Will stood before the Miró now, contemplating these questions, and heard sharp, audible breaths from somewhere. It took him a moment to realize they were his own. He had been so relieved, that seeming eternity ago, when he’d found law as a warm and friendly way station, that he never once considered the long-term implications of a career in contracts. But that fucking mural—sensing it even where it wasn’t—confirmed for him his most private concern: that his thoughtless career choices had led him into a trap of inescapable dullness. He must quit. But he couldn’t quit. He needed the money badly. For loans, for living. No one who had been hired right after the crash threw away a job so hastily. He needed to keep up with Whitney, anyway. He needed to stay above water and not plunge into the deep end with all the people around him who had even worse debt than he did. There wasn’t anything he could do just now.
And so he would wait. He would wait for feedback on the screenplay. The thought of his script provided instant relief. He’d sent it out before the trip. It was a secret; Whitney knew nothing about it still. He would hear back soon from the producer. And the new escape pod would present itself. A new life that moved just a little slower. A life of more cafés, more afternoon naps. He couldn’t quit just yet. He couldn’t succumb to the provocations of the mural. He would be patient for now. He would persist.
At the other end of the museum, Whitney smiled as she turned another corner. She loved being inside museums. She believed they could change your chemistry, if even for a short spell. After visiting a museum, she felt civically lifted, the same sensation that flooded her after voting. She felt at home with the generous width and limited depth of her knowledge, with the undergraduate’s foundational base. She kept up with reviews in the Times and The New Yorker. She paid full price at the Met and took advantage of her MoMA corporate membership. She felt comfortable confirming her best guesses with the labels on the walls. There were connections that went back.
Her father told people she’d been named for a mountain, but her mother insisted she’d been named for a museum. Her mother would drop little truths like that, as though she were the only one who knew the real story, as though her version of their shared life superseded his. Her father flew commercially, the reason they’d wound up in Dallas in the first place. He was bighearted but unconditionally deferential, conceding any fact—including the origin of his daughter’s name—in order that he might get out the door faster, his head still clear for flying. His stretches away meant Whitney’s mother was often alone with a messy house and a full-time job and a shy but self-sufficient daughter and a handsome but hell-raising son, who sucked up the lion’s share of her attention, the energy of a solar system. Whitney’s mother had had a life before them, she made sure they knew. A life that reared its head with the names of museums in far-off cities, and a habit of going alone to the movies once a week, and an insistence to Whitney that she not waste her time on a liberal arts degree, as she had, lest Whitney find herself trapped in the same endless cycle of dissatisfaction.
They’d moved to five different pockets of Dallas–Fort Worth by the time Whitney was even thinking about college. Her mother switched schools more than football coaches, searching out new teaching opportunities for herself, but claiming all the change was on behalf of Whitney’s brother, who could never seem to find the right “situation,” whose violence on the playground would rear its head “unexpectedly,” even though physical fighting was the only way he communicated with Whitney for years. But for all the focus on her brother, Whitney knew even from a young age that it was her mother who necessitated the sudden ejections, the hard pivots, the whiteboard wiped clean. She’d never stopped wanting the better something for herself that she was certain she was owed for all the sacrifice. She told Whitney all her life that everything she did was to make her and her brother’s life easier. But the effect of her rule—for Whitney, at least—was almost always to make it harder.
At schools in Euless and Arlington and Richardson and Haney, Whitney navigated toward the unobtrusive middle, tacking neither too high or too low, leaving knots of near-friendships in her wake. Daylight hours, then, were devoted to schoolwork and soccer. And in the evenings, on the personal television that her parents gifted her as an alternative to the 24/7 live-sports marathons her brother insisted on, Whitney could commune nightly with the wisdom of MTV, of the lives lived out there, away from the Webers and the Whataburgers and the overwatered yards of her cul-de-sac. Growing up, she’d never given herself entirely over to home. She’d never even let the accent in—choosing to mimic her mom and dad and MTV VJs instead. Her parents had only landed there eventually, she reasoned. They didn’t have it in their blood, and so why should it be required of her? But New Orleans and Chicago and Paris—her favorite seasons of Real World—what would it be like to turn herself into not a cast member necessarily, but an extra in a city like one of those someday? A young woman in the background reading a book in a café? A slightly older woman in monochromes clacking down a sidewalk in heels? There was something grand out there, she knew, something her mother and father had seen in their prehistory together, in their years stationed overseas, that she must experience herself. She’d had
