Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

The days after those nights always felt like they were over before they started. All I wanted was to get Terese off to work, pop the flower video in for Mazie, and try to catch up on some of the sleep I’d missed. I’d nap on the couch with my face turned away from the TV, barely dozing, still at the ready in case Mazie needed me, and consequently any dreams I managed to have were warped by the singing sunflowers in their endless encore medley of greatest hits.

One day I had had enough. I couldn’t take another round of the same old songs or any of it. After we said good-bye to Terese I got Mazie dressed and put some Goldfish crackers in a baggie for her for later. I set her car seat up in my car and we hit the road.

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.

… 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.