Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  Scott writes a check for three thousand dollars, leaves the “to” line blank, and folds it into his wallet. If he is ever stopped on the street by the dog’s original owners, he will look them in the eye, tell them the plain truth, and offer the check. He will put his palms up and let the leash go free. It will be their choice: the dog or the money. And no matter what happens next, he will at least know Yreka’s true name.

  Scott and Yreka stop by the coffee shop on their way to Dolores Park, where people lay out blankets on the sunward slope of the great green hill. Olivia gives him a free coffee and a quick kiss on the mouth, then kneels down to ruff up Yreka’s fur and kiss her on her cold black nose. She says that she’ll be off in an hour and will meet up with them. She disappears into the employee restroom to wash her hands before she makes another drink.

  At the vet’s office, Scott writes on the form that Yreka is a recent adoptee, that he found her wandering with no collar on Jack Kerouac Alley next to City Lights and brought her home. The vet is happy to report that Yreka is worm free. Also, she’s pregnant. He gives Scott a brochure about what to expect. When Scott gets home, he gives Yreka two extra Beggin’ Strips, fishes the unaddressed check from his wallet, and tears it in half. He halves the halves, then repeats this procedure until tiny pale-blue squares burst from his fingers like confetti.

  When Scott first got to town, and even after he decided to stay, he held off on getting in touch with any of his contacts in the music scene. But now that he’s ready to play shows again it only takes a couple of emails to line up a gig. He’s got his headphones plugged into his laptop and his iTunes on shuffle while Yreka snoozes on the couch beside him. He strokes her blond zeppelin belly with one hand while cruising Facebook with the other. He one-hand-types Ellen’s full name into the search bar, and when her profile pops up he is astonished to see that she never unfriended him.

  Probably she forgot, is all, or else the thought never crossed her mind. Ellen was always an intermittent Facebooker. She isn’t one of those people who feel the need to broadcast all the excruciating minutiae of their lives. He reads through her old updates, starting with the day after he left and working his way back to the present. There’s not much there: a handful of promo posts for the film festival in the weeks leading up to it, a couple of embedded music videos, a link to a Times op-ed about peak oil, a little gallery of photographs from the festival’s after-party. He lingers on a snapshot of Ellen, drink-flushed and grinning, her arm around a bemused-looking Gus Van Sant. Her most recent status update is from last week, and all it says is “Fffrrryyydddaaayyy.” Five people “like” this—Percy Tomlinson, Kat Stokes, Rachel Duncan, Ellen’s great-aunt Marlene, and Danny Kramer, the guy who sent Scott the text message warning him never to even think Ellen’s name ever again. Scott clicks on Danny’s name and is unsurprised to see that Danny did unfriend him, which means the only parts of Danny’s profile he can see are those few tidbits that he leaves public:

  Danny Kramer

  Networks: Schmall College; Edgewater High School,

  Orlando, FL

  Music: Rilo Kiley, Wilco, Weezer (only Pinkerton—obvs), Neutral Milk Hotel, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Velvet Underground

  Employers: Not if I can help it.

  Danny’s profile picture is a close-up of him and Ellen in a staring contest, eyes wide open and nose tips touching, in what Scott believes to be the master bedroom of the house he fled.

  Scott’s DJ set is totally killer and he knows it. Sweat streaming down his bald head, the firm clamp of the headphones over his ears—he’s entering that zone where he’s both more and less himself than any other time: he is everyone dancing in the whole hot venue, and he’s the huge amps hung on shining chains from the black ceiling, and he’s the thunder being flung from the amps’ blind mesh faces. He’s all of it at once but also none of it—beautifully, perfectly, inexhaustibly nothing at all.

  Olivia comes over to him while he’s packing up, a rocks glass in each hand.

  “Nice set,” she says, grinning. She nods at his equipment case. “Nice gear, too.”

  “Medical grade,” he says, giving her the same nod back. “One of those for me?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Oh, I’ll let you know,” she says, and then they’re both laughing. Then they’ve finished their Jamesons, and he’s loading his gear into his trunk while she orders them another round. When the next DJ goes on, Scott pulls Olivia out onto the dance floor. The whole rest of the perfect night the lightning of success is wild in him—through the next set and last call and the smeary, invincible drunk drive home. Then they’re somehow in his room, and here’s his tall girlfriend on her naked knees as he explodes across her tits and chin.

  They lie on their backs, breathing deep and slow in the hot dark. Scott realizes that the universe is ungoverned: there is no law for him to be an outlaw from. He says to Olivia that he’s going to take the dog out for a walk. She tells him not to be long. He throws on the shirt that he was wearing earlier and a pair of jeans without underwear. He enters the living room on watery legs and flips the light on. Yreka, surprised by the sudden burst of light, whimpers pitifully but does not pause in her effort to eat her newest whelp free from its amniotic sac. If she doesn’t hurry, it will drown in there, and the next one is already on its way—a shiny purple oval like an enormous cold-medicine capsule or a small translucent dinosaur egg inching out of her distended vulva. The couch, of course, is ruined. Inside the emergent sac is something like a bald rabbit trapped in gelatin: squirming, blind, awake.

  Olivia, naked in the bedroom doorway, draws a sharp breath when she sees why Scott is frozen. She sidles up behind him, her belly against his back, and slides her arms around his waist—thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. Yreka licks her chops, then grabs her youngest pup by the scruff. She plunks it over by its brothers and sisters, four—now five—wrinkled pink things mewling in residual slime. By the time it’s over, Yreka has whelped nine puppies. Scott knows from the brochure to expect to lose a few of these, but there’s no apparent runt, and by the evening of the next day it’s clear that the whole litter will survive. Life becomes a blur of tiny bodies in harmless ceaseless collision. Mouths yip and teeth nip and new claws emerge and scratch. The living room is transformed into a nursery, and the whole apartment stinks of shit and newspapers. Yreka’s teats bleed from the rough, unending attention: her blond muzzle shows its first threads of white, tired pride now inscribed in her watery wise brown eyes. Scott loves the puppies but doesn’t know how he would have managed without Olivia. She’s over at his place so often he winds up making her a key.

  MIKE’S SONG

  Mike Beckstein’s in his kitchen, sitting at the small round table, drinking a glass of organic, pulp-free orange juice, idly regarding but not precisely looking at his MacBook. Ken and Angie, his grown son and daughter, are in their respective childhood bedrooms, going through their closets and drawers. It’s the last week of December—and good riddance, as far as Mike’s concerned; ’09 was a shit year. Come spring he and Miranda are selling the place—thus completing, finally, their divorce settlement—so the kids have to decide what’s important enough to keep and what can be thrown away, which so far seems to be pretty much everything.

  There are three tabs open in Firefox and a to-do list in an unsaved Word doc. Behind those windows, and therefore at the moment entirely hidden from view, his desktop wallpaper is a photo from the 2007 Masters of himself with defending champ Phil Mickelson—who later that same day would surprise everyone by blowing his opening rounds and nearly getting cut.

  Ken, shouting down the hallway: “Why does every trip down memory lane seem to end at the city dump?”

  Angie, calling back to her brother: “Maybe if American childhood consisted of more than collecting every last Beanie Baby and fucking baseball card . . .” This comment not explicitly a dig at Mike—though not explicitly not a dig either—just the words
of a hard-nosed progressive reduced by present circumstance to her inner pissed-off teen. And it’s true that the only thing the kids remember about most of this stuff is buying it: the jolt of commercial desire followed by the soft shock of success as the parental wallet opened—and then the getting bored. A long day of Internet price checking—Mike’s job, hence the tabs and list—has yielded little. All this stuff really is junk: the small black-eyed bears forlorn in their Ziploc baggies; a Mike Piazza rookie in a plastic screw case; all five installments of DC Comics’s “limited edition” Zero Hour series, each issue in its own polymer sleeve with white cardboard backer. The complete set, mint condition, on eBay right now, is going for ten bucks. Now the Piazza card, on the other hand, might have been worth some real cash if it had been mint—and a Bowman instead of a Fleer, but what can you do? Not like they need the money. But it would’ve been—what? Validating, somehow, and a nice surprise if even one of these things had paid out.

  Anyway, it’s about time to knock off and hit the road. They’ve got tickets to go see the kids’ favorite group, the Phish, play the first of four concerts at the Miami Arena—technically American Airlines Arena now, but Mike prefers the old name, just as he’ll always think of the stadium where the Dolphins play as Joe Robbie, not Pro Player or Sun Life or whoever owns the naming rights for next year.

  Angie—who lives in Brooklyn—insists that she be the one to drive. “Gotta get the practice when I can,” she says, and Mike could make this into a thing about how if she came home to visit more she would have more chances, etc., but that’s one conversation he doesn’t want to get into without an exit strategy, besides which she’s not wrong about the practice thing, so here he is riding shotgun in his own champagne-colored Saab.

  Ken says he doesn’t mind sitting in back.

  Mike, catching a glimpse of himself in the side-view mirror, stops to take a good long look: close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair—well, mostly salt these days, but still thick, and wavy if he’d ever let it grow out; nose getting a little bulbous, old-man-ly; not too many lines on his face at least, except around his eyes or when he smiles wide, a rare enough occurrence; the eyes themselves pale blue and chilly, almost alien, exuding calm power. Self-assurance. A self-made man. A wealthy man. A real estate lawyer, B.S.D. at a premier firm, with two grown children who have largely forgiven what he did to their mother, wearing a two-hundred-dollar knit pullover with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, a modest gold link bracelet on the wrist of one hairy well-toned arm.

  This used to be an open neighborhood, but a couple years ago the community board got a measure through the city council to wall it off and put up a guard gate—inconvenient, but great for property values—which means there’s only one way in and out, which means that Angie will have to drive past the old Rosen house, which happens to be on the street where the gate is. Mike himself drives past it every day, so it’s no big deal to him. But the kids? They were fifteen and sixteen when Brad—a neighborhood boy, Ken was friendly with him—cut his own throat in his backyard with a kitchen knife. There was more to it than that, but the details are vague to Mike now. An article in the Herald had speculated about a “black magic” angle, that the kid had been attempting some kind of heavy metal voodoo Satanist—well, he doesn’t remember what the claims were, and anyway that’s all they ever were: Claims. Rumors. Busybody chatter. Some hack columnist clawing his way onto A1. One line from the piece that’s always stuck with Mike: “A stunning tragedy that has shaken this close-knit, well-off community to its core.” Not to suggest that Mike thinks money can stop bad things from happening, but in his heart of hearts he might believe it should.

  Ken is twenty-five now; Angie’s twenty-six. They’re what in the old days were called Irish twins—eleven months between them, though they were a grade apart all through school, which Mike believes was for the best. Their mother was less sure. Where Mike always feared the kids in competition, Miranda saw lost opportunities for camaraderie. Doing their homework together, standing up for each other. All water under the bridge now, ancient history, dust in the wind—Mike tries to think of another cliché and can’t. No matter, point’s made, and all that stuff about Brad Rosen is no less ancient, no less blown away.

  “So you guys psyched for the Phish?” Mike asks.

  “It’s ‘Phish,’ Dad, not ‘the Phish.’” That’s Angie chiding him. How many years have they been correcting him about this and it still won’t stick?

  “He does it just to bug you,” Ken says from the backseat. Mike smiles and shrugs noncommittally. It’s not true, what Ken said, but he likes the idea. Ken and Angie love their Phish like they love few other things in this world. He likes them himself, well enough anyway, not that he ever plays their music at home. What he likes is seeing his kids together, enjoying each other’s company, sharing a common interest—all that hokey shit that when you get right down to it really and truly is what it’s all about. Family time’s not been easy to come by of late. Mike knows he’s not blameless, as far as that goes, but he also doesn’t blame himself for taking what he can get—these primo tickets, for example, the way he dangled them out before his kids like fruit. They spent Thanksgiving with their mother in Tampa so they’d be free to spend New Year’s week with him.

  They’re passing the house now, though the Rosens themselves haven’t lived there in—he isn’t sure of that either, but let’s say nine years. Nobody says anything but the kids’ heads both turn so Mike looks, too, though at first he’s looking at them looking rather than at the house itself. The living room curtains are open and the lights are on. People sitting at a table in the dining room, two adults and two kids: a girl who might be seven and a bibbed toddler wriggling in a booster seat. Through a doorway on the right side of the dining room you can see into the kitchen with its small round table. It occurs to Mike that the floor plan of the Rosen house is a mirror image of his own house. Which is itself truly nothing special since every house in the neighborhood is one of four designs (eight with the reversed versions included) but still—to have never noticed such a thing before.

  “Do you think they know about what happened?” Ken asks.

  “Jesus Christ,” Angie says. “Why would you even ask that?”

  “I’m sure it came up when they were negotiating, if not sooner,” Mike says. He’s about to start ballparking what it probably cost the Rosens, in terms of resale value, when Angie says, “Please, for fuck’s sake, can we just, like, not?”

  She slows toward the guard gate, not quite needing to come to a complete stop before the sensor reads the beige plastic card clipped to the sun visor. The gate arm—a white plank of wood striped with orange reflective tape—eases itself skyward and they coast on through. Then it’s a quick right onto the I-95 overpass, then the loop-around on-ramp for the southbound lanes. In the car there’s no noise but the white rush of the air conditioner and the thrum of their wheels on the road.

  “Hey, so why don’t we put some tunes on?” Mike says. The sooner this silence is broken, he feels, the better. Ken reaches through the space between the front seats and plugs a thin black cord into a jack on the dashboard. Now he can DJ off his iPhone. Mike pays both kids’ phone bills because it’s a better value, he says, for them to all be on a family plan. Angie used to insist on sending Mike a check every month for her share, but he never cashed them and eventually she stopped.

  “Here’s a great version of my song from ’98,” Ken says, stringy hair falling in his face as he stares at the glowing rectangle, scrolling through MP3s with a swerve of his thumb. “They’re gonna play it tonight—second set opener, I can feel it.”

  “Nah, they’ll save it for New Year’s Eve,” Angie says.

  “Could be both,” Ken says, “but tonight for sure.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Angie’s getting exasperated; when it comes to her brother, it doesn’t take a lot.

  “Sister, I can feel it in my bones.”

  “What makes it ‘your s
ong,’ Ken?” Mike interjects, hoping to head off this argument before it can get going.

  “Not ‘my,’ Dad,” Angie says, replying on her brother’s behalf. “‘Mike’s.’ It’s called ‘Mike’s Song.’ So I guess it’s yours if it’s anybody’s.” She laughs.

  “Well, yours and Mike Gordon’s,” Ken adds. Mike knows enough to know that Mike Gordon is the bass player. He could ask for more details but doesn’t want a full-blown history lesson. When Ken gets going about the Phish, forget it.

  “I guess we’ll have to share then,” Mike says, forcing a laugh of his own. He hates when he’s wrong about things. Ken hits the play button and music fills the car. Mike recognizes the little signature of notes that kicks the song off—he just never knew its name before and hadn’t thought to ask. It’s six o’clock on a weeknight but all the traffic’s headed in the other direction. Already dark out. They’re making great time.

  He takes his own phone out of his pocket and knocks out a quick text to Lori—“Thinking of you, cannot wait until nye, xo”—but then he doesn’t send it, instead goes back and changes “Thinking” to “thinkin”; “cannot” to “cant,” though the autocorrect grants him the apostrophe; “you” to “u”; and finally, in place of the “xo,” an animated smiley face that will wink at her when she opens the message. Ken and Angie are going back on the thirty-first for the New Year’s Eve show; Lori and Mike, who haven’t seen each other much this week, are going to spend the night alone. He’s got a bottle of Rías Baixas that’s going to be perfect with the steak she’s planning to make them. Music on the stereo, the countdown on the living room TV.

  “Who you talking to, Dad?” Angie asks.

  “Just Barry,” Mike says.

  “Oh.”