Next

by James Hynes

  Kevin gives her a double thumbs up and backs away. “Starbucks.”

  “Starbucks be catty corner, right across the street.” She slices the air again.

  Kevin pivots on his squeaking toe, nearly blunders into the paunchy smoker, who’s slouching back to work across the lobby. They do a brief Alphonse and Gaston dance, side to side in the arid air, and the smoker gives Kevin another shrug. Kevin sidles round him at last, through his faint tang of tobacco, then hits the blue door with both hands—ponggg—and steps out again into the heat.

  Crossing Sixth Street, Kevin passes through a cascade of sunlight. An old, round clock on a lamppost, some restored relic of old Austin, tells him it’s coming up on ten; he instinctively starts to set his watch back an hour, then decides not to. He’s here less than twelve hours, might as well stay on Michigan time. Now he’s got the walk signal, so he veers left across Congress. In harsh sunlight at the end of the avenue, framed by office towers and a row of exhausted trees on either side, the capitol looks shrunken now and faded, like a dusty model in a museum, the Texas statehouse rendered in matchsticks or sugar cubes. Everybody else in the crosswalk—more khaki businessmen, a pair of bare-shouldered girls in camisoles and jeans (oh, Joy Luck! Oh, Lynda!), a shuffling homeless guy in a huge Minnesota Vikings T-shirt and sandals worn down to his bare heels—each moves more slowly than Kevin, metabolically adjusted to the heat. Halfway across, he pauses and takes a deep, calming breath of the viscid air. He’s sticky under his shirt; sweat prickles out of his hairline. Starbucks is just ahead, the cornerstone of a big, blond, vaguely deco office block. Against Kevin’s inclination—progressive, Ann Arbor, buy local—Starbucks looks like a haven, and instantly he’s irritated at himself for falling for the mendacious seduction of the chain store: reassurance, familiarity, a spurious homecoming. Near campus in Ann Arbor there’s a Starbucks at the corner of State and Liberty, a ninety-second walk from his office in Willoughby Hall, but he’s never been inside, not once. Of course he’s been in other Starbucks—who hasn’t?—but this one supplanted his favorite local coffeehouse, Gratzi, where he used to run into other university staffers every midmorning and midafternoon, where behind the counter the cute girl (not always the same one) remembered his preference, where he bought his coffee every day in his own Gratzi cup, which collects dust now on his desk up under the eaves of Willoughby, as forlorn an artifact as a big-haired troll or a pet rock. So he won’t set foot in the State Street Starbucks, out of his stubborn and admittedly useless nostalgia for the funky Ann Arbor of song and story—which, to be honest, he only caught the last act of. He came to Ann Arbor too late for Tom Hayden at the Daily, for the Black Action Movement strike, for the torching of the ROTC building, for John and Yoko at Crisler Arena, for the first Hash Bash where a state representative fired up a spliff in public on the Diag right in front of the A-Squared pigs, man. Kevin was half a generation behind the town’s heyday, but even so, during his undergraduate days and his years as a waiter and a record store clerk, he caught the scent of it like the last April Fool’s whiff of Panama Red. He heard all about it after work from old-timers like McNulty and others, sitting breathless at their every word over pizza in Thanos Lamplighter (gone now, too), over a beer at the Del Rio (also gone), or over a plate of fries at the Fleetwood (still there, but not the same), listening to world-weary guys only five years older as if they were flinty old veterans of the Ardennes or Guadalcanal.

  These days, where he buys his coffee depends on which way he walks to work. Say he comes up behind the Union and along Maynard under University Towers and through the Arcade, in which case he stops at Expresso Royale and carries his cardboard cup steaming along State Street. That’s his route on cloudy days. When it’s sunny, though, he walks all the way up Fifth to Liberty, then straight up Liberty into the rising sun, because one of his favorite sights in the world is the view up Liberty on a brisk autumn morning or on a mild spring one, under a scrubbed blue midwestern sky, with the Michigan Theater’s black marquee soaking up the slanting light and Burton Tower printed against the sky at the end of the street, limned in astringent northern light. Here, at least in Kevin’s youth, was once the epicenter of funky retail Ann Arbor, the heart of elvendom on earth. Within two minutes walk of each other were three world-class record stores: Liberty Music, where a middle-aged clerk in a tie escorted you to a booth so you could listen to six different recordings of Shostakovich’s Fifth; hip Big Star, where if you didn’t know what you wanted, you were in the wrong place; and Discount Records, where Iggy Pop once worked. And five bookstores: overlit Follett’s, fussy Charing Cross, overstuffed David’s, bohemian Centicore, and the original, independent, prelapsarian Borders, whose clerks had to pass a book test to get the job and afterward strutted the carpeted aisles as arrogant as Jesuits. “Romance novels? We don’t sell romance novels. Why don’t you try Walden’s? At the mall.”

  Not to mention a shoe store and a barbershop and a pharmacy and a five-and-dime and a declining old midwestern department store. And two Greek diners, a gourmet hot dog stand, a vegetarian restaurant, a five-dollar steak house, a Japanese restaurant, two or three sub shops, an ice cream shop, a cookie shop. And Drake’s, where he first met Beth, not long after he started at the Asia Center as an editorial assistant. As an undergraduate Kevin had never liked Drake’s, with its sickly green decor and cramped, unpadded, wooden booths, unupholstered since 1935. The place survived on nostalgia—misty alums on football Saturdays sharing a pot of weak tea, and the rest of the week homesick undergrads who’d been steered there by sentimental parents or older siblings. By Kevin’s time it was cluttered and dark, the entryway heaped with boxes, the counter lined with dusty jars of mummified candy. The owner, an enormous, bald old man, bloodless as a slug, his trousers pulled up to his armpits, slumped immovably on a stool at the end of the counter, doing God knows what; Kevin never saw him stir or speak. And the portions were small: a Coke came in an eight-ounce glass, more crushed ice than cola, and a sandwich was a flavorless scoop of something pink in mayonnaise on wilted lettuce and dry white bread, cut into fussy little triangles skewered with toothpicks. Worst of all, you had to fill out your own order ticket with a blunt pencil stub and then try to catch the attention of one of the sullen girls behind the counter.

  The first time Kevin laid eyes on Beth, he vainly waved his ticket at her as she whispered with another haughty Drake’s girl, the two of them casually ignoring him. He hadn’t been in Drake’s since he’d graduated, despite working only a block away at Big Star for years, but this was his first week at the Asia Center, and he figured, if you work at the U, you might as well eat at Drake’s at least once. Plus the girls behind the counter were usually cute, despite the shapeless green tunics they wore, and looking back at that first exchange of glances now, as he steps up out of the crosswalk at Sixth and Congress in Austin, Texas, it comes to him as a much-belated revelation that it was probably her Drakette hauteur that drew him to Beth in the first place. At last she pried herself away from her conversation with the other girl—Debra, Kevin learned later, shorter but equally cute; how different would his life have been if she’d come to take his order?—and carried herself down the narrow aisle behind the counter as imperiously as a runway model, tall, clear-skinned, wide-eyed. She fixed him with her gaze and, without a word, plucked the ticket from Kevin’s hand with two fingers and pivoted away, her hair swinging. Kevin, who fell easily and hard, felt a tingle that started in his balls and reverberated all the way up his spine and down his arms to the tips of his fingers. And she knew it, too. When she called him back to pick up his sandwich, she thrust her lower lip at him and slid the plate across the counter with a surly clatter, fixing him with her gaze again as if daring him to say something. He started back to his booth, heart pounding, then turned and carried it back to the counter, where he lifted his finger to get the tall girl’s attention. She exchanged a look with Debra—what does this idiot want?—and carried herself down the aisle to Kevin again. She placed
her long, pale fingers on the countertop, canted her hip, and lifted an eyebrow.

  Kevin leaned on the counter, extracted a toothpick, and peeled back the top of one quarter of his sandwich. He frowned sheepishly. “Is this tuna?” he said.

  For a long, thrilling moment she locked eyes with him, then deigned to drop her gaze to the pink clot of chunky paste he’d laid bare. They both regarded it for a moment, then looked at each other again. “What do you think it is?” she said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  She angled her head, as if to regard the sandwich in a slightly better light. “Why don’t you try it and see?”

  “Well,” said Kevin, keenly aware, in his peripheral vision, of the lovely Debra trying not to laugh, “if I’m not sure what it is, I don’t think I want to put it in my mouth.”

  “I see,” said the tall girl, speaking with faux gravity. She pinned him once more with her gaze, and Kevin thought he might never breathe again. Then he felt the sandwich moving under his hands as the girl slid her hand across the counter and hooked one long, pale finger over the lip of the plate. She never took her eyes off Kevin’s as she pulled it toward her. The little flap of bread Kevin had lifted curled slowly back down.

  “Only one way to find out,” she said, and she picked up the triangle of sandwich and bit it in two. Kevin gasped and stood up straight. Debra turned sharply away, lips pinched bloodlessly shut, while the enormous old man on his stool at the end of the counter sat as immobile as the Buddha. Meanwhile the tall girl deliberately masticated one-eighth of Kevin’s lunch, gazing pensively upward.

  “Well,” she said, and paused to push a loose fleck of whatever back into the corner of her lips with her pinky, “it tastes like tuna to me.”

  Kevin watched the girl in astonishment. His blood was singing. Finally she swallowed and replaced the uneaten half of the triangle with a little pat and nudged the plate back toward Kevin. Who picked it up, fastidiously turned her teethmarks toward him, and put the rest of the section in his mouth. As he swallowed it whole, nearly choking on tuna and his own laughter, the girl smiled and turned a dark shade of red.

  “You’re right,” he said, tapping his sternum lightly. “It is tuna.”

  Thus began a battle of wills that lasted thirteen years. God knows it was her Drakette hauteur on display that day in the bath when she told him she was leaving. Several years ago now, and it still stings as if it had happened this morning. It stings right now, in fact, along with the sudden, unbidden taste of tuna in the vault of his palate. Beth, what hath thou wrought? If it weren’t for her, he probably wouldn’t be sweltering outside Starbucks on a street corner in subtropical Austin. He touches the taste of tuna with the tip of his tongue, the taste of Beth. The men in khakis are walking toward the capitol, still laughing, while the camisole girls sway fetchingly in the other direction, as hearty as Minoan dancing girls. On a bus stop bench a couple of Hispanic girls hunch together in matching fast-food uniforms and consult a sheet of paper. One girl runs her blunt finger along a line, syllable by syllable, while the other girl reads haltingly, “Heh, hel-lo. Wel-come. To. Pancho’s Taco. Ex, express. Hah, how. May I. Heh, heh, help you?”

  “Bueno.” The first girl nods and moves her finger down a line. “El siguiente,” she says. Next.

  Kevin veers to the steps of Starbucks, which are guarded by a street musician—dirty gray beard, sleeveless T-shirt, pale upper arms—standing against the wall, aimlessly but vigorously strumming a guitar. Is he in his forties, Kevin wonders, or his fifties? He’s so frayed by bad luck it’s hard to tell, but even in the heat Kevin feels the cold breath of time brush them both. The guy’s eyes shift mournfully from side to side, following passersby, and Kevin wonders, what memory is he trying to erase? Is he another McNulty, hitting rock bottom? The man’s scuffed guitar case is closed at his feet. Perhaps he’s forgotten to open it, or maybe it’s a rare example of ars gratia artis. Kevin steps past him up into the coffee shop.

  The morning rush is nearly over, and the place is disheveled—napkins on the floor, crumbs underfoot, a plastic stirrer in a little pool of coffee on the countertop. Behind the counter a black girl with dreadlocks hangs on a lever at the espresso machine, and a golden-haired white girl with a stain on the breast of her company tunic slouches at the register. They each have that end-of-shift, thousand-yard stare that Kevin recognizes from his own days in retail. Meanwhile a rotund young woman with a buzz cut works up a sweat changing out the trash bins; she yanks a bulging bag of cups into the air and twists it sharply, as if snapping its neck. The only person ahead of Kevin is a businesswoman in her late thirties—no, thinks Kevin, looking closer through her makeup at the crinkled corners of her eyes, mid forties. She steps aside and smiles at him. “I’m waiting,” she says.

  Kevin needs to wash the taste of Beth out of his mouth, so he orders an iced tea.

  “With legs?” says the golden blond, absently pressing a key on the register.

  “Pardon?” Starbucks is like its own country, you have to know the silly argot.

  “To go?” says the fortysomething woman, in a rising, Texas singsong. “ ‘With legs’ means ‘to go.’ ”

  Cheerleader, thinks Kevin. Sorority girl, marketing major, party girl once upon a time. A Republican, maybe, but a fun Republican, a sexy Republican. He smiles and she purses her lips—nicely red, but not too red, sort of business sensual—which Kevin finds mildly flirty, and instinctively, in spite of himself, before his forebrain can get a word in edgewise, he looks her up and down. She’s pretty, formerly pert, now softening around the edges. Brown hair pulled back with a ribbon the same color as her lipstick. Wide eyes, cornflower blue, a little too made-up for close range, but just right (Kevin’s guessing) for a presentation in front of a boardroom. Snug jacket, but not too snug, knee-length skirt. Matching nail polish, no wedding ring. A little wide in the hips, but nice calves. Kevin’s appraising gaze glides back up to her face, and she blushes and looks away, over the counter, at nothing in particular.

  “Yes,” says Kevin, his forebrain at last wresting the controls away. “I mean, no.”

  “What?” says the barista. The middle-aged are so boring.

  “It’s for here,” says Kevin. “No legs.”

  The girl slouches away for his legless tea, and Kevin smiles sidelong at the woman and says, “ ‘With legs,’ huh?”

  She smiles warily.

  “What am I,” says Kevin, “Damon Runyon?”

  Her eyebrows lift, her smile widens ever so slightly, and Kevin can see his joke sailing deep into the cornflower blue yonder, without striking a goddamn thing. She doesn’t get it, she’s just being polite—guess they never did Guys and Dolls at Texas A&M—and the embarrassment pulls tight as a wire between them until it’s blessedly snapped by the dreadlocked girl reaching over the counter with the woman’s steaming paper cup of venti double cap something, and Kevin and the woman turn from each other with relief. Kevin pretends to study the baked goods under glass next to the register while the woman taps across the floor in her sensible heels. One of the pastries, he notices, is a madeleine. Good thing he didn’t make a joke about that.

  Kevin watches the rotund barista swipe at tables with a damp cloth until the blond barista returns and money and iced tea are exchanged across the retail membrane of the countertop. Kevin hesitates, buys a muffin, and then juggles cup, muffin, and change past the love seat where the businesswoman, legs crossed, displays her excellent calves and swings her toe as she consults a very thin, very stylish silver laptop. A little wheeled suitcase waits at her feet like a faithful dog. She glances up, he glances back, they look away, and Kevin makes for a small round table in the corner, still gleaming from the stout barista’s damp cloth. He sets his tea and muffin before him and takes a bentwood chair where the businesswoman is at the corner of his eye. The windows look up both Sixth and Congress, offering a wide, 270-degree vista of the street corner, like Captain Nemo’s observation bubble in the Nautilus, only instead of flas
hing schools of fish and lumbering manta rays, he sees just beyond the glass a gangly man in a sleeveless, gold lamé minidress teetering on platform heels, his calves and thighs ropy, his arms veined and hairy. He wears badly applied lipstick and a crooked wig, a Bizarro Mary Tyler Moore circa The Dick Van Dyke Show. A frayed evening bag that doesn’t quite match the minidress dangles from the guy’s knotty forearm.

  Kevin sips at his tea. For the first time he notices the rhythmic world music over the speakers—women singing wordlessly over drums—and he hears the padded tapping of the businesswoman at her keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye he notes her pretty pout as she concentrates on her e-mail or whatever. He nibbles the muffin; it’s sweet, but still Beth troubles Kevin like indigestion, a sour backwash that his snack can’t extinguish. Bitch, he thinks, without saying it out loud. Thirteen years they were together, until he was forty-six and she was thirty-eight, and the day Beth told Kevin she was leaving him, he had been lying in the bath in four inches of warm water, a little square of sodden gauze on the loose flesh around his belly button. Somehow, during a walk out at Silver Lake the weekend before, he’d gotten poison ivy. Not on his arms or ankles where he usually got it, but on this little patch of belly. How it got there, under the elastic of his shorts, he had no idea, but now he had a reddened cordillera around the crater of his navel, a little archipelago of pustules that oozed clear liquid, and he was lying in warm water with a coffee cup full of warm Domeboro’s solution on the edge of the tub. It was a black promotional cup, the logo for The Sopranos with its semi-automatic R printed in red on the side. He was reading an old Martin Amis novel with a black cover as he soaked, and every couple of pages he carefully balanced the split-spined paperback on the edge of the tub and ladled another teaspoon or two of warm, grainy solution onto his belly, little white flecks of powder catching in the soaking weave of the gauze. When Beth came in, Kevin looked up cluelessly, thinking she’d just come for a leisurely chat, and for a moment he contemplated lunging out of the tub, damn the cup and the book, and dragging her in, jeans and T-shirt and all. He’d done it before, though not for years, but why not? She looked good, and, if he did say so himself, he didn’t look too bad for forty-six, even stretched out pale and hairy in lukewarm bathwater. His arms and chest were firm and his legs strong, though he’d got this little pouch just below his belly button that he couldn’t make go away, no matter how many crunches he did. But Beth perched on the lid of the toilet, the toes of her Birkenstocks pressed to the tile and her heels lifted, her knees primly together. She leaned forward with her forearms together and her long fingers tightly laced and looked intently at him for a moment before she reached over the edge of the tub and lifted the book out of his hand. Then, without preface, she said, “I’m pregnant and it’s not yours.”