The first visit to California with his parents. The first visit to Texas with hers. The ease with which they became the new addition to each family. They said and did the right things. They cleaned their dishes and dusted up their crumbs. They didn’t stay out too late, didn’t wake anyone up when they trundled in at night. They laughed at things that were funny and were interested in stories even the second time they were told. They didn’t throw up from drinking too much. They didn’t fool around within earshot. They felt comfortable lazing about and comfortable asking for a glass of water. Before leaving town, they made sure to leave a full tank of gas in the car that they had borrowed.
The polyps they found in her mother’s colon after graduation. The body they found of a friend of his near the pylons of the pier that first summer. The astonishing sense that they didn’t know a thing about death but had said mostly the right things to each other anyway, confirming that those first couple months weren’t just the product of a bottled-up experiment, of the Stockholm syndrome of the end of college, but rather of something worth paying attention to. Still, they’d considered what it might be like to break up over the summer, that it might realistically be too hard to preserve whatever special thing they’d started, even if they both planned to end up in New York. But then the news, the two shots of heaviest reality right away. They comforted one another and they realized that no one in their lives, even those they’d known for considerably longer, could have said the right things any better. They didn’t just want each other, they needed each other now. They needed each other to keep the world from intruding too quickly.
The day before parents arrived. The day before graduation weekend. A party at his house. Up all night, drinking and dancing to live Talking Heads records and working their way through a molehill of cocaine. They’d been upstairs in his room with their share, spread out on the carpet, faces nearly touching and hovering above an old issue of Rolling Stone. They’d been in the room for ten minutes, or an hour, quieter up there, the music contained to the basement floor. They were screwing around, shouting Boogie Nights lines into each other’s faces, that they must never leave this room, while feeling the sentiment elementally too, in every cell from their soles to their scalps. He asked her what she wanted more than anything in the world and she told him her most private ambition, and she asked him what he wanted more than anything in the world and he told her his. And then he started tearing up and he grabbed her by the face, and told her he didn’t know quite how or why, but he just knew they were destined to hold each other to their dreams, and that together they could make them happen. That even though they’d known each other for just six weeks, they owed each other their assurances right then and there that no matter what, no matter what happened in the future history of their long lives and their destiny with fulfillment, they must always hold each other to it, whether they were romantically linked or not, to make sure neither ever forgot what they’d once desired and what they were meant to make of themselves, what they’d confessed in this room on this very last night, when life was still okay, and everything was still possible, before the real world came crashing in. They pinkie-swore and then snorted a line each off the magazine cover, and he tackled her as their brains and bodies sparkled like Pop Rocks, and he pinned her down and stuck his tongue up her nose and they stared into each other’s eyes, and she said Yes to a question that hadn’t been posed.
The week of their final finals. Will buried beneath books, secreted away in the fourth-floor stacks, hidden well enough that only Whitney knew where he was. Whitney out in the open, on the first floor, near the entrance. In the late afternoons all week long, he could count on her being there. Once her papers were submitted, she didn’t need to show up. But she kept coming anyway, to be there in case he walked by. She’d sit beneath the high windows lit up with Southern spring from morning until dusk, reading scripts, waiting for it. Will knew, even as he was seeing it for the first time, that he’d never lose that image: Whitney in the soft swirl of book dust, Whitney in the library light, the first true love of his life.
The moment of linkage on that bed in Barcelona, it went back further still, almost
