James Hynes - Next

The van’s driver guns the engine and lurches forward, all of six inches. Kevin bounces on his toes. “Come on. ” Somewhere the Intercontinental Socialists are laughing mirthlessly at his middle-aged longing — another instance, no doubt, of the cultural alienation of late monopoly capitalism. Or maybe some dark-eyed mullah is cursing Kevin’s corrupt Crusader lust, quoting chapter and verse from the Koran. If only the Other Kevin had been luckier with girls, thinks Kevin, maybe he wouldn’t have taken his frustration and rage out on the defenseless commuters of Buchanan Street. The only reason to go to meetings like that, in Kevin’s day, was to meet girls, and if there aren’t any girls, what’s the point? In fact, the last time he went to a meeting like that was with none other than Lynda herself — Lynda à la plage! Lynda on the railing! He was still working at Big Star that summer, and she’d been a fairly regular customer, so he began flirting with her one afternoon as she diffidently flipped through the jazz section, clearly with no intention of buying anything, but slouching in her jeans and tank top over the record bin, bending back the toe of her sandal, pushing aside her strawberry blond hair with the tips of her fingers as she smiled sidelong at him. After some desultory conversation—“Are you into Sun Ra?” “Sort of”—she said she was going to a meeting that night, and would he like to come?

“What kind of meeting?” he’d said, as his Jiminy Cricket started jumping up and down in his brain, shouting, “Watch out! Danger! She’s a Moonie! A Maranatha! A Young Spartacist! All she wants is your soul!”

“Oh, I dunno,” she sighed. “Some nuclear freeze, pro-Sandinista, fuck Reagan kind of thing.” With one hand she lifted her hair at the nape of her neck, exposing to Kevin the pale, expertly shaved scallop of her underarm. “I promised some boy I’d go, but I don’t want to show up, you know, alone?”

“Sure,” said Kevin, throttling Jiminy. “Cool.”

Indeed, it was that same afternoon, shortly after she left, that Mick McNulty had told him of the Battle of Bertrand Russell, and he told Kevin he should definitely go with Lynda to her meeting.

“You ever see the usual guys who show up at those things?” McNulty said in his hipster mumble, politely expelling his cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth away from Kevin. “Scrawny vegetarians, man. Guys who bathe once a week, if that. Guys who wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if one dropped in their lap.” He squinted across the store through his haze of smoke, at something only he could see. “Tom Courtenay,” he said.

“Tom Courtenay?”

“In Zhivago, man. You ever see that flick?”

“Sure,” said Kevin.

“Yeah, Dr. Zhivago, ” McNulty continued, slowly remembering. “Julie Christie’s his girlfriend — Julie Christie, man! — but he has a hard-on for Trotsky.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you, you’re Omar Sharif, okay?” McNulty gestured with his cigarette, dragging tendrils of smoke through the air. “Take it from me, man, these political chicks are desperate for some red meat.” He tapped Kevin meaningfully on his sternum. “So you go be Yuri Zhivago.”

Kevin laughed, and McNulty shrugged and dragged the last out of his Marlboro. “You’ll have to listen to some political shit,” he gasped, “but so what? At least you don’t have to tell her you love her.”

And so, after hearing balalaika music in his head all afternoon, Kevin went. He can’t remember now what the meeting was about, except that it rapidly devolved into an argument about the number of women of color on the organizing committee. He vividly remembers the venue, though, a windowless, subterranean classroom in the Modern Languages Building — he can picture it down to the subliminal strobing of the fluorescents, the unswept candy wrappers in the corners, the useless fragments of chalk in the chalkboard tray. Christ, he can smell it even now, the dank air-conditioning of MLB, the years of floor polish and disinfectant. And he remembers Lynda introducing him to the boy who’d invited her, a rodent-faced little guy in a leather vest who looked more like Ratso Rizzo than Tom Courtenay, who limply shook Kevin’s hand and said to Lynda, with barely disguised anger, “I think it’s cool that you brought somebody.”

Most of all, though, Kevin remembers sitting in the back of the room with Lynda, the two of them slumped in classroom desks like a couple of bored sixteen-year-olds. Lynda had brought a pint of Jack Daniels in a little paper sack, and they passed it back and forth, sneaking swigs and stifling their laughter. Poor, luckless Ratso Rizzo would have murdered them with his gaze, but as luck would have it, he ended up as one of the chief combatants in the climactic contretemps, violently shaking his miniature forefinger at a plump black girl with cornrows, who waved her more substantial forefinger back at him and shouted, “Motherfucker, don’t you shake that finger at me!” At which point, Lynda grabbed Kevin by the wrist with her cool fingers and dragged him out of the room, where they ran doubled over with laughter down the hall. Ten minutes later, they were seated halfway up the steps of the grad library, looking over the Diag in the long midwestern twilight, the top of Burton Tower golden in the last of the day’s light, and they finished the Jack swig by swig, turn and turn about, getting a nice, mutual buzz on. Kevin sat on the step above her and Lynda sat between his thighs, drumming her fingers on his knees, the bottle on the step between her legs. He lightly pulled at the hair at the nape of her neck, and she tilted her head back and handed up the last of the whiskey, pursing her lips when she caught him enjoying the view down the front of her tank top.

“What are you looking at?” she said. And half an hour after that, in Lynda’s summer sublet, a steamy attic room at the top of a cooperative house on Jefferson Avenue, they were happily balling on her sketchy mattress — yes, balling, Kevin thought, that’s exactly the word — and he laughed out loud, right in the saddle as it were, thrusting away in that lovely, loose-hipped way the girls loved. The two of them slick as seals in the heat, the window wide open, their grunts and moans wafting into the treetops just under the eaves, eine kleine nachtmusik for an Ann Arbor summer evening.

“Why were you laughing?” she asked him afterward, pursing her lips at him again as they sprawled together, hot and panting and reeking of sweat and semen and pussy.

“I’m just really… happy!” Kevin laughed, just drunk enough to be telling the truth.

“ Move, ” he shouts now, rapping on the side of the van with his knuckles, filling it with a hollow rumble. The driver guns it into the street, wheels smoking against the pavement. Kevin hears a muffled, diminishing, “Fuck you, asshole!” from the driver, and feels, without actually seeing it, the guy’s middle finger thrust in his direction. But he doesn’t care, because right there, up ahead, silhouetted against the blazing Texas sky, lifting her hair away from the sweaty nape of her neck in a gesture he hasn’t seen in a quarter of a century, a gesture that makes his heart tumble like a gymnast, is Lynda herself, swaying round the corner out of sight, the ends of her duffel bounding slowly with every step.

Okay, not Lynda, actually, but close enough. He rounds the corner and finds another, funkier coffeehouse called Empyrean, with a hand-painted sign, purple letters across a starry sky between a grinning sun and a sultry moon. Through a side window he sees swaybacked sofas, blowsy easy chairs, a vintage floor lamp with a fringed shade. In the shade of an awning, he tiptoes between the empty tables of a patio — formerly a loading dock — and plays peekaboo behind the flyers taped in the front window, watching Joy Luck prop her duffel on end against a couch at the back of the shop. As Kevin pretends to read flyers for a poetry slam and a band called Titty Bingo, Joy Luck smiles at someone he can’t see and tugs at a zipper at the bulging end of the duffel. He watches her yank The Joy Luck Club free and with a backhand snap of the wrist sail it toward her unseen interlocutor. Then she gives the duffel a proprietorial little pat and disappears down a dim hallway into the back.