Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

Startled, I take my eyes off the road and look over, find her smiling shyly in the passenger seat, two fresh smokes rolled up and ready to go.

“You are my teacher,” I say. “A magic Russo American sent to my life to make it better — to make me better. But your life is also a life. I see that now. I’m going to make your life better, somehow.”

“Fifty percent would be better.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d remember I said that,” I say. “I mean it was mixed in with all that other stuff that made you mad.”

“How about it’s the only thing I remember?”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I liked the way you said ‘solidarity’ before. It sounded very Russian.”

“I say it the way my father says it. I like to say it’s the only Russian word I know.”

“Would you say it again for me?”

“ Solidarity .” We smile at each other. She pauses a moment. I can hear her teeth grind while she thinks about something. Time passes — not a long time, but time. I keep my eyes roadward, high beams burning away the darkness, bleaching the trees. “It was nice,” she says, finally. “The thing you said about my clit. Don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t have said it, and you’re never going to do it, but it was nice to hear.”

Early the next week the letters start coming from HQ. No more phone calls. They want records now, a paper trail. The restaurant is billed for a new mushroom suit. Apparently there’s a reason they don’t have a hundred of those things in a warehouse somewhere, and now I know what that reason is. Plus, we learn, HQ has been sending secret shoppers in here, and the reports have not been good. We’re drowning in violations. Our Caesar dressing tests positive for anchovies. We are beyond probation. The choice is between closing our doors immediately and getting sued to death.

“I’m so fucked,” Ethan says, drunk as I’ve ever seen him but sounding scarily sober. I pull the lever on the Jagerator, top us both off (and I should, or maybe shouldn’t, specify that we’re drinking out of pint glasses).

“You’re not fucked,” I say, then take a big gulp of cold black syrup so I have something to choke on other than hysterical laughter in the face of our mutually fucked future and my own profoundly idiotic lie. I actually think the words Poor Ethan .

Then he says, “If I lose this place they’re going to make me go to business school.” They meaning his family, and in a heartbeat the spore of sympathy I had for him twists itself inside out, grows to a thousand times its original size, becomes a blood-colored hate-mushroom big enough to block out the sky.

“Ethan,” I say to him, “we’ve known each other a long time, and I’ve always helped you.”

“That’s true, Brian. You’re a true friend. I love you.”

“Do you want my help now?”

“More than anything.”

“Then put the motor oil down and listen.”

Ethan does as I tell him. He reaches into his pocket, comes out with a blue pen, a notepad like the waitresses use, and his bag of coke. He pours the lines while I cut up a drinking straw. We get to work.

HQ scrapes the company name off the glass on the front door and takes all our swag away: the T-shirts and the menus and the secret sauce recipe card and the vinyl banners and the napkins — if their logo’s on it it disappears. I couldn’t have asked for a more thorough de-shrooming than the one they give us. Ethan keeps the lease on the space itself.

We’re closed for a month for the reboot. The sound system goes back to the plantation. The pinball machine follows close behind. Banquettes and bar stools reupholstered in leather. Pearlescent earth tones floor to ceiling, sconces wherever they’ll fit. We become “dazzlingly understated nouveau recherché”—that’s a quote from the local paper in their five-star review. And granted it’s the same schmuck who gave four stars to both Panera and Carrabba’s, but his is the voice that matters in this town, and anyway we snagged that elusive fifth star. It’s just us and Outback on the mountaintop, here in flatland.

Our waitresses — and, holy shit, waiters! — wear black jeans and crisp black button-ups. We still favor young people, indeed hire back as many of the Melissa/Jessicas as will get down with the brave new vibe. Their friends don’t come in for lunch anymore — we’re not even open for lunch on weekdays — but sometimes their teachers turn up. The adjunct profs, that fraud gentry, save up all semester for a big night out, and we show them their idea of a classy time. The new menu’s littered with the word “artisanal” instead of the word “organic”—though obviously “organic” is on there, too. It’s mostly the same food as before, only served on ceramic plates the size of manhole covers at triple the price. The day we put the new sign up, Polina took a picture on her phone and texted it to her father. The place is called Sungold, duh.

We still haven’t managed to find a black person willing to work with us but it’s something we’re interested in pursuing. Is it weird that we talk about it? That we agree? I understand that they — like women, right? — are not some homogenous body made up of interchangeable units any one of which might as well be any other and/or representative of the whole. That’s a pernicious cultural fantasy — words that still stick in my throat a bit when I use them, but the point is I do use them, even have some sense of what they mean. Anyway we love their music and think they’re cool and wish we knew some. One day one’s bound to walk in here — after all, isn’t that what Polina did?

Ethan’s still the owner but he keeps his distance. We have a verbal agreement, a kind of off-the-books restraining order. I was going to make it a blood oath but didn’t want to mix my fluids with his. He’s still on thin ice with his family, but Sungold turns a profit so they’re provisionally impressed. The ice is thickening: going from something legitimately dangerous to something merely frozen to the core. If they’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, they’re going to be waiting a long time because Polina and I manage Sungold as a team and it’s a tight operation. No more on-the-clock hummers in the walk-in freezer. No more Captain Morgan going missing by the case. Nobody robs Ethan except for us, and we keep things slow and steady — the goose will lay golden eggs until the day his heart bursts or his liver turns to foie gras. Then I guess I’ll have to meet his mom.

One Melissa/Jessica who did not come back to work for us is the one who helped me out of the mushroom suit, the one who showed an interest in my slimed physique, not to mention a rare enthusiasm for putting up with my shit. At Polina’s encouragement I called her and asked her to dinner. It was supposed to be chaste, a proper thank-you for having saved me from brain death, but you know how these things go. Her name turns out to be Kaylee Boyd, peach-colored all-American Dave Matthews fan, but beyond that rife with specific attributes and qualities of all kinds. For example, she studies environmental science, is working on a model to predict the rate at which our landlocked town will become beachfront property, then a water park, then a coral reef — though of course, she’s quick to qualify, coral will be a history lesson by that point, so something else will take over our drowned houses, or nothing will. That part’s harder to guess about. It’s all terrifying. I mostly tune it out.

Here’s what it comes down to. Kaylee is a woman who looks like a photograph of a woman. A photograph you look at and go, Oh come on that’s not real . And you’d think that because of this, being with her would feel like being in one of those photographs, but it doesn’t. It feels… different, somehow, not like that at all.