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by James Hynes

  “They’ll help you choose a Medicare plan,” she says, chomping with her mouth open. “You’ll get discounts at Applebee’s.”

  She thinks she’s coming across as pertly as Sarah Jessica teasing Mr. Big, but she’s being more bitchy Miranda than flirty Carrie. It’s all he can do to keep from telling her, you’re closer to this than you admit, baby, I’ve seen your driver’s license, but he hasn’t yet. And to be fair, she always ends her dramatic reading with a little slap and tickle. “Chicks dig a guy with a senior discount,” she likes to whisper in his hairy ear.

  “There’s a Neiman Marcus,” Claudia is saying as she creeps the truck over speed bumps through a labyrinthine parking lot sectioned with bristling waist-high hedges and little trees with purple flowers.

  “Whoa,” Kevin says. “Neiman Marcus? Didn’t you say something about Target?”

  “It’s Neiman’s Last Call store.” She glances at him. “Everything’s marked way down.”

  “Huh.”

  “There’s a Wohl’s, too,” she says. “They’re less expensive.”

  “Ah.” He relaxes a bit—Wohl’s he knows, there’s a Wohl’s out near Briarwood, on the far side of 94. It’s not much further up the retail evolutionary tree than Target or Sears, but it’s all he needs. Stella would drag him into Neiman Marcus, but then Stella’s not here, is she?

  “Wohl’s is good,” he says as the truck rounds a corner into a wide-open, sun-hammered, nearly empty parking lot. A few cars are clustered at the far end where the bleached yellow façade of Wohl’s is taking the sun full in its face, and a few more are parked along the bland redbrick storefronts on the right: postal store, Christian books, big and tall menswear. The rest of the lot, with its faded chevrons of empty parking spaces and minimalist light poles staring down like surveillance devices, seems as desolate as a salt flat. All it needs are the bleached ribs and eyeless skulls of dead cattle. Even through the window tint and the icy blast of AC in his lap, Kevin can feel the blinding glare and the baking heat, and suddenly his stomach knots up so tight he nearly winces.

  Don’t leave me here, he almost says aloud. This wasteland is indistinguishable from any strip mall parking lot in North America, but suddenly it seems like the most alien landscape Kevin’s ever seen. He’ll get out of the truck as Kevin Quinn, but by the time he stumbles across to Wohl’s, he’ll be Fred C. Dobbs for sure, all alone and thousands of miles from anybody who loves him—assuming anybody does—hollow-eyed, stubbled, footsore, and lip-blistered, muttering to the first person he sees, “Can ya stake a fellow American down on his luck?” His stomach only clenches tighter when Claudia’s truck rolls to a stop in the emptiest portion of the lot, equidistant from Wohl’s and the shops on the right.

  “Last Call’s just around the corner,” she says, and he realizes she’s being polite, leaving the choice to him, but it feels as if she’s leaving him to die. He’s afraid he’s going to beg her not to abandon him, that she’s going to have to get out of the truck herself and drag him out into the heat as he clings to the headrest for dear life, leaving long, desperate fingernail scratches in the upholstery. He turns to her, his mouth dry again.

  “He’s wrong,” he says, and when she looks at him quizzically, he adds, “Your father. I’ll bet you’re a fantastic surgeon.”

  She blinks at him, momentarily speechless. He shrugs, but makes no effort to get out of the truck.

  “Who needs another nurse?” he says. “World’s lousy with nurses.”

  She gives a harsh bark of a laugh. “Not really, but thank you.”

  “Thank you. For everything.” He hugs the jacket to his chest, gestures weakly at his knee. “I feel better already.”

  “Good.”

  As he watches her sidelong, desperately trying to think of something else to say, she shifts her focus rather meaningfully toward the department store. No doubt she’s wondering what he’s doing, why he’s postponing their parting, and he can’t decide if he wants her to misunderstand—wants her, in other words, to think it has something to do with her and what passed between them—or if he wants her to understand the truth, that he simply doesn’t want to be left to fend for himself in this empty parking lot under a semiforeign sun, semisunstroked and wearing semitattered clothes, not knowing a soul for miles in any direction, left alone to think only of all the frustrations and disappointments that have led him here, to this barren place. Either way, he realizes, he’s going to seem pathetic to a woman like Dr. Barrientos, and at last, like a dying prospector accepting his fate in that last euphoric moment before the sun kills him, he starts fumbling—for the seat belt release, for the door handle, for something to say that will leave a better impression than he has so far. He’s got the belt unlatched somehow and is disentangling his right arm, and then he cracks the door and lets in the heat, and as he nudges the panel with his injured knee, pushing the door wider, he hears her say, “Everybody.”

  He’s got one foot on the running board, his jacket clutched to his chest. She’s not looking at him, but staring through the windshield, not at Wohl’s, but at something infinitely far away.

  “Well, listen.” He edges down into the heat. As he plants both shoes on the gritty pavement and puts his hand on the door to swing it shut, she shifts her gaze to him slowly, eerily.

  “Everybody is tender and passionate.” It’s almost as if she’s not talking to him, it’s more like she’s talking in her sleep, an utterance out of a dream.

  “Everybody,” she says again, her gaze sharpening in his direction.

  “I know,” says Kevin.

  She gives him the barest of smiles, one lonely prospector passing another in a trackless waste.

  “Good luck to you.” She puts her truck in gear.

  “And to you,” he says, and bangs the door shut. With a throaty roar the truck glides away in a wide curve across the empty lot, and Kevin lifts his eyes to the freeway interchange, which is close now, ramps swooping over and under each other, lines of cars gliding as if pulled by strings, high above sunburned yellow grass. When he can’t hear the grumble of Claudia’s truck anymore, only the windy rush of traffic, he turns and limps through the heat toward the department store, pulling his sunglasses out of his pocket.

  Stepping up on the curb in front of Wohl’s, he meets his reflection in the tinted glass of the doors, and it’s the first time he’s seen himself full-length since the men’s room at the airport—his shirt is half-untucked, the rip in his trouser leg bares the white square of his bandage and an alarming reach of pale shin. Around the bug eyes of his sunglasses, his head seems swollen. That’s just a flaw in the glass, he tells himself, my head’s not that big, but then his image trembles and he has the awful feeling he’s about to evaporate into the overheated air. The door opens as he reaches for it, startling him again, and out comes an elderly woman unflatteringly packed into white capri pants and a red striped top. Kevin holds the door as she teeters past on hot pink heels, her tight coiffure dyed an unconvincing blond, her bright mouth, the same shade of pink as her shoes, puckered under wraparound sunglasses. He nods, but she sails by as if she hasn’t seen him, stepping heavily down off the curb and mincing toward her car. And who am I to call her elderly? he wonders, as earnest as Jimmy Stewart. She gets the same mail from the AARP that I do. Twenty years ago, he might have thought of her as a sexy older woman. And twenty-five years from now, that could be Stella, dyeing her hair and risking her ankles and packing herself into pants two sizes too small. He folds his sunglasses into his jacket pocket and passes through the second set of doors into the mellow fluorescence and cool, dry, floral air of the store, thinking of the once and future Stella. In the three years they’ve been together, this is the first time he’s been shopping for clothes without her and he feels the same mildly illicit, slightly queasy thrill he felt last night when he sat in the big picture window of Blimpy’s and greedily ate a cheeseburger and onion rings. But this is even riskier, because by the time he sees her again—tomorrow night,
when she gets back from Chicago—he will no longer smell of onions, but he will have a new pair of trousers, and Stella, who could star in her own production of CSI: Ann Arbor, will eventually come across them in his closet or in the laundry and she’ll say, oh my God, not Wohl’s! Because she’ll know. What on earth were you doing in Wohl’s?

  None of your business, Kevin thinks, not any more, but as he limps up the wide entrance aisle, he knows it doesn’t matter what he thinks, because Stella’s going to kibitz whether he likes it or not, in spirit at least. There doesn’t seem to be anybody behind the glittering jewelry counter, but it’s a measure of his anxiety—at shopping without her, at sneaking away for a job interview without telling her, at thinking he could leave her and start over in Texas—that he feels a blinding, guilt-inducing beam from the engagement rings under glass, as if the ranked zirconia are focused in his direction like a navy searchlight. Though, to be fair, Stella would never shine that light on him here. Who would marry the oaf who bought a ring at Wohl’s? Puh-leeze.

  He limps past the counter and up the wide aisle, his thick-soled shoes squeaking on the spotless white tile. The tiles and white suspended ceiling recede in mirror-image toward a vanishing point behind the pastel folded towels in the bath shop at the far end. Kevin still doesn’t see any employees, doesn’t even see another customer, just receding ranks of breastbone-high racks, pink and burgundy lingerie to his right, trousers to his left. He angles onto the silent gray carpeting of the labyrinth of slacks, and someone moves directly into his path, startling him, but it’s only himself in a mirrored column, still disheveled and pale. The store seems to be sailing on mysteriously unmanned like the Marie Celeste, with tantalizing indications of recent activity—the AC still humming, the Muzak still playing. Standing directly under a little round ceiling grille, Kevin can hear Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

  Kevin sighs. The AC’s cold enough that he slips on his jacket over his wilted shirt, inventorying each pocket by touch. He finds his tie rolled in a side pocket and shakes it out to check it for creases, but it seems to have survived the heat and his fall on the bridge, so he rolls it up and puts it back. He moves the folded letter and spare bandage from his breast pocket into his jacket, fingers his boarding pass for the return flight. In the dry refrigeration of the store he can smell himself, and he lifts the lapels of his jacket to see sweat stains under his arms. Now he’ll have to buy a new shirt, too.

  To the beat of the Tina Turner song, Kevin walks his fingers through one rack of trousers after another. He avoids the worsted dress pants—he’s not spending $75.00, no matter what Stella would say. But then Stella’s shade scares him away from the $45.00 trousers, because they’re microfiber. “That’s just itsy bitsy polyester,” she whispers in his ear. Kevin moves to the Dockers, which are only $29.99, and starts to dicker with Stella’s spirit. Didn’t I tell you, protests Stella, I wouldn’t be caught dead with a man in pleated khakis? But they’re 100 percent cotton, replies Kevin, not a trace of microfiber. And they’re only thirty bucks. I’m not even sure I want this job, I’m not dropping another seventy-five bucks on a pair of trousers just to impress a bunch of strangers I’ll probably never see again. Reaching a compromise with his inner Stella, Kevin pulls out a dark blue pair of flat-front khakis in his size, 34/36.

  Clutching the trousers, he winds through the slacks toward a display of shirts. Who is Stella to lecture him, anyway? Even during their worst moments, at least he and Beth got each other. He could carry on a conversation with her and not feel like he was speaking to a bratty younger cousin. She may not have liked Martin Amis’s books (she hated them, in fact) but at least she knew who he was and could tell you why she hated him (she called him a motormouthed misogynist). But Stella, on the other hand, Stella reads featherweight novels with pastel covers, when she reads at all. And the first thing she does is turn to the back of the book and read the last few pages, to see how it turns out. “I need to know,” she says. “I can’t stand the suspense.”

  “What suspense?” Kevin said. “They all have the same ending: Reader, I married him.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “Which is why I look: if she doesn’t get the guy, then I know I don’t want to read the book.”

  Beth used to drag him to operas and gamelan performances and concerts by Tuvan throat singers. They worked out a compromise about live music, by which she would consent to go see Richard Thompson at the Ark, and he would accompany her to hear some jazz performer he’d never heard of at the Firefly. One of their ancient arguments was over a Betty Carter album that Beth loved, called It’s Not About the Melody.

  “Actually, it is about the melody,” protested Kevin, a second-generation Sinatra fan.

  But with Stella, the roles were reversed. She agreed to go see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Power Center only after Kevin told her that Captain Picard from Star Trek was playing Antony—and then Stella’s chief reaction was awe at Patrick Stewart’s abs, which you could see from the second balcony.

  “I’d jump him in a heartbeat,” she’d said on the walk home.

  “He’s in his sixties,” Kevin had said.

  “I like older men,” she’d said, linking arms with him. “You know that.”

  Stella’s idea of high culture is one those gaudy, fascistic shows in which some formerly charming folk genre—Irish step-dancing or Japanese drummers or Chinese acrobats—is blown all out of proportion into the sort of spectacle that would have fit right in at the Nuremburg rallies. Or a show that takes something vaguely “street” or mildly avant-garde—hip-hop dancers banging trash-can lids, men painted blue whacking each other with plastic tubing—and turns it into Vegas spectacle. Don’t even get him started about Cirque de Soleil. She dragged him all the way to Chicago on his fiftieth birthday—and, to be fair, paid for the whole trip—to surprise him with a bewildering, assaultive show full of faux mysticism and pointless virtuosity. When she asked him if he didn’t just love it, he stifled his gut response: that this was what entertainment would have been like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War, fantastically fit but facelessly interchangeable performers in revealing outfits doing spectacular but meaningless stunts for a mindlessly bedazzled audience. Even the show’s title wasn’t really a word, he was convinced—vaguely Italian- or French-sounding, but signifying nothing, in the manner of some expensively concocted corporate brand name.

  “It was great” is what he actually said, after which she took him back to their room at the Drake—“Don’t worry,” she’d said, “I’m expensing it”—and engaged him in some elaborately silly sex involving feathers, restraints, and a pair of Cirque-style masks. All of which, he had to admit, put the show retrospectively in a much more favorable light, as a kind of public foreplay. She also insisted on playing a CD of Cirque music she’d bought at the show—a rhythmic hash of ethnic music, like the folk tunes of Benetton—and Kevin started to laugh halfway through. But Stella just took his laughter as pleasure—which it mostly was—and redoubled her efforts.

  He’s startled again by the sight of himself in another mirrored column, and he wonders if Stella would be caught dead with a man in torn trousers and sweaty, wilted shirt and one blood-soaked sock. He zeroes in on a poly/cotton dress shirt—fuck it, it’s marked down to twenty bucks. He pulls the tie from his pocket and makes sure the shirt matches. Then he pivots on his injured leg and lurches toward the socks. The gray carpet has no give to it, it’s like walking on the green of a minigolf course. From a wall of socks he plucks off a pair for ten bucks—it’s a lot for socks, but they’re antimicrobial, so his sweaty feet won’t smell. Note that, Stella? You can’t go all Queer Eye on me when I buy antimicrobial socks. And even I know you don’t buy a woman an engagement ring at a department store. Who said anything about a ring, anyway? I know how to read a home pregnancy test, too, and I know when I’m off the hook. What’s love got to do, got to do with it?

  He finds a cash reg
ister where the only apparent survivor of whatever plague cleared out the store, a pudgy, round-faced, lank-haired salesgirl, is flipping through a ring binder. She pushes it to one side as he lays his purchases on the counter.

  “Find everything you need?” she says robotically, without making eye contact. “Do you have a Wohl’s charge card?” She flips the trousers to find the tag.

  “No.” He should have tried the trousers on first, but fuck it.

  “Are you interested in opening a Wohl’s account?” the girl says in her retail zombie monotone, scanning the tags.

  “No thanks,” says Kevin. “Do you have a public restroom?”

  For the first time, the girl’s bovine gaze flickers at Kevin, and her fingers hesitate over the register. What must he look like? He wonders if she can smell him.

  “Up front, by the service desk.” She looks him up and down and says, “Sixty-six fifty-one.”

  Kevin fishes for his wallet, plucks out his Visa, and the salesgirl swipes the card with two fingers as if it’s infectious, then holds it out to him at arm’s length, watching him warily. As she scoops his purchases toward a plastic bag, Kevin startles them both by pressing his hand next to hers on top of the clothes, not quite touching. He tugs the trousers out from under her palm. “Where’d you say the men’s room is?”

  She lifts her chin over the labyrinth of racks toward the front. Kevin tucks his receipt inside his jacket and cradles his purchases in the crook of his arm. Her eyes slide down to his shoes and all the way up to his face again. “You okay?” she says.

  “Never better,” he says, limping away.

  Customer Service is off to one side of the store—CUSTOMER CONVENIENCE says the sign, CONVENIENCIA PARA EL CLIENTE—and it’s even more brightly lit than the sales floor. This desk, too, seems to be unstaffed, and as he passes the counter toward the restrooms Kevin feels vaguely guilty, as if he’s stealing the clothes. The men’s room is just as brightly lit as the rest of the store, and it’s aggressively clean, smelling of urinal cakes and floral air freshener. Just inside the door there’s even a framed print of orchids. There are four sinks on the wide counter, with boxes of tissue between them. The Muzak is louder in here, some contemporary pop hit he doesn’t recognize, a young woman with a sharpish voice telling him to “Breathe, just breathe.”