by James Hynes
But he never loved her. So that when she dumped him—or rather when he walked in on her fucking one of her housemates in her bare little room up under the eaves on Jefferson Avenue and she sat up on the mattress without even bothering to pull the covers up, she smiled and just kind of shrugged at him, and he just kind of shrugged back. Because that was the same summer he was in love with the Philosopher’s Daughter, and what he sees now in Kelly/Joy Luck/TGWWLL is the best of both worlds—both Lynda’s effortless sensuality and the imperious passion of the Philosopher’s Daughter, or at least the passion the Philosopher’s Daughter said she was looking for—and now this is his last chance, while he’s still young enough, fit enough, good-looking and charming enough to persuade a girl possibly half his age that, despite what Ian did to her—that feckless asshole—and despite what the Philosopher’s Daughter told him—that vain, heartless bitch—he is capable of tenderness and passion.
Kelly’s veering from Lamar Avenue now, away from the waterfall rumble of traffic crossing a bridge over the river, toward a pedestrian bridge running parallel to it. Under the shadows of the exhausted, drooping trees along the riverbank, Kevin can see figures improbably jogging along a dirt trail. Kelly pauses at a crosswalk to slam a lamppost button with the heel of her hand, then sprints across without waiting for the light. Kevin jogs to catch up, sweat pouring off him, his own scent rising like steam from the open collar of his wilted shirt, and this time he reaches the crosswalk just as the signal flashes WALK. Kelly disappears under a wide spiral ramp that descends from the end of the pedestrian bridge, and Kevin hangs back at the edge of the running trail, his heart pounding from the heat, his exertion, his excitement. In the shadow of the bridge and the trees it’s just as hot as it is in the sun, like being stuck in a windowless, airless room. Two runners in opposite directions labor past each other on the trail, dust puffing behind their shoes: a bare-chested young man in skimpy shorts, his calves and thighs bulging, and a firm-limbed young woman in a sweat-splotched sports bra, her taut muscles gliding under her skin, her blond ponytail swinging metronomically, the hem of her shorts—the Texas state flag—swaying like a bell. Kevin notes the rictus of effort on their faces, the knotted foreheads, the tightened mouths; it’s almost like they’re having sex with each other, but they pass without a glance. Beyond them, even the river looks exhausted—a dull, unmoving sheen of olive green. These people, Kevin thinks, these jogging Texans, they’re like a whole other race of creatures, subtropical übermenschen genetically engineered to run in the heat, killer androids from the future walking through flame. It makes him even hotter to watch them; he can feel his shirt clinging to him like wet tissue. He glances at his watch; it’s nearly twelve o’clock, but then he remembers that he didn’t set his watch back, which means it’s only eleven here, but even so, his interview is at two. What does he think is going to happen if he actually catches up to Kelly? For an instant Jiminy Cricket nearly gets the upper hand—she just broke up with her boyfriend, you idiot, like, ten minutes ago, so go back the way you came, scuttle from coffee shop to air-conditioned coffee shop, drink lots of iced tea, let your shirt air out, and act your age—but then he sees Kelly again, on a flight of stairs that rises to the pedestrian bridge under the winding ramp. Her back is erect with rage and hurt, but her walk is still as feral as a cat’s, a stain of sweat plastering the back of her camisole to her spine.
He’s tugged forward by the sight, he can’t help himself. He’s never felt this excited about Stella, not even at the beginning. Stella was an accident, a mistake, and now she’s practically living with him. She’s even talking about children, for God’s sake. In the car on the way home from Gaia, the same frigid February night they’d run into Beth, Stella was quieter than usual as they crawled through the dark toward home. She held their dinner—two fat slices of turkey loaf—on her lap, under the roaring heat vent to keep it warm. Normally she’d have been talking a mile a minute, restlessly dipping into their takeout and eating crumbling pieces of turkey loaf with her fingers, but instead she sat with her cap pulled down to her eyebrows and watched the blurred lights of oncoming cars and the snow gliding in long streaks toward the windshield, all the while making those abrupt little gestures that meant she was having a conversation with herself in the Stella Continuum. At last she sighed and turned to him, and he thought: this won’t be good.
“What?” He shifted in his seat, his parka hissing.
“We haven’t talked about kids,” she said.
Wherever Beth was at the moment—Kevin realized with a pang that he had no idea anymore where she and Noah lived—she was picking up the vibe of this conversation, hearing it in real time over whatever jungle telegraph women are hooked into and, of course, laughing her ass off. Joining her from wherever he was, was McNulty, though his laughter was less sarcastic and triumphant and I-told-you-so, and more rueful and world-weary and I-been-there-buddy. Back when they were both working at Big Star, McNulty had somehow managed to score a younger girlfriend for a time, a tall, spooky redhead, and he’d gotten her pregnant. He told Kevin about it late one soporific weekday afternoon when they were both at the cash register. McNulty wreathed his head in a cloud of cigarette smoke as if he was trying to hide behind it.
“Is she going to have it?” Kevin dropped his voice, even though there were no customers in the store. He could only wonder what that would be like, to be a father at McNulty’s advanced age of forty.
“No,” said McNulty, wearily rubbing his face. “I’m paying for an abortion.” He breathed smoke. “Least I could do.” He sucked the smoke back in. “But she doesn’t want to see me after that.”
Kevin stammered something, but McNulty only shook his head and stared through the swirling smoke as if at something on the horizon. “The thing is,” he said, “at my age, if you want to hang onto a younger woman, you have to be willing to give her children.”
Only now did he focus on Kevin through the blue haze.
“I don’t expect you to understand this now,” McNulty said, in his diffident stoner drone. “But someday, you will.”
And now, Kevin did. In the stifling silence of the car, the tires of his Accord crunching over packed snow and the chains of the cars in the opposite lane rattling like maracas, Kevin thought of all the things he could say. We haven’t talked about kids? I’ll say we haven’t! And we’re not going to! Not now, not ever. It was one of those heart-freezing moments, when they wait to let you have it until you’re in an enclosed space, with no place to run. (When Beth cornered him in the bath, for example.) What are you talking about—kids? Are you crazy? We’re not like that, Stella. Their relationship was predicated on a cute meet and a blow job, and maintained on the basis of a lot of semisincerely enthusiastic sex. But of course he couldn’t say that, so he said nothing, listening to the chains of the oncoming cars clinking at him like Marley’s ghost.
“So what do you think?” she said.
His mouth was so dry, he wasn’t sure he could speak, even if he wanted to.
“I’m almost fifty,” he said at last.
“So?”
“So, figure it out. Say we start tonight, I’d be fifty-one by time the kid would be born. That means I’d be”—God help him, was this true?—“nearly seventy before he graduates from high school.”
This would have silenced Beth, because it would have made her furious, leading to an explosion later on. But give Stella credit, he’s thinking now, in the heat under the pedestrian bridge in Austin, Stella’s not an idiot, Stella can read subtext like a Kremlinologist. And Stella’s wily, she’s not a slugger like Beth was. Stella would never ask him point-blank, “Don’t you want to be with me for the next eighteen years?” No, Stella’s got footwork, Stella floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Stella knows how to not take no for an answer.
“You’d be so cute,” she’d said, reaching across the car. His hood was pushed back around his earlobes, and her glove rasped along the fabric as she stroked the side of his head.
“You’ll have graying sides at her graduation, like that guy on The Sopranos.”
“Paulie Walnuts?” Kevin said. “That’s your role model for fatherhood?”
Stella laughed and said, in her best HBO Jersey accent, “He’s a good earner!”
Then she cracked open the plastic shell and filled the car with the warm scent of turkey loaf, popping a piece between her lips. Leaving Kevin’s head ringing with the idea of children, just like she meant to.
But who would bring children into the world, now? The pillars under the ramp of the pedestrian bridge are spattered with stickers and stenciled slogans, which Kevin recognizes from the kiosks and sidewalks around the Diag back home. HAPPY OILDEPENDENCE DAY says one sticker. 100,000 DEAD IRAQIS—HAD ENOUGH WAR YET? says another. That’s the pitch he needs to try on Stella, to discourage her from childbearing. New York, Madrid, London, Mumbai—it’s only a matter of time before it happens again: not if, but when—and next time it’ll be a car bomb on State Street, a suicide bomber at Briarwood Mall, an airliner dropped from the sky over Metro by a Stinger. Plague virus in a reservoir, nerve gas in the subway, a nuke in a cargo container. Everybody knows it, even Stella. Buchanan Street Station freaked her out, too.
“When I’m in Chicago next week?” she told him that night, standing behind the couch, watching CNN over his shoulder, clutching her elbows. “I may have to ride the El. I mean, God!”
Maybe that’s why she clings to him at night, why she wakes up wild-eyed and trembling like a child. He passes another stenciled slogan that reads
ISLAM IS
NOT THE ENEMY,
and instinctively Kevin hears the dismissive grunt of his late Uncle Stan, his mother’s oldest brother. Stan was a jowly, gin-blossomed veteran of World War II, owner of a Polish bakery on Joseph Campau Street in Hamtramck, and a habitué of the VFW hall, where he drank silently with his buddies and sometimes let eight-year-old Kevin have a sip of his Schlitz. “Tell it to the Marines, buddy boy,” that’s what Uncle Stan would’ve said if he’d lived to see the “war on terror.” Some of the other guys would’ve found some colorful way to mispronounce Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and one in particular, Uncle Stan’s best friend, a wiry, ginger-haired little guy everybody called Rooster, would have launched into a cheerfully racist rant about the goddamn Ay-rabs in goddamn Dearborn. He’d’ve called them sand niggers, camel jockeys, towel heads, goat fuckers, boy lovers—“You ever see that guy, Omar whatshisname, in Lawrence of Arabia? Fairy son-of-a-bitch was wearing eyeliner the whole goddamn movie, like some two-dollar whore out on Eight Mile.” Then he’d conclude, as he often did about the jigaboos, jungle bunnies, and spear chuckers who had ruined Detroit, “Ah hell, at least they’re not Jews.” Throughout all of this, Uncle Stan never joined in, but he never objected, either. He just shook his head and smiled. The closest he ever came to a demurral was when he’d noisily swallow a mouthful of beer, clear his throat, and roll his rheumy eyes toward the impressionable young Kevin. “C’mon, Rooster. My sister’s kid, for chrissakes.”
All that—Stan’s boozing, his passive racism—was on the one hand. On the other, Uncle Stan had provided Kevin’s entrée into the middle class. That’s what Stella probably didn’t understand. Perhaps she assumed that because he owned a rental property two blocks from the Michigan campus, Kevin had money he wasn’t telling her about, but the house was a fluke, a one-time deal. Stan had never married—he knew a thing or two, Kevin supposes, about two-dollar whores on Eight Mile—and never had any kids of his own—“That he knows about, har har har,” said Rooster—and he left all his money to his nieces and nephews when he died. Who knew that fifty years of making pierogi could be so lucrative? Kevin had used his share to make the down payment on his house on Fifth Street, a purchase he’d never have been able to swing on his salary as a university staffer, and which enables him to say to Kelly—if he ever catches up to her, if he ever works up the nerve—come to Ann Arbor anyway! Forget that loser Ian! Don’t worry about your deposit! I have a place where you can stay, rent free! Thank you, Uncle Stan!
That’s assuming he does catch up to her. Kelly’s disappeared around the turn at the landing, and all Kevin sees above him is a wedge of bleached blue sky. He can smell the river under the bridge, sour and organic, not especially unpleasant. The water is seamlessly green, soaking up the light and giving little back. Just below the surface floats a turtle, its snout thrust up for air; even it seems exhausted, its flippers barely moving.
Kevin quickens his pace up the stairs. So what if Kelly is thirty years younger? I could be Warren Beatty to her Annette Bening, I could be Michael Douglas to her Catherine Zeta-Jones. Hey, thinks Kevin, rounding the landing and starting up the next flight, I could be Sinatra to her Mia Farrow! Even if she insisted on kids—he’s dimly remembering now that Mia Farrow has, what, fifteen or twenty children—Kelly would never get heavy after childbirth, she’d never lose her feral strut, never thicken around the middle, never become distracted and demanding like Beth has. He thinks of his own hollow-eyed, high-strung mother swirling a scotch on the rocks, tinkling the ice cubes, her gaze on something a million miles away. He thinks of his father, who—even more than Kevin does right now—wanted to be Frank Sinatra, wanted to be the Irish chairman of the board. An engineer for Ford, he rose without much ambition to middle management and no further, bumping along the ceiling like a half-deflated helium balloon the morning after a party. But Kevin’s dad had the same first name as Ol’ Blue Eyes, didn’t he? And didn’t Kevin’s mother like to say, even affectionately sometimes, “It’s Frank’s world, we just live in it”? What wouldn’t his father have given to have Angie or Mia hanging on his arm as he walked into the Sands? What wouldn’t he have given to have some meaty goon in a cheap suit precede him into the London Chop House and say, “That’s Mr. Quinn’s seat you’re sitting in”? Climbing the steps, Kevin remembers how his father used to sing Sinatra in the bathroom—oddly enough, never the cocky, up-tempo, ring-a-ding tunes, but always the slow, melancholy, I-had-Ava-Gardner-and-I-lost-her ones—until he was usually interrupted by his wife’s sardonic rap on the bathroom door. Two minutes, Mr. Sinatra.
Kevin pauses on the top step, back in the sunlight. He’s looking north, back the way he’s come, over the trees along the riverbank toward the imperial bulk of Gaia, toward the garden of half-built condominium blocks, the toy dome of the state capitol, and the white smokestacks of the City of Austin power plant. Something overhead is buzzing, and Kevin realizes that when he heard his father singing those sad songs all alone in the bathroom, it never occurred to him to wonder—youthful narcissist that he was—what makes my father so sad? Because now, right this moment, he totally gets where his father’s melancholy came from, and the realization presses down on him with all the force of central Texas’s brutal sunshine. His jacket drags at him like chain mail, his shoes weigh like bricks, he’s not sure if he could move even if he wanted to. And what’s that buzzing, anyway? He swats at the air around his ear.
A jogger is coming toward him up the spiral ramp, another Latina Amazon like the soldier in the airport, or the bustling woman in the tight skirt on Congress. Only this one is older than the soldier and younger than the businesswoman, a no-nonsense woman in her thirties, glossy hair pulled scalp-tight, powerful thighs pistoning as she charges up the ramp, black eyes fierce on either side of her sharp Aztec nose. Her fists clench and unclench as she runs, her shoes slap the pavement, her breath comes in sharp bursts, huh-huh-huh-huh. She pounds by him without a glance, close enough for him to smell the ammoniac tang of her sweat, her ponytail whipping like a lash.
And there’s Kelly halfway across the bridge, tightly gripping the railing with both hands, gazing back along the river at Austin’s boomtown skyline. He can’t see her face from here, can’t read her expression, but her hair is pushed back behind her ear, the ends of it plastered to the long, lovely curve of her neck. If he gets a little closer, maybe he can read her mood, guess what she’s thinking,
figure out what to say to her. He moves along the bridge, which is wide and sinuous and paved with cream and pink lanes of concrete, with square planters and green benches along the sides. Kelly is standing at a buffed steel railing next to a short lamppost with a flat steel shade like a monsignor’s hat, and now she’s gazing up at a little single-engine plane buzzing high over the river, dragging behind it a limp orange banner that Kevin can’t quite read. HOT something. Or is it OTT? As the plane banks back toward the skyline in the breathless heat, the banner only folds a different way instead of straightening, and Kevin sees the letters ERS. Can that be right? Is someone paying to advertise OTTERS over Austin, Texas?
Well, there’s your opening line, thinks Kevin, edging forward. His feet are burning, and he’s pretty sure the sour odor he smells now is not the sluggish river, but the steam from his own armpits, under his jacket. Despite the utter lack of wind, the buzzing of the little plane comes and goes; maybe the heat dampens the sound. He’s hoping Kelly is as puzzled by the banner as he is.
“ ‘Otters’?” he’ll say.
But won’t she freak when she sees it’s the guy from the seat next to her on the airplane? Or what if it’s worse—what if she doesn’t recognize him at all? She hasn’t yet; she walked right past him in the coffeehouse and the grocery store, and somehow she hasn’t noticed him treading after her like a faithful mutt for the last hour. Could it be that he’s that anonymous, that middle-aged? Now he knows why his father sang melancholy Sinatra in the shower, and the memory of his father’s bass-baritone—too low for Sinatra, he strained for the high notes—unexpectedly tightens his throat. It kills Kevin to think he never put it together, the difference between what his father sang when he was alone and thought no one could hear, and what he sang when he was harmonizing with his SPEBSQSA buddies two Saturdays a month, one hideous old chestnut after another: By the liiiight… (by the light, by the light)… of the silvery mooooon… (that silv’ry moon!).