Flings: Stories Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Amanda Leigh Bullock

  EPIGRAPH

  Rabbi Pinhas often cited the words: “‘A man’s soul will teach him,’” and emphasized them by adding: “There is no man who is not incessantly being taught by his soul.” One of his disciples asked: “If this is so, why don’t men obey their souls?” “The soul teaches incessantly,” Rabbi Pinhas explained, “but it never repeats.”

  —Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim

  Oh, for a change of heart, a change of heart—a true change of heart!

  —Saul Bellow, Herzog

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Flings

  Sungold

  A Talking Cure

  Adon Olam

  After Ellen

  Mike’s Song

  Poets

  Carol, Alone

  Saint Wade

  A Night Out

  The Happy Valley

  Gregory’s Year

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Justin Taylor

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FLINGS

  Percy took Intro to US Labor History for an elective in the spring of his sophomore year. The professor’s name was Leon Pitzer, an embittered pinko genius with an august limp. In him Percy knew he had finally found the father surrogate he’d been searching for since arriving at Schmall, a semielite liberal arts college in a town of the same name in the heart of the heart of Ohio. Percy changed his major from English to history, and over the following three semesters took every course Pitzer offered. Pitzer directed Percy’s senior thesis, an inspired treatise on the American government’s illegal 1921 deployment of the Air Force to bomb striking mine workers at Blair Mountain, West Virginia. The SEIU invited Percy to come to Chicago and work on a hotel campaign. He talked to Kat about his decision. They both cried, but later, recounting the story to his best friend, Danny, on the porch over nightcap beers while Kat slept, Percy tried to make it sound as if only Kat had cried. Danny knew the truth because his bedroom was across the hall from Kat’s and he’d been listening in. “I don’t get what the whole big deal is,” he said to Rachel about it. “So he loves her, too. So what? Why is that some disaster? And what century does he live in where a man’s not allowed to cry?”

  “Are you, like, preparing me for something right now?” Rachel asked. She lived around the block from Danny. They were between her sheets and he held her tightly, as though the bed were a dinghy in some rough sea and he meant to keep her from going over. Rachel and their other friend Ellen—both film students—had managed to get their mentor to secure them internships working for an experimental West Coast filmmaker who staged an annual festival in Portland, Oregon. It was not clear when—or even whether—Danny and Rachel would see each other again. “Please don’t say anything else,” Rachel said. Danny clenched his jaw. Not talking when he felt like talking was pretty much the hardest thing in the world for him, and there were few people other than Rachel for whom he would do it. He thought of a popular song he’d hated in high school, the one with the chorus that went “Well, I guess this is growing up.” He squeezed Rachel tighter, closer, begged her body to be his anchor, keep him from setting adrift in his own head. Nothing was going as anticipated. Her lower lip was between her front teeth. They enjoyed fast, rough sex and then she threw him out so she could shower and get dressed. She was due to meet her boyfriend, Marcus, for pizza. Instead of a good-bye kiss, or even a hug, they high-fived—a fierce flat sound that did not echo, and yet it rang in his ears the whole block home.

  Danny knew he liked writing, and he knew he didn’t want to move back to Kettering, and he knew he didn’t want to stay in Schmall, especially not without his friends, but that was as much as he knew. So when a professor of his, presumably inspired by the STOP THE IMF! button on his backpack, offered to help him secure an internship at a prestigious-sounding New York political magazine that he had never heard of before, he told her he’d been a subscriber since he was fifteen and that it would be a dream come true. He printed out the application from their website and she wrote him a letter and the next thing he knew he was on a plane east.

  His boss in New York had close-cropped hair and a permanent turtleneck: the arts and letters editor. One day they happened to return from their separate lunches at the same time and stood together in the low drone of the elevator. Danny ventured to comment that he was excited to see a new Branford Marsalis album coming out. He knew this because the editor had gotten a review copy in the mail earlier that day and, naturally, opening and sorting the editor’s mail was one of Danny’s several jobs. The editor brightened and asked if Danny was a fan, and Danny said, yes, he was. The editor asked what record Danny liked best and he said Without a Net, which the editor said he’d never heard of. Danny explained that it was a double live Grateful Dead record on which Marsalis sits in for a totally sick “Eyes of the World.”

  Let this anecdote serve as synecdoche for Danny’s time in New York. Percy, meanwhile, had been relocated by the union to organize nursing homes all across Oregon state. He was moving to Portland, too! He took an apartment on Southeast Belmont Street in a low-rise building with open walkways across from a gourmet grocery store that he never once patronized. The first nursing home was in a town called La Grande, way out east in the Oregon desert—closer to Idaho than Portland. He lived in a motor lodge during the week and on Fridays drove the four hours back to the city. But for what? Nobody and nothing. Maybe drinks with Ellen and Rachel, if they were even around. He took his loneliness out on Kat, who was still back in Schmall. Not that he said it in so many words, but he was asking for her to come be with him. And who knew, Kat thought, but that maybe now they had a chance at the real thing.

  So Kat sat around at the Belmont Street apartment while Percy was away all week organizing the nurses. He sent her lascivious promissory emails from his motel, and she responded in enthusiastic kind while IM-ing in a separate window with Danny in New York about his frustrations with the internship, her own boredom, and how despite everything it was honestly pretty cool. Gorgeous, cheap, progressive—the Great Northwest! Kat was looking for temp work. Once she had a job her days wouldn’t be so empty and long. And once the La Grande home was organized Percy would ask the union to give him something closer to base so he could actually live in his apartment, and then they’d just see what they saw—wouldn’t they? Danny supposed they would. “‘Portland’s a drawing card,’” Kat said, quoting that Raymond Carver story where the guy’s wife sells vitamins while he sneaks around with her friend.

  Rachel had asked Marcus to go with her to Portland, but he was unwilling to give up his “good job” at the hardware store in Schmall. She’d decided to live alone rather than share a place with Ellen and Ellen’s boyfriend, Scott, a reasonably talented DJ with family money. It was assumed that Scott would soon propose to Ellen. He was balding, so his time seemed short, and it was understood among the friends that Ellen was bound to become famous like Miranda July. Ellen thought about how she’d phrase the Facebook update when the day came, or if instead she’d just post a picture of the ring on her finger, let the commentariat figure it out for themselves.

  Rachel got a one-bedroom apartment on Couch Street—“couch” inexplicably pronounced “cooch” in the local demotic. She lived six blocks from Percy and Kat. The three ganged up on Danny about joining them. Percy and Kat said he could crash in their living room indefinitely; they had a futon. Rachel was notably silent on the subject of where Danny might live. Danny had fifteen hundred dollars in the bank. Since he wouldn’t be paying rent the money would last him awhile, which meant he could devo
te himself entirely to two objectives: (1) write the great American novel, despite having never experienced anything of significance other than Rachel; (2) Rachel.

  Danny, no sap like Kat, understood that he and Rachel would never be “together.” And yet the allure of what they inflicted on each other—the sheer thrill of wounding and the deep satisfaction of licking each other’s wounds clean—was too great to resist. He could not imagine living without it. He felt like he was waking from one of those dreams where when you’re dreaming you think you’re awake, and only when you wake up do you realize that what you thought was your waking life was in fact another tier of the big deep dream—or was it? Like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, Danny thought to himself as the landing gear groaned and the plane began its descent into PDX. There was no such thing as New York. Danny saw that now. He wasn’t one of Those People. He belonged to this strange town, his best friends. Her. Bedazzling, unaccountable girl who skipped the trip to the airport to meet his plane but turned up at the apartment at midnight for a late drink and to christen the futon after Percy and Kat went to bed.

  So Danny’s two projects were one and the same. Rachel was his muse—a word he no longer made the mistake of calling her to her face. Rachel hated to be written about. It made her feel like she was under some microscope, she said, or a zoo animal having its picture snapped by gawking tourists in foam hats. That made things difficult, though in a way it made them easier since he mostly only wrote out of anger, frustration, or hurt. For as often as she was bedding him, why didn’t he matter more?

  Ellen and Scott sublet a house in a suburb at the far edge of town. They went hard-core domestic and the other friends rarely saw them. Even Rachel only saw Ellen in passing at the filmmaker’s office, where they were both rapidly learning the extent to which they had overestimated their interest in experimental film. Ellen seemed to take this in stride, but not Rachel. Impulsive and reckless at the best of times, in Portland she was rallying her disappointments into an all-out nihilism spree.

  Rachel felt stuck, and neither she nor Danny was sure how Danny fit into the quagmire. Sometimes she clung to him: a nonjudgmental ear, the comforts of familiarity, and as much sloppy drunken sex as she could stand. He cherished these times and, though he did not know it consciously, was usually hoping for her to sink lower, because it was in her weakness that she called on him and he would once more have the chance to play the role of unwavering savior, at least until she got tired of having a savior, which never took all that long. She had come out there to find herself, but here was everything she’d left behind like a fence hemming her in or a bowline tying her to a dock. So she made friends with some townies in the music scene, which even she knew was a Band-Aid on a dog bite, but for the moment at least it would have to do.

  While Rachel was out at house shows or watching kids in hoodies wipe out on their boards at the Burnside Skatepark, Danny sulked and wrote an endless, plotless book that was ostensibly dedicated to her but of which she was essentially the villain. Well, he had to work his feelings out somehow, didn’t he? The only other choice would have been to talk to Percy about it, which he hated doing, because Percy related Danny and Rachel to him and Kat, and obviously in that formulation Danny was Kat. So he filled notebooks up with the grand tally of Rachel’s misdeeds, transgressions, insensitivities, shortcomings, and general failure to sufficiently understand the grave importance of their love, which he regarded as a manifestation of capital-L Love in all of its philosophical, political, artistic, literary, existential, and metaphysical connotations and ramifications. Yes, whenever they made love the world was saved. He knew that, and so could hardly help but see that what they had was not a convenience, crutch, or habit but rather a solemn responsibility. It never once occurred to him that even if she’d understood the crazed scope of his vision, said vision still might not have been especially appealing to a girl adrift and unhappy in a world that she largely despised.

  Rachel decided to do the stupidest thing she could think of, which was try heroin. Her townie friend Miles told her not to tell anyone about them going to shoot up, but she told Danny because she knew that he’d keep her secret, unlike Percy, who would tell Kat and then it would get back to Ellen, whose older brother had gotten bad into drugs in high school, resulting in a mess that had nearly torn her family apart. Nobody even smoked pot around Ellen. But Rachel knew she could trust Danny because she knew he would do absolutely anything for her except leave her alone. And this way, she reasoned to herself, he would feel nominally involved, despite the fact that he was absolutely not invited along. They were at the Cricket Cafe, a hipster diner whose specialty was biscuits and white gravy, though it was lunchtime now. The Velvet Underground happened to be on the house radio, and she hoped this coincidence somehow clichéd things to the point where he’d have to stop freaking out and laugh at the absurdity of it all—which he didn’t, as she had known all along that he wouldn’t.

  Miles was going to handle the buy and getting clean works, as well as shooting her up and babysitting her. He knew what he was doing, she said; it was all taken care of. She wouldn’t give Danny an address but grudgingly promised to keep her phone on.

  Danny hated Miles. He was an unknown quantity, a dangerous usurper—everything, in short, that Danny had been to Marcus—though the few times Danny was allowed to meet him, Miles seemed nice enough. It was really only possible to hate him when he was an abstraction. The actual person just banged his head along with the music and asked if Danny wanted another beer. Miles was a high school dropout who played in a couple bands and had a three-year-old who lived not with him but with his parents, two towns over. He was doughy and soft-spoken, a moptop with hazel eyes and bad tattoos up and down his arms.

  Ellen came home from work and found that Scott had left her. He’d loaded up their car with his half of their belongings, written a note about sad things sometimes being for the best, shut his phone off, and split. As Scott drove south he kept thinking that the cars passing him going the other direction were Percy on his way home, but that was because he only had the vaguest (and anyway mistaken) sense of where La Grande was on the map. He continued to entertain this possibility long after he crossed the California line.

  When Ellen realized Scott was never going to pick up—and with Rachel MIA as well—she called Danny, who felt terrible having to pretend he didn’t know why Rachel wasn’t answering the phone. The world was wobbling on its axis. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ellen and Scott were supposed to have been the sure thing—the un-fucked-up and un-fuck-up-able couple, the golden standard against which the other friends could fail and fail absolutely, that task (he thought of Barthelme, who had been thinking of Beckett) standing always before them, like a meaning for their lives.

  Ellen was alone out in the burbs, stuck with all the half-empty drawers and the craven, mealy-hearted note. Neither Kat nor Danny had a car with which to go retrieve her. Danny tried Percy, who was on the road home but still hours away. “Man, that sounds like an epic shit show,” he said to Danny. “I’ve got half a mind to stay in La Grande.” They shared a humorless laugh and then said good-bye. In the silence that followed, Percy considered the truth of what he’d said to Danny. It was a massive waste of time and money, all this travel back and forth, and there was a nurse named Jacquelyn with whom he’d become somewhat involved. If he turned back now he could get to her place by midnight, but then what would he say to his friends? Danny already knew he was on the way, so he’d have to make up an emergency. A union emergency? It didn’t make sense. Percy’s was the only car on the road. He imagined his headlights as streaking comets and his car as a dark ghost chasing their tails. That didn’t make a ton of sense either but so what? Road signs flashed in and out of his vision. He didn’t imagine himself at all.

  Danny wanted Ellen to come to them, call a cab, but she was barely listening to what he said. There was no way she could wait patiently, give directions, sit back and watch streetlights roll by. She was in meltdow
n mode and someone had to get to her. Kat fired up the computer while Danny kept repeating, “It’ll all be okay.” Ellen hung up on him midsentence and he was suddenly worried that she might do something. The bus schedule was a nightmare—it was too late in the evening, there were too many transfers. Everything was wrong.

  Danny called Rachel. Only he knew where she was, and she knew he knew; therefore if she saw it was him calling, she would know it was important because she would know that he would know that she’d kill him if he was calling her for no reason—or, worse yet, to check up.

  Her phone rang, then went to voicemail. He wondered if she had broken her promise. He called again. The third time, finally, Miles picked up. Fucking Miles! “Hey, man,” he said. Presumably he’d recognized Danny’s name on her phone’s little screen. Danny told him to put her on. “She’s kinda . . .” he said, and then Danny started screaming at him. No idea what he was even saying. Miles told Danny to chill out and then he put the phone down. Danny heard voices, but he couldn’t tell what was being said. A couple minutes passed.

  Minutes. It was excruciating.

  “What,” she said, finally, in a blank voice that set Danny’s guts churning. He launched into a garbled apology for having bothered her. “I’m hanging up,” she said, but then before she could he blurted the news. “Oh no,” she said, emotion seeping through the drug screen and into the two hushed syllables.

  He wanted to apologize again but was scared to. Another epic silence.