James Hynes - Next

I said to my reflection, let’s get out of this play-ee-ace, goes the song, and he manages to unpin the new shirt without sticking himself and discovers that it’s short-sleeved, which ticks him off — at himself, mainly, for not checking in the first place — but he puts it on anyway, because if he wants to return it, he’d have to dig his old, soiled shirt out of the trash or go back into the store bare-chested. At least the new shirt buttons all the way to the top without choking him, so he just tucks it in and snakes his belt through the loops of his new trousers. He tugs on the new socks, hopping one-footed on the cold floor. Drops his shoes smack on the tile, steps into them, props each on the counter to tie the laces. Then he retrieves his jacket from the stall and watches himself in the mirror as he shrugs it on, shooting the cuffs. Did some bored security guard watch Kevin’s entire striptease on CCTV? Is he even now calling the Austin police, to report some pasty, Celtic suicide bomber in the men’s room, ritually preparing himself for an atrocity? Kevin wonders if he’ll be arrested before he even leaves the store.

“Relax,” Kevin says out loud, smiling insincerely at himself in the mirror. “I’m harmless.” He replaces his wallet and keys in the pockets of his new trousers, scoops the change off the damp counter into his palm. He steps to the urinal and empties his bladder of all the iced tea he’s been drinking, his stream spattering the little plastic filter that says JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS. Then he returns to the sinks and washes his hands, turning his newly scrubbed face this way and that in the mirror. He stands, squares his shoulders, plucks the tie out of his pocket, and ties it quickly in the mirror, cinching it until he’s happy, then loosening it a bit and undoing his top shirt button for the trip back downtown. He flips the changing table up against the wall — for the last time or the first? — and hits the door just as the singer gives a final, soulful grunt— Unhhh, tempted by the fruit of another, tempted but the truth is discovered…

… what’s been going on , thinks Kevin. At last there’s someone behind the Customer Service counter, a short, buxom, black-haired young woman in a fitted shirt, also flipping through a ring binder, and Kevin, cooled and cleaned and smelling of coconut and new clothes, steps up with a smile and puts both hands on the counter.

“Excuse me,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ve left my cell phone at home. Could you call me a cab?”

Feeling refreshed and dapper, Kevin waits in the vestibule between the two banks of doors at the front of store. Gazing out the tinted doors at a yellow minivan coasting toward him through the dusty glare of the nearly empty parking lot, he’s thinking he should just tell the cabbie to take him straight to the airport, adding like some wiseguy in a snap-brim fedora, “And make it snappy, chief.” Might as well just go home, he thinks. He still can’t make up his mind about Stella, but what he’ll probably do is let things drift until she presents him with a positive pregnancy test, and by then it’ll be too late to abandon her. He will back into fatherhood the way he’s backed into everything else in his life. He’s already certain that he’s not going to take the job here, whatever it is, even if they offer it to him. Move to Texas? What the hell was he thinking?

The cab stops at the curb, and the cabbie’s silhouette peers toward the store. Kevin puts on his sunglasses and pushes out the door into the midday sun. Through the viscous air he hears the grumble of the cab’s engine and the waterfall rush of the nearby freeway. Only mad dogs and Englishmen, thinks Kevin, gripping the hot door handle and sliding open the minivan’s rear door. He climbs up onto the stiff seat, then heaves the door shut with a satisfying chunk. Enfolded in the cab’s pine-scented AC, he hauls the seat belt across and clicks it. The cabbie, a skeletally lean young black man, tilts his close-cropped head slightly, so that Kevin can only see his sharp, ebony cheekbone.

“Downtown,” Kevin says, tugging his jacket straight, shooting his cuffs like some high roller. Without a word, the cabbie puts the minivan in gear. Wohl’s glides backwards in Kevin’s window.

Well, why not? He’s spent all this money to come all this way, he might as well go through with the interview, even if he doesn’t really want the job. Five hundred for the plane ticket — though they’re going to reimburse him — another forty bucks on two cab rides, wait, make that sixty for three cab rides, because it’ll cost him another twenty to get back to the airport from downtown. Not to mention seventy bucks on new clothes. Cruising down the parking lot, the cabbie taps on the brake for an attractive thirtysomething in khaki shorts and a tight sleeveless blouse who is carrying a bag from Neiman Marcus. The cab passes behind her as she approaches a parked SUV, and Kevin turns to watch her open the hatchback, her heels lifted from her flip-flops, her calves taut, her firm arm extended, her blouse lifting to bare the small of her back. No tattoo like Kelly had, alas, but an admirably round ass, and dirty blond hair brushing her freckled shoulders. Kevin faces front again, simultaneously reminded of Stella’s toned upper arms and of the freckled shoulders of long-lost Lynda, and he smiles to realize that that’s why he just dropped seventy dollars on new clothes — the money isn’t an index of his professional ambition, it’s the price of his foolish middle-aged longing, his geriatric priapism. If he’d kept his mind on the interview to begin with, he’d still be downtown in Starbucks. It wasn’t ambition, but lust and nostalgia that wilted his shirt and tore his trousers and bloodied his socks, and it wasn’t even really lust for Kelly, fine as she was, it was lust for a woman he hasn’t even seen in twenty-five years. Lynda would be forty-five now, at least. Probably thicker around the middle, broader in the hips, her slinky walk buried under the sediment of middle age, her sleekness blunted, her pale skin a little less springy than it was. And what happens to freckled girls as they age? What do freckles look like on a forty-five-year-old? Do they fade away or do they become age spots? Do women at midlife pay cosmetic surgeons to save their freckles or erase them? Is it cruel to think this way? Having lived in Ann Arbor for thirty years, he regularly runs into old lovers or college classmates — the way he ran into Beth at Gaia Market — but he’s watched them age in small increments. What takes him by surprise is running into some old high school crush when he’s visiting his mom in Royal Oak, someone he hasn’t seen since the seventies. Usually she recognizes him before he recognizes her, and he has to fake it for a moment, pretending at first that he knows who she is, and then pretending he isn’t taken aback at how she’s changed since her days of hip-hugging bell bottoms and halter tops and ironed hair. He doesn’t always succeed, and no matter how enthusiastically he says, “You look great!” or “Of course I knew it was you!” he can see her gauge his response. It’s the same when he’s channel-surfing and he comes across some formerly dewy sitcom actress he fantasized about in his teens and twenties, and the sight of her playing a gruff lesbian mom on Lifetime or a gorgon of a defense attorney on Law and Order depresses him like nothing else. But Lynda, Lynda, whatever happened to Lynda? From that steamy summer until now, as often as he’s retrospectively fantasized about that one night on the porch, it has rarely occurred to him to wonder where she is now. Would he even recognize her if he passed her on the street?

The cab negotiates the maze of hedges, and the little bushes with purple flowers bristle at Kevin from beyond his window. Without his intending it to happen, the faces of the women he’s known are stuttering now before him like a mis-sprocketed film. Beth, Stella, the Philosopher’s Daughter, Lynda — there are others, but those are the four who are popping up most often in his sexual highlight reel. The minivan rocks over a speed bump, and Kevin feels a tingling in his balls. He and Beth sometimes made love as if they were struggling for mastery, grappling like a pair of sweaty high school wrestlers, each trying for a more lethal grip, muscles taut as guy lines as they grunted and strained against each other, racing to see who could make the other finish first. In this battle of wills, making the other climax wasn’t tenderness but one-upmanship: it was getting the other to cry uncle, it was earning a victory by which the other was stripped bare. He grinned fiercely in her face as he pinned her by the wrists and pounded her, grunting, “Give it up, give it up.” And sometimes she’d pinned him, straddling him like a playground bully and grinding against him, pressing him down by the wrists and baring her teeth and laughing like a frat-boy date rapist: “You know you want it.” In these ruthless contests, if he came first he sobbed aloud as if he were ashamed and turned his face away. And if she came first, she groaned as if in pain and then fended him off with a forearm and rolled out from under him, curled on the edge of the bed with her chest heaving as if she’d just pulled herself out of dark, cold water. It wasn’t like this all the time or even most of the time — they had sentimental sex and sleepy sex and conversational sex and make-up sex like any other long-term couple — but what he remembers now are those desperate grapplings.