Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  We drove the smallest roads I knew of, out into the Florida-looking part of Alabama, where the sun flashes like a searchlight through stands of oak and tall pine thick with Spanish moss. We were headed for the Port of Mobile, where when me and Benny were little our father used to take us to sit and watch the boxcars load onto the boats. We’d loved it like nothing else. I was going to take Mazie there and we were going to take a picture on my phone of us waving and I was going to send it to Benny, and he’d call and want to know who she was and I’d tell him, and he’d mention the next time he was going to be down in Carrabelle, and I’d suggest that maybe we could meet him there, spend the weekend, and he’d say, Yeah, man, sure thing, love to have you, brother. And that would be the beginning of our new start—me and Terese’s, Benny’s and mine. I didn’t see any reason Mazie wouldn’t like the port as much as me and Benny had. There were stevedores in yellow hard hats and huge, graceful, slow-moving cranes that hoisted the freight through the air. But my favorite were the boats with railroad tracks built right into their decks so that the train cars could roll right up onto them. I bet she’d never seen a thing like that before. Those boats sailed out into Mobile Bay, then across the Gulf, and made ports of call in Mexico, where the cars rolled right off onto Mexican tracks, ready to go wherever they were going.

  And who knows, maybe they still do, but it turns out you can’t go to the Port of Mobile and watch the docks anymore. Some terrorism protocol, the guard at the gate said, and when he turned us away I found that I didn’t have it in me to get worked up over one more way in which I had either been fucked over or come up short. Mazie and me split fries and a chocolate Frosty—I took a picture of her with chocolate all over her face and sent it to Terese, who didn’t respond, though come to think of it she probably wasn’t allowed to keep her phone on her when she was working, so I guessed she’d see it when she could and hopefully think it was cute and not lace into me later for fattening up her kid.

  We got back on the road and were cruising up this two-lane highway, out in the country again, going fast but also taking our time. There were train tracks on one side and a big field on the other. All alone out there, in terms of traffic, and we came upon this field. It was mostly tall grass—might have been a failed crop of something, maybe abandoned, I don’t know. A line of bare trees at the far edge, thin gray branches like a fence made out of skeleton hands. Looking through, you could see a small farmhouse set back on its land. Then, as if from the fingers of those hands, a wave of starlings rose up; thousands moving as one body, like black water coming to a boil, blotting out the sky over the field. I pulled to the shoulder, shut the car off, got Mazie unbuckled, stood leaning against the car, holding her tight in my arms, her head on my shoulder and both of us dumbstruck staring at all these birds swooping and maneuvering, sometimes descending back into the branches but never letting more than a few seconds pass before they rose up again, and always together, all as one. Up and back down and back up and they just kept going. It looked to me like they didn’t know whether they were free or stuck.

  A NIGHT OUT

  . . . and a story called “The Light of the World” which nobody else ever liked.

  —Hemingway, “Preface to ‘The First Forty-nine’”

  Caleb is good-looking and something of a fashionista—whatever that means. You’re not sure, but it’s the word you think of when you think of your old friend who these days blogs album reviews for a national fashion magazine and writes art reviews for a print-only underground literary annual called—for no reason you can discern—Farm Report. Back in August, for your golden birthday, i.e., the day one turns the same age as one’s date of birth—twenty-nine on the twenty-ninth, in your case—Caleb got you each an eight ball and took you out for a crosstown spree: the Maritime Hotel, the Jane, a pit stop at the Spotted Pig for burgers before heading to the LES—“Lush Life land,” quoth Caleb, never one to shrink from irony though it’s a safe bet he hasn’t read the book.

  You finally cabbed it home at sunrise, slept clear through the afternoon, and woke up to a prodigious nosebleed—straight-up terror, fucking swimming in your own blood—itself the herald of a sinus disaster that swelled your whole face up and kept you out of the office for three days. Two weeks of antibiotics, little souvenir lump of scar tissue in your right cheek—too small to see unless someone’s looking real close, but you can feel it with your thumb and sometimes when you’re nervous you’ll catch yourself worrying it back and forth like a pebble under a beach towel. So obviously you swore off cocaine forever—lesson learned, thanks—and yet for some reason hung onto the still-mostly-full bag. It’s been in the drawer of your bedside table for five-plus months. You’re getting ready to go meet Caleb at his place; then together you’ll head over to Sandra’s party.

  Lindsey’s at a Chelsea gallery, breaking her own first rule of art openings: never order the special original-recipe cocktail. The bartender is invariably somebody’s assistant/boyfriend/nephew and he doesn’t know how to make this drink, or any drink more complicated than, say, a screwdriver. He’s reading the recipe for the nth time off the smeary 3x5 it’s scrawled on. He doesn’t “get” measurements. He’s worried about his hair. But Lindsey has a thing for Goldschläger and so she breaks the rule and now she’s got this gallery-monogrammed rocks glass full of bracing poison: cinnamon and citrus (fucking Christ, is that grapefruit juice?), gold flakes suspended in pink pulp. She swipes at her watering eyes with a downy blond forearm. When her vision clears she’s staring at a wall-size blowup of the same arm she just raked across her face.

  This is her friend Logan’s show so he must be here somewhere. Last year he got this idea that he would try to sexualize apparently neutral parts of women’s bodies, napes of necks and backs of knees and things. Lindsey wanted to—but didn’t—say that a woman’s body doesn’t have any neutral parts, but when Logan asked her to model for him she grudgingly agreed. He took high-res close-ups, pinned the prints right onto the edges of his easel. Then he got—his words—“painter’s block.” He stared at the photos for days, for weeks, the brush in his unmoving hand, unable to begin. He ended up having the photographs themselves blown up and mounted on foam boards, then called his gallerist, ecstatic, and then all of the girls, most of whom readily consented to the change of plans. Lindsey wound up being the lone holdout, because she’s always been weird about her arm hair, but she let Logan convince her that this wasn’t just about him, his project and career, but in fact represented an opportunity for Lindsey in the form of personal growth. Anyway here she is up there, wrist to elbow, her freckles big as skulls, her forearm down a forest of white-gold light.

  Lindsey’s about halfway through her cocktail. Phone’s buzzing in her purse. She steps outside to take the call and it’s Sandra wanting to know when she’s coming to her birthday party. “You’re one of my go-to girls, Linz,” Sandra’s saying. “I need you here early so it looks like something when everyone else gets here.” A pause. “And so I’m not fucking drinking alone.” Lindsey rolls her eyes but says OK, sure, she’s on the way. Who knows, maybe Caleb will be there. Sort of weird, come to think of it, that she didn’t run into him here. She texts Logan to tell him she’s so sorry they missed each other, steps into the street, hails a cab. She slides in and says, “SoHo.” The art world slips into the rearview mirror as she gags on a gulp of her pink drink and realizes, shit, she’s stolen the glass. If the cabbie notices he doesn’t let on.

  Sandra is petite and so beautiful she’s sometimes hard to look at, particularly when she does this quasi-Egyptian thing with her eyeliner. As it happens, today, the thirtieth, is her golden birthday. It’s January.

  Via Caleb, you’ve met Sandra once or twice before. Was she maybe there on your birthday, at one of the bars or another? Odds are. She’s nice enough, aloof though, and you aren’t wild about the crowd she runs with. In fact, you had to be talked into going to this thing at all. You’d been thinking, Night in; thinking, Netflix Instant and takeout. B
ut Caleb seemed to want you here—need you here, almost, though Caleb never quite needs anything. When you remembered what was in your drawer, some weird counterintuition sensor in your mind got tripped; you fished the bag out of a cuff links box and tucked it into that part of your wallet where condoms go.

  Caleb doesn’t like to smoke in his own apartment—filthy habit, he says—so you guys are on the roof of his building, eight or nine stories up, in that part of the East Village that stayed rough into the mid-’90s but then caved in and got safe like everything else. You’re hoping he’ll finish before the warming flush of the drugs does, at which point you’ll start to feel the chill. Above you the night sky is swollen and gray-white.

  Sandra has a long-term boyfriend, Gene—away on tour like usual. As far as anyone can tell, she’s faithful to him. His band doesn’t have an album yet, but ever since they got a song on the soundtrack to the summer’s second-biggest superhero movie they’ve been getting pride of place in the “favorite bands” category on the social network profiles of all the country’s coolest skater tweens. Caleb—like any good heterosexual friend to a stunning, untouchable woman—has been valiantly sleeping his way through Sandra’s Rolodex.

  A lot of people think Caleb’s an operator, man slut, etc., and there’s a case to be made there, sure, but you happen to know that Caleb loves Sandra, she’s the one for him, because Caleb has just said so, in exactly those saccharine and hackneyed terms, which is in its way as shocking as the sentiment itself.

  Caleb in profile, Gauloise between his lips (he brings back cartons every time he goes to Paris), dark glasses on, collar of his leather jacket popped. You’re a couple lines in now and thinking how if you tried to describe Caleb to anyone who didn’t know him the guy would sound like a total poseur blowhard but that would be such bullshit because Caleb is the real deal in the sense that the life he appears to be living—whatever you might think of it—is the actual life that he lives, not an imitation of something he read about on the Internet or only has time for on the weekend—and the lesson is, well, you’re not totally sure, but it’s along the lines of that nobody should judge anyone, and hell, who do you think you are, anyway? You wear a tie all day. Wing tips, Christ almighty, to an office in a building on Maiden Lane. We’re all cartoon versions of ourselves.

  Caleb flicks the cigarette over the roof edge, leans out to witness its earthward flutter, wobbles on his heels, and you’re bolting across the roof, grabbing a fistful of jacket, pulling your friend back to safety.

  “Dude,” Caleb says to you. “Chill.”

  The SoHo loft is owned, you think, by a friend of a friend of Sandra’s who isn’t here, or nobody’s seen him. Or maybe it’s rock star Gene’s loft? Whatever. The place is cavernous, moodily track-lit. In one area of the hangar-like room, a digital projector and a MacBook sit side by side on top of a vintage dark wood chest. The projector casts a blazing black-and-white square that sweeps the full sixteen feet from ceiling to floor. You know it’s Hitchcock, but you can’t place which one. Ingrid Bergman in doctor’s whites, older men in suits all around her in what looks like a drawing room. The movie’s muted—dance music issues from a dozen hidden speakers, the room suffused in throb.

  Elsewhere in the loft, away from the glow of the screen, a pair of Caleb’s one-offs are having a chat. He hasn’t noticed. Sandra doesn’t exactly condone how he is with her friends, but neither has she jerked his leash. Her shows of displeasure and indulgence are understated—as with any queen, her seemingly clearest signals often misdirect and her true desires can only be inferred. You and Caleb are sipping drinks and shooting the speedy breeze while his gaze runs recon routes over the room—who’s here? what’s up?—and oh, hey, shit, there’s that special little clique of two.

  “That’s not gonna be good for business,” he says, and you reply by reflex: “That’s not gonna be good for anybody.” (Are you two really doing a Seinfeld bit? At this party?) Then Lindsey hauls off and slaps Candi in the face, flips a bird clear across the room at Caleb, storms off. Candi’s standing dumbfounded, her own hands slack at her sides—not even testing the presumably tender spot on her pinking cheek.

  “Do you think it’s the fault of the movies that we imagine our lives as movies?” Caleb says as you hustle over.

  “I think it’s the fault of movies that we imagine ourselves as the stars of our movies,” you reply. You guys could riff like this all night but cut yourselves short as you arrive at Candi, who springs to sudden sullen life.

  “I just got slapped,” she says. “In the face.”

  “Lindsey seemed pretty upset,” Caleb says. “Do you think I should go after her?”

  “But I just got slapped,” Candi says. “In the face.”

  “Look,” Caleb says, then says nothing. He does look, though—at you. Then he bolts.

  “Heya,” you say to Candi.

  “In the face,” she says.

  Sandra appears. “Everything OK?”

  “Well, well,” you say, thrilled to have backup or relief or whatever. “It’s the star. Happy golden.” Wait. Are you not supposed to know she’s thirty? Isn’t that the age when you’re supposed to stop talking about a woman’s age? But maybe phrasing it in the cute terms of the whole golden birthday thing makes it somehow OK.

  “I just got slapped,” Candi says, and Sandra says, “Oh, Candi, you know how Lindsey gets.”

  “Yeah, well, and we all know why.”

  You don’t know why, of course, which Sandra must be realizing because she turns purposefully toward you and says, “Thank you,” presumably for having wished her a happy birthday, though you feel like that was conversational aeons ago. Now what is Sandra saying?

  “. . . two know each other?”

  “Drew,” you say.

  “Candi. But you can call me Slapped in the Face.”

  “Think of it as a conversation piece,” Sandra says. You suspect this has already crossed Candi’s mind. You say, “Uh, do either of you want, like—” You put an index finger flush to the side of your nose, make a snort noise, and, inexplicably to the women, wince both of your eyes shut. Your enthusiastic pantomime seems to include a bit of sense memory.

  “Thanks,” Sandra says, “but not for years now. Getting up there, you know?” Shit. Is that a dig on what you said before? “But if I know Candi here—”

  “What was your name again?” Candi asks you. “I’m sorry, I’m a little jostled. I mean—”

  “Yeah,” you say. “Nobody likes to be slapped in the face.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Sandra says, which you’re pretty sure was meant for only you to hear, so you’re like, what, friends now? Trading digs on your other friends. OK. Or was it some sort of cryptic warning? (Though if it was a warning, it wasn’t all that cryptic.) Anyway Sandra’s off to make her rounds. She’s got her hair up. She even walks like a queen.

  “So you were saying,” Candi says.

  “Was I?”

  She mimics your gesture from a moment ago, emphasizing the snort but skipping the wince.

  “Gotcha.”

  Well, you’re not gonna do it in front of everyone, and the line for the bathroom is backed up to the edge of the dance floor, so you suggest going downstairs, prop the front door with a rock or something, share a cig. You can bump off your keys when the street’s empty. Candi says, “That’s pretty ghetto, dude,” but in a kind of laughing way that suggests an additional, unspoken clause: But what do I care? So now you’re huddled in a recess between two buildings, not so much an alley as an alcove, a niche. So cold your fingers barely function, your breath and her breath rich white puffs melding into one cloud: there and gone and there again. “We’re all living in each other’s breath all the time,” you say, “only nobody thinks of it like that when they can’t see it.” A gentleman, you hold the bag for her and she takes the key. Her shoulders are bare. It’s a strapless dress, black. She’s shivering. At first you aren’t sure you see it, but there, in the casts of the streetligh
ts—the fat flakes wink in the glow—it’s snowing. Wasn’t it supposed to be too cold to snow tonight? You’re at the point where pretty much anything seems like a sign. She’s beautiful, and everything else is, too. You lay a warming arm across her shoulders. “Let’s get out of here,” you say. But the coats, duh.

  “You go up,” she says. “If I go it’ll be half an hour with good-byes.”

  In the cab you kiss and pet a little and sip from a red plastic cup full of strong rum and Coke because you, when you were upstairs, had the good sense to make a drink. Candi, truth be told, is sort of gulping her share. You’re both imagining the city as a thing whizzing past you, rather than you through it, though the misconception is a moot point inasmuch as your cab is crawling through traffic, now stopping for a light. Why is this guy trying to go through Union Square? He should have gone west on Houston and taken 6th. Not worth getting into. Your hand riding up Candi’s thigh. She leans past you to reach for the party cup.

  In the elevator your pupils get so dilated you can barely make each other out through the haze of glare. Your one-bedroom is tiny, but decent for Hell’s Kitchen. “Don’t turn the light on,” she says. She has this certainty about her that’s unnerving. She’s walking around your dark apartment like she’s been coming here for years.

  She throws her bag next to the couch, coat on top of the bag, steps out of her heels. She’s walking toward the bath—no, bedroom. She’s got a hand behind her back, trying to get at the dress’s zipper. Shit, if this is how she wants it, well, OK. You take your shoes off, start pulling at your clothes as you walk after her. You drop your belt, decide you should hit the bathroom, pee, splash your face with cold water, lean down into the sink and guzzle. Then you give yourself a few quick strokes, just to check—not that you’re one of those guys with an, ahem, problem, but on a night like this it’s better to be sure. Anyway, it perks right up, so OK. Great. Sweet. Now save it for game time.