by James Hynes
Yeah, thinks Kevin, I have a girlfriend, and he looks at the doctor again, not so sidelong this time, and wonders if it’s too late to… what? Leave Stella? Leave Ann Arbor? Start his life over in sun-bleached Austin? Live happily ever after with Claudia Barrientos, MD? Just as Kevin is thinking he should change the subject, let his luncheon invitation die unanswered, pretend he never said it, Claudia’s eyes refocus and she speaks.
“All right,” she says.
Almost before the light changes her pickup has surged through the intersection and glided into the left-turn lane—where, after an instant of hesitation, it roars in front of oncoming traffic and into a parking lot that rides like it’s unpaved, though Kevin can see ancient, bleached asphalt. The truck lurches to a stop in front of a low, makeshift building with a latticed awning and a faded redbrick front papered with faded flyers. On the flat roof above the door, a large plaster woman with unnaturally pink skin and black, Betty Page bangs spreads her bare arms wide like an invocation. The figure’s six-foot wingspan and fixed, upward gaze makes Kevin think it’s Wonder Woman, then Eva Peron, then Madonna playing Eva Peron. But it’s none of these women, for across her bosom where a Stars and Stripes bustier or a spangled ball gown should be, instead there’s a hand-painted sign that reads ANNA’S TACO RAPIDO. Don’t cry for me, Austin, Texas.
Kevin’s still hanging against his shoulder belt as Claudia opens her door and steps down to the pavement.
“Leave your jacket, why don’t you?” she says, and slams the door.
In the time it takes him to catch his breath, unharness himself, and climb gingerly down from the truck—his scraped knee throbbing, the heat enfolding him—Claudia has already passed through the narrow door. In the patterned shadow of the awning, Kevin limps across the wooden porch, hauls open the glass door, and steps into a clammy gust of AC heavily scented with grease and grilling onions. It’s cooler inside, but smoky and humid and so dim that Kevin can hardly see a thing until he remembers to take off his sunglasses, thrusting them absently toward his jacket pocket. But his jacket’s in the truck, so he slides them instead into his trouser pocket. The long, dusky room has a smooth concrete floor and a low ceiling of crumbling particleboard, lit only by a couple of thin, purple fluorescent tubes and some tiny red Christmas lights. Even with his glasses off he’s still adjusting to the gloom, and yet there’s a strong feeling of déjà vu. The room is bisected lengthwise by a wide wooden counter—on the left are high, narrow tables and stools, and behind the counter on the right, a couple of sweaty figures in stained aprons and baseball caps jostle each other in the narrow aisle before the sizzling grill. Behind a cash register at the end of the counter a figure is silhouetted against a grimy window, talking to another silhouette across from him. Just as Kevin recognizes her broad shoulders and powerful thighs, the second silhouette speaks to him.
“Sorry?” He can’t hear her over the clatter of the spatula against the grill and the wh-wh-whirl of the ceiling fans and the thumping dance beat of a Latin pop song, but still he seems to know this place instinctively. The wholly satisfying smell of frying meat, the insistent music, the narrow layout with high tables on one side and the grill on the other, the grease-laminated workers jostling each other—he’s been here before.
Claudia beckons him to the register, where a sad-eyed man in a white guayabera and crisp khakis turns his melancholy gaze to Kevin.
“He’s paying,” she says to the man, then, to Kevin, “right?”
“Absolutely!” Kevin jerks his wallet from his hip pocket. Only then does he see the big hand-lettered menu board behind Claudia, four columns of tight little letters, yellow and blue against black, listing tacos in all their infinite variety.
“You don’t even want to look at that,” Claudia says. “We’ll be here all day. I already ordered for both of us.”
“Great!” But as Kevin pops his wallet open, Claudia touches his wrist.
“Unless you’re a vegetarian. I should have asked.”
“Me? No,” says Kevin, and as he hands the guayabera a twenty a veil falls from his eyes and the déjà vu resolves; he almost hears a heavenly choir. It’s the menu board that’s put him over: all it needs is a couple of cartoon bears and the slogan “2,147,483,648 Combinations!” He starts laughing, causing Claudia and the cashier to exchange a glance.
“Blimpy Burger!” Kevin exclaims. “You’ve taken me to Austin’s Blimpy Burger!”
The guayabera frowns and hands Kevin his change and a receipt. “You’re number fifty-eight.” He hands a couple of plastic glasses over the counter to Claudia.
“Why don’t you find us a seat outside.” She nods toward an open door where the midday glare leaches in. “And I’ll get us some tea.”
Kevin stops to pee in a tiny toilet, no bigger than a broom closet. Then, with the greasy gust of AC at his back like a gentle shove, he steps down into a courtyard of packed dirt, surrounded by a wooden fence and overhung with an enormous, leafy tree. His torn trouser leg flapping, he limps under unlit strings of party lights and settles gratefully into a plastic chair at a rough, unsteady wooden table. A couple of lean young guys in shorts and T-shirts slouch at another table, talking quietly, while a pair of black birds looking for scraps strut in the dirt like little T. rexes. One of them boldly flaps up onto a nearby table and insolently fixes Kevin with one fathomless black eye. Kevin waves his hand until the bird flaps into the dirt again, then he settles back into the flexible grip of the chair.
The mottled shadow of the tree trembles in a breeze Kevin can’t feel, but it is cooler than in the direct sunlight, and the rumble of traffic on Lamar is muffled by the fence. An old Mobil sign with a faded Pegasus hangs on the fence, while across the side of the building is a colorful and very un-Texan mural of two clumsily drawn sheep in an alpine meadow full of freakishly large dandelions. Nailed to the whitish bark of the tree are three desiccated old cowboy boots, shriveled and colorless, with broken toes. The décor is accretive and eclectic, but authentically so (though as a scholarly editor Kevin knows better than to take “authenticity” at face value), not like the fastidiously art-directed eclecticism of the yuppie bars in Ann Arbor—the kind Stella likes—or the Disneyfied hominess of a chain family restaurant—the kind his mother frequents for lunch with her gal pals. Still, there’s something self-conscious about it—it’s a hip place that knows it’s hip—but then, what isn’t self-conscious anymore?
Indeed, Kevin’s experiencing a very self-conscious sort of metahappiness at the moment: relieved that Claudia has brought him to an unexpectedly familiar place, while at the same time surprised by his own relief. The strangeness and alienation of the morning, the uncharacteristic behavior he’s indulged in, the awkwardness of every exchange so far—all of it is temporarily eased by the familiar feel and smell of a place where he’s never been in his life. It’s like a little bit of Ann Arbor, and not just any bit, but Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger—“Cheaper Than Food!”—one of the few constants of his last thirty years. Ann Arbor has grown a thick crust like barnacles all around it, of strip malls and big box stores, which is surrounded in turn by vast plantations of McMansions, all the way out to Saline and Dexter. Most of the funky little bars and clubs and restaurants of his younger days are long gone. But Blimpy’s, God bless it, Blimpy’s endures. It’s been his unofficial polestar—for most of his adult life he’s lived within a five-minute walk of the place, at Packard and South Division, from his freshman year in the hive of South Quad to his middle age as a homeowner on Fifth Avenue. Sometimes he even wonders if the real reason he bought his house was just to stay in walking distance of his regular burger—a triple with provolone, grilled onions, and mushrooms on an onion roll. Beth objected to Blimpy’s at first, until he shrewdly made the buy-local, at-least-it’s-not-McDonald’s argument, after which she beat a tactical retreat and stopped giving him a hard time about it. Stella, however, won’t eat there at all anymore after their one disastrous visit together. She wrinkled her nose at the sm
ell the moment they walked in, then tried to order a single patty, extra lean, on a whole wheat bun.
“Extra lean?” said the gloriously mouthy black woman at the grill. “Girl, you know where you are?” Part of the charm of the place, Kevin tried to explain later, was the surliness of the help.
Stella settled for a double without cheese on a regular roll, then sat with Kevin at his favorite spot in the wide front window—with its Cinemascope view of the old redbrick Perry School across the street and the leafy ridge of the Old West Side beyond—pinching her knees together and tucking in her elbows as if afraid to touch anything. With undisguised distaste she lifted the top of her bun between two sharp red fingernails. Kevin almost pointed out that at Zingermann’s Deli she regularly ordered the most enormous, and enormously calorific, sandwiches; what you’re objecting to, he almost said, is that the food here is cheap. But instead he repeated what the woman at the grill had said, which turned out to be another mistake.
“Have you ever seen a picture,” she said, wide-eyed with schadenfreude, “of a human heart encased in fat?”
“My heart’s fine,” he said, though his glorious mouthful of beef, provolone, mushroom, onion, and mayo had suddenly turned to offal in his mouth. “I’m a runner, remember?”
“A friend of my father?” she whispered. “A runner? For twenty years? Keeled over dead with a massive coronary. During a marathon.”
“Huh,” said Kevin, swallowing hard.
Since then they don’t talk about it, and Kevin’s visits are clandestine and guilty, as if he’s cheating on her instead of merely indulging in the occasional greasy cheeseburger. Luckily, her job takes her out of town for two or three days at a time, and in fact, Kevin ate at Blimpy’s just last night, indulging himself in a quad and a large order of rings, knowing that for once it didn’t matter if his breath smelled of onions afterward.
With a little electric crackle, the amplified voice of the guayabera issues from a loudspeaker bolted to the tree. “Number fifty-six, your order’s ready,” says the voice, and one of the young guys at the other table glances at his receipt, rises, and crosses the courtyard, scattering the black birds strutting at his feet. At the door he stands aside for Claudia, who is bearing a glass of iced tea in each hand. Without smiling, she fixes Kevin in her dark-eyed gaze like a raptor zeroing in on a rabbit, and Kevin, thrilled and terrified, sits up straighter in his wobbly chair. She switches her hips between the tables, never taking her gaze off him, and sets the sweating glasses on their table. She lifts her plastic chair back one-handed.
“I didn’t think to ask,” she says. “Do you take lemon? Sugar?”
Kevin would love some sweetener, but he says, “This is great,” lifting the glass. The tea is refreshing, but mostly what he tastes is ice.
“Good.” Claudia leans back in her seat, lifting both hands to loosen her ponytail. She shakes her hair back and sighs, as if she’s willing herself to relax. Kevin watches her over his glass. He hadn’t noticed it when her hair was pulled back, but she has a Susan Sontag streak of white. She isn’t looking at him now, but gazing distractedly across the courtyard. Then, having shaken out her hair, lank with sweat, she pulls it tightly back again and nimbly slips the elastic over her ponytail. Somehow she’s figured out how to make the streak of white disappear when she pulls her hair back, and now he’s not even sure he saw it. He wonders why she let her hair down if she was just going to tie it back up again.
“How are you feeling?” she says.
“Fine,” he says. “Thanks again, for everything.”
She lifts her own tea, scowling as she swallows. She looks across the table, sighs, and carefully sets her glass to one side.
“May I impose upon you a little?” She leans forward on her crossed arms, making the table wobble. “I have a favor to ask.”
Kevin wonders if Dr. Barrientos is able to do anything at all without you being able to see the wheels turning. That could be a kind of curse, especially if she’s aware of it, leading to an infinite regression of self-consciousness. He worries he’s about to hear a pitch for Amway, or testimony of the doctor’s personal relationship with Christ, or—oh hell—both, simultaneously.
“Sure,” he says warily.
“I want to talk to you about something important.” She’s hunched forward, watching him, gauging his reaction.
Oh fuck, thinks Kevin, here it comes. Have you thought about how you’re going to spend eternity? And are you familiar with distributed sales? But then her eyes slide away from him, and Kevin thinks, if she were about to pitch him Christ and/or laundry detergent, she’d be less nervous.
“Well, it’s important to me, anyway,” she says, staring across the courtyard at nothing in particular. “It may not mean that much to you. But I want to tell somebody.”
“Okay.” Kevin’s still wary, but now he’s also curious.
She looks down at the table, tightening her grip on her own biceps.
“It’s just that we don’t really know each other,” she says, “and the odds are we’ll never see each other after today.”
Kevin’s surprised at his own sharp dismay. Oh no! he almost says aloud. Don’t say that!
“It’s just that makes you the perfect person to tell this to.” She looks up at him. “Does that make any sense?”
Now he really is curious, but a little disappointed as well: is she about to come out to him? Just his luck, the day he meets a really attractive woman in a city where he might be moving, that’s the same day she decides to announce to the world, or at least to him, that she’s a lesbian.
“I guess that depends.” He leans forward and rests his own arms on the table. Now they’re only a couple feet apart, like two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes in some dimly lit bistro, over a little bowl of candlelight. “On what you want to tell me.”
He regrets having put it so bluntly, regrets having sat forward like this. Is that alarm in her gaze? He should’ve just stayed where he was, slumped in his chair, looking blasé. Now he’s afraid she won’t go on.
“Though whatever it is,” he adds, trying to inch back from this intimate proximity without being too obvious about it, “I’m sure it’s okay with me.”
She lets her gaze drift again, and as she opens her mouth, probably to tell him to forget the whole thing, the loudspeaker crackles and says, in the melancholy voice of the guayabera, “Number fifty-eight, your order’s ready.”
“Is that us?” Kevin slaps his pockets for the receipt.
“I’ll get it,” says Claudia, suddenly upright. “Don’t get up.” Halfway to the door, she looks back. “Salsa?”
“Not too hot.” Kevin leans back in his chair, and she disappears into the greasy gloom.
Kevin sighs. The moment’s gone, she’ll never tell him now, and he’ll wonder for the rest of the day what it was she wanted say to him, some random guy she never plans on seeing again. Then his Jiminy Cricket chirps up, saying, this is your chance, leave now while she’s gone. Whatever she wants to tell you, trust me, you don’t want to know. You’ll regret it. This is your last chance, chump, get up and go. Vamoose. Scram. Skedaddle. Maybe Jiminy’s talking sense, thinks Kevin, God knows I should’ve listened to him earlier today. He sits up straight in the unsteady chair, puts his hands on the arms. He twists to look behind him, and sees a doorway in the courtyard fence that leads straight to the parking lot. If he gets up right now, without hesitating, he could be half a block up Lamar before she comes back. And no harm done, really; he’s already paid for her lunch. Of course, he’d have to do it right now…
Too late. He faces forward to see her in the doorway holding a plastic tray in both hands. She’s just standing there, watching him, which means that she caught him just now contemplating his escape. He shifts in his seat and ventures a smile, and she steps down out into the courtyard, carefully balancing the two paper cartons on the tray. As she sets it on the table between them, she smiles to herself, then directs the smile at him.
&
nbsp; “You’re still here.” She lifts one carton to his side of the table and the other to hers. Each contains a fat, steaming soft taco, bulging with chunks of brown meat, grilled onions, and a liberal sprinkling of what looks like fresh cilantro. She also sets aside a small stack of paper napkins. “I haven’t scared you off,” she adds, setting a little plastic cup of lumpy red salsa before him. Her own cup of salsa is green and thick with what looks like stems and seeds.
“You don’t know me,” he says. “I’m not like that.” Not to mention he just remembered that his jacket’s still in her truck. He looks up at her. “Claudia,” he adds. It’s the first time he’s called her by name.
She’s standing with all her weight on one solid, glorious leg, her hand lightly on the back of her chair, as if she’s contemplating fleeing, too. Then she nods briskly, jerks the chair back, and sits. She squares her taco in front of her and opens it to coat the filling with salsa verde. Kevin moves aside the warm flap of his own taco and pours salsa over the meat and onions and green leaves. It smells wonderful. Lifting it with both hands, Kevin’s pleasantly surprised by his first bite. The taco’s spices, whatever they are, hit places on his palate that he didn’t know existed. His usual Mexican place in Ann Arbor, a little dive near campus, basically serves up ground beef and cheese with jalapeños. This is richer and much more subtle. “Wonderful,” he mumbles with his mouth full. “What is it?”
“Al pastor.” She picks up her own taco with the tips of her fingers. “Pork.”