James Hynes - Next

He’s got one foot on the running board, his jacket clutched to his chest. She’s not looking at him, but staring through the windshield, not at Wohl’s, but at something infinitely far away.

“Well, listen.” He edges down into the heat. As he plants both shoes on the gritty pavement and puts his hand on the door to swing it shut, she shifts her gaze to him slowly, eerily.

“Everybody is tender and passionate.” It’s almost as if she’s not talking to him, it’s more like she’s talking in her sleep, an utterance out of a dream.

“Everybody,” she says again, her gaze sharpening in his direction.

“I know,” says Kevin.

She gives him the barest of smiles, one lonely prospector passing another in a trackless waste.

“Good luck to you.” She puts her truck in gear.

“And to you,” he says, and bangs the door shut. With a throaty roar the truck glides away in a wide curve across the empty lot, and Kevin lifts his eyes to the freeway interchange, which is close now, ramps swooping over and under each other, lines of cars gliding as if pulled by strings, high above sunburned yellow grass. When he can’t hear the grumble of Claudia’s truck anymore, only the windy rush of traffic, he turns and limps through the heat toward the department store, pulling his sunglasses out of his pocket.

Stepping up on the curb in front of Wohl’s, he meets his reflection in the tinted glass of the doors, and it’s the first time he’s seen himself full-length since the men’s room at the airport — his shirt is half-untucked, the rip in his trouser leg bares the white square of his bandage and an alarming reach of pale shin. Around the bug eyes of his sunglasses, his head seems swollen. That’s just a flaw in the glass, he tells himself, my head’s not that big, but then his image trembles and he has the awful feeling he’s about to evaporate into the overheated air. The door opens as he reaches for it, startling him again, and out comes an elderly woman unflatteringly packed into white capri pants and a red striped top. Kevin holds the door as she teeters past on hot pink heels, her tight coiffure dyed an unconvincing blond, her bright mouth, the same shade of pink as her shoes, puckered under wraparound sunglasses. He nods, but she sails by as if she hasn’t seen him, stepping heavily down off the curb and mincing toward her car. And who am I to call her elderly? he wonders, as earnest as Jimmy Stewart. She gets the same mail from the AARP that I do. Twenty years ago, he might have thought of her as a sexy older woman. And twenty-five years from now, that could be Stella, dyeing her hair and risking her ankles and packing herself into pants two sizes too small. He folds his sunglasses into his jacket pocket and passes through the second set of doors into the mellow fluorescence and cool, dry, floral air of the store, thinking of the once and future Stella. In the three years they’ve been together, this is the first time he’s been shopping for clothes without her and he feels the same mildly illicit, slightly queasy thrill he felt last night when he sat in the big picture window of Blimpy’s and greedily ate a cheeseburger and onion rings. But this is even riskier, because by the time he sees her again — tomorrow night, when she gets back from Chicago — he will no longer smell of onions, but he will have a new pair of trousers, and Stella, who could star in her own production of CSI: Ann Arbor, will eventually come across them in his closet or in the laundry and she’ll say, oh my God, not Wohl’s! Because she’ll know. What on earth were you doing in Wohl’s?

None of your business, Kevin thinks, not any more, but as he limps up the wide entrance aisle, he knows it doesn’t matter what he thinks, because Stella’s going to kibitz whether he likes it or not, in spirit at least. There doesn’t seem to be anybody behind the glittering jewelry counter, but it’s a measure of his anxiety — at shopping without her, at sneaking away for a job interview without telling her, at thinking he could leave her and start over in Texas — that he feels a blinding, guilt-inducing beam from the engagement rings under glass, as if the ranked zirconia are focused in his direction like a navy searchlight. Though, to be fair, Stella would never shine that light on him here. Who would marry the oaf who bought a ring at Wohl’s? Puh-leeze.

He limps past the counter and up the wide aisle, his thick-soled shoes squeaking on the spotless white tile. The tiles and white suspended ceiling recede in mirror-image toward a vanishing point behind the pastel folded towels in the bath shop at the far end. Kevin still doesn’t see any employees, doesn’t even see another customer, just receding ranks of breastbone-high racks, pink and burgundy lingerie to his right, trousers to his left. He angles onto the silent gray carpeting of the labyrinth of slacks, and someone moves directly into his path, startling him, but it’s only himself in a mirrored column, still disheveled and pale. The store seems to be sailing on mysteriously unmanned like the Marie Celeste, with tantalizing indications of recent activity — the AC still humming, the Muzak still playing. Standing directly under a little round ceiling grille, Kevin can hear Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

Kevin sighs. The AC’s cold enough that he slips on his jacket over his wilted shirt, inventorying each pocket by touch. He finds his tie rolled in a side pocket and shakes it out to check it for creases, but it seems to have survived the heat and his fall on the bridge, so he rolls it up and puts it back. He moves the folded letter and spare bandage from his breast pocket into his jacket, fingers his boarding pass for the return flight. In the dry refrigeration of the store he can smell himself, and he lifts the lapels of his jacket to see sweat stains under his arms. Now he’ll have to buy a new shirt, too.

To the beat of the Tina Turner song, Kevin walks his fingers through one rack of trousers after another. He avoids the worsted dress pants — he’s not spending $75.00, no matter what Stella would say. But then Stella’s shade scares him away from the $45.00 trousers, because they’re microfiber. “That’s just itsy bitsy polyester,” she whispers in his ear. Kevin moves to the Dockers, which are only $29.99, and starts to dicker with Stella’s spirit. Didn’t I tell you, protests Stella, I wouldn’t be caught dead with a man in pleated khakis? But they’re 100 percent cotton, replies Kevin, not a trace of microfiber. And they’re only thirty bucks. I’m not even sure I want this job, I’m not dropping another seventy-five bucks on a pair of trousers just to impress a bunch of strangers I’ll probably never see again. Reaching a compromise with his inner Stella, Kevin pulls out a dark blue pair of flat-front khakis in his size, 34/36.

Clutching the trousers, he winds through the slacks toward a display of shirts. Who is Stella to lecture him, anyway? Even during their worst moments, at least he and Beth got each other. He could carry on a conversation with her and not feel like he was speaking to a bratty younger cousin. She may not have liked Martin Amis’s books (she hated them, in fact) but at least she knew who he was and could tell you why she hated him (she called him a motormouthed misogynist). But Stella, on the other hand, Stella reads featherweight novels with pastel covers, when she reads at all. And the first thing she does is turn to the back of the book and read the last few pages, to see how it turns out. “I need to know,” she says. “I can’t stand the suspense.”

“What suspense?” Kevin said. “They all have the same ending: Reader, I married him.”

“Well, yeah, ” she said. “Which is why I look: if she doesn’t get the guy, then I know I don’t want to read the book.”