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by James Hynes

  “Do you want to know why I don’t think I could love you, Kevin?” said the Philosopher’s Daughter, in that voice at once sensible and pixieish.

  “Not really,” said Kevin, and then she told him anyway.

  “Curses, foiled again!” goes the singer on the radio, and Kevin’s another victim of the Red Baroness of Washtenaw County: he’s shrieking toward earth, his legs shot off at the knees, his guns jammed, his craft in flames and trailing a winding spiral of bitter black smoke. Many men died trying to end that spree, and he’s just another stencil on her fuselage. Mere moments to live, he should be making peace with the Almighty, but all he can see is her porcelain face and the cool, appraising light in her eye as she watches him bleed slowly to death.

  “Shit,” Kevin says aloud, and too late he realizes he’s gripped the paper so hard that the section has doubled over as if in pain. I can’t believe, he almost says aloud, I can’t believe that I still let this get to me after twenty-five years. It’s not like he still loves her—he’s seen her a couple, three times since then, he even went to her wedding with no ill effect—but he still experiences that one moment, when she told him what she told him, as if it happened ten minutes ago. Love fades, but rage and humiliation endure forever.

  And so it’s now, while Kevin’s glowering like a serial killer, that Joy Luck turns away from the laptop guy with a final, flirty wag of her fingertips, and walks straight toward him. Kevin’s right in her eye line, and as his eyes refocus from the memory of the Philosopher’s Daughter’s cold victory to the midmorning twilight of Empyrean, he finds himself looking straight at Joy Luck. Her eyes were fixed and glistening before, now they’re hard. She’s angry again, and Kevin’s breath catches in his throat, his heart thumps like an animal trying to burst out of his chest. She’s knows who I am! He cannot look away—but Joy Luck does. Her glare glides right over him as she sails past his sofa and pushes out the door. A little gust of warmth from the hot morning outside brushes Kevin’s knees.

  Kevin sags into the cushions, relieved, but also disappointed. She doesn’t recognize me, he thinks. She sat next to me for three hours on the plane, six inches apart for three hours, and she doesn’t fucking recognize me. I’m wearing my magic ring of middle-aged invisibility, a dog-faced old burgher like Bilbo Baggins, only taller.

  He starts to laugh, and the two other men in Empyrean look up from behind the counter and a dimly glowing laptop screen. Kevin discovers that he’s standing, clutching the crumpled newspaper in one hand. The laptop guy sighs (over what, Kevin wonders, over whom?) and raps at his keyboard. The gaunt barista, The Joy Luck Club in his hands once again, watches Kevin with professional wariness. His eyes slide to the untouched glass of tea and back to Kevin. Kevin forces a smile and drops the paper on the couch behind him.

  “Bad news,” he says. The barista says nothing, doesn’t even nod, just watches, and Kevin slides around the coffee table and pushes out the door, after Joy Luck.

  Walking into the heat again is like wading fully clothed into warm water, and the air itself drags Kevin to a halt just beyond the shadow of Empyrean’s awning. Across the empty street the low old buildings have been divvied up into trendy bars and restaurants, nighttime facades of dark brick and tinted glass like the bars along Liberty and Washington in Ann Arbor, only here, on a Texas morning, they have a hungover squint against the unblinking sunlight. The street is empty. Where’s Joy Luck?

  There she is! Empyrean’s patio, the old loading dock, pushes out into the intersection like a prow, and he can see the top of her head as she descends the steps and pauses for the wall of oncoming traffic to pass. He sidles between the little round tables, wondering what he’ll do if he gets to the corner before she crosses. How can she not recognize him from the plane? And how can she not wonder what the hell he’s doing right next to her on an Austin street corner, radiating longing and strenuously acting like he doesn’t recognize her?

  But then she crosses the street against the light, not slinking now, but marching, because she’s out for blood. At the corner Kevin waits for another shoal of cars, their tires making a hollow rumble against the pavement. Up ahead Joy Luck marches past a bar, the Ginger Man, and the little green apple in the small of her back winks at him over the martial but still sensual switch of her jeans. I wouldn’t want to be Ian right now, Kevin thinks. Ian’s in for it, Ian has no idea what’s coming.

  Kevin keeps his distance, passing the Ginger Man and another bar, The Fox and Hound. What’s up with this, two English pubs on the same block—these royal thrones of kings, these sceptered isles, these earths of majesty, desiccating in the unforgiving Texas heat. Joy Luck and Kevin, girl and man, are the only pedestrians in sight. From the blank, tinted gaze of the square windows of the office building across the street, is some bored middle manager watching her with the same longing Kevin is? And is he watching Kevin following her? Give it up, bud, says Mr. Middle Manager, you haven’t got a prayer. Or is he the Noel Coward of central Texas, watching in fey bemusement as Kevin—pale, sweating, overdressed—follows the silken-skinned Oriental in a fever of lust and longing past this corner of a foreign land that is forever England. A fox and a hound, indeed, dear boy, how wonderfully droll! Kevin’s dad used to sing Noel Coward in the car, to the mutual embarrassment of Kevin and his sister: Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday, out in the noonday, out in the noonday sun.

  But if he stops now, he’ll never know how Joy Luck does that, how she manages to embody not one, but two old flames from Kevin’s Summer of Love, the summer he fell harder for a woman than he ever had before, and the summer he had the most wanton and least guilty sex of his life—but not with the same woman. And Joy Luck reminds him vividly and unmistakably of both. Is she some kind of succubus? Or is it incubus?

  At the next corner, cars rushing past her heels, she crosses against the light again into a little park. Keeping well back, Kevin trots after her past a tall, verdigris green sculpture, two elongated, abstract, but sensual figures, one broad in the shoulders, the other broad in the hips, who look like they’re just about to kiss. Succubus, Kevin suddenly concludes, that’s the female version, though he’s not sure why he thinks so. Perhaps it’s because it sounds like “suck.” God, laughs Kevin, am I still that much of an adolescent? She said “suck,” heh heh heh heh. He’s got Stella to thank, he supposes, trudging past the canoodling sculptures. Stella’s epic fellation on the first evening of their acquaintance, the one that emptied his brain of all common sense, is still a high point of their relationship. Beth never was particularly enthusiastic or skillful at going down—“Teeth,” he always had to warn her—and she did it only when she was really excited for some reason, nodding furiously over his cock with her eyes squeezed shut. Stella, God bless her, tickles and teases and takes her time, she knows tricks as if she’s actually thought about it. And she keeps her eyes open, watching him wide-eyed over his heaving rib cage. When he reciprocates—a specialty of his, another American practice McNulty told him that the girls all love—he keeps his own eyes shut, nose buried in wiry pubic hair, glancing up only occasionally past her flattened breasts at the straining muscles in her throat. Beth always seemed distracted when he went down on her, as if her own pleasure irritated her somehow, though she always climaxed convincingly enough. There’s a lot of theater in Stella’s ecstasy, though: she arches her back, she claws the sheets, she thrashes her head from side to side. Her voice cracks as she calls his name; a blue vein pounds in her neck. Kevin’s never entirely convinced he’s actually gotten her off, her response is too self-consciously intense, too pornographically hysterical. God knows, though, she takes him in gratefully afterward, when, in another one of his signature moves, he launches himself up between her legs and enters her in one smooth thrust, without looking or guiding himself with his hand. At that moment Beth always turned her face away with a grimace and swiped his lips with the palm of her hand, an exasperated mother wiping her messy brat. But Stella, praise Jesus, mashes her
mouth against his and sucks her own juices greedily off his lips.

  Now Lynda, Kevin recalls, watching Joy Luck’s angry strut at the far corner of the park—the legendary Lynda, the Lynda of song and story, Lynda à la plage, etc., etc.—Lynda was good at it, too, but she never took him all the way, not once in three months. She’d lower her lips to his cock, gathering her hair one-handed away from her face, baring her lovely throat, and she’d dip, once, twice, three times, until he was straight and hard and taut, and then she’d pull away and give him a filthy grin. “Oh, God, don’t stop,” Kevin moaned, his cock chilled by her saliva, but she swung her long, freckled thigh over him and slid slickly onto him, doubling over him with her hair pooling coolly on his chest, nuzzling him and laughing in his ear.

  Jesus, Kevin thinks, if Joy Luck knew what I’m thinking back here, she’d scream bloody murder, or call a cop, or—more likely, he thinks, focusing on the glide of her back muscles beneath her flawless skin—she’d go all Michelle Yeoh on his melancholy middle-aged ass, leaping straight up into the air and slapping the side of his face in slow motion with the hot sole of her sandal, quivering his flesh like Jell-O, spinning his head a spine-splintering 180 degrees.

  Kevin stops to peel off his jacket as if readying himself for single combat. The street ahead is a garden of new condo towers, some completed, some still under construction with tall T square cranes affixed to their sides, like the stalks from which they grew. One finished tower is wide and flat like the monolith in 2001, another rises in the same proportions as a Zippo lighter, the farthest one, still skeletal on top, sheathed halfway up in green panels that throw the sun back in Kevin’s eyes, is tall and narrow like a Pez dispenser without the head. He fishes inside his jacket for his sunglasses and looks back toward downtown Austin’s foreshortened skyline, like a three-quarters-scale Manhattan in some imperial Las Vegas casino. What looked like a great big urban canyon when he was coming up it in the cab is now, he realizes, just an arroyo. He sees the sleek, narrow, ice-blue tower, Barad-dûr, much taller than all the other buildings, too tall, really, for this theme-park skyline. It’s only three or four blocks away, its glassy spires bleached a little paler in the sun. He puts on his sunglasses and it dims a little more.

  Then something moves behind the translucent panes of the spires, something dark and quick and massive, and Kevin is chilled all over. The hell is that? he wonders, his pulse racing. The hand holding his jacket seizes up, and a wave passes down the coat like a shiver. Something sleek is issuing now from between the spires, as if the tower really is the lair of Sauron, the Dark Lord. It’s a snake… it’s a dragon… holy shit, it’s a winged Nazgûl! Kevin’s heart thumps in his chest, and even behind the amber tint of his glasses the glare of sunlight off the spires is magnified into an enormous, burning eye…

  No, it’s a jet, coming out from behind the tower, climbing from Austin’s airport over the city so steeply and slowly it looks as if it’s winching itself into the sky. Kevin breathes again and folds his jacket over his elbow as he rolls his shirt cuffs back. The aircraft is gray with a long, white underbelly, its wings swept back, its long throat bared, a migrating goose straining for altitude. And though Kevin’s pulse has slowed, the still surprising and indelible conjunction of two formerly unrelated compound nouns—airplane, skyscraper—makes his stomach drop. What’s worse is that he can’t even hear the jet yet, and its silence as it crawls glittering against the bleached sky makes the sight even creepier. And he can’t help thinking again of shoulder-fired missiles; from where he’s standing at the center of the park he could bring down this plane. Or maybe it’ll be brought down by Another Kevin, sweatily mixing liquid explosives in the lavatory and urgently murmuring “Allahu akbar” over and over again. Stinger or no Stinger, jihadist or no jihadist, the plane looks as if it’s barely going to make it, and Kevin expects it any moment to stall and slide sickeningly backward, then tumble wing over wing straight down into the city below, hitting the earth with an echoing boom and a roiling cloud of black smoke.

  Then at last he hears the hollow, throbbing roar of the jet, trailing like a banner just behind the plane. Wow, thinks Kevin, his pulse still racing a little. It’s weird how much the climbing jet has freaked him out, and he only saw the two towers fall on television like most people. What if he’d actually been there? What if he’d actually seen the planes hit the towers, seen the falling bodies, watched the towers flower hideously into dust, run for his life through the midmorning darkness, breathed the choking air, felt the acrid sting of burning plastic and jet fuel and God knows what else at the back of his sinuses? All he’d seen—sheer repetition has graven the image permanently into his lizard brain—was a toy plane colliding with a scale model of a skyscraper and a little silent orange bloom against the blue September sky. It looked like a special effect and a mediocre one at that—a blurry, trembling, telephoto image with none of the digital polish and Dolby rumble of an A-list production. If something he’d seen on TV could take him by the throat like that years later, imagine if he’d actually been there.

  He turns, his jacket still draped over his arm. The chill is fading, the heat folds around him again. He really should go back, sit in goddamn Starbucks for three hours, but it’s too late, he’s already walking, damp all over with sweat, his shirt stuck to his spine. The broiling sky opens high and wide before him. By the time he gets to the curb—the corner of Fifth and San Antonio, says the street sign—Joy Luck is halfway up San Antonio, turning left on Sixth Street, heading west, so Kevin turns left on Fifth, walking parallel to her on a covered walkway underneath one of the half-built condo towers. His feet thump on the flooring, and through the plywood overhead he can hear the ricocheting ring of mallets, the insistent beeping of a vehicle backing up, some guy yelling in Spanish. The traffic rushes up Fifth Street toward him, springing from light to light in quantum bursts, enormous, candy-colored trucks with bulbous curves, spotlessly clean, piloted by pink-cheeked, freshly barbered young evangelicals in crisp shirts talking on cell phones.

  Across the stream of traffic, between buildings and up side streets, Kevin watches Joy Luck on Sixth Street, but at the next cross street he’s lost her, and he dithers for a moment, not sure whether to go forward or back. His heart beginning to race, he walks the next block more quickly. Under a big condo block bristling with balconies, he crosses Fifth, trotting north past the snouts of a row of SUVs. He’s already halfway across before he realizes that the traffic was already moving, but he doesn’t stop, and four lanes of SUVs lurch forward on their toes as he wards them off with his palm. He hardly notices, because Joy Luck should be crossing the intersection ahead of him, but he still can’t see her, and he’s thinking she’s gotten away, he’s lost her, but suddenly, when he’s ten paces from the corner, she appears from behind the building and stops for the light. Kevin’s heart soars, but his relief is cut short by the fact that in another three seconds he’ll be right next to her on the curb. Kevin pivots on the toe of his shoe, grinding the fat black tread into the hot pavement, slapping his trouser pockets like he’s forgotten his keys or something, swinging the jacket off his shoulder and rummaging in every pocket, lifting his eyes to the sky like he’s concentrating. Doesn’t matter, though, he’s already caught, busted, blown; he expects a tap on the shoulder any moment now, or even something way less demure, way more Michelle Yeoh, an iron grip spinning him around, grinding another millimeter of shoe sole into the pavement, and an angry, beautiful young woman nose to nose with him, her eyes blazing, demanding to know, “Why are you following me? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  When he finally peeks over his shoulder, her swaying backside is disappearing behind the liquor store across the street, and he sags with relief. At the corner, he sits on a ledge outside a bar called Molotov to catch his breath and let her get ahead of him. In the shade for the first time since he left Empyrean, he clutches his limp jacket to his chest with both arms, watching Joy Luck stride up Sixth toward a massive redbric
k building like a fortress. He peers through the tinted window into Molotov, taking off his sunglasses and shading his eyes against the warm glass. The place is empty at this hour: an unpainted concrete floor; a long, featureless curve of space-age banquette; a pair of thirty-year-old, piss-yellow La-Z-Boys. There’s a mock socialist realist painting along the back wall, an idiotically smiling rocket scientist holding up an ICBM like it was a banana. Six months from now—if he’s offered the job and he takes it—he could be on the other side of this window listening to music he doesn’t recognize, chatting up women much too young for him, and paying extortionate prices for some cocktail they’d seen on The Hills or whatever they’re watching now. Not like his days at the Central Café back in Ann Arbor, when just after closing he and the rest of the immortally young waitstaff used to do a line each right off the prep table—hello, Mr. Health Inspector!—and then swagger en masse to the Rubiyat, where they would do more blow in the bathroom and dance to “It’s Raining Men” or “Atomic Dog” until three or four in the morning, and where one memorable dawn—a dawn he has never spoken of to another living soul and never will, a dawn that both mortifies and titillates him until this very moment—he woke up in Ypsilanti in the bed of a man he didn’t recognize and never saw again, and walked all the way up Washtenaw back to Ann Arbor in the freezing rain even before the buses were running, with a crippling headache and a taste in his mouth that he hoped never to identify. Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay!