James Hynes - Next

“Sorry?” He can’t hear her over the clatter of the spatula against the grill and the wh-wh-whirl of the ceiling fans and the thumping dance beat of a Latin pop song, but still he seems to know this place instinctively. The wholly satisfying smell of frying meat, the insistent music, the narrow layout with high tables on one side and the grill on the other, the grease-laminated workers jostling each other — he’s been here before.

Claudia beckons him to the register, where a sad-eyed man in a white guayabera and crisp khakis turns his melancholy gaze to Kevin.

“He’s paying,” she says to the man, then, to Kevin, “right?”

“Absolutely!” Kevin jerks his wallet from his hip pocket. Only then does he see the big hand-lettered menu board behind Claudia, four columns of tight little letters, yellow and blue against black, listing tacos in all their infinite variety.

“You don’t even want to look at that,” Claudia says. “We’ll be here all day. I already ordered for both of us.”

“Great!” But as Kevin pops his wallet open, Claudia touches his wrist.

“Unless you’re a vegetarian. I should have asked.”

“Me? No,” says Kevin, and as he hands the guayabera a twenty a veil falls from his eyes and the déjà vu resolves; he almost hears a heavenly choir. It’s the menu board that’s put him over: all it needs is a couple of cartoon bears and the slogan “2,147,483,648 Combinations!” He starts laughing, causing Claudia and the cashier to exchange a glance.

“Blimpy Burger!” Kevin exclaims. “You’ve taken me to Austin’s Blimpy Burger!”

The guayabera frowns and hands Kevin his change and a receipt. “You’re number fifty-eight.” He hands a couple of plastic glasses over the counter to Claudia.

“Why don’t you find us a seat outside.” She nods toward an open door where the midday glare leaches in. “And I’ll get us some tea.”

Kevin stops to pee in a tiny toilet, no bigger than a broom closet. Then, with the greasy gust of AC at his back like a gentle shove, he steps down into a courtyard of packed dirt, surrounded by a wooden fence and overhung with an enormous, leafy tree. His torn trouser leg flapping, he limps under unlit strings of party lights and settles gratefully into a plastic chair at a rough, unsteady wooden table. A couple of lean young guys in shorts and T-shirts slouch at another table, talking quietly, while a pair of black birds looking for scraps strut in the dirt like little T. rexes. One of them boldly flaps up onto a nearby table and insolently fixes Kevin with one fathomless black eye. Kevin waves his hand until the bird flaps into the dirt again, then he settles back into the flexible grip of the chair.

The mottled shadow of the tree trembles in a breeze Kevin can’t feel, but it is cooler than in the direct sunlight, and the rumble of traffic on Lamar is muffled by the fence. An old Mobil sign with a faded Pegasus hangs on the fence, while across the side of the building is a colorful and very un-Texan mural of two clumsily drawn sheep in an alpine meadow full of freakishly large dandelions. Nailed to the whitish bark of the tree are three desiccated old cowboy boots, shriveled and colorless, with broken toes. The décor is accretive and eclectic, but authentically so (though as a scholarly editor Kevin knows better than to take “authenticity” at face value), not like the fastidiously art-directed eclecticism of the yuppie bars in Ann Arbor — the kind Stella likes — or the Disneyfied hominess of a chain family restaurant — the kind his mother frequents for lunch with her gal pals. Still, there’s something self-conscious about it — it’s a hip place that knows it’s hip — but then, what isn’t self-conscious anymore?

Indeed, Kevin’s experiencing a very self-conscious sort of metahappiness at the moment: relieved that Claudia has brought him to an unexpectedly familiar place, while at the same time surprised by his own relief. The strangeness and alienation of the morning, the uncharacteristic behavior he’s indulged in, the awkwardness of every exchange so far — all of it is temporarily eased by the familiar feel and smell of a place where he’s never been in his life. It’s like a little bit of Ann Arbor, and not just any bit, but Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger—“Cheaper Than Food!”—one of the few constants of his last thirty years. Ann Arbor has grown a thick crust like barnacles all around it, of strip malls and big box stores, which is surrounded in turn by vast plantations of McMansions, all the way out to Saline and Dexter. Most of the funky little bars and clubs and restaurants of his younger days are long gone. But Blimpy’s, God bless it, Blimpy’s endures. It’s been his unofficial polestar — for most of his adult life he’s lived within a five-minute walk of the place, at Packard and South Division, from his freshman year in the hive of South Quad to his middle age as a homeowner on Fifth Avenue. Sometimes he even wonders if the real reason he bought his house was just to stay in walking distance of his regular burger — a triple with provolone, grilled onions, and mushrooms on an onion roll. Beth objected to Blimpy’s at first, until he shrewdly made the buy-local, at-least-it’s-not-McDonald’s argument, after which she beat a tactical retreat and stopped giving him a hard time about it. Stella, however, won’t eat there at all anymore after their one disastrous visit together. She wrinkled her nose at the smell the moment they walked in, then tried to order a single patty, extra lean, on a whole wheat bun.

“Extra lean? ” said the gloriously mouthy black woman at the grill. “Girl, you know where you are?” Part of the charm of the place, Kevin tried to explain later, was the surliness of the help.

Stella settled for a double without cheese on a regular roll, then sat with Kevin at his favorite spot in the wide front window — with its Cinemascope view of the old redbrick Perry School across the street and the leafy ridge of the Old West Side beyond — pinching her knees together and tucking in her elbows as if afraid to touch anything. With undisguised distaste she lifted the top of her bun between two sharp red fingernails. Kevin almost pointed out that at Zingermann’s Deli she regularly ordered the most enormous, and enormously calorific, sandwiches; what you’re objecting to, he almost said, is that the food here is cheap. But instead he repeated what the woman at the grill had said, which turned out to be another mistake.

“Have you ever seen a picture,” she said, wide-eyed with schadenfreude, “of a human heart encased in fat?”

“My heart’s fine,” he said, though his glorious mouthful of beef, provolone, mushroom, onion, and mayo had suddenly turned to offal in his mouth. “I’m a runner, remember?”

“A friend of my father?” she whispered. “A runner? For twenty years? Keeled over dead with a massive coronary. During a marathon.”

“Huh,” said Kevin, swallowing hard.

Since then they don’t talk about it, and Kevin’s visits are clandestine and guilty, as if he’s cheating on her instead of merely indulging in the occasional greasy cheeseburger. Luckily, her job takes her out of town for two or three days at a time, and in fact, Kevin ate at Blimpy’s just last night, indulging himself in a quad and a large order of rings, knowing that for once it didn’t matter if his breath smelled of onions afterward.

With a little electric crackle, the amplified voice of the guayabera issues from a loudspeaker bolted to the tree. “Number fifty-six, your order’s ready,” says the voice, and one of the young guys at the other table glances at his receipt, rises, and crosses the courtyard, scattering the black birds strutting at his feet. At the door he stands aside for Claudia, who is bearing a glass of iced tea in each hand. Without smiling, she fixes Kevin in her dark-eyed gaze like a raptor zeroing in on a rabbit, and Kevin, thrilled and terrified, sits up straighter in his wobbly chair. She switches her hips between the tables, never taking her gaze off him, and sets the sweating glasses on their table. She lifts her plastic chair back one-handed.