James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

Callie twisted her mouth, plainly considering a retreat. But then she pushed the fat H. G. Wells volume aside and plunked the Norton onto the table. She was wearing a thin sweater, Paul noted, not very tight, and she bent over the table and turned the massive anthology towards him with both hands. She leaned over the book, one hand splayed against the tabletop, the other hovering over the tissuey page, one long finger extended. Paul stole a glance down the open collar of her sweater and was rewarded with a glimpse of a bra strap. Reading upside down, Callie pressed the nail of her index finger — clear now, but with flakes of red polish in the seam — against a word in one of the tiny footnotes, creasing the page.

“How do you say that word?”

Paul looked up from her collar and met her eyes, which were swimmingly blue. “Sorry?” he said.

“It don’t appear in the glossary.” Callie squeezed her eyes shut for an instant. “It doesn’t appear in the glossary.”

He waited for her eyes to open again, then he lowered his gaze to the book.

“ ‘Synecdoche’?” He looked up again. “Is that the word you mean?”

“Say that again,” she said, watching his lips. Agin , she pronounced it.

“Sit.” Paul nodded at the chair across the table, the one he had sat in at lunch, the one she was leaning over now so fetchingly. Callie narrowed her eyes at him, biting her lip, then abruptly pulled the chair out and sat. She crossed her arms and leaned forward on her elbows, her sweater pulled tight across her shoulders.

“Se- nek -duh-key,” he said, watching her eyes, but she was looking at the book. “Rhymes with Schenectady.”

“Rhymes with what?” She looked up at him.

“Never mind. It’s from the Greek. It means. .” She was squinting hard at him, concentrating on what he was saying. “It’s when you use the name of part of something to refer to the whole . Like, uh. .” The first example that came to his mind was skirt , and he shook his head to get rid of it. “Like when you call your car your wheels , for example.”

To Paul’s surprise, Callie gasped. Her whole face relaxed; her eyes widened and her forehead unfurrowed. Her cheekbones lowered, unclenching her freckles. It was beautiful to watch, as if the shadow of a cloud had passed from a mountain lake of deepest blue.

“Synecdoche,” she said, and for the skip of a heartbeat, Paul thought she might smile.

“What are they glossing here?” He dipped to the book again, hoping to prolong the moment.

“Glossing?” Her eyebrows drew together, her freckles began to clench again.

“What’s the footnote about?” Paul’s gaze climbed the page, a long ladder of Elizabethan poesy, either a long poem or a speech from a play. But before he could find the reference, Callie put her long palms over the facing pages.

“That’s okay.” She pulled the book towards her. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

Paul grabbed the outside edges of the book.

“It’s no bother.” He dipped his head, trying to catch her gaze. “Have dinner with me.”

Callie stiffened, half out of her chair, her hands on the book, her elbows locked. Her shoulders were hunched; her lips squeezed tight. She peered at Paul as if through a pair of gun slits.

“You want to have dinner with me,” she said flatly.

“No,” Paul said. His thumbs were a fraction of an inch from her pinky fingers. “I want to take you to dinner.”

“You want to take me to dinner.” Her shoulders did not loosen, but she shifted her weight onto one hip.

“Hello! Hello! Hello. .!” Paul said in diminishing volume, mimicking an echo.

Callie snorted. She was trying not to laugh. Paul restrained a smile. “Unless you don’t go out with guys like me.”

She canted her hip a little more sharply and let her elbows relax. “Hon,” she said, “I think my history shows I’ll go out with prit’ near anybody.” Then she gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes alight. “Oh, shit.” She lowered her fingers to her chin. “That’s a hell of a thing to say, innit, to some guy who just. . You’ll think I’m—”

“I think you’ve got no excuse not to go out with me.” Paul leaned back in his chair and gripped the edge of the table, the way the Colonel had a few hours before. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I’ll tell you all about synecdoche. Or Schenectady, if you prefer.” He smiled; she didn’t. Keep trying, he told himself. “Or we can branch out into simile. Or sigmatism. Or syllepsis. Or syzygy.” Years of graduate training that he thought he’d lost forever came back to him. “Or synaesthesia. I’m real good on synaesthesia.”

Callie pursed her lips. “Don’t get carried away, cowboy.” She crossed her arms, but her shoulders were loose. “It’s just dinner.”

“Well, when?”

She gave him one last, long, appraising look, then leaned slowly across the table. She took the book with both hands, slammed it shut, and picked it up one-handed, cradling it against her hip. “Tomorrow’s Friday, innit?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Paul rocked the chair back on its rear legs. “It surely is.”

“Well, I can’t Friday.” She turned and walked away, the book balanced on her hip. Cain’t , she said. Oh my God, Paul thought, I’ve just asked out Ado Annie.

“Saturday, then,” he called after her.

Callie turned expertly on her heel and kept walking backwards, a sight that startled Paul in his precariously balanced chair. He jerked forward and brought the chair down with a thump, rattling the table. Callie lifted a corner of her lips.

“Alright,” she said, and she pivoted again on her heel and swung her hips around a table and out the door.

Paul was still floating later when he went out onto the griddle of the parking lot after work. He rolled down the windows, lifted the hatchback of his car to let out the heat, and tossed his shirt on the passenger seat. The sight of the string dangling from a gap in the ceiling he had consigned to limbo; it was a daydream, a product of subliminal suggestion by the dying tech writer— “They’re up there,” indeed — and Paul’s regular midafternoon stupor. H. G. Wells probably didn’t help, either. If I want to see weird shit, Paul thought, all I need to do is go home every day and deal with my ghost cat. I don’t need any weird shit at work. Get thee behind me, Stanley Tulendij.

But right now, with the prospect of a Saturday night out with an attractive young woman, for all he cared a whole chorus line of Stanley Tulendijs and Boy Gs and dead cats could kick step across the top of the embankment. As he started the stuttering engine and put the car in reverse, he glanced back and noted the trash in his backseat. I ought to clean all that out, he thought. It’s bad enough showing up Saturday night in this old heap; what will she think? Paul backed out of the parking spot. Oh hell, he told himself, I’m an office temp going out with a minimum-wage TxDoGS employee. She’s not expecting a Lexus.

As he idled noisily in the nose-to-tail line of elephantine SUVs waiting to pull out onto Travis Avenue, Nolene rolled majestically past the nose of his car with her vast bag slung over her shoulder. Paul watched her approach an enormous minivan, and he swung out of line and into the empty spot next to her van. He left his car running, got out, and called to her across the roof of the Colt. She had heaved open the massive sliding rear door and was slinging in her bag; Paul caught a glimpse of not one, not two, but three child car seats in a row along the backseat.

“Hey, Nolene,” he said again. She glanced back at him and heaved the other way, leaning into the sliding panel as if she were closing the door of an airplane hangar.