She closed her eyes again, touched her longest fingers to her temples and rubbed clockwise.
“This is so dumb,” he said. “You sound like a fucking study-abroad pamphlet: ‘Get lost in Florence.’ ‘I just love losing myself in the alleys of Toledo.’ Whatever, man—do whatever you want.”
“Maybe we bump into them again tonight.”
Her eyes were still shut. He turned his body on the bench again and looked at her, disbelieving, waiting for her to return to the time and space where they were sitting.
“Is this jealousy?” he said. “Is that what’s going on? You’re jealous that the chick with the famous feet gets to go home with the basketball star, too?”
“Please don’t put it in those terms,” she said. “I wasn’t until now.”
He smiled. “God, you’re so easy. You’re almost thirty years old and you’re easy as ever. And I can tell you’re not even actually bothered by it. You just want to be bothered by it, because it’s more interesting. Let’s wrap this the fuck up, all right?”
“I’m sorry. I know. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know what’s going on right now. I woke up drunk and buzzing in the face and my whole body’s fucking throbbing. And I got this chill out on the museum terrace. My mind started wandering to some unhelpful places. I’m just…feeling anxious. Like: You’re wasting an opportunity. Like: You’ve been granted something spooky, and you’re in a museum while the world’s waiting to see how you respond to its big provocation.”
“Maybe we should’ve stuck together in there. I didn’t realize how perilous it was gonna be. I saw a painting that made me want to quit my job, if that makes you feel better. It started speaking to me and said that I could never set foot in my office building again. It convinced me that I need to look for a job that traffics in less fine print.”
“Or maybe you just need to work somewhere that doesn’t require you to go in both days on the weekend.”
“I can’t do it yet,” he said. “I need to do it, but I can’t do it without the money lined up.”
She nodded and leveled her eyes out at the basin. “Think about it, really.…She’s here for twelve hours…she gets one man off with her feet, then she goes home later that night with a nice tall handsome guy who also happens to be a pro athlete. What is that? What are we being told here? What is the volcano saying to us?”
“I think the volcano’s saying that sometimes real-world shit goes down. Sometimes volcanoes erupt. Sometimes events transpire and consequences are imparted. This isn’t biblical, as much as you want it to be. This isn’t a bulletin from the heavens.”
The sky was brightened by a light source deep in its recesses. It gave the impression of an El Greco seen through sunglasses.
“But what if it is?” she said. “Maybe this is a sign that we should be paying more attention to something.”
He shook his head again.
“Like, what if we’re stuck here until we come to terms with some implicit truth about ourselves and change something essential?”
“Ah, right—trapped here until we live a day being kind to everyone we encounter,” he said. “We should keep our eyes out for Phil Connors.”
“I love that tone. I love that dismissal and that fucking smirk when you say it.”
“Your eyes aren’t even open. You can’t tell whether I’m smirking. I just don’t have a clue what you’re talking about still.”
“Maybe what I’m talking about is that our twenties are over, and what did we do? What did we miss? How did we behave? Who did we become?”
“All over an arbitrary number?”
“It’s not arbitrary. At thirty you’re basically halfway dead.”
He shook his head again, but didn’t address the math. Her mother had had a cancer scare at fifty-three. “What am I holding you back from? What am I not letting you be? Let’s go do it. Let’s get it out of our system today. Let’s get it done this afternoon so that we can maybe go back to something standard-issue, seeing a fucking Gaudí park or whatever, without a crisis of life choices.”
“Maybe I’m just hungry. Maybe this is just my insides talking. Maybe this is why we don’t stay out late. Why I don’t drink like that, ever, and why we don’t do these things. This is why I’m no good at being young or fun or interesting anymore.”
“We get older, we try to feel better about it, not worse. We live our lives. We do our best. We’ve never tried to keep up. Not so pathetically, at least. I don’t get it. Why now?”
“There is just something going on up there,” Whitney said, serious as the sky. “I just have a sense for these things. All I’m saying is there’s something strange that it happened when it happened, after everything we’ve done. The timing is just—”
“That what happened?”
“The volcano.”
“The volcano ‘happened…after everything we’ve done’?”
“I’m saying it’s a strange coincidence, and maybe there’s something to it.”
“You’re saying, what, exactly? That the volcano is somehow related to last month? You’re saying there are ties between our sex life and earth science? You’re saying: It’s a global response for 1-2-3? A ruling from the gods?”
“I know you think that everyone who believes their life is tied up in something bigger is full of shit. But it would be a mistake not to at least consider it, just this once—what we did before we got here, and what happened once we confessed. And why it is we’re trapped in the first place…”
“This is Sunday school talking? This is everything that was branded into you as a kid?” His mouth was tight, incredulous. Her eyes were open and fixed in the middle distance. He licked his lips
