James Hynes - Next

“That’s hard,” he says. “A thing like that. Somebody you love says the last thing you want to hear.”

“Yes.” Her gaze is withdrawing again. Another moment, and they’ll both be casting about for something to do with their hands, looking everywhere but at each other, like a first date gone bad. Gosh, look at the time. Suddenly he’s certain he’s disappointed her somehow — she’s just told him this story that she hasn’t told anyone else, thinking he might understand in a way that the men she usually deals with might not, and the best he can do is offer bromides. No doubt she’s just made up her mind about him as peremptorily as her father would have, and the last thing he wants to know is what she thinks of him, some soft-handed, sweaty, heatstruck, middle-aged white guy from up north. In fact, he suddenly has an unreasonable fear that that’s precisely what she’s about to do, fix him with her gaze across the table, drill him down to his spine, and tell him exactly what he doesn’t want to hear.

“Listen.” Kevin sits sharply forward, rocking the rickety table, sloshing tea over the lip of his glass. Both of them react instinctively, steadying the table with their palms, reaching for their respective glasses.

“Listen,” says Kevin again, and their eyes lock across the table. “I was in love with this girl once. This is, like… twenty-five years ago.”

Now that he says it out loud — twenty-five years! — it feels more like a century. It’s half his lifetime ago, but at the same time it feels like it was yesterday.

“She was the daughter of a professor of mine, a philosophy professor, in the town where I went to college. In the town where I still live, in fact.”

Where did this come from? He can’t believe he’s telling her this. He never told Beth, and certainly not Stella. He’s started speaking, in fact, before he’s even realized that this was what he was going to say. But it was on his mind earlier, in Empyrean, and now he’s sitting up straight in his chair, keenly aware of the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence, the tinny throb of amplified music, the tremor of leaves overhead, the black-eyed birds strutting in the dirt, the pressure of the heat all around their table. He’s aware of Claudia’s startled gaze over their never-to-be-finished lunch.

“I didn’t know her when I was in school,” he’s saying, “when her father was my professor. I only met her a few years after I graduated, when she was still in college and she used to share a house with a friend of mine.”

Who also loved her, though Kevin doesn’t say that. Half the guys Kevin knew in Ann Arbor in the mid-eighties were in love with the Philosopher’s Daughter.

“And even then, I didn’t really get to know her until a year or two later, one summer after she graduated from Michigan, and she was living in her parents’ attic, in this big old farmhouse halfway to Saline.” He pauses. “That’s a little town outside of Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, “Michigan.”

Claudia gestures, go on.

“Anyway, this girl, she always had a cloud of guys circling around her, waiting for whoever she was seeing at the moment to go away or be dumped, so they could take their shot. You know what I mean?”

Kevin’s dimly aware of the potential awkwardness of telling a middle-aged woman what a babe another, younger woman used to be — though, actually, she’d be older now than Claudia — but Dr. Barrientos seems to be taking it in stride. She nods, at any rate.

“I don’t know where her parents were that particular summer, but she always seemed to have the house to herself, and she used to have people out there all the time, for cook-outs or parties or whatever.”

One party in particular, thinks Kevin, but that’s not the half of this story that he’s telling right now.

“One night that spring, early May maybe, she had five or six of us out, just her and five or six guys, and we stayed up late watching movies on TV. And these five or six guys, all of us had crushes on her to varying degrees, though only one of us was her actual, official boyfriend at the time. And the thing was, he was leaving in a couple weeks to go to Europe or something, and the rest of us were, you know, circling, angling to take his slot. So you get the idea — five guys and this irresistible girl, all of us in our twenties, more or less, and we all kind of know why we’re there. It’s like a casting call, and she’s playing it very cool, but enjoying every minute of it.”

“Do you blame her?” says Claudia.

“Wait and see,” Kevin says. “So we ordered pizza or grilled hot dogs or something, and we stayed up really late watching whatever we could pull in on her parents’ shitty little black-and-white TV. This was before VCRs, understand. You’d think a full professor at Michigan would have a decent television, and cable, and a color TV, but no, it was a little Zenith black-and-white portable, yay big, with rabbit ears and one of those loops for UHF.” Kevin laughs. “Christ, they didn’t even have a roof antenna!”

Claudia smiles, if only at his enthusiasm.

“So we’re watching Channel 50 out of Detroit, this low-rent station that showed movies all the time, and I can still remember the movies we saw that night, in order.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “ Trilogy of Terror, The Snakepit, and The Big Country. ” He laughs again. “ Trilogy of Terror? Karen Black versus the devil doll?” He crosses his eyes, mimes stabbing with a carving knife, cries, “Ai yi yi yi yi!” loud enough to startle a bird and attract the attention of the two lean guys across the courtyard. Claudia shakes her head — she has probably never wasted her time watching horror movies — but she smiles slightly.

“Never mind. Point is, halfway through The Snakepit, which was this old forties melodrama, I realize I’m not watching the movie. I’m lying on the floor with my head on a throw pillow and instead I’m watching the Philosopher’s Daughter with her boyfriend, Tom or Bill or Gary or whatever his name was, the two of them draped over each other on the couch. I can see the TV light flickering over them, I can even see the little black-and-white reflection of the screen in her eyes. He’s behind her with one hand on her hip, and she’s curled against him with her head on his arm, and he’s, like, half-asleep, bored out of his mind, but she’s absolutely rapt, okay, she’s watching this dopey old picture like it’s, I dunno, Citizen Kane. And I’m watching her, I can’t take my eyes off her, and I’m thinking: I want to be that guy. I want to be the guy with her on the couch with my hand on her hip and her head on my arm. Only, believe me, I wouldn’t look so fucking bored.”

Kevin stares at nothing, reliving the moment.

“Anyway,” he starts up again, abruptly, “one by one, everybody else crawled off to find places to sleep, and it was just me and the Philosopher’s Daughter and her sleeping boyfriend. By now we’re watching The Big Country, which has got to be one of the most overblown, overproduced, boring Westerns I’ve ever seen. Nothing happens for, like, hours. Gregory Peck plays this sea captain who’s engaged to a rancher’s daughter, only he ends up in love with a schoolteacher played by Audrey Hepburn. Or maybe not Audrey Hepburn, but somebody just like her. Point is, for most of the movie, Peck gets insulted, beaten, and abused by all the cowboys, especially Charlton Heston, who all think he’s just the most pathetic”—almost says “pussy,” but says instead—“sissy imaginable. He’s got some sort of Quaker thing going, won’t talk back, won’t fight, unless he’s absolutely forced into it.”