She was still on hold, a loop of the songs that scored the opening credits of a hit show. She googled JJ Pickle and scrolled through pictures of him in college. She googled Leonard NYU, but the only images that emerged were of bearded adjunct professors. She went to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water and found Will passed out on the couch. The terrible, familiar shape. Slung way down in the seat of the sofa, head balanced on the backrest and mouth gaping like a Pez dispenser. She’d never understood why he didn’t just lie all the way down. It was the same resistance that made him believe he could stay awake later than she could at the end of the night. It didn’t bother her except when he’d insist he could make it through another episode of whatever they were streaming, only to pass out minutes in, leaving her with the high-moral conundrum of whether to press on without him or not. She hated being out front alone with a series. She watched everything for work, and so only a few for fun. It was nice sometimes to just have something to share in, to mete out casually with him. She knew the inside word on the successes and failures of every show on every network, as seen through the eyes of the industry. She knew the fate of a show months before civilians had had the opportunity to rate it for themselves. So to have just one, every now and again, to experience purely, alongside someone who knew nothing about the takes of the trades, was a treat for her. But then each night: that dead face, that retired mass next to her in bed. He looked, in sleep, like every photo she’d ever seen of him as a child. Most people looked different over time, changed, but all of those people were not Will. That strange quality—that perpetual all-Will is now-Will—returned her frequently to a sort of lineage of their love, a proximity to the whole story of it, which flattened out the spikes and kept close for Whitney all the good from before.
When Will had moved back to New York from Washington, they’d picked out a place together: a second-floor studio apartment on the corner of 10th and A, across the street from Tompkins Square Park. It had exposed beams and high ceilings and it was a better deal than anything else they’d seen in the neighborhood. It didn’t make sense, except that the owner was practically dead and wasn’t concerned with market value. It was unlisted. Whitney worked with someone who lived in the building. Will liked the location fine, but loved especially that it was cheap, an outlier, a ninety-ninth-percentile steal.
The studio was a studio, but they rhetorically broke the space into the component parts of a larger home: they called the three shelves in the closet that held the scissors and thank-you cards the office; they called the corner near the park-facing window with the free weights and yoga mat the gym; they called the three-foot halo around the queen-size bed the bedroom, and treated that imaginary border like the line between territorial and international waters. It seemed like no time had passed since they’d been scattered across the city that first summer after college, surfing couches and subletting rooms without air-conditioning, sweating through sheets in four out of the five boroughs. Texting one another from hundreds of blocks away some nights and from within the same neighborhood on others. They’d lived apart for the first years, with roommates and then in other cities. But when they got to the same place again, they were ready for rootedness. Ready to read books and watch movies and roast chickens together. To receive the quarterly alumni magazine in duplicate. It was easy, at first, riding that conveyor belt of domestic life, easy and pleasurable and fun. When it wasn’t, they fought hard with each other, but they forgave easily, too. The secret to making it work was that they were in love. They’d known each other since they were practically children. Three and then five and then seven years elapsed. They ended most nights beside one another in the bedroom. They’d never lived alone in their lives.
Whitney just hung there in the living room of the Airbnb, on hold, listening to Will breathe, the familiar faint wheeze from the twice-broken nose. She hated that unconscious mass, especially on nights when she couldn’t sleep herself. And yet the thought of him passed out in their bed was the first thing that made her cry during the early days of 1-2-3. At eight or nine Pacific Standard, she would imagine the worst: Will with any of the thousands of young women in the neighborhood, with their elastic skin and flexible hips, every last young hopeless striver living life in the sliver of a chance that they might go to a bar after work and meet someone like her boyfriend. A good guy with a decent apartment and a little cash and white teeth and a Goldilocks cock—the mix of checked boxes those bees had been scouring the city for during happy hours since they’d graduated a few Mays ago. Whitney, alone, imagining all the possibilities, but knowing in her guts that Will was more likely than not propped up in their bed, trying to catch up with a show she’d long left him in the dust on, doing what he could to make a good-faith effort to get back in the game now that he had all this time to himself. Whitney, alone in L.A., checking their shared streaming account and seeing it had been used by another laptop, the elapsed-time bar frozen just
