Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

“Hi,” I say to Blake as I approach him. I open my arms and we briefly embrace. He smells clean and fresh, not like cigarettes. For some reason I’d thought of him as a smoker, which maybe is my way of saying, Kids these days. Zachary hustles over to join us, but I let the boy slip from my arms to his. A sort of handoff. I’m back at the stove. Let them have this moment, if they can wring a moment out of whatever is happening. I keep my back turned, one hand holding the wooden sauce spoon, stirring.

The boys sit. I serve dinner. We drink ourselves comfortable. Together we move to the increasingly storied couch, undressing one another, but Blake can’t seem to get in the mood. Finally, he reaches down and eases Zachary’s head from between his pale legs, his flaccid penis shiny like a slug. “Hey, it’s okay,” he says to Zachary, as though he were the wiser of the two of them, the three of us. “Let me do you,” he says, but then instead of switching places with Zachary scoots over to the far end of the couch and draws his legs up under himself like a nesting animal. I reach out and take Zachary’s hand, pull him over to me. Blake watches us as though we were a reasonably compelling foreign film. He waits until we finish, then gets dressed and says good night.

“It’s better like this,” Zachary says when we’re alone again.

“I think you’re right,” I say and take him into my arms. As we rock slowly back and forth, heads on shoulders, I notice our reflection in the dark glass face of the TV. We look like we’re bobbing in a rowboat, on a lake or out to sea. It occurs to me to wonder: Is this what a marriage is? And then a related question: So what if it’s not?

Over the sixth grade holiday break—1993, this would have been, heading into ’94—my friend Isaac Adelman began to suspect that something was off about his twin brother, Jake. They were identical, but lately Jake had been getting short of breath when we played half-court in their front driveway, and when we went swimming — nothing special in South Florida in December — Jake wouldn’t race with us or have a diving contest or anything. “I’ll be judge,” he said, glum and defensive as he climbed onto the green raft and gave himself a push toward the shallow end of the pool.

So Isaac and I saw who of the two of us could jump farther (me), and who could hold his breath the longest (me), and who could do the fastest lap, which was such a close call that we really did need Jake to judge for us, but Jake had fallen asleep. He was lying on his side on the raft, half curled up, with his eyes closed and mouth open, one arm across his face to block the sunlight, the other arm dangling in the water.

The pediatrician took X-rays. A sarcoma was putting pressure on Jake’s left lung as well as his heart. Everything changed in the Adelman house after that. For example, the twins had always shared one huge room upstairs, but now Jake was to be moved to the first floor, down the hall from his parents and next door to Claudette, the housekeeper, in what had been Mr. Adelman’s home office. To offset the sickroom atmosphere, Mr. and Mrs. Adelman splurged on electronics and toys. They got a three-disc CD changer with speakers, a new TV and VCR for each of their rooms, and every game system you could think of — Super Nintendo, Neo Geo, Sega CD, Game Boys for the long hours in doctors’ waiting rooms. They had lava lamps and Nerf guns and remote-controlled cars.

My mother encouraged me to spend time with the twins. They needed me, she said, to bring some cheer into the house and to offer my “moral support.” She said I made things feel more normal over there. And of course we would have offered to reciprocate, but Jake couldn’t go on sleepovers, and she wouldn’t want the poor sick boy to feel left out if just Isaac came over, besides which she imagined that Mrs. Adelman must not want to split the boys up more than they already were, what with their room situation and Jake’s having been pulled out of school.

When I slept over we were allowed to stay up as late as we wanted playing video games and watching movies. If Jake had an appetite it was like a miracle. They’d have Claudette make anything he asked for. And there was always stuff to snack on — Fruit Roll-Ups and Kudos bars, fresh-made peanut butter oatmeal cookies and frozen yogurt. They had this big ceramic bowl — Mrs. Adelman had made it in a class she took — that sat on the breakfast bar and was always filled with clementine oranges. I would beg my mom to buy us some when she went to the store.

Mr. and Mrs. Adelman were usually in bed by ten thirty, and it was never long after that before Claudette retired to her room to watch TV with her headphones on. By this point Jake would have fallen asleep during whatever movie we’d chosen after dinner. I’d nudge him awake and help him down to his room while Isaac set the timer on his digital stopwatch for fifteen minutes. We’d pass the time playing Street Fighter II Turbo . He always had to be Ryu, who wore a white karate suit and had a hurricane kick and shot energy blasts out of his hands. I liked Guile, the American special ops vet with camo pants and a flat top, but I could kick Isaac’s ass so fast with Guile that it wasn’t fun for either of us, so I’d usually hit random and let the computer decide, though if it made me be Chun-Li — the Chinese girl — then we had to reset. When the stopwatch beeped we’d peek down from the top of the stairs for one last security check, then shut Isaac’s bedroom door.

When Mr. Adelman converted his office into a room for Jake, he’d moved some boxes into the front hall closet underneath the stairs. While most contained tax returns and business records, one had turned out to be full of dirty magazines. Isaac had grabbed a handful of these and stashed them in his closet, in the boxes of board games and the deep pockets of winter coats. Isaac alone got to choose which magazine we looked at and the pace at which the glossy pages turned. He liked to talk about the girls in the pictures, what they were doing and the guys they were doing it with and if we’d ever be like them. We compared which of us had a bigger thing, and more hair around it, and who could shoot more stuff, which was pretty much impossible to determine as long as we were shooting into socks from the laundry since the point of the sock was to absorb the stuff, so we stopped using them and did it into each other’s hands instead but it was still hard to tell. He tried to make it seem like these were just more games we were playing, friendly competitions like pool jumps or Street Fighter rounds or whatever. When Jake got better, Isaac said, we could all play.

I wanted to tell him to shut up about it, but I didn’t know how. (Plus I knew if I made him angry he might take the magazine away.) I wished that he had gotten sick instead of his brother, who was bald now, thinner every time I saw him, and wheezing in his sleep so bad that when the house settled at night you could hear it from all the way upstairs.

Jake’s funeral was the first one I ever went to. It was an overcast April morning, and I remember how the family lined up to receive the mourners: his mom’s mascara running, Isaac flanked by his grandparents and pallid in a suit he’d half outgrown, eyes glued to his shoes. And Mr. Adelman, how impossibly tall he seemed, leaning down and in close to shake my hand. I remember his big wet eyes and how I avoided them, terrified his grief might somehow allow him to read my secrets if I met his gaze. I don’t remember the service, only afterward, standing by the open grave, and even that I don’t think I remember the way it happened. There must have been a crowd gathered, a rabbi, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, but my mind seems to have erased all these things, or else never recorded them in the first place. I can see the green mat they put out, smell the fresh earth, feel the humidity of the day — all of it eerily clear in my mind — but I can also see myself alone beside the gravestone, which makes no sense, because as Jews we don’t unveil the stone until a year after the burial — there’s this whole other ceremony for it — besides which, if it had really been the way I remember, wouldn’t the memory be of the view looking out through my own eyes instead of a picture of myself standing there?