He’s startled again by the sight of himself in another mirrored column, and he wonders if Stella would be caught dead with a man in torn trousers and sweaty, wilted shirt and one blood-soaked sock. He zeroes in on a poly/cotton dress shirt — fuck it, it’s marked down to twenty bucks. He pulls the tie from his pocket and makes sure the shirt matches. Then he pivots on his injured leg and lurches toward the socks. The gray carpet has no give to it, it’s like walking on the green of a minigolf course. From a wall of socks he plucks off a pair for ten bucks — it’s a lot for socks, but they’re antimicrobial, so his sweaty feet won’t smell. Note that, Stella? You can’t go all Queer Eye on me when I buy antimicrobial socks. And even I know you don’t buy a woman an engagement ring at a department store. Who said anything about a ring, anyway? I know how to read a home pregnancy test, too, and I know when I’m off the hook. What’s love got to do, got to do with it?
He finds a cash register where the only apparent survivor of whatever plague cleared out the store, a pudgy, round-faced, lank-haired salesgirl, is flipping through a ring binder. She pushes it to one side as he lays his purchases on the counter.
“Find everything you need?” she says robotically, without making eye contact. “Do you have a Wohl’s charge card?” She flips the trousers to find the tag.
“No.” He should have tried the trousers on first, but fuck it.
“Are you interested in opening a Wohl’s account?” the girl says in her retail zombie monotone, scanning the tags.
“No thanks,” says Kevin. “Do you have a public restroom?”
For the first time, the girl’s bovine gaze flickers at Kevin, and her fingers hesitate over the register. What must he look like? He wonders if she can smell him.
“Up front, by the service desk.” She looks him up and down and says, “Sixty-six fifty-one.”
Kevin fishes for his wallet, plucks out his Visa, and the salesgirl swipes the card with two fingers as if it’s infectious, then holds it out to him at arm’s length, watching him warily. As she scoops his purchases toward a plastic bag, Kevin startles them both by pressing his hand next to hers on top of the clothes, not quite touching. He tugs the trousers out from under her palm. “Where’d you say the men’s room is?”
She lifts her chin over the labyrinth of racks toward the front. Kevin tucks his receipt inside his jacket and cradles his purchases in the crook of his arm. Her eyes slide down to his shoes and all the way up to his face again. “You okay?” she says.
“Never better,” he says, limping away.
Customer Service is off to one side of the store — CUSTOMER CONVENIENCE says the sign, CONVENIENCIA PARA EL CLIENTE — and it’s even more brightly lit than the sales floor. This desk, too, seems to be unstaffed, and as he passes the counter toward the restrooms Kevin feels vaguely guilty, as if he’s stealing the clothes. The men’s room is just as brightly lit as the rest of the store, and it’s aggressively clean, smelling of urinal cakes and floral air freshener. Just inside the door there’s even a framed print of orchids. There are four sinks on the wide counter, with boxes of tissue between them. The Muzak is louder in here, some contemporary pop hit he doesn’t recognize, a young woman with a sharpish voice telling him to “Breathe, just breathe.”
If you say so, thinks Kevin. Avoiding his image in the wide mirror, he casts about for someplace to put his purchases, wishing now he’d let the girl put them in a bag. The counter looks spotless, making him wonder again if anybody ever actually comes into this store, but instead he tilts the baby-changing table down from the wall, inspects it carefully, even sniffs it, and lays down his new clothes. He takes off his jacket, spreads his fingers under the collar, and brushes off any remaining dust. A little rumpled, he thinks, but presentable, and he hangs it on the hook behind the door of the handicapped stall. Then, at last, he confronts himself in the mirror.
In the pastel glitter of the reflected restroom, he sees an admirably slender but pale, round-faced, and baggy-eyed middle-aged man, his formerly crisp shirt wilted and stained under his arms, his forehead damp with sweat, his sandy hair matted along his sideburns and against the back of his neck. The shirt is half-untucked all around his waist, and his ruined trousers hang low like oversized jeans on some teenager. He resists the instinct to tuck in the shirt and tug up his pants, leaning over the sink instead and pushing the button on a faucet, waiting with his hands under the water for it to run hot. Nose to nose with the mirror he sees melancholy eyes and the unsubtle features of a peasant, son of an Irish father and a Polish mother — a Mick and a Polack, Uncle Stan used to say — good-looking enough, he supposes, to hang onto his younger girlfriend, at least for now. But he can already see where his cheeks are going to sag, and the bags under his eyes aren’t entirely the result of heat and fatigue; they are becoming a more or less permanent feature. Face to face with himself, he realizes he looks like somebody’s dad. Not like my dad, though, he thinks. He’s already four years older than his father was when he died.
The water stops running before it gets hot, so Kevin mashes the button again with the heel of his palm. He dips his head, cups lukewarm water in both hands, and splashes his face. He knows how to read a pregnancy test — he knows he’s nobody’s dad yet — but he still doesn’t know what the discarded test really means. He found the stick five weeks ago, and Stella hasn’t said a word about it. She must have missed a period, but did she take the test because she hoped she was pregnant or because she hoped she wasn’t? He’s seen her little clamshell birth-control dispenser in the medicine cabinet, but it’s not like he keeps track, it’s not like he counts the pills to make sure she’s taking one each day. Kevin wears a condom most of the time, too, but sometimes he doesn’t. He didn’t that night in Chicago, when Stella, her eyes shining behind that goofy mask, plucked the little foil square out of his fingers and flipped it across the room, murmuring wetly in his ear, “I want it to be just us, Kevin, skin to skin.”
Where does she get this stuff? he wondered at the time, but even now, his cock stirs at the memory. He’d thought the masks were silly, he’d hated the music, but he remembers that night vividly: the shudder of her thighs around his waist, the rabbit pulse of the vein in her neck, the tremble of her lower lip under the gaudy mask. He splashes his face again and presses the soap dispenser. The milky goo in his palm looks like semen and smells like coconut, and he starts to laugh as he lathers his face, pushing his fingers up into his hairline and along his sideburns and around the back of his neck. He squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs with his fingertips, and in the reddened blackness behind his eyelids he can see Stella’s wrists straining against the leather cuffs — well, vinyl really, she isn’t as snobbish about sex gear as she is with trousers — and he can hear the rhythmic chirp of her excitement. He opens his eyes to peer through soapy eyelashes at the lather dripping off his nose and eyebrows and into the collar of his shirt, then presses the faucet again and splashes double handfuls of lukewarm water against his face, spattering the mirror and the countertop. Blinking at his reflection, he yanks a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and scrubs himself dry, vigorously rubbing his hair.
Chicago was eight months ago, so the pregnancy test wasn’t the result of their own Cirque de Drake, but they’ve gone bareback since. More frequently since then, in fact, with Stella assuring him that it’s okay, she’s got it taken care of, or that she’s just had her period, or that she’s just about to have it. He unbuckles his belt, slides it out, and coils it on the changing table, and he unbuttons his shirt slowly, pausing only to glance up at the ceiling for a security camera. Fuck it, he’s a customer, he’s dropped nearly seventy bucks here today, and anyway, there can’t be a law against changing clothes in a public restroom, not even in Texas. There’s always the possibility, of course that Stella took the test because she wanted to make sure she wasn’t pregnant. And she wasn’t, this time, anyway, which was probably just as well, because Kevin had just read of some study in the New York Times that said older men were more likely to father autistic children or kids with birth defects. Just like men, spermatozoa don’t stay young forever — they age, they break down, they decay. He didn’t actually say anything to her about the article, but he left the newspaper on the kitchen table with the article prominently displayed, and it was gone when he came home from work.