“Duh, duh, define your terms, son,” stammers Professor Stewart. “Wha, wha, what do you mean by tenderness and passion?”
I have no idea! Kevin wants to shout. I can’t define them. To define them would be to pin them like butterflies to a corkboard. And anyway, professor, according to your own daughter, my problem isn’t that I can’t define them, it’s that I can’t express them. Besides, what do tenderness and/or passion get you? When Stella wakes up crying in the middle of the night, he holds her tightly until she stops shuddering. Neither of them says a word, they just clutch each other in the dark until she’s breathing evenly again. Then he loosens his grip but doesn’t let go of her completely. In the morning they never speak of it. What has his tenderness accomplished?
And passion, what of it? The Other Kevin, the Jihadist Kevin, the Freckled Suicide Bomber, he was passionate, wasn’t he? How many people died because of his passion? The Other Kevin’s blurry martyrdom video has been running nonstop on CNN and Fox all weekend, perhaps because it’s one of the rare examples performed in English. And even then they’ve been running it with subtitles, because Kevin/Abdul — posing in a green headband before a grainy blow-up of Osama bin Laden — speaks of jihad in an incomprehensibly thick Glaswegian monotone. Without the subtitles Kevin — Quinn, not MacDonald — would understand only every third or fourth word. Yeah, young Kevin was one confused, inarticulate young bastard, but at least he believed in something, didn’t he? At least he was willing to die for something. What would I be willing to die for, wonders Kevin — the decent Kevin, not the murderous Kevin — anything? Who would I be willing to die for? The Philosopher’s Daughter? That would have been a waste, she didn’t want me anyway. Lynda? Don’t be stupid, that wasn’t passion. Beth? Would he have died for her? Would he have died for her when she was pregnant with another man’s child? Say they were in a public place — the aisles of Gaia, say — and say Kevin saw some nervous-looking young guy suddenly open his overcoat to reveal a canvas vest bulging with plastic explosives, and say the guy started yelling Allahu akbar or whatever — would Kevin throw himself between Beth and her unborn child and the bomber? Probably, but that might just be good manners. In that last instant before everything went black, Kevin would feel like a chump. He’d be thinking, it’s not even my kid. And what if Stella’s life were in danger? Would he die for her if she was carrying his child? Would he sacrifice himself then more willingly, the way the Other Kevin did? That’s what passion does, thinks Michigan Kev (not Glasgow Kev) — passion makes you stupid, passion uses you and then throws you away.
He glances at Claudia, afraid he might have said some of this out loud, but if he has, she either didn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it. She’s driving distractedly again, one-handed, while with her other hand she pinches and unpinches a crease in her lower lip. Kevin’s not sure conversation is even possible now, as if the padded upholstery of the cab would soak up every sound. He’s not sure he would make any sense if he did speak, he’s not even sure if he would make sense to himself. For all he knows she’s feeling the same numbness, preoccupied with her father’s disappointment, her own uncertainty, the face of the woman she killed. Way to go, Dr. Barrientos, with the bedside manner! Just what he needs on the day of a job interview, the doctor passing her lacerating self-doubt along to him like Typhoid Mary. He’s still tongue-tied, but somebody better say something quick, because at last Lamar has widened and straightened out, lying as broad as the Champs-Élysées between strip malls and garages and down-market apartment complexes, and instead of the Arc de Triomphe at the far end, South Lamar’s vanishing point is obscured by a freeway overpass where the glittering roofs of cars and SUVs glide in the midday sun.
“How far are these stores?” Kevin says abruptly, at the same moment as Claudia says, “What sort of store are you looking for?”
They glance at each other.
“Sorry?” says Kevin.
“You first,” says Claudia.
Up ahead, freeway signs hang over the road like big green guillotine blades, blunt white arrows pointing the way to Johnson City, Llano, Bastrop. Kevin shifts in his seat, afraid that if they survive the steel blades and enter the tangle of overpasses, Claudia’s truck will get snagged and slotted in and shot like a pellet further south than Kevin wants to go, all the way to San Antonio, all the way to Mexico lindo.
“I don’t want to get too far from downtown,” he says. “I still have to find my way back to, ah…” He nearly says Barad-dûr, catches himself. He can’t remember the actual name of the building, which only makes him feel worse. Bad enough he bared his soul uselessly to this woman, dredging up an ancient hurt for no particular reason and with no particular result other than to embarrass her and make himself feel awful. Now on top of it, he’s having a senior moment, and all at once he thinks of the growing hair in his ears, his enlarging prostate, his receding gums, and how the location of his job interview has become yet another alarming pothole in his memory.
He’s still saying “Ah…” when Claudia cuts to the right and they glide across two lanes into a driveway with a grassy median and a brick sign that says LAMAR OAKS.
Kevin closes his mouth. Her briskness annoys him, makes him feel even frailer, just like Stella does when she brings in his mail and sorts it for him. Technically they have separate mailboxes, she’s still paying rent on the downstairs apartment, but if she’s home before he is, she empties both boxes and brings the mail up to his kitchen table and sorts it into piles, his and hers, junk and not-junk. She especially likes to fish out envelopes from the AARP, the first one of which appeared just before his fiftieth birthday as ominously as a crack in a levee, which has since widened into an irreparable breach, flooding his kitchen table with offers for life insurance, prescription drug delivery, low-interest credit cards, and Mediterranean cruises, not to mention anodyne and unconvincing reassurances that the best of life is yet to come. Stella loves to eat an apple and slice the envelope open and read the letter aloud while he pretends to be a good sport.
“They’ll help you choose a Medicare plan,” she says, chomping with her mouth open. “You’ll get discounts at Applebee’s.”