But it just wasn’t happening for her here today. She was too distracted, maybe even drunk still. Whitney turned the corner to find a class of elementary school children spread out across the floor, hunchbacked and crane-necked, fixated on the paintings, working hard at their own works. Handprints, sparrows, suns with faces. The children were making a real effort to see something special on the walls, even if they didn’t fully understand. She looked at the paintings with them. She waited. She concentrated. It was like she was being muted. By plastic. By glass. By ashcloud. She watched their little faces searching. She felt trapped suddenly. There were no windows in the corner where she’d wandered. It was boiling hot. The light was stale and the tiles were brown. She needed air, even volcano air, even air filled with fire and smoke.
She stepped out onto the terrace with the sculptures. Play-Doh colors, the pinched-form figurines. She looked out over the bowl of the city and tried to imagine the basin soaked in a golden light. Her eyes found the water. They found the unfinished cathedral. Everything was bathed in a blackness of shadow. She coveted nothing more in that moment than a crack in the clouds, even the briefest glimpse of the city in its full radiant glory. She even tried praying—what was she doing? It was dark still. She wasn’t important enough, powerful enough, talented enough to affect things like that. She knew. And so she slipped into a familiar spiral. She thought back to several mistakes she’d made at work this year, several people she perceived she’d disappointed recently, all the people she’d failed to let herself get close to growing up. She thought of the disappointment her parents had expressed when she quit the soccer team, the financial burden it had brought upon all of them when she forfeited her scholarship, all because she couldn’t stand playing a single day more. She thought of the ways in which she’d wasted those first couple years on campus, hobbling around on her bum knee, failing to fit in, fearing nothing more than being found out by the young women who so very much belonged. She thought of the errors she’d made back then—the blinding fuckups, the miscarriage—and the subsequent escape abroad. She thought of Paris, she thought of the pivots she’d engineered, the reorientation to the heading that finally made sense, that had led directly from there to here. She thought of all the things she was responsible for now, and how she wasn’t qualified to be responsible for any of them. She thought of all she’d never be able to achieve.
She thought, then, of Will. Of Will fucking other women. It sent a hot shock down the length of her esophagus. She hated him just then, but he’d done nothing wrong. It had been her idea. She imagined Will fixated on the tops of their blonde heads between his legs, Will’s mind in those moments filled with every thought but a thought of Whitney. She thought of being naked with the strangers of her own. She thought of the openness of her body those evenings and afternoons, the ease with which her clothes had come off, how much she’d worried about being naked with someone for so many years, and then one day how ordinary it had become.
The city was frozen still beneath the ashcloud. She turned on her roaming and checked her email. She had several. She read them. She felt her nipples pressing against the padding of her bra. And then she felt a searing shame that she’d been growing aroused on the terrace all alone in the grim ash. She wandered back inside holding her head, her hangover suddenly chirping like a smoke alarm.
When they found each other inside, they inferred that they were both through with their museum-going experience, and wandered into the courtyard café without either suggesting it. Whitney said she was growing queasier by the moment, so Will ordered a couple beers. He popped the caps and stuffed the bottles in his jacket pockets and the two of them spilled into the dense-shade park that adjoined the museum. Cypresses and palms and damp mud, damp without a concession by the ashcloud to some drying light. They sat on a bench in the park that had softened with the weather to the texture of a cashew. The mud near their feet had a skin like ballpark cheese.
“What do you think happened to them?” Whitney said.
They’d resisted until then. Neither had acknowledged the resisting, but it had been present in their silence all afternoon. They had bangings in their brains, they had dry tongues and fatigue. They hadn’t minded the lack of small talk on the walk up, since each was focused merely on completing successive footsteps, on suppressing nausea, on following their slow-rolling shepherds in cardigans. But they’d known that the other had been thinking about the question and the likely answers.
“What happened to who?” Will said.
Her face forfeited nothing and made it clear she wasn’t in the mood to be teased.
“I mean,” he said, “it was probably going where it looked like it was going, right?”
“Whose place?”
“Well, I doubt they went back to Gram’s at six in the morning.”
“What do you think his apartment is like?”
“Probably not that different from the place we’re staying. Those guys don’t make so much money. He’s living alone. He’s not there half the time. A big bed and a big TV? Some chicken in the crisper and a tub of protein powder on top of the fridge?”
“They make me feel old,” Whitney said.
“You and JJ are practically the same age.”
“But he still has that thing where, I dunno, he’s been playing a game since graduation.”
“That
