Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

Barry Stern’s another rainmaker at the firm and at this point Mike’s oldest, closest friend. He’s someone about whom Angie will have no further questions, especially since he’s currently going through a nasty divorce himself, which she will definitely not want to hear about, or else has already heard about from their mother, who would have given Christina’s version, not that Mike’s got anything to say in his friend’s defense. Barry was always a fuck-around, but then he started getting reckless, and since having been kicked out of the house he’s been on an almost nihilistic tear—secretaries, summer associates, maybe one of the interns (Mike isn’t certain and doesn’t want to know); he’s going to get the shit kicked or sued out of him one of these days, maybe both. Not that anyone else would see it this way, but compared to Barry, Mike’s been practically a saint. He rarely stepped out on Miranda, and when he did it was only ever with professionals. You’re in town somewhere a few days on business, let’s say, and you’ve been given a number by someone you trust. You call the number and that’s that. Or you’re sitting at a titty bar and the dancer leans in close and whispers that she’s about to get off her shift. He was safe and discreet about all of it. This thing with Lori was a total surprise.

  The kids know Lori exists but they haven’t met her. A picture of her on the fridge has gone thus far unremarked. He thought about inviting her out tonight but wasn’t sure how they would have reacted to the proposal, and his instinct said to let things lie for the time being, besides which Lori didn’t want to see Phish, though that hasn’t stopped her from acting hurt about being, quote, “left out.” “I’m sure we’d have tons in common,” she’d said of his children. “Being the same age and all.” Which isn’t true—Lori’s almost thirty-two—but close enough to make Mike certain that delaying introductions was the right move. One ancillary benefit of this plan is he’ll spare himself seeing whatever shit shape Ken’s bound to be in by the time the New Year’s concert lets out. Another good reason for letting Angie get her driving practice in tonight.

  Angie. He looks at his daughter, appraising: she was a blond baby, now a chestnut-haired woman with his chilly eyes—green, like her mother’s, but still, indubitably, his. Sturdy close eyebrows, thin lips, no makeup, a sharpness to her jawline that makes her face seem to taper toward an almost heart-like chin. A beautiful woman in black jeans and a pale-yellow T-shirt, her slender fingers drumming the steering wheel, her face flashing in and out of shadow as they fly through the night.

  She was always the precocious one, a pain in the ass sometimes but easy to be proud of. Great grades in school even when she was in her “rebellious” phase, partial scholarship to NYU, internships every summer; always in a rush to get her life started, to be the best. She works for a feminist nonprofit—something like Emily’s List but not Emily’s List—urging rich old Democrat ladies to support city council and statehouse candidates. When Mike and Miranda wanted to see her they’d go to New York, which wasn’t a bad arrangement by any means: breeze in, try out whichever new hotel Mike had been hearing about, museum and a Mets game, Broadway show if there was anything decent playing, hugs and kisses and a town car back to JFK. Which is still pretty much how the visits go, come to think of it, only Angie hasn’t invited him in a while, and the next time he goes it will probably be alone.

  Ken’s had a more difficult time than his sister in terms of, let’s say, finding himself, and even that’s a charitable way of putting it—but why shouldn’t Mike show his own kid some charity? He’s rocking out in the backseat, head bopping, eyes closed, hollow-cheeked and vaguely horsey with a weak goatee. Faded red corduroys and a blue T-shirt commemorating some other Phish concert he went to six years ago. A hemp necklace strung with a single ceramic bead the color of river mud. Ken’s a guitar player, and quite gifted, which Mike’s not saying merely as the boy’s father but rather as a man who prides himself on knowing shit from Shinola. When Ken finished high school he stayed right on living at home, enrolled at Miami-Dade Community College, worked part-time at a restaurant in the mall. Turned out he didn’t like restaurant work much, or community college, so the next year he transferred up to FSU, which it turned out he didn’t like either, though he still lives in Tallahassee; when pressed he says he’ll go back to school sooner or later, “when the time’s right.” Meanwhile he seems to be doing okay living off his music (plus a not-inconsiderable monthly supplement from Mike), playing at bars by the college and at house parties, jamming on the side with a couple guys who tour with George Clinton. He’s never met Clinton himself but says there’s been some talk that if a spot ever opens up he’d almost definitely get asked to audition. Anyway, he’s still finding himself.

  Mike envies musicians, and has always talked about trying to learn, but he’s always sort of known he’d never do it, and indeed he never has, which may explain why he cuts his son so much slack to be a slacker with—because he would rather view himself as indulgent than jealous. Mike knew Ken would come for the holidays. And knows that he’ll stay longer than originally planned, in no rush to make the long drive back upstate, grateful for access to a stocked fridge and free laundry. Angie, on the other hand—well, Mike doubts she’d even be here if not for the concerts. She’s leaving on New Year’s Day, the earliest flight she could get. So maybe he’ll introduce Lori to Ken next week at some point, like a test case, and if that goes well then Ken can sort of help soften his sister up about the whole situation and maybe next time it can be all of them together. If nothing else, the band’s bound to come through town again.

  Which is funny, when Mike thinks about it, because when Angie was younger she hated the Phish like they were poison, dog shit, lepers, the scum of the earth. He’d forgotten about this but now, in the car, he remembers. The kids used to fight about music like it was some kind of religious schism. Which in truth is probably exactly what it seemed like from their perspectives at the time, Mike realizes, remembering a screaming match he once had with his father about a Jimi Hendrix record. Kids! Mike remembers Angie and her fat friend—what was her name?—the miserable girl who used to be over at the house all the time playing records by that Marilyn Manson, teaching Angie to wear fishnets and powder her face pale so she looked like a dead hooker—Dawn! Dawn was the fat girl’s name. Angie and Dawn used to cover their ears and scowl whenever Ken put his “hippie” music on. They’d run shrieking across the house to Angie’s room and slam the door. God how Mike had hated Marilyn shit-ass Manson. Would’ve liked to ban all that crap from his house, and probably would have, only Miranda believed in letting kids test boundaries, express themselves, whatever. Whatever the fuck Miranda had believed. But time heals all wounds, doesn’t it? Nobody thinks about Marilyn shit-ass Manson anymore, while Hendrix is still very much a god. Ken says the Phish sometimes cover “Bold as Love” in their encore. Mike’s got his fingers crossed.

  Mike is about to ask Angie whatever happened with Dawn, but then thinks better of it. He seems to remember that the friendship ended abruptly—one day Dawn was a fixture in Angie’s life and then one day she wasn’t, and if he ever asked about it at the time he was surely rewarded with rolled eyes and frosty silence. Teenagers. And come to think of it, wasn’t Brad Rosen sometimes hanging around too in those days? Mike doesn’t remember the boy so much as he does his own annoyance, still visceral even at this late remove, at coming home from a punishing day at the office to a house full of other people’s kids. Miranda on the phone with the pizza guy, shrugging her shoulders as in, What can you do? Then one day Brad Rosen up and kills himself and Dawn stops coming around.

  Angie eases the Saab into the exit lane. They pass below the monorail track, looking for a decent place to park. There’s something ominous about downtown Miami, an abandoned feeling even on streets where the city’s renaissance (Angie calls it “gentrification”) is in full swing. Not that this, where they are now, is one of those streets. Nobody’s on the sidewalk; a streetlight’s out. All the stores have Spanish signage and their metal gates down. Angie sees an open
spot but Mike says to keep going.

  They end up paying twenty-eight dollars to park in the garage at the Bayside Mall, conveniently adjacent to the arena, though Ken says they’ve got to “scope the lot scene” before they go inside.

  Grilled cheese and veggie burritos cooking up on portable griddles set on truck beds and station wagon gates. Dread-headed guys in hoodies all over the place; Ken says half of them are cops. He’s on the lookout for a friend of his—this guy Adam from their high school, doesn’t Angie remember, he was in her grade—still nothing? Oh well.

  A minute later a voice says, “Hey, whoa, meet the Becksteins!”

  “Adam! Dude!” Ken and the guy embrace. Mike and Angie watch. Adam gives Angie a quick hug during which her arms remain firmly at her sides; then he shakes Mike’s hand. The kid’s wearing brown cargo shorts and skateboard shoes and an old holey T-shirt that identifies him as a staff member of a JCC youth camp in the summer of 1998, the same year as the “Mike’s Song” they listened to in the car, which Ken—staunch believer in omens—will certainly take for a promising sign if he notices.

  “Hey, we’ll be right back,” Ken says. “Adam’s got some, uh, bootlegs in his car I want to see.”

  “Right,” Angie says. “We’ll be over there.” She points down the row of parked cars to where two guys with guitars and a girl with a tambourine are giving an impromptu performance, playing acoustic covers of songs they’re hoping to hear tonight. Mike and Angie stand near enough to hear them but not so close as to make eye contact, perchance to be obliged to throw a bill into the guitar case open like a mouth at the players’ feet. Mike taps his own foot in time with the music, steals a glance at his phone.

  Should he send Lori another message? He’d like to. But how many sweet nothings should you have to whisper before you get one back? He puts the phone away. It hasn’t been that long. Better to play it cool. Get it together, Mike, you fucking pussy. That’s what Barry would say.

  Ken comes back empty-handed.

  “Nothing you liked?” Mike asks. At first his son doesn’t seem to have understood the question, but then he snaps to something like attention.

  “Oh yeah, well, I heard all those shows before.”

  Angie guffaws. Everyone in the lot seems to be selling something: stickers, T-shirts, necklaces, glass pipes packed in custom foam cases or laid out loose on black cloths in the dirt. They can hear the hiss of a nitrous tank somewhere nearby but out of sight. A wide-eyed girl with hairy armpits and acne around her mouth walks past them, mumbling in singsong, “Goo balls, goo balls.”

  Ken looks at his family. “I’d split one,” he says, in a tone perfectly calibrated to make it unclear which one of them he’s talking to or whether he’s even serious.

  “Your friend didn’t want to walk in with us?” Angie asks.

  “He doesn’t have a ticket.”

  “No ticket? Gee, then what’s he doing here?”

  “Waiting for a miracle, I guess.”

  They leave the lot and head inside, make their way through the bottleneck at security, then get in an all-things-considered-not-too-terribly-bad line to buy foamy beers that cost eleven dollars apiece. Their seats are down on the floor, twenty rows back from the stage. You wouldn’t believe what these tickets cost. And the ones for New Year’s Eve? Forget it. A roar sweeps the audience as the house lights go down.

  They open with a song Mike recognizes but can’t name. It’s got slowish verses that build toward this quasi-anthemic chorus that the whole crowd shouts along with. Ken produces a joint from somewhere on his person, lights it, puffs twice, then offers it to his sister. Mike is determined to be unsurprised no matter what his daughter does, but he doesn’t try to hide his curiosity—he’s staring at her, waiting to see. She only takes one toke, but it’s a good toke, then offers the joint to Mike. She’s holding her hand out but avoiding looking him in the eye—apparently unsure herself about what reaction to expect, but Mike made his decision about this earlier and so takes it without hesitation. Miranda will shit fire if she ever finds out—which fact he will remind his kids of, if and when he ever feels the need to play a card. Mike makes sure his toke is as long as his daughter’s. He hacks into his fist, then tokes again.

  Songs come and go. One opens with this long, sinuous guitar part that feels like walking through a curving tunnel and suspecting that the trail is doubling back on itself but not being sure. Then in a later part of the same song—he thinks it’s the same song, at any rate—there are these intervals where the band stops playing for two beats while the whole audience does these handclaps and then there’s this kind of chanting-wailing part—who knows what babble the lyrics are?—but then the lead singer’s voice is suddenly clear as a bell and he’s asking, hardly singing now, more like shouting, “Was it for this my life I sought?” and twenty-some-odd thousand people shout back at him, “Maybe so and maybe not!” Mike watches Ken, fist pumping in rhythm with the chant, screaming with what seems to be conviction. Mike can’t remember the last time he saw his son so excited about anything. Figures that the one thing that does it for him would be a declaration of existential uncertainty.

  The guitar solo takes off like a bird, no, like a flock of birds, and Mike’s mind is adrift in the music, then away from it, the remainder of the set passing by as he thinks about a leather couch he saw at West Elm that he’s going to get for the condo he’s going to get after he unloads the house. Lori went with him and helped pick it out—the couch that is, though she’s also gone with him to see a number of properties. He’s almost made up his mind. Lori. Her downy face, wet eyes the same warm brown as the roots she lets show beneath her shock-blond hair. She likes smock blouses and matchstick jeans. Her favorite color is aquamarine. They met at a party on Mike’s friend’s yacht. She was pale in her bikini, somebody’s wife’s niece, drinking a screwdriver and standing alone. He imagines her in his new condo, a high-rise on the beach or pretty near it: A marble breakfast bar separates the living room from the kitchen, the leather couch they picked out sitting opposite a wall-mounted flat-panel TV. She’s in the kitchen in the morning in her panties and an unbuttoned shirt of his, rinsing the dregs of last night’s wine from a long-stemmed glass.

  The ending of a song snaps him back to reality. The band starts up a new song but then they interrupt themselves a minute in so the lead singer can tell some kind of story while the drummer climbs out from behind his kit. It is revealed that the drummer is going to “play” a vacuum cleaner by sticking his face up to the hose part and letting it suck on his lips. Mike remembers teenage Ken raving about how cool it was that they did stuff like this; Mike himself always thought it sounded like second-rate Zappa gags and, seeing it live, now feels retroactively validated. The drummer is wearing a sleeveless polka-dot muumuu. The vacuum makes a sound like a dentist’s drill. When it’s over they play a couple more normal songs to close out the set.

  The house lights go up and Angie says she’s going to go find the bathroom. Mike gives her forty bucks and tells her to pick up another round of beers on her way back. Mike watches Ken staring glassy-eyed at the empty stage. Christ, Ken. His long hair’s in a tight ponytail, fixed with an elastic band he borrowed from his sister; his pupils are like pits in the earth. Mike can see that Ken’s hair is starting to thin in front. Soon enough it’ll start to pull back. Mike’s never had much cause to think about this sort of thing. The men in his family do not, as a rule, go bald. This is the opposite of Miranda’s family—her father, her brother, all her uncles bare up top like someone reached in with an ice cream scoop. “Scalped,” Miranda’s brother, Derek, used to say with a laugh. Probably still says—just not to Mike. And baldness travels on the maternal gene, so that’ll be Ken before his thirtieth birthday, and it’s all his wife’s fault, and for once he’d like to say that out loud, fucking scream it, as if volume were the arbiter of truth, which, come to think of it, always has been the secret message of rock and roll. That and, of course, Never get old.

&nbs
p; “Hey, Ken,” Mike says. “Can I ask you something?” No response. He tries again: “Ken.”

  “Oh, hey, Dad, sorry, spaced there. Wassup?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I just, well, I was wondering, do you know why Angie got so upset when you mentioned Brad?”

  “Yeah, sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “But why? He was your friend, wasn’t he?”

  “I mean I guess so. But he tried to kiss her once, like not that long before he, you know.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “Well, duh, of course not. You’re the dad, Dad. I shouldn’t have said anything. I mean I wouldn’t have, normally, but I’m pretty—” He stops himself short, looks away from Mike, and wiggles his fingers stageward; this gesture, apparently, meant to complete the sentence.

  “Hey, guys.” Angie’s back with the beers. She hands Mike his drink, which he takes, and his change, seven bucks, which he refuses. He tells her to put some gas in the car on the thirty-first. She shrugs and pockets the money. Ken raises his cup up and the other two move to meet his cheers.

  “But what are we drinking to?” Ken asks.

  “It’s your cheers,” Angie says.

  “Shit, I dunno.”

  “To new beginnings in the new year,” offers Mike.

  “Sláinte!” Ken says, happy, his unsteady hand sloshing foam onto the floor. Angie stops her cup a moment shy of contact, deftly reverses course, takes a long drink instead. Mike feels his jaw clench. The house lights, mercifully, go down.

  First song of the second set it happens: the guitar serves up that signature volley of notes that they heard in the car. Mike can almost see the smooth lines arcing through the air, like when you’re signing a contract and it feels like the pen has your name coiled up inside it and all you need to do is set it free. The stage lights turn the whole arena ocean-green and Ken’s on his feet, tiptoes even, doing a double fist pump, his instincts and faith in the world affirmed. Angie leans over, her rebuke to him from a moment ago already ancient history, forgotten; she’s wearing a grin about a mile wide now, shouting into Mike’s ear, “Dad! It’s your song, it’s your song!” Then she’s out of her chair also, arms and hips asway.