None of your business, Kevin thinks, not any more, but as he limps up the wide entrance aisle, he knows it doesn’t matter what he thinks, because Stella’s going to kibitz whether he likes it or not, in spirit at least. There doesn’t seem to be anybody behind the glittering jewelry counter, but it’s a measure of his anxiety — at shopping without her, at sneaking away for a job interview without telling her, at thinking he could leave her and start over in Texas — that he feels a blinding, guilt-inducing beam from the engagement rings under glass, as if the ranked zirconia are focused in his direction like a navy searchlight. Though, to be fair, Stella would never shine that light on him here. Who would marry the oaf who bought a ring at Wohl’s? Puh-leeze.
He limps past the counter and up the wide aisle, his thick-soled shoes squeaking on the spotless white tile. The tiles and white suspended ceiling recede in mirror-image toward a vanishing point behind the pastel folded towels in the bath shop at the far end. Kevin still doesn’t see any employees, doesn’t even see another customer, just receding ranks of breastbone-high racks, pink and burgundy lingerie to his right, trousers to his left. He angles onto the silent gray carpeting of the labyrinth of slacks, and someone moves directly into his path, startling him, but it’s only himself in a mirrored column, still disheveled and pale. The store seems to be sailing on mysteriously unmanned like the Marie Celeste, with tantalizing indications of recent activity — the AC still humming, the Muzak still playing. Standing directly under a little round ceiling grille, Kevin can hear Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”
Kevin sighs. The AC’s cold enough that he slips on his jacket over his wilted shirt, inventorying each pocket by touch. He finds his tie rolled in a side pocket and shakes it out to check it for creases, but it seems to have survived the heat and his fall on the bridge, so he rolls it up and puts it back. He moves the folded letter and spare bandage from his breast pocket into his jacket, fingers his boarding pass for the return flight. In the dry refrigeration of the store he can smell himself, and he lifts the lapels of his jacket to see sweat stains under his arms. Now he’ll have to buy a new shirt, too.
To the beat of the Tina Turner song, Kevin walks his fingers through one rack of trousers after another. He avoids the worsted dress pants — he’s not spending $75.00, no matter what Stella would say. But then Stella’s shade scares him away from the $45.00 trousers, because they’re microfiber. “That’s just itsy bitsy polyester,” she whispers in his ear. Kevin moves to the Dockers, which are only $29.99, and starts to dicker with Stella’s spirit. Didn’t I tell you, protests Stella, I wouldn’t be caught dead with a man in pleated khakis? But they’re 100 percent cotton, replies Kevin, not a trace of microfiber. And they’re only thirty bucks. I’m not even sure I want this job, I’m not dropping another seventy-five bucks on a pair of trousers just to impress a bunch of strangers I’ll probably never see again. Reaching a compromise with his inner Stella, Kevin pulls out a dark blue pair of flat-front khakis in his size, 34/36.
Clutching the trousers, he winds through the slacks toward a display of shirts. Who is Stella to lecture him, anyway? Even during their worst moments, at least he and Beth got each other. He could carry on a conversation with her and not feel like he was speaking to a bratty younger cousin. She may not have liked Martin Amis’s books (she hated them, in fact) but at least she knew who he was and could tell you why she hated him (she called him a motormouthed misogynist). But Stella, on the other hand, Stella reads featherweight novels with pastel covers, when she reads at all. And the first thing she does is turn to the back of the book and read the last few pages, to see how it turns out. “I need to know,” she says. “I can’t stand the suspense.”
“What suspense?” Kevin said. “They all have the same ending: Reader, I married him.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Which is why I look: if she doesn’t get the guy, then I know I don’t want to read the book.”
Beth used to drag him to operas and gamelan performances and concerts by Tuvan throat singers. They worked out a compromise about live music, by which she would consent to go see Richard Thompson at the Ark, and he would accompany her to hear some jazz performer he’d never heard of at the Firefly. One of their ancient arguments was over a Betty Carter album that Beth loved, called It’s Not About the Melody.
“Actually, it is about the melody,” protested Kevin, a second-generation Sinatra fan.
But with Stella, the roles were reversed. She agreed to go see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Power Center only after Kevin told her that Captain Picard from Star Trek was playing Antony — and then Stella’s chief reaction was awe at Patrick Stewart’s abs, which you could see from the second balcony.
“I’d jump him in a heartbeat,” she’d said on the walk home.
“He’s in his sixties,” Kevin had said.
“I like older men,” she’d said, linking arms with him. “You know that.”
Stella’s idea of high culture is one those gaudy, fascistic shows in which some formerly charming folk genre — Irish step-dancing or Japanese drummers or Chinese acrobats — is blown all out of proportion into the sort of spectacle that would have fit right in at the Nuremburg rallies. Or a show that takes something vaguely “street” or mildly avant-garde — hip-hop dancers banging trash-can lids, men painted blue whacking each other with plastic tubing — and turns it into Vegas spectacle. Don’t even get him started about Cirque de Soleil. She dragged him all the way to Chicago on his fiftieth birthday — and, to be fair, paid for the whole trip — to surprise him with a bewildering, assaultive show full of faux mysticism and pointless virtuosity. When she asked him if he didn’t just love it, he stifled his gut response: that this was what entertainment would have been like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War, fantastically fit but facelessly interchangeable performers in revealing outfits doing spectacular but meaningless stunts for a mindlessly bedazzled audience. Even the show’s title wasn’t really a word, he was convinced — vaguely Italian- or French-sounding, but signifying nothing, in the manner of some expensively concocted corporate brand name.
“It was great” is what he actually said, after which she took him back to their room at the Drake—“Don’t worry,” she’d said, “I’m expensing it”—and engaged him in some elaborately silly sex involving feathers, restraints, and a pair of Cirque-style masks. All of which, he had to admit, put the show retrospectively in a much more favorable light, as a kind of public foreplay. She also insisted on playing a CD of Cirque music she’d bought at the show — a rhythmic hash of ethnic music, like the folk tunes of Benetton — and Kevin started to laugh halfway through. But Stella just took his laughter as pleasure — which it mostly was — and redoubled her efforts.