Flings (23 page)

“Dylan?” says the guy. “Yeah, he's okay, sure, but what about Albert Ayler, Funkadelic, any Dead show from the spring of '74?” Gregory, swaying on his barstool and feeling osmotic, scribbles names and dates on a napkin, offers to get the next round.

The day Audrey's train comes in it starts pouring, doesn't stop for two weeks. They have no idea how to live in a house together. They don't even know where the nearest grocery store is. He's been on an all-takeout diet, trying to figure out whether it's (1) possible and (2) worth it to jam out “China Cat Sunflower” on solo acoustic guitar.

“This isn't working,” Audrey says, staring forlorn out their front window at the gray rain veiling the world. Looks back over her shoulder, sees the look on his face, clarifies that she meant Montreal. “Or maybe Canada altogether. We need to get back to the roots of things. Where did you grow up?”

“Indianapolis.”

“Okay, forget your roots. What would you say to a cabin in the pines outside of Johnson City?”

Gregory says he's always wanted to explore sweet Dixie. Audrey's sundress makes a blue pool at her feet.

But August is a stupid time to be anywhere. That's what he keeps telling himself to feel better about being here. The cabin has front and back porches he can stand on in the shameless nude. Not bad. But it's forty-five minutes to the nearest strip mall full of chain stores and the rednecks they encounter on their weekly supply trips do not charm him. His faith in Žižek wavers. He thinks the Slovenian has given short shrift to Buddhism; he'd like to investigate for himself but doesn't know where to start. He and Audrey can go a day, days, without speaking, to each other or at all. He can lie down on the floor and listen to Albert Ayler's
Live in Greenwich Village
from start to finish without feeling the least bit restless or opening his eyes even once. Are these things Zen? And if not then what is fucking Zen? Bodies moving past each other through the same hot rooms, pouring cold drinks into jelly jars, throwing steaks in the skillet, flat on their backs in a queen bed, side by side. Sounds all right when you put it that way, but still, something's off.

At the back of the bedroom closet he finds an old math textbook left behind by some former occupant's no doubt underachieving son. He decides Algebra II must be like Buddhism and suggests to Audrey that they seek to master that which they faked their way through in the prehistoric and halcyon days of their respective tenth grades. They work in earnest on problem sets, sneaking glances across the raw scored kitchen table, then check each other's answers. The work gives their lives a grammar and their days a shape. By September they've completed chapter ten, running way ahead of the schedule suggested by the book, though as far as the book knows they are (1) fifteen years old, and (2) taking five other classes besides this one, plus presumably extracurriculars. Audrey says she tried track but wasn't built for it. Ditto honor society, A/V club, chess club, and debate. Gregory played football, had a nickname and everything, until a senior year knee injury reduced him to recording secretary for the local student chapter of the Young Republicans. Their biggest accomplishment had been remembering to show up on Yearbook Picture Day. Three of the six with clip-on ties. Now he's holed up in the woods with this woman, wearing pilled boxers, torn undershirt, unending beard—all three of these articles dried stiff with his own sweat plus Audrey's, having finally mastered that bitch goddess the quadratic equation, and it's like, Who the hell was Jacques Lacan, where the hell on the map is Slovenia, and how could I have ever fallen for this lisping poseur's bad voodoo?

Audrey says her rank-choice vote for the next city is Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; Portland, Maine. He says, “Baby, when I look in the cracked mirror of this cabin's bathroom what I see is a man who is in the place that is the right place for him.”

“'Cause you stopped shaving your head,” she says, “or grooming your beard. Your mountain man fantasy's about a half inch deep; see if there are some scissors around we can restore your dignity with—my Lady Bic if it comes to that.”

“How will a Lady Bic restore my dignity?”

The night she leaves they have one of those legendary sessions, personal instant classic, a story you'd tell to everyone you knew if you knew how to say it in a way that didn't make you sound retarded: it was exactly the same as always but somehow infinitely better, the best. Then she gets dressed, puts her things in the car, goes, is gone. When her taillights wink out of view he strips down, stands stark on the porch in the crisp October air. It'll be a long walk whenever I leave here, he thinks, and he'd like to write a song about the feeling of that knowledge, an expressive instrumental composition, something soulful and crisp with a touch of melancholy, a kind of bright-eyed fatalism, like John Fahey on
Of Rivers and Religion
or Nathan Salsburg on
Affirmed
. Instead he uses GarageBand to record a twenty-six-minute “Not Fade Away”
“Uncle John's Band”
“Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad”
reprise of “Not Fade Away.” He adds layers of himself doing the harmonies and backups, foot stomps and handclaps, beating forks against the math book and the table and the skillet for a little drum break, emails the result to his brother as the first sunbeams cut through the pines. His brother writes back an hour later: “If you need a place to crash you can say so.”

Kevin is five years younger, has a wife, lives in Philly, which Gregory quickly comes to recognize is a provincial shithole filled with ugly people uninterested in traffic laws or any other form of etiquette or self-preservation. Regaining his urban anomie is like physical therapy, but faster and more rewarding. He grows a goatee but not a soul patch. By the end of November he's got his brother reading Žižek, who makes glorious apocalyptic sense again, and Kevin's got him into the whole slow-food thing. Kevin's become this genius chef, apparently, side benefit of his status as one of the long-term unemployed. The brothers spend their time talking revolution, crimping piecrusts, slow-cooking brisket, brining turkey, baking bread from scratch. The first time his dough rises Gregory is unashamed to shed a tear, indeed, rather wishes he would have broken wholly down. Sounds very cleansing, freeing, to be emptied out, presumably as prelude to some experience of renewal, anyway refill. He bites into an onion as though it were a Honeycrisp, but the moment seems to have passed.

The wife, his sister-in-law, is Nancy. At night when she comes home from her job in the archives at a university art museum they sit in the living room and sing their favorite songs together, a bottle of rye going around the circle like a looped video clip while they debate whether their cover of “Promised Land” is a Dead cover or a Chuck Berry cover since the Dead were covering Berry in the first place but the Dead version is the only one they've ever heard. Nancy suggests they YouTube the original—a Gordian solution, granted, but one that seems to Gregory a pinhole glimpse into the sorry heart of the contemporary world. When she teasingly leans toward his MacBook they have words. His brother, an untalented drinker, is curled up on the couch, head in hands.

Kevin and Nancy cajole Gregory to fly back to Indianapolis with them for Christmas. Their father is straight John Birch these days, but weirdly, this doesn't ruin the visit. Gregory realizes that apart from a few particulars about immigration and Jewish people, their beliefs are basically aligned: the system is both rigged and rotten, the economy is one continuous act of fraud, anyone wearing a tie on the TV has already been bought and sold. They both voted for Obama, now feel betrayed. Two days before New Year's, in the parking lot of Harris Teeter, he runs into Kara, a girl from his high school, a B-lister from the old vanished Hollywood of his adolescent porn dreams, hardly worse for a decade's wear, he's got to say; in fact she's held up better than a lot of the old A-list, if Facebook's any way to judge. He's on his way out of the store and she's on her way in. “Gregory?” she says. “Is that you? Oh em gee, I'd heard you were in New York.”

They catch up while his twelve-pack of Beast Ice sweats through its paper box. She's home for the holidays like he is, says she lives in Detroit now, is separated from her terminally alcoholic husband, is a painter in roughly the same sense that he's a rock star. “You should come visit sometime,” she says. After a few weeks of increasingly familiar emails, he does—in January no less. If he lived here, he decides, he'd be in love with her in three months, which, he further muses, is probably about when she'll be ready to give some kind of rebound thing a try. Back in Philly he buys a '93 Camry, throws his guitar in the trunk, big hugs for his brother and sister-in-law. “Your devotion,” he says, “will not be forgotten. You are granted title to great mansions in the sky.” He hitches up his pants. They're loose. You wouldn't believe the difference fresh, organic, homemade food makes. It was Philly itself that taught him this, as much as his brother. Yellow drip cheese, half-priced buffalo wings, smeary death. No thanks.

Lease on the Detroit apartment starts February 15. A whole floor to himself for what his shoe-box room cost in that Bed-Stuy share. It's time to work again so he gets into a gig doctoring white-collar résumés, still despicable in its way but less categorically or directly so, and he can do it from home. He takes long drives in his car whenever he feels like it, soaks up such beauty and desolation as Detroit abides—in a month or two when spring returns many of these empty white lots will be blooming fields, Audrey's rural-urban dream realized, but he doesn't write her to tell her about it. She must have other dreams now.

He picks Kara up from work, cooks her dinner whenever she'll let him, but it's not time for the next step yet and both of them know it, which somehow makes everything easier rather than fraught like you might expect. What is expectation, anyway? A fantasy. A shot in the dark. A wish. What is anything? Who was this man Chesterton whose bons mots Žižek is always pinching? What would it have been like to have lived one of the lives of the saints? Gregory makes flank steak with raspberry-chipotle marinade, fingerling potatoes au gratin. Salmon and asparagus with Israeli couscous. Apple cobbler, peach pie. He pulls the guitar off its stand while the dishes soak, plinks around to get himself loose and in tune. Kara's on the love seat, legs tucked up. He clears his throat, grins shyly, launches into his new favorite cover, an old country blues—Garcia loved it—called “Sitting on Top of the World.”

“Flings” is, among other things, in loose homage to Virginia Woolf's
The Waves
.

In “A Night Out,” Candi's recurring dream is of Paul Klee's
Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door
.

“Adon Olam” owes a debt—and perhaps an apology—to Gershom Scholem's
On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead
.

“Mike's Song” is a quasi-sequel to a story called “The New Life,” which appears in my first collection. The concert the Becksteins attend is a real historical event, used here fictitiously but true to the set list as performed. My sister, Melanie, went with me when nobody else would, and we had a better time than Mike did—even though our seats were a lot worse.