by James Hynes
If you say so, thinks Kevin. Avoiding his image in the wide mirror, he casts about for someplace to put his purchases, wishing now he’d let the girl put them in a bag. The counter looks spotless, making him wonder again if anybody ever actually comes into this store, but instead he tilts the baby-changing table down from the wall, inspects it carefully, even sniffs it, and lays down his new clothes. He takes off his jacket, spreads his fingers under the collar, and brushes off any remaining dust. A little rumpled, he thinks, but presentable, and he hangs it on the hook behind the door of the handicapped stall. Then, at last, he confronts himself in the mirror.
In the pastel glitter of the reflected restroom, he sees an admirably slender but pale, round-faced, and baggy-eyed middle-aged man, his formerly crisp shirt wilted and stained under his arms, his forehead damp with sweat, his sandy hair matted along his sideburns and against the back of his neck. The shirt is half-untucked all around his waist, and his ruined trousers hang low like oversized jeans on some teenager. He resists the instinct to tuck in the shirt and tug up his pants, leaning over the sink instead and pushing the button on a faucet, waiting with his hands under the water for it to run hot. Nose to nose with the mirror he sees melancholy eyes and the unsubtle features of a peasant, son of an Irish father and a Polish mother—a Mick and a Polack, Uncle Stan used to say—good-looking enough, he supposes, to hang onto his younger girlfriend, at least for now. But he can already see where his cheeks are going to sag, and the bags under his eyes aren’t entirely the result of heat and fatigue; they are becoming a more or less permanent feature. Face to face with himself, he realizes he looks like somebody’s dad. Not like my dad, though, he thinks. He’s already four years older than his father was when he died.
The water stops running before it gets hot, so Kevin mashes the button again with the heel of his palm. He dips his head, cups lukewarm water in both hands, and splashes his face. He knows how to read a pregnancy test—he knows he’s nobody’s dad yet—but he still doesn’t know what the discarded test really means. He found the stick five weeks ago, and Stella hasn’t said a word about it. She must have missed a period, but did she take the test because she hoped she was pregnant or because she hoped she wasn’t? He’s seen her little clamshell birth-control dispenser in the medicine cabinet, but it’s not like he keeps track, it’s not like he counts the pills to make sure she’s taking one each day. Kevin wears a condom most of the time, too, but sometimes he doesn’t. He didn’t that night in Chicago, when Stella, her eyes shining behind that goofy mask, plucked the little foil square out of his fingers and flipped it across the room, murmuring wetly in his ear, “I want it to be just us, Kevin, skin to skin.”
Where does she get this stuff? he wondered at the time, but even now, his cock stirs at the memory. He’d thought the masks were silly, he’d hated the music, but he remembers that night vividly: the shudder of her thighs around his waist, the rabbit pulse of the vein in her neck, the tremble of her lower lip under the gaudy mask. He splashes his face again and presses the soap dispenser. The milky goo in his palm looks like semen and smells like coconut, and he starts to laugh as he lathers his face, pushing his fingers up into his hairline and along his sideburns and around the back of his neck. He squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs with his fingertips, and in the reddened blackness behind his eyelids he can see Stella’s wrists straining against the leather cuffs—well, vinyl really, she isn’t as snobbish about sex gear as she is with trousers—and he can hear the rhythmic chirp of her excitement. He opens his eyes to peer through soapy eyelashes at the lather dripping off his nose and eyebrows and into the collar of his shirt, then presses the faucet again and splashes double handfuls of lukewarm water against his face, spattering the mirror and the countertop. Blinking at his reflection, he yanks a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and scrubs himself dry, vigorously rubbing his hair.
Chicago was eight months ago, so the pregnancy test wasn’t the result of their own Cirque de Drake, but they’ve gone bareback since. More frequently since then, in fact, with Stella assuring him that it’s okay, she’s got it taken care of, or that she’s just had her period, or that she’s just about to have it. He unbuckles his belt, slides it out, and coils it on the changing table, and he unbuttons his shirt slowly, pausing only to glance up at the ceiling for a security camera. Fuck it, he’s a customer, he’s dropped nearly seventy bucks here today, and anyway, there can’t be a law against changing clothes in a public restroom, not even in Texas. There’s always the possibility, of course that Stella took the test because she wanted to make sure she wasn’t pregnant. And she wasn’t, this time, anyway, which was probably just as well, because Kevin had just read of some study in the New York Times that said older men were more likely to father autistic children or kids with birth defects. Just like men, spermatozoa don’t stay young forever—they age, they break down, they decay. He didn’t actually say anything to her about the article, but he left the newspaper on the kitchen table with the article prominently displayed, and it was gone when he came home from work.
He strips off the shirt and with a twinge of midwestern guilt—what a waste, all it needs is laundering—he wads it into a ball and stuffs it in the trash. Who is he kidding? Stella’s announcement in the car coming home from Gaia, her spinning of condoms across the room like little Frisbees, supposedly in the heat of the moment—there’s only one thing on Stella’s mind. No matter how geriatric his seed is, Stella wants a child. He takes off his pricey shoes and puts the left one on the counter. He sniffs the right one and runs a dry paper towel through it, which comes out a little damp, smelling of his foot, but showing no blood. It’s all soaked into his sticky sock, which he peels off with two fingers and flings into the trash. Then he peels off the other one and tosses it, too, and then, right there in the overlit, over-air-conditioned, Muzaked men’s room, miles from home, surrounded by strangers in all directions, Kevin feels the shock of the icy tile against his bare soles like the opening of an abyss at his feet. It’s like the time he was hiking the coast of Donegal—back when he was responsible for no one but himself and could do things like that—and the red-faced warden of the slovenly youth hostel told him not to go up on the cliffs, the fog had rolled in and it wasn’t safe, and Kevin went anyway, figuring as long as he couldn’t hear the surf booming against the rocks, he probably wasn’t close to the cliff edge, and he strode happily through the mist beading on his anorak like diamonds, until a sudden shift in the wind simultaneously carried the thunder of the surf to him and blew the mist away like a veil to reveal that he was inches, inches, from a sheer, thousand-foot drop into roiling black water. His whole body convulsed in shock, nearly tipping him over the edge, and he saved himself only by dropping to his ass and scuttling crabwise back away from the edge.
Just as he scuttles crabwise now back away from the very thought of fatherhood, because he knows fatherhood would upend his life. For starters, it would cost him lots and lots of money—not just the prenatal care and the birth, but food, clothing, shelter, medicine, fees, tuition, toys—twenty years of it at least, without the kid contributing one thin dime. Thousands of dollars right off the bat, because Stella would want nothing but the best baby paraphernalia, wireless baby monitors and Baby Einstein DVDs and handcrafted wooden toys and some Swedish-engineered stroller with more safety features than a Volvo. Not to mention Kevin’s house would have to be babyproofed top to bottom: every socket capped, every cabinet latched, every blade locked away, the chemicals under Kevin’s sinks sealed up like a Superfund site. And never mind the expense—what perks of his semibachelor life would he have to give up? He has friends with kids, he knows that for years he’d have to forego movies, concerts, going to clubs. No more eating out. No more spur of the moment weekend trips. No more reading Martin Amis for hours in the bath. No more performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company. No more devoting an entire weekend to watching a whole season and all the extras of Galactica straight through on DVD. And no more HBO, if
there’s a chance that little Kevin or Stella Jr. could wander into the room and glimpse a bloody murder or a pole dance, and he’d have to answer the question, “What’s that, Daddy?”
And, again, how old would he be when the kid’s graduating from high school? Kevin would never have a real retirement, he’d be working to pay for the kid’s college till he keeled over dead. He wouldn’t live long enough for the kid to take care of him. And what if he gets sick or dies when the kid’s still young? Could Stella raise a child on her own? High-strung, tense, impatient, capricious—not the most maternal qualities, if he does say so himself. Not to mention those scars on her arms and inside her thighs—old and pale, but unmistakable—and her nightmares and her periodic daylight sojourns in the Stella Continuum. What happens when little Kevin or Stella Jr. is sticking his or her finger into an electrical socket or choking on strained peas or squeezing through the railing of Kevin’s second-story deck, and Mommy’s just staring into space, gesturing and murmuring to herself? If I’m not around, the kid’s dead, and if I am around, I’m the alpha parent by default, picking up the slack while Stella freaks or zones out, with me telling the screaming kid, “Mommy needs a little time out, kiddo. Mommy loves you, but Mommy needs her space.”
He empties his trouser pockets onto the counter—wallet, keys, a handful of change—and panics for a moment when he can’t find his Swiss Army knife, until he remembers he left it on the dresser at home, knowing he couldn’t take it on the plane. He’s feeling a little naked without it—and in fact, now that he’s stripping off his ruined trousers and stuffing them in the trash, he is nearly naked in the mirror, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs that have gone saggy in the heat. The semi-erection that stirred when he was thinking about Stella in Chicago has gone saggy, too, drooping down one leg of his shorts. He sniffs his armpits and hits the faucet and pulls out another fistful of paper towels. He soaks them, squeezes them out, and runs the makeshift sponge over his bare chest and down his arms and into his armpits. The water is barely lukewarm, and the AC chills his wet skin. He arches his spine and reaches as far as he can behind his back. In the mirror he’s happy to see his ribs and not to see a gut, but while he’s got a flat belly—mostly—it’s no Patrick Stewart six-pack, never was and never will be. And he can already see where his pecs and his upper arms are going to slacken and droop in the not-distant future, no matter how many bench presses he does. I’m not going to have another shot at a younger woman, he thinks. Stella’s my last chance.
He lathers up more milky soap between his palms and rubs coconut scent across his chest and under his arms and down his back. So that’s the choice, he thinks as soapy water dampens the waistband of his saggy shorts. Lose Stella and find a woman his own age who’s already had her kids. Learn to love, or at least live with, wrinkles, wattles, a thickening waist, spreading hips. Or hang on to Stella and lose his life, basically. With a kid there’d be less sleep, less sex, less time to exercise. Fatherhood would mean he’d lose what muscle tone he still has. No more hour-long runs in Gallup Park, no more lifting free weights after work, no more brisk hikes around Silver Lake, because every waking moment would be devoted to, or at least planned around, the kid, the kid, the kid. What’s the kid doing, where’d she get to, is she okay, is she safe? I thought you were watching her. Where did she go? Did somebody take her? Because it’s not like when Kevin was a child, when he could disappear with his friends for hours—playing with matches, frying ants with a magnifying glass, setting off firecrackers—or take off on his own—wandering up alleys, breaking bottles in vacant lots, gliding on his Stingray through traffic—no, these days you can’t leave them alone for an instant, every moment has to be accounted for, every contingency foreseen, which is why they carry cell phones like tracking devices, why they have to be fingerprinted and microchipped like cats, why they have to be padded and helmeted like middle linebackers just to ride a bicycle. Because the world’s full of crazed, childless women who will murder you and steal your kid for their own; pedophiles lurking on the Internet pretending to be twelve-year-olds; angry working-class white guys taking whole schoolrooms of little girls hostage. And that’s not even taking into account the kid’s peers: the distracted teenaged girl behind the wheel of daddy’s SUV with a learner’s permit and a cell phone and your daughter in the passenger seat, not buckled in; the hulking guy dropping Rohypnol in her punch at a party; the sullen little Columbine wannabe striding up a school hallway with a Mac-10 under his long black overcoat like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And terrorists—oh my God, they watch cable news, they’re not stupid, they know an opportunity when they see it. Forget Al Qaeda, there’s no central planning anymore, it’s all eager beaver freelancers now, or so Kevin understands from Frontline. It’s only a matter of time before some nasty, self-pitying little fuck takes a whole school hostage, decapitating children one by one, live on CNN. It could happen; it’s already happened elsewhere in the world. There was that massacre not so long ago in Russia, a whole cell of terrorists storming a school and killing kids; he’s forgotten the name but he remembers the video: desperate parents running under fire with limp, bloodied children in their arms. The guys who did that were Muslims, weren’t they? He’s not actually sure, but what does Kevin’s instinctive racial profiling mean anymore when some round-faced white guy like the Other Kevin could memorize a few verses of the Koran and carry out his own jerry-rigged jihad under the streets of Glasgow? It’s the worst of both worlds, adolescent rage meets religious fanaticism, Dylan Klebold meets Mohammed Atta. That’s what fatherhood gets you—your kid’s either a monster or a victim. A father is either guilty or grieving.
He rinses with another damp handful of towels, then wipes himself with some dry ones, chafing his skin. The trash bin is filling up with wadded paper; he can’t even see his discarded clothes anymore. He props his bare right foot on the rounded edge of the counter and scrubs the sticky blood away with soap and water. Coconut between his toes, behind his ears, in his armpits—he’s going to smell like a Piña Colada. With his knee bent and the stained bandage pulled tight, he feels the ache of his scrape, and he yanks the bandage painfully off and tosses it. Pinpricks of fresh blood ooze through the orange stain on his patella, so he puts his foot down on the cool floor, steps into the handicapped stall—only now does it occur to him that maybe he shouldn’t be walking around barefoot in a public restroom—and fishes the clean bandage out of his jacket pocket. He peels off the backing, props his foot back up on the counter, and pastes the new bandage against the scrape, smoothing down the edges.
Then Kevin tugs his new trousers out from under the shirt and socks on the changing table, tearing off the tag and picking out the threads with his teeth and fingernails, missing his Swiss Army knife again. He balances for a moment like a stork on one bare foot, the other foot poised over the empty waist of his new trousers, and surveys one more time his own pale, slackening, coconut-scented flesh. He hasn’t washed and changed his clothes in public since he used to go swimming at Silver Lake, and he hasn’t done that in years. Kevin doesn’t even like to take his shirt off in public anymore. He thinks of the Other Kevin, ritually bathing himself in the dank bathroom of some gloomy Glaswegian tower block, just before he strapped on his suicide vest and blew himself and a lot of other people to smithereens, and Kevin thinks, maybe if the Other Kevin’d had a girl, maybe if he’d gotten laid once in a while, he wouldn’t have felt that loathing for his own flesh, wouldn’t have felt the need to express his rage through plastic explosives.
Wobbling, Kevin thrusts one leg and then the other into the pants and zips them up. A little snug, but not too bad. He’s aware that he’s squaring his shoulders and sticking his chest out, even though he’s alone in the restroom with the Muzak. He’s been tuning it out until now, perhaps because it’s been playing songs he doesn’t know. But now it’s a song he recognizes, “Tempted” by Squeeze, more boomer comfort food, and now Kevin just feels tired. He doesn’t want to think about fatherhood anymore
. He wishes the interview were over with, he wishes he were on his way to the airport, he wishes he were already on the plane. No, it’s more than that: he wishes he’d never come to Austin in the first place, wishes he’d never applied for the job, wishes he were back at his desk in Willoughby Hall, editing some deadly dull manuscript, reading his e-mail, mollifying some paranoid junior academic on the phone. He wishes he were on his deck drinking a Molson’s, waiting for Stella to come home from Chicago.
I said to my reflection, let’s get out of this play-ee-ace, goes the song, and he manages to unpin the new shirt without sticking himself and discovers that it’s short-sleeved, which ticks him off—at himself, mainly, for not checking in the first place—but he puts it on anyway, because if he wants to return it, he’d have to dig his old, soiled shirt out of the trash or go back into the store bare-chested. At least the new shirt buttons all the way to the top without choking him, so he just tucks it in and snakes his belt through the loops of his new trousers. He tugs on the new socks, hopping one-footed on the cold floor. Drops his shoes smack on the tile, steps into them, props each on the counter to tie the laces. Then he retrieves his jacket from the stall and watches himself in the mirror as he shrugs it on, shooting the cuffs. Did some bored security guard watch Kevin’s entire striptease on CCTV? Is he even now calling the Austin police, to report some pasty, Celtic suicide bomber in the men’s room, ritually preparing himself for an atrocity? Kevin wonders if he’ll be arrested before he even leaves the store.