Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  Abigail finished the MFA (as well Cal must have), then decided to go for a PhD. She studied abstruse, devastating theories and soon enough could drive them like knives through the soft guts of any TV commercial or radio hit—not that these great lumbering beasts of mass culture ever took note of their having been hunted and skinned. The work was not particularly easy, but neither was it overly challenging. It was interesting at first, and then it wasn’t, but you got into a rhythm and then it was like anything you did for a living. Any job. And occasionally, when your pet theory, pushed to its intellectual asymptote, somehow turned inside out on you, you called this dialectics, turned the paper in anyway, let the long-haired guy from your German class take you out for a drink or two or five. He was Continental, indeed French, and looked like a true and total asshole with his neckerchief, but she knew the rules were different with Europeans and something about him whispered that he would not disappoint.

  It turned out she was a genius for German. She was tutoring the poor Frenchman, who was merely bilingual—not that his English was any great shakes either. On her own time she rendered Hölderlin and Rilke into English with a felicity and art that her own work—the poetry or the crit stuff—rarely achieved.

  Abigail cut the Frenchman loose when her orgasms became predictable. He gave them to her still but seemed to be doing it somehow lazily, which was not to be endured. Nearly two years passed without significant company. She took her degree. A university press took her thesis, a boring and sophisticated treatise that eight people would ever read. She was proud of it but also felt that it didn’t matter. She took an assistant professorship at a private college in the Pacific Northwest and by her thirtieth birthday found herself in a position to think about buying a little house, which is just what she did.

  She knew some men out West. One was an inveterate loser in perpetual self-consolation over a childhood episode of sexual abuse. He had stumpy blond dreadlocks, refused to give up on heavy metal, and had never held a job of any kind. She did not love him, but he wasn’t as dumb as he might have been, and she appreciated his utter incompatibility with every aspect of her professional life. Also, there was his awful taste in music, which was the same as her awful own. That part she did love. He kept up regular correspondence with his molester, an old family friend with a position in state politics and a string of car dealerships up and down the coast. Dreadlocks drove a Lexus SUV, had been blackmailing the pervert lo these many years. But the patron-criminal had carcinomas in uncertain remission and she knew Dreadlocks would lose his mind whenever the cancerous creep finally kicked, so she gave herself three months longer for indulgence’s sake, then broke things unequivocally off. Dreadlocks plowed his SUV into a utility pole and was lucky to escape from the accident—if that’s what it was—with nothing worse than two fractured ribs, a mild concussion, and a pile of fines from the city. These and his hospital bills were paid off by the molester, and likewise was the car replaced, though Dreadlocks’s license was revoked for a year.

  Who else did she date? A woman artist. A reticent priest. She finished many translations but did not publish them. It would be too easy and they’d garner her far too much acclaim. It was still her own verse that she loved. She sought a poetry press small, earnest, and middling enough that she might be its star.

  And so Woodpile Editions, out of a suburbanized farmstead in Wichita. They ran an annual contest that cost ten dollars to enter. The prize was your book perfect-bound in an edition of five hundred, twenty-five of which were yours to keep, gratis, and you could buy as many more as you liked at the author discount (plus shipping). As soon as she’d seen the business card–size ad in the back of Poets & Writers, Abigail had known that she was home.

  The publishers were a married pair of Berkeley refugees turned midwestern veterans; they drank wine out of teacups and had matching silver ponytails. Abigail’s verse was gloomy and fitful and at first shocked them badly. Imagine her treasured Rilke at his highest-strung and the concerns of George Garrett in “Buzzard”; crossbreed these, then refract the result through the operatic doom music to which she for some reason still gave equal credence. It was not bloodless, at least; her lines were stormy and kinked. Without question she was the most talented thing to have ever come their way, so they called her on the phone and told her she had won the contest. She volunteered to them that she meant to purchase the entire print run herself and in their instant and total thrill at this news they invited her out to Wichita to visit the home office and confer on the question of her cover art.

  Abigail spent an excruciatingly charmed weekend on the plain, the result of which was the inevitable chiaroscuro calla lily set against a burnt umber field. The book’s name and her own name would appear, respectively, above and below the lily in passable white serif. She gave a reading to an audience of seven, then went home. Two months later she received her shipment of the complete edition of her poetry—ten small boxes, fifty books in each one.

  Her school gave her a reading, too, albeit grudgingly. The creative writing department did not like to see their action elbowed in on. But they knew what was politic, and there was even a reception afterward with crackers and three different cheeses, ice-cold soda cans and headache champagne. She drank more than she should have while a grad student volunteer sold her books for her. He was studying Chaucer as an antecedent of hip-hop and claimed to have read her book—not the one of poems, which he had only purchased that evening, but the theory one. She had ridden her bicycle to campus, as per usual, but was now quite drunk. He offered to drive her home. In her driveway he looked at her with his dark moist striving eyes and she told him to recline his seat back. She was thirty-four, but if you got her out of her professorial dress suit and into, say, jeans and a peasant blouse, she could still pass for twenty-seven. Naked you could see she was at least thirty, but her thirty made it seem like thirty was the great perfect age: a goal. Who needed those magazine teenagers hawking underwear and vodka? This woman looked like what it meant to be a woman, in her stunning adult prime. Not that the grad student was treated to such revelations. He never even saw her out of her coat. “Don’t you make me regret this,” she said in a flat, serious voice, leaning low over his lap and unzipping him, and he promised that he wouldn’t, and he didn’t, and so neither did she.

  She wanted to go to the National Creative Writing Association Annual Literary Writing Conference and so appealed to her school for funds. Her request was denied. Her publishers agreed to split the cost of a table with her. She paid out of pocket for the flight and hotel. They sent a large stack of flyers announcing this year’s incarnation of the contest; she herself was to be its honorable judge. She liked seeing her own name and thumbnail author photo on the top of the flyer. There was also a Woodpile banner, which she tacked to the front of the table.

  The conference was in Denver that year. She sat for hours at her table, not selling any books at all. There were many seminars taking place in conference rooms, also panels and readings and lectures, all of which she skipped. In the evening she insinuated herself with some friendly strangers who claimed unanimous fealty to “avant-post-meta-narrative,” though it was possible she’d gotten the prefix sequence wrong. They hailed from around the Southeast and ran some kind of website together. She followed them from one hotel bar cocktail hour to another, then retired to her own hotel for an On-Demand movie followed by a hot bath that lasted as long again.

  The second day she put all the books she’d brought—a hundred of them, in a wheeled blue suitcase—out on the table in a careful pyramid. She made a sign that said PLEASE TAKE ONLY ONE. Beside these she put out the stack of flyers for the contest, and then she got up to walk around the fair, sneaking sidelong glances at university journals and small presses of every niche and distinction (or lack thereof). She was barely curious as to the natures of these outfits and sought mostly to protect herself from being shanghaied into chitchat, the inevitable segue to the sales pitch. This lack of interest, she recognized,
was equally present in her would-be readership no less than in herself, and in this knowledge one could locate the precise central flaw of the entire enterprise. A cult of self-expression was throttling the life from the world.

  Well, why not? All her favorite music of youth—which she still loved and believed in and blared constantly, both at home and in her office—heralded and celebrated apocalypse, devastation, chaos. She was nobody’s savior and had no wish to be. Let the world save itself, if it could. She personally aspired to be part of the problem—to exacerbate the mess.

  Abigail saw Cal sitting second from the end in a row of five men crammed cheek by jowl at a single table. CYGNUS LOOP COLLECTIVE, their banner read. Cal’s face was grooved now and his hairline had hiked back a ways but sure as anything it was him. He was signing a book for somebody and did not see her. All around them young people rushed: boys with goatees and girls with bangs, everyone clutching official maps and shouldering tote bags misshapen with bulk. Maybe she was wrong about the conference-goers, the future of literature, and who knew what else. Or was it possible to be both wrong and right at once? Cal’s customer walked away and he became focused on twirling his pen. Her shadow spilled over the white tablecloth and his books; he looked up.

  They found a small sunny patch of grass outside the convention center and leaned with their backs against a giant decorative hunk of Colorado stone.

  He’d worked construction at some point; his mother had died. He had left New York, returned, then left again. He was involved with the Unitarian church in his new hometown, which was conveniently just over on the other side of Boulder, though he’d been there four years, so was it really “new” anymore? (He actually asked her this—she shrugged.) He worked in sales for a regional brewery, did his books thing on the side. The year after they graduated, he said, he’d written the best poem of his life—the only good one he’d ever written, if the truth was to be told about it, and why shouldn’t he tell the truth? He was content with his life now. He had long since figured out who he was. He looked at her meaningfully as he said this, as if his strange parenthetical glance could somehow hyperlink back through the years to both acknowledge and disown his behavior on that strange night that had ended their intimacy. So anyway he’d written the good poem and sent it to Poetry magazine—where it was accepted!—a victory that had nearly ruined him. There was a long struggle he mostly glossed over, the upshot of which was that he wrote prose now, considered himself a novelist. “But enough about me,” he said.

  She kept most of it to herself. He could always Google her. Perhaps he already had. She deflected their conversation back toward his life (it wasn’t difficult) and in service of this aim feigned an interest in his “project,” as he had called it with no hint of irony, no trace of shame.

  “A sonnet in novels,” he said.

  “You mean a novel in verse?”

  “No,” he replied with a flash of the old maddening confidence. “Fuck John Wheelwright. I meant what I said.”

  It was to be a cycle of fourteen books, and their several titles taken together would form a sonnet—the very sonnet he’d had in Poetry, in fact. He expected to write one book every two years for twenty-eight years and complete the cycle in time for his sixty-fifth birthday. He’d finished and self-published Book One earlier this year and had brought it to Denver for its official debut. Cal, short for Calvert, was his middle name. “Cal” was the only thing anyone had ever called him, but as a published author he was F. Calvert Donovan. She felt sure she had known about the F. but couldn’t remember whether she had ever known what it stood for. She did not ask about it now. Book One in his cycle was called I Molt Backwards Through Time, and though she couldn’t help but notice that this phrase was four syllables too short for a sonnet line—to say nothing of the missing iambs—she chose not to spoil the moment and held her tongue.

  Abigail could see that whatever had broken loose in Cal that hellish evening all those years ago had never been righted or healed. She felt special, in retrospect, to have witnessed the birth of such a deep and unyielding derangement. She said she would look his sonnet up. He said there was no need because it was printed as the frontispiece to the novel—and would be printed in each subsequent book as well, with the given titular line in boldface. She said she’d come by his table later, maybe tomorrow, and they could trade books.

  A book of hers! Why hadn’t she said anything sooner? But of course because what else would she be doing here? And a trade! It was too perfect! He’d be honored. What was it called?

  “Beloved Predator,” she said.

  “It’s so damn good to see you,” he said, and reached over and gave her a hug. He was firmer now, more muscled in early middle age than he had ever been young. The construction work? The good mountain air? She was stiff in his arms at first but then leaned forward, pressed her chest against his and even got one arm around his shoulders—squeezed and counted three Mississippi before pulling back. He was slow in releasing her, then smoothed his shirt and said he had to get back to his table. He didn’t know the Cygnus Loop guys too well—he’d met them through a listserv—and he didn’t want to impose on their goodwill, but maybe they could meet up later that evening at his “off-site” reading. This seemed to mean that the event was not a part of the official conference program and therefore not held on the convention center’s grounds. He’d secured the back room of a restaurant that unfortunately was vegan, but the burritos were supposed to be decent, he said, and anyway the drinks were cheap. He produced a small spiral notebook like a reporter might carry, flipped it open to a blank page, scribbled down the restaurant’s name and address and his own phone number, then ripped the page out and folded it in half. On the outside of the fold he wrote in spindly block capital letters the title of his novel, then underlined it: I MOLT BACKWARDS THROUGH TIME. “So you don’t forget what it’s for,” he said. “I know how hectic the conference gets.” He pressed the folded paper into her palm with both hands. They stood; he hugged her again, then turned and jogged, nearly sprinted, back inside. She lingered in the grass, watching the long glass faces of the downtown buildings flash fire-gold in the sinking western sun.

  Back at her table she saw that all the flyers for the contest had been taken, and her sign knocked over, but her pyramid of books had not been so much as jostled. Her monument was perfectly undisturbed. She did not know whether to feel injured or pleased. All those copies of her precious book—she left them as they were. Let the janitors puzzle over them or slide them unread into a black vat of trash. It no longer mattered, if it ever had, and there were four hundred more copies boxed up unvanquished back at her Oregon home. Her work would become a little more rare, was all, which maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. The torn-off page with Cal’s phone number on it seemed to warm the pocket in which it lay. She was a beautiful woman in a smart dress and dark stockings. The world itself seemed to barely know what to do with her. She had no old friends.

  CAROL, ALONE

  Seventy-two years old and I’m the last person I know who drinks real coffee. Everyone else gave in to decaf years ago. Bad hearts, they’ve got, or they don’t want to be kept up. Gerald felt that coffee was the root cause of my insomnia but I never could believe that and I still don’t. A strong cup in the morning hardly keeps me from a nap in the afternoon. It is only in the night I lie awake, alert and tossing, denied entry to the vault of sleep. Sometimes, when I know in my bones there will be no rest no matter what, I get out of bed and go make myself a cup and drink it while I watch TV or pace the house or sit out on the back porch and listen to the night: crickets and groaning air conditioners and faraway cars.

  Tonight I’ve found a documentary about the ruins of São Paulo Cathedral in Macau. Built by Jesuits in the 1500s, operated for three hundred years or so, burnt down in 1835. Why never rebuilt? The program doesn’t say. But the stone facade survived the fire and has stood freely ever since. There’s a long shot of it silhouetted in sunset light, then a station break. A
ll the commercials are for tax attorneys and prescription drugs. A fat-faced man in a blue suit says, “Bankruptcy isn’t the end—it’s a new beginning!” Grinning AARP members in tracksuits chat about pills for their bladders, memory, blood sugar, skin, pain, sleep—everything managed and nothing solved, ask your doctor today.

  When the program returns there are close-ups of the church’s stonework. The camera lingers over waggle-tongued demons, gray saints, a great ship frozen among scrolling waves. I imagine climbing the steep steps, can practically feel the island sun on our necks and arms and Gerald’s bald spot (he preferred visors to hats), pausing to catch our breath and mop our brows in the relative comfort of the facade’s shadow before passing through its tall archway and into the hot open land that was once the cathedral. “By now it’s been nothing for almost as long as it was ever something,” I say, speaking the words aloud to the empty living room. The program says that the grounds have been made a World Heritage Site. And so the ruin’s future is secure, its preservation assured.

  The program ends but the night keeps going.

  Thirty-five years apiece in the New York City public school system—I taught high school English; Gerald taught middle school science and a bit of shop. Twenty-nine of those thirty-five years in the row house in the Slope, riding the subway and raising the boys and hacking away at the mortgage and finally owning it outright just in time to sell when we took our retirements and went south—before the market did, thank God. “Turncoat,” my sister, Elsie, said about us leaving. “You’ve gone soft.” But Elsie and Donald never had children—they couldn’t—so what would she know about it?

  We moved to a development called Canyon Lakes. This being South Florida, there is of course no canyon. As for the so-called lakes, they are skinny man-made channels of murky water in which you can neither fish nor swim. They ribbon through the development, brushing property lines so that every unit can be listed as “waterfront.” We do get birds, ducks and heron, sometimes ibis, and minnows at the grass banks for visiting grandkids to catch in Dixie cups and torture—they squeeze them between their fingers and the little fish burst like grapes.