This wasn’t quite like that. This was electronica. This was another language that at least Whitney didn’t speak. This was a face-off among the DJs, but also a propping up of one another, passing the beat like a baton. People moved spastically in tight quarters, like they were trying to dance their way out of a Porta-Potty. For Will and Whitney, it had kept feeling better until all of a sudden the music made no sense, and it was as though the link had failed between the cheap booze they kept buying and the way it manifested itself in their blood. There was nothing left to do but look around and realize it was a strange place where they didn’t belong. Not just because they were illiterate to the music, not just because they didn’t have any money left, but because, it occurred to them as bluntly as a crashing wave, they were the oldest people there—they were practically thirty.
Before they left, they found Jack and Leonard in line for the bathroom. They would’ve ordinarily let the night be the night and gone off forever without a trace—their MO at weddings, at dinner parties, at gatherings where they didn’t have the time or energy to make new friends. But there was no telling how long they’d be trapped. It might actually be nice to hang out with someone else in the coming days. And so they all exchanged contacts, and Will explained that he wasn’t always on the network—that he tended to keep his roaming turned off, it was so expensive—and that the best way to be in touch was probably via email. They learned from Leonard that before she’d left Paris, a whole impossibly long day ago, she’d thrown her phone into the Seine. It was the end of something significant, Leonard explained, and she couldn’t possibly need it anymore.
Will and Whitney and Jack nodded like they understood completely, and then the couples detached and Will and Whitney found themselves riding the elevator down alone, and then spilling outside onto the asphalt, where there was a line fifty deep, now that it was four-thirty in the morning and time for people to really start coming out for the night. Will asked Whitney if she wanted to take a cab, but she said she’d prefer to walk along the water, to let some of the booze run its course while the music in her brain and body dialed down.
They wound up back at the long flat benches, at the palm trees, at the edge of Barceloneta. The sky was lightening, if vaguely. To the left was the Gehry fish. To the right was that giant hotel, out there on the point like the sail of a sixteenth-century galleon. The light was changing, but it was a matter of grays. The sun was coming up, somewhere behind the blackout shade of the ashcloud. But there was no color, there were no cones at work, just pencil shadings, just gradations. They’d made it to dawn. They had endured.
They slumped there on one of the backless benches, Whitney’s head on Will’s shoulder, Will’s shoulders pushed way up to his ears. They had stayed out, they had been interesting enough, they had done something new and unexpected and wholly unlike themselves. Whitney rubbed her fingers through Will’s salt-crystalled hair. And though she knew that what he wanted most just then was for her to say it first, to concede her desire to finally go home, she resisted, which he knew she would, which only confirmed for him just how well he knew what was going on in her head, too. Instead, she stood up, in silence, and wondered if he was really going to make her say it, she was too exhausted for words, and he must know what she wanted, anyway.
They let each other dangle there, they deferred the curtain. He needed her to say it, to name it, to be the dull one, to be the bore—just for a change of pace. He needed to prove his interestingness, his ability to last. They played this game at home sometimes. Who would call it quits first? Who would be the first to go down for the night? They would sometimes fall asleep with the lights on, they were both so stubborn—lights bright, a mutual abeyance. Most of the time, though, Will would pass out right out of the blocks. He was, after all, as deficient as he suspected sometimes, limited in all the ways he feared. Tonight, for once, he had been convincing as the sort of young American who stays out late in Barcelona. He had played the part, and it had even felt easy at times.
At the party, she had been never less cool than the coolness of her career. Which meant she hadn’t had to be from anywhere in particular. She hadn’t had to speak, as she sometimes did, on behalf of the legislature and laws of the state where her parents happened to live. She hadn’t had to answer questions about Aikman or Cruz or JR. She could simply be American, and quite beautiful, and young enough still. And so she wouldn’t be the one to concede. But she knew that he wouldn’t either, resisting with every fiber in his bones being the one who ended the unending night.
So instead, she just started back in the direction of the apartment alone.
