Kings of Infinite Space

TWENTY

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Wednesday, Paul did not see Callie’s truck in the TxDoGS parking lot. He circled the lot twice in his rattling little Colt until he was certain it wasn’t there. Inside, Preston gave him a look of manly concern, which Paul chose to ignore, and after stashing his wretched lunch in the refrigerator, he stuck his head in Building Services and asked Ray as casually as he could where Callie was. Ray’s cheeks bulged with a mouthful of breakfast burrito, and Paul had to wait until Ray swallowed, which was like watching a rat pass through a cobra.

“Out sick,” Ray said.

“Ah,” said Paul, a little less casually than before.

After an hour in his cube of listening to Olivia across the aisle working on the RFP — she tsked and hmm’d and sighed — Paul worked up the nerve to cross to her doorway and ask if she had any questions so far about the document or the project. He needed to keep this job, and if keeping the job meant swallowing shit from Olivia Haddock, then, by God, he would close his eyes and open wide. “I’d be happy to hear any suggestions,” he said, his jaw clenching involuntarily.

Olivia scarcely lifted her eyes from the page before her, which she was converting into a palimpsest of emendations, marginalia, and the bold lime-green tracks of her highlighter. “When I’ve finished,” was all she said, and Paul retreated to his cube.

The morning crawled by. Paul noodled on the RFP, certain that all the work he had put into it so far was about to be overridden or contradicted in the next day or two by Olivia. He worked himself into a zone of numbness where each passing moment was like a fat drop of water accumulating at the mouth of a leaky faucet, growing and growing and growing until Paul didn’t think he could stand it for another instant. Then at last the drop fell in slow motion and plinked into the drain, an utter waste of effort, and another tiny drop began to accumulate, glistening and slow. By the end of the morning he was trying to lose himself in an equally futile sexual daydream about the lovely Erika of his temp agency, in which he never got any further than fumbling at the buttons of her blouse. The fantasy kept stuttering back to the start like a tape loop, and Paul sat gazing sightlessly at his monitor, his head propped in his hand, the side of his face squeezed out of all proportion.

“How are you fixed for lunch, Professor?”

Paul nearly overturned his chair. “What?” he gasped, righting himself.

The Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier huddled in the doorway to his cube. The Colonel pursed his lips, while Bob Wier beamed at Paul and J.J. glowered into the empty cube next door.

“Pull up your socks and follow me.” The Colonel grasped Paul firmly by the biceps and hauled him to his feet. “We’re taking you to lunch.”

A moment later his three colleagues were marching him in a flying wedge up the hall.

“Where are we going?” said Paul.

“Someplace special.” J.J. rubbed his palms together. “Hoo-wee.”

“Lord forgive us,” said Bob Wier.

As they passed through the lobby, Paul twisted around to glance up at the balcony, at the doorway of Building Services, only to see Ray lumbering out of the office. Preston watched the flying wedge pass with a narrow gaze, but before he could say anything, they were out the door. In the heat of the parking lot the four men approached a massive, silvery SUV; the Colonel beeped the enormous vehicle from twenty paces away, and the beast’s doors unlocked with a hearty chunk.

“Shotgun!” cried J.J., trotting towards the vehicle, but the Colonel brought him up short. “Not today, son.” He gave Paul a look of manly approbation. “Mr. Trilby’s our guest of honor.”

Shotgun? Paul hadn’t heard that since high school. He endured a petulant glance from J.J. as he climbed up into the front passenger’s seat; J.J. and Bob Wier hoisted themselves into the back. Paul settled into a deep bucket seat and hauled the shoulder strap, as wide as an ammo belt, across his chest. The SUV’s leather upholstery and dashboard were a rich wine-red, like the appointments of a private club. With the push of a button the Colonel locked the doors again, and the solid, metallic chunk sounded like a penitentiary lockdown. When he started the engine the whole vehicle purred with power.

The Colonel followed the lunchtime line of vehicles out of the lot, then crossed the bridge. Paul could never see over the parapet from his own low-slung heap, but now he seemed to be looking down at the sluggish green water from an impossible height. Dry, freezing air poured out of the AC vents all along the dashboard, and the Colonel lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror and said, “Cold enough back there for you boys?”

“Mmm,” said Bob Wier, and J.J. grunted. In the lunchtime traffic the Colonel’s vehicle even towered over other SUVs, and once he revved his engine impatiently at some poor subcompact that had the temerity to pull in front of him. Slowly they entered a street of faux-ethnic chain restaurants with hearty, good-time names along the south bank of the river — Bella Bellisimo, Ay Caramba’s, Paddy O’Shaughnessy’s — and then the Colonel executed a sweeping left turn into a crowded parking lot. Headlights was a low-slung sports bar with a blue-and-green color scheme and a logo that featured a pair of bright, round headlights, each with a pink aureole right in the center, just faint enough to give a corporate spokesman leeway to say, My goodness, they’re just a pair of headlights. I don’t see anything else, do you?

The four men swung down out of the vehicle, and the Colonel locked it behind them with his remote, ka-chunk. The SUV’s own headlights flared once, lasciviously. J.J. and Bob Wier loped across the sun-blasted parking lot. Through the restaurant’s wide windows, Paul saw a waitress in a tight, low-cut t-shirt leaning pendulously across a table, delivering a plate of buffalo wings. The Colonel hung back and gave Paul a manly squeeze around the shoulders.

“You a Jew, Paul?”

“Sorry?”

“Are you Jewish, son?”

“Uh, no, actually. I’m not.”

“Then you never had a bar mitzvah?”

“My parents were Episcopalians.”

“Well, just think of this as your TxDoGS bar mitzvah.” He gave Paul one last squeeze. “Today you are a man.”

Never had Paul gone so far beyond the pale of his former life. Simply setting foot in a Headlights would have ended his academic career, if he’d still had one. The women he had pursued in the coffeehouses north of the river, close to campus — the earnest graduate students in their sleeveless blouses, or Virginia, the willowy chairperson of the History Department — would at the very least have ostracized him immediately if they’d known. The de facto feminism of his former life made his legs weak as the Colonel ushered him into the restaurant’s arctic air-conditioning, but at the same time Paul was breathless with anticipation, like an adolescent discovering a stack of Playboys in the back of his father’s closet. At the hostess’s podium, J.J. bounced eagerly on his toes, while Bob Wier cast his eyes to the floor. “ ‘The cravings of sinful man, the lust of the eyes,’ ” he muttered, “ ‘comes not from the Father but from the world.’ One John, two, sixteen.”

The tanned and fantastically fit hostess bounded towards them in a pair of spotlessly white running shoes. She was wearing Headlights colors, a filmy pair of blue running shorts and a cut-off, sleeveless t-shirt in green. The shorts were slashed well up her thigh, and the t-shirt ended just below her breasts. Paul’s chief impression was of long, firm, fulsomely healthy arms and legs, and a midriff you could bounce a handball off of. The heat from those arms, those legs, and that tummy was making him sweat in spite of the air-conditioning, and he found his eyes drawn to her breasts like a needle to magnetic north. It was only when the hostess spoke that Paul’s eyes staggered from her nipples to her unnaturally bright smile. She plucked four laminated menus from the hostess station and tapped them with her long, red nails.

“Four?” she chirped, cocking her head.

“By the window, if you please,” said the Colonel, the only one of the four men to display a modicum of cool. In single file they trailed after the swaying hem of the hostess’s shorts. Bob Wier shuffled like a prisoner, his eyes on the floor, his face as red as a homegrown tomato. J.J. swiveled his gaze all around the room, unable to fix on just one waitress; if he could, he would have rotated his head a complete 360. Paul’s head withdrew between his shoulders, like a turtle’s; he felt as if every woman who had ever been angry at him — his mother, his wry seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Altenburg, his fierce thesis advisor Professor Victorinix, his ex-wife Elizabeth, Kymberly, even Callie — was watching him scornfully. The Colonel, meanwhile, carried himself like the aging, corseted John Wayne crossing the parlor of a whorehouse, shoulders squared, hips loose, confident at every moment that the camera was on him and not on the busty young women all around him.

The restaurant had an automotive theme. Bumpers and mag wheels and gleaming exhaust manifolds were suspended from the lights. Handsomely detailed models of famous stock cars lined a ledge just below the ceiling; half of the fiberglass shell of a Formula One racer, sawn lengthwise, was mounted over the bar. Behind the bar Paul noted a shrine to Dale Earnhardt, framed with little American flags, and on the large TV over the bar a NASCAR race was in progress with the sound off. The tables were already crowded with men, mostly middle aged, mostly middle managers, with here and there a few trim young guys in polo shirts. Just loud enough to make the lunch crowd raise their voices, the sound system played one automotive tune after another. As Paul threaded between the tables after the switching backside of the hostess, he heard “Hot Rod Lincoln” segue into “Pink Cadillac.” Then he was settled on a tall stool at a tall table of blonde wood, facing the Colonel, with J.J. and Bob Wier against the window.

“What kind of lubrication can I get you guys?” asked the hostess, and the Colonel ordered a pitcher of Kirin.

“I’ll have a Sprite,” mumbled Bob Wier, aiming his eyes over the young woman’s head.

“They got Kirin on tap here?” J.J. said, twisting on his stool to follow the hostess’s rhythmic retreat.

The Colonel followed J.J.’s gaze. “They’ve got everything on tap here,” he said.

“A-rooo-ga!” said J.J., miming a cartoon wolf. He curled his fingers before his eyes as if they were popping out of his head like telescopes. He lolled his tongue as if it were unscrolling to the floor.

“First Corinthians, ten, thirteen,” Bob Wier said, gazing mournfully out the window into the noonday glare. “ ‘God will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.’ ”

“Amen.” The Colonel laughed.

Bob Wier closed his eyes. “ ‘But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.’ ”

“Will you relax, Reverend?” J.J. said. “Fuck.”

“Bob’s afraid one of these girls will recognize him from Sunday school,” said the Colonel.

“Lord have mercy.” Bob Wier laughed nervously. “Would it have killed you guys to go to Applebee’s?”

“I’ll bet the professor’s never been here before,” the Colonel said.

“No,” said Paul, barely paying attention. At the moment his cerebellum was at war with his medulla oblongata. His lizard brain was watching a particularly long-limbed young woman with boyishly bobbed hair bouncing towards them on her padded shoes; she was athletically balancing a cork-lined tray with a pitcher and four frosted glasses on it over her head, one-handed, which had the effect of pulling her cut-off tee tighter against her breasts. Meanwhile his cerebellum was trying to pretend that he was in a foreign country where he needed to play along with the local customs so as not to offend anybody.

“Methinks the professor’s blood is up,” said the Colonel.

Paul glared at him. “Quit calling me that,” he was about to say, but he was interrupted by the arrival of the long-limbed waitress. Beaming at them all, she set the brimming pitcher one-handed on the table and lifted one of the frosted glasses from the tray; it was already full, with a wedge of lemon squeezed over the rim.

“Which of y’all had the Sprite?” she sang, and Bob Wier speechlessly waggled his fingers. Extending one long leg behind her, she reached all the way down the length of the table to set the Sprite in front of him. Her tee pulled tight across her supple back, and Paul and J.J. caught each other looking. Only the Colonel maintained any degree of suavity, and even he, Paul noted, cast a discreet glance along the filmy curve of the waitress’s shorts. Then she straightened, and all the men at the table breathed out.

“I’m Stony,” she said, with a beauty queen’s smile, setting out the three empty beer glasses. “Have y’all decided what you want?”

The four men fumbled open their menus.

“Do y’all need a minute yet?”

“No,” said the Colonel.

“Yes,” said J.J.

“Umm. .,” said Paul.

“Mmph,” said Bob Wier through a mouthful of Sprite.

Stony winked at them and pivoted away. “I’ll come back in a sec.”

J.J. twisted in his seat to watch her go. Bob Wier gasped and wiped the back of his hand across his lips. Over the edge of his bright menu, Paul caught the Colonel watching him watching Stony’s retreat. He dropped his eyes.

“Nobody’s putting a gun to her head, Professor,” murmured the Colonel.

“What?” muttered Paul.

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking.” The Colonel smirked at his menu. “You’re thinking the lovely Stony does charity work with the homeless in her spare time. It spares you from the guilt over the tingling in your loins.”

The Colonel was once again annoyingly close to the truth. Even as his lizard brain throbbed for Stony’s world-class midriff, Paul’s forebrain was trying to tell him that “Stony” was the waitress’s nom de service; that her real name was Zoë; that she was only working here until her Fulbright money kicked in and she could leave for Paris to study French women’s labor relations at the Sorbonne. Or better still, she already had a NEH grant to work here undercover to study the lives of all the other Fulbright scholars who were working their way through graduate school serving BBQ chicken wings to goggle-eyed middle managers. He felt his face get hot.

“What’s the harm in admiring a nubile young woman?” The Colonel closed his menu definitively and slapped it on the table. “After all, it’s only natural. It’s what she’s engineered for. Hell, son, it’s what you’re engineered for.” Still looking at Paul, he reached along the table and pressed his finger to J.J.’s jaw, pushing him roughly around to face the others.

J.J. flinched. “What the fuck?”

The Colonel lifted the pitcher one-handed and poured a beer. “The professor here knows exactly what I’m talking about.” He pushed the glass in front of J.J. then poured another glass and pushed it towards Paul. “Are you a sporting man, Paul?”

Am I a Jew? wondered Paul. Am I a sporting man? What’s he getting at?

“In my experience,” said the Colonel, pouring himself a glass, “even your radical Marxist college professor enjoys a bone-crunching gridiron display.”

“I’m more of a baseball fan,” said Paul, instantly regretting

it.

“Of course you are!” cried the Colonel. “It’s the national sport of intellectuals. The complexity of it, its fascinating geometry and mathematical precision. Its uncertain pace, its longueurs punctuated by moments of passion and high performance.” He took a hearty sip of beer and ran his tongue along his upper lip. “Gives a fellow a lot to think about.”

Paul lifted his own beer to avoid having to say anything.

“But consider your real sports for a moment, Professor.” The Colonel fixed him with his bright gaze. “Your violent sports. What’s the point of each and every one of them?”

Paul, swallowing, only lifted his eyebrows.

“I’ll tell you,” said the Colonel. “It’s to get a little pellet of pigskin or cowhide or rubber past all the other men on the court or the gridiron, into that tight, narrow spot at the end of the field. Which is then the occasion for a moment of pure, blissful, mindless ecstasy. A moment, in other words, of release.”

Paul dived into his beer again. It was all he could do to keep from rolling his eyes. Somewhere in officer training school, the Colonel had read a chapter from Freud. If he knew the sort of thing my ex-wife wrote about in her theoretical work, Paul thought, his balls would shrivel and retract into his scrotum like landing gear.

“Football, basketball, hockey, even golf — it’s what they’re all about,” continued the Colonel. “Get that little piece of yourself into the hole. It’s what we’re all competing for, isn’t it?”

“Huh!” gasped J.J., with a puzzled smile. He understood that something lubricious was being talked about, but he wasn’t sure what.

“It’s about, it’s about building character,” stammered Bob Wier, trying to get in the game.

“Hey, wait a minute!” J.J. sat up straight. “A baseball’s a little white pellet—”

“Yes, yes, yes.” The Colonel waved his hand dismissively. “Perhaps you weren’t listening, son. Baseball’s for intellectuals.” He might as well have said, baseball’s for pussies. “Consider your catcher, squatting with his legs open like a woman, that big, soft mitt between his legs—”

“I was a catcher,” said J.J., sounding wounded.

The Colonel sighed and turned his gaze to Paul again. “What do you know about evolution, Paul? The reverend here believes there’s no such thing.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Bob Wier. Paul lifted his beer again to avoid having to answer.

“Every person in this room is engineered for the preservation of the species.” The Colonel took another sip and licked his lip again. “Do you know why young J.J. here stares at Stony’s breasts? Do you know why you do?”

“Because they’re fucking amazing?” J.J. glowered over his glass. He was still pissed about the catcher thing. “Fuck, even an intellectual can see that.”

“Guys!” Bob Wier laughed and glanced nervously over his shoulder. “We’re in a public place. Do we have to—?”

The Colonel leaned over the table. “It’s your genes talking, Paul.”

Paul was trying to keep a straight face, but he couldn’t help but notice Stony swaying in their direction carrying a tray crowded with plates of food. High over her left breast, over her collarbone, she had pinned a bright yellow button, but at this distance Paul couldn’t read it. She stopped at a tableful of guys and distributed the plates, while the men’s faces swiveled towards her like sunflowers towards the morning sun.

“You know what I mean, Professor,” the Colonel was saying. “Deep in your mitochondrial DNA, you see a perfect mother for your offspring: a young, healthy, strapping woman with a strong, shapely pelvis for giving birth, and firm, full breasts for giving suck.”

J.J. smirked. “Giving what?”

“Oh, God.” Bob Wier put his face in his hands.

“Did you say suck?” said J.J.

“Young J.J.’s mind is in the gutter, Professor, but then his mind is supposed to be in the gutter. He’s supposed to be thinking about spreading his genes to every young woman in this room, thus maximizing his genetic legacy. It’s certainly not love. It’s not even lust. It’s the selfish gene guaranteeing its own survival, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, mindless and shrewd, all at once.”

“You know,” said Paul at last, lowering his beer, “a little Discovery channel is a dangerous thing.” It was like being trapped in hell with E. O. Wilson.

The Colonel manufactured a hearty laugh and rocked back from the table. “Very droll,” he said.

Stony arrived and squared her shoulders. “How ’bout it, guys? What’s your pleasure?”

The men fell silent in the presence of tawny Stony. Paul found himself wondering what to do with his eyes and his hands, and at last he folded his fingers together on the cool tabletop and glanced sidelong at the fulsome curve of her breasts. Then he lifted his eyes to the yellow button at her shoulder, which read ASK ME ABOUT OUR TENDER CHICKEN STRIPS!

“I’ll have the chicken strips,” said Paul.

“I believe I’ll have them, too,” said the Colonel.

“So,” said J.J., leaning in, “is that breast meat?”

“It’s not just breast meat, hon,” said Stony, a little more cannily than was attractive. “It’s tender, juicy breast meat.”

“Sounds fingers-lickin’ good,” said J.J., leaning closer.

“Oh, they are! Especially if you dip them in our own special dippin’ sauce!”

“Wow, dippin’ sauce.” J.J. was hanging off his stool. “What’s in that?”

Bob Wier hyperventilated speechlessly, his eyes wide as coffee cups.

“He’ll have the same, my dear,” said the Colonel. “Chicken strips all round.”

“Outstanding!” Stony reached along the table again to collect their menus; J.J. settled back on his stool and theatrically fanned himself. She swung away, and all four men sagged a little in their seats, unaware until that moment that they’d all been sitting a little straighter.

“No doubt you’ve noted Stony’s professional detachment,” the Colonel said, watching Paul. “She smiles and thrusts her bosom at us, but she keeps that certain distance.”

“Fucking cocktease,” muttered J.J., half turned around on his stool.

“A professional necessity,” Paul heard himself say, “in a place like this.” Paul knew he shouldn’t argue with this blowhard, but it was such a relief to be asked his opinion on something and to have his opinion listened to. After all, didn’t he have eight years of graduate school training in talking about gender? “It’s what this place is engineered for, isn’t it?” Paul went on. “The tease. The slap and tickle.”

“No fucking shit. They’re all fucking teases.” J.J.’s restless gaze bounced from one waitress to another. “None of these bitches would give a guy like me the time of day.”

“That’s one way to put it, my hormonal young friend,” said the Colonel over his beer. “But look at it from her point of view. Hers is a finely calibrated performance, and I don’t just mean her professional restauranteur’s hospitality. It’s her genes speaking.” He sipped and smacked his lips. “Young Stony wants to attract a robust fellow like you, or the professor here or even an old buck like myself, but she’s prepared to make us work for it. While it’s in the male’s interest to spread his seed as widely as possible, it’s in Stony’s interest to find a potent, yet reliable fellow who will participate in the raising of her offspring. Given the investment of time involved, Stony can only yield to a man who she can be certain will feed and protect her offspring. To oversimplify, young J.J. here is interested in the quantity of partners, while the discriminating Stony is interested in the quality of one partner.”

“What’s he saying?” J.J. narrowed his gaze at Paul.

“That you’d like to fuck them all,” Paul said.

“Fucking A.” J.J. sat up straight and took a manful drink of beer. “Fucking bitches.”

Propped against the window, desperately watching the traffic outside, miserable Bob Wier was repeating scripture to himself under his breath.

“Do you think I’m wrong, Professor?” said the Colonel.

Paul hesitated. Did he really want to argue the construction of gender with this jerk? His ex-wife Elizabeth, the theorist of gender, would have handed this loser his genitalia about twenty minutes ago. But then Lizzie wouldn’t have been sitting in a Headlights to begin with, would she? She wouldn’t know what it was like to be a man surrounded by other men, waited upon by half-dressed young women, sitting here half aroused, with his hormones singing in his blood. She couldn’t possibly get what it was like to stew in your own humidity, heat prickling the backs of your eyeballs, sweat coming out on the palms of your hands. Dear God, he thought, what if the Colonel is right?

“Do you know what ‘essentialism’ means?” Paul heard the condescension in his own voice.

“No,” laughed the Colonel, “but I can guess. All your fancy literary jargon doesn’t hold any water any longer, Professor. I’m talking science, son, science. Philosophy is over. There is no more philosophy.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” said Paul.

“The world’s turned upside down, Paul,” said the Colonel fiercely, leaning across the table. “Suddenly they don’t need men any more. Single mothers. Lesbian mothers. Or they forgo motherhood altogether and compete directly with us in the marketplace. Why maximize their genetic legacy, why pick a mate, why have children at all, when they can take our jobs. Look at all the childless women in our office: Olivia, Renee, Nolene.”

Paul remembered the three child-safety seats in the back of Nolene’s van. “I think Nolene has kids,” he said.

“She might as well not have them,” spat the Colonel. “Is she home with them? Ensuring their safety and survival? Hell no, she’s at work, raising them by proxy. It’s not natural, Paul. Don’t you get it?” He clasped Paul’s forearm in a painful grip.

“Easy,” Paul said, but he couldn’t pull free.

“Look across the length and breadth of our office, Paul. What do you see? Cube after cube of women working at jobs that men used to have. Cube after cube of women not raising children.”

There was a breathless silence at the table. Even Bob Wier stopped praying and turned away from the window. J.J. gripped his beer with both hands and shifted his gaze from the Colonel to Paul and back again. Paul tensed his arm under the Colonel’s grip. The Colonel fixed Paul with a furious, penetrating gaze.

“Here we go, fellas, get ’em while they’re hot.” Stony swung her tray close to the end of the table, extending her long arm to place a large plate in front of each man. On each plate was a heap of chicken strips on one side and a heap of seasoned fries on the other, surrounding a little dish of pinkish dippin’ sauce. “Can I get you boys anything else?”

The Colonel released Paul and sat back; he drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Paul leaned back, too, and rubbed his arm where the Colonel had grasped him.

“I think we’re fine,” said J.J., and Stony winked at them and went away.

“I got a little heated there, son,” said the Colonel. “I apologize.”

“No harm done,” said Paul. In the silence that followed, he lifted a chicken strip and dangled it over the pink sauce. J.J. picked one up, too, and plunged it into the sauce.

“It’s just,” the Colonel went on, “we used to be competing for women. Now we’re competing with women.” They all watched the Colonel as his forehead knotted and unknotted. He gazed at his plate of chicken strips as if he’d never seen anything like it before in his entire life.

“What does a man do to ensure his survival now?” He looked up at Paul meaningfully. “What do men do, gentlemen, working together, as men, to ensure our survival?”

Before anyone else could answer, Bob Wier groaned, and the other three men looked down the table at him.

“Not here okay?” he said. “Not now. Can we just eat?”