Flings: Stories

by Justin Taylor

  “I can always use direction,” she wrote. Thinking, If this doesn’t do it . . .

  They took the one o’clock ferry to Lamma Island, disembarked at Yung Shue Wan, a village of seafood restaurants and narrow poured-concrete homes on narrow roads. Men drove puttering flatbeds the size of golf carts, hauling stacks of pressboard and sections of pipe. Frayed strips of sun-bleached tarp rose in the hot breeze like fingers. Construction dust rimed branches and fronds. They walked past cloudy fish tanks full of razor clam, lobster, eel, and prawn.

  The walking path would take them south across the ridge of the island along Ha Mei Wan Bay, which was scenic despite a three-stack coal-fired power plant that, like a dark spot on the retina, occupied a small corner of every otherwise perfect view. (Colin said it powered all of Hong Kong—Danielle thought reflexively of the frigid air forever bleeding from the storefronts all over town.)

  They made their way out of the village center, wound through the trees, past the mouths of cart-scale driveways that led to tucked-away bungalows. Danielle had a Nalgene in her satchel. She unscrewed the cap, took a big swig, offered the bottle to Colin, who accepted it with evident gratitude. “There’s nobody out today,” he said as he handed the bottle back to her. “I bet we don’t see another person till we get to Sok Kwu Wan.”

  “Lucky us,” Danielle said.

  They emerged from the forest—or was it jungle? Or were both these terms too grandiose? Was it maybe just some trees? They mopped their foreheads on their sleeves, walked over green slopes dotted with broken white stones. Danielle said that the landscape felt Scottish and when he laughed at her she faked a little pout. They took the optional detour up Mount Stenhouse and high-fived at the viewing platform, thrilled to have found a vista untroubled by the power plant. Danielle wanted to take a picture together but he got weird about it, like employing the technology of the camera phone would somehow tarnish their experience of nature. She was about to call him out on his affected Luddite bullshit when it occurred to her that he must be worried about people from the office, her father, seeing the picture, so she put her BlackBerry away and finally, finally, he kissed her. They fooled around like high school kids up there at the top of the path.

  The descent took them through stinking marshes and more wooded land, then finally into a village that seemed a mirror of the one they’d set out from, though this Tin Hau temple was a little bigger and had a turtle pond. The turtles had red markings on their pointy, wizened heads. They paddled around their oval pool and swam through algae and bumped into lily pads. They hauled themselves slowly from the water. With their webbed feet and small claws they struggled for purchase, then laid themselves out on the hot gray stone.

  They took the ferry back to Central, then a cab to Colin’s building. In the elevator they saw themselves reflected in the dull gold finish of the doors. Danielle thought they looked like they were trapped in amber. The elevator sighed to a stop and the doors slid open. There were shoes on a rack in the foyer of his apartment: loafers, sandals, little blue sneakers with Velcro straps, a scuffed pair of mary janes. As Danielle knelt to unlace her own sneakers she noticed a framed photograph on the far wall—Colin, a bottle blonde (the eyebrows gave her away), and a little boy. They were all wearing white golf shirts and khakis on a lawn somewhere, big grins, soft-focus lake and tree behind them.

  “How old’s your son?” Danielle asked, rising barefoot.

  “About to turn seven,” he said. There was pride in his voice. “That picture’s a few years old.” Then he paused, as though having suddenly remembered who she was or, maybe, who he was. “Listen,” he said, “should I be worried about something? Because just tell me if I should be.” Danielle considered his question. She could see clearly the threads of gray she’d inferred at the bar, and also that he’d missed a spot of stubble around his Adam’s apple when he’d last shaved. Had his family left yesterday or just this morning? All his scrupulous duplicity was revealed now, and her father had been the last thing on his mind.

  “Oh, I’m nothing to worry about,” Danielle said. They stripped their hiking clothes off and got into his shower together. When they got out he put their things in the wash and gave her a robe to wear. It was a man’s robe, thankfully, one of his own. She liked feeling small in it. They stood in their robes and watched dusk fall over the island and the docked boats and the ones at anchor and the land on the other side. Buildings on both sides of the harbor lit up their fronts and began to beam lights off of their roofs in an elaborately choreographed sequence. This was the Symphony of Lights, a nightly public spectacle that Danielle had read about it in her guidebook but hadn’t yet seen. She thought of the power plant on Lamma, and again of those storefronts in Kowloon. But who was she to condescend, to think she knew what was best, to judge what other people had decided was right for them?

  I am Danielle Melman, she thought. Long streaks of color—blue, green, red, purple, white—flashed like lightning across the black water as the show dragged on.

  Danielle woke up and slipped quietly out of bed. She used the bathroom—the one in the hallway, so as not to risk disturbing Colin—then stood at the living room window. It was just past dawn. She went back into the master bedroom and woke Colin up. They were making love when his alarm clock went off. He hit the snooze with a flailing hand.

  Their clothes had sat in the washer overnight but it would probably be fine, he said, to move them to the dryer now. She asked if he wanted breakfast. He showed her where they kept everything and she cooked them sunny-side-up eggs with turkey bacon and toast. She made their coffee in his Keurig. Did he take sugar? He didn’t. Milk? He did. The low-fat stuff or the regular? Either one was fine.

  “So what’s on tap for today?” she asked.

  “Work,” he said. “Probably till late since I didn’t go in at all yesterday. You?”

  “Literally no idea,” she said.

  “Must be nice.”

  Danielle, still wearing Colin’s robe, got their stuff out of the dryer and spread everything out on the unmade bed. She folded his clothes and laid them on top of the dresser, then gathered her own clothes up into her arms, thinking she would go into the bathroom to change, but when she turned around she saw Colin leaning in the doorframe of the walk-in closet, wearing the same suit he’d been wearing the night they met. He gave her a thin smile but didn’t say anything. She understood what he wanted: to see her, all of her, one more time, and then to watch as she disappeared, piece by piece.

  The Jewish Cemetery was at 13 Shan Kwong Road in the Happy Valley, about a mile away from the racetrack and the colonial cemetery. An unlocked gate on a steeply sloping residential street—she walked past it twice before she noticed the Star of David in the metalwork. She followed a concrete path between a bamboo construction fence and a day school that was closed for the summer. Behind the school the grounds opened out. There was a durian tree and a stone fountain. Beyond that, the markers and tombs. The heat was brutal but the air hadn’t been so clear in weeks. The chopstick buildings shimmered in the high middle distance.

  In addition to the usual—name, dates of birth and death, epitaph (many in Hebrew and English, some only in Hebrew, almost none in Chinese)—these markers often listed birthplace. Many of the Jewish dead of Hong Kong, Danielle noticed, hailed from Eastern Europe: Carl Bercovitz, born at Bucharest, 1846, aged 43 years. Pearl Antschel Steinberg, native of Russia, died 3 August 1901, aged 72 years. Pepi Eidelstein, born 25 July 1862 in Brody Austria, died 4 July 1899. Elias Salnicker, Bialostock, Russland, 1862–1898. Mary Bunderoff, Tergu Okna, Rumania, 12 Aug. 1904, aged 31 years. Max Wolff, Kadan Kurland. Carla Dietrich nee Salenicker, wife of Max, mother of Moses Benjamin and Myron Alexander, born in Odessa 3 April 1894, died 22 April 1947.

  Rachel Leah Rapoport Rahf, born in Hankow—the rest was in Hebrew, which Danielle couldn’t read.

  Danielle thought of her grandfather, her father’s father, American-born but whose parents (she’d never known them) had come over
from Lvov. Her great-grandmother Essie pregnant on the steamer ship, giving birth in a charity hospital or else, more likely, at home. They’d lived in Lower East Side tenements; when their son, Yakov, had come of school age he’d changed his name to Jack, taught himself English, put himself through night school and then law school, bought the building that housed his practice and a brownstone on the southwestern border of Prospect Park. Stan and his sister, Sarah, had grown up in that house, which was later left to them, and they sold it and split the money. Stan married Lynne and they moved to Long Island, then to Westchester, where Danielle had grown up. Between being thrown out of his house and moving to Asia, Stan had rented a walk-up at Ludlow and Hester, right back where the first immigrant Rosses had lived.

  Danielle thought about how her life, how all of their lives, would have been different if Essie and her husband, Danielle’s great-grandfather—whose name Danielle could no longer recall, if she’d ever known it in the first place—had gotten on a boat bound elsewhere. Or if Essie had died along the way to America, or if she’d stayed put in Lvov. Every choice makes us and remakes us. What’s incredible, Danielle thought, is not that we might have been somebody else, or nobody, but rather that despite everything we are somehow still ourselves.

  She should send her father a text, she thought: see how his trip was going, if he knew yet when he was coming back. Come to think of it, though, an email might be better—she wouldn’t have to be so terse in an email, and he wouldn’t feel that text message pressure for an immediate reply. Yes, it would definitely be better to email—which of course she could do with the BlackBerry, but there was a laptop back at the apartment that would be much more comfortable to use. She pictured herself stretched out on her father’s couch with the machine in her lap, Beggars Banquet tinkling from the small speakers and the sun setting into the bay behind her as she shared her impressions of Lan Kwai Fong, the Jewish cemetery, Lamma Island—all the places she’d been. She imagined him in his Beijing hotel room reading her letter, probably on his BlackBerry, and how the small screen would make whatever she wrote seem much longer than it was. Maybe a text would be better after all—save the stories for when he got back—though of course this still wasn’t the place to send it from.

  Mrs. Rachel Levy, born in Shanghai, died 2 January 1968, aged 84. Gunner Wilfred Ross, A. A. Regt. Royal Artillery, died at Hong Kong 12 November 1938, aged 20 years. Fanny, dearly beloved wife of S. S. Benjamin, born in London, 1867–1892. Jacob Ezekiel Dagai: born 1 December 1902, Bombay, India, died 1 August 1999. Samuel Moses Perry: born in Shanghai 29 Feb. 1904, died in Florida U.S.A. 5 Oct. 1981—and yet buried here. In memory of my dear husband, Vladimir Zubitsky, who taught me what real love is, born in Kunelai, Siberia, May 25, 1905, died January 4, 1973. Harry Morgan Weinrebe: born April 1, 1914, Boston, Massachusetts, died March 14, 2000. Anatoly Livshits, no date or place of birth given, died 21 October 2005: Passed away in Shenzhen, alone in this world.

  Siegfried Kumur, George Bloch, Adolf Wolepstein, Flora Edgar.

  Moselle Gatton, Louisa Anna Green, Elias David Sykes Sassoon.

  Danielle dug into the earth with the toe of her sneaker and found a rock. It was smooth and mottled gray-white, smaller than an egg. She placed it atop the Livshits headstone, then made for the shade of the durian tree. The sweet-rot stink of the fruit was almost overpowering but she was glad to be out of the sun. She sat with her back against the trunk and looked out across the sea of graves, then up through the leaves toward the blue apartments anchored in the sky.

  GREGORY’S YEAR

  March and there’s dirty snow humped on the windowsills, still; sidewalk’s mucked, sky’s been the color of dust for days. He’s shaving his head over the bathroom sink, weekly ritual some years now, ever since that monk’s tonsure blossomed high in the back. He remembers how the pads of his fingers felt when they first found the smooth patch, warm and soft, and how he thought, Shit no, not gonna be that guy. So instead he’s this guy, clean-scalped but boasting a thick beard, well-groomed—hazelnut, he likes to think but would never say. A well-groomed beard is paramount, believes Gregory, who when he meets someone new says “Please, call me Greg” but doesn’t mean it. The full name is what he likes, its fine whiff of archaism, bouquet of saints and England, popes and Greece; the two g sounds granting clangorous passage toward the open and humming “ory” with its quick high finish like a young wine, like the inflatable slide you ride to escape from the burning plane. But nobody calls him Gregory except his mother, and he rarely calls her at all. So Greg, then: a higher-up in the lower echelon of a medical copy-writing firm in West Chelsea. Sometimes it seems like science fiction that one blue train line should connect that neighborhood to the part of Bed-Stuy where he’s been living for—what is it, two years now? Two years. Merciful Mary. Two years. Fucking hell.

  In April he stops at his corner coffee shop for an afternoon latte, asks the barista out on a date. Not only does she say yes, but over Rioja it turns out she doesn’t just work at the Grind Shack, she owns it. Used to have another one just like it, successful, in Charlottesville, Virginia, unless she said State College, PA. Anyway she sold that place and bought this one because she wanted to have the experience: city life. Audrey says business is booming but she never imagined she’d hate New York the way she does. She expected an adjustment, sure, but up all night crying? Never. Says she’s wolf-whistled at by corner drunks, wants to see a field sometime, may be suffering PTSD from a train grope.

  “What can you do?” he says.

  “I’m looking for a buyer,” she says. He’d meant the question rhetorically—hadn’t, in fact, thought it could be taken any other way.

  He has these great big bear hands and loves them, favorite thing about himself, easily, the way a double cheeseburger looks a little lost when held in them, or the neck of his old Fender Strat. Proud, too, of the arms on which those hands are mounted: half gift and half result of honest effort (he’d looked into a gym near his office, joined the Y near his place instead). He’s in the bathroom, lathering his head. It’s May and already most days the mercury’s hitting eighty-five by noon. The stripper—one of four strangers he shares this narrow two-story house with—is banging on the door for the second time. She’s got her own shaving to take care of, plus mascara, body glitter, diaphragm. She’s running late, she says; the car the club sends for her is going to be here any minute. His eyes are red; cheeks round, puffy, hairy, and high. Everything about his job disgusts him. He engineers the jargon that lies the company out of whatever the studies they’ve done have proven more or less unequivocally. The raw data is enough to keep you up half the night mulching your fingernails, choking back bile and fright. Ergo face puff, ergo eyes. He buys Žižek books by the pound and wine by the gallon. Žižek and Audrey, he feels, are the only people who understand him. Zombies his way through the workweek with a bottomless coffee mug—I’m always on drugs, he thinks at the mirror, always trying to go faster or else slow down, my fingers a beige blur over the beige keyboard, up and down my beige girlfriend; if I were someone else looking at myself at my desk I’d see a slack face bathed in monitor light, dull. He heats the razor by running it under the faucet. He touches the thin hot steel to his head, pulls.

  By June Audrey’s found her buyer. She’s ready to go, but where? He says, “Well, we’ve both got some money.”

  She says, “Are you serious? I mean is this us talking serious?”

  He says, “I moved to this shit-ass city to become a rock star. Instead I’m an office drone and, increasingly, a raving Communist, only the only times I have time to rave I’m too drunk or too sleepy and the people who need raving at aren’t around, or they are but they’re holding my leash. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I search Craigslist for sublets in Canadian cities. Square footage alone has brought me to the verge of weeping joy.” This is the longest monologue he’s ever taken in her company. She throws her arms around his wide neck, tilts her pelvis into his hip.

  “I want a new
guitar,” he says. “Acoustic.”

  Part of the deal for the Grind Shack is Audrey has to help the new owner learn the ropes, so Gregory’s alone in Montreal the first few weeks of July. When they Skype he plunks out “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and can see her in her little digital box, melting for him. And there he is, in his even smaller box inset in the corner of her box, the Ibanez slung across his belly, his sweaty head agleam. Sometimes they let whole minutes pass in silence; he watches her and he watches himself watching her. Audrey in her New York living room, a pale face afloat before a plain gray wall. He takes epic walks around Montreal, up backstreets, down alleys, wherever. If a parade went by he’d probably join it. In a bar near McGill he finds himself knocking back whiskies with a guy who does research on sleep cycles. Guy’s going on about fruit flies, the never-ending bitchwork of grant proposals, how it’s gonna be when he gets his degree, his own lab, tenure. Guy says he wants to move to New York City. There’s a postdoc at Columbia he’s got an eye on. Gregory starts to tell him about the old loathed Bed-Stuy share, the way the city stinks in summer. Guy’s not saying much anymore and Gregory, worried his frankness has unnerved, swerves toward a different subject.

  “Dylan?” says the guy. “Yeah, he’s okay, sure, but what about Albert Ayler, Funkadelic, any Dead show from the spring of ’74?” Gregory, swaying on his barstool and feeling osmotic, scribbles names and dates on a napkin, offers to get the next round.

  The day Audrey’s train comes in it starts pouring, doesn’t stop for two weeks. They have no idea how to live in a house together. They don’t even know where the nearest grocery store is. He’s been on an all-takeout diet, trying to figure out whether it’s (1) possible and (2) worth it to jam out “China Cat Sunflower” on solo acoustic guitar.

  “This isn’t working,” Audrey says, staring forlorn out their front window at the gray rain veiling the world. Looks back over her shoulder, sees the look on his face, clarifies that she meant Montreal. “Or maybe Canada altogether. We need to get back to the roots of things. Where did you grow up?”