Flings (2 page)

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 meltdown 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.

“Okay,” she said.

Half an hour later Rachel was banging on Ellen's door. Her nausea had mostly passed, but her hands were shaking. There was sweat on her forehead. She had chills. But they were there for each other. Ellen and Rachel forever! Friendship would carry the day where love had failed. Hours passed, crying and screaming, and then Ellen on the phone with her mother while Rachel—thrilled for the distraction—snuck outside and painted the rosebushes blue, a rejection of the Gatorade she'd chugged on the way over.

(Later, Rachel would tell Danny that Miles had gotten his hands on some seriously cheap shit. She'd drifted in a warm gray-on-gray la-la land for about twelve minutes; then the sickness had set in. Miles had called her to the phone from out of the bathroom, where she'd been huddled. All in all, she said, the biggest disappointment since the
Matrix
sequels.)

Danny sat slouched at Percy's kitchen table, swirling a wineglass full of Old Crow, his magnum opus splayed before him. His work was a disaster. He saw that now. His ostensible monument to Rachel was in reality a fairly astute but immensely boring exposition of his own most regrettable qualities and aggressive failures. His narrator was unreliable, unlikable, and calculating: a cipher for his worst self, a conniving sneak with a pornographer's eye for exploiting sentimentality, matched only by his penchant for producing actual pornography. Every sex act was recorded, but not as a memory or emblem of love; more like evidence entered into the record at a trial.

He finished the glass of bourbon and lurched about the apartment, flipping light switches off, closing shades.

The pioneer cemetery on Southeast 26th was a designated historical site, easily mistaken for a park and protected only by a chain-link fence. He hopped it, plunged headlong into the blizzard of shadows cast by the great oaks, silence booming like the sea in his ears. He realized that what the occasion required was music. Music consecrates everything and this was a holy moment, or it would be soon.

He picked a spot near—but not on—the grave of one Mollie Fletcher, 1832–1845. Poor kid. He piled the notebooks on the ground, then turned his attention to his iPod, a first-generation model about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He scrolled down to Rilo Kiley's
Take Offs and Landings
because Rachel had first turned him onto them, back three years ago when she'd been a bright-eyed indie rock girl. And because the first song on the album starts out “If you want to find yourself by traveling out West / Or if you want to find yourself somebody else that's better, go ahead.” So it was pretty much perfect in every way. He turned the volume up as loud as it would go, knelt before his little pyre like Hendrix in that photo where his guitar's burning, hit the play button, stuck the device in the breast pocket of his plaid snap-button shirt. He coaxed a flame from his Zippo and held it to the pages of a spiral-bound Mead with a blue cover. It took. The cover curled up from its corner, revealing its white reverse side even as that whiteness blossomed into an orange that was already browning, the brown almost as quickly again becoming white-gray ash borne away on the breeze. He watched the fire take on a life of its own. Jenny Lewis's high, honeyed voice swarmed all the space between his ears, and everything she sang was the most important thing he had ever heard before, though he'd long known all these lines by heart. By the time he got to that song with the chorus that goes “These are times that can't be weathered and / We have never been back there since then,” his great work was history and he was singing along with her. Cocooned in noise and self-pity, Danny felt like a pure spirit, righteous, the king of his own broken heart. He never heard the police approaching, or their shouts for him to get his goddamn hands in the air.

What could he have looked like to those night shift beat cops? A Satanist, perhaps: yowling on his knees before a fire in the old cemetery at close to the witching hour. His hands
were
in the air now, a lazy arrhythmic sway, but he still couldn't hear them, so they tasered him and he writhed on the ground in an ecstasy of suffering. His pants went piss-dark; the earphones flew free of his whipping head. From his new dirt-level vantage the wimpy fire looked scary and right. Then a second zap sent his eyes up into his skull.

Everyone came in the morning to bail him out. It was like the day he'd flown in, only Rachel was there, too, and everybody looked somber and fatigued. Danny was hungover, ashamed, rotten on Portland—fuck his court date; all he wanted was to leave town. They talked him down over breakfast at the Cricket—the same place he and Rachel had lunched the day before, lifetimes ago now. And what had the whole thing been about, anyway? He wouldn't say, only forked apart sopping pieces of the house special, his hand shaking as he raised it to his mouth. They let it go.

Not much changed between him and Rachel. They kept things status quo while her internship wound down; then she decided to go back to Schmall, not explicitly to get back together with Marcus but everyone knew it was in the cards. Percy's job moved him to Eugene and he didn't invite Kat along. She was bartending downtown and doing great for herself. She took over the lease at Rachel's place. Ellen got hired on at the film company but was just killing time. She wanted to go to law school, she thought.

Danny had a problem—he was homeless, almost broke, and needed to stick around town to finish his community service, or else live the rest of his life with a bench warrant out on him in the state of Oregon. He got a job doing shitwork for Greenpeace. Hey, you got a minute for the whales, the seals, the trees? He wore a blue windbreaker, held a brown clipboard, stood smack in the middle of the sidewalk. Ellen had more space than she knew what to do with out at her place and was glad for the company. She helped him buy a secondhand Trek bike to ride to work. It turned out that Danny and Ellen were the ones who were right for each other all along. Weird world. Weirder still for everything Ellen knew about Danny and Rachel, which was, well, everything.

They only had one secret from Ellen: the whole heroin saga, the third plotline of that already-storied April day—Danny and Rachel both gone dark with stupidity, and Ellen in her blazing grief. “You know what I think?” Rachel said to Danny one time. “There's nothing honorable about hurting someone you care about for no good reason. I think that the only way to make it up to her is to keep keeping the secret.” They never brought it up again, even to each other. What else was there to say?

Ellen specialized in contract law at BU. Danny designed websites. They had a son and named him Dylan and were doing well for themselves but had no love for Boston, so when an opportunity arose in Hong Kong she said she wanted to take it. They lived in a tower in the Central Mid-Levels and Ellen commuted to an office in Taikoo. They had been in Asia nearly three years and loved it, but were always eager for their old friends to come visit. Rachel, freshly divorced at thirty-one from a man named Rowan, was encouraged and cajoled and prodded and finally said yes. She would come for thirteen days—all her vacation time, but the flight was fifteen hours so it hardly seemed worth it to come for less.

(Percy had died several years earlier, thrown from a horse while on a weekend getaway with Kat's successor. Kat herself still lived in Portland. She had a new set of friends, owned her apartment, sent e-cards on all their birthdays, but had basically written herself out of their lives.)

“I had the weirdest dream,” Ellen says on the morning of the day Rachel lands. “I dreamed I never got tired of experimental film. I was on the faculty at Hampshire. I had this big brass key that opened a room full of old projectors. Also, I'd never quit smoking.”

“I'm glad you quit smoking,” Danny says. Then, “Have you ever even been to Hampshire?”

“I've never even been to Amherst,” she says, laughing. They make love and then she has to get ready for work. She'd have liked to go with Danny to meet Rachel, but this whole week is going to be rough, in no small part because she's taking several personal days
next
week: they're going to show Rachel the city, do all that touristy stuff they're always hearing about but never seem to get around to checking out.