Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel

by James Hynes

  “And to top it all off,” Paul said, losing steam, “I get this insulting little award from some corporate zombie. . . .”

  “Is that what’s eatin’ you?” Callie looked at him sharply. “Or is it that you’re working for one woman, while another woman gets to decide when you get your money?”

  Paul sat up in his seat as if he’d been slapped. He hadn’t felt this way since the first year of graduate school when Elizabeth, his future wife, had berated him in a crowded seminar for his insufficient appreciation of Jane Eyre’s sapphic rage—it was Lizzie’s contention that the real love story in Jane Eyre was between Jane and the original Mrs. Rochester—and now, as then, Paul was reduced to stammering. “I didn’t . . . that’s not what . . . is that what you . . . ?”

  “Forget it,” Callie said. Fergit it. She waved her hand as if brushing away cobwebs. “I’m sorry.”

  Paul stammered on. “What I meant was . . .”

  Callie sighed; her face was slowly turning red. “I can’t see you tonight.” Cain’t, she said.

  “Why not?” Paul suddenly felt even more forlorn. At the very least, this meant a long evening alone with Charlotte.

  Callie fiddled with her fingers in her lap; she would not meet his eye. “I gotta do something.” She glanced at him sidelong. “I gotta meet somebody.”

  “Gotta meet who?”

  She returned her gaze to her lap. “Mr. X,” she murmured. Paul was speechless for a moment, but finally he said, “The musician?”

  “Yeah, the musician,” she said wearily. “He wants to talk to me about something.”

  Paul blinked across the empty lunchroom, seeing nothing. “Okay. Fine.” How much disappointment could a man take in one day? He drew his book to him across the table and clutched it with both hands. “Why are you telling me? It’s none of my business.”

  Callie frowned. “Guess it ain’t.”

  Paul stood suddenly so that his chair screeched behind him. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Me too,” mumbled Callie, and she was out of her chair in an instant, swinging between the tables. Paul watched her go, then he dropped back into his seat. He drummed his fingers on the fat book before him. “Motherfucker,” he said out loud, to no one.

  A few minutes later, Paul started up the stairs. As he came around the corner into the elevator lobby, he stopped before the recycling box and its hellish little hole. What a day: a lunch he couldn’t afford, after which Olivia had blindsided him, Rick had slapped him in the face, and Erika had humiliated him. And now Callie had just kicked him in the balls. Like a nagging little reminder, the sharp angles of the little jewelry box in his pocket dug into his thigh. In a surge of anger, he yanked the box out of his pocket and shoved it down the hole. To his surprise he heard a clink! right away, and he wrenched off the loose lid of the box. It was two-thirds full of crushed and sticky cans.

  “Oh, come on,” cried Paul. He dropped his book to the floor, tossed aside the lid of the box, and yanked the box with both hands away from the wall. The cans rattled and the box nearly toppled, but under where it had been standing against the wall, Paul saw only the scuffed tiles of the floor.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, his anger leaching away. He shook the box again; the Tiffany’s box settled a little farther into the rattling cans, until only a corner of it was visible. Then he tilted the recycling box back into place and stooped to retrieve the lid. Without a further glance into the box, he squared the lid over the top and stepped back. He felt drained, bone tired.

  I’m losing my mind, he thought, as he picked up his book and went back to his cube.

  TWENTY

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Wednesday, Paul did not see Callie’s truck in the TxDoGS parking lot. He circled the lot twice in his rattling little Colt until he was certain it wasn’t there. Inside, Preston gave him a look of manly concern, which Paul chose to ignore, and after stashing his wretched lunch in the refrigerator, he stuck his head in Building Services and asked Ray as casually as he could where Callie was. Ray’s cheeks bulged with a mouthful of breakfast burrito, and Paul had to wait until Ray swallowed, which was like watching a rat pass through a cobra.

  “Out sick,” Ray said.

  “Ah,” said Paul, a little less casually than before.

  After an hour in his cube of listening to Olivia across the aisle working on the RFP—she tsked and hmm’d and sighed—Paul worked up the nerve to cross to her doorway and ask if she had any questions so far about the document or the project. He needed to keep this job, and if keeping the job meant swallowing shit from Olivia Haddock, then, by God, he would close his eyes and open wide. “I’d be happy to hear any suggestions,” he said, his jaw clenching involuntarily.

  Olivia scarcely lifted her eyes from the page before her, which she was converting into a palimpsest of emendations, marginalia, and the bold lime-green tracks of her highlighter. “When I’ve finished,” was all she said, and Paul retreated to his cube.

  The morning crawled by. Paul noodled on the RFP, certain that all the work he had put into it so far was about to be overridden or contradicted in the next day or two by Olivia. He worked himself into a zone of numbness where each passing moment was like a fat drop of water accumulating at the mouth of a leaky faucet, growing and growing and growing until Paul didn’t think he could stand it for another instant. Then at last the drop fell in slow motion and plinked into the drain, an utter waste of effort, and another tiny drop began to accumulate, glistening and slow. By the end of the morning he was trying to lose himself in an equally futile sexual daydream about the lovely Erika of his temp agency, in which he never got any further than fumbling at the buttons of her blouse. The fantasy kept stuttering back to the start like a tape loop, and Paul sat gazing sightlessly at his monitor, his head propped in his hand, the side of his face squeezed out of all proportion.

  “How are you fixed for lunch, Professor?”

  Paul nearly overturned his chair. “What?” he gasped, righting himself.

  The Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier huddled in the doorway to his cube. The Colonel pursed his lips, while Bob Wier beamed at Paul and J.J. glowered into the empty cube next door.

  “Pull up your socks and follow me.” The Colonel grasped Paul firmly by the biceps and hauled him to his feet. “We’re taking you to lunch.”

  A moment later his three colleagues were marching him in a flying wedge up the hall.

  “Where are we going?” said Paul.

  “Someplace special.” J.J. rubbed his palms together. “Hoo-wee.”

  “Lord forgive us,” said Bob Wier.

  As they passed through the lobby, Paul twisted around to glance up at the balcony, at the doorway of Building Services, only to see Ray lumbering out of the office. Preston watched the flying wedge pass with a narrow gaze, but before he could say anything, they were out the door. In the heat of the parking lot the four men approached a massive, silvery SUV; the Colonel beeped the enormous vehicle from twenty paces away, and the beast’s doors unlocked with a hearty chunk.

  “Shotgun!” cried J.J., trotting towards the vehicle, but the Colonel brought him up short. “Not today, son.” He gave Paul a look of manly approbation. “Mr. Trilby’s our guest of honor.”

  Shotgun? Paul hadn’t heard that since high school. He endured a petulant glance from J.J. as he climbed up into the front passenger’s seat; J.J. and Bob Wier hoisted themselves into the back. Paul settled into a deep bucket seat and hauled the shoulder strap, as wide as an ammo belt, across his chest. The SUV’s leather upholstery and dashboard were a rich wine-red, like the appointments of a private club. With the push of a button the Colonel locked the doors again, and the solid, metallic chunk sounded like a penitentiary lockdown. When he started the engine the whole vehicle purred with power.

  The Colonel followed the lunchtime line of vehicles out of the lot, then crossed the bridge. Paul could never see over the parapet from his own low-slung heap, but now he seemed to be looking down at the sluggis
h green water from an impossible height. Dry, freezing air poured out of the AC vents all along the dashboard, and the Colonel lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror and said, “Cold enough back there for you boys?”

  “Mmm,” said Bob Wier, and J.J. grunted. In the lunchtime traffic the Colonel’s vehicle even towered over other SUVs, and once he revved his engine impatiently at some poor subcompact that had the temerity to pull in front of him. Slowly they entered a street of faux-ethnic chain restaurants with hearty, good-time names along the south bank of the river—Bella Bellisimo, Ay Caramba’s, Paddy O’Shaughnessy’s—and then the Colonel executed a sweeping left turn into a crowded parking lot. Headlights was a low-slung sports bar with a blue-and-green color scheme and a logo that featured a pair of bright, round headlights, each with a pink aureole right in the center, just faint enough to give a corporate spokesman leeway to say, My goodness, they’re just a pair of headlights. I don’t see anything else, do you?

  The four men swung down out of the vehicle, and the Colonel locked it behind them with his remote, ka-chunk. The SUV’s own headlights flared once, lasciviously. J.J. and Bob Wier loped across the sun-blasted parking lot. Through the restaurant’s wide windows, Paul saw a waitress in a tight, low-cut t-shirt leaning pendulously across a table, delivering a plate of buffalo wings. The Colonel hung back and gave Paul a manly squeeze around the shoulders.

  “You a Jew, Paul?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Are you Jewish, son?”

  “Uh, no, actually. I’m not.”

  “Then you never had a bar mitzvah?”

  “My parents were Episcopalians.”

  “Well, just think of this as your TxDoGS bar mitzvah.” He gave Paul one last squeeze. “Today you are a man.”

  Never had Paul gone so far beyond the pale of his former life. Simply setting foot in a Headlights would have ended his academic career, if he’d still had one. The women he had pursued in the coffeehouses north of the river, close to campus—the earnest graduate students in their sleeveless blouses, or Virginia, the willowy chairperson of the History Department—would at the very least have ostracized him immediately if they’d known. The de facto feminism of his former life made his legs weak as the Colonel ushered him into the restaurant’s arctic air-conditioning, but at the same time Paul was breathless with anticipation, like an adolescent discovering a stack of Playboys in the back of his father’s closet. At the hostess’s podium, J.J. bounced eagerly on his toes, while Bob Wier cast his eyes to the floor. “ ‘The cravings of sinful man, the lust of the eyes,’ ” he muttered, “ ‘comes not from the Father but from the world.’ One John, two, sixteen.”

  The tanned and fantastically fit hostess bounded towards them in a pair of spotlessly white running shoes. She was wearing Headlights colors, a filmy pair of blue running shorts and a cut-off, sleeveless t-shirt in green. The shorts were slashed well up her thigh, and the t-shirt ended just below her breasts. Paul’s chief impression was of long, firm, fulsomely healthy arms and legs, and a midriff you could bounce a handball off of. The heat from those arms, those legs, and that tummy was making him sweat in spite of the air-conditioning, and he found his eyes drawn to her breasts like a needle to magnetic north. It was only when the hostess spoke that Paul’s eyes staggered from her nipples to her unnaturally bright smile. She plucked four laminated menus from the hostess station and tapped them with her long, red nails.

  “Four?” she chirped, cocking her head.

  “By the window, if you please,” said the Colonel, the only one of the four men to display a modicum of cool. In single file they trailed after the swaying hem of the hostess’s shorts. Bob Wier shuffled like a prisoner, his eyes on the floor, his face as red as a homegrown tomato. J.J. swiveled his gaze all around the room, unable to fix on just one waitress; if he could, he would have rotated his head a complete 360. Paul’s head withdrew between his shoulders, like a turtle’s; he felt as if every woman who had ever been angry at him—his mother, his wry seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Altenburg, his fierce thesis advisor Professor Victorinix, his ex-wife Elizabeth, Kymberly, even Callie—was watching him scornfully. The Colonel, meanwhile, carried himself like the aging, corseted John Wayne crossing the parlor of a whorehouse, shoulders squared, hips loose, confident at every moment that the camera was on him and not on the busty young women all around him.

  The restaurant had an automotive theme. Bumpers and mag wheels and gleaming exhaust manifolds were suspended from the lights. Handsomely detailed models of famous stock cars lined a ledge just below the ceiling; half of the fiberglass shell of a Formula One racer, sawn lengthwise, was mounted over the bar. Behind the bar Paul noted a shrine to Dale Earnhardt, framed with little American flags, and on the large TV over the bar a NASCAR race was in progress with the sound off. The tables were already crowded with men, mostly middle aged, mostly middle managers, with here and there a few trim young guys in polo shirts. Just loud enough to make the lunch crowd raise their voices, the sound system played one automotive tune after another. As Paul threaded between the tables after the switching backside of the hostess, he heard “Hot Rod Lincoln” segue into “Pink Cadillac.” Then he was settled on a tall stool at a tall table of blonde wood, facing the Colonel, with J.J. and Bob Wier against the window.

  “What kind of lubrication can I get you guys?” asked the hostess, and the Colonel ordered a pitcher of Kirin.

  “I’ll have a Sprite,” mumbled Bob Wier, aiming his eyes over the young woman’s head.

  “They got Kirin on tap here?” J.J. said, twisting on his stool to follow the hostess’s rhythmic retreat.

  The Colonel followed J.J.’s gaze. “They’ve got everything on tap here,” he said.

  “A-rooo-ga!” said J.J., miming a cartoon wolf. He curled his fingers before his eyes as if they were popping out of his head like telescopes. He lolled his tongue as if it were unscrolling to the floor.

  “First Corinthians, ten, thirteen,” Bob Wier said, gazing mournfully out the window into the noonday glare. “ ‘God will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.’ ”

  “Amen.” The Colonel laughed.

  Bob Wier closed his eyes. “ ‘But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.’ ”

  “Will you relax, Reverend?” J.J. said. “Fuck.”

  “Bob’s afraid one of these girls will recognize him from Sunday school,” said the Colonel.

  “Lord have mercy.” Bob Wier laughed nervously. “Would it have killed you guys to go to Applebee’s?”

  “I’ll bet the professor’s never been here before,” the Colonel said.

  “No,” said Paul, barely paying attention. At the moment his cerebellum was at war with his medulla oblongata. His lizard brain was watching a particularly long-limbed young woman with boyishly bobbed hair bouncing towards them on her padded shoes; she was athletically balancing a cork-lined tray with a pitcher and four frosted glasses on it over her head, one-handed, which had the effect of pulling her cut-off tee tighter against her breasts. Meanwhile his cerebellum was trying to pretend that he was in a foreign country where he needed to play along with the local customs so as not to offend anybody.

  “Methinks the professor’s blood is up,” said the Colonel.

  Paul glared at him. “Quit calling me that,” he was about to say, but he was interrupted by the arrival of the long-limbed waitress. Beaming at them all, she set the brimming pitcher one-handed on the table and lifted one of the frosted glasses from the tray; it was already full, with a wedge of lemon squeezed over the rim.

  “Which of y’all had the Sprite?” she sang, and Bob Wier speechlessly waggled his fingers. Extending one long leg behind her, she reached all the way down the length of the table to set the Sprite in front of him. Her tee pulled tight across her supple back, and Paul and J.J. caught each other looking. Only the Colonel maintained any degree of suavity, and even he, Paul noted, cast a discreet glance along the filmy curve of the waitress’
s shorts. Then she straightened, and all the men at the table breathed out.

  “I’m Stony,” she said, with a beauty queen’s smile, setting out the three empty beer glasses. “Have y’all decided what you want?”

  The four men fumbled open their menus.

  “Do y’all need a minute yet?”

  “No,” said the Colonel.

  “Yes,” said J.J.

  “Umm . . . ,” said Paul.

  “Mmph,” said Bob Wier through a mouthful of Sprite.

  Stony winked at them and pivoted away. “I’ll come back in a sec.”

  J.J. twisted in his seat to watch her go. Bob Wier gasped and wiped the back of his hand across his lips. Over the edge of his bright menu, Paul caught the Colonel watching him watching Stony’s retreat. He dropped his eyes.

  “Nobody’s putting a gun to her head, Professor,” murmured the Colonel.

  “What?” muttered Paul.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking.” The Colonel smirked at his menu. “You’re thinking the lovely Stony does charity work with the homeless in her spare time. It spares you from the guilt over the tingling in your loins.”

  The Colonel was once again annoyingly close to the truth. Even as his lizard brain throbbed for Stony’s world-class midriff, Paul’s forebrain was trying to tell him that “Stony” was the waitress’s nom de service; that her real name was Zoë; that she was only working here until her Fulbright money kicked in and she could leave for Paris to study French women’s labor relations at the Sorbonne. Or better still, she already had a NEH grant to work here undercover to study the lives of all the other Fulbright scholars who were working their way through graduate school serving BBQ chicken wings to goggle-eyed middle managers. He felt his face get hot.

  “What’s the harm in admiring a nubile young woman?” The Colonel closed his menu definitively and slapped it on the table. “After all, it’s only natural. It’s what she’s engineered for. Hell, son, it’s what you’re engineered for.” Still looking at Paul, he reached along the table and pressed his finger to J.J.’s jaw, pushing him roughly around to face the others.