by James Hynes
“Somethin’ bad happen,” says the cabbie. He’s fiddling with the radio, which hisses and spits from station to station.
“I’m sorry?” Kevin shifts on the backseat. A moment after she did the line, he and Lynda were dancing again, and now she was watching him with half-lidded eyes through her wild screen of hair, now she spun closer and ran the tips of her fingers down his arms. He grinned stupidly back at her, woozy and aroused, almost touching her but not quite, close enough to feel the lash of her hair across his cheek, close enough to smell her sweat.
“On the radio,” says the cabbie, searching the dial without pausing. “Somethin’ bad in Minnesota.”
The cab is already crawling across the Lamar Avenue Bridge, though Kevin can’t remember descending that last mile, curve after curve, to the river. He’s disoriented by the view out his window, where he sees a line of boxcars crawling across the rust-red trestle, the inverted reflections of the railcars crawling through the glassy green water of the river below. On the pedestrian bridge where he fell an hour or two ago, sweaty joggers trudge past a cluster of busy young men in polo shirts and khakis, some sort of film crew, it seems, working within a rough rampart of metal boxes, setting up a couple of tripods and aiming them at Austin’s dynamic skyline. Kevin feels as if his own film is being rewound, as if his lust has reeled him out to the end of the line, and is now reeling him back in, all the way down Lamar back to the center of town where he started. His disarticulation and reconstruction as a Texan as he traveled south down Lamar has been reversed, and now he’s being returned to his former state, the original Kevin, Michigan Kev.
The cabbie’s watching him in the rearview, his gaze more mournful than before, but Kevin can’t remember what the guy just said. He cranes around the headrest in front of him and sees traffic kinking and unkinking up the hill toward Gaia Market. Perhaps there’s been another accident; it can’t be the same one. Kevin, restless and rattled, notes the glowing red numbers of the fare; this is going to be another expensive cab ride.
“I got a brother up there.” The cabbie has given up on the radio; he’s feeling for something on the front seat. “He drive a cab, too, in the Twin Cities. I gettin’ worried.”
“I’m sorry,” Kevin says. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
The cabbie’s cradling a glossy red cell phone in his broad palm and thumbing the tiny keypad, shifting his gaze back and forth between the traffic ahead and the cell’s display as the cab glides and stops, glides and stops.
“What’s this about Minnesota?” Kevin leans forward against his seat belt, but the cabbie raises his finger for silence as he cups the tiny phone to his ear. The man’s other hand grips the wheel tightly, even though they’re crawling at only fifteen miles per hour off the end of the bridge and under the railway underpass.
“Fine,” mutters Kevin, settling back against the seat. Over the rush of the AC vents Kevin hears the tiny ring of the cabbie’s phone and then the ringing silence on the dance floor when the tape cuts off in midsong and everybody sags in place and groans in the heat and humidity. “Waaayyyne!” sings out the Philosopher’s Daughter, laughing, mocking. Wayne vaults from the couch, the old floor shuddering under his weight, and pushes his way through the breathless dancers to the stereo. Kevin and Lynda sink back on their heels, and Lynda pushes her hair away from her face with both hands and fixes Kevin with her cocaine eyes. All around them people are shouting over the music that isn’t playing, and Wayne and the Philosopher’s Daughter are loudly haggling over which tape to play next. Lynda sways against Kevin and catches his T-shirt with one hand and tugs him toward the door. They pinball off other dancers who don’t seem to notice and stumble out onto the empty farmhouse porch, the screen door slapping shut behind them. The red light within tints the windows but casts no glow on the porch, and Kevin isn’t sure if the shrilling all around him is the absence of amplified music ringing in his ears or the crickets under the shadowy trees on the farmhouse lawn. Lynda backs up to a porch upright and pulls Kevin up against her, and she drapes her arms over his shoulder and kisses him. She tastes salty from sweat. Kevin slips his hands inside the loose armholes of her dress and slides his palms up her warm, slippery rib cage, stiffens her nipples under his thumbs, feels her blood pulsing through the tips of his fingers. She kisses him deeper in the ringing, buzzing silence, her fingers through the sweaty hair at the back of his head. Kevin’s cock was already stirring on the dance floor, and now he’s hard. He frees a hand and slides it up under her skirt. “That’s the one!” he hears their hostess cry over the chatter inside the house, and now he’s aware of the Philosopher’s Daughter somewhere behind him like a source of heat, and he sends a thought in her direction, watch this, his thumb sliding up the inside of Lynda’s slick thigh, I’ll show you passion. Lynda flinches, catching her breath.
(The cabbie is speaking rapid-fire into his phone in a foreign language. He’s repeating the same word—a name?—over and over again. Nobody seems to be answering him.)
Then the stereo erupts again to shouts and cheers, a ragged electric guitar in a sharp, insinuating figure that Kevin recognizes instantly. In the clinch, Kevin and Lynda gaze through the dark at each other as the drums kick in, Charlie Watts playing a slow, sensual, urgent beat. On the sloping old porch they can feel the trembling of the farmhouse floor under the dancer’s feet, and Kevin starts to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” murmurs Lynda.
“Nothing,” he breathes as the bass comes in, Bill Wyman playing a balling rhythm. He kisses Lynda and slides his sweaty palm farther up under her skirt, and she grips his wrist and holds him back. They part slightly, their mutual humidity rising between them, and he tries to catch her gaze, why not? But she’s looking past him, blinking through her scrim of hair as if listening carefully for something. Then Jagger starts singing, Yeah, you got… satin shoes, and she eases from under him and sways her hips to Watts and Wyman down the porch, away from the windows. She doesn’t look back, but he follows her past one dim red window and then the other, brushing the porch swing and making it twist slowly, end by end. Dim red figures bob and sway in the farmhouse windows, and Kevin can’t make out anyone in particular, but he knows the Philosopher’s Daughter is there, he can feel her radiating through the wall of the house.
(Cupping the cell, the cabbie makes the turn by Gaia Market one-handed, accelerating east down Fifth into the canyon of construction sites. He presses Dial again and lifts the phone to his ear.)
At the end of the porch Lynda lifts her chin and pushes her hair back again with both hands, saying nothing. Jagger growls through the window screens, Y’all got… cocaine eyes, and she grips Kevin by the forearms and wheels him around and settles him on the wooden railing, never taking her half-lidded eyes off his. His feet flat on the floorboards, the bass pounds through the soles of his sneakers. Lynda glances back at the windows, tosses her hair, then squats barefoot before him, pushing Kevin’s knees apart. “Oh,” he breathes, so quietly that no one could possibly hear him over the music, not even himself. In the windows crimsoned bodies churn while at his feet Lynda tugs the zipper of his jeans and pries his cock free with the tips of her fingers. He lays his trembling hand on the crown of her head as she takes the tip of it in her mouth and strokes him three times, up and down, like she’s nodding at something he said. One long-fingered hand rests on his thigh, the other curled under her skirt, between her legs. His cock aches it’s so hard, but Lynda lifts her mouth away and pushes herself to her feet with her hands on his knees. Even in the humid summer air her saliva chills his hard-on. “Don’t stop,” he says, still not loud enough to be heard over the music, but Lynda lifts her skirt to thumb her panties down into a knot on the porch. Her face is in shadow, her eyes hooded. She slips the straps of her dress off her shoulders, baring her breasts, and leans into him and kisses him, her hair falling across their faces. He slides his hands up under her dress and digs his fingers into her slippery ass. She pushes down on his shoulders, he l
ifts, and somehow she’s straddling his lap with her knees on the railing, her thighs taut, her moist cunt sliding exquisitely onto his cock.
(The cab dashes from light to light toward Austin’s downtown as the cabbie mutters into the phone, then presses Quit and tosses it in frustration on the seat beside him.)
The porch railing creaks under their weight, and even drunk and excited Kevin wonders about the farmhouse’s craftsmanship and hopes the Philosopher’s Daughter’s father is as good a handyman as he is a philosopher. He worries about toppling backward into the bushes, he worries about splinters, but the beer and the anxiety are making him last longer, otherwise he might have come the instant he was inside her. Then Lynda murmurs “Wait” right in his ear, and as he clutches her waist under her dress she unbends first one leg and then the other over the railing, settling tightly against him, taking him in even deeper. She tightens her calves against the railing and squeezes with her thighs, and he groans, because he’s deeper inside this girl than he’s ever been inside any girl before, and he presses his open mouth against the long, salty curve of her neck. He’s inhaling her humidity, she’s panting like an animal just above the top of his head. They can’t move much—if she thrusts too hard against him she’ll topple them into the bushes—but the song has finished with words and now it’s just a driving sax, and they rock together to the beat, her sweat dripping into the dress bunched at her waist, her hands kneading his back, his face pressed between her salty breasts, her heart thumping against his lips. He can’t move much, he can hardly breathe, but he can’t stop now, and he hooks his chin over her shoulder, her hair scratching his nose and filling his mouth, and through it he can see the red window where the music’s pouring out, he can see pumping limbs and torsos in the red light, hair swinging, heads shaking. There’s someone in the window, he can’t make out who in the darkness, just a silhouette against the red glow, catching a breeze through the screen, breathing in something other than sweat and beer and marijuana. Kevin wants it to be her, and he thinks, look at me, but he can’t be sure, it’s just a shape in the window, it might not be her, it might be someone else. Now the music is circling and building, just the rhythm section and an insinuating solo guitar, and as Lynda rocks against him, he surges with each bar of the solo, almost cresting but not quite, and he thinks, I want you to see me. He hopes this lasts forever, he hopes that it doesn’t and that he comes like a waterfall, but either way he wants her to know, he wants her to see him. His heart hammers, his breath rasps through Lynda’s hair. Turn around, he wills the silhouette in the window, this could have been us.
(The cab idles impatiently at the corner of Fifth and Congress. The cabbie breathes heavily through his nose; he has the phone in hand again, and he’s staring at the little screen, as if willing it to ring.)
Now the guitar and the saxophone are trading off, leading each other on, and Lynda starts thrusting harder against him, faster than the beat, gasping like a runner. Kevin tries to grip her tighter, but she’s so slippery under her dress and she’s moving so urgently it’s all he can do to keep them both on the railing. His thighs ache and his back hurts, and under his hands he can feel every muscle in her body pulling tighter. All he can do is hold on tight and flex his buttocks. Now her gasps are high-pitched and squeaky and he hopes they finish before the song does because he doesn’t want her to come out loud in the gap between the songs when everybody could hear them. Only her, he thinks, hanging on to Lynda for dear life, I only want her to know. Lynda digs her nails into the back of his neck, and he sinks his teeth into the taut curve of her throat to keep from groaning aloud. Her sweat pours over his fingers, and now she’s whimpering rhythmically, chirping like a bird, and through the window the guitar and the saxophone are winding tightly round and round each other, and Kevin thinks, Turn around, just about to come himself, look this way.
(As the cab turns onto Congress, the cell phone sings, and the cabbie exclaims aloud, inclining his head toward the red phone like a tiny heart in his palm. There’s a torrent of speech, both ends of the conversation talking excitedly over each other. The cabbie sounds like he’s about to cry.)
Lynda sucks in her breath and her cunt seizes tightly around Kevin’s cock and Kevin feels it all the way up his spine and down to his toes, blood pounding in his temples, his heart squeezing tighter than a fist, as if it will never relax again. He clenches his arms around her back, digging his fingers into her; he groans wordlessly into the salty flesh of her shoulder. He can feel his balls pumping into her. Then Lynda goes slack, her head drooping over his shoulder, her ass sagging back against his knees. His own limbs turn rubbery and he can barely hold her up, her sweat pooling under his palms. Through her tangled hair he sees bodies thumping in the living room, limned in red light. Nobody’s in the window anymore. It’s another song now, they fucked right past the end of the last one. Lynda’s pulse is still pounding, she’s panting against his cheek. His own heart is beating again, slow and hard, and he feels postcoital lassitude spreading through him like a barbiturate. Lynda sighs and rocks back, counting on him to keep her from sliding off his lap to the porch. Her breasts gleam in dark, and she lifts her elbows one more time and brushes back her sweat-stringy strands of hair and gives him the slowest, dirtiest smile he’s ever seen, before or since, the same smile she’ll give him a month or so later, when he finds her in bed with another guy.
“Hey, mister.” The cabbie is looking right at Kevin through the gap between the minivan’s bucket seats.
So what if I didn’t love her—she didn’t love me, no big deal. That night on the porch wasn’t even the best sex he ever had, but it’s the moment he always comes back to, and after fingering this memory threadbare for all these years, he knows it’s only because of where it happened and who might have been watching. Did he really love the Philosopher’s Daughter? Has he ever really loved any of the women he’s known? Has any of them ever really loved him? He’s pretty sure he loved Beth, but they fought all the time. The worst he can say about Stella is that she irritates him, frustrates him, bores him, but Beth, holy shit, Beth used to send him into a rage. There were shouting matches and tears and slammed doors and a couple of times the flinging of substantial objects, capable of inflicting injury. She threw a plate at him once, and he just laughed and said, “A plate? Really? You couldn’t find the rolling pin?” and then she threw another one at him. And once he threw a book at her, a hardcover copy of Rabbit Is Rich, which is a pretty big book, bruising her backside and making him feel guilty for weeks afterward. But that’s what proves he loved her—at least that’s what he tells himself—the fact that they stayed together for so long despite driving each other crazy. It was the longest relationship he’s ever had, it went on for years, but in all that time together he never shook the feeling that she was still making up her mind about him, and in the end, when she did make up her mind, she left. When Beth decided at long last to have a child, she found somebody else to have it with. She didn’t want it to be his, not any more. Stella, on the other hand, tells him all the time she loves him, but always in passing—in the aisle at Gaia, or squeezing him from behind at the kitchen counter, or at the end of a phone call, saying “Love you” in the same singsong way she’d say “Keep in touch” or “Take care.” Never face to face, never in some tender moment, never in bed. She never even meets his eye when she says it. Maybe she thinks she’s wearing him down, like drops of water on a stone. But who’s he to complain? He’s never told her at all he loves her, not once, not even just to be polite, the way he has upon occasion with other women. Yet Stella, thinks Kevin, whom I don’t love, and who may not really love me—maybe she’s just being polite—Stella not only wants to have a child, she wants to have a child with me. She wants us to have a child. She wants to have my child.
“Mister, you’re here.” The cabbie’s glaring at him, tears welling out of the corner of his eyes. “You gotta get out now.”
“I’m sorry,” Kevin says, shifting in his seat, detumes
cent at last. He glances out the window, where he’s surprised to see the ice-blue doors of One Longhorn Place, Barad-dûr. He’s even more surprised to see the cabbie sniffling in the driver’s seat. “Are you okay?” Kevin says.