He rinses with another damp handful of towels, then wipes himself with some dry ones, chafing his skin. The trash bin is filling up with wadded paper; he can’t even see his discarded clothes anymore. He props his bare right foot on the rounded edge of the counter and scrubs the sticky blood away with soap and water. Coconut between his toes, behind his ears, in his armpits — he’s going to smell like a Piña Colada. With his knee bent and the stained bandage pulled tight, he feels the ache of his scrape, and he yanks the bandage painfully off and tosses it. Pinpricks of fresh blood ooze through the orange stain on his patella, so he puts his foot down on the cool floor, steps into the handicapped stall — only now does it occur to him that maybe he shouldn’t be walking around barefoot in a public restroom — and fishes the clean bandage out of his jacket pocket. He peels off the backing, props his foot back up on the counter, and pastes the new bandage against the scrape, smoothing down the edges.
Then Kevin tugs his new trousers out from under the shirt and socks on the changing table, tearing off the tag and picking out the threads with his teeth and fingernails, missing his Swiss Army knife again. He balances for a moment like a stork on one bare foot, the other foot poised over the empty waist of his new trousers, and surveys one more time his own pale, slackening, coconut-scented flesh. He hasn’t washed and changed his clothes in public since he used to go swimming at Silver Lake, and he hasn’t done that in years. Kevin doesn’t even like to take his shirt off in public anymore. He thinks of the Other Kevin, ritually bathing himself in the dank bathroom of some gloomy Glaswegian tower block, just before he strapped on his suicide vest and blew himself and a lot of other people to smithereens, and Kevin thinks, maybe if the Other Kevin’d had a girl, maybe if he’d gotten laid once in a while, he wouldn’t have felt that loathing for his own flesh, wouldn’t have felt the need to express his rage through plastic explosives.
Wobbling, Kevin thrusts one leg and then the other into the pants and zips them up. A little snug, but not too bad. He’s aware that he’s squaring his shoulders and sticking his chest out, even though he’s alone in the restroom with the Muzak. He’s been tuning it out until now, perhaps because it’s been playing songs he doesn’t know. But now it’s a song he recognizes, “Tempted” by Squeeze, more boomer comfort food, and now Kevin just feels tired. He doesn’t want to think about fatherhood anymore. He wishes the interview were over with, he wishes he were on his way to the airport, he wishes he were already on the plane. No, it’s more than that: he wishes he’d never come to Austin in the first place, wishes he’d never applied for the job, wishes he were back at his desk in Willoughby Hall, editing some deadly dull manuscript, reading his e-mail, mollifying some paranoid junior academic on the phone. He wishes he were on his deck drinking a Molson’s, waiting for Stella to come home from Chicago.
I said to my reflection, let’s get out of this play-ee-ace, goes the song, and he manages to unpin the new shirt without sticking himself and discovers that it’s short-sleeved, which ticks him off — at himself, mainly, for not checking in the first place — but he puts it on anyway, because if he wants to return it, he’d have to dig his old, soiled shirt out of the trash or go back into the store bare-chested. At least the new shirt buttons all the way to the top without choking him, so he just tucks it in and snakes his belt through the loops of his new trousers. He tugs on the new socks, hopping one-footed on the cold floor. Drops his shoes smack on the tile, steps into them, props each on the counter to tie the laces. Then he retrieves his jacket from the stall and watches himself in the mirror as he shrugs it on, shooting the cuffs. Did some bored security guard watch Kevin’s entire striptease on CCTV? Is he even now calling the Austin police, to report some pasty, Celtic suicide bomber in the men’s room, ritually preparing himself for an atrocity? Kevin wonders if he’ll be arrested before he even leaves the store.
“Relax,” Kevin says out loud, smiling insincerely at himself in the mirror. “I’m harmless.” He replaces his wallet and keys in the pockets of his new trousers, scoops the change off the damp counter into his palm. He steps to the urinal and empties his bladder of all the iced tea he’s been drinking, his stream spattering the little plastic filter that says JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS. Then he returns to the sinks and washes his hands, turning his newly scrubbed face this way and that in the mirror. He stands, squares his shoulders, plucks the tie out of his pocket, and ties it quickly in the mirror, cinching it until he’s happy, then loosening it a bit and undoing his top shirt button for the trip back downtown. He flips the changing table up against the wall — for the last time or the first? — and hits the door just as the singer gives a final, soulful grunt—Unhhh, tempted by the fruit of another, tempted but the truth is discovered…
… what’s been going on, thinks Kevin. At last there’s someone behind the Customer Service counter, a short, buxom, black-haired young woman in a fitted shirt, also flipping through a ring binder, and Kevin, cooled and cleaned and smelling of coconut and new clothes, steps up with a smile and puts both hands on the counter.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ve left my cell phone at home. Could you call me a cab?”
Feeling refreshed and dapper, Kevin waits in the vestibule between the two banks of doors at the front of store. Gazing out the tinted doors at a yellow minivan coasting toward him through the dusty glare of the nearly empty parking lot, he’s thinking he should just tell the cabbie to take him straight to the airport, adding like some wiseguy in a snap-brim fedora, “And make it snappy, chief.” Might as well just go home, he thinks. He still can’t make up his mind about Stella, but what he’ll probably do is let things drift until she presents him with a positive pregnancy test, and by then it’ll be too late to abandon her. He will back into fatherhood the way he’s backed into everything else in his life. He’s already certain that he’s not going to take the job here, whatever it is, even if they offer it to him. Move to Texas? What the hell was he thinking?