Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

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. But 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.