They marched two by two, up beach, even farther up beach, past a port and some closed fish restaurants. Then, emerging from the blackness as though it were the only place for hundreds of miles, there appeared before them a softly lit cube on the sand, open-air, with windows and doors missing. It looked like what was left when the inessential blocks had been yanked from a Jenga.
Leonard led the way, and without a break in stride they had four seats at a corner of the bar, two and two again, Will and Whitney pointed toward the water, toward the bonfires on the beach, toward the midnight volleyball and soccer games near the surf. The only other people at the bar were a pack of Swedish teens sitting in the corner sharing large bottles of beer and watching commercial-free music videos loop on a projector screen.
Leonard asked what everyone wanted and ordered in better Catalan than the three of them could muster combined. They sat there for a moment in the silence of realizing that they’d covered plenty of ground already. That they’d already imbibed more collective chatter than was responsible for strangers in a first encounter. So they did what was particularly useful in cases of the sort, and they talked about college. Whitney revealed to Jack that she too had been an athlete at school, if only for a season, and really just for a couple weeks. She showed him the gnarled scar beneath her kneecap. She described for Jack and Leonard her final couple semesters, when she’d finally locked into her most effective mode on campus: solo, solitary, script-obsessed. And though she left out what had come before all that, she felt its presence right there, beneath the surface of the bar, like the fat part of an iceberg.
Will told Jack and Leonard the story of the gardens, how he and Whitney had met, as wild as it was to recall now, the night of Jack’s Sweet Sixteen game his junior season. It was the kind of school that was just big enough for that to be possible—for the three of them to have all been there together, but to have never overlapped. Jack couldn’t believe it, but he loved it. He kept slapping the bar.
Leonard looked bored and so they paid up and she led them to a club. Will and Whitney would never have known about such a place themselves. It was a mile down the beach in the direction of the blackness, a twenty-minute walk. They followed the beach and kept the ocean to their right. They passed a fighting couple, then a stray dog, before arriving at a lonely office building sprung from a plain of asphalt. The office building functioned normally during the day, but at midnight it opened its top floor to music and dancing. Leonard spoke Catalan to the doorman. He let the two girls behind the rope but put his palms on the chests of Will and Jack. Leonard hooked the doorman’s bicep and spoke something persuasive into his ear, and then he let them in, too, but with a finger that said: Just this once.
They took an elevator to the top floor. The ceiling and walls were covered with screw-in light bulbs, whites and reds and blues, that pulsed with the beat of the DJs at center stage. At the bar, Leonard explained there would be an unbroken string of thirty-minute sets until eight in the morning. The bright green numbers at the cash register said 01:32. They were early. The drinks were surprisingly inexpensive. Will and Whitney drank tequila. They drank beers from tiny bottles. They drank vodka mixed with Red Bull. They’d been exhausted, but now they felt further from sleep than they had six hours ago.
Leonard and Jack were easy to keep an eye on. Jack’s head grazed the light bulbs on the ceiling. They moved from the dance floor to one of the wings, and then to the stage. Will and Whitney danced together near the bar, dancing like they never did at home. They faced forward, moving side by side. Everyone faced forward, bodies toward the DJ. It was the crowd-facings of a political rally. They didn’t look at one another, they looked at the person working the faders and the knobs. Everyone but Jack and Leonard, at least, who locked inward instead. Jack bent over a little awkwardly. He must’ve had his legs spread to lower himself to her height. She fit between his legs and he was low enough then for her to sling her arm over his shoulders, one hand on the back of his neck. Will and Whitney watched them dance. Will and Whitney could sense each other watching them dance. They could see, out of the sides of their eyes, the other shift toward them like the face of a flower to light. They could feel the other drawing in with curiosity, with concern, with whatever the feeling was when you need to see something and can’t stop looking.
They hadn’t gone out dancing for years—not since Will was in law school, probably, when the two of them would burn off the endless hours of Will’s case law and Whitney’s assistant work with friends who were in the same boat. They’d eat falafel and suck down shots on MacDougal and spill out onto the streets in an all-points-Lower-East stream to the underground rock ’n’ roll bars below Delancey. They’d squeeze in together and dance themselves dripping, until their shirts and pants and dresses sweat through, until somebody lost a shoe. And then they’d wander
