Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  “Excuse me?”

  “He told me.”

  “Told you.”

  “When I told him I was going to propose. He said he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t.”

  I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. Here I’ve been keeping this terrible secret close, nursing it with my guilt. And then it turns out that the boys have long since settled the matter among themselves. How nice for them.

  “Well, did he think I was good?” I ask.

  He ignores my question. We bask in our silence, maybe zone in on the green of the microwave display clock—if you squint hard you can make the LED quiver, the numbers swimming apart into fragments before your blurring vision, your watering eyes. I can hear cars idling at the light. Someone’s blasting dance music.

  Then he breaks the silence, says, “You want to know something funny?”

  “Something funny? Oh, yeah. I mean, you bet.”

  “Maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word. I don’t know, I never expected to say this, but since we’re talking I guess I might as well tell you that when you told me the thing about you and Evan—well, I mean when he told me the thing, but then, seriously, again when you said it just before—both times the first feeling I had wasn’t anger or hurt. I swear to God, Lacey Anne, it was straight-up jealousy. I was in love with him for a long time. The whole time we were growing up, I guess. I’d have done anything for him, I really would have, or with him, not that I ever tried, or I mean there was never any question of—but it’s like, if just once, you know, like if I could have ever put it out there and had to own it, maybe my whole life would have been different. I don’t know. And not that there’s anything wrong with my life now, but—well, it made me feel bad for that past version of myself, that’s all. That kid. He ached so fucking much.”

  “Baby,” I say, meaning it.

  He stands up and so I do, too, though I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be going. It’s as if I’m watching myself—watching us—from somewhere else, not like the God’s eye view from the ceiling but maybe like a pervert on the fire escape, peeping in. As Zachary rounds the table I grab my dress by the skirt and in one fluid but graceless motion pull it over my head and off my body. I ball it up and chuck it at him. He catches it and throws it down. We end up on the couch, tangled, neither one of us speaking but both of us thinking the same thing: Is this the spot where it happened? Is this?

  There are several competing theories about where Stonewall’s arm might be. Marauding Union men is the popular one, though considered unlikely by serious historians. It may have been stolen in the 1920s; there’s a whole school of thought about that. The notion I find most compelling postulates that the original marker was never meant to designate the exact burial plot but rather the field of battle where the injury was sustained. Everything else, says this theory, has been one long misunderstanding.

  At the winery we took the tour and then spent some time tasting. There was a Cabernet with a blackberry thing happening that I liked. We bought three bottles and asked the sommelier if he knew of a decent place in town to eat. Zachary would propose to me the next day beneath an oak on a green slope at noon, and I would of course say yes, and we would kiss and start ourselves, our lives, careening toward everything that I’ve already shared. But let’s stick for a minute with the night before the proposal. In our suite at the Red Roof Inn there was a little coffee maker by the sink. I took the two plastic cups out of their plastic packaging while Zachary opened one of our bottles. We shut off the overhead light, then turned on both bedside lamps and the shower. We left the bathroom door open and the bathroom light off. The water was warm, then all of a sudden too hot. I wanted to get it perfect. A little steam’s okay, but nothing scalding. We climbed in. Zachary worked the soap between my legs, exploring me as if for the first time, as if he didn’t already know me by heart. I reached back. He said, “Lacey Anne.” He loves to breathe my name when he’s inside me, and it is the only time that I genuinely enjoy hearing it said, because it’s like everything I love and hate about myself somehow comes together, and I feel exposed and completed, named and found.

  Which is a good line to end on, though it must be obvious by this point that neither of us is the type to leave well enough alone, so I may as well tell what happens next.

  He picks the boy out—a student from the 201 class he taught last semester. He says there were hints dropped, inklings. They’ve kept in touch.

  The boy, Blake, comes on a Wednesday. He knocks on our door even though we cracked it open for him when we buzzed him into the building. Zachary is sitting on the couch, watching something on TV he doesn’t care about. A sport. I’m checking the spaghetti sauce. It’s sauce, all right. “Nearly done,” I say as I turn toward the knocking, which has nudged the door fully open. He stands in the doorway, obviously nervous but trying hard not to show that he is. I do not try to hide that I’m sizing him up. He ought to know it. He’s taller than either of us, and somewhat bedraggled-looking in dirty white jeans and a pair of beat-up Converse All Stars. He wears a thin yellow T-shirt with a mud-colored corporate logo, a red bandana tied loose about his neck. His beard is patchy. He’s holding a six-pack of PBR in a plastic bodega bag with a black-eyed smiley face above the blue words THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. The smiley face is the same color as his T-shirt must have been when it was new.

  “Hi,” I say to Blake as I approach him. I open my arms and we briefly embrace. He smells clean and fresh, not like cigarettes. For some reason I’d thought of him as a smoker, which maybe is my way of saying, Kids these days. Zachary hustles over to join us, but I let the boy slip from my arms to his. A sort of handoff. I’m back at the stove. Let them have this moment, if they can wring a moment out of whatever is happening. I keep my back turned, one hand holding the wooden sauce spoon, stirring.

  The boys sit. I serve dinner. We drink ourselves comfortable. Together we move to the increasingly storied couch, undressing one another, but Blake can’t seem to get in the mood. Finally, he reaches down and eases Zachary’s head from between his pale legs, his flaccid penis shiny like a slug. “Hey, it’s okay,” he says to Zachary, as though he were the wiser of the two of them, the three of us. “Let me do you,” he says, but then instead of switching places with Zachary scoots over to the far end of the couch and draws his legs up under himself like a nesting animal. I reach out and take Zachary’s hand, pull him over to me. Blake watches us as though we were a reasonably compelling foreign film. He waits until we finish, then gets dressed and says good night.

  “It’s better like this,” Zachary says when we’re alone again.

  “I think you’re right,” I say and take him into my arms. As we rock slowly back and forth, heads on shoulders, I notice our reflection in the dark glass face of the TV. We look like we’re bobbing in a rowboat, on a lake or out to sea. It occurs to me to wonder: Is this what a marriage is? And then a related question: So what if it’s not?

  ADON OLAM

  Over the sixth grade holiday break—1993, this would have been, heading into ’94—my friend Isaac Adelman began to suspect that something was off about his twin brother, Jake. They were identical, but lately Jake had been getting short of breath when we played half-court in their front driveway, and when we went swimming—nothing special in South Florida in December—Jake wouldn’t race with us or have a diving contest or anything. “I’ll be judge,” he said, glum and defensive as he climbed onto the green raft and gave himself a push toward the shallow end of the pool.

  So Isaac and I saw who of the two of us could jump farther (me), and who could hold his breath the longest (me), and who could do the fastest lap, which was such a close call that we really did need Jake to judge for us, but Jake had fallen asleep. He was lying on his side on the raft, half curled up, with his eyes closed and mouth open, one arm across his face to block the sunlight, the other arm dangling in the water.

  The pediatrician took X-rays. A sarcoma was putting pressure on Jake’s left lun
g as well as his heart. Everything changed in the Adelman house after that. For example, the twins had always shared one huge room upstairs, but now Jake was to be moved to the first floor, down the hall from his parents and next door to Claudette, the housekeeper, in what had been Mr. Adelman’s home office. To offset the sickroom atmosphere, Mr. and Mrs. Adelman splurged on electronics and toys. They got a three-disc CD changer with speakers, a new TV and VCR for each of their rooms, and every game system you could think of—Super Nintendo, Neo Geo, Sega CD, Game Boys for the long hours in doctors’ waiting rooms. They had lava lamps and Nerf guns and remote-controlled cars.

  My mother encouraged me to spend time with the twins. They needed me, she said, to bring some cheer into the house and to offer my “moral support.” She said I made things feel more normal over there. And of course we would have offered to reciprocate, but Jake couldn’t go on sleepovers, and she wouldn’t want the poor sick boy to feel left out if just Isaac came over, besides which she imagined that Mrs. Adelman must not want to split the boys up more than they already were, what with their room situation and Jake’s having been pulled out of school.

  When I slept over we were allowed to stay up as late as we wanted playing video games and watching movies. If Jake had an appetite it was like a miracle. They’d have Claudette make anything he asked for. And there was always stuff to snack on—Fruit Roll-Ups and Kudos bars, fresh-made peanut butter oatmeal cookies and frozen yogurt. They had this big ceramic bowl—Mrs. Adelman had made it in a class she took—that sat on the breakfast bar and was always filled with clementine oranges. I would beg my mom to buy us some when she went to the store.

  Mr. and Mrs. Adelman were usually in bed by ten thirty, and it was never long after that before Claudette retired to her room to watch TV with her headphones on. By this point Jake would have fallen asleep during whatever movie we’d chosen after dinner. I’d nudge him awake and help him down to his room while Isaac set the timer on his digital stopwatch for fifteen minutes. We’d pass the time playing Street Fighter II Turbo. He always had to be Ryu, who wore a white karate suit and had a hurricane kick and shot energy blasts out of his hands. I liked Guile, the American special ops vet with camo pants and a flat top, but I could kick Isaac’s ass so fast with Guile that it wasn’t fun for either of us, so I’d usually hit random and let the computer decide, though if it made me be Chun-Li—the Chinese girl—then we had to reset. When the stopwatch beeped we’d peek down from the top of the stairs for one last security check, then shut Isaac’s bedroom door.

  When Mr. Adelman converted his office into a room for Jake, he’d moved some boxes into the front hall closet underneath the stairs. While most contained tax returns and business records, one had turned out to be full of dirty magazines. Isaac had grabbed a handful of these and stashed them in his closet, in the boxes of board games and the deep pockets of winter coats. Isaac alone got to choose which magazine we looked at and the pace at which the glossy pages turned. He liked to talk about the girls in the pictures, what they were doing and the guys they were doing it with and if we’d ever be like them. We compared which of us had a bigger thing, and more hair around it, and who could shoot more stuff, which was pretty much impossible to determine as long as we were shooting into socks from the laundry since the point of the sock was to absorb the stuff, so we stopped using them and did it into each other’s hands instead but it was still hard to tell. He tried to make it seem like these were just more games we were playing, friendly competitions like pool jumps or Street Fighter rounds or whatever. When Jake got better, Isaac said, we could all play.

  I wanted to tell him to shut up about it, but I didn’t know how. (Plus I knew if I made him angry he might take the magazine away.) I wished that he had gotten sick instead of his brother, who was bald now, thinner every time I saw him, and wheezing in his sleep so bad that when the house settled at night you could hear it from all the way upstairs.

  Jake’s funeral was the first one I ever went to. It was an overcast April morning, and I remember how the family lined up to receive the mourners: his mom’s mascara running, Isaac flanked by his grandparents and pallid in a suit he’d half outgrown, eyes glued to his shoes. And Mr. Adelman, how impossibly tall he seemed, leaning down and in close to shake my hand. I remember his big wet eyes and how I avoided them, terrified his grief might somehow allow him to read my secrets if I met his gaze. I don’t remember the service, only afterward, standing by the open grave, and even that I don’t think I remember the way it happened. There must have been a crowd gathered, a rabbi, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, but my mind seems to have erased all these things, or else never recorded them in the first place. I can see the green mat they put out, smell the fresh earth, feel the humidity of the day—all of it eerily clear in my mind—but I can also see myself alone beside the gravestone, which makes no sense, because as Jews we don’t unveil the stone until a year after the burial—there’s this whole other ceremony for it—besides which, if it had really been the way I remember, wouldn’t the memory be of the view looking out through my own eyes instead of a picture of myself standing there?

  Isaac had a new suit, a blue one that fit him, for our sixth grade graduation, which was held in the library, a spacious open-plan building with a tall peaked roof. They pushed all the rolling shelves against the walls and brought a makeshift stage in and folding chairs for the parents. Our principal gave a speech, and so did Dr. Joshua Mizzum, a local orthodontist who was running for school board. After that the chorus sang “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” and then the principal came back up to read all of our names. They included Jake’s with the rest of the class, and he got a standing ovation. Boys in pulled-loose ties clapped and cheered while girls who had never spoken a word to either twin dabbed away fat jewel-like tears.

  The Adelmans went away that summer, and the next year Isaac’s parents enrolled him in a private school. He took a bus and wore a uniform and had all new friends. My mother never pressed me about it. I think that as far as she was concerned I had done my job.

  This was a lonely time for me. Our house was on a lake and there was this one part, down our block a ways, where the road went over a canal. I liked to spend time there. I’d hop a low fence, scuttle down eight or maybe ten feet of embankment, not too steep. A skinny oak stood at the shoreline, leaning out over the smooth, still water so a mirror tree hung in the lake, its limbs like arms reaching down into a dull sky at the bottom of the world. Instead of going to the tree, you turned around and then could duck into the culvert. It had a concrete ledge big enough to sit comfortably on. The cars going by on the road above made a low pervasive thrum, and if you raised your voice you got killer echo. As near as I could tell nobody else knew about it. I’d go down there with comic books, or a box of matches and a few of my old G.I. Joes, even my homework if I was bored enough.

  Sometimes I would sing down there, songs by bands I liked or older stuff off records my mom played or even songs they’d made us learn in Hebrew school—anything I knew by heart. I sang “Adon Olam,” which was my favorite Jewish song, mostly because of its melody, which was like, I don’t know, swaying or something, but also it had these, like, zigzags in it. I mean it felt powerful somehow, significant, almost haunted—if you can be haunted in a good way. I liked to sing as loudly as I could and go slow, stretch each line out so the echoes piled up on each other and I would keep my eyes shut tight and feel like I was disappearing into the noise, or else becoming it. Vortex, I thought. Wormhole. Black hole. Vacuum. B’terem kol. In English this meant “before the creation,” or “before form.” What the song was saying was that God is God of everything even when there’s nothing to be God of. Which was exactly how I felt when I was down there: a God of nothing.

  For my sixteenth birthday my mom gave me her ’91 Buick Skylark, free and clear, having leased herself a certified preowned Volvo. But she warned me that she was only paying for gas until the end of the school year, which meant I was going to need a
summer job. Which is how Isaac Adelman came back into my life again, in the summer of 1998, at a day camp run out of the local JCC, where we’d both applied to be junior counselors and had been assigned to work together.

  Our senior counselor was three years older, a college girl home for the summer. Alana Shekhin had gone to my high school but had been a senior when I was a freshman. I knew she’d been in Honor Society and run with the J.A.P. crowd, into which she’d blended well enough to have never figured in any but my most depraved locker room fantasies. But the year away had been good to her. She’d let her hair grow past her shoulders and had a silver nose stud that the camp wouldn’t let her wear while she was on duty. I would see her at the end of the day, sitting in her car, putting it back in before she turned the ignition. She had a flat stomach but a thick waist, strong legs topped by a world-class fat Jewish ass crammed into a small pair of khaki shorts. She wore a gold chai charm on a thin gold chain.

  Isaac wore a gold chain, too, but a thicker one, with no charm. He had a fade in his hair, baggy basketball shorts low on his hips, and spotless white Nike Airs. I wore whatever. Brown or beige cargoes, a pair of scuffed Vans or my old black Airwalks with the little carrot insignia stitched on the tongue. I’d had them since eighth grade and considered them my lucky sneakers, despite being vaguely ashamed that they still fit, though I told myself they would have been unbearably tight if they hadn’t been so worn in.

  And all of us in our requisite camp T-shirts, pale-yellow fabric with blue text and graphics: an anthropomorphic Star of David grinned and made jazz hands below a clip-art banner that read, CAMP KLIPPOT KETANOT 5758 / 1998!!!!

  Our campers were six years old, or would be soon. Isaac’s mission seemed to be to avoid interacting with them at all costs. He didn’t craft; he didn’t help with bathroom runs or changing the kids for swim. Alana took the ten girls and I took the eight boys and we split for our separate locker rooms while Isaac stood poolside, checking his pager. Alana and I made up splashing games for the kids to play, encouraged them to dunk their heads underwater, kept them amused and alive.