Flings (19 page)

“So you were saying,” Candi says.

“Was I?”

She mimics your gesture from a moment ago, emphasizing the snort but skipping the wince.

“Gotcha.”

Well, you're not gonna do it in front of everyone, and the line for the bathroom is backed up to the edge of the dance floor, so you suggest going downstairs, prop the front door with a rock or something, share a cig. You can bump off your keys when the street's empty. Candi says, “That's pretty ghetto, dude,” but in a kind of laughing way that suggests an additional, unspoken clause: But what do I care? So now you're huddled in a recess between two buildings, not so much an alley as an alcove, a niche. So cold your fingers barely function, your breath and her breath rich white puffs melding into one cloud: there and gone and there again. “We're all living in each other's breath all the time,” you say, “only nobody thinks of it like that when they can't see it.” A gentleman, you hold the bag for her and she takes the key. Her shoulders are bare. It's a strapless dress, black. She's shivering. At first you aren't sure you see it, but there, in the casts of the streetlights—the fat flakes wink in the glow—it's snowing. Wasn't it supposed to be too cold to snow tonight? You're at the point where pretty much anything seems like a sign. She's beautiful, and everything else is, too. You lay a warming arm across her shoulders. “Let's get out of here,” you say. But the coats, duh.

“You go up,” she says. “If I go it'll be half an hour with good-byes.”

In the cab you kiss and pet a little and sip from a red plastic cup full of strong rum and Coke because you, when you were upstairs, had the good sense to make a drink. Candi, truth be told, is sort of gulping her share. You're both imagining the city as a thing whizzing past you, rather than you through it, though the misconception is a moot point inasmuch as your cab is crawling through traffic, now stopping for a light. Why is this guy trying to go through Union Square? He should have gone west on Houston and taken 6th. Not worth getting into. Your hand riding up Candi's thigh. She leans past you to reach for the party cup.

In the elevator your pupils get so dilated you can barely make each other out through the haze of glare. Your one-bedroom is tiny, but decent for Hell's Kitchen. “Don't turn the light on,” she says. She has this certainty about her that's unnerving. She's walking around your dark apartment like she's been coming here for years.

She throws her bag next to the couch, coat on top of the bag, steps out of her heels. She's walking toward the bath—no, bedroom. She's got a hand behind her back, trying to get at the dress's zipper. Shit, if this is how she wants it, well, OK. You take your shoes off, start pulling at your clothes as you walk after her. You drop your belt, decide you should hit the bathroom, pee, splash your face with cold water, lean down into the sink and guzzle. Then you give yourself a few quick strokes, just to check—not that you're one of those guys with an, ahem, problem, but on a night like this it's better to be sure. Anyway, it perks right up, so OK. Great. Sweet. Now save it for game time.

Candi hasn't quite gotten the dress off. The bottom is hiked up to her waist, and the top is pulled halfway down her torso so her breasts are exposed. The Hula-Hoop: classic. She's on her side, facing away from you. You lie down and spoon up to her, try to slip between her legs, but she won't open, not even a little. Too soon? Never can tell what a woman will think is proper procedure. You grab a handful of breast.

What the hell is that?

It's small, about the size of the first pad of your middle finger. A scab? No, it's . . . squishy. In your mind you run through the old health-class list. Never heard of anything like this. A deformity? Some weird giant mole? OK. Shit. What do you do? Should you ask? Does it hurt her when you touch it? Doesn't seem to. You should seriously stop touching it, though. You touch it again.

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 if 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.