by James Hynes
The street before him descends toward the river between low, old, brick warehouses converted into bars and restaurants. A half-built condo tower looms over the end of the street, the giant crane above it sweeping as slow as a second hand. Joy Luck crosses an alley and sails up a raised sidewalk under an awning. Kevin jogs to close the gap, and suddenly a battered white van pulls out of the alley right in front of him, and a young driver with a jigging Adam’s apple cranes over the steering wheel, looking both ways. Kevin dodges left to go round the back of the van, but it’s too close to a telephone pole, and he finds himself nose-to-nose with an old red flyer, now faded to pink, stapled to the splintered wood—DOES MARX MATTER? Sponsored, Kevin notes, by the Intercontinental Socialist Alliance, six months ago, on the University of Texas campus. He sees flyers like this every day of his life in Ann Arbor, and over thirty years he’s gone from a mildly guilty, dilettantish interest through grumpiness to eye-rolling bemusement. He can see the sparse crowd, most of them coreligionists of the speaker, and most of them, men and women both, fatally uncool: humorless, pedantic, puritanical little narcissists with burning eyes and a Talmudic grasp of infinitesimal ideological details. During Kevin’s undergraduate years, people like this seemed like the vanguard of something, but now, after the Fall of the Wall and the Fall of the Two Towers and the Fall of Kevin’s Fiftieth Birthday, a meeting like this seems as quaint as college boys in raccoon coats strumming ukuleles. Nowadays disaffected young men like the Other Kevin—slave of the Prophet, blessings be upon him—turn to actual religions for their ideology. Same sort of cheerless meetings, Kevin suspects, in the same sort of cheerless, overlit meeting rooms, only with fewer girls. Or probably no girls at all.
The van’s driver guns the engine and lurches forward, all of six inches. Kevin bounces on his toes. “Come on.” Somewhere the Intercontinental Socialists are laughing mirthlessly at his middle-aged longing—another instance, no doubt, of the cultural alienation of late monopoly capitalism. Or maybe some dark-eyed mullah is cursing Kevin’s corrupt Crusader lust, quoting chapter and verse from the Koran. If only the Other Kevin had been luckier with girls, thinks Kevin, maybe he wouldn’t have taken his frustration and rage out on the defenseless commuters of Buchanan Street. The only reason to go to meetings like that, in Kevin’s day, was to meet girls, and if there aren’t any girls, what’s the point? In fact, the last time he went to a meeting like that was with none other than Lynda herself—Lynda à la plage! Lynda on the railing! He was still working at Big Star that summer, and she’d been a fairly regular customer, so he began flirting with her one afternoon as she diffidently flipped through the jazz section, clearly with no intention of buying anything, but slouching in her jeans and tank top over the record bin, bending back the toe of her sandal, pushing aside her strawberry blond hair with the tips of her fingers as she smiled sidelong at him. After some desultory conversation—“Are you into Sun Ra?” “Sort of”—she said she was going to a meeting that night, and would he like to come?
“What kind of meeting?” he’d said, as his Jiminy Cricket started jumping up and down in his brain, shouting, “Watch out! Danger! She’s a Moonie! A Maranatha! A Young Spartacist! All she wants is your soul!”
“Oh, I dunno,” she sighed. “Some nuclear freeze, pro-Sandinista, fuck Reagan kind of thing.” With one hand she lifted her hair at the nape of her neck, exposing to Kevin the pale, expertly shaved scallop of her underarm. “I promised some boy I’d go, but I don’t want to show up, you know, alone?”
“Sure,” said Kevin, throttling Jiminy. “Cool.”
Indeed, it was that same afternoon, shortly after she left, that Mick McNulty had told him of the Battle of Bertrand Russell, and he told Kevin he should definitely go with Lynda to her meeting.
“You ever see the usual guys who show up at those things?” McNulty said in his hipster mumble, politely expelling his cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth away from Kevin. “Scrawny vegetarians, man. Guys who bathe once a week, if that. Guys who wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if one dropped in their lap.” He squinted across the store through his haze of smoke, at something only he could see. “Tom Courtenay,” he said.
“Tom Courtenay?”
“In Zhivago, man. You ever see that flick?”
“Sure,” said Kevin.
“Yeah, Dr. Zhivago,” McNulty continued, slowly remembering. “Julie Christie’s his girlfriend—Julie Christie, man!—but he has a hard-on for Trotsky.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you, you’re Omar Sharif, okay?” McNulty gestured with his cigarette, dragging tendrils of smoke through the air. “Take it from me, man, these political chicks are desperate for some red meat.” He tapped Kevin meaningfully on his sternum. “So you go be Yuri Zhivago.”
Kevin laughed, and McNulty shrugged and dragged the last out of his Marlboro. “You’ll have to listen to some political shit,” he gasped, “but so what? At least you don’t have to tell her you love her.”
And so, after hearing balalaika music in his head all afternoon, Kevin went. He can’t remember now what the meeting was about, except that it rapidly devolved into an argument about the number of women of color on the organizing committee. He vividly remembers the venue, though, a windowless, subterranean classroom in the Modern Languages Building—he can picture it down to the subliminal strobing of the fluorescents, the unswept candy wrappers in the corners, the useless fragments of chalk in the chalkboard tray. Christ, he can smell it even now, the dank air-conditioning of MLB, the years of floor polish and disinfectant. And he remembers Lynda introducing him to the boy who’d invited her, a rodent-faced little guy in a leather vest who looked more like Ratso Rizzo than Tom Courtenay, who limply shook Kevin’s hand and said to Lynda, with barely disguised anger, “I think it’s cool that you brought somebody.”
Most of all, though, Kevin remembers sitting in the back of the room with Lynda, the two of them slumped in classroom desks like a couple of bored sixteen-year-olds. Lynda had brought a pint of Jack Daniels in a little paper sack, and they passed it back and forth, sneaking swigs and stifling their laughter. Poor, luckless Ratso Rizzo would have murdered them with his gaze, but as luck would have it, he ended up as one of the chief combatants in the climactic contretemps, violently shaking his miniature forefinger at a plump black girl with cornrows, who waved her more substantial forefinger back at him and shouted, “Motherfucker, don’t you shake that finger at me!” At which point, Lynda grabbed Kevin by the wrist with her cool fingers and dragged him out of the room, where they ran doubled over with laughter down the hall. Ten minutes later, they were seated halfway up the steps of the grad library, looking over the Diag in the long midwestern twilight, the top of Burton Tower golden in the last of the day’s light, and they finished the Jack swig by swig, turn and turn about, getting a nice, mutual buzz on. Kevin sat on the step above her and Lynda sat between his thighs, drumming her fingers on his knees, the bottle on the step between her legs. He lightly pulled at the hair at the nape of her neck, and she tilted her head back and handed up the last of the whiskey, pursing her lips when she caught him enjoying the view down the front of her tank top.
“What are you looking at?” she said. And half an hour after that, in Lynda’s summer sublet, a steamy attic room at the top of a cooperative house on Jefferson Avenue, they were happily balling on her sketchy mattress—yes, balling, Kevin thought, that’s exactly the word—and he laughed out loud, right in the saddle as it were, thrusting away in that lovely, loose-hipped way the girls loved. The two of them slick as seals in the heat, the window wide open, their grunts and moans wafting into the treetops just under the eaves, eine kleine nachtmusik for an Ann Arbor summer evening.
“Why were you laughing?” she asked him afterward, pursing her lips at him again as they sprawled together, hot and panting and reeking of sweat and semen and pussy.
“I’m just really… happy!” Kevin laughed, just drunk enough to be telling the trut
h.
“Move,” he shouts now, rapping on the side of the van with his knuckles, filling it with a hollow rumble. The driver guns it into the street, wheels smoking against the pavement. Kevin hears a muffled, diminishing, “Fuck you, asshole!” from the driver, and feels, without actually seeing it, the guy’s middle finger thrust in his direction. But he doesn’t care, because right there, up ahead, silhouetted against the blazing Texas sky, lifting her hair away from the sweaty nape of her neck in a gesture he hasn’t seen in a quarter of a century, a gesture that makes his heart tumble like a gymnast, is Lynda herself, swaying round the corner out of sight, the ends of her duffel bounding slowly with every step.
Okay, not Lynda, actually, but close enough. He rounds the corner and finds another, funkier coffeehouse called Empyrean, with a hand-painted sign, purple letters across a starry sky between a grinning sun and a sultry moon. Through a side window he sees swaybacked sofas, blowsy easy chairs, a vintage floor lamp with a fringed shade. In the shade of an awning, he tiptoes between the empty tables of a patio—formerly a loading dock—and plays peekaboo behind the flyers taped in the front window, watching Joy Luck prop her duffel on end against a couch at the back of the shop. As Kevin pretends to read flyers for a poetry slam and a band called Titty Bingo, Joy Luck smiles at someone he can’t see and tugs at a zipper at the bulging end of the duffel. He watches her yank The Joy Luck Club free and with a backhand snap of the wrist sail it toward her unseen interlocutor. Then she gives the duffel a proprietorial little pat and disappears down a dim hallway into the back.
And before Kevin has a chance to think, he’s pulled the door open and entered. Empyrean is self-consciously contra-Starbucks, aggressively laid-back, an echoing old warehouse with a high ceiling and bare rafters, a scuffed hardwood floor in need of a sweeping, mismatched tables and chairs. Earnest and slightly amateurish paintings in black and red line the bare brick wall along one side, each with a little card announcing its asking price with calligraphic self-importance. Even the air-conditioning is laid-back, a dank, shadowy breeze instead of the industrial, fluorescent deep freeze of Starbucks. The counter is an old wooden bar top, and the boy behind it is slender to the point of gauntness, with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin and a high forehead. His narrow sideburns hang as low as the tips of his earlobes, his black T-shirt hangs from his collarbone, his jeans from the points of his pelvis. He’s puckering his lips and thumbing through The Joy Luck Club, as if trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. As Kevin crosses the creaking floor, the boy stows the paperback out of sight and lifts his eyebrows.
“Iced tea,” Kevin says. The boy carries Kevin’s glass in knuckly fingers; Kevin drops his change in the tip jar. The boy nods, then stoops to retrieve the paperback from under the counter. Sweating tea in hand, Kevin plucks a disheveled newspaper out of a rack and sinks into a worn corduroy sofa the color of oatmeal, just inside the door, facing toward the back. Knees higher than his lap, he grunts to set his tea on the scruffy little table before the sofa. Then he spreads the paper in front of his face, watching for Joy Luck over the top of the page.
The only other customer is a guy with a shaved head, who is slightly older than the barista, though not by much, and who slumps in his chair at another table, nodding slowly to himself as he peers into a laptop. His clothes seem to have just barely survived some apocalyptic blast—his short-sleeved shirt is faded blue plaid, and the knees of his jeans have simply vanished. He’s crossed an ankle over the other leg, exposing his entire knee and a long reach of white, hairless thigh. He extends his long arm to the laptop and gives the keyboard a sharp tap.
Just then Joy Luck reemerges from the hallway at the back, and Kevin ducks behind his paper. Without thinking, he’s picked up a section of the Wall Street Journal, and his leathery middle-aged pupils laboriously refocus on the close-ranked print, his heart racing at the sight of Joy Luck, at the memory of Lynda, at the mild thrill of his own shamelessness.
“So.” It’s Joy Luck’s voice, he recognizes it from the plane: flat, midwestern, uninflected. “Any more sentimental crap you want me to read?”
Maybe not midwestern, thinks Kevin. Midwesterners aren’t that tart, usually. Maybe she’s a Texan, maybe he got the accent all wrong. Kevin risks another peek. The gaunt barista is shrugging. The book is out of sight.
“Thought you’d like,” he says. “Sorry,” he adds, though he doesn’t really mean it.
“Whatever,” says Joy Luck, waving her fingers. It might almost be an apology. Then, “Where’s Ian?”
“Ian,” says the barista. “Oh.”
“Tall guy?” says Joy Luck. “Kind of funny-looking? Claims to be my boyfriend?” She’s standing at the counter now, hip canted, fingertips just touching the countertop.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Didn’t he tell me what?” She’s doing it again, that Lynda thing she does, twisting her hair one-handed away from her neck, her long arm bent at the elbow in a perfect triangle, a taut triceps displayed.
“I so don’t want to be in the middle of this.” The barista backs away from his side of the counter, as if he expects her to reach across like Lee Marvin grabbing the barkeep by the lapels.
“He knew I was coming back today, right?” She looks like she might do it, too. She’s certainly got the upper-body strength for it. “He had the flight number and all?”
The barista glances away toward Kevin, who ducks behind his paper.
“He started at Gaia last week,” Kevin hears him say. “Didn’t he tell you?”
There’s a long, tense silence.
“Gaia?” she says at last. “Since when?”
“Since last week?”
“Is that where he is now?” For the first time she sounds not just angry, but hurt.
“Sweetie, I don’t know his schedule.”
The Wall Street Journal swims before Kevin. Joy Luck and the barista lower their voices, their exact words lost in the rafters, under the hum of the AC and the music on the sound system. Kevin’s surprised to realize that this self-consciously hip little coffeehouse is playing an oldies station—some ironic whim of the gaunt barista, no doubt—and the song that’s drowning out the conversation he’d like to hear is, of all things, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” Jesus Christ, when was the last time he heard that? He peeks around the left edge of the paper. Barista and Joy Luck are leaning toward each other over the counter. Barista’s eyes are wide in sympathy. He nods slowly as he speaks. Joy Luck’s kneading the edge of the counter with her fingers. She looks stricken.
Whatever she says next is drowned out by the rat-a-tat beat of the idiotic song, and Kevin thinks, these two weren’t even born yet when this song was on the charts. I’m the oldest guy in here. I’m the oldest guy for blocks in any direction.
Kevin turns the page and sees his tea, untouched, sweating on the table beyond his knee, but he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by reaching for it, doesn’t want to reveal his face. The sweat along his hairline is evaporating in the AC; the smell of his armpits rises from between the lapels of his jacket. Tucking his chin, he leans slowly to the right to peek around the paper.
“Can I leave this here?” Joy Luck has pushed away from the counter, but she sways on her long legs, almost as if she’s going to fall over. Almost as if someone has hit her. She gestures wanly to her duffel. There’s a tremor in her voice.
“Bring it around,” the gaunt barista says. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”
With a thump like a body hitting the floorboards and a long, gritty scrape, Joy Luck drags her duffel one-handed around the far end of the counter. Kevin dips guiltily to the paper again.
“That’s fine, sweetie. It’ll be fine with me.”
Now she’s sailing down the length of the coffeehouse, and Kevin can hear the creak of the floorboards, the rhythmic slap of her sandals.
“You good?” the barista calls after her.
“No,” she says.
He peeks, not a good
idea because she’s headed in his direction, but it doesn’t matter. He could be right in her path and she’d never see him. Her eyes glisten, her gaze is fixed straight ahead. Behind her the barista blows out a sigh. The other customer, the laptop guy with the shaved head, is watching her sidelong as his bony fingers tremble over his keyboard.
“Hey,” he says, with the ghost of a smile.
Joy Luck pauses, glances, then says, “Hey!” and breaks into a sad, heartfelt smile and pivots on the toe of her sandal. She coos at the laptop guy, who murmurs something back, and Kevin’s heart tumbles again in his chest. Joy Luck is smiling down at the guy, and he’s beaming shyly up at her as if he can’t believe his good luck. She’s holding his hand by the thumb and waggling his long arm playfully back and forth. Laptop grins sheepishly, baring his pink gums. Even at this distance, in the crepuscular cool of the café, Kevin can see the guy blush. Joy Luck’s eyes have brightened and she’s laughing—a musical laugh, a charming laugh, a laugh that makes Kevin’s balls tingle—and the laughter and the carefree grasp of the man’s hand pierce Kevin right through to his spine, because it’s a gesture that reminds him of another old flame—not Lynda this time, but the Philosopher’s Daughter, his great unrequited crush, the girl that got away. She had a laugh like that, mocking and affectionate all at once, and an effortlessly flirtatious manner. Kevin never made a bigger fool of himself over anyone than he did over her.
Across the room Joy Luck drops the guy’s hand, and the poor guy almost involuntarily reaches for her again. Then he catches himself, as spastic as Dr. Strangelove, and jerks his hand back over the sheen of his head, rubbing so hard he furrows the back of his scalp. That was the other side of the Philosopher’s Daughter, of course—jolt you awake like a nine-volt battery, then cut you off at the knees. Not to mix a metaphor or anything, thinks Kevin, but she could cut you dead in an instant, stick a shiv between your ribs, yank your heart out of your chest, and drop-kick it into the next county. Even after all these years, Kevin can feel the little blood pressure gauge in his head throb into the red zone. Half a moment more and he’ll be as red-faced as a cartoon character, veins bulging and steam shooting out of his ears.