James Hynes - Next

There’s passion for you, Kevin thinks, his cock semihard in his boxer briefs. He wonders if he could adjust himself without the cabbie noticing, but just as he glances at the glossy back of the cabbie’s head — trapezius muscles like a weightlifter’s, a shiny scalp under stubbled hair — the driver looks right as he changes lanes. The radio is muttering now, the cabbie’s turned it up. More talk radio; Kevin can hear the shrillness of the announcer, though he can’t make out what he’s saying. Don’t the cabbies here ever listen to music? Isn’t Austin supposed to be the live music capital of the world? Kevin grips his knees and shifts his legs, which relieves the pressure on his hard-on. He’s surprised to see that they’ve left the shopping center and are already cruising north up Lamar, back the way he came with Claudia Barrientos, the street wide and flat and laced over with wires, under a whitish sky. Kevin sees things he hadn’t noticed coming the other way: a Wendy’s in a grove of gnarled trees; a scruffy used-car lot flying both American and Mexican flags; a low, ancient, ramshackle wooden dance hall with an unlit neon sign reading THE BROKEN SPOKE. Another place I’ll never go, thinks Kevin, coasting downhill back toward downtown, then back to the airport, back to Ann Arbor, back to Stella.

Whom he doesn’t love, or so he keeps telling himself. Yet their lovemaking can be surprisingly tender. Part of that’s the difference in their ages: no matter how many bench presses he does or how far he runs, he’s still fifty, so no more three vigorous copulations a night — it’s two if he’s lucky, once or twice a week, and the second time is an uphill climb. Like a general fighting the previous war, a couple of times early on he tried to grapple with Stella the way he’d grappled with Beth, pinning her wrists to the sheets, but she stiffened as if in pain and gasped, “Please don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, instantly releasing her. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Stella may like her faux-leather handcuffs from time to time, but that’s about performance and make-believe and a kind of adolescent role-playing that Kevin has learned to go along with and even enjoy. Instead, what he can offer Stella in bed is midlife courtliness. What he feels toward her, in fact, is a kind of protectiveness, and on those rare occasions when he tries to plumb the mystery of Stella — who made the scars on her inner thighs and why, who she’s talking to in the Stella Continuum and what they’re talking about, why she wakes up sweating and shuddering in the middle of the night, what she’s looking at when she doesn’t seem to be looking at anything — he wonders what could have happened to her before he met her that makes her respond so gratefully to simple kindness. Mutual gratitude may even be the foundation of their relationship, because he knows that at his age he’s lucky to be having any sex at all with a fit and energetic younger woman.

“… in St. Paul, Minnesota,” says the minivan’s radio, suddenly even louder. “Reports are still sketchy at this time…”

Kevin watches the cabbie’s long arm, all muscle and bone, withdrawing from the radio dial. Their gazes meet in the rearview. The cabbie has wide, deep-set, mournful eyes, and the instant he sees Kevin looking back, he reaches for the radio again and turns down the volume.

“We goin’ where downtown, exactly?” the cabbie says to Kevin in the mirror. He has a musical accent, which Kevin guesses is African.

Up ahead, framed by telephone poles and power lines, broad Lamar descends into a gentle curve lined with trees and billboards and low buildings. Against the bleached sky rises a new condo tower like something made of Legos, and the narrow dome of the Texas capitol. Kevin can’t see the pronged tower, and he still can’t remember its name, nearly calling it Barad-dûr out loud.

“Sixth and Congress,” he says, shifting in his seat, picturing the view from Starbucks: the homeless guy in the lamé dress and Laura Petrie wig; the flat-bellied, sweat-free guys in khakis; the swaying, bare-midriffed nymphets; Kelly, with her duffel over her shoulder, swinging her hips like a sailor on shore leave. Kelly, who led him astray and wilted his suit and tore his trousers and lacerated his knee, who lured him off the map to his fall. Only it wasn’t really Kelly who’s to blame, it was Lynda, and it wasn’t even really Lynda, but his nostalgia for the only truly uncomplicated and regret-free fucking he’s ever done in his life. Not even in retrospect does he feel any tenderness for Lynda, which is probably why he hardly ever wonders what happened to her. Even when they were lovers, she provoked no other emotion in him but desire, and for that reason, probably, twenty-five years later she looms larger in his fantasy life than all the other women he’s known put together. Even more than the Philosopher’s Daughter — about whom, it sometimes amazes him to realize, he has never fantasized sexually.

Whoa, thinks Kevin, nearly saying it out loud. Riding semi-aroused in an air-conditioned minivan in sweltering Austin, the glare outside cut by the window tint and his own amber sunglasses, Kevin is breathless suddenly, his heart racing. The tapestry of trees and bungalows on either side scrolls past the windows, while up ahead the sun-hazed backdrop of the capitol dome and condo towers and skeletal construction cranes slides from side to side with each curve of Lamar. At last Barad-dûr is visible, and it seems to glide back and forth like it’s being trundled about by unseen stagehands. Not once over the years has he ever daydreamed about the Philosopher’s Daughter, who at the time he thought he would love until he died, and yet his three month’s worth of couplings with Lynda, whose last name he doesn’t even remember, are his go-to memories— à la plage, on the dance floor, on the railing — whenever he needs to arouse himself. She is his default fantasy, his shortcut to a quick ecstasy.

And now, in a little bubble of freezing air drifting down a wide commercial street in Austin, Texas, he realizes once again that the primacy of Lynda in his imagination is because of the Philosopher’s Daughter. He’s not proud of it, and it’s not something that he likes to contemplate, but it’s true. The reason he has never sullied his memory of the Philosopher’s Daughter with self-abuse is because of that night at her parent’s house, the night of one of her impromptu parties, when their mutual friend Wayne carted his whole stereo out to the house because her parents’ ancient hi-fi wasn’t up to the job. Wayne set up the system in her parents’ living room and blasted his painstakingly composed party tapes into the warm summer night while everyone danced on the creaking floorboards of the Philosopher’s farmhouse. Kevin had been out dancing with Lynda already on a number of occasions — he loved to watch her wave her arms in the air, like Anna’s arms on the roof of Taco Rapido, raised to the sky (as Kevin now passes) in invocation of… what? Perhaps she overheard Kevin’s story on the packed dirt patio below and like some local, tutelary deity, the Tex-Mex goddess of desire, she has lifted her hands to bless his nostalgic erection, or at least to bless his memory of that one particular night, because that’s the night he best remembers Lynda on the dance floor, with the Philosopher’s surprisingly shabby Persian rug rolled up and the sofa pushed back, the coffee table jammed against the wall and littered with flakes of weed and grains of cocaine. On the sofa sprawled Wayne, a plump Asian guy, smoking cigarette after cigarette and nodding behind the screen of his long black hair to the music, watching the dancers and only occasionally dancing himself. The Philosopher’s Daughter herself danced to every song, often bolting from the dance floor midsong, laughing, to abandon one partner and pull another onto the floor, working her way with a teasing evenhandedness through her entire roster of suitors. But this wasn’t like the TV party, when she had been a queen bee surrounded only by wistful wannabees — no, tonight there were actually other girls at this party, lots of them. This was only a month or two after the Philosopher’s Daughter had rejected him, and Kevin made a point of introducing Lynda to the Daughter during the ringing silence between dance tapes, while Wayne squatted at the tape deck picking the next one with exquisite judgment and the sweaty dancers wandered out to the back porch for beer and a breeze.