James Hynes - Next

Across the room Joy Luck drops the guy’s hand, and the poor guy almost involuntarily reaches for her again. Then he catches himself, as spastic as Dr. Strangelove, and jerks his hand back over the sheen of his head, rubbing so hard he furrows the back of his scalp. That was the other side of the Philosopher’s Daughter, of course — jolt you awake like a nine-volt battery, then cut you off at the knees. Not to mix a metaphor or anything, thinks Kevin, but she could cut you dead in an instant, stick a shiv between your ribs, yank your heart out of your chest, and drop-kick it into the next county. Even after all these years, Kevin can feel the little blood pressure gauge in his head throb into the red zone. Half a moment more and he’ll be as red-faced as a cartoon character, veins bulging and steam shooting out of his ears.

“Do you want to know why I don’t think I could love you, Kevin?” said the Philosopher’s Daughter, in that voice at once sensible and pixieish.

“Not really,” said Kevin, and then she told him anyway.

“Curses, foiled again!” goes the singer on the radio, and Kevin’s another victim of the Red Baroness of Washtenaw County: he’s shrieking toward earth, his legs shot off at the knees, his guns jammed, his craft in flames and trailing a winding spiral of bitter black smoke. Many men died trying to end that spree, and he’s just another stencil on her fuselage. Mere moments to live, he should be making peace with the Almighty, but all he can see is her porcelain face and the cool, appraising light in her eye as she watches him bleed slowly to death.

“Shit,” Kevin says aloud, and too late he realizes he’s gripped the paper so hard that the section has doubled over as if in pain. I can’t believe, he almost says aloud, I can’t believe that I still let this get to me after twenty-five years. It’s not like he still loves her — he’s seen her a couple, three times since then, he even went to her wedding with no ill effect — but he still experiences that one moment, when she told him what she told him, as if it happened ten minutes ago. Love fades, but rage and humiliation endure forever.

And so it’s now, while Kevin’s glowering like a serial killer, that Joy Luck turns away from the laptop guy with a final, flirty wag of her fingertips, and walks straight toward him. Kevin’s right in her eye line, and as his eyes refocus from the memory of the Philosopher’s Daughter’s cold victory to the midmorning twilight of Empyrean, he finds himself looking straight at Joy Luck. Her eyes were fixed and glistening before, now they’re hard. She’s angry again, and Kevin’s breath catches in his throat, his heart thumps like an animal trying to burst out of his chest. She’s knows who I am! He cannot look away — but Joy Luck does. Her glare glides right over him as she sails past his sofa and pushes out the door. A little gust of warmth from the hot morning outside brushes Kevin’s knees.

Kevin sags into the cushions, relieved, but also disappointed. She doesn’t recognize me, he thinks. She sat next to me for three hours on the plane, six inches apart for three hours, and she doesn’t fucking recognize me. I’m wearing my magic ring of middle-aged invisibility, a dog-faced old burgher like Bilbo Baggins, only taller.

He starts to laugh, and the two other men in Empyrean look up from behind the counter and a dimly glowing laptop screen. Kevin discovers that he’s standing, clutching the crumpled newspaper in one hand. The laptop guy sighs (over what, Kevin wonders, over whom?) and raps at his keyboard. The gaunt barista, The Joy Luck Club in his hands once again, watches Kevin with professional wariness. His eyes slide to the untouched glass of tea and back to Kevin. Kevin forces a smile and drops the paper on the couch behind him.

“Bad news,” he says. The barista says nothing, doesn’t even nod, just watches, and Kevin slides around the coffee table and pushes out the door, after Joy Luck.

Walking into the heat again is like wading fully clothed into warm water, and the air itself drags Kevin to a halt just beyond the shadow of Empyrean’s awning. Across the empty street the low old buildings have been divvied up into trendy bars and restaurants, nighttime facades of dark brick and tinted glass like the bars along Liberty and Washington in Ann Arbor, only here, on a Texas morning, they have a hungover squint against the unblinking sunlight. The street is empty. Where’s Joy Luck?

There she is! Empyrean’s patio, the old loading dock, pushes out into the intersection like a prow, and he can see the top of her head as she descends the steps and pauses for the wall of oncoming traffic to pass. He sidles between the little round tables, wondering what he’ll do if he gets to the corner before she crosses. How can she not recognize him from the plane? And how can she not wonder what the hell he’s doing right next to her on an Austin street corner, radiating longing and strenuously acting like he doesn’t recognize her?

But then she crosses the street against the light, not slinking now, but marching, because she’s out for blood. At the corner Kevin waits for another shoal of cars, their tires making a hollow rumble against the pavement. Up ahead Joy Luck marches past a bar, the Ginger Man, and the little green apple in the small of her back winks at him over the martial but still sensual switch of her jeans. I wouldn’t want to be Ian right now, Kevin thinks. Ian’s in for it, Ian has no idea what’s coming.

Kevin keeps his distance, passing the Ginger Man and another bar, The Fox and Hound. What’s up with this, two English pubs on the same block — these royal thrones of kings, these sceptered isles, these earths of majesty, desiccating in the unforgiving Texas heat. Joy Luck and Kevin, girl and man, are the only pedestrians in sight. From the blank, tinted gaze of the square windows of the office building across the street, is some bored middle manager watching her with the same longing Kevin is? And is he watching Kevin following her? Give it up, bud, says Mr. Middle Manager, you haven’t got a prayer. Or is he the Noel Coward of central Texas, watching in fey bemusement as Kevin — pale, sweating, overdressed — follows the silken-skinned Oriental in a fever of lust and longing past this corner of a foreign land that is forever England. A fox and a hound, indeed, dear boy, how wonderfully droll! Kevin’s dad used to sing Noel Coward in the car, to the mutual embarrassment of Kevin and his sister: Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday, out in the noonday, out in the noonday sun.

But if he stops now, he’ll never know how Joy Luck does that, how she manages to embody not one, but two old flames from Kevin’s Summer of Love, the summer he fell harder for a woman than he ever had before, and the summer he had the most wanton and least guilty sex of his life — but not with the same woman. And Joy Luck reminds him vividly and unmistakably of both. Is she some kind of succubus? Or is it incubus?

At the next corner, cars rushing past her heels, she crosses against the light again into a little park. Keeping well back, Kevin trots after her past a tall, verdigris green sculpture, two elongated, abstract, but sensual figures, one broad in the shoulders, the other broad in the hips, who look like they’re just about to kiss. Succubus, Kevin suddenly concludes, that’s the female version, though he’s not sure why he thinks so. Perhaps it’s because it sounds like “suck.” God, laughs Kevin, am I still that much of an adolescent? She said “suck,” heh heh heh heh. He’s got Stella to thank, he supposes, trudging past the canoodling sculptures. Stella’s epic fellation on the first evening of their acquaintance, the one that emptied his brain of all common sense, is still a high point of their relationship. Beth never was particularly enthusiastic or skillful at going down—“ Teeth, ” he always had to warn her — and she did it only when she was really excited for some reason, nodding furiously over his cock with her eyes squeezed shut. Stella, God bless her, tickles and teases and takes her time, she knows tricks as if she’s actually thought about it. And she keeps her eyes open, watching him wide-eyed over his heaving rib cage. When he reciprocates — a specialty of his, another American practice McNulty told him that the girls all love — he keeps his own eyes shut, nose buried in wiry pubic hair, glancing up only occasionally past her flattened breasts at the straining muscles in her throat. Beth always seemed distracted when he went down on her, as if her own pleasure irritated her somehow, though she always climaxed convincingly enough. There’s a lot of theater in Stella’s ecstasy, though: she arches her back, she claws the sheets, she thrashes her head from side to side. Her voice cracks as she calls his name; a blue vein pounds in her neck. Kevin’s never entirely convinced he’s actually gotten her off, her response is too self-consciously intense, too pornographically hysterical. God knows, though, she takes him in gratefully afterward, when, in another one of his signature moves, he launches himself up between her legs and enters her in one smooth thrust, without looking or guiding himself with his hand. At that moment Beth always turned her face away with a grimace and swiped his lips with the palm of her hand, an exasperated mother wiping her messy brat. But Stella, praise Jesus, mashes her mouth against his and sucks her own juices greedily off his lips.