by Daniel Riley
A clink of two wineglasses. A bar without a menu. Will with his eyes over the rim of the butcher-red something from Penedès. Whitney’s freckled face distorted through the bleeding legs that ran down the windows of her wineglass. Alone in the world with one another. Wrapped up tight, rubber-banded together on those barstools, in an elastic closeness, as each waited to hear what the other had done, and who they’d done it with. To understand how much damage had been inflicted, and whether it was the beginning of something or very much the end.
A beach outside the city, a week ago now. Palm trees rooted in ancient stone. Brown bodies arranged like glyphs on the sand, no one at work on a warm weekday afternoon. Will’s face turned up into the sun, throat exposed, the posture of a defiant executionee. White feet, white thighs, white arms from the elbows up. Flesh spilling over the edges of his shorts, stomach muscles concealed by the dough of an uncooked piecrust. Whitney propped up like a waterslide beside him, legs crossed at the ankles, palms dug into the sand on either side of her towel. Eyes drifting to the women with the exposed breasts, the heavy breasts spread out across the sand, eyes scanning through the lenses of her shades to watch Will’s eyes, to watch him watching, wondering what he was wondering about. Whitney wondered what Will had done while she’d been in L.A. She dreaded the dinner they’d planned to have at the end of the trip, when they’d spill all their secrets. She wondered what he’d seen, what he’d taken, what he’d experienced that he hadn’t even known he’d been missing for those seven long years with her. All around Whitney, Mediterranean breasts, Mediterranean tan lines. Beauty. When the women got toasted, they turned over. When they got hot, they went swimming. Everybody watching everybody else. Will breathed shallowly beside her, drifting off to sleep. Whitney breathed sharply and unknotted her top. Her fingers fell back to the sand, clenched around the weightless fabric. The sun stung her nipples. She’d done something she’d never done before, just like that. Will stirred and turned to Whitney, Whitney turned to Will. There was a look between them. Two faces that expressed the pleasant realization that there was still room on their seven-year-old island for surprises.
A call from Los Angeles, a month ago now. Will well asleep, Whitney sleepless. She’d tried three times already, and on the fourth he picked up. Nothing but uncertainty in the story of their affairs, nothing revealed yet. He might’ve been with someone that very night, she might’ve just as likely, too—there was no way of knowing. But she sounded alone in her hotel room, and he sounded asleep in their bed. Whitney asked for the old thing they’d done in the early years. When they’d been living in separate apartments, in separate cities, to help her get to sleep. My feet on the back of your feet, he’d say. My shins on the back of your calves. Spoon on spoon. All the way up the body, until her breathing would shift and she’d be dead to the world. She relied on the routine most nights, whether he was at home or with friends. He’d step out of the bar into the cold of a snowy night and run through the evolution, whispering into his phone beneath an overhang near a dumpster—the same lines, the same order, like a prayer. It had been forever since she’d asked for it. But that night, it was like old times.
A childhood bed, last Thanksgiving. A bed Whitney’s parents had never swapped out. Will scanning the corkboard of memories above her desk for the pictures of her dates to high school dances, to the acquaintances she’d mostly kissed off, to the boys he’d always assumed she’d kissed. The bulletin board filled with the quaint tendernesses from a life lived long ago. Her shrine to those souls—the wilting corsages, the cracked petals that meant there was always a past no matter how much they both tried to overwrite it with one another.
A shared couch they’d purchased together for their shared “living room,” their first month off Tompkins Square Park. A grown-up couch with a grown-up chicken roasting in a grown-up pot, the scent slipping from the kitchen and wrapping them up in a blanket of maturity. A new home. A new chapter. They lived together now. Sometimes they worried about growing too old too fast. Here, though: two faces of contentment wed in that instant to the scent of responsibility, of roasting chicken, a scent that they could welcome for the rest of their lives.
An argument, too much to drink, too much talk of long-term plans. About cities they might live in. About parents who might need them around someday. About where life could take them, and about where they’d never let it. They used to drink more and they used to fight harder. When everything was still possible, even the theoretical felt consequential. Will would yell. Whitney would punch and bite. Will would shove. Whitney would weep.
An unexceptional window of an unexceptional restaurant on an exceptionally cold morning during the first days of a new year. Will in D.C., Whitney down for the weekend, off the Washington Deluxe bus, twenty bucks each way. Drinking before noon, fighting off the crush of playoff football fans crowding in around them. Eating croques madames and monsieurs, and ordering rounds of Belgian beer until their brains unsealed from the walls of their skulls and relieved them of their hangovers. Pinned in by Redskins jerseys on all sides, shoved into the center of the table toward one another, in no hurry to return to the single digits outside, or the tiny room he rented from strangers on the sunnier side of U Street. It was one of the times they’d looked at each other in the midst of the chaos of a crowd, and cinched off their own fate from the fates of everyone else, speaking aloud across the table the sentiment, if not the exact words: I think we’re destined to win this thing together, I think we’re meant to make it. It happened often in those middle years, but this one stuck with both of them, maybe because of the cold outside. It was eight or nine degrees, and it made a mark like frostbite.
The raw, filthy fucking. Fistfuls of hair. Choking and gagging. Bruises and burns that wouldn’t vanish for days. Broken bed frames. Snapped straps and torn fabric. Tequila and whiskey and mushrooms and molly. Gratuitous volume through temporary walls. Retroactive apologies to roommates. Video functions on outdated digital cameras. Blackmailable photos. There were months and then years when they were mostly apart. He bought her a lavender vibrator before he moved to D.C. She bought a blue silicone dildo that roughly resembled the shape of his cock. They traveled hours on Friday evenings and Monday mornings in order to break each other’s bodies, and then answer emails side by side beneath the sheets. They knew other couples in long-distance arrangements who’d lose entire weekends in bed. That wasn’t them; they did other things together, too. But when they fucked each other, they were obscene. And as the years went on, as they grew more anxious spending all their time with single friends whose twenties were playing out the way they were meant to, the more seriously they took the imperative to prove something to one another. To treat each time like a first time, with effort to make it memorable. They auditioned for one another—physical arguments that said there was nothing else out there worth ending what they had.
The toast for graduating from law school. The toast for convincing a strange adult in a job interview that she was exactly what the streaming service was looking for. The toast for setting their lives on a course. It all happened in the same week. And so: six beers each in a grimy bar with tall windows on the hottest night of the year. The two of them at the corner table where the windows touched, projecting their lives forward into grand, sweeping plotlines. They disappeared the pint glasses and decided that it was worth the little money they had between them to keep new glasses coming forever. It was one of those nights in a bar in New York, one for no one else but them. They couldn’t tell you the faces of the people in the place, but they remembered for years the particulars of those who passed by the windows. There was a late sun. There were bare legs. There was chest hair. There was every last sweating skinny beautiful body that night in a hurry to somewhere sexy.
The sleepovers in the law-school dorm. A Friday evening that first winter when both his roommates had gone home for the weekend. They’d bought groceries and tried to cook themselves dinner for the first time in their lives. They boiled pa
sta and made grilled cheeses. They smoked one roommate’s weed from the other roommate’s pipe. Whitney scavenged the fridge for snacks. She found a tube of Toll House and spread the dough around a ceramic plate. She burned her forearm on the oven door but didn’t notice the infection until the morning. They fell asleep on the couch, watching the ocean episodes of Planet Earth and testing out names for their future children.
A one-star hotel room with blood and wine. A young American couple in Europe, their first big trip together. And so they skirted the hostels they’d stayed at in college and splurged on a proper private hotel room instead. The second day they walked themselves dead, stayed in at night, opened three bottles of wine and a playlist on her laptop. They woke up at an indeterminate hour to half a bottle tipped into the bed, the sheets doused and stained maroon. They sprang up, he to the bathroom and she close behind. He barfed in the tub, she slammed the door on his foot. A screw in the door separated his big nail from his big toe. He bled out on the tile and the carpet and eventually in the bed when, after running out of towels, she wrapped his foot in the soiled sheets. They slept on the bare mattress and woke again to the carnage of a murder-suicide. They spent the next day at an American hospital, a vacation day devoid of new sites. They left a guilty tip for the maid that equaled the price of a night. They left the city forever and never returned. But on the train that afternoon, they confessed to one another that they’d never been more in love.
The first visit to California with his parents. The first visit to Texas with hers. The ease with which they became the new addition to each family. They said and did the right things. They cleaned their dishes and dusted up their crumbs. They didn’t stay out too late, didn’t wake anyone up when they trundled in at night. They laughed at things that were funny and were interested in stories even the second time they were told. They didn’t throw up from drinking too much. They didn’t fool around within earshot. They felt comfortable lazing about and comfortable asking for a glass of water. Before leaving town, they made sure to leave a full tank of gas in the car that they had borrowed.
The polyps they found in her mother’s colon after graduation. The body they found of a friend of his near the pylons of the pier that first summer. The astonishing sense that they didn’t know a thing about death but had said mostly the right things to each other anyway, confirming that those first couple months weren’t just the product of a bottled-up experiment, of the Stockholm syndrome of the end of college, but rather of something worth paying attention to. Still, they’d considered what it might be like to break up over the summer, that it might realistically be too hard to preserve whatever special thing they’d started, even if they both planned to end up in New York. But then the news, the two shots of heaviest reality right away. They comforted one another and they realized that no one in their lives, even those they’d known for considerably longer, could have said the right things any better. They didn’t just want each other, they needed each other now. They needed each other to keep the world from intruding too quickly.
The day before parents arrived. The day before graduation weekend. A party at his house. Up all night, drinking and dancing to live Talking Heads records and working their way through a molehill of cocaine. They’d been upstairs in his room with their share, spread out on the carpet, faces nearly touching and hovering above an old issue of Rolling Stone. They’d been in the room for ten minutes, or an hour, quieter up there, the music contained to the basement floor. They were screwing around, shouting Boogie Nights lines into each other’s faces, that they must never leave this room, while feeling the sentiment elementally too, in every cell from their soles to their scalps. He asked her what she wanted more than anything in the world and she told him her most private ambition, and she asked him what he wanted more than anything in the world and he told her his. And then he started tearing up and he grabbed her by the face, and told her he didn’t know quite how or why, but he just knew they were destined to hold each other to their dreams, and that together they could make them happen. That even though they’d known each other for just six weeks, they owed each other their assurances right then and there that no matter what, no matter what happened in the future history of their long lives and their destiny with fulfillment, they must always hold each other to it, whether they were romantically linked or not, to make sure neither ever forgot what they’d once desired and what they were meant to make of themselves, what they’d confessed in this room on this very last night, when life was still okay, and everything was still possible, before the real world came crashing in. They pinkie-swore and then snorted a line each off the magazine cover, and he tackled her as their brains and bodies sparkled like Pop Rocks, and he pinned her down and stuck his tongue up her nose and they stared into each other’s eyes, and she said Yes to a question that hadn’t been posed.
The week of their final finals. Will buried beneath books, secreted away in the fourth-floor stacks, hidden well enough that only Whitney knew where he was. Whitney out in the open, on the first floor, near the entrance. In the late afternoons all week long, he could count on her being there. Once her papers were submitted, she didn’t need to show up. But she kept coming anyway, to be there in case he walked by. She’d sit beneath the high windows lit up with Southern spring from morning until dusk, reading scripts, waiting for it. Will knew, even as he was seeing it for the first time, that he’d never lose that image: Whitney in the soft swirl of book dust, Whitney in the library light, the first true love of his life.
The moment of linkage on that bed in Barcelona, it went back further still, almost all the way back. A late night in the hammock on the porch of his house. A bus ride to a formal at a farm with dairy cows. The big bright afternoon of the last day of classes, when they’d been swimming in the buzz of a long morning of shotgunned beers, and wound up fucking in the public shower of a freshman dorm neither of them had lived in. They were clear memories, crisp incidents, because there were photographs commemorating so many of the moments. Photographs taken by his housemates who knew that what they were witnessing was dangerous. A futile pairing-off during the home stretch, right before it was all meant to end. They took those pictures without faith that it could last. But they saw the way Will and Whitney’s eyes locked amid crowds, as though they were the only ones alive at a party, the way their hands found each other’s cheeks on overstuffed dance floors, as though the hourglass was draining down a little bit slower for the two of them than it was for everybody else. It was a joke that every last classmate at the bars on Sweetgum Street those last few weeks could share in—watching the ill-advised enterprise lift off. But not even they were there to witness Will and Whitney sitting alone together in a parking lot outside a bar on one of the earliest nights, as she held the back of his head in the crook of her elbow, petting his feathery hair, whispering “Can I keep you?” into his ear.
The end of that long first night together, seven years ago. A bar closing down. His friends winking as they left them together to order one final drink. A cab, even though his house was walking distance. A cab, even though she didn’t have any cash left. A kiss in the back of the cab. A hot spring night that began in a garden—a denim skirt for her and cotton shorts for him. A pair of hammered twenty-two-year-olds. One hand each on the other’s face. Eyes sealed shut. She crept her free hand to the fabric in his lap and felt his smile through her lips. He moved his free hand from her knee to the hem of her skirt and felt her legs part microscopically. His fingers traced the inside of both sticky thighs. She was dripping wet, heat radiating from the thatch of hair. The driver braked abruptly in front of the house and Will opened his eyes to peek out the window. He pulled his hand and reached for his wallet and then looked at Whitney’s face in the sallow streetlight to ask her if she wanted to come see that DVD collection he had been talking about all night.
And then finally, at last: a garden. The campus gardens in early spring. A boy playing catch with a friend who’d brought two baseball mitts to school
all four years. A girl reading a 1970s movie script in the shade of a dogwood tree. A boy with gym shorts and a Dodgers hat and a T-shirt printed with a pun on the name of his freshman dorm. A girl with a green camisole and faded blue boyfriend jeans frayed at the knees, a revealing window on a gnarled scar from an athletic injury. Both without shoes. It was a shoeless kind of day, during a shoeless time of their lives. A boy who spotted the cover of the hardbound script, the poster for a movie he knew better than any other. A cover on a book in the hands of a girl he maybe recognized but whose name he didn’t know, a girl with a body stretched out like a leaf in the grass, a body with a head that was still, and legitimately reading, unconcerned with anything swirling around her. A boy who’d just handed back the mitt and the ball, telling his friend he’d see him downtown in a few hours to watch the game, to watch JJ Pickle play in the Sweet Sixteen of the tournament. A boy, therefore, with nothing in the world requiring his attention at that very instant. A boy who thought: At worst she’ll politely acknowledge that it is indeed the movie script the cover says it is, and maybe roll her eyes at him for making a move in the gardens, of all places. A boy who thought: At best she’ll politely acknowledge that it is indeed the movie script the cover says it is, and maybe smile and sort of applaud him for making a move in the gardens, of all places. A boy taking a chance, out of character for him, truly. A boy just feeling lifted by the green and the breeze, and killing time before the big game. A boy who noticed her freckles come into focus on her yogurt-smooth skin and couldn’t help but say something. A boy who noticed her plump pink lips and her thick black brows and the blue blackness of her hair, and then the flush of her throat, the roundnesses beneath her shirt, the narrow slot of skin between the bottom of her top and the top of her jeans, the brass button there catching the sun like a gold coin. A boy whose head inadvertently cast a shadow across the face of a girl, dirty-blondly knocking the sun out of the sky. A girl who felt the shadow and lowered her book and, coaxed by some force beyond her comprehension, decided to look up into a stranger’s face and start things off with a spring-sweet smile.