by James Hynes
He lay there with the water cooling all around him, the gauze turning chill on his slack belly. As he listened to her—“I’m in love with him, and I want to have a child with him”—he reached for the cup. Instead of ladling out more solution, he put the wet spoon on the open book, where a wet patch instantly soaked into the page, and he poured the rest of the cup slowly over his belly, watching the milky water pool in his navel and overflow through the thicket of hair into the bath. Then he set the cup back on the edge of the tub, very carefully so that it didn’t make a sound, and he turned it around so that he was reading the Sopranos tagline on the other side, in fat red letters against the black ceramic: FAMILY. REDEFINED. Beth said she wouldn’t make a fuss, she didn’t want his money or his house, and she hoped he wouldn’t make a fuss either. “I want a child,” she said, squeezing her fingers bloodless, “and you won’t give me one.” Now the urge to grab her and haul her into the tub was almost overwhelming. Not out of rage, Kevin thought—though he couldn’t be sure—but for some reason he felt an overpowering lust for her that he hadn’t felt in a couple of years. He really wanted to fuck her right there in the tub, the way they used to, in a rubbery tangle of limbs and bumping elbows and splashing water. There was probably some evolutionary reading of his desire—she’d been with another man and now his genes needed to reassert their dominance over the guy who’d knocked her up, or some Dawkins shit like that. But even knowing that, Kevin thought there was something irreducible and elemental about the emotion. It was what it was: she’d been with another man, and it made him hot. In the tub he’d been aware of his penis lolling, the black nimbus of hair at its root shifting like seaweed in the sloshing bathwater. God help me if it gets hard, thought Kevin, because he knew that what would have been friskiness a few years before would be something close to assault now. Plus, even he could read her body language: toes and knees together, hands clenched into a single white-knuckled fist. His lust cooled like the water lapping his flanks and thighs, and he was filled with sorrow at the thought that he’d already made love to this woman, whom he used to love and maybe still did, sorta, kinda, for the last time.
Now, in Starbucks, slumped over his muffin, he’s not the least bit aroused, just really, really sad. The morning sunlight pours through the window and across the table before him, warming his iced tea. The muffin has a scallop in it, though he doesn’t remember taking a bite, couldn’t even say exactly what kind of muffin it is. He’s almost nauseous with melancholy now, and he pushes the dead muffin across the tabletop. He’s angry, too, for letting this get to him, today of all days. It’s been four years, for chrissakes, going on five, he has a new lover, a striking, high-maintenance woman even younger than Beth. And Beth—boy, has she moved on, she has a kid who’s almost as old as their breakup. Even so, he’s always pissed off when he stumbles over another hidden trip wire of regret. The insipid moaning of the women over the stereo only makes it worse, and the rattle of the businesswoman’s keyboard behind him makes him want to snap at her. Still, he’s sorry he ever called Beth a bitch, even silently. Then he sits up a little straighter in the chair because he’s got nothing to be sorry for, goddammit, it’s not his fault that sorrow overwhelms him, that’s just middle-age, buddy, everybody regrets something. He and Beth were together for thirteen years, and that’s a lot of emotional momentum, a runaway freight train rolling downhill, nothing but tanker cars full of toxic waste and high explosives, and sometimes he feels like he’s tied to the fucking track.
“Excuse me?” trills a voice with a rising, singsong inflection. Kevin turns; the businesswoman is smiling at him. At this distance her makeup is just right, and his heart fibrillates with unexpected pleasure that this yellow rose of Texas is beaming at him over the screen of her silvery laptop.
“Do you know another word for ‘regret’?” she says.
Wow, thinks Kevin, that’s a little on the nose. Can former Texas cheerleaders read minds? Do they teach telepathy at Baylor? Outside the window, a school of colorful fish enters the crosswalk from each direction, sifting neatly through each other. Another couple of girls in tank tops stride away from him—do they travel only in pairs?—and Kevin turns back to the beaming woman.
“Regret, huh?” he says. “Sounds serious.”
“That’s just it,” says the Yellow Rose of Starbucks. “It sounds too serious.” She tilts her head. “I want to say, ‘I regret the misunderstanding,’ but on the other hand”—she tilts her head the other way—“I don’t really think it was my fault.”
“Huh.” Kevin looks down at his muffin, sneaks a glance at the sunlit girls, but someone carrying a big green duffel bag is blocking his view. Move, he thinks.
“Business or personal?” He takes a nip of his muffin. Cranberry, that’s what it is.
“Wellll,” drawls the Yellow Rose, “mostly business.” She really does have a rather fetching, crooked smile.
This should be easy, thinks Kevin, I’m an editor. A professional. This is my job, helping folks find the right word. He furrows his brow to show he’s mulling it over, but what flashes across his eyeballs is big green duffel bag.
“I mean, I’m sorry he misunderstood?” says the woman, crinkling her nose, which is going a little too far. “But I’m not really sorry?”
The big green duffel bag is balanced on the shoulder of a tall, swaying Asian girl threading her unsmiling way through the knot of homeless and day laborers on the corner, neatly sidestepping the woozy stagger of Mr. Mary Tyler Moore. She sails by Kevin’s window, just beyond the glass, and all the pagan priestesses on the stereo sing alleluia! Kevin nearly chokes on his muffin. O frabjous day! Callooh, callay! It’s Joy Luck!
Kevin chases the chunk of muffin with a gulp of tea. The Yellow Rose is still talking but he’s not listening; instead he’s rising from his chair and shuffling like a zombie to the window.
“Uh huh,” he says, splaying a hand against the warm glass and peering sideways up Sixth Street after Joy Luck. Her arm curls around the duffel, her head is neatly obscured, so that she looks like a hybrid creature, a land-bound hammerhead shark with a very sexy walk. But she keeps close to the building and after a moment all he can see is the butt end of the duffel before it too disappears. “Sorry,” he says, pushing back from the window, leaving his palm print on the glass. “What was the question?”
The businesswoman has stopped talking, her bright red nails hooked over the upright screen of her laptop. Kevin’s heart sinks at the sight: a frost has touched the Yellow Rose. She’s seen what he was looking at; she’s watched him levitate from his chair and stumble to the window, all the blood rushing from his head. Her bright mouth has crumpled, her eyes have hardened, and all at once she looks ten years older. It breaks his heart to see, and inwardly he lacerates himself even as his tongue stumbles uselessly in every direction at once.
“She’s, uh…” He gestures at the window. “I know her from…”
The Yellow Rose’s petals turn brittle in the chill. She spreads her fingers as if to say, whatever, none of my damn business.
“I know her father.” Kevin’s face burns as he sidles toward the door. But the businesswoman has withdrawn within her suit as if behind a rampart, so Kevin snatches his iced tea. Then turns back and grabs the muffin—at these prices, he’s not leaving it behind.
“I’m sorry you misunderstood,” Kevin says as he slips past the Yellow Rose, and she snaps her head back as if he’s slapped her. “Just say that,” he adds, gesturing at the laptop before he plunges out the door into the heat.
He hustles around the corner onto Sixth Street. Half a block ahead, without breaking stride, Joy Luck swivels the duffel from her left shoulder to her right, jogging a little like a sailor to hike the load up higher. The muscles in her arm, the glide of her shoulder blades, the little apple in the dimple of her back—all are nicely picked out by the sunlight pouring down Sixth from behind. Kevin feels a little surge of, well, joy.
“Nice,” someone says next to him. Ke
vin pulls up short and instantly dances away from the wavelet of tea sloshing from his cup. He’s still standing outside Starbucks, and from the window above the chunky barista glowers at him and rubs away the palm print he’s left on the glass. It’s not her speaking, but another shaggy homeless guy hunkered against the building, smoking a cigarette. No, not a cigarette—Kevin recognizes the sweet, resinous smell. The homeless man—cadaverous in T-shirt and jeans and an ancient tweed sport coat—watches Joy Luck walk away. He draws deep on the joint, then turns his dilated gaze to Kevin.
“Friend of yours?” he rasps.
“I know her father.” He has no idea why he keeps repeating this lie, especially to strangers.
The guy cocks a bird-bright eye at Kevin and says, “O-kay. What’s her name?”
Kevin laughs. In cannabis veritas. He weighs the cup in one hand and the half-eaten muffin in the other, and impulsively, as if propitiating some local deity, he offers them to the homeless man, who peers at them warily, then slowly takes the muffin and stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket. He waves away the cup. Up ahead, Joy Luck pauses at the next cross street, stoops to look right under her duffel, then sways into the intersection. Meanwhile, with grave hippie generosity, the homeless man offers the joint to Kevin with a smooth, palm-down gesture, the smoke pooling under his hand and rising through his fingers. He lifts his scraggy eyebrows and holds his own toke as he waits. For the tiniest increment of time Kevin considers it—in Ann Arbor, under the right circumstances, he wouldn’t hesitate—and then a train of considerations rumbles by—strange city, Texas drug laws, job interview in a few hours—and he shakes his head subtly, as cool as the homeless guy making the offer. The international brotherhood of dopers. No thanks, bro. The homeless guy shrugs and gasps out a puff of smoke. Kevin starts up the street after Joy Luck.
“Go get her, dude,” rasps the homeless guy.
What am I doing? thinks Kevin, treading on his own shadow. Who am I kidding? What am I going to do, strike up a conversation with her like some drunken Shriner? Hey honey, I’m only in town for the day, what’s a fella do for fun in this burg, har har har? The very thought shrivels him, but he keeps walking. Cars pour west down Sixth toward the bright, hazy hills in the distance, but there’s no other foot traffic, only Joy Luck and him. Get a grip, he thinks, she’s twenty-five years younger, maybe even thirty. But so what? The first day he met Stella, in Expresso Royale, she told him she was twenty-nine. The fact that she lied about her age—he knows because after she moved into his rental apartment downstairs and started spending most of her nights upstairs with him, he snuck a peek at her driver’s license and found out she was actually thirty-five—is sort of beside the point. Fact is, the look on Beth’s face when he told her how old his new lover was—it was worth all the grief he knew she’d give him. Who cares if Stella’s actually five, six years older? Whatever the actual difference, the gap in their ages is the running gag of their relationship, it’s the grain around which their relationship formed.
“The Black Crowes” was the first thing she’d ever said to him, as they both waited in line at the Royale one bright spring morning. They’d been taking turns glancing at each other for the past minute or so, and at last she’d turned and caught him admiring her firm calves and the way she dangled her slim briefcase before her, her slender fingers linked through the leather handle. And what she said was “The Black Crowes.”
“Sorry?”
She dipped her broad forehead toward him. It was a calculated effect, he knew it the moment she did it, but even so it worked and he leaned closer.
“The Black Crowes?” She shimmied a little in place. “On the stereo?”
Kevin lifted his chin and put on his listening face. One of the harried undergrads on the morning shift at the Royale was feeling retro this morning; the speakers were broadcasting “Brown Sugar,” the first song Kevin had ever danced to, back in the Pleistocene. Before he could stop himself, Kevin laughed.
The young woman pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. She had a mane of kinky, dirty-blond hair, barely restrained in a shaggy ponytail; clear skin pulled tight across a flawless forehead; a strong jaw. She was very slightly bandy-legged, accentuated by the boxy heels of her pumps. A black-and-white polka-dot skirt, wasp-waisted blazer.
“Can’t a girl like the old bands?” she growled, and in spite of himself, in spite of her lovely narrow waist and strong-looking legs, Kevin laughed again.
“How old are you?” he asked her, before he had time to think.
“Twenty-nine?” she said, blushing. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Sorry.” Kevin brushed her elbow with the tips of his fingers. “It’s the music. It’s just…” He smiled. “You made me feel old is all.”
She looked puzzled, but turned a little more in his direction. Kevin was aware without looking that the twenty-year-olds ahead of and behind them were rolling their eyes and exchanging smirks at this elderly flirtation, but fuck ’em. The young ’yeη n, pl: those on whom youth is wasted.
“The band’s older than you think.” Kevin lowered his voice and gestured with his eyebrows into the aural space above their heads, where the song had reached the climactic moment when Mick and the lads chanted, “Yeah… yeah… yeah… whoooo!” The very point at which, in the sweaty, paneled, suburban basements of his youth, Kevin and his tube- or halter-topped partner, shaking their hip-huggers to the thumpa-thumpa Watts and Wyman beat, would chant along and waggle their hands in the air. “How come ya, how come ya dance so good?”
“It’s not the Black Crowes,” he murmured, inclining his head toward hers. “It’s the Rolling Stones.” Then he added, “The Black Crowes of their day,” never sure how much a young person would know of the popular music of the Pleistocene. “Sort of.”
“I know that,” said the young woman, and she unlaced the long fingers of one hand from the grip of her briefcase, her nails a deep but not unprofessional shade of red, and playfully rapped his arm with her knuckles. “How old are you?”
Good question, thinks Kevin, trotting through the Texas heat after a girl who’s even younger than Stella, a girl whose father he is old enough to be. Up ahead Joy Luck dashes on tiptoe across Sixth Street, the duffel bouncing heavily on her shoulder, her arm thrown out for balance, her sandals flapping loose of her heels. A block behind her Kevin crosses, too. She turns left down a side street, and when he reaches the corner, Kevin pauses to slug down the rest of his tea in one long, wobbling gulp. By now it’s as warm as his sweating palm, it’s like drinking some bodily fluid of his own, and as Joy Luck sways downhill toward the river, he tosses the empty cup in a trash can and plods after her. His shirt’s wilting under his jacket, sweat courses along his sideburns and down the groove of his spine.
What will he say if he catches her? Will he say anything at all, or just watch her longingly from a distance, some cow-eyed, sweaty loser in a wilted suit? What if she recognizes him and asks him, point-blank, why he’s following her? Does he even know why? Say he tells her it’s because she walks like a girl he slept with for three months back in the eighties—Christ, that’s even more ridiculous than simple, middle-aged lust. What would a young woman say to such an avowal? What could she say? Would she find it poignant or touching, or just pathetic? Is it pathetic? It makes him feel old just to think about it. This is way out of the ordinary for Kevin, he doesn’t follow young women in strange cities as a general rule, but still he keeps walking. Certainly he expects nothing to happen. In Ann Arbor he knows the ground, has a clearer sense of where he has a shot and where he doesn’t. Indeed, his flirtations in Ann Arbor, like that first morning in Expresso Royale, have paid off occasionally, though rarely as precipitately as they did with Stella.
“Let an old man buy you coffee,” he’d said when they reached the counter, and “Brown Sugar” had segued into “Sway.” Half an hour later, they had a dinner date, and that evening, during a pleasantly anticipatory meal at the Mongolian Barbecue downtown,
where he took all his first dates, he got the Stella backstory: sales rep for a textbook company, just moved here from St. Louis, didn’t know a soul, did he know of any apartments for rent? Funny you should ask, he said, not really thinking it through. Forty-five minutes later he was showing her the empty apartment on the ground floor of his house on Fifth Avenue. Where, up against a bare wall, in the dark, and against his better judgment, he agreed on the spot to rent her the apartment—“French doors!” she’d exclaimed. “Oh God, a fireplace!”—and then uttered not a word of demurral as she dropped to her knees on the newly revarnished hardwood floor and fellated him. Well, maybe it was the other way around, she blew him first and then he offered her the apartment—he’s hazy on the details, he was a little drunk at the time—but either way it was an epic fellation. She took her time, she acted as if she enjoyed it, she had technique. Whatever warnings the Jiminy Cricket in his forebrain might have had about a young woman who was willing to blow her potential landlord on the first date were sluiced away in the patella-rattling rush of pleasure, and by his relief, considering where she was putting her mouth, that she hadn’t ordered the bird peppers with her stir-fry.