James Hynes - Next

When he finally peeks over his shoulder, her swaying backside is disappearing behind the liquor store across the street, and he sags with relief. At the corner, he sits on a ledge outside a bar called Molotov to catch his breath and let her get ahead of him. In the shade for the first time since he left Empyrean, he clutches his limp jacket to his chest with both arms, watching Joy Luck stride up Sixth toward a massive redbrick building like a fortress. He peers through the tinted window into Molotov, taking off his sunglasses and shading his eyes against the warm glass. The place is empty at this hour: an unpainted concrete floor; a long, featureless curve of space-age banquette; a pair of thirty-year-old, piss-yellow La-Z-Boys. There’s a mock socialist realist painting along the back wall, an idiotically smiling rocket scientist holding up an ICBM like it was a banana. Six months from now — if he’s offered the job and he takes it — he could be on the other side of this window listening to music he doesn’t recognize, chatting up women much too young for him, and paying extortionate prices for some cocktail they’d seen on The Hills or whatever they’re watching now. Not like his days at the Central Café back in Ann Arbor, when just after closing he and the rest of the immortally young waitstaff used to do a line each right off the prep table — hello, Mr. Health Inspector! — and then swagger en masse to the Rubiyat, where they would do more blow in the bathroom and dance to “It’s Raining Men” or “Atomic Dog” until three or four in the morning, and where one memorable dawn — a dawn he has never spoken of to another living soul and never will, a dawn that both mortifies and titillates him until this very moment — he woke up in Ypsilanti in the bed of a man he didn’t recognize and never saw again, and walked all the way up Washtenaw back to Ann Arbor in the freezing rain even before the buses were running, with a crippling headache and a taste in his mouth that he hoped never to identify. Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay!

Or — as he turned away from the gloom of Molotov’s window — there were his less cringe-worthy Big Star days, when he had an arrangement with the bouncer of Second Chance across the street — he gave Danny advance copies of reggae records and Danny comped him into shows — and he saw the Ramones for free. Those were the days when he took the Philosopher’s Daughter to see R.E.M. not once, but twice — once at the Blind Pig and again at Joe’s Star Lounge — and she spurned his advances both times. Once because he wasn’t tender enough, and the other because he wasn’t sufficiently passionate. Stop! he nearly says aloud, and reminds himself that most nights at the Pig or Joe’s, he could buy a girl three or four beers in a plastic cup and at least count on making out with her later on, sometimes even right outside the club in the narrow back seat of his yellow Pinto. “A Pinto?” she’d say, half-drunk. “Aren’t you afraid it’ll, like, blow up?” And Kevin, tugging at the strap of her tank top and clumsily trying to find her nipple with the tip of his tongue, would pause to say, “Kinda adds to the thrill, doesn’t it?”

But the thing is, standing here now in the heat, twenty-five years later and fifteen hundred miles from Michigan, he knows he couldn’t say a word about any of this to any of the girls he’d meet in a lounge like Molotov; they wouldn’t give a shit that he’d seen the Police at Bookie’s on their first American tour. Or that he once drunkenly yelled, “I wanna have your child!” to Patti Smith in Second Chance and that Patti gave him the finger. Or that once, in the Fleetwood Diner at two in the morning, he sat next to James Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop — a tiny little guy in eyeliner, Ypsilanti’s favorite son — and that Iggy accepted a steak fry from Kevin’s plate. Hell, apart from their first conversation vis-à-vis the Rolling Stones and the Black Crowes, he couldn’t even have this conversation with Stella, even though she isn’t quite as young as she said she was. The thing is, Kevin thinks, still sitting in the shadow of the lounge’s awning, Stella would like Molotov, just like she likes watching reruns of Sex and the City over and over again. They usually watch from his bed, Stella clinging to him like a limpet, tapping his chest with her red nails, asking him, what does he think of the shoes Carrie’s wearing? Or does he ever wonder if Miranda is too much of a bitch? Or is Samantha empowered, or just a slut? She asks him like it matters what he thinks, but then shushes him when he tries to answer. So he has no doubt she’d love this pretentious little lounge in Austin: she’d want to live in a hideously expensive condominium in one of the new blocks, right up at the top, and she’d doll herself up every night and come down here and drink too much and laugh too loud, her eyes swimming in Absolut, and she’d wriggle her delightful ass in that awful La-Z-Boy like a happy little girl in the teacup ride at Disneyland, because to her a La-Z-Boy is funny, wonderfully retro, not a stomach-churning reminder (as it is to Kevin) of the suburban anomie of the hideous paneled basements of his youth. That’s what a twenty-year difference in age (okay, fifteen, if we’re going by Stella’s driver’s license) does to a relationship: artifacts that make Kevin suicidally despondent — a recliner, his mother’s cocktail glasses, his father’s golf trophies, his sister’s Partridge Family 45s — are exotic objets d’art to Stella, like African masks or Indonesian batik. Kevin’s depressing Ice Storm boyhood is Stella’s theme park.

He sighs. In the bright sunlight ahead, Joy Luck has crossed a bridge and started up a hill toward the redbrick fortress. She’s dwindled in the sunlight from a flesh-and-blood girl, with muscles gliding beneath her skin, her apple tattoo winking over her jeans, to an incorporeal, impressionist squiggle that means Girl, a couple of charcoal lines narrow in the middle and wide at the hips. He stands and steps out into the sunlight again and starts after her. Stella, Stella, Stella, he’s thinking, how’d that happen? She’s even met his mother, once, through no fault of Kevin’s, the day his mother asked him and his sister to come sort through the junk in the basement in Royal Oak. At last she was selling the old house and moving into a condo—“If you want any of this stuff,” she warned him over the phone, “it’s speak now or forever hold your peace”—and Stella invited herself along, as pert as Sarah Jessica herself in white tennis shorts and a ball cap with her bushy pony tail tugged through the back. She and Mom yakked it up in the kitchen, drinking highballs at one on a Saturday afternoon while Kevin and Kathleen sweated and sneezed in the basement, going through mold-spotted cardboard boxes full of nameless crap that Kevin, honest to God, had hoped never to see again.

“Ohmi god! ” he heard Stella cry as he stumbled up out of the basement. “You’re not getting rid of this, are you?” Through the archway he saw Mom in the living room, swinging her leg in the rocking chair, dangling her second or third highball from her bent wrist. He got himself a glass of water at the kitchen sink, then came in and saw Stella bent over the back of the sofa, running her palms sensuously over the nubbly fabric. It used to be white, but now it was dirty white like an old dog, kind of gray, really, with cigarette burns and other unidentifiable stains that no combination of flipping the cushions could disguise.

“If you want to haul it out of here, hon,” Kevin’s mother said, “it’s all yours.”

Stella characteristically overdid her gratitude, dropping her jaw and widening her eyes at Mom. “No way, ” she said, stamping her foot. “You are not. ”