For a long, thrilling moment she locked eyes with him, then deigned to drop her gaze to the pink clot of chunky paste he’d laid bare. They both regarded it for a moment, then looked at each other again. “What do you think it is?” she said.
“I’m not sure.”
She angled her head, as if to regard the sandwich in a slightly better light. “Why don’t you try it and see?”
“Well,” said Kevin, keenly aware, in his peripheral vision, of the lovely Debra trying not to laugh, “if I’m not sure what it is, I don’t think I want to put it in my mouth.”
“I see,” said the tall girl, speaking with faux gravity. She pinned him once more with her gaze, and Kevin thought he might never breathe again. Then he felt the sandwich moving under his hands as the girl slid her hand across the counter and hooked one long, pale finger over the lip of the plate. She never took her eyes off Kevin’s as she pulled it toward her. The little flap of bread Kevin had lifted curled slowly back down.
“Only one way to find out,” she said, and she picked up the triangle of sandwich and bit it in two. Kevin gasped and stood up straight. Debra turned sharply away, lips pinched bloodlessly shut, while the enormous old man on his stool at the end of the counter sat as immobile as the Buddha. Meanwhile the tall girl deliberately masticated one-eighth of Kevin’s lunch, gazing pensively upward.
“Well,” she said, and paused to push a loose fleck of whatever back into the corner of her lips with her pinky, “it tastes like tuna to me.”
Kevin watched the girl in astonishment. His blood was singing. Finally she swallowed and replaced the uneaten half of the triangle with a little pat and nudged the plate back toward Kevin. Who picked it up, fastidiously turned her teethmarks toward him, and put the rest of the section in his mouth. As he swallowed it whole, nearly choking on tuna and his own laughter, the girl smiled and turned a dark shade of red.
“You’re right,” he said, tapping his sternum lightly. “It is tuna.”
Thus began a battle of wills that lasted thirteen years. God knows it was her Drakette hauteur on display that day in the bath when she told him she was leaving. Several years ago now, and it still stings as if it had happened this morning. It stings right now, in fact, along with the sudden, unbidden taste of tuna in the vault of his palate. Beth, what hath thou wrought? If it weren’t for her, he probably wouldn’t be sweltering outside Starbucks on a street corner in subtropical Austin. He touches the taste of tuna with the tip of his tongue, the taste of Beth. The men in khakis are walking toward the capitol, still laughing, while the camisole girls sway fetchingly in the other direction, as hearty as Minoan dancing girls. On a bus stop bench a couple of Hispanic girls hunch together in matching fast-food uniforms and consult a sheet of paper. One girl runs her blunt finger along a line, syllable by syllable, while the other girl reads haltingly, “Heh, hel-lo. Wel-come. To. Pancho’s Taco. Ex, express. Hah, how. May I. Heh, heh, help you?”
“Bueno.” The first girl nods and moves her finger down a line. “El siguiente,” she says. Next.
Kevin veers to the steps of Starbucks, which are guarded by a street musician — dirty gray beard, sleeveless T-shirt, pale upper arms — standing against the wall, aimlessly but vigorously strumming a guitar. Is he in his forties, Kevin wonders, or his fifties? He’s so frayed by bad luck it’s hard to tell, but even in the heat Kevin feels the cold breath of time brush them both. The guy’s eyes shift mournfully from side to side, following passersby, and Kevin wonders, what memory is he trying to erase? Is he another McNulty, hitting rock bottom? The man’s scuffed guitar case is closed at his feet. Perhaps he’s forgotten to open it, or maybe it’s a rare example of ars gratia artis. Kevin steps past him up into the coffee shop.
The morning rush is nearly over, and the place is disheveled — napkins on the floor, crumbs underfoot, a plastic stirrer in a little pool of coffee on the countertop. Behind the counter a black girl with dreadlocks hangs on a lever at the espresso machine, and a golden-haired white girl with a stain on the breast of her company tunic slouches at the register. They each have that end-of-shift, thousand-yard stare that Kevin recognizes from his own days in retail. Meanwhile a rotund young woman with a buzz cut works up a sweat changing out the trash bins; she yanks a bulging bag of cups into the air and twists it sharply, as if snapping its neck. The only person ahead of Kevin is a businesswoman in her late thirties — no, thinks Kevin, looking closer through her makeup at the crinkled corners of her eyes, mid forties. She steps aside and smiles at him. “I’m waiting,” she says.
Kevin needs to wash the taste of Beth out of his mouth, so he orders an iced tea.
“With legs?” says the golden blond, absently pressing a key on the register.
“Pardon?” Starbucks is like its own country, you have to know the silly argot.
“To go?” says the fortysomething woman, in a rising, Texas singsong. “ ‘With legs’ means ‘to go.’ ”
Cheerleader, thinks Kevin. Sorority girl, marketing major, party girl once upon a time. A Republican, maybe, but a fun Republican, a sexy Republican. He smiles and she purses her lips — nicely red, but not too red, sort of business sensual — which Kevin finds mildly flirty, and instinctively, in spite of himself, before his forebrain can get a word in edgewise, he looks her up and down. She’s pretty, formerly pert, now softening around the edges. Brown hair pulled back with a ribbon the same color as her lipstick. Wide eyes, cornflower blue, a little too made-up for close range, but just right (Kevin’s guessing) for a presentation in front of a boardroom. Snug jacket, but not too snug, knee-length skirt. Matching nail polish, no wedding ring. A little wide in the hips, but nice calves. Kevin’s appraising gaze glides back up to her face, and she blushes and looks away, over the counter, at nothing in particular.
“Yes,” says Kevin, his forebrain at last wresting the controls away. “I mean, no.”
“What?” says the barista. The middle-aged are so boring.
“It’s for here,” says Kevin. “No legs.”
The girl slouches away for his legless tea, and Kevin smiles sidelong at the woman and says, “ ‘With legs,’ huh?”
She smiles warily.
“What am I,” says Kevin, “Damon Runyon?”
Her eyebrows lift, her smile widens ever so slightly, and Kevin can see his joke sailing deep into the cornflower blue yonder, without striking a goddamn thing. She doesn’t get it, she’s just being polite — guess they never did Guys and Dolls at Texas A&M — and the embarrassment pulls tight as a wire between them until it’s blessedly snapped by the dreadlocked girl reaching over the counter with the woman’s steaming paper cup of venti double cap something, and Kevin and the woman turn from each other with relief. Kevin pretends to study the baked goods under glass next to the register while the woman taps across the floor in her sensible heels. One of the pastries, he notices, is a madeleine. Good thing he didn’t make a joke about that.
Kevin watches the rotund barista swipe at tables with a damp cloth until the blond barista returns and money and iced tea are exchanged across the retail membrane of the countertop. Kevin hesitates, buys a muffin, and then juggles cup, muffin, and change past the love seat where the businesswoman, legs crossed, displays her excellent calves and swings her toe as she consults a very thin, very stylish silver laptop. A little wheeled suitcase waits at her feet like a faithful dog. She glances up, he glances back, they look away, and Kevin makes for a small round table in the corner, still gleaming from the stout barista’s damp cloth. He sets his tea and muffin before him and takes a bentwood chair where the businesswoman is at the corner of his eye. The windows look up both Sixth and Congress, offering a wide, 270-degree vista of the street corner, like Captain Nemo’s observation bubble in the Nautilus, only instead of flashing schools of fish and lumbering manta rays, he sees just beyond the glass a gangly man in a sleeveless, gold lamé minidress teetering on platform heels, his calves and thighs ropy, his arms veined and hairy. He wears badly applied lipstick and a crooked wig, a Bizarro Mary Tyler Moore circa The Dick Van Dyke Show. A frayed evening bag that doesn’t quite match the minidress dangles from the guy’s knotty forearm.