by James Hynes
He almost demonstrates from his chair, but to his surprise, the thoracic surgeon nods.
“And one night we were at a party, dancing, drinking beer, and we went out on the porch of this house.” He pauses. “I don’t remember the address, but I could find it for you again, it’s still there, out on West Liberty, in the Old West Side. Won’t mean anything to you.” He waves his hand, clearing the air before him. “But that was the night I… That was the night we were… That was the night I decided to…” Pause. “Well, I didn’t decide anything, it just happened, because we were both really relaxed and happy, we’d both been drinking but we weren’t really drunk, we were just dancing without thinking about anything, brushing up against each other and touching and…”
Kevin can feel the mild midwestern heat of that summer, not like the stifling heat here in Austin. He can hear the crickets, the throb of the bass from the stereo inside the house, the cries of the dancers inside, the thump of their feet. He can see the Philosopher’s Daughter leaning against the porch railing in the dark, irresistibly silhouetted against the glow of a streetlight. He can see the red spark of her cigarette.
“We went out to take a break, to cool off, and she asked me, ‘Do you think I dance like a geek? Am I totally embarrassing myself?’ And I couldn’t help myself, so before I had a chance to think about it I said, ‘I love the way you dance. You’re adorable.’ God, I just…”
Twenty-five years after the fact, even in the Texas heat, Kevin’s blushing.
“Thing is, she had this way of watching you like she thought you were really funny, or really stupid, or stupid in a really funny way, and she’d laugh at you, but I didn’t care, because she had the loveliest laugh. I can’t explain it, but she was always watching you like she was right on the cusp of derision. But in a nice way, if that makes sense. And even in the dark on the porch, even when I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was watching me like that.”
Somehow in the heat, Kevin’s face feels cool again.
“So of course that’s when I told her I loved her. Just blurted it out.” Pause. “Dead silence.” The thump of the bass. The crickets. The Philosopher’s Daughter in exquisite silhouette, saying nothing. “They were playing the B-52s inside the house, ‘Rock Lobster,’ and everyone was chanting, ‘Down, down,’ and sinking slowly to the floor in a big tangle. Meantime, me, on the porch, having just handed my beating heart to this girl, I just stood there like an asshole, listening to dead silence from the girl I just said I loved.” Kevin stops.
“What happened?” says Claudia after a moment.
“Here’s the thing,” says Kevin hoarsely. “This is why I thought of this right now. This was my moment like the one with your father. This is why I brought this up. You know what she said to me?”
Claudia waits.
“She said to me, ‘Kevin,’ she said to me, ‘I don’t think I could love you.’ Bad enough, right? Under the circumstances.”
Claudia says nothing.
“Bear in mind, we’re in the dark, I can’t see her face, I can’t see her eyes. But she can see through me like a fucking x-ray. And if she laughs right now?” Kevin shakes his head. “But I’ll give her this much, she knew better than to laugh. Even she wasn’t that cruel.”
“What did she say?” Claudia says quietly.
“She asked me a question,” says Kevin. “She said, ‘Do you want to know why I don’t think I could love you?’ ”
Claudia gasps slightly.
“Exactly,” Kevin laughs. “Loaded question, right? I’m not as dumb as I look, so naturally I said, ‘No, not really. I’d actually rather you didn’t tell me that.’ ”
Claudia waits.
“And then she told me anyway.”
Claudia breathes out.
“She said, ‘I don’t think you’re capable of tenderness and passion.’ ”
Claudia winces.
“Yeah. Ouch, huh?”
“You just should have kissed her,” says Claudia.
“Thought of that,” says Kevin briskly. “Not right then, of course, not till it was too late. At the moment I was too busy bleeding to death. And anyway, if I was going to kiss her, it should have been before she told me that I had no soul, not after.”
“She shouldn’t have said that to you.”
“Maybe not,” says Kevin. “Unless it was true.”
“Was it?”
Kevin gasps, turns it into a weak laugh. I asked for that, he realizes, I left myself wide open. He feels a little spike of anger, but then he gave her the opportunity. And anyway, it’s just like him wanting to know what she did or didn’t do to that patient who died on her operating table.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“It’s a fair question,” says Kevin. “And it’s not like I haven’t asked it myself, every day of my life for the last, oh, quarter of a century.”
“Maybe you give her too much power.”
“I could say the same thing to you.”
Claudia gives him a sharp look. “That’s different. That was my father.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“You ever tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“How she made you feel.”
Kevin shrugs. “I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t even know where she is anymore. And by now, what’s the point? I’m going to call her up all these years later, and say, hey, remember stabbing me in the heart and twisting the knife that night back in the eighties?” Kevin laughs. “She must be, what, forty-five now? Whatever she did to me, whether she meant to hurt me or not, by now she’s no doubt had the same or worse done to her.” He smiles ruefully. “Bombardier, it’s your karma.”
“Pardon?”
“Firesign Theatre.” Kevin waves it away. “Forget it.”
They sit for a moment in silence, and Kevin feels the Texas heat closing in around him again, hears the traffic beyond the fence. “Rock Lobster” is replaced in his head by another rhythmic pop song in Spanish from the tinny loudspeaker.
“So what happened after that?” says Claudia.
“Oh,” says Kevin, “I started seeing this other girl that summer, someone I didn’t actually, you know, love. And who didn’t love me, either, but that was okay.”
Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing. No way he’s telling Dr. Barrientos the second half of the story. He’s told her what the Philosopher’s Daughter said, how it set up a vibration in him that he still feels a quarter-century later, but no way he’s telling her about Lynda on the Philosopher’s Daughter’s front porch.
“No,” says Dr. Claudia. “I mean right then, at the party, on the porch. What happened next?”
“Oh.” In the flexing embrace of the flimsy plastic chair, Kevin runs his palm over his sweaty forehead and hair. “I really don’t remember. We probably went back inside and danced some more, I don’t know. It was kind of like the moment right after an explosion, my ears were ringing, I couldn’t really hear or see anything. I honestly don’t remember.”
He’s feeling calm now, calmer than he’s felt all day, actually. Calmer than he’s felt in weeks, even, since before he found Stella’s pregnancy test in the kitchen trash. You put a moment like that in the context of a lifetime, and it’s not such a big deal. Makes him wonder why he’s been so fretful about it. Makes him wonder why he’s in Texas at all.
“Why’d she tell me that, though,” he hears himself say, “when I asked her not to? That’s what I still don’t get. That’s what I still can’t get my mind around after all this time. Maybe she was just being cruel to be kind, telling me what she thought I needed to know so that I wouldn’t embarrass her again. A girl like that, I’m sure she had guys throwing themselves at her all the time. In fact, I know she did. Like I say, half the guys I knew…”
He thinks of her name, even as her face fades into the glare leaking through the leaves of the tree over the courtyard.
“I mean, she must have
felt constantly besieged, and I’m sure she did her best to deflect all that uninvited interest as nicely as possible, because she wasn’t a bad person, or mean, or bitchy. It’s just that she must have gotten tired of all that… longing coming at her, all the time. So she learned to cut to the chase, say just the right thing that would stop the latest lovesick bastard in his tracks.”
Now he just feels tired. He wishes he could go somewhere and lie down. Even Lynda’s face is hard to recall now.
“But you know,” Kevin says, “that thing she said? What she told me about myself? It wasn’t exactly helpful. In fact, if you want to know the truth, it feels like a curse. I’ve never forgotten it, and it’s always there, at the back of my mind. Especially when I’m with a woman I love, or think I love. Or think I want to love. It’s like a leash, with the Philosopher’s Daughter at the other end. If I try too hard with a woman, if I make the effort, then I feel this little tug, like, not so fast, buster, who do you think you’re kidding?”
“Ah,” says Claudia.
“Because here’s the thing.” Kevin leans forward, rocking the table again. “Even it wasn’t true when she told me, it’s been true ever since because she told me.”
In the time they’ve been sitting there, a few more people have settled at tables in the courtyard. Some of them are already eating, so somewhere along the way the loudspeaker has announced more numbers, and Kevin just hasn’t heard them. A black bird is goose-stepping to and fro on a tabletop close to Kevin and Claudia’s, eyeing their half-finished tacos, first with one unblinking eye and then the other. In the heat under the tree Kevin and Claudia look at each other across the table as if they have each only just realized the other person is there. Their silence is no longer like a first date, but like the silence at the end of a break-up, when there’s nothing more left to say. Kevin doesn’t feel embarrassed or exposed or angry, just spent. Now what? he thinks. What’s next?
“Shall we go?” says Dr. Barrientos.
Out on Lamar again, in the hot cab of the truck, Claudia lowers the side windows a few inches, which lets out the heat and lets in a wedge of midday glare from either side.
“Just till the AC blows cold,” she says, though Kevin can already feel the difference from a vent as it plays over the rip in his trouser leg. His jacket folded again on his lap, Kevin gazes dully through the windshield at South Lamar finishing its slow, sinuous climb up from the river. As the glaring sky opens out above the street, Kevin sees a large church with a vast yellow lawn and a diner with a big neon coffee cup and more scruffy garages and bottom-rung car dealers, but he barely registers them. He feels numb and hollowed out by his exchange of intimacies with Dr. Barrientos, as if he’s just survived a loud explosion and is struggling to form a coherent thought in the reverberating silence. But all he can hear is tenderness and passion, tenderness and passion—oddly enough, though, not in the Philosopher’s Daughter’s own midwestern pixie’s intonation, but in the slightly nasal drawl of her lanky father, the professor himself, from whom Kevin took a class in ethics and who reminded Kevin of Jimmy Stewart. In fact, over the course of the semester, the professor managed to embody not one, but several avatars of Jimmy Stewart: narrating the death of Socrates as if it were the last reel of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; explaining utilitarianism as if he were the flinty, selfless technician of Strategic Air Command; and throughout the semester eyeing with barely repressed longing, as if he were the embittered sexual obsessive of Vertigo, a pair of ripe and stylish Southfield girls who always sat together in cashmere sweaters in the front row. So much did the professor remind Kevin of the actor, down to stammering and widening his eyes and waving his big-fingered hands when he was excited, that now, as the professor lectures Kevin about tenderness and passion—which he never did in real life—Kevin can’t really picture the Philosopher’s Daughter’s father at all, but sees instead the graying, middle-aged, parentally befuddled Stewart of the late-career comedies, flying off to Paris to rescue his teenaged daughter from some dreamy French boy, or his teenaged son from Brigitte Bardot, or even the professor’s own, real, vixenish daughter from some passionless son of Royal Oak.
“Duh, duh, define your terms, son,” stammers Professor Stewart. “Wha, wha, what do you mean by tenderness and passion?”
I have no idea! Kevin wants to shout. I can’t define them. To define them would be to pin them like butterflies to a corkboard. And anyway, professor, according to your own daughter, my problem isn’t that I can’t define them, it’s that I can’t express them. Besides, what do tenderness and/or passion get you? When Stella wakes up crying in the middle of the night, he holds her tightly until she stops shuddering. Neither of them says a word, they just clutch each other in the dark until she’s breathing evenly again. Then he loosens his grip but doesn’t let go of her completely. In the morning they never speak of it. What has his tenderness accomplished?
And passion, what of it? The Other Kevin, the Jihadist Kevin, the Freckled Suicide Bomber, he was passionate, wasn’t he? How many people died because of his passion? The Other Kevin’s blurry martyrdom video has been running nonstop on CNN and Fox all weekend, perhaps because it’s one of the rare examples performed in English. And even then they’ve been running it with subtitles, because Kevin/Abdul—posing in a green headband before a grainy blow-up of Osama bin Laden—speaks of jihad in an incomprehensibly thick Glaswegian monotone. Without the subtitles Kevin—Quinn, not MacDonald—would understand only every third or fourth word. Yeah, young Kevin was one confused, inarticulate young bastard, but at least he believed in something, didn’t he? At least he was willing to die for something. What would I be willing to die for, wonders Kevin—the decent Kevin, not the murderous Kevin—anything? Who would I be willing to die for? The Philosopher’s Daughter? That would have been a waste, she didn’t want me anyway. Lynda? Don’t be stupid, that wasn’t passion. Beth? Would he have died for her? Would he have died for her when she was pregnant with another man’s child? Say they were in a public place—the aisles of Gaia, say—and say Kevin saw some nervous-looking young guy suddenly open his overcoat to reveal a canvas vest bulging with plastic explosives, and say the guy started yelling Allahu akbar or whatever—would Kevin throw himself between Beth and her unborn child and the bomber? Probably, but that might just be good manners. In that last instant before everything went black, Kevin would feel like a chump. He’d be thinking, it’s not even my kid. And what if Stella’s life were in danger? Would he die for her if she was carrying his child? Would he sacrifice himself then more willingly, the way the Other Kevin did? That’s what passion does, thinks Michigan Kev (not Glasgow Kev)—passion makes you stupid, passion uses you and then throws you away.
He glances at Claudia, afraid he might have said some of this out loud, but if he has, she either didn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it. She’s driving distractedly again, one-handed, while with her other hand she pinches and unpinches a crease in her lower lip. Kevin’s not sure conversation is even possible now, as if the padded upholstery of the cab would soak up every sound. He’s not sure he would make any sense if he did speak, he’s not even sure if he would make sense to himself. For all he knows she’s feeling the same numbness, preoccupied with her father’s disappointment, her own uncertainty, the face of the woman she killed. Way to go, Dr. Barrientos, with the bedside manner! Just what he needs on the day of a job interview, the doctor passing her lacerating self-doubt along to him like Typhoid Mary. He’s still tongue-tied, but somebody better say something quick, because at last Lamar has widened and straightened out, lying as broad as the Champs-Élysées between strip malls and garages and down-market apartment complexes, and instead of the Arc de Triomphe at the far end, South Lamar’s vanishing point is obscured by a freeway overpass where the glittering roofs of cars and SUVs glide in the midday sun.
“How far are these stores?” Kevin says abruptly, at the same moment as Claudia says, “What sort of store are you looking for?”
They glance at e
ach other.
“Sorry?” says Kevin.
“You first,” says Claudia.
Up ahead, freeway signs hang over the road like big green guillotine blades, blunt white arrows pointing the way to Johnson City, Llano, Bastrop. Kevin shifts in his seat, afraid that if they survive the steel blades and enter the tangle of overpasses, Claudia’s truck will get snagged and slotted in and shot like a pellet further south than Kevin wants to go, all the way to San Antonio, all the way to Mexico lindo.
“I don’t want to get too far from downtown,” he says. “I still have to find my way back to, ah…” He nearly says Barad-dûr, catches himself. He can’t remember the actual name of the building, which only makes him feel worse. Bad enough he bared his soul uselessly to this woman, dredging up an ancient hurt for no particular reason and with no particular result other than to embarrass her and make himself feel awful. Now on top of it, he’s having a senior moment, and all at once he thinks of the growing hair in his ears, his enlarging prostate, his receding gums, and how the location of his job interview has become yet another alarming pothole in his memory.
He’s still saying “Ah…” when Claudia cuts to the right and they glide across two lanes into a driveway with a grassy median and a brick sign that says LAMAR OAKS.
Kevin closes his mouth. Her briskness annoys him, makes him feel even frailer, just like Stella does when she brings in his mail and sorts it for him. Technically they have separate mailboxes, she’s still paying rent on the downstairs apartment, but if she’s home before he is, she empties both boxes and brings the mail up to his kitchen table and sorts it into piles, his and hers, junk and not-junk. She especially likes to fish out envelopes from the AARP, the first one of which appeared just before his fiftieth birthday as ominously as a crack in a levee, which has since widened into an irreparable breach, flooding his kitchen table with offers for life insurance, prescription drug delivery, low-interest credit cards, and Mediterranean cruises, not to mention anodyne and unconvincing reassurances that the best of life is yet to come. Stella loves to eat an apple and slice the envelope open and read the letter aloud while he pretends to be a good sport.