Across the stream of traffic, between buildings and up side streets, Kevin watches Joy Luck on Sixth Street, but at the next cross street he’s lost her, and he dithers for a moment, not sure whether to go forward or back. His heart beginning to race, he walks the next block more quickly. Under a big condo block bristling with balconies, he crosses Fifth, trotting north past the snouts of a row of SUVs. He’s already halfway across before he realizes that the traffic was already moving, but he doesn’t stop, and four lanes of SUVs lurch forward on their toes as he wards them off with his palm. He hardly notices, because Joy Luck should be crossing the intersection ahead of him, but he still can’t see her, and he’s thinking she’s gotten away, he’s lost her, but suddenly, when he’s ten paces from the corner, she appears from behind the building and stops for the light. Kevin’s heart soars, but his relief is cut short by the fact that in another three seconds he’ll be right next to her on the curb. Kevin pivots on the toe of his shoe, grinding the fat black tread into the hot pavement, slapping his trouser pockets like he’s forgotten his keys or something, swinging the jacket off his shoulder and rummaging in every pocket, lifting his eyes to the sky like he’s concentrating. Doesn’t matter, though, he’s already caught, busted, blown; he expects a tap on the shoulder any moment now, or even something way less demure, way more Michelle Yeoh, an iron grip spinning him around, grinding another millimeter of shoe sole into the pavement, and an angry, beautiful young woman nose to nose with him, her eyes blazing, demanding to know, “Why are you following me? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
When he finally peeks over his shoulder, her swaying backside is disappearing behind the liquor store across the street, and he sags with relief. At the corner, he sits on a ledge outside a bar called Molotov to catch his breath and let her get ahead of him. In the shade for the first time since he left Empyrean, he clutches his limp jacket to his chest with both arms, watching Joy Luck stride up Sixth toward a massive redbrick building like a fortress. He peers through the tinted window into Molotov, taking off his sunglasses and shading his eyes against the warm glass. The place is empty at this hour: an unpainted concrete floor; a long, featureless curve of space-age banquette; a pair of thirty-year-old, piss-yellow La-Z-Boys. There’s a mock socialist realist painting along the back wall, an idiotically smiling rocket scientist holding up an ICBM like it was a banana. Six months from now — if he’s offered the job and he takes it — he could be on the other side of this window listening to music he doesn’t recognize, chatting up women much too young for him, and paying extortionate prices for some cocktail they’d seen on The Hills or whatever they’re watching now. Not like his days at the Central Café back in Ann Arbor, when just after closing he and the rest of the immortally young waitstaff used to do a line each right off the prep table — hello, Mr. Health Inspector! — and then swagger en masse to the Rubiyat, where they would do more blow in the bathroom and dance to “It’s Raining Men” or “Atomic Dog” until three or four in the morning, and where one memorable dawn — a dawn he has never spoken of to another living soul and never will, a dawn that both mortifies and titillates him until this very moment — he woke up in Ypsilanti in the bed of a man he didn’t recognize and never saw again, and walked all the way up Washtenaw back to Ann Arbor in the freezing rain even before the buses were running, with a crippling headache and a taste in his mouth that he hoped never to identify. Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay!
Or — as he turned away from the gloom of Molotov’s window — there were his less cringe-worthy Big Star days, when he had an arrangement with the bouncer of Second Chance across the street — he gave Danny advance copies of reggae records and Danny comped him into shows — and he saw the Ramones for free. Those were the days when he took the Philosopher’s Daughter to see R.E.M. not once, but twice — once at the Blind Pig and again at Joe’s Star Lounge — and she spurned his advances both times. Once because he wasn’t tender enough, and the other because he wasn’t sufficiently passionate. Stop! he nearly says aloud, and reminds himself that most nights at the Pig or Joe’s, he could buy a girl three or four beers in a plastic cup and at least count on making out with her later on, sometimes even right outside the club in the narrow back seat of his yellow Pinto. “A Pinto?” she’d say, half-drunk. “Aren’t you afraid it’ll, like, blow up?” And Kevin, tugging at the strap of her tank top and clumsily trying to find her nipple with the tip of his tongue, would pause to say, “Kinda adds to the thrill, doesn’t it?”
But the thing is, standing here now in the heat, twenty-five years later and fifteen hundred miles from Michigan, he knows he couldn’t say a word about any of this to any of the girls he’d meet in a lounge like Molotov; they wouldn’t give a shit that he’d seen the Police at Bookie’s on their first American tour. Or that he once drunkenly yelled, “I wanna have your child!” to Patti Smith in Second Chance and that Patti gave him the finger. Or that once, in the Fleetwood Diner at two in the morning, he sat next to James Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop — a tiny little guy in eyeliner, Ypsilanti’s favorite son — and that Iggy accepted a steak fry from Kevin’s plate. Hell, apart from their first conversation vis-à-vis the Rolling Stones and the Black Crowes, he couldn’t even have this conversation with Stella, even though she isn’t quite as young as she said she was. The thing is, Kevin thinks, still sitting in the shadow of the lounge’s awning, Stella would like Molotov, just like she likes watching reruns of Sex and the City over and over again. They usually watch from his bed, Stella clinging to him like a limpet, tapping his chest with her red nails, asking him, what does he think of the shoes Carrie’s wearing? Or does he ever wonder if Miranda is too much of a bitch? Or is Samantha empowered, or just a slut? She asks him like it matters what he thinks, but then shushes him when he tries to answer. So he has no doubt she’d love this pretentious little lounge in Austin: she’d want to live in a hideously expensive condominium in one of the new blocks, right up at the top, and she’d doll herself up every night and come down here and drink too much and laugh too loud, her eyes swimming in Absolut, and she’d wriggle her delightful ass in that awful La-Z-Boy like a happy little girl in the teacup ride at Disneyland, because to her a La-Z-Boy is funny, wonderfully retro, not a stomach-churning reminder (as it is to Kevin) of the suburban anomie of the hideous paneled basements of his youth. That’s what a twenty-year difference in age (okay, fifteen, if we’re going by Stella’s driver’s license) does to a relationship: artifacts that make Kevin suicidally despondent — a recliner, his mother’s cocktail glasses, his father’s golf trophies, his sister’s Partridge Family 45s — are exotic objets d’art to Stella, like African masks or Indonesian batik. Kevin’s depressing Ice Storm boyhood is Stella’s theme park.