other shit was just starting up.”

  “So three each?” Jack said. The premise of 1-2-3 was finally sinking in.

  “Well, he actually only did…we only did two…” She flinched as she said it. “To be fair to the facts.…But all that’s behind us now.”

  “Does Will know it’s behind you?” he said. Jack was tuned in in a way she hadn’t seen before, like she’d found a station with a song he liked.

  “I believe so…yes.” She looked up at him. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, I don’t think you need to worry about him making any moves on her.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I’ve just never met someone in that situation. I’m legit curious. It’s totally cool if you don’t want to talk about it anymore, but you can understand why it piques my interest.”

  “How ’bout this?” Whitney said. “Three more questions and then we change the subject, never to speak of it again. I’ll answer honestly, unless I lie. In which case you won’t know the difference anyway. What do you most want to know about 1-2-3?”

  “What’s 1-2-3? You call it 1-2-3?!”

  She’d never encountered a fellow human looking so pleased.

  “Are those your first two questions?” she said.

  “No way!” he said. There was a new energy all around. It was as though the red neon had clung to them, a spiderweb stuck to their skin and clothes. She felt a heat in her hair. She felt static in her stomach and thighs.

  “Can I ask a pre-question?” he said. “Like a warm-up question?”

  “In addition to the ones you’ve already used up?” she said. “How ’bout I decide after you ask?”

  He smiled. “You really hadn’t been with anyone else for the whole seven years?”

  She breathed in through her nose. “I guess it’s related to what I was saying before. It wasn’t even just that it wasn’t something I’d considered, it’s that I was crazy about cheating for a long time.…After that thing I mentioned, after that one shit-faced slipup of Will’s, I just became this zealot. I couldn’t stand the thought. I couldn’t hear stories about cheating. I felt sick when I’d watch shows or read scripts with affairs. I’d stop talking to friends if they were screwing around. It just…twisted me up in a way I can’t even articulate. Then as the years built up, something relaxed. Or maybe it was more like deadened nerves. I started to think of 1-2-3 as this very adult thing. This hedge against future problems. Mitigating the derailment of the relationship down the road by going through with the arrangement now. I’d never have done anything without being on the same page as Will. But it made me realize how dumb it had been of me to project onto other people for so long. Nobody has any idea what’s going on in someone else’s relationship. I guess that’s one thing to come out of this: I don’t know shit about anyone else’s sex life, just like they don’t know about mine.”

  “Except me, now…” He smiled. “And I’ll take that as a…no—one person in seven years?”

  “Is that your second question?”

  “No way, you didn’t even answer definitively!” he said, grinning. “I’m just looking for some context. If one since senior year, then how many before that?”

  “Is that your second question?” It had started light, but the way it was going was starting to irritate her. “What’s so interesting about a girl’s number, anyway? I’ve never understood it. Nobody gives a shit the other way around so long as it’s, like, more than two and less than a thousand.”

  “I withdraw the question, then. I didn’t mean to waste one.”

  “No, no. It’s out there. There’s gotta be some penalty for this sloppy line of questioning.”

  He zipped his lips with his fingers. He wasn’t going to waste another shot.

  “Six before,” she said.

  “Oh—” he said.

  “Is that Oh a question or Oh an exclamation?”

  “It’s neither, it’s just: Oh.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s too few or too many for you,” she said. “It can’t possibly be either?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, raising innocent hands. “We’re talking about numbers at twenty-two? Who cares?”

  “Exactly, yes,” she said. “It’s one of those questions that means everything for a while and nothing after a certain point. Every year I realize there are things like that that killed me for what felt like eternities, and that are meaningless now.”

  “Like what else?”

  “Well, let’s see: going back, you know.…Did you make varsity or junior varsity? Did you make the Haney Hawks travel team? Have you ever kissed anyone? Have you ever given a hand job? Then, you know: virginity; college admissions; GPA; career; title; salary; what you’ve made; where you’ve been; where you’re going. Then you get to a point, and I feel myself hurtling toward it, where nobody seems to give a shit about anything anymore. About what boxes you’ve checked, about how high up you got or how pure the work was or wasn’t. It’s just less important. It becomes about comfort. About doing what it takes to just be happy enough. Fewer concerns about whether something’s cutting edge, or cool, or art, or selling out. At least in TV. But also for other jobs, for other friends.…Everyone seems to just want to be content enough. And you know what? That’s okay with me. Because nobody knows anything, it turns out. Most people are just feeling around in the dark, trying to do their best…”

  “Haney Hawks travel team,” he said. “I love it.”

  “I lost you way back there, huh?”

  “No, no,” he said. “I hear you on the rest, too. At least, I think I do. I just—I can’t relate, totally. I feel completely removed from so much that’s going on with my friends. I wish I knew more about it—about titles and promotions and office gossip or whatever. When I’m home, I’m embarrassed how much I like hearing about people’s dumb problems at their offices. They care so much! They catch themselves and say they’ll stop talking about it, but they really want to keep going on about the boss, their reports, the guy who does less work and gets paid more. They talk about it all night. And I’m totally into it! It’s just not my world. Not yet. Senior Associate. CMO. PowerPoint deck. It all sounds goofy to me, but I love it. They probably say the same thing about my world.”

  “Slam dunk. Bottle service. Jersey chaser.”

  “Oof, you make me sound like Gronk,” he said. “Anyway, back to the matter at hand.…I feel like I’m maybe only more confused now. Can I at least use up all three? Unlike you…”

  She smiled. “Get on with it.”

  “After seven years with the same person, was it…like, was it super weird?”

  She smiled. “Uh. It’s not like the technology changed. It’s not like the last time I was with someone else it was a Razr and now it’s an iPhone.”

  “Okay, okay
…” he said.

  “But I dunno, the thing that made it the most different was the guilt of the whole thing…”

  “But you both had agreed to it, right?”

  “You still just kinda feel deeply deeply wrong for it to not be the person you’re used to it being with, even when you’re in the clear. Or at least I did. There’s the obvious stuff that makes you feel it, the things anyone knows from being with someone for the first time. You don’t know what they look like with their clothes off. The moment before everything comes off when you’re wondering whether you’re going to be impressed or disappointed. It’s the way it’s all sort of the same, except when…I dunno, when it isn’t…” She was playing with her hair, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “You think it’s the relationship that’s made it rote. You think it’s the familiarity with the other person. But maybe it’s something else.…Besides, there was this famous actor, so that might’ve been at play, too.”

  “A famous actor? Which actor?!” he said, lit up fresh.

  “Sorry, you’re out of questions.”

  “Seriously?”

  “That’s another question. You’re digging yourself deeper into debt.”

  “Okay, how ’bout this…” he said, pointing a finger to the marquee a couple blocks away. “If he’s on one of the posters out front of the theater, will you tell me?”

  She didn’t think he was in anything that was out. It was safe enough.

  “Fine,” she said, and they walked the rest of the way, eventually edging up to the posters, where they started scanning.

  He kept naming actors. Practically every actor he recognized, and then the last names of some Spanish actors he read straight from the posters.

  She smiled at his enthusiasm. Then she stopped smiling and said, “Oh God.”

  “What?” Jack said, excitedly covering the distance to her side in a single stride.

  She didn’t move.

  “I stepped on a bug,” she said. “It surprised me.”

  “No way,” he said. “I saw what you were looking at, you were looking at this one, and you saw something.”