Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

“So what does it feel like?” Polina asks me. It’s late. We’ve sent everyone home and are sitting at the bar, tired after a long night’s work but happy, relaxing in sconce light, drinking nightcaps of Ethan’s Macallan twelve-year while we finish up ripping him off. I’m not sure how to answer her question.

“Normal, I guess. Or like, I don’t know, being alive.”

My name is Lacey Anne Schmidt. My fiancé’s name — which I still haven’t decided whether I’ll take or not — is as or more plain. He is Zachary Davis, black-haired and lanky with a little beer belly that pooches over the waist of his slacks. If I take his name I will be Lacey Anne Davis, or Lacey Anne Schmidt-Davis, though I think Davis-Schmidt sounds better, though I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to go. I mean in terms of the order of the names when a woman takes a man’s. Meanwhile there remains the problem of my first name. I can never decide if I hate “Lacey” because it’s so white trash or so country club, but one way or the other it sounds terribly unserious, and so when I publish it’s going to be as Anne Schmidt, or Anne Schmidt-Davis, which I think has a decent cadence to it, like Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick or Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Forgive me if my references trend obscure. Zachary and I are both PhD candidates at UPenn. I’m New Media and he’s Comp Lit, which means, at the risk of totally overdetermining your reading of this story, that the common ground of our respective theoretical apparatuses starts and ends with Freud. Zachary’s dissertation is on ideations of Confederate masculinity in late twentieth-century Southern fiction, i.e., post Faulkner and O’Connor. He’s writing about Barry Hannah’s obsession with J. E. B. Stuart in Airships , and Padgett Powell’s with Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men . Also “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason, where the woman leaves the trucker after they visit the hallowed grounds, etc. — though the way things have been going these past few months, it’s not clear Zachary’s writing anything about anybody. He’s been completely blocked.

We live together in a third-floor apartment near campus and are both ABD. We’ve been dating for about three years, and engaged for exactly seven weeks. It’s Friday night. We’re getting home — late — from a reception at the school followed by a few nightcaps with some of our fellow grad students. Both of us are drunk, and I’ve got this idea in my head that we should do our own version of the truth session from “Water Liars,” that Barry Hannah story where the husband and the wife tell each other about their sexual pasts.

At first Zachary doesn’t want to, but I kind of stick it to him so he says, Okay, sure. So I get another set of nightcaps going and we start. But the thing of it is, even though we’re about the same age as the people in the story, that couple had been married for ten years already. What I mean is that they had plenty of — how to put this? — distance from what they were talking about. And of course the point of “Water Liars” is how the wife’s news sends the husband for a brutal loop anyway — distance nothing. Distance be damned.

Zachary proposed to me in Locust Grove, Virginia, about four hours down from Philly. We were on a kind of vision quest for his project (the truth session hardly our first experiment with voodoo academia), visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm at Ellwood Manor — Jackson himself of course lying in Lexington in a cemetery that bears his name.

I’d looked online and found a couple of wineries nearby in Spotsylvania and a place in town to stay. Not exactly two weeks in Paris, or even a long weekend in the Poconos, but it was something: what we could swing.

The funny thing — well, one funny thing — about the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm is that it is not, technically, a grave anymore, and indeed it may never have been. Nobody’s sure. We’d read online that in 1998 the park service dug up the plot to install a piece of concrete to keep looters out, and when they did this they discovered that the legendary metal box containing the arm, the very thing they meant to protect, wasn’t there to be protected. But Zachary said this didn’t change his desire to see the site. If it was a fraud, he said, that was interesting, too, albeit in a different way.

Forgive me one last digression, but my inner second-wave feminist thinks it’s obscene that I’ve spent this much time discussing my boyfriend’s — ahem, fiancé’s — work without mentioning my own. And who am I to say she’s wrong? So. My work concerns the appropriation of mythological and folk motifs for use in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. I buy high-level characters from burnt-out gamers, and these allow me access to the most remote realms of the virtual worlds without my having to spend thousands of hours building up experience points in a half dozen different games.

Zachary played Spells of Evermore 3 with me once. I had a barbarian warrior and a wood elf druid, and I needed him to play the druid, backing me up while I fought this one particular dragon. His job was to alternately cast ensnaring vines on the monster and healing spells on me. So basically he had to press two buttons. But the dragon had these minions and one of them was a necromancer and things got out of hand, and I admit I may have overreacted when we both got killed, but that was because I knew it was going to be a fucking week of my life to get the lost experience points back when slaying the dragon hadn’t even been the goal in the first place. We were only killing him to get his eyes so we could go see some witch who supposedly had been modeled on Baba Yaga. Zachary said I was no fun to play with and I reminded him that the point of the game wasn’t to have fun, and that was the last time I asked him to take an active interest in my work.

But getting back to our truth session. Because it’s not 1971 or whatever year it’s supposed to be in the Hannah story, we’re having a tough time finding stuff that the other person doesn’t already know. We know each other’s loss-of-virginity episodes and we know each other’s numbers. He knows about my abortion. I know he messed around with guys a few times in college. All very healthy and progressive, I’m sure, but the point is that before we know it we’ve run out of revelations from our pasts and have stumbled into the veritable present.

So I admit that, yes, I sometimes fake with him. Not often, I’m quick to add, trying to be kind here and pulling it off, I think, though this is admittedly something I’ve been looking for a way to talk about.

“Well, when was the last time?” He isn’t looking at me. He’s at the counter, fixing us fresh drinks. Gin and tonics with zests of lime, because even though we can joke knowingly about “the peculiar institution” and “the War of Northern Aggression” we are still people who live in Philadelphia with their citrus zester. Anyway, I give him the truthful answer about my faking: “Tuesday.”

“I see.” His tone is relaxed. Casual introspection. If he’s hurt he hides it well. Or, also plausible, I’m too drunk to read him.

“Your turn,” I say. It occurs to me that we’re doing our truth session backwards. In the story they have this great night out — it’s the guy’s birthday — and then they get into it the morning after, when they’re sober, after ditching a party and reaffirming their love. But it’s too late to offer this observation, with him already in the middle of talking about Bridget, the girl he dated before me. How it only lasted a few months but was super heavy while it did. I already know all this, I want to say to him. Well, here’s some news. Bridget used to be into some rough stuff — she liked to be choked and held down, tossed around. Your average rape fantasy, it sounds like. And he’s got his hands in the air, palms out, preemptive defense, saying how he didn’t even want to do it at first — refused to role-play the oppressor, was worried he might injure her, etc. But then he learned that simulating violence in a safe space can be a valid way of gaining psychological mastery over trauma. (One wonders what ol’ Bridget’s truth session might have sounded like.) Long story short, he came around.