Justin Taylor: Flings: Stories

Kevin is five years younger, has a wife, lives in Philly, which Gregory quickly comes to recognize is a provincial shithole filled with ugly people uninterested in traffic laws or any other form of etiquette or self-preservation. Regaining his urban anomie is like physical therapy, but faster and more rewarding. He grows a goatee but not a soul patch. By the end of November he’s got his brother reading Žižek, who makes glorious apocalyptic sense again, and Kevin’s got him into the whole slow-food thing. Kevin’s become this genius chef, apparently, side benefit of his status as one of the long-term unemployed. The brothers spend their time talking revolution, crimping piecrusts, slow-cooking brisket, brining turkey, baking bread from scratch. The first time his dough rises Gregory is unashamed to shed a tear, indeed, rather wishes he would have broken wholly down. Sounds very cleansing, freeing, to be emptied out, presumably as prelude to some experience of renewal, anyway refill. He bites into an onion as though it were a Honeycrisp, but the moment seems to have passed.

The wife, his sister-in-law, is Nancy. At night when she comes home from her job in the archives at a university art museum they sit in the living room and sing their favorite songs together, a bottle of rye going around the circle like a looped video clip while they debate whether their cover of “Promised Land” is a Dead cover or a Chuck Berry cover since the Dead were covering Berry in the first place but the Dead version is the only one they’ve ever heard. Nancy suggests they YouTube the original — a Gordian solution, granted, but one that seems to Gregory a pinhole glimpse into the sorry heart of the contemporary world. When she teasingly leans toward his MacBook they have words. His brother, an untalented drinker, is curled up on the couch, head in hands.

Kevin and Nancy cajole Gregory to fly back to Indianapolis with them for Christmas. Their father is straight John Birch these days, but weirdly, this doesn’t ruin the visit. Gregory realizes that apart from a few particulars about immigration and Jewish people, their beliefs are basically aligned: the system is both rigged and rotten, the economy is one continuous act of fraud, anyone wearing a tie on the TV has already been bought and sold. They both voted for Obama, now feel betrayed. Two days before New Year’s, in the parking lot of Harris Teeter, he runs into Kara, a girl from his high school, a B-lister from the old vanished Hollywood of his adolescent porn dreams, hardly worse for a decade’s wear, he’s got to say; in fact she’s held up better than a lot of the old A-list, if Facebook’s any way to judge. He’s on his way out of the store and she’s on her way in. “Gregory?” she says. “Is that you? Oh em gee, I’d heard you were in New York.”

They catch up while his twelve-pack of Beast Ice sweats through its paper box. She’s home for the holidays like he is, says she lives in Detroit now, is separated from her terminally alcoholic husband, is a painter in roughly the same sense that he’s a rock star. “You should come visit sometime,” she says. After a few weeks of increasingly familiar emails, he does — in January no less. If he lived here, he decides, he’d be in love with her in three months, which, he further muses, is probably about when she’ll be ready to give some kind of rebound thing a try. Back in Philly he buys a ’93 Camry, throws his guitar in the trunk, big hugs for his brother and sister-in-law. “Your devotion,” he says, “will not be forgotten. You are granted title to great mansions in the sky.” He hitches up his pants. They’re loose. You wouldn’t believe the difference fresh, organic, homemade food makes. It was Philly itself that taught him this, as much as his brother. Yellow drip cheese, half-priced buffalo wings, smeary death. No thanks.

Lease on the Detroit apartment starts February 15. A whole floor to himself for what his shoe-box room cost in that Bed-Stuy share. It’s time to work again so he gets into a gig doctoring white-collar résumés, still despicable in its way but less categorically or directly so, and he can do it from home. He takes long drives in his car whenever he feels like it, soaks up such beauty and desolation as Detroit abides — in a month or two when spring returns many of these empty white lots will be blooming fields, Audrey’s rural-urban dream realized, but he doesn’t write her to tell her about it. She must have other dreams now.

He picks Kara up from work, cooks her dinner whenever she’ll let him, but it’s not time for the next step yet and both of them know it, which somehow makes everything easier rather than fraught like you might expect. What is expectation, anyway? A fantasy. A shot in the dark. A wish. What is anything? Who was this man Chesterton whose bons mots Žižek is always pinching? What would it have been like to have lived one of the lives of the saints? Gregory makes flank steak with raspberry-chipotle marinade, fingerling potatoes au gratin. Salmon and asparagus with Israeli couscous. Apple cobbler, peach pie. He pulls the guitar off its stand while the dishes soak, plinks around to get himself loose and in tune. Kara’s on the love seat, legs tucked up. He clears his throat, grins shyly, launches into his new favorite cover, an old country blues — Garcia loved it — called “Sitting on Top of the World.”

“Flings” is, among other things, in loose homage to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves .

In “A Night Out,” Candi’s recurring dream is of Paul Klee’s Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door .

“Adon Olam” owes a debt — and perhaps an apology — to Gershom Scholem’s On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead .

“Mike’s Song” is a quasi-sequel to a story called “The New Life,” which appears in my first collection. The concert the Becksteins attend is a real historical event, used here fictitiously but true to the set list as performed. My sister, Melanie, went with me when nobody else would, and we had a better time than Mike did — even though our seats were a lot worse.

“Carol, Alone” and “The Happy Valley” both make use of my maternal family history. My grandparents Lorelei and Jack Starkman and my great-aunt Ellen Greenberg were patient with my questions, generous with their answers, and will please forgive all omissions, distortions, and honest mistakes. I would also like to acknowledge Lord Lawrence Kadoorie’s letter of February 6, 1979 (“The Kadoorie Memoir”), Dennis A. Leventhal’s article “The Jewish Community of Hong Kong: An Introduction,” and Ken Nicolson’s book The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery , which mentions the Jewish cemetery only in passing, but is nonetheless the text that alerted me to its existence. And I wouldn’t have been in Hong Kong in the first place if not for the love and hospitality of the Goldners: Caryn, Andrew, Ava Grace, and Lillian Jade.

Thank you to the editors of the journals, magazines, and websites where several of these stories first appeared.

For steadfast love and friendship, close readings, saintly patience, stiff drinks, and otherwise Coming Through, my boundless gratitude is offered to Noah Ballard, Mary Beth Constant, Elliott David, Mark Doten, Dan Guy Fowlkes, Caryn & Andrew Goldner, Gregory Henry, Jodie Mack, Peter Masiak, Cal Morgan, Alec Niedenthal, Amanda Peters, Suzanne Rindell, Jarrett Rosenblatt, Michael Signorelli, Emma Sweeney, Eva Talmadge, Maggie Tuttle, and Adam Wilson; my parents and sister; all the Taylors and Bullocks;

and Jeremy Schmall — whose Giant goes with him wherever he goes;

Joshua Cohen — for guidance, indulgence, and translations from the Hebrew;