James Hynes - Next

“Yes,” says Kevin, his forebrain at last wresting the controls away. “I mean, no. ”

“What?” says the barista. The middle-aged are so boring.

“It’s for here,” says Kevin. “No legs.”

The girl slouches away for his legless tea, and Kevin smiles sidelong at the woman and says, “ ‘With legs,’ huh?”

She smiles warily.

“What am I,” says Kevin, “Damon Runyon?”

Her eyebrows lift, her smile widens ever so slightly, and Kevin can see his joke sailing deep into the cornflower blue yonder, without striking a goddamn thing. She doesn’t get it, she’s just being polite — guess they never did Guys and Dolls at Texas A&M — and the embarrassment pulls tight as a wire between them until it’s blessedly snapped by the dreadlocked girl reaching over the counter with the woman’s steaming paper cup of venti double cap something, and Kevin and the woman turn from each other with relief. Kevin pretends to study the baked goods under glass next to the register while the woman taps across the floor in her sensible heels. One of the pastries, he notices, is a madeleine. Good thing he didn’t make a joke about that.

Kevin watches the rotund barista swipe at tables with a damp cloth until the blond barista returns and money and iced tea are exchanged across the retail membrane of the countertop. Kevin hesitates, buys a muffin, and then juggles cup, muffin, and change past the love seat where the businesswoman, legs crossed, displays her excellent calves and swings her toe as she consults a very thin, very stylish silver laptop. A little wheeled suitcase waits at her feet like a faithful dog. She glances up, he glances back, they look away, and Kevin makes for a small round table in the corner, still gleaming from the stout barista’s damp cloth. He sets his tea and muffin before him and takes a bentwood chair where the businesswoman is at the corner of his eye. The windows look up both Sixth and Congress, offering a wide, 270-degree vista of the street corner, like Captain Nemo’s observation bubble in the Nautilus, only instead of flashing schools of fish and lumbering manta rays, he sees just beyond the glass a gangly man in a sleeveless, gold lamé minidress teetering on platform heels, his calves and thighs ropy, his arms veined and hairy. He wears badly applied lipstick and a crooked wig, a Bizarro Mary Tyler Moore circa The Dick Van Dyke Show. A frayed evening bag that doesn’t quite match the minidress dangles from the guy’s knotty forearm.

Kevin sips at his tea. For the first time he notices the rhythmic world music over the speakers — women singing wordlessly over drums — and he hears the padded tapping of the businesswoman at her keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye he notes her pretty pout as she concentrates on her e-mail or whatever. He nibbles the muffin; it’s sweet, but still Beth troubles Kevin like indigestion, a sour backwash that his snack can’t extinguish. Bitch, he thinks, without saying it out loud. Thirteen years they were together, until he was forty-six and she was thirty-eight, and the day Beth told Kevin she was leaving him, he had been lying in the bath in four inches of warm water, a little square of sodden gauze on the loose flesh around his belly button. Somehow, during a walk out at Silver Lake the weekend before, he’d gotten poison ivy. Not on his arms or ankles where he usually got it, but on this little patch of belly. How it got there, under the elastic of his shorts, he had no idea, but now he had a reddened cordillera around the crater of his navel, a little archipelago of pustules that oozed clear liquid, and he was lying in warm water with a coffee cup full of warm Domeboro’s solution on the edge of the tub. It was a black promotional cup, the logo for The Sopranos with its semi-automatic R printed in red on the side. He was reading an old Martin Amis novel with a black cover as he soaked, and every couple of pages he carefully balanced the split-spined paperback on the edge of the tub and ladled another teaspoon or two of warm, grainy solution onto his belly, little white flecks of powder catching in the soaking weave of the gauze. When Beth came in, Kevin looked up cluelessly, thinking she’d just come for a leisurely chat, and for a moment he contemplated lunging out of the tub, damn the cup and the book, and dragging her in, jeans and T-shirt and all. He’d done it before, though not for years, but why not? She looked good, and, if he did say so himself, he didn’t look too bad for forty-six, even stretched out pale and hairy in lukewarm bathwater. His arms and chest were firm and his legs strong, though he’d got this little pouch just below his belly button that he couldn’t make go away, no matter how many crunches he did. But Beth perched on the lid of the toilet, the toes of her Birkenstocks pressed to the tile and her heels lifted, her knees primly together. She leaned forward with her forearms together and her long fingers tightly laced and looked intently at him for a moment before she reached over the edge of the tub and lifted the book out of his hand. Then, without preface, she said, “I’m pregnant and it’s not yours.”

He lay there with the water cooling all around him, the gauze turning chill on his slack belly. As he listened to her—“I’m in love with him, and I want to have a child with him”—he reached for the cup. Instead of ladling out more solution, he put the wet spoon on the open book, where a wet patch instantly soaked into the page, and he poured the rest of the cup slowly over his belly, watching the milky water pool in his navel and overflow through the thicket of hair into the bath. Then he set the cup back on the edge of the tub, very carefully so that it didn’t make a sound, and he turned it around so that he was reading the Sopranos tagline on the other side, in fat red letters against the black ceramic: FAMILY. REDEFINED. Beth said she wouldn’t make a fuss, she didn’t want his money or his house, and she hoped he wouldn’t make a fuss either. “I want a child,” she said, squeezing her fingers bloodless, “and you won’t give me one.” Now the urge to grab her and haul her into the tub was almost overwhelming. Not out of rage, Kevin thought — though he couldn’t be sure — but for some reason he felt an overpowering lust for her that he hadn’t felt in a couple of years. He really wanted to fuck her right there in the tub, the way they used to, in a rubbery tangle of limbs and bumping elbows and splashing water. There was probably some evolutionary reading of his desire — she’d been with another man and now his genes needed to reassert their dominance over the guy who’d knocked her up, or some Dawkins shit like that. But even knowing that, Kevin thought there was something irreducible and elemental about the emotion. It was what it was: she’d been with another man, and it made him hot. In the tub he’d been aware of his penis lolling, the black nimbus of hair at its root shifting like seaweed in the sloshing bathwater. God help me if it gets hard, thought Kevin, because he knew that what would have been friskiness a few years before would be something close to assault now. Plus, even he could read her body language: toes and knees together, hands clenched into a single white-knuckled fist. His lust cooled like the water lapping his flanks and thighs, and he was filled with sorrow at the thought that he’d already made love to this woman, whom he used to love and maybe still did, sorta, kinda, for the last time.

Now, in Starbucks, slumped over his muffin, he’s not the least bit aroused, just really, really sad. The morning sunlight pours through the window and across the table before him, warming his iced tea. The muffin has a scallop in it, though he doesn’t remember taking a bite, couldn’t even say exactly what kind of muffin it is. He’s almost nauseous with melancholy now, and he pushes the dead muffin across the tabletop. He’s angry, too, for letting this get to him, today of all days. It’s been four years, for chrissakes, going on five, he has a new lover, a striking, high-maintenance woman even younger than Beth. And Beth — boy, has she moved on, she has a kid who’s almost as old as their breakup. Even so, he’s always pissed off when he stumbles over another hidden trip wire of regret. The insipid moaning of the women over the stereo only makes it worse, and the rattle of the businesswoman’s keyboard behind him makes him want to snap at her. Still, he’s sorry he ever called Beth a bitch, even silently. Then he sits up a little straighter in the chair because he’s got nothing to be sorry for, goddammit, it’s not his fault that sorrow overwhelms him, that’s just middle-age, buddy, everybody regrets something. He and Beth were together for thirteen years, and that’s a lot of emotional momentum, a runaway freight train rolling downhill, nothing but tanker cars full of toxic waste and high explosives, and sometimes he feels like he’s tied to the fucking track.