Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

To Caleb this remark instantly pegs Amy as the smartest person here. Sandra is not a crazy person. He is going to win her heart. He makes a drink. He crosses the room. He sees you come in, grab two coats, pour an insane-looking rum and Coke, leave again. Hey, all right , he thinks. Good for him — guy could use a little fun in his life .

There’s a DJ doing the music now, some skinny bald guy supposedly semifamous on the West Coast, hunched over a pair of turntables with USB ports hooked into a brushed aluminum MacBook Pro. Sampled snatches of music are like flying fish in the river of a doubled-up dubstep, breaking the surface and flashing in the air, then disappearing again. Sandra’s dancing with Lindsey and Caleb wants to join in. He’s an incredible dancer but has always held back around Sandra because dancing means ceding control over his instincts — usually a plus, but when he’s around Sandra he needs to maintain exquisite control. Ahh, these girls! They’re both so perfect. They shine. How can he even watch them, much less join in? How can he not?

Suddenly Sandra stops dancing. She’s seen something. For a second Caleb thinks it’s him and they’re having a moment — maybe the moment — but then he realizes no, her eyes are looking past his, past him. Perhaps you and Candi are back from wherever you guys snuck off to, which he figures was the roof. But you’ve only been gone for — well, time’s become sort of a nebulous concept here in Caleb Land, and anyway back to the main issue, which is, What — who — is Sandra looking at? All he has to do is turn his body around.

Sandra, thrilled, squealing: “Gene! You made it!”

Now Caleb’s on the roof with a bottle of Maker’s, looking for you and Candi and the bag. But what the fuck, man? There’s nobody up here. Swig. God, snow’s annoying. He’s sitting on this stumpy metal thing. The whole roof is white. It’s still coming down. I spend a lot of my life on rooftops , Caleb thinks. What, if anything, does this mean? Of course, to parse this question Caleb would need to concede the premise of a world where meaning is (a) possible and (b) desirable, both notions antithetical to him. He drops the line of thought like a kid bored with a toy, flips his cell phone open, sends you that text message you ignored. Swig. There’s a sort of jump cut in his mind, or maybe a whole scene’s missing. There was nearly half a bottle, now there’s nothing. The world swirls, sparkling, falling. Where’s his jacket? Fuck it. He closes his eyes and the dark swirls, too.

Sandra is in Gene’s arms, her own arms tight around his neck, squeezing out Sogoodtoseeyou and Babynevergonnaletyougo . She’s been sipping Belvedere since sunset and feeling nothing; it passes through her blood like water, or so she thought, but now, here, as his hands find her narrow hips and circle them it’s like — hello! She realizes she’s barely on her feet, and all of that Emma-and-Mr.-Knightley bullshit with Caleb is instantly vaporized. Not to say that she doesn’t feel for him — indeed, she feels for all of them, every person at the party, their names chant through her thrilling and woozing brain: Caleb, Lindsey, Candi, Mark, Miles, Brandon, Amy, Alec, Shannon, Teresa, that friend of Caleb’s, uh… she’s trying to remember your name but then gives up because why bother? Gene is here! Gene who keeps kissing her, and she will let him prolong the moment for however long he wishes — has it been mere seconds? a whole minute yet? who knows — but she can’t help opening her eyes for a quick survey of the party around her and she sees Caleb storm out the door, holding the fat-bottomed Maker’s bottle by its long neck coated in carmine wax; it swings briskly in time with his furious stride. On the one hand, how dare he! On the other — well, everything. She’ll deal with him after Gene goes away again; late next week, she thinks. Truth is, if Caleb would out-and-out come on to her, she’d probably go for it, palace intrigue being SOP for a palace, after all, besides which who knows (better not to dwell on this) what Gene gets up to on the road. But in order to take the queen you have to have guts enough to make a play for her, so what’s left to even say?

Lindsey’s back in Chelsea at the after-party for Logan’s show. They’re in this restaurant on 10th Avenue that’s got a cobblestone patio — terrace? courtyard? — with what looks like a no-bullshit oak tree planted in its center, but of course it’s like five degrees and snowing so nobody’s out there. She’s on an oxblood banquette between Logan and some middle-aged guy wearing a white silk vest over a blue silk shirt tucked into a pair of black dad jeans. The gallerist introduces them, explains in tones of dulcet condescension that Vest is now the proud owner of Lindsey’s arm. Lindsey offers what she hopes is a winning smile as she obliges Vest’s request for “a closer look at the real thing.” He takes her arm in his hands, lifts and bends it for different angles. Logan, below the table, puts a hand on Lindsey’s knee, squeezes. The gesture is meant, she thinks, to communicate some combination of “Thank you” and “I’m sorry” because they’ve talked a million times before about how awful it is that he has to suck up to assholes like Vest, but how it’s part of the game, inescapable, way of the world, etc. Anyway his hand is a comfort, even if it does seem to be migrating north. Vest, meanwhile, keeps one-handed hold of her elbow while he knocks back his vodka cran, then announces that he’s going to count her freckles. She doesn’t bother to tell him he’s holding the wrong arm, turns her attention back to Logan, who is unsuccessfully attempting to work his fingers between her tightly crossed thighs. This , she thinks, is when all that fucking yoga pays off .

Lindsey wonders if Logan’s show sold out and, if so, how much money he made. She forgot to look at any of the prices when she was there earlier. She wonders what Vest paid for her arm, thinks of asking him, changes her mind. The gallerist is handing a credit card to the waiter. Vest releases her arm, turns to a girl across the table, another one of Logan’s models, asks her which part of her he “missed the chance to cherish forever.” The girl doesn’t say anything, just leans forward until her forehead is pressed to the table, grabs a fistful of her own hair from the back of her head to pull it out of the way, with the other hand points to the pale mound where her neck becomes her spine.

Candi’s back in the orange room with the tall door so ghostly pale purple that it might be gray. This is where her brain sends her whenever she blacks out. She kind of wants to call it her “safe place” only she can’t say she feels very safe here. It’s a creepy purgatory cluttered with stuff — furniture? objects? — all rendered in this weird skeleton geometry so she can’t tell what she’s looking at, indeed feels she is perhaps not even in the room but merely viewing it, as though it were not a place at all but a picture, a canvas or a page, but if that’s true then why is she able to walk across the orange floor toward the tall door, to reach her hand out for the knob and, watching her fingers pass through it, wonder whether it is she or the room that is ethereal? Here, as ever, is where the dream begins to deflate, as though it were a balloon pricked by the pin of her uncertainty.

Now she’s awake in an unfamiliar bedroom in a hiked-up (and pulled-down) black dress. The good news is her underwear’s still on; there don’t seem to be stains on the sheets. In the living room, that semicute guy with the drugs from the party — i.e., you — is asleep on what she rightly infers is your own couch. You’re tangled in a blanket with a throw pillow over your face to block out the morning sun. Huge chunks of her night are missing, but it’s clear enough what must have happened. There’s a red Solo cup on your kitchen counter. She can see from where she’s standing that it’s empty.