by Daniel Riley
“I could barely follow it, either way,” Whitney said. “But I’m not entirely blaming the movie—I got up to pee three times. I think I missed every explanation of the science and how the jump to Mars worked.”
“I promise you you didn’t miss anything helpful. They just sort of skipped over it, assumed we’d go along with whatever. Anywho…”
“Anywho?”
He was skimming around on his laptop, too, several tabs pulled up.
“No fucking way…” he said. “That makes it even funnier.” He looked up at Whitney. “Jenna’s dad was one of the executive producers.”
“What do you mean?” Whitney said.
“He wasn’t the sole guy, but one of a dozen or whatever.”
“I thought her dad was a stay-at-home something or other—a part-time caddy.”
“Yeah, that’s what she told me that first night, too. Another one of the…Her dad’s this guy Bob Silverstein. He—”
“Bob Silverstein?”
“He’s a—”
“I know who he is. What do you mean that’s her dad? She said her mom’s some businesswoman and her dad’s a deadbeat layabout.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I heard a bunch of different versions.…She said she doesn’t like people to know. She said she started doing it when she was little, telling the other stories. She didn’t want people to know about him. I guess the caddy guy is her stepdad, maybe? Or who the fuck knows, maybe he doesn’t exist at all.”
“Isn’t her name Jenna Leonard?”
“Mom’s name. After the divorce. Started using it in college.”
“You’re kidding me. What a ridiculous person. So all that stuff…all that stuff she said the other night was bullshit?”
“I dunno…some of it?”
“Bob Fucking Silverstein.”
“He’s a big deal?” he said.
“You have no idea.”
So she was even more the thing that Whitney envied and loathed. Admired and detested. Attraction, repulsion. She’d been born to the professional caste Whitney most strived for. It was Jenna’s for the taking. She could leapfrog the Whitneys of the industry at will, when useful, just by dropping her name.
“And seems like some people are gonna see this one, huh?” Jack said. “Though maybe it’s not the best movie to start our lessons on. Maybe I’ll email you sometime when we’re home and we can discuss something better.”
“Why me, when she’s got the real keys to the kingdom?” Whitney said. “Remember, I’m not anybody when it comes to this stuff. I’m just getting my feet wet.”
“Well, that’s obviously not true, or else you wouldn’t have your job. She’s probably never gonna talk to me again, anyway. But I like you—I hope that’s not the case with you…”
She stared back at him. She couldn’t decide whether to respond to what he was saying or stay stuck in the mud, piecing together the puzzle of Jenna Silverstein.
“And come this time two days from now,” he said, his eyes still glassy, buzzed, “I’m gonna be a little shaky about the end of all this. Summers at home always used to restore me, but this year—”
“What do you mean restore?”
“I dunno, it’s related to this other thing, it’s not important, it’s just…The first few seasons, I’d think about home at all times. It would be December or January in Norway or Germany, and there wouldn’t be any sun, or any way to go outside, it was so cold.”
Whitney lifted an exaggerated eyebrow.
“No, I realize where I’m from, but it’s somehow worse. It’s hard. It’s bad. Plus, practice all day for a coach who didn’t speak English. The only other American on the team resenting me because of stuff from college, because of the tournament run and the magazine covers, because they thought that supposedly meant I was given more opportunities than they were. I had a good thing on those teams, but I had stretches of terrible weeks. You start getting run-down in practice. You catch the flu, can’t eat anything. Entire months like that those first few seasons.”
He paused and closed his eyes and shook his head.
“And I can fall back into that place pretty easily. It’s scary. I’ve done what I can about it. I saw doctors, I saw shrinks, and, you know, they never put me on drugs, but I was there. I know that place. I mean, you said you had something like it, right? It sounds like maybe you know…”
She listened to see if he was going to continue, and then she spoke slowly. “I do. You’re right. It was bad. It was really really bad.”
“But then it went away?”
“It was…everything changed for me after that.”
He nodded and looked at her and she felt a compulsion to explain herself.
“I don’t want it to sound like it was just over a bad breakup,” she said. “That’s what started it. But then that summer at home, I fought constantly with my parents. I really think I hated them for those months, and they hated me. And, like I said, I got…I was working, but I was going out a lot. With these people from this restaurant I was waitressing at. There was this bartender. I didn’t even know it until it had happened, but…I somehow got pregnant and miscarried.”
His face didn’t move. She had his attention.
“I didn’t know what was happening. I just had the worst cramps of my life. I was in the bathroom one night. And— It was terrifying. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that I couldn’t tell anyone. My brother—he’s four years younger, we’d been at each other’s throats all my life. I don’t think I’d had a single serious conversation with him up to that point. My dad was away, there was just no way to…over the phone. And my mom, I just couldn’t imagine facing her. Just having to live the rest of my life with that look on her face. That flinch of shame…I…I couldn’t do that. So I handled it by myself. I just refused to give them that piece of me—I didn’t want that ordeal to suck me back down into some sort of indebtedness to them. I don’t know—I’m sure it wasn’t the right thing to do.…Then I quit my job. I didn’t leave my room for two weeks. My mom was on me the rest of the summer for being lazy. But gradually it got better. I stopped drinking. I started running again in the evenings. And that’s when I started calling the study-abroad office every day. I couldn’t stay at home and I couldn’t go back to campus, but all of a sudden I had this escape. And that was everything for me. When I was gone, when I was in Paris, I was finally able to start figuring out what the hell I was meant to be doing. It worked, I guess. That pivot. That fresh start. That was the beginning of something important. And I haven’t been back to that place since…”
She’d pushed him into silence. She hadn’t intended to give so much, but she hadn’t been this open with a stranger about any of it in seven years, and it felt good.
“What happened to you, then?” she said.
“It was nothing like that,” he said, sheepishly. “It was nothing real.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He looked at her squarely, searching for some stoplight, and when he couldn’t find it, he must’ve felt free to proceed. “Those winters, I’d just walk around scared sometimes for what could trigger it. People called it homesickness—that’s just not what it was. Or it was that times one hundred. I’d hear a song in a restaurant, and it’d remind me of being in a car cruising around in high school, and I’d practically start crying, I just felt so fucking alone. They said it would screw up my game if I took something to help with it. I didn’t know better, I just knew I was struggling. They gave me this lamp. They gave me a subscription to a juice service, to up my fruits and vegetables. But it only does so much. There was just this ache, at all times. I dunno, this perpetual off-ness.”
It was Whitney’s turn to sit quiet. She gave him everything she had.
“During those stretches, though, the one thing I could fixate on when I wasn’t on the court was getting back home for summer. To the swimming pool in the back, to the concrete court off the yard where my brothers and sister and I pl
ayed two-on-two everything you can think of.…It’s always been about my brothers and sister and mom and dad. When we would fly somewhere, it would have to be all of us on board, or max two of us together. So that if the plane went down, no one would be left all alone. It was always that sort of thing, those sorts of considerations. So, yeah, just getting back home, to that house, to that block. They pave the streets with bricks there. Wide sidewalks with cracks from tree roots. Streetlamps. Big old elms on both sides of the block, and branches that meet in the middle of the street like the roof of a church or something.”
“There’s the good Catholic bringing everything back to…” she said.
He smiled. “That’s what I’d think about when I was feeling sick, when I couldn’t get myself out of bed in Norway…those trees in summer. The heat coming up, the trees buzzing. For weeks with the team, I’d throw up I ached so bad. But then I’d get home and everything would just settle again. Even Christmas worked. The week off at the holidays. The snow piled up in the gutters. The way—I don’t know what the word is, but the way I used to tell my mom that the smell of the snow had different colors: green and black and blue. The blue snow compacted in the yard.”
She’d taken a seat on the couch, wrapped tightly in her robe, listening close, watching him melt into the bent shape of a child.
“Blue,” she said. “I love that. Reminds me of visiting my grandparents in Colorado. That clean cold like we never got at home. Blue cold.”
“So, anyway, I love it there,” he said. “I’m just afraid, I guess. It’s dumb. But I really am afraid that I’ll get back tomorrow, and just never leave again for the rest of my life.”
“But that doesn’t have to be the—” Whitney started.
“I’ve been away six years and coming back without knowing any fucking thing. Here I am at the end of this whole time away and I’m returning with what, exactly?”
“Well, at least you know what you don’t know,” she said. “And so what? It’s the same for literally everyone. I thought I knew some things, and now every day the universe informs me that I don’t. That’s how it’s apparently gonna go from here on out. You’re still trying to decide what kind of person you want to be? Okay. Welcome to the club.”
Her face went a little haywire, a jolt of recognition, having heard herself say it. She watched his face react, and then he said it back to her: “Right. Exactly. I’m still figuring out what kind of person I want to be…”
“But before we get too squishy,” she said, “I just want to point out that when you had me on your block, outside your house, that was good. That was the establishment of a world—of a very specific, emotional place for you. You have this place, and it punches you in the chest. You’ve got a house on this block in a town where the weather rolls around. You’ve got something you love, but something you maybe yearn for beyond it. That’s the first five seconds of a movie, right? Maybe that’s something that could be useful to you. That set of images to open on. So: now what?”
He was biting his nails, something she hadn’t seen him do before. His legs were slung out in front of him.
“Now what?” he said.
“Now what?” Whitney said, smiling stupidly at her dumb repetition, and she felt herself drawing in slightly to his sprawling roots of bone and muscle and skin and hair. She wasn’t wearing anything beneath her robe and her mind began to fixate on the ease with which she could drop the robe to the floor. Some decisions require patience and care and an order of operations. Others require nothing but the act itself. It could be achieved in the simultaneous snap of her shoulders, arms, and hands. A choice could be deliberately plotted or reckless—the point was she was in control of it.
“Now what,” he said, “is I’m gonna hop in the shower.” He stood. “You can throw your clothes in the dryer down the hall, if you want. Mine have been in for five minutes, or however long I’ve been blabbing. But shouldn’t be a problem to drop yours in now, too.”
“Great,” she said, and smiled through the pinkness of her cheeks, the steam still in her face, the tension between a decision and a not-decision still taut in her mouth.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, before disappearing into the bathroom.
She put her clothes in the dryer and then walked in tight lines around the parts of the apartment she could see from the living room, never veering too close to a wall or a closet door or anything that might be disturbed or intruded upon. The window curtains on the far side of the living room were drawn and she pulled them aside to peek at the view.
They were on the eighteenth floor. The apartment had an unobstructed look out onto the Mediterranean. Below them, to the right, were the residential buildings of Barceloneta. Way out on the promontory was the hotel where she’d holed up that morning. Farther still was the considerable altitude of Montjuïc, and the Miró museum. Directly in front of her was that stroke of beach and palm trees they’d walked through that first night together a million years ago on their way to and from the club.
The city was coming together for her. Even in its blacks and grays, even in the illness-colored hues of the ashcloud, the city made its intentions obvious. Its tight coils. Its proximate logic. Its complementary, puzzle-cut edges. The city was modest in size and meant to be known. The whole thing was right there in front of her.
The windows stretched from the ceiling to her knees. There was an empty sill, and on the empty sill was a bright blue hair tie. She picked it up and stretched it with her fingers. She sniffed it as though it might have an answer to her question, which it did.
Jenna Fucking Silverstein. It was all so perfectly designed to get her goat. She still couldn’t quite believe it. But it made so much sense that she laughed out loud.
Smiling still, she lifted her robe off her shoulders so that she could dry her hair with it, and then she combed her hair back with her hands and drew the bright blue band around her ponytail. It was hers, Whitney knew. It was hers and now it belonged to Whitney.
“So, now what?” Whitney whispered to her reflection in the windows of Jack’s apartment, and to the city outside, sooted over in shadow and rain. Her phone was somewhere in the apartment, probably dead. But containing all the new texts and emails that were always waiting for her. She lowered her robe back down onto her shoulders and loosened the knot around her waist. “Now what?”
As Will walked Jenna back to her hotel, he slipped off a curb and ended up on his hip in the gutter. They’d had five or six little beers each, on top of whatever it was she’d given him earlier, and his body was humming when he went down. He didn’t appear to have broken any bones or done much but scrape up his ankle and wrist, but his heart was beating hard and he felt the blood in his brain. Then he sensed the crackle in his pocket, like a plastic baggy. He understood the implication at once. He carefully slid the mess of his phone out between two pincers. The screen was lit still but splintered in a dense web. He couldn’t comprehend anything on it but the power bar in the upper right-hand corner, which was running out anyway.
His mouth was slack in incomprehension. He stared back at the curb as though it was the curb’s fault. They were on a walkway that split Diagonal. The curbs were gleaming. The result of the healthy and happy-seeming street cleaners he’d admired that morning. The civic pride, the reasonable cost of living, the halfway decent hours. He had them to thank for the cleanness of the curb.
“It’s decimated,” he said.
“Throw it out,” she said.
“I’m not throwing it out. I can’t just throw away a phone.”
“Then at least try not to cut your hand. Look at that thing.”
He held it a foot from his body, the way dog-walkers hold a bag of shit. Jenna was off down the sidewalk, up Diagonal. He was drunk and rattled and his head was flooded with adrenaline, contemplating all that he would miss now that his phone was busted. His mind was elsewhere, which was how he started absently answering all of Jenna’s questions about 1-2-3.
Once he�
��d started, he worried that he shouldn’t have said anything to begin with, and knew it was a double betrayal of Whitney that he was blabbing to someone who irked her so intensely. But it was out of the bag, and so he decided to go fishing for a big laugh. He told her things he had told Whitney at dinner on Saturday—the bloody nose, the litter box. But he told her things he’d forgotten to tell Whitney, too. He told her about how he’d gone empty-handed to Kelly Kyle’s, how they’d had to go on a scavenger hunt for condoms in her closet, and how they’d found a single glow-in-the-dark something called a “Night Light.” He told her about how Whitney had taught him some new moves before she’d gone to L.A., “tricks” she’d picked up from somewhere but never suggested he use before, not for them, but that she figured might come in handy when he went out there all alone in the world. He told her that, in retrospect, one of those new moves might have prevented the bloody nose. He told her about prowling the East Village, the way he’d walk into bars to case the joint, the way he wouldn’t even buy a beer sometimes, but would just sweep around for realistic targets. He said he didn’t even know what he meant by that—realistic targets—but it’s what it felt like. He told her how he’d look for girls in the East Village whose dresses weren’t zipped up all the way to the top, who evidently didn’t have a helping hand at home in the mornings. He told her how he’d look for girls reading alone on benches in the park. How he’d look for girls in bars whose friends were coupled off with other guys. It reminded him of something Whitney had said before: that she wished her single friends from work could hang out together like Will and his friends could, where the hanging out was the point, rather than just a means toward the be-all-end-all mission of getting picked up. Every night she went out with them, Will said, Whitney would be traded out at the earliest opportunity for the first cute guy who approached their table. Jenna shrugged like it was nothing surprising, like everything he’d said made obvious boring sense.