She’s nodding slightly, her gaze directed entirely within. Over the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence and the faint beat of Mexican pop through the courtyard door, Kevin can hear her breath hissing through her nose. Then, like a sleeper waking, she shudders, her gaze softens, and she looks at Kevin, sad but utterly dry-eyed.
“That look he gave me,” she says evenly, “that was my father making up his mind. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew what he meant. If I’d only gone to nursing school, I wouldn’t be in this situation.” She breathes in, out. “If I’d only gone to nursing school, that woman would still be alive.”
Kevin says nothing. What can he say? He can hardly bear to look at her, but he can hardly look away. He can feel his heart pounding. What’s more, he’s flooded again with a strong feeling of déjà vu, which only adds to his anxiety, because he has no idea why this moment should feel so familiar. This place, this woman, this situation — she killed somebody, if inadvertently, and an admission like that, only an hour after he’s met her, is sort of new in Kevin’s experience.
She manages a rueful smile. “Have I freaked you out?”
Kevin blows out a sigh. “That’s serious stuff.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” She leans back in her seat. “I’m sorry to burden you with it.”
“And of course I said just the wrong thing, didn’t I,” Kevin continues, just to be saying something, “back by the river.”
“Oh, no no no.” Claudia lifts her hand from the table. “That’s not it. That’s not why I…”
“I know, I just meant…”
“Oh, no no no. It’s fine.”
“But what I said made you think of it.”
Claudia laughs sharply and looks away. “Trust me, I was thinking of it anyway. It’s pretty much all I think about lately.”
Kevin sits back and says nothing. A little of his anger comes back, just an echo. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume she was a nurse. Can I help it, he thinks, if her father’s a judgmental SOB? But now the déjà vu is stronger than ever, and mainly Kevin’s still puzzled. Why does this moment feel so familiar?
“That’s hard,” he says. “A thing like that. Somebody you love says the last thing you want to hear.”
“Yes.” Her gaze is withdrawing again. Another moment, and they’ll both be casting about for something to do with their hands, looking everywhere but at each other, like a first date gone bad. Gosh, look at the time. Suddenly he’s certain he’s disappointed her somehow — she’s just told him this story that she hasn’t told anyone else, thinking he might understand in a way that the men she usually deals with might not, and the best he can do is offer bromides. No doubt she’s just made up her mind about him as peremptorily as her father would have, and the last thing he wants to know is what she thinks of him, some soft-handed, sweaty, heatstruck, middle-aged white guy from up north. In fact, he suddenly has an unreasonable fear that that’s precisely what she’s about to do, fix him with her gaze across the table, drill him down to his spine, and tell him exactly what he doesn’t want to hear.
“Listen.” Kevin sits sharply forward, rocking the rickety table, sloshing tea over the lip of his glass. Both of them react instinctively, steadying the table with their palms, reaching for their respective glasses.
“Listen,” says Kevin again, and their eyes lock across the table. “I was in love with this girl once. This is, like… twenty-five years ago.”
Now that he says it out loud — twenty-five years! — it feels more like a century. It’s half his lifetime ago, but at the same time it feels like it was yesterday.
“She was the daughter of a professor of mine, a philosophy professor, in the town where I went to college. In the town where I still live, in fact.”
Where did this come from? He can’t believe he’s telling her this. He never told Beth, and certainly not Stella. He’s started speaking, in fact, before he’s even realized that this was what he was going to say. But it was on his mind earlier, in Empyrean, and now he’s sitting up straight in his chair, keenly aware of the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence, the tinny throb of amplified music, the tremor of leaves overhead, the black-eyed birds strutting in the dirt, the pressure of the heat all around their table. He’s aware of Claudia’s startled gaze over their never-to-be-finished lunch.
“I didn’t know her when I was in school,” he’s saying, “when her father was my professor. I only met her a few years after I graduated, when she was still in college and she used to share a house with a friend of mine.”
Who also loved her, though Kevin doesn’t say that. Half the guys Kevin knew in Ann Arbor in the mid-eighties were in love with the Philosopher’s Daughter.
“And even then, I didn’t really get to know her until a year or two later, one summer after she graduated from Michigan, and she was living in her parents’ attic, in this big old farmhouse halfway to Saline.” He pauses. “That’s a little town outside of Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, “Michigan.”
Claudia gestures, go on.
“Anyway, this girl, she always had a cloud of guys circling around her, waiting for whoever she was seeing at the moment to go away or be dumped, so they could take their shot. You know what I mean?”
Kevin’s dimly aware of the potential awkwardness of telling a middle-aged woman what a babe another, younger woman used to be — though, actually, she’d be older now than Claudia — but Dr. Barrientos seems to be taking it in stride. She nods, at any rate.
“I don’t know where her parents were that particular summer, but she always seemed to have the house to herself, and she used to have people out there all the time, for cook-outs or parties or whatever.”
One party in particular, thinks Kevin, but that’s not the half of this story that he’s telling right now.
“One night that spring, early May maybe, she had five or six of us out, just her and five or six guys, and we stayed up late watching movies on TV. And these five or six guys, all of us had crushes on her to varying degrees, though only one of us was her actual, official boyfriend at the time. And the thing was, he was leaving in a couple weeks to go to Europe or something, and the rest of us were, you know, circling, angling to take his slot. So you get the idea — five guys and this irresistible girl, all of us in our twenties, more or less, and we all kind of know why we’re there. It’s like a casting call, and she’s playing it very cool, but enjoying every minute of it.”
“Do you blame her?” says Claudia.
“Wait and see,” Kevin says. “So we ordered pizza or grilled hot dogs or something, and we stayed up really late watching whatever we could pull in on her parents’ shitty little black-and-white TV. This was before VCRs, understand. You’d think a full professor at Michigan would have a decent television, and cable, and a color TV, but no, it was a little Zenith black-and-white portable, yay big, with rabbit ears and one of those loops for UHF.” Kevin laughs. “Christ, they didn’t even have a roof antenna!”
Claudia smiles, if only at his enthusiasm.
“So we’re watching Channel 50 out of Detroit, this low-rent station that showed movies all the time, and I can still remember the movies we saw that night, in order.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Trilogy of Terror, The Snakepit, and The Big Country.” He laughs again. “Trilogy of Terror? Karen Black versus the devil doll?” He crosses his eyes, mimes stabbing with a carving knife, cries, “Ai yi yi yi yi!” loud enough to startle a bird and attract the attention of the two lean guys across the courtyard. Claudia shakes her head — she has probably never wasted her time watching horror movies — but she smiles slightly.