Flings Read online

  She’s sleeping of course. Has been since she hit the mattress. You’re getting that now. On top of everything else, you’re feeling up the passed-out girl. Man, this night.

  You roll Candi over as gently as you can. The first thing you see—stomach plummet—is that whatever it is is black. And there’s one on each breast. For a second you’re sure it’s leprosy.

  But the strapless dress—duh, you fucking asshole. It’s tape.

  Sweet relief! Now with that settled, let’s get back to the issue. How can a person with all that coke in her system be sleeping? Hmm. Well, there’s how much she drank for one thing. Christ, these people and their lives. And if she was ready to pass out, what the hell did she agree to come over for? Caleb owes you big-time for this. Somehow, you feel, this is all your friend’s fault. And where is Caleb now? Probably at an after-hours dance club, making up with Lindsey. They’ll fuck at sunrise. He’ll pretend she’s Sandra.

  You watch Candi sleep for a minute—kind of checking her out, kind of making sure she keeps breathing—then go into the living room. Snow’s still coming down out there. You remember that this meant something to you before, but now you can’t remember—can’t even guess—what it might have been. Like looking into a mirror and only seeing the mirror (cf. Peck to Bergman in Spellbound, which, duh, was what was screening at the party). Your eyes ache; your hands are shaking. You go to the hall closet and find yourself a blanket. It’s soft. You wrap yourself up, then hear your phone buzzing in the pocket of your pants, wherever you left those—the hallway. That’ll be Caleb wondering where you and the coke are at because he knows that with you holding the bag there’ll still be some left. Lucky sonofabitch is probably with Lindsey and Sandra. So you know what? Just this once, fuck him. You stretch out on the couch, struggle to push Caleb’s presumed ménage from your mind, then jerk off while thinking about Candi’s tits and what you saw and briefly groped of her legs and ass. Not your finest hour to be sure, but at least you’re not standing in there, mouth-breathing over her. You go into the bathroom, finish directly into the toilet, flush, collapse back to the couch, and fall quickly into deep but worthless sleep. When you wake up it’s the next day and she’s long, long gone.

  Caleb finds Lindsey in the stairwell.

  She starts to kiss him. He kisses back for a minute, then remembers how he promised himself he wouldn’t do this. Tonight is his night with Sandra. He extracts himself from Lindsey. There’s some crying but not much. Having slapped Candi, Lindsey feels like she’s made her point and could truthfully take or leave getting laid. Caleb’s good, but he’s also old news. She lets him go. He’s back inside, walking past a little cluster of people who are still talking about the slap.

  “Yeah,” some guy is saying, “but crazy girls are a lot of fun.” Two of his buddies agree. The first guy makes an engine-growl noise, like vrrroww, i.e., sex stuff. One girl doesn’t think it’s funny. Her name is Amy, Caleb seems to know. “Crazy girls,” Amy says, “ruin things for everybody. Especially for not-crazy girls.”

  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 i
f 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.

  If she wakes you you might take her out to breakfast. That’d be nice, but it’d also mean at least an hour of chitchat. She starts to look for your wallet or a piece of mail, anything with your name on it, then changes her mind and decides to bail. Better to be mysterious. If you’re even halfway interested in her you’ll ask Caleb for her number. Speaking of which, her phone’s battery apparently ran out of juice at some point last night. Oops.

  The plows have already come through; snow piles stand waist-high. The stretches of sidewalk between the driveways are like little canyons. Her heels click on that synthetic salt stuff they throw down. The gutters aren’t even muddy yet; it hasn’t been light out long enough. Everything looks pure in that superficial way. Snow.

  She sees a cab and hails it, gets in, fastens her seatbelt, then gives him the address. If she’d told him first he’d have peeled out and left her standing there. He shakes his head, about as annoyed as she expected, but punches the address into his GPS and pulls back into traffic. He resumes his conversation—in Gujarati or whatever—with whoever’s on the other end of the Bluetooth clipped to his left ear. She puts her forehead against the cold window. Looking at all the early commuters and other cars and changing scenery is nauseating. She shuts her eyes and tries to lose herself in the hum and shake of the car. She’s dozing but only lightly, having one of those dreams about being exactly where you are.

  Candi has the keys to her sister’s place but knocks before she lets herself in. Taya is standing in the hall where it meets the kitchen—these Windsor Terrace brownstones, you get space out here—holding her daughter, Emily, on a cocked hip. Taya takes one look. “Where did you sleep last night?”

  Over coffee, Candi tells her story, embroidering as she goes—what everyone was wearing, what the coke must have cost, the whole backstory of why Lindsey slapped her. She fills in the big gaps with lurid surmises and fibs. In her telling, you get six inches taller, are wearing brands Caleb favors (you’ve never heard of them), and are the bassist in Gene’s band. Taya’s pitch-perfect in her big-sister act: mildly disapproving but also obviously jealous—everything Candi hoped for. Her sister is the best.

  They decide to call their mother, who lives upstate and is always going on about some new herbal weight-loss drug she ordered off the TV. “You won’t be young forever, girls,” her mother likes to say in this evil little singsong, and ain’t that the truth? Though the lesson Candi takes from the admonition is not to stock up on diet pills and join a Pilates class but rather to get her kicks in while she can.

  After Emily talks to Grandma she says she wants to go to the park. Taya says it’s too cold to go but Emily won’t stop talking about it, so Candi says she’ll take her and they get the kid dressed. Candi, too—she roots around in her sister’s closet. Their sizes run close enough. Taya says she’ll bake banana bread while they’re gone.

  “Oh, I almost forgot, I need to charge my phone.”

  “No prob. I’ll plug yours in and you can take mine just in case.”

  At the playground, the swings and slide have been mostly erased by the snowfall. Emily’s zipped up and insulated, crash-proof, so Candi lets her go wild among the vague shapes. A flyer taped to a streetlight reads, REJOICE—YOU ARE A REALLY SPECIAL PERSON IN THE HEART OF GOD AND HIS PERFECT PLAN HAS A UNIQUE PLACE IN IT JUST FOR YOU. She pulls her sister’s heavy coat tight around herself, plunges into the snow to catch up with her niece.

  THE HAPPY VALLEY

  Danielle had her days to herself and half the summer still in front of her. A Fodor’s guide and a debit card called the Octopus, Hong Kong’s version of a rail pass, but you could use it in cabs, too, and even some stores. She ate noodles in steaming broth at the last dai pai dong in Wan Chai, was given scissors to shell squillas with at a food stall in North Point Market. She slurped xiao long bao—soup dumplings—at the Victoria Harbour Restaurant in what had once been a waterfront property but now, thanks to the ongoing “harbor reclamation” project, was several bustling city blocks inland from its namesake. Everywhere she looked, it seemed, new buildings were being constructed while old ones were under renovation or being razed. The city never stopped changing, never slowed. Hong Kong truly was the city that New York claimed to be, she thought, a bit guiltily, even though she hadn’t exactly meant it as praise. She could not accustom herself to the sight of the lashed bamboo they used for scaffolding here, but at least the workers didn’t catcall, or if they did their words were lost in the language gap, as were most billboards, street chatter, and whatever was on the radio in a given taxi or store. So many pretty colors, so much white noise.

  Cold air blasted from the open-faced storefronts as she made her way along Nathan Road, Kowloon’s main tourist drag. She was awed by the flagrant waste even as she moved to the inside of the sidewalk to make sure she didn’t miss a single hit of chill. She imagined electric bills in quantum notation. She rode the funicular, the ding-ding, the double-decker bus out to Shek O once, but never the red-and-green minibuses; those things were death traps, her father had warned: the worst.

  She went to the historic markets—bird, flower, fish, and jade. She stood in front of the Chungking Mansions, let the hustlers’ pitches wash over her. She did not want to follow them to where their knockoff purses and watches were cached. She did not want to eat at their brothers’ food stalls. She stood on the viewing platform on the roof of the mall at the Peak. She went to the racetrack in the Happy Valley and bet on the horses with the names she liked best: Bespoke Master, Cars King Prawn. In the high distance beyond the grandstand, above the colonial cemeter
y, stood a pair of blue-glass residential towers everyone called “the chopsticks.” They looked like twins but weren’t.

  She spent an afternoon at the JCC on Robinson Road. They had a library and were happy to let her use it even though she wasn’t a member. Danielle read about the prominent families, Sassoons and Kadoories, how they came over with the British from Baghdad and owned merchant shops and founded charities and later opened the Peninsula Hotel. She read about the Axis occupation, how most Jews fled to Shanghai and the island’s oldest synagogue was turned into stables and all the British subjects were sent to prison camps. She shared these stories with her father over dinner at a Lebanese restaurant, their first proper meal together in three or four days.

  “Did you know that Nathan Road is named for the first Jewish governor of Hong Kong?” Danielle asked. She did not mention that in the ninety years between Sir Matthew Nathan’s reassignment to South Africa and Hong Kong’s return to Chinese control there had never been another Jew in charge. Her father had always enjoyed history, and over the years had developed a bombastic pride in his heritage—this despite a near-perfect indifference to its teachings or practice. This was common among Jewish men in their late middle age, Danielle thought; she had many friends whose fathers had done the same. Stan Ross seemed to believe he held claim to a share of the credit for anything any of their people had ever accomplished, individually or collectively, including living in a given place for any length of time without being annihilated or kicked out. Which is why the Jewish history of Hong Kong had seemed like such a promising topic, the very thing to draw him out of what Danielle took to be his abiding stoicism, a term she preferred to the other options that suggested themselves: reticence, dissatisfaction, boredom, gloom. But she hadn’t anticipated that they’d be having the conversation in this particular venue. A Lebanese restaurant might well be the den of the enemy, for all they knew, though the artwork on the walls suggested Coptic Christianity, which in turn probably meant these people were more rabidly pro-Israel than even her father was. Still, he wasn’t certain, and said he meant to maintain his ignorance so he could keep eating here in good conscience, or at least not in bad. There were a hundred places to get shawarma in Hong Kong but this one was his favorite; they had a house-made spicy ketchup that he all but ate straight with a spoon. His suit jacket hung on the back of his chair. He’d taken his gold cuff links out, rolled his sleeves up almost to his elbows.