James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

ALL OF LAMAR, TEXAS, is divided into three parts. There are the musicians, slackers, aging hippies, computer entrepreneurs, and academics in the arboreal old city north of the river; the Republican, Texas two-stepping, cowboy boot — wearing, SUV-driving Baptist middle managers in the sun-blasted suburban prairies south of the river; and the Hispanic and African-American gardeners, nurses, fast-food workers, and day laborers crowded into the crumbling streets east of the interstate, among the taquerias and truck depots and tank farms. The rentier class, living off the productivity and consumer spending of the low-landers, have their own enclave in the hill country west of the river, a separate municipality called Westhill that technically isn’t even part of Lamar. They live along picturesquely winding roads protected by a savagely enforced sign ordinance, where only the silhouettes of their houses — vast, gaudy boxes with giant plate-glass windows and enormous air-conditioning bills — rise out of groves of fragrant juniper and stands of tough old live oaks, serrating the ridgelines like teeth.

This, at any rate, was how Paul described Lamar to himself; he called it his Texas Theory of Surplus Value. This reading of the city was a byproduct of his self-laceration. By rights he should have started his residency in Texas in the part of town he called Groovy Lamar, the genteelly shabby neighborhoods of bohemian coffee shops and organic groceries around the university, where he could have walked to work at Longhorn State every day past the pierced and dreadlocked homeless kids on the Strip across from campus. Instead, his academic career in ruins, he had moved into a comfortable, forty-year-old suburban ranch house down among the buffet restaurants and propane dealerships south of the river. Today, as he lurched home through his old neighborhood in his hot, farting little automobile, bumper-to-bumper from stoplight to stoplight on South Austin Avenue, he recalled that his chief consolation when he had lived here, in south Lamar, had been that at least he wasn’t living with the no-hopers across the interstate. Which was, of course, where he lived now.

Still, not even the blistering heat and the SUV fumes and the staccato rattling of his car could ruin his good mood. Even TxDoGS could move quickly when it wanted to, and by the end of the day, all the paperwork for Paul’s raise had been filed, and all the appropriate signatures — Rick’s, Eli’s, some woman’s in Human Resources — had been obtained. Paul had floated all afternoon. Inspired by Rick’s magnanimity to do some actual work, he had photocopied a stack of the latest draft of the RFP for the maintenance managers’ meeting tomorrow, and he dove into the deeps of Microsoft Word to see if he could come up with a watermark. He e-mailed Erika, the pert young woman at the temp agency who had placed him at TxDoGS, to ask when he was going to see the raise in his paycheck. Indeed, creeping forward in his car through rush-hour traffic in his t-shirt, smelling his own sweat, he daydreamed about the extra $120 a week he was going to make. That was almost another $500 a month! Almost a rent payment! Even better, Rick, on his own initiative, had asked that the raise be made retroactive for a month. Human Resources had balked at that, but Rick had managed to get Paul at least a retroactive week at the new, $ll-an-hour rate. That meant, with his next paycheck, an extra $240 right off the bat! Rick was a saint!

Then Paul found himself idling at the light where he had used to turn off into the leafy neighborhood where he’d lived with Kymberly, and the memory of his fall from grace gathered gloomily on the horizon of his good spirits like a massive Texas thunderstorm. Once upon a time, Paul had been a very promising literary theorist with a very impressive Ph.D. from a very prestigious school, the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, Minnesota. But within a few years of matriculating, he had found himself stuck in the last year of a nonrenewable postdoc at an undistinguished state school in Iowa, cruelly writer’s blocked, and up to his neck in a pointless affair with a sleek graduate student in communications, a kinetic California girl named Kymberly. His only hope of professional salvation had been to ride the coattails of his wife, Elizabeth, as she negotiated a tenured position for herself at Chicago University. But riding Elizabeth’s coattails depended on Elizabeth not finding out about Kymberly, and that in turn depended on placating Elizabeth’s sinister cat, Charlotte, who lived with Paul in Iowa while Elizabeth commuted back and forth to Chicago. What happened next was sort of willfully blurry in Paul’s memory, but there had been a titanic battle of wills between Paul and the goddamn cat. Charlotte had hoarded evidence of Paul’s infidelity — panties, an earring, wine cooler bottle caps — while Paul had alternated between trying to buy her affection with catnip mousies and fish snacks, and terrorizing her. The battle ended badly for both of them. Call it a draw: Elizabeth found out about Kymberly and cast off Paul like a sack of old clothes, effectively ending his academic career, and Charlotte ended up drowned in Paul’s bathtub. Somehow.

An angry honk from the pickup behind him startled Paul; the light had gone green without his noticing. He jerked his foot off the brake and accelerated grumpily through the intersection. Now he had to let the little mental thunderstorm blow itself out. After Iowa, Paul had followed Kymberly to Texas, where she had gotten a job as a junior reporter at a struggling network affiliate in Lamar, KNOW, channel 48, “You’re in know now with K-Now 48,” intoned the announcer, “your home for news and entertainment in central Texas!” while a giant K meant to appear carved out of limestone rotated in a depthless TV null space. But KNOW was fighting for its life in a tough market, and everything was done on the cheap, and Paul came to refer to the station as Know Nothing 48, Home of the Giant Rotating Styrofoam K. The station’s threadbare budget worked both to Kym’s advantage, allowing a rookie a great deal of airtime on big stories, and against her, allowing her to make all her mistakes live, as she mispronounced names, lost her place in her notes, and asked wildly inappropriate questions of the grieving families of murder victims and death-row inmates.

But then Kymberly toughened up and buckled down. She took a stenography course; she cut her hair into a stylish and professional bob; she bought herself a word-a-day calendar and practiced her pronunciation every morning with steely determination, baring her teeth at herself in the bathroom mirror and carefully working her lips around “eleemosynary” or “prestidigitation.” Her performance improved so much that Paul was surprised one evening to realize that the brisk young woman in the trim, lemon yellow suit he was admiring on TV was actually the woman he was living with. This revelation allowed Paul to tap into previously unknown reserves of lust (his desire for her had begun to wane, for all sorts of reasons), and that evening when she came home, he begged her to keep her suit and makeup on, murmuring in her ear, “I’ve never fucked an anchorwoman before.” And Kymberly, even though she was bone tired, allowed him to do it, asking him breathlessly at a crucial moment, “Do you really think I’m anchorwoman material?”

And soon she was an anchorwoman, at least on weekends. On Saturday and Sunday evenings she shared the fortresslike anchor desk with an aggressively cheerful fireplug of a guy who doubled as the weekend weatherman, wearing his immense double-breasted blazer like a cuirass. Paul was bemused to realize that the guy had a crush on Kym; at the end of one of their first broadcasts together, as he reminded viewers of stormy weather heading their way, he laid his stubby little hand on Kym’s wrist and said, “You be careful driving home, pumpkin.”