Kink Read online

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  Driving home I hit five green lights: Moss. Seaglass. Celery. Mouthwash. New leaves. I park at the quick-stop down the block from home and get excited-scared in my chest as I walk in. DING goes the welcome bell. No one looks at me. I’m pulling a ginger ale from the cooler when I see him, two aisles over, hair sweated flat, the hint of a beard starting on his chin. He passes by me on his way to the checkout, but I don’t call out and Jay doesn’t see me. He buys his miserable lunch and leaves, looking haggard from sleeping not at all or just in his car.

  My invisibility feels like a passport. Suddenly everything feels open, like I could adapt to anything.

  When I get home Jay’s truck is in the driveway. I walk into the kitchen and he sees me. At first I think he might get angry. He’s never said I couldn’t wear them, and we’ve shared clothes before. But then a familiar look in his eye. It’s been since before the sap stopped flowing, before I worried about losing the geese, that I saw that look.

  We go to the bedroom, and I expect him to protest when I climb on top because he’s tired, but the hormones make him hornier and his green hands are on me. It’s disturbing to watch them creep like vines around my areolae. After we finish, I think about this coming back together, what it will look like for us with so much different and still the same.

  Then I hear the squawking. Louder now, and even inside I know it’s a flock. I rush to the window and their dark swarm appears in the triangle of sky between the barn and the sugar maple. North. Their V is pointing north. They no longer want even our winter warmth. I run to the kitchen to warn Jay that these last signs of seasons are fleeing us, but he’s already heard. He’s pulled out the bottle of champagne we were saving and popped the cork, saluting a birdless state, toasting the last of them with big gulps, their squawks petering out as they head away from this unseasonable heat.

  * * *

  After sex I like to water the houseplants, share with them my body after fruitless mating and feel the heat of their little blossom breaths on my skin. Then the geese start up. I go to the kitchen window and there they are: going. Nina comes out looking like she’s about to cry, and part of me wants to go to her and tell her we’ll be fine without them. But these days all she cares about is that she’ll never see a goose again. She goes back to the bedroom and shuts the door. The last goose passes over our patchwork of scorched fields, our dried-up lakes, our barren greenhouses. If geese can’t hack it here, good riddance. Good riddance to the delicate snowberry, to black-footed ferrets, to salamanders that can’t deal with rising water. I want nothing incapable of change. I want cowbirds and milfoil. I want kudzu and knapweed and snakeheads and cheatgrass and bark beetles. I want the false webworm—I want plants that can withstand a flood, insects that won’t apologize for taking up space, things that shouldn’t thrive but do because conditions are finally ripe.

  Oh, Youth

  by Brandon Taylor

  The dinner party was almost over.

  Grisha smoked out on the terrace, his shadow on the lawn. The other guests had stopped smoking some years before, or so they’d said when Grisha had excused himself. They had smiled and nodded, their dental implants slightly discolored from coffee and wine and life, the flash of their grayed canines. “Oh, youth.”

  The house was nestled near the milky blue pond in the heart of the arboretum—it belonged to James, who was a friend of Victor and Enid, and his second wife, Ramona, who Grisha sensed almost immediately was not. At the start of the evening, Ramona had opened the door for them, and Grisha had found himself involuntarily staring at her dark lipstick and the large growth on her neck. She had seemed to brace herself as she let them in, not saying welcome or hello so much as humming tightly at the back of her throat. It was a sign, Grisha thought, of how the night would go.

  The air was cool and damp. Overhead, a field of glinting white stars. Quiet, except for the music streaming through a window somewhere around the front of the house near the garden.

  “Here you are,” Enid called from behind him. Grisha turned and watched her approach through the low cloud of cigarette smoke. She was a tall woman in her late fifties, beautiful in the way that certain women become later in life, as though all their years of plainness had been rewarded with a sudden flare of beauty. Her hair was naturally light, a soft gray cold color, and her eyes were quite close together, which made her gaze censorious and accusatory. “I found you,” she sang.

  “I wasn’t hiding,” he said. “I told you I’d be out here.”

  “That’s a filthy habit,” she said, plucking the cigarette from his mouth. She did not inhale, just let the filter press to the surface of her lips. He watched her watch him. A dark gnat landed on her collarbone. Her face was caught up in the pool of shadow between their bodies, and her expression became vague, inscrutable.

  “So I’ve heard,” he said.

  “It’s not personal, baby. Don’t pout.” She inhaled. Folded her arms and put her head back a little. “It’s so bad; that must be why it tastes so good.”

  “You sound like a cigarette commercial,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets and looked away from her. She came closer to him in the dark.

  “You can’t be old enough to remember cigarette commercials,” she said. “What are you, twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-five,” he confirmed, smiling, feeling his face go taut.

  “Do you know what I was doing when I was twenty-five?”

  “No,” he said. She blew the smoke up into his face. It was sweet and pungent. He breathed it in.

  “Married,” she said. “Married to Victor. Living in Portland.”

  “Another life,” he said, laughing. In the car on the way over, Enid had leaned against her seat, squeezed her legs together, and said with a sigh, “Another life,” when Grisha asked how long she had known James and Ramona. But then she glanced back at him and said, “But that was before Ramona. Claudia was still alive then. She was still okay.” Truthfully, Enid had said it every week, before each of the parties they had attended, Another life, another life, another life, as though it were a standardized measure of time. Victor would lift her fingers from the center console and kiss them, and Grisha, in the back, fiddling with the buttons of his shirt, would look out the window and catch Enid’s eyes in the wing mirror.

  Enid held the cigarette close to her lips and watched him through the sideways drift of the smoke. Grisha saw the faintest smudge of her dark lipstick. He could hear the shaft burning: a soft crackle.

  She started to say something, but then, seeming to think better of it, said, “You hate these parties, don’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “I just don’t know why you keep bringing me.”

  She nodded at this but did not supply an answer. He took the cigarette from her and took a drag. The taste of her mouth was in the filter.

  “We don’t twist your arm. You could say no.”

  “Where would the fun be in that?”

  “Where indeed,” she said with an expression of half pain, half boredom.

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “Amen,” she said, taking the cigarette back from him and taking a long, slow pull. Grisha’s eyelids tingled, and he took a step toward her. Enid’s tone had been dry, but he did not know in that moment how to read its texture. She turned from him, and the light of the party lit a strip of her skin. She laughed a little.

  Grisha held his breath.

  “It’s the last party of the season,” she said. “You can tell by the light in the sky, you know. This exact hour, three months ago, there was still light in the sky, but now, well… it’s all used up.”

  “There’s still light,” he said.

  “The young are still idealistic. There’s that at least,” she said and dropped his cigarette, still burning into the damp grass below the terrace.

  Grisha made a low, soft sound.

  “I’m not going to fight with you,” he said.

  “Who’s fighting?” Enid gave a little s
hrug, but then, as if tired of herself and tired of the circular, narrowing flight of their conversation, she gave a sharp nod. Grisha dug his hands into his pockets and made fists. His nostrils were burning. There was still smoke somewhere inside of him. He looked out over the lawn and saw the sad, diminished summer furniture. The blue plastic straps of the lawn chairs, the circular table, the dark metal of the low fence rimming the perimeter, which Grisha assumed had something to do with the hosts’ small silver dog and coyotes, and which struck Grisha as so inadequate that he wanted to laugh, like it was a pun or a joke out of rhythm.

  “I don’t know what’s so funny,” Enid said, and she shook her head.

  “It’s nothing,” Grisha said, but Enid was already walking back across the terrace. She slid the door open and left him there. He took out another cigarette and lit it. He sat on the edge of the terrace and crossed his legs. In truth, he’d wanted to get out of the party because he was tired of being asked how Enid and Victor knew him. It had been his least favorite part of these summer parties, aside from how Enid and Victor’s friends touched him and ran their hands and eyes over his body like he was chattel. This question of how they came to know each other. Sometimes Grisha just let a long enough period of time elapse for the person asking to forget. Other times, he was vague and let them change the subject.

  But it was a question that hung in the air of every room he entered with Enid and Victor. How the three of them came to be. In one sense, it had been boring and straightforward. They had contacted him via an email inquiring about his ad on a website popular with married couples of a certain age. They had exchanged pictures. Details. And that had been that. But on the other hand, it was impossible to be straightforward about such things. Particularly when Grisha suspected that they were only asking as a way to steal a little power for themselves because they knew, surely they knew. He had seen them, some of these very people, at other parties in other summers. They knew. They must have known, in the same way that Enid and Victor had known to come look for him in the first place. They were all a part of the same network of hunger and want, a collective of desire. Here this very night, Grisha felt that he might be laying the foundation for next summer’s couple. And so they asked politely, gently, And where did you three meet? when what they wanted to ask was, Might I be next? Or me? Or me?

  Earlier that day, they had gone swimming. Enid and Grisha. Victor had lain alongside the pool with a magazine. He hated the water. Enid and Grisha swam in lazy circles, gliding through the cold water. They had eaten a small lunch because of the party, and the swimming had been to train their hunger into a keener point. It had been Enid’s idea, and he had gone along with it. Sure enough, he had found himself growing hungrier and hungrier the more they swam. He and Enid went into the house, trailing water across the floor, and in the bathroom, he’d peeled off his swimsuit and hers, and the two of them had pressed against each other in the shower. Enid had dug her nails into his sacrum so sharply that the pain of his skin breaking and the ache of hunger had been indistinguishable. They emerged to find Victor still beside the pool reading. Grisha had straddled his lap, taken the magazine from his hands, and kissed him hard. Victor had been beautiful his whole life. Grisha had seen the pictures. He was tall and lean. He ran every day. He was in his late middle age, and in tremendous shape. Grisha kissed him. Victor kissed him back, and when Grisha slid a hand into Victor’s swimming shorts, Victor sighed and closed his eyes. He said, “What beneficence.”

  It had been that way all summer—the lazy easiness of their sex. The slowness of their days. They ate their lunches indoors, in the small nook beside the kitchen, where they had long, lateral views of the trees and the water. Grisha had been given a bedroom in the western side of the house, a place to store his books and his drafting table. He spent the morning watching the light come into the world, sketching, trying to get down the shapes that could be made into homes and monuments. What he wanted was to build something simple, something elegant, something dexterous, the sort of structure one brought all of oneself to, and which could change in a moment, in an instant, with the shifting of the light through its surface.

  In the evenings, before dinner, they listened to music in the parlor. Enid preferred Schubert, for his sweetness, for the docility of his nature. Victor preferred Liszt, as performed by Martha Argerich. Grisha preferred watching the record spin, the smooth, rhythmic turn of its treads, the barely discernible undulation of its rim.

  He’d lie on his back on the floor watching the record while they sat on the gray chaise, their arms linked together, watching him. And then, when the music turned, right before one song became another, he would feel, sure enough, the press of Victor’s heel against his shoulder, and he knew that he was to come to them that night. Walk down the long hall that connected their rooms, pass quietly as he could into their bedroom, and stand at the foot of their bed, watching them. He was to come to them, put his hand over their mouths or their throats, or else slide between them in the bed and let them draw themselves up out of sleep toward the heat of his body, the sourness of their breath issuing out of their teeth and gums as they writhed and twisted until they were suddenly awake, their eyes startled by the shape of his body, by the suddenness of his presence. Sometimes he did not come to them. Sometimes he let them wake and find themselves alone with each other.

  But now the summer was ending in the way that the summers always did. He’d say goodbye to them. They would pay him. There would be restrained, warm handshakes. Hugs. Your generosity, your kindness, thank you, thank you, and just like that, the transaction completed, they would become strangers again. It had the crisp finality of a mathematical conversion. Money was clarifying that way, a useful boundary. Grisha preferred married couples. It was inevitable that they were anxious to get back to how they were. One party always wanted it slightly more than the other, and so one became relieved that it was ending. Like a spring pulled out of equilibrium allowed to snap back into shape. He had made the mistake of spending the summer with a single man two years before, and it had been a disaster. Carlton had been difficult to lose: he left messages, he sent letters, he sent flowers, he sent an expensive watch that had glinted up from its velvet box like the eye of a snake, he had emailed pictures of himself hog-tied and facedown, had told Grisha what it was that he wanted done to himself, had begged into the phone, begged like a crying animal until it was too pitiful to listen to the messages anymore.

  Grisha blew the smoke out and over the lawn, and then he lay back on the terrace and closed his eyes. The wind blew westward through the trees.

  Grisha’s first summer couple had been Nate and Brigid Wollend five years ago. Nate had been Grisha’s professor in Form II the spring of his sophomore year. Grisha had volunteered to be Nate’s research page, which had mostly involved running over materials from the architectural library and having things copied and shipped—the work had been numbing and menial, but Grisha grew to appreciate its rhythm, its finitude. Fifty copies, front and back, black-and-white, twenty-five color copies arranged into these folders for a research review. Copy the last three pages of this write-up on flow dynamics. Check these figures against the math from the consulting firm. Three coffees, no cream, two sugars each. Grisha found a kind of natural easiness to the work, to the scope of its demands upon his time and concentration. Then had come that thick day in late spring when Nate had asked him, as easy as anything, if he wanted to come up to the lake for the weekend, as a reward for all his hard work, for his steadfastness, for his errand running. Grisha had agreed with an eagerness that he now saw as foolish—how had he not seen it coming? How had he not known until the very moment Nate had turned to him on the edge of their dock and kissed him full on the mouth, how things would go? What he liked to think now was that he had let himself be snared. How else to account for it?

  Under the weight of Nate’s hand on his thigh, Grisha had gone still and quiet. The lake was flat and dark beneath them, and across its surface flicked the lig
hts of other people’s lives. It was still the cool part of the year, and Grisha had been wearing a lightweight sweater in a pale color, and Nate had been wearing a slouchy green cardigan. Where their skin touched, he felt warm and dry.

  “I think we better not do that,” Grisha had said with Nate’s mouth still on his. “I think we better stop.”

  “Why? Do you not want to?”

  “I don’t know,” he had said. “What about Brigid?”

  Brigid had been in the house, built on an incline, made out of sharp angles and lots of glass and steel. Nate had laughed. “Oh, Brigid and I have an understanding.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re not stupid, Grisha. Come on. I can make it so good for you. I can make it worth it, you know?”

  But Grisha had not known exactly what Nate was referring to—he had known what Nate wanted, but not what he was offering. Grisha wanted so few things then. He did want things—decent coffee, food that went beyond what was free at campus events, drafting pencils, trace paper that didn’t tear when he unfurled it, sweaters that didn’t have holes in them, cigarettes, an apartment off campus. His life at the time was a series of minor discomforts that accumulated like grit in a socket until rotation was no longer possible. But he had no way of connecting the things he wanted with what Nate wanted, or it hadn’t occurred to him to connect the two. He had thought that want was a closed circuit, sealed inside of a person, and what you made of it might become ambition or bitterness, but it was always stuck inside of you. There was his soccer scholarship, small and inadequate. But that, too, had felt coterminous with his own desires, not something that someone had offered him, though in that moment with Nate’s palm on his thigh, it became clear to Grisha, for the first time, that it had been exactly that.