Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  Startled, I take my eyes off the road and look over, find her smiling shyly in the passenger seat, two fresh smokes rolled up and ready to go.

  “You are my teacher,” I say. “A magic Russo American sent to my life to make it better—to make me better. But your life is also a life. I see that now. I’m going to make your life better, somehow.”

  “Fifty percent would be better.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d remember I said that,” I say. “I mean it was mixed in with all that other stuff that made you mad.”

  “How about it’s the only thing I remember?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I liked the way you said ‘solidarity’ before. It sounded very Russian.”

  “I say it the way my father says it. I like to say it’s the only Russian word I know.”

  “Would you say it again for me?”

  “Solidarity.” We smile at each other. She pauses a moment. I can hear her teeth grind while she thinks about something. Time passes—not a long time, but time. I keep my eyes roadward, high beams burning away the darkness, bleaching the trees. “It was nice,” she says, finally. “The thing you said about my clit. Don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t have said it, and you’re never going to do it, but it was nice to hear.”

  Early the next week the letters start coming from HQ. No more phone calls. They want records now, a paper trail. The restaurant is billed for a new mushroom suit. Apparently there’s a reason they don’t have a hundred of those things in a warehouse somewhere, and now I know what that reason is. Plus, we learn, HQ has been sending secret shoppers in here, and the reports have not been good. We’re drowning in violations. Our Caesar dressing tests positive for anchovies. We are beyond probation. The choice is between closing our doors immediately and getting sued to death.

  “I’m so fucked,” Ethan says, drunk as I’ve ever seen him but sounding scarily sober. I pull the lever on the Jagerator, top us both off (and I should, or maybe shouldn’t, specify that we’re drinking out of pint glasses).

  “You’re not fucked,” I say, then take a big gulp of cold black syrup so I have something to choke on other than hysterical laughter in the face of our mutually fucked future and my own profoundly idiotic lie. I actually think the words Poor Ethan.

  Then he says, “If I lose this place they’re going to make me go to business school.” They meaning his family, and in a heartbeat the spore of sympathy I had for him twists itself inside out, grows to a thousand times its original size, becomes a blood-colored hate-mushroom big enough to block out the sky.

  “Ethan,” I say to him, “we’ve known each other a long time, and I’ve always helped you.”

  “That’s true, Brian. You’re a true friend. I love you.”

  “Do you want my help now?”

  “More than anything.”

  “Then put the motor oil down and listen.”

  Ethan does as I tell him. He reaches into his pocket, comes out with a blue pen, a notepad like the waitresses use, and his bag of coke. He pours the lines while I cut up a drinking straw. We get to work.

  HQ scrapes the company name off the glass on the front door and takes all our swag away: the T-shirts and the menus and the secret sauce recipe card and the vinyl banners and the napkins—if their logo’s on it it disappears. I couldn’t have asked for a more thorough de-shrooming than the one they give us. Ethan keeps the lease on the space itself.

  We’re closed for a month for the reboot. The sound system goes back to the plantation. The pinball machine follows close behind. Banquettes and bar stools reupholstered in leather. Pearlescent earth tones floor to ceiling, sconces wherever they’ll fit. We become “dazzlingly understated nouveau recherché”—that’s a quote from the local paper in their five-star review. And granted it’s the same schmuck who gave four stars to both Panera and Carrabba’s, but his is the voice that matters in this town, and anyway we snagged that elusive fifth star. It’s just us and Outback on the mountaintop, here in flatland.

  Our waitresses—and, holy shit, waiters!—wear black jeans and crisp black button-ups. We still favor young people, indeed hire back as many of the Melissa/Jessicas as will get down with the brave new vibe. Their friends don’t come in for lunch anymore—we’re not even open for lunch on weekdays—but sometimes their teachers turn up. The adjunct profs, that fraud gentry, save up all semester for a big night out, and we show them their idea of a classy time. The new menu’s littered with the word “artisanal” instead of the word “organic”—though obviously “organic” is on there, too. It’s mostly the same food as before, only served on ceramic plates the size of manhole covers at triple the price. The day we put the new sign up, Polina took a picture on her phone and texted it to her father. The place is called Sungold, duh.

  We still haven’t managed to find a black person willing to work with us but it’s something we’re interested in pursuing. Is it weird that we talk about it? That we agree? I understand that they—like women, right?—are not some homogenous body made up of interchangeable units any one of which might as well be any other and/or representative of the whole. That’s a pernicious cultural fantasy—words that still stick in my throat a bit when I use them, but the point is I do use them, even have some sense of what they mean. Anyway we love their music and think they’re cool and wish we knew some. One day one’s bound to walk in here—after all, isn’t that what Polina did?

  Ethan’s still the owner but he keeps his distance. We have a verbal agreement, a kind of off-the-books restraining order. I was going to make it a blood oath but didn’t want to mix my fluids with his. He’s still on thin ice with his family, but Sungold turns a profit so they’re provisionally impressed. The ice is thickening: going from something legitimately dangerous to something merely frozen to the core. If they’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, they’re going to be waiting a long time because Polina and I manage Sungold as a team and it’s a tight operation. No more on-the-clock hummers in the walk-in freezer. No more Captain Morgan going missing by the case. Nobody robs Ethan except for us, and we keep things slow and steady—the goose will lay golden eggs until the day his heart bursts or his liver turns to foie gras. Then I guess I’ll have to meet his mom.

  One Melissa/Jessica who did not come back to work for us is the one who helped me out of the mushroom suit, the one who showed an interest in my slimed physique, not to mention a rare enthusiasm for putting up with my shit. At Polina’s encouragement I called her and asked her to dinner. It was supposed to be chaste, a proper thank-you for having saved me from brain death, but you know how these things go. Her name turns out to be Kaylee Boyd, peach-colored all-American Dave Matthews fan, but beyond that rife with specific attributes and qualities of all kinds. For example, she studies environmental science, is working on a model to predict the rate at which our landlocked town will become beachfront property, then a water park, then a coral reef—though of course, she’s quick to qualify, coral will be a history lesson by that point, so something else will take over our drowned houses, or nothing will. That part’s harder to guess about. It’s all terrifying. I mostly tune it out.

  Here’s what it comes down to. Kaylee is a woman who looks like a photograph of a woman. A photograph you look at and go, Oh come on that’s not real. And you’d think that because of this, being with her would feel like being in one of those photographs, but it doesn’t. It feels . . . different, somehow, not like that at all.

  “So what does it feel like?” Polina asks me. It’s late. We’ve sent everyone home and are sitting at the bar, tired after a long night’s work but happy, relaxing in sconce light, drinking nightcaps of Ethan’s Macallan twelve-year while we finish up ripping him off. I’m not sure how to answer her question.

  “Normal, I guess. Or like, I don’t know, being alive.”

  A TALKING CURE

  My name is Lacey Anne Schmidt. My fiancé’s name—which I still haven’t decided whether I’ll
take or not—is as or more plain. He is Zachary Davis, black-haired and lanky with a little beer belly that pooches over the waist of his slacks. If I take his name I will be Lacey Anne Davis, or Lacey Anne Schmidt-Davis, though I think Davis-Schmidt sounds better, though I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to go. I mean in terms of the order of the names when a woman takes a man’s. Meanwhile there remains the problem of my first name. I can never decide if I hate “Lacey” because it’s so white trash or so country club, but one way or the other it sounds terribly unserious, and so when I publish it’s going to be as Anne Schmidt, or Anne Schmidt-Davis, which I think has a decent cadence to it, like Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick or Claude Lévi-Strauss.

  Forgive me if my references trend obscure. Zachary and I are both PhD candidates at UPenn. I’m New Media and he’s Comp Lit, which means, at the risk of totally overdetermining your reading of this story, that the common ground of our respective theoretical apparatuses starts and ends with Freud. Zachary’s dissertation is on ideations of Confederate masculinity in late twentieth-century Southern fiction, i.e., post Faulkner and O’Connor. He’s writing about Barry Hannah’s obsession with J. E. B. Stuart in Airships, and Padgett Powell’s with Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men. Also “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason, where the woman leaves the trucker after they visit the hallowed grounds, etc.—though the way things have been going these past few months, it’s not clear Zachary’s writing anything about anybody. He’s been completely blocked.

  We live together in a third-floor apartment near campus and are both ABD. We’ve been dating for about three years, and engaged for exactly seven weeks. It’s Friday night. We’re getting home—late—from a reception at the school followed by a few nightcaps with some of our fellow grad students. Both of us are drunk, and I’ve got this idea in my head that we should do our own version of the truth session from “Water Liars,” that Barry Hannah story where the husband and the wife tell each other about their sexual pasts.

  At first Zachary doesn’t want to, but I kind of stick it to him so he says, Okay, sure. So I get another set of nightcaps going and we start. But the thing of it is, even though we’re about the same age as the people in the story, that couple had been married for ten years already. What I mean is that they had plenty of—how to put this?—distance from what they were talking about. And of course the point of “Water Liars” is how the wife’s news sends the husband for a brutal loop anyway—distance nothing. Distance be damned.

  Zachary proposed to me in Locust Grove, Virginia, about four hours down from Philly. We were on a kind of vision quest for his project (the truth session hardly our first experiment with voodoo academia), visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm at Ellwood Manor—Jackson himself of course lying in Lexington in a cemetery that bears his name.

  I’d looked online and found a couple of wineries nearby in Spotsylvania and a place in town to stay. Not exactly two weeks in Paris, or even a long weekend in the Poconos, but it was something: what we could swing.

  The funny thing—well, one funny thing—about the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm is that it is not, technically, a grave anymore, and indeed it may never have been. Nobody’s sure. We’d read online that in 1998 the park service dug up the plot to install a piece of concrete to keep looters out, and when they did this they discovered that the legendary metal box containing the arm, the very thing they meant to protect, wasn’t there to be protected. But Zachary said this didn’t change his desire to see the site. If it was a fraud, he said, that was interesting, too, albeit in a different way.

  Forgive me one last digression, but my inner second-wave feminist thinks it’s obscene that I’ve spent this much time discussing my boyfriend’s—ahem, fiancé’s—work without mentioning my own. And who am I to say she’s wrong? So. My work concerns the appropriation of mythological and folk motifs for use in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. I buy high-level characters from burnt-out gamers, and these allow me access to the most remote realms of the virtual worlds without my having to spend thousands of hours building up experience points in a half dozen different games.

  Zachary played Spells of Evermore 3 with me once. I had a barbarian warrior and a wood elf druid, and I needed him to play the druid, backing me up while I fought this one particular dragon. His job was to alternately cast ensnaring vines on the monster and healing spells on me. So basically he had to press two buttons. But the dragon had these minions and one of them was a necromancer and things got out of hand, and I admit I may have overreacted when we both got killed, but that was because I knew it was going to be a fucking week of my life to get the lost experience points back when slaying the dragon hadn’t even been the goal in the first place. We were only killing him to get his eyes so we could go see some witch who supposedly had been modeled on Baba Yaga. Zachary said I was no fun to play with and I reminded him that the point of the game wasn’t to have fun, and that was the last time I asked him to take an active interest in my work.

  But getting back to our truth session. Because it’s not 1971 or whatever year it’s supposed to be in the Hannah story, we’re having a tough time finding stuff that the other person doesn’t already know. We know each other’s loss-of-virginity episodes and we know each other’s numbers. He knows about my abortion. I know he messed around with guys a few times in college. All very healthy and progressive, I’m sure, but the point is that before we know it we’ve run out of revelations from our pasts and have stumbled into the veritable present.

  So I admit that, yes, I sometimes fake with him. Not often, I’m quick to add, trying to be kind here and pulling it off, I think, though this is admittedly something I’ve been looking for a way to talk about.

  “Well, when was the last time?” He isn’t looking at me. He’s at the counter, fixing us fresh drinks. Gin and tonics with zests of lime, because even though we can joke knowingly about “the peculiar institution” and “the War of Northern Aggression” we are still people who live in Philadelphia with their citrus zester. Anyway, I give him the truthful answer about my faking: “Tuesday.”

  “I see.” His tone is relaxed. Casual introspection. If he’s hurt he hides it well. Or, also plausible, I’m too drunk to read him.

  “Your turn,” I say. It occurs to me that we’re doing our truth session backwards. In the story they have this great night out—it’s the guy’s birthday—and then they get into it the morning after, when they’re sober, after ditching a party and reaffirming their love. But it’s too late to offer this observation, with him already in the middle of talking about Bridget, the girl he dated before me. How it only lasted a few months but was super heavy while it did. I already know all this, I want to say to him. Well, here’s some news. Bridget used to be into some rough stuff—she liked to be choked and held down, tossed around. Your average rape fantasy, it sounds like. And he’s got his hands in the air, palms out, preemptive defense, saying how he didn’t even want to do it at first—refused to role-play the oppressor, was worried he might injure her, etc. But then he learned that simulating violence in a safe space can be a valid way of gaining psychological mastery over trauma. (One wonders what ol’ Bridget’s truth session might have sounded like.) Long story short, he came around.

  I’m wondering, Is this a real story, or is it more like his own roundabout way of asking for—Oh, but I shouldn’t be stupid. Besides, if he wants it, he’s going to have to say so, or else make a move. Not that I’m in a huge hurry to be gagged with my own underwear, but being pinned at the wrists and bent over the coffee table might make for a nice change of pace. What I won’t stand for, however, is this “I’m sending you a signal to make me the offer” shit. Of course, he’s gotten pretty good about asking for what he wants—which, by the way, I credit myself with having taught him because I remember what it was like when we first got together—so maybe this is just the drunken truth slopping out. Speaking of which.

  “I gave Evan Stanz a blow job,”
I say. Evan is Zachary’s best friend. They grew up together, and both did their undergrad at Wesleyan. Now Evan lives in Chicago. He works in real estate and on the weekends plays bass in a grunge nostalgia band. The first time Evan visited after we had started dating, he slept on Zachary’s couch for four nights. We’d been together about three months at the time.

  My fingers are drumming on the table. Zachary drains his drink. Would you believe that I did not engineer this whole conversation to lead up to betraying myself in this way? At least not consciously. But it’s worth stressing that even in retrospect my confession does not feel inevitable—it has taken us both by surprise.

  “That night was the first time I was ever really, like really mad at you,” I say, exponentially more amazed with myself every moment that words keep coming out of my mouth. “You remember how we fought? And I was thinking I was going to break up with you, that’s how mad I was, and—oh, fuck it, I wanted to.”

  “Were you trying to get caught?”

  “God, no. I waited until you were asleep. Evan was asleep, too. I had to wake him. I told him to be quiet, and that if he ever breathed a word of it I’d deny the whole thing. We didn’t fuck. He didn’t touch me at all. I did what I wanted to do, and then it was over.”

  “Did you swallow?” he asks, trying to do the ice-cold thing, though to sell it he’d have to be able to look me in the eye.

  “You’re taking this rather in stride,” I say. “And also, fuck you.”

  “Just tell me if you did.”

  “You’re being disgusting.”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to spit it on the floor, was I?”

  “Lacey Anne,” he says, and it’s like, Okay, so we’re done being hard-asses now.

  “If I had it back, I mean if I could do that night over—”

  “He told me.”