Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  He scanned the poster in front of her. It was a space movie with an ensemble cast. The Right Stuff, but for a mission to Mars. There he was. One of the astronauts, second from center. She watched Jack’s eyes scan the poster frantically, trying to decide which one. Then she gave in and thumbed at him.

  “Oh, yes…” he said. “Oh, this is awesome! This is the best thing I’ve ever heard. And Will knows?” He was jumping up and down a little bit. He was purely delighted. “And you’ve seen that one movie, right?”

  She knew which movie he was referring to and why. She felt her throat getting pink and she raised her eyebrows and smiled through tight lips.

  “Oh my God, that’s awesome. I’ve never known someone who’s had sex with a movie star. This is great. I’m so glad we met! I’m so glad we didn’t go to the concert and that we wound up here instead. So that I can finally say I know someone who—”

  He was bobbing up and down a little recklessly and spilled over into the gutter as a car was passing by.

  “Easy…” she said, as he hopped back up onto the curb with a doofy grin slopped across his face.

  “What was he like? Did you know him from before?”

  “You’re out of questions. You’re well into the red. We’re on to other things now.”

  A warm storm gust blew through. She heard the weather in the trees. The sky was getting evening-colored. It wasn’t raining yet, but it couldn’t hold off forever.

  “Should we see it?” Jack said. “Should we go in?”

  “You want to see a movie?” Whitney said.

  “I mean, look at that,” he said, gesturing at the ashcloud. “Might as well not get caught in it. And besides, it’ll give us an opportunity for you to break it down for me.”

  “My time with Adrien?”

  He smiled widely again and pulled the hair on his arms. “No, no,” he said, giddy. “I mean, that too, sure. But I meant we can talk about the movie afterward. I’m sure you pick up on a million things I don’t even know to look for. Maybe I can ask you some more questions if you’re not sick of me yet.”

  She hadn’t planned to see this movie and she hated seeing movies that weren’t on her lists. But where else was there to go? What else would she do with the borrowed time? The concert was meant to last another two hours.

  She turned on roaming and checked her phone. She’d forgotten to charge it last night or after her run, and it was already in the red. She watched the signal announce itself. She checked her email first. Then she saw there were no new texts from Will. He was either crammed in with a bunch of teenagers pretending to enjoy the music or he was fucking Jenna in a Porta-John. Neither of which she had much say over from where she stood, anyway. She wondered what might happen to the concert if it started raining, but she let the thought consume her only a little.

  “Sure,” Whitney said. “But let’s get a couple tallboys from over there and hide them in my pockets.”

  She started across the street to the supermercat. She thought he heard him say, “My kind of woman.”

  And then she paid for the beers and he paid for the tickets and they disappeared inside the theater to watch a blockbuster movie on a weekday afternoon and to get drunk in the dark together.

  They hid under a tree and then an awning and then a sculpture, squeezing in with several dozen other concertgoers. They were getting wet—not directly, but by mist, by diffuse exposure like secondhand smoke. From what Will could see over the tops of heads and down into the bowl in front of the band shell, there wasn’t any movement toward more music. So they got their hands stamped and split through the turnstile and found a bar off Diagonal, a couple blocks away.

  They sat at the corner of the bar and ordered two beers. The air from the cooling unit chilled Will’s shirt on his back. He felt his skin clam up. Jenna wrapped her arms around her ribs and when she turned toward him, Will could make out the width of her nipples. They dabbed their faces with waxy napkins. They dried their hair with their hands.

  Will activated his roaming again and texted Whitney to let her know they’d left. He checked his email, too. There might be news. No word on the script, of course, but there was a message from the airline: flights would start back up in the midafternoon tomorrow. They still had their place in line, so they should stand by for further updates. He cycled back to his texts. Nothing in response.

  He placed his phone on the bar, screen facedown.

  “You don’t have to hide it,” Jenna said.

  Will glanced at the black rubber case, touched it with his finger, flipped it over.

  “I’m a big girl,” she said. “I know she’s probably not thrilled that you’re alone with me. And certainly not psyched about that move you pulled back there. If I were her, I wouldn’t have been so chill about splitting off.”

  “It’s no problem,” he said. “We can do some things apart.”

  “But it’s not just doing some things apart…” she said. “She obviously doesn’t, you know…she doesn’t seem to like me much.”

  “What makes you say that?” he said.

  She shaded toward him in her seat, and instead of answering the question, ticked her head from twelve o’clock to two.

  “I don’t know…” he said. “It hasn’t come up. I think she likes you fine. We’ve all just been a little stressed these past few days. If you’re referring to last night, that was just booze and exhaustion. That was as weird as anything I’ve seen her do, but nothing to read too much into.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “Defending her. Defending me. It’s a lie, but it’s a lie with heart.”

  She sipped her beer and wore the foam on her lip. He smiled. The length of her long pink tongue removed the foam like a windshield wiper. He watched a little too fixedly and his smile dialed back.

  “I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever have something like that, you know?” she said. “Someone who’ll lie helpfully on my behalf. Someone who’ll lie with heart for me.”

  “Well, you’re twenty-two,” he said.

  “Which means, yes, you think so?” she said.

  “You have endless time. You’ll meet your share.”

  “But I’m not just talking about meeting boys, going out. I’m talking about dinners and vacations and real fucking. I’m talking about years. I’m talking about something built-up, like…living in a conspiracy with someone.”

  “You’re very early days in this whole thing,” he said, smiling. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I think if you asked Whitney, she might say she could’ve used a couple more years in your shoes. Could’ve used a couple more years in her twenties, as a person in the world, before getting in too deep with someone else.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I don’t think about it much anymore because it doesn’t change anything at this point. But, I mean, it’s always easier to look back from a nice position and say, Hey, I should’ve taken more advantage of being single. That it would’ve been nice to screw around while I had the opportunity.…But you never know what’s in store, right? You never know when you’re out of time.”

  “That’s depressing,” she said.

  “Then maybe that’s not the way to put it. But you get what I mean. When you’ve found the person—”

  “The person for ever and ever…” she said.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “Is there ever any pressure? I mean, seven years? Don’t people ask you about it?”

  He laughed a little and clicked his nails on the bar to the bass line. “Are you asking as a follow-up to your taste-bud theory? Or because you believe so deeply in marriage that you can’t imagine waiting?”

  She shrugged, though he saw the answer in her face.

  “I don’t know about it,” he said. “We don’t know about it. I know we seem ancient to you, but in some circles we’re thought of as young still.”

  “I know that…” she said. “It’s just impossible for me to imagine what I’ll be looking for in
seven years. Especially given that seven years ago I was at camp just praying each night that Davy Rothman would feel me up before the end of the summer.”

  Will finished his beer. It came in a small glass. He felt his scalp lift a centimeter off his skull.

  “And were your prayers answered?”

  “They certainly were,” she said. “Unwavering faith here.”

  The waiter brought over two more. Will was wondering about Whitney again, and he could feel Jenna reading it on his face. He glanced at his phone and she caught his eyes.

  “No response?” she said.

  He moved his phone to his pocket.

  “I wonder if she’s still with Jack,” she said.

  “Don’t know,” he said, sipping his fresh beer.

  “And you don’t worry about her with other men like that?”

  “Should I?” he said. “Do you worry about him with other women like that?”

  “Oh, I could care less. We’re just, you know…I’m going home. He’s cool. And I like the way he looks with his clothes off. But we’ll never see each other again after we get out of here.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

  She shrugged again.

  “You’re right, that’s not giving you enough credit,” he said. “But that’s a pretty mature way to think about this stuff.”

  “If I was convinced he was my Whitney, maybe it’d be different…” She’d said her name out loud and it sounded to him like a provocation. “I like him fine. And his place is better than Gram’s.”

  “A big bed…” he said.

  “It’s a nice bed.”

  “And so you’re just staying with him till you catch your flight?”

  “I actually got a hotel this morning. I needed some space of my own, even for a day. I haven’t had my own place in, I don’t know, since being home last summer, maybe. Which: nothing like the Valley in summer, but still…”

  Will flexed his eyebrows. She hadn’t said anything about the Valley before.

  “I had some leftover cash. I got this place this morning—and after hauling my stuff up to the room, I just lay there on the covers in the quiet. It was paradise. Even if it was just for an hour.”

  “I traveled in Europe the summer before college. We went hostel to hostel, four or eight or sixteen people to a room. Me and my buddies from high school. They left before I did at the end of the trip, so I was alone for a few days when I’d totally run out of steam. I hadn’t asked my parents for money the whole time, but I wrote them from an internet café and splurged on a hotel in Amsterdam those last few days. I basically didn’t leave the room for forty-eight hours. It wasn’t even nice, but I was finally alone. Air-conditioning. A bathroom that wasn’t way down the hall. It felt like staying at the Ritz compared to what we’d gotten used to for ten weeks. Point is: I get what you mean.”

  “I never meant to end up at Jack’s, you know? I just really couldn’t go back to Gram’s.”

  “No more swinger parties.”

  “There was that. But there was also, he just…when I went back there to get my stuff that morning after the club, there was a whole scene. He said I hadn’t had his permission to be out all night. He didn’t like me skipping out on the party and coming back in the morning. He was treating me like I’d been hired to spend the night with him. Like I was his girlfriend. It was awful.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know, it was all very intense. He yelled, he threw some books around.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I grabbed my bags and he stood by the front door and tried to block me from leaving. Curtis the Cook had to intervene. He popped up in the loft and asked if everything was all right, and Gram sort of straightened up, shocked—he must’ve thought we were alone. And so I squeezed past him and out the door into the courtyard. I waved goodbye to Curtis over my shoulder and he had this horrified look on his face. Like, What kind of monster have I been living with?”

  “God, I’m sorry. That sounds awful.”

  “I knew what was going on,” she said. “I just didn’t think it’d come to that. I knew he was an asshole. I knew he was possessive. But he paid a lot for practically nothing. I never let him touch me, okay? That time I took my shirt off, he tried, and I made a big deal out of it, and he seemed genuinely sorry and ashamed. I thought he’d be able to handle his shit. Which is fucking naive of me.”

  “How did you even meet him initially?”

  “I was writing a paper in the fall about Picasso. The class spent time with the collections in Paris, but the professors encouraged us to come down to use the research library at the museum here, too. I was all set up at a hostel, and then someone at the museum told me about the Sunday dinner, and so I went to check it out, whatever, and then he offered me a bed and blah blah.”

  “Blah blah foot model blah blah.”

  “That’s how it usually goes, right? It seemed fine enough at first. I can look out for myself. It was money and it was easy work and it was free trips down and it was no big deal. I love visiting here. Obviously. I just never thought of it as crossing a line, even when it probably did. It was never…I was never made to feel like I was yesterday. But as I was rolling my bag across the courtyard after the whole blowup, he yells after me—with all those open windows, he says it in Spanish for people to hear—You ungrateful little whore. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, silly as that sounds.”

  “I mean, you shouldn’t have. You were modeling for money and a room—so what?”

  “But then, later that day, there I was in this deluxe apartment with this guy I’ve just met, propped up on the bed, putting out for my room and board again. I don’t know, it just begs the question…”

  “I don’t think that’s how it really works. I don’t think that’s how people classify someone hooking up with a person they’re into.”

  “He was just so nonchalant about it,” she said, reliving it in her mind, clearly. “Just another one of many for the basketball star.…Not ungrateful, but not exactly surprised by his great good fortune.” She smiled. “He’s been there before, he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Ah, of course,” Will said, wincing a little. “Lucky you.…Lucky Whitney…”

  He was drunk. He didn’t know why he said it or what he meant.

  “So you are worried about her with him…”

  “No, not that. I just meant Whitney and this…”

  “Whitney and what?” She leaned forward on her stool.

  The slipup had boxed him in. They’d been sealed here by the ashcloud, scooted inside by the rain. His shirt was sticking to his skin still. His hair was matted down flat on his forehead. He was trapped in this comfortable corner of the bar with this beautiful young woman with whom he was conversing more easily than in their previous encounters. She was sharing secrets, and maybe so should he. His beer glass was empty again and his head felt light, light all over, this morning’s whiskey melting again and dripping down his shoulders and arms into his static fingers. He felt his heart beating carefully, deliberately, beating like wings. He hadn’t spoken to friends back home all week. He hadn’t spoken to family. He had spent time with Whitney and with Jack and with Jenna. That was it. Here was this woman, one of the few now in his immediate orbit, and maybe just maybe she was becoming one of his favorite people to talk to in all the world. Maybe here in this city was where they were supposed to meet some new people who might displace the old. Maybe with a few more years he and Jenna would become close, as proper adults, the age difference growing less substantial each year. She was intelligent, independent. She was good-looking and had figured out lots on her own already. She was extremely impressive in her way. Maybe this was his brand new friend beside him now at the bar. He certainly enjoyed being in her presence. She was full of life, overripe with energy, and he could use some proximity to that from time to time. Like a battery-charging station. Not an everyday sort of companion, but an after-work-beers-once-a-season kin
da thing. She had interestingness in surplus. She had living to spare. She lowered the angle of her face, and her lips pressed together into an expectant node, deliciously, flirtatiously egging him on into telling her precisely what he’d meant. She had shared some of her secrets. It was only fair that he might share some of his. They were confidants now, after all.

  “So the thing to know,” he started, “and this is very much between you and me, like deeply between you and me, because our closest friends and family don’t even know this.…But Whitney and I are engaged.”

  “Oh?” Jenna said, shifting on her stool again and leaning back a little. “Congratulations, then. I didn’t—”

  “We’re sort of engaged, kind of engaged, TBD engaged.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “I don’t really, either. But something happened between our maybe becoming engaged and this trip. And that something was—seriously, please, you can’t even mention this to Jack—but we decided to give each other a couple freebies before setting things in stone.”

  “Like, freebie freebies?”

  “We called it…well, it doesn’t matter what we called it, but she went to L.A. for a month and we decided to go on a break, with the intention of meeting up here after and coming clean. And then just having that be a thing we did while we still could, while we still had the chance to get it out of our systems, and not hurt each other terribly, and still be honest about it, and just sort of take care of something that felt necessary.”

  Jenna was sitting up straighter now. She wore that pucker again, and her eyes and nose and mouth all seemed to be compassing toward a space a couple inches in front of her face. Her eyes were thrilling to the new information. She looked to have so many questions, so many questions that they’d logjammed the flume and nothing was coming out, and so there hung between them a silence that Will just kept filling.

  “And so we did. She in L.A. Me in New York. And then on whatever night it was, Saturday, we told each other about it.”

  “This past Saturday? The day before the party? ’Cause by then, you’re saying you were back to being together? Or at least that’s how it looked from the outside…”