One evening, a week into 1-2-3, Whitney sent a text to no response, but that time, surprising herself, she cracked. Her face went haywire without warning, she wanted to be physically next to that sleeping potato sack so badly. This was after a long day of a read-through, a few days after Adrien Green. There was probably some fatigue, certainly some guilt. There was that thing where her brain had been split in two along the cleave between her desire for Will to even the score and her desire for them to pack up the enterprise altogether and never exist in that idiotic in-between again. To make a date at City Hall and take care of things the easy way, the way they should have all along, and just get on with it, the way it was supposed to go. But she knew she couldn’t do it. Not at that point. It wasn’t fair if it wasn’t even. And she knew it was too early for him, it’d take him longer than it had taken her. She knew she’d have to wait for the month-long prescription to run its course. It was dangerous to cut off medicine midstream.
So she busied herself making plans for their Memorial Day trip instead. They considered maybe Rome or Berlin or Mexico City or Peru. But they were ultimately pretty set on Barcelona. Neither had been before, and Whitney had just been forwarded an email guide written by someone she’d never met. Early one morning, after a few hours of sleep, she’d flipped over in bed and whispered to Will that her knee was throbbing again, that she’d run too hard that day, would he help her stretch her legs in the morning? But Whitney was in L.A. and Will was in New York. And at the moment of realization, emerging from sleep, her mind split again like a fault line in a California quake. She imagined herself on the wrong side of the chasm from Will—her fate of being alone until her dying days. She imagined him gone. She imagined him vanished. She imagined a lifetime of calling out to someone across the room about her clicky hips and busted knee, and the list of toiletries for him to order off Amazon, and her ideas for new shows—did he think it was a good concept for a half-hour comedy? That was the night she cried hardest, heavier than about anything since her mother’s cancer scare, and then she fell asleep again with swollen eyes on a damp pillow that left a rash on her cheek.
“Whitney, you still there?” the call came back through the speaker into the bathroom in Barcelona, and she retreated to the bed to finish up her work.
Will woke up to Whitney’s voice. She was on the call still. The afternoon news had turned over to a variety show with sequined dancers, and he reached for the control to cut the signal. He went to the kitchen sink for a fresh glass of water and crashed into the corner of the counter. He felt the disorienting face-fuzz of a daylight hangover and popped a new beer to sand off the edges. He halved the bottle and walked to the bedroom, where Whitney rolled back her eyes and stuck out her tongue and slashed her throat with her finger.
“Mm-hmm,” she said into the phone. “We can one hundred percent try that.”
Will passed the closet on the way to the bathroom. Whitney had unpacked the entirety of her suitcase again, just as she’d done their first day of the trip, hanging her dresses and folding her shirts and jeans and underwear into stacks in the drawers. Will, by contrast, had left all his clothes in his duffel, into which they’d been carelessly shoveled from the floor near the radiator the morning before. They lived together. They shared spaces and money and a projection of a future. But they lived differently still. Especially when left to their own devices or their own coasts or their own sides of a rental apartment.
He stood before the closet and ran his eyes over her clothes. They were expensive but they would last. They met the standard of what Whitney considered a justifiable cost-per-wear. She piped in on the call every thirty seconds or so. “That’s exactly right. That was the plan all along, but we can hit that note harder.” He strummed the edges of her dresses like a harp. He brought a cream linen hem to his nose. She’d left the dresses in New York during her month in L.A. She’d taken more casual clothes—jeans, and button-downs, and sneakers. She said it was more appropriate. She said it would be a waste to bring anything else along. And so these, the vestiges of functional and fashionable New York City professionalism, they’d stayed put. Will would come home after striking out at a neighborhood bar, and he’d just hang there in their shared space, their shared studio. He’d pour their shared bottle of olive oil into their shared frying fan. He’d boil their shared tap water in their shared teakettle. He’d strum the dresses in their shared closet and kick back atop their shared comforter to watch a TV show he’d fallen
