James Hynes - Next

“The Black Crowes” was the first thing she’d ever said to him, as they both waited in line at the Royale one bright spring morning. They’d been taking turns glancing at each other for the past minute or so, and at last she’d turned and caught him admiring her firm calves and the way she dangled her slim briefcase before her, her slender fingers linked through the leather handle. And what she said was “The Black Crowes.”

“Sorry?”

She dipped her broad forehead toward him. It was a calculated effect, he knew it the moment she did it, but even so it worked and he leaned closer.

“The Black Crowes?” She shimmied a little in place. “On the stereo?”

Kevin lifted his chin and put on his listening face. One of the harried undergrads on the morning shift at the Royale was feeling retro this morning; the speakers were broadcasting “Brown Sugar,” the first song Kevin had ever danced to, back in the Pleistocene. Before he could stop himself, Kevin laughed.

The young woman pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. She had a mane of kinky, dirty-blond hair, barely restrained in a shaggy ponytail; clear skin pulled tight across a flawless forehead; a strong jaw. She was very slightly bandy-legged, accentuated by the boxy heels of her pumps. A black-and-white polka-dot skirt, wasp-waisted blazer.

“Can’t a girl like the old bands?” she growled, and in spite of himself, in spite of her lovely narrow waist and strong-looking legs, Kevin laughed again.

“How old are you?” he asked her, before he had time to think.

“Twenty-nine?” she said, blushing. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Sorry.” Kevin brushed her elbow with the tips of his fingers. “It’s the music. It’s just…” He smiled. “You made me feel old is all.”

She looked puzzled, but turned a little more in his direction. Kevin was aware without looking that the twenty-year-olds ahead of and behind them were rolling their eyes and exchanging smirks at this elderly flirtation, but fuck ’em. The young \’yeη\ n, pl : those on whom youth is wasted.

“The band’s older than you think.” Kevin lowered his voice and gestured with his eyebrows into the aural space above their heads, where the song had reached the climactic moment when Mick and the lads chanted, “Yeah… yeah… yeah… whoooo! ” The very point at which, in the sweaty, paneled, suburban basements of his youth, Kevin and his tube- or halter-topped partner, shaking their hip-huggers to the thumpa-thumpa Watts and Wyman beat, would chant along and waggle their hands in the air. “How come ya, how come ya dance so good? ”

“It’s not the Black Crowes,” he murmured, inclining his head toward hers. “It’s the Rolling Stones.” Then he added, “The Black Crowes of their day,” never sure how much a young person would know of the popular music of the Pleistocene. “Sort of.”

“ I know that,” said the young woman, and she unlaced the long fingers of one hand from the grip of her briefcase, her nails a deep but not unprofessional shade of red, and playfully rapped his arm with her knuckles. “How old are you? ”

Good question, thinks Kevin, trotting through the Texas heat after a girl who’s even younger than Stella, a girl whose father he is old enough to be. Up ahead Joy Luck dashes on tiptoe across Sixth Street, the duffel bouncing heavily on her shoulder, her arm thrown out for balance, her sandals flapping loose of her heels. A block behind her Kevin crosses, too. She turns left down a side street, and when he reaches the corner, Kevin pauses to slug down the rest of his tea in one long, wobbling gulp. By now it’s as warm as his sweating palm, it’s like drinking some bodily fluid of his own, and as Joy Luck sways downhill toward the river, he tosses the empty cup in a trash can and plods after her. His shirt’s wilting under his jacket, sweat courses along his sideburns and down the groove of his spine.

What will he say if he catches her? Will he say anything at all, or just watch her longingly from a distance, some cow-eyed, sweaty loser in a wilted suit? What if she recognizes him and asks him, point-blank, why he’s following her? Does he even know why? Say he tells her it’s because she walks like a girl he slept with for three months back in the eighties — Christ, that’s even more ridiculous than simple, middle-aged lust. What would a young woman say to such an avowal? What could she say? Would she find it poignant or touching, or just pathetic? Is it pathetic? It makes him feel old just to think about it. This is way out of the ordinary for Kevin, he doesn’t follow young women in strange cities as a general rule, but still he keeps walking. Certainly he expects nothing to happen. In Ann Arbor he knows the ground, has a clearer sense of where he has a shot and where he doesn’t. Indeed, his flirtations in Ann Arbor, like that first morning in Expresso Royale, have paid off occasionally, though rarely as precipitately as they did with Stella.

“Let an old man buy you coffee,” he’d said when they reached the counter, and “Brown Sugar” had segued into “Sway.” Half an hour later, they had a dinner date, and that evening, during a pleasantly anticipatory meal at the Mongolian Barbecue downtown, where he took all his first dates, he got the Stella backstory: sales rep for a textbook company, just moved here from St. Louis, didn’t know a soul, did he know of any apartments for rent? Funny you should ask, he said, not really thinking it through. Forty-five minutes later he was showing her the empty apartment on the ground floor of his house on Fifth Avenue. Where, up against a bare wall, in the dark, and against his better judgment, he agreed on the spot to rent her the apartment—“French doors!” she’d exclaimed. “Oh God, a fireplace!”—and then uttered not a word of demurral as she dropped to her knees on the newly revarnished hardwood floor and fellated him. Well, maybe it was the other way around, she blew him first and then he offered her the apartment — he’s hazy on the details, he was a little drunk at the time — but either way it was an epic fellation. She took her time, she acted as if she enjoyed it, she had technique. Whatever warnings the Jiminy Cricket in his forebrain might have had about a young woman who was willing to blow her potential landlord on the first date were sluiced away in the patella-rattling rush of pleasure, and by his relief, considering where she was putting her mouth, that she hadn’t ordered the bird peppers with her stir-fry.

The street before him descends toward the river between low, old, brick warehouses converted into bars and restaurants. A half-built condo tower looms over the end of the street, the giant crane above it sweeping as slow as a second hand. Joy Luck crosses an alley and sails up a raised sidewalk under an awning. Kevin jogs to close the gap, and suddenly a battered white van pulls out of the alley right in front of him, and a young driver with a jigging Adam’s apple cranes over the steering wheel, looking both ways. Kevin dodges left to go round the back of the van, but it’s too close to a telephone pole, and he finds himself nose-to-nose with an old red flyer, now faded to pink, stapled to the splintered wood — DOES MARX MATTER? Sponsored, Kevin notes, by the Intercontinental Socialist Alliance, six months ago, on the University of Texas campus. He sees flyers like this every day of his life in Ann Arbor, and over thirty years he’s gone from a mildly guilty, dilettantish interest through grumpiness to eye-rolling bemusement. He can see the sparse crowd, most of them coreligionists of the speaker, and most of them, men and women both, fatally uncool: humorless, pedantic, puritanical little narcissists with burning eyes and a Talmudic grasp of infinitesimal ideological details. During Kevin’s undergraduate years, people like this seemed like the vanguard of something, but now, after the Fall of the Wall and the Fall of the Two Towers and the Fall of Kevin’s Fiftieth Birthday, a meeting like this seems as quaint as college boys in raccoon coats strumming ukuleles. Nowadays disaffected young men like the Other Kevin — slave of the Prophet, blessings be upon him — turn to actual religions for their ideology. Same sort of cheerless meetings, Kevin suspects, in the same sort of cheerless, overlit meeting rooms, only with fewer girls. Or probably no girls at all.