Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “I guess that’s right,” he said. “It was weird. But so was a lot about that night. So I guess the only reason I’m telling you is, just, there was more going on than it maybe seemed. There’s been more reason to be jealous of her lately.”

  “And—I have so many questions, but—you were both, just, okay with it? That was something you were cool with?”

  “I think so. I mean, she’s still here, I’m still here, right?”

  “But, like, these other men were fucking your fiancée?”

  “I hate that word.”

  “Fuck?”

  “No. Too many syllables.”

  “Fiancée?”

  “The whole thing sounds not great when you say it…and it wasn’t great, don’t get me wrong. But, I don’t know, I had mine, too. It was even. It was fair. And, besides, haven’t you ever taken a break with someone?”

  “No.”

  “Well, things get interesting when you get super old like us. Stuff happens. Things end up different than you expect.”

  “And here I thought…here I was with all my presumptions about how boring…”

  “You thought you had us all figured out, huh?” Will said. “Well, that’s it for us, as far as that stuff goes. No more swinger parties in our future, I don’t think. No more flings. Those were it.”

  “Those…how many, exactly?”

  “The rules were three each, but we took two.”

  “You had free passes for three and you left one on the table?”

  “We didn’t realize it until the other night. We each did two independently.”

  “How adorable,” she said. “How perfect. Was it amazing, though? After all those years—”

  “It was…I had fun.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I dunno, it was sex with strangers.”

  “And so never anyone else that whole time?”

  “I hooked up with someone my first year of law school.”

  “Hooked up?”

  “We made out.”

  She laughed. “So? That doesn’t count.”

  “Well, it counted with Whitney. We were just starting out, we were young—well, we were your age—and so the scale of everything just…it felt different.”

  “I mean, that doesn’t count. Even for a high schooler that doesn’t count.”

  “Well, you weren’t on the jury at my sentencing. I wish you had been.”

  “She really held that against you?”

  “It was pretty dumb. But I should’ve…”

  “What happened?”

  “It was the first semester of 1L. Some stupid mixer with the business school. You know the nickname for MBAs, right? Married But Available?”

  “No, but that’s pathetic.”

  “Well, yes. Now you know. Regardless, it’s a fucking snake pit. You’re around all these people in this pressure cooker. Most MBAs are coming in from the real world and then suddenly it’s like all the rules are suspended, nobody seems to give a shit who’s from where, how old he is and how old she is, who’s coupled up or what. They’ve already gotten a taste of how shitty life is at most jobs, so they’re extra out of their minds. I ended up in an empty classroom with this not-even-great-looking British chick.”

  “And you told Whitney?”

  “I told her within the week.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a terrible liar. I’m terrible at holding shit in.”

  “You must be a bad lawyer, then.”

  “Not that kind of lawyer,” he said. “But, yeah, I melted down over the course of the week and came clean.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She made me point her out. She, like, made me hunt her down at the library just to give her a look. Then she mercilessly trashed the way the girl dressed and her haircut and my taste and my pathetic lack of restraint, et cetera. It was interesting, she was always sort of too cool for school about everything up to that point. Nothing seemed to phase her. Never jealous about other girls. Never worried about me. She had it all figured out when I met her. But then from that point forward…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I dunno, it just took a while to get back to normal. It was terrible. It’s one of my strongest memories of law school. Just being on the phone with her in between classes. Worrying that I’d miss a call and she’d come after me. It was like I was wearing an ankle monitor. You know how when people get struck by lightning it changes their pH levels, or whatever? That’s what happened to her—and that’s how I thought it was gonna maybe be forever. This one stupid fucking thing had changed her chemistry. I thought about ending it almost daily, and it killed me, because I knew I didn’t want to, but maybe I had to. I just couldn’t keep living under that cloud. Then gradually things got better. Returned to normal. But, man, I was not gonna fuck up again. I was so conditioned against it. Not even because I thought it was the most horrible thing you could do to a person—it’s not like I’d had some long-standing affair. I just couldn’t fathom dealing with the fallout again. It was like extra-bad food poisoning, or something. You’re not gonna tempt fate eating raw tuna again even if it was just one fluke piece that made you sick.”

  “Tuna or fluke?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t heard Jenna make a dad joke before. The glasses of Moritz were framing this new version of her. “So yeah,” he said, “you especially don’t test the fences if you think you’re gonna end up with the person in the long run.”

  “And yet you orchestrate this scheme.”

  “Well, right, that all happened a while ago. That was during the first year we were dating, and I guess everything was more fragile. Then everything changed. I know on paper it looks like I’ve been with the same person all this time. But in reality, for both of us, it’s like we’ve dated several different people. At least three Whitneys. Probably three Wills. You lock into new routines, new comforts, new ideas about things. You change a lot, especially when you’re together in your twenties. It’s just different, I dunno. And, yeah, things had just felt extra right for a while, and so I asked her to marry me, and she had these…surprise reservations. And she was the one who suggested the whole thing.”

  Jenna’s eyebrows flinched.

  “So I went along. And, you know, once you’re in it, it’s not exactly twisting your arm to be out there talking to cute girls again, but there was still a part of me that was deeply deeply conditioned to feel nothing but guilt about putting myself in that position. I just felt properly trained off of tempting myself with situations like those. It took a little while to be okay with it, to sort of deliberately expose myself to it.”

  “And now what? You’re just back to where it was? You’re free for a month and then able to snap right back to normal?”

  “I guess so? I hadn’t thought too hard about it. We had this name for it—1-2-3—and when—”

  “Even though it was 1-2-” She smiled at her cleverness.

  “Yes. Exactly.” He felt his phone in his pocket but didn’t pull it out. “Doesn’t have the same pop, does it? But when we came clean, I dunno, I thought we’d just return to how things were. Hop on a plane, get back to New York, everything behind us. But instead we’re stuck here in whatever this is.”

  “And did you like being out there? I mean, once you were deprogrammed?”

  “It’s funny,” he said, “I didn’t even tell Whitney this, but the first thing that happened—and this is ridiculous to say out loud—but you just start to see women in the world a little differently again when you’re single. I mean, there’s this thing for so much of your life where you just can’t help but picture women naked, in their underwear, getting undressed, whatever. At least that’s how it was for me. Maybe it comes from growing up at the beach—the constant bodies, the constant bikinis, the bathing suits on every size, age, whatever. And so wherever I went for years, it was just a thing, it was wiring. But then, as I got older, busier, it sort of faded away. I hadn’t noticed for a while. Most
of the time I’m riding the subway I’ve got my nose in paperwork, or I’ve got a podcast distracting me. But Day One with Whitney out of the house, I was riding the train to work, and there it was, that long-lost filter—all I saw was every woman in her underwear. My age. Younger. Older. Non-discriminating. It was one of those New York spring days when people were losing their minds, just skin everywhere. Pasty legs in sundresses, sleeves off the shoulder. But I could see straight through everything, too.”

  “Sounds violating.”

  “Sure,” he said. “So, apologies to everyone. It’s not the most conscientious way to walk around in the world. But April and May in New York…I mean, you get it. The next thing that happens is I find that I’m noticing wedding rings, engagement rings, I’m looking for them in a way I never have before. Everywhere I go, my eyes shoot to the ring finger. That was obviously never a consideration the last time I was single, but it was something that happened unwittingly this time. It’s weird: There were far fewer than I’d expected. Especially on the trains. And so I realize it’s just: single everywhere. Availability. Bodies, bare fingers. All these possibilities.”

  She sat up straight, her beer was almost gone. “It sounds like a dream, then.”

  “But it should be very much said that I don’t have whatever the skill is. Or at least I don’t have it anymore. Maybe I only ever had it one time.…The conversation-with-strange-girls skill, the willingness-to-be-humiliated skill. And so it almost became doubly frustrating. All these women, and I don’t have an angle in on any of them. I can’t download the apps, because we can’t have people we know seeing us on there, right? So the whole thing is, like, walking up to these women and putting it out there cold. That gives me hives. I don’t have any of those superpowers.”

  She smiled. “Just your X-ray glasses.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “So, do you still have them?”

  “What’s that?” he said, smiling back and reaching for his beer.

  She sat up straight again and twisted in her seat so that her legs dangled off the stool, dark denim and a long brass zipper facing him squarely, the black of the leotard up under her arms, up over her shoulders. Will’s eyes involuntarily down-and-upped her. It was still very cold beneath the AC unit. He caught himself lingering and squinted instead, as though he’d been testing out the glasses, as though it were a bit.

  “I guess the powers ran out at the end of the month,” he said.

  “Too bad. I was gonna test you to see if they really worked.”

  “Oh yeah? Test how?”

  “Just a quiz, you know, colors, that sorta thing.”

  “What kind of colors?”

  “Like: What color is my bra?”

  Will smiled but Jenna’s face was serious. His smile faded slowly and he heard himself breathing.

  “Well, Jenna, that would be a trick question,” he said.

  “Oh!” she said. “So they do still work. I knew you were a liar.”

  “A liar with heart.”

  She’d picked up a cocktail straw and was chewing it. She smiled in appreciation of the callback.

  “You know, hearing you say that just now,” he said, “that was the thing I think I enjoyed the most. About the month. About the whole thing. Was just the ability to lie again, and the lying being okay. You spend all these years, or at least I spent all these years, trying to do the right thing—bending it sometimes, but knowing I’d be caught out if I didn’t just spill the complete truth to Whitney. That it was just easier to cut the crap and say it straight. But this whole thing was different. Stuff like: I’ll call you. And: I just got out of a long relationship. And: I’m going out of town next week, so won’t be around for your party, sorry. And obviously the small ones lead to bigger ones, and soon you’re doing nothing but lying—purposefully, consciously, spooling out these elaborate whatevers. But with these little interactions, these little rendezvous with women, there were no consequences. And so: a hundred little lies—who cares? The lightness of that, the ease and the lack of consequence. I loved it. I’d never given myself over to it before.”

  “So there were lessons learned,” she said. “And now you get it.”

  He smiled into his beer and squinted at her again. “Bear with me for apparently stating the obvious to an old pro…” he said.

  “I’m not advocating for it, Will Who Cannot Lie. I’m just saying: Yep, that’s part of the game.”

  “Jenna Saisquoi…”

  Her face deadened, and then she bit down on the edge of her glass with both rows of teeth, and started laughing her biggest laugh yet.

  “Exactly…” she said. “Now he’s starting to understand.”

  The theater lobby was stained with the scent of popcorn butter, and when they saw the rain through the windows, they stopped short of the doors.

  “I guess we made the right call,” Whitney said, pressing her hands to the glass and peering up into the blackness. It could’ve been the middle of the night, but according to her phone, they were still an hour out from sunset.

  “I wonder if they got crushed by this at the festival,” Jack said.

  “I just saw a text from Will. He said there was a rain delay but that they were gonna stay close by, and that he’d let me know if things change. But my phone’s about to die. Should I tell him to just text you instead?”

  “Sure, but I wonder what’s up with my service, too. Couple things popping up all at once,” he said, and they stood there staring at their screens. “Wow. The team says they have me on a flight tomorrow. That they’ve started booking people out for the afternoon and evening.”

  “Let the countdown begin, then,” Whitney said. “Twenty-four hours left of…”

  It turned down the corners of his mouth.

  “This is a good thing,” she said. “We all need to get on with it, and, you know, lucky you to have a seat. I wonder if Will heard anything for us.”

  Jack had a little glisten in his eyes. He was such a lightweight and he’d been drinking those big beers. He was hanging there in the space and light of the lobby, almost like he was underwater.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “The smell of this place is making me dizzy.”

  “You have an umbrella?”

  “I’m not that far from here. Five or six blocks. Want to make a run for it?”

  “I guess? It occurred to me during the movie that Will has the fucking key—and I need to get somewhere to charge my phone. But it’s actually really raining, you know?”

  “It’ll be, like, five minutes of exposure. It’ll barely touch us if we’re quick.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works…” she said. “But, okay, I’ll be right—”

  He opened the door and eyed the storm as though it were a raging river he intended to ford. Then, on some private mark of go, he hit the street like a golden retriever. “Now!”

  They splashed along the sidewalk and were drenched at once. By the second street crossing, Whitney was soaked through. By the third she couldn’t get any wetter, and so slowed to a stroll and watched Jack gallop along in the direction of the beach, toward the glass high-rise she’d eyed that morning from the hotel bar. Just the one she’d suspected. Her feet were slipping from her sandals and she worried she might break a strap if she didn’t remove them. So she went the rest of the way barefoot, careful to avoid the broken glass that showed itself every so often. The wetness gave Whitney the feeling of swimming in the rain, no amount of water making a difference, the temperatures of the water on her body and the water in the air close enough to be indistinguishable.

  He was waiting for her in the lobby with a towel. It was a luxury building with a doorman who kept freshly laundered linen beneath the front desk. She searched with her eyes for the lobby bathroom, but he’d already called the elevator and was holding the door.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Because the building’s big, I always think it’s a little closer.”

  She flexed her eyebrows
and dried her hair silently.

  “I have a washer and dryer, so you can at least get your clothes back in shape. I’m really…I just needed to get some air and get back here. I think it sorta hit me all at once.”

  She saw his muscles decompress as he stepped through the door of his apartment. The unit wasn’t huge but it was sleek. It had the sharp lines and neutral shades of a boutique hotel room. He offered her a robe with the name of the building stitched on the breast. He pointed her in the direction of the bathroom and told her she should feel free to warm up in the shower if she wanted.

  Her hair was dripping wet. She hurried to the bathroom and the lights came up automatically when she stepped inside. There was a shower with a glass door and oversize black squeeze bottles of male shower goop. There was shaving cream and antiperspirant gel and toothpaste streaked in the porcelain bowl of the sink. She peeled her clothes off and felt her skin grow pimpled, the light air from the vent above the toilet dropping the temperature just enough to frost over her skin. Her nipples were shades darker than she’d seen them since winter and her fingertips were already withered. She wrung out her hair on the shower tiles and decided to turn on the hot water.

  She rinsed quickly and then wrapped herself in the robe. She felt instantly better, lifted, her head high from the terrycloth and the lingering suds sloshing around her brain.

  In the living room, he was sitting enamored with his phone, shirtless in a fresh pair of shorts. He was dry on the surface but still clearly waterlogged. His hair had been combed back on his head by his hands.

  “You know what bugged me most?” he said. He was reading about the movie, she could tell from his face. He was reacting to reviews. “The way it was so thirsty for, like, every country to have their star in it. I didn’t know the Chinese guy, but he’s their biggest movie star right now, apparently. And the Russian woman. And the Nigerian woman. And the Italian. It’s one thing if it makes sense—like, I get it, you bring together this dream team of pilots from all over the world, and yes, there are going to be some from other countries, not just Americans. And that’s great. But then you just leave them in there to say dumb shit?”