Flings by Justin Taylor

Author:Justin Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

POETS

They met at the mixer the week before their semester started. He seemed ambitious, a pleaser; she walked away annoyed. But it was a small program and she was resigned to running into him in hallways and at events. Perhaps they’d have workshop together. They were poets and this was graduate school.

A computer lab in the basement of their program’s building on West 11th Street: grapefruit-colored chairs with screwheads poking through the fabric, the old desktops purring as their cooling fans kicked into gear. She could usually be found there before class, checking her email or some goth band’s tour schedule. She was a smart girl but young—fresh out of her undergrad with no “time off” and the city made her feel younger still. Her classmates were mostly in their late twenties, early thirties; some were even older. She was quick to anger and to judge, and knew these things about herself. She had some mastery over her emotions, but it was hard to sustain. Often she did not even try. Dark circles weighted her warm brown eyes; below those, a perfect nose and pout. She drew people’s attention but couldn’t keep it—or maybe could have but didn’t want to. Frequently she herself was uncertain which it was, and refused as a matter of inchoate principle to consider the question at any length. Psychology was for losers! Her name was Abigail Paige. A loner in tight black jeans and fingerless gloves—somehow exquisite in whichever shirt she’d happened to pluck from her bedroom floor that morning—she had a hard, lithe beauty despite greasy hair the color of late wheat.

When Cal came into the lab and Abigail was there he took a station close to hers, the next one over if he could get it. He’d interrupt her to ask how things were going, what was new. She pointedly ignored him but sometimes slipped and gave an answer. He lit up when she did that and she felt a hot, sharp shift inside of herself, like a needle between her guts. Then she’d clam up, furious, as though she’d been taken advantage of in some small but definitive way.

When Abigail came in and Cal was already seated she made a point of sitting far down the row from him, every unoccupied terminal between them another condemnation. But if Cal felt rebuked he did not let on. In a way, she was coming to realize, he was as guarded as she was. He broadcast his pleasantries, kept everything else to the vest. Cal was a wall masquerading as a window. When she sat far away from him in the lab he simply did his work, or whatever it was he was doing, and then when he was finished took a stroll by her station to say hello before he left.

Somewhere early on she told him a lie. It came unprompted, a non sequitur, practically: she said that she had a boyfriend in Baltimore with whom she was quite serious. She said they had been together several years and saw each other as often as they could.

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