The Kid from Out West

“My Evolutionary Sweetheart” by Matthew Fertel

Do you remember him? It was the first cold night of the year. We had gone to Walter’s party across town. Walter had sold his furniture because he’d landed a job out of state — and then suddenly the job fell through, leaving him with an empty house. He decided to throw himself an impromptu party to lift his spirits.

The crowd was like us: late thirties, having risen about as far as they would go, past their rawest yearnings. Walter’s ex-wife was there with her fifty-something boyfriend, who had brought his fifteen-year-old, but everybody was nice, everybody got along. We drank wine from paper cups in the dimness — even the electricity seemed to have been pawned — and talked about the World Series. Walter’s house was big enough that the party didn’t feel crowded, even though there were many people we didn’t know. As we wandered through the first floor, you put your arm around me, and we smiled, glad to be done with the frantic, lonely nights of our youth, and a little nostalgic for them all the same.

The kid began to hover near you while I was freshening up our drinks. You were in the living room, looking at one of the few pictures that Walter had unpacked. I watched him from the kitchen — watched him approach you, look at you examining the picture, then turn to examine it himself: a sketch of a church on a hill. When the kid saw it, it seemed to affect him. From his smooth features, I figured he was the fifteen-year-old’s friend — Walter’s ex-wife’s boyfriend’s son’s friend, I mean. Later, he would claim to be a stout twenty-five. He was dressed more fashionably than anyone else in the room, although, since none of us had tried to be hip, his efforts came off as slightly pitiful. He had long, shiny hair parted to the side. You were wearing a yellow sweater and jeans. We had dressed for the party like we were going to pick up a pizza.

I watched him affectionately, I took my time pouring your drink. I had once dressed like that, and it seemed to me that he deserved his chance. When I joined you, he was talking about the sketch, how he had been to Spain, how it reminded him of that nation (he used the word nation). In the next moment he began talking about his favorite films (he used the word films). He was from out west — he didn’t clarify what that meant, so I don’t know if out west was meant to evoke Big Sky or Big Sur. Twice, he mentioned how things were there, as opposed to how they were here, as if where we lived embodied the East.

At some point, he colluded with another partygoer to replace the jazz on the stereo with something more swinging. He tugged on your arm, and you obliged him, dancing a little, throwing me the occasional bemused look — but only when the kid wasn’t staring at you, only when he had his head down and was lost in his own world. I think I heard him say to you that what he really liked above all was Mozart, and I thought how funny that was, given that you and I don’t listen to classical music.

He started to smile at you a little too much when the next song came on — an oldie, a real heartbreaker — and I saw that the moment had come to cut in. He retreated to the couch with a grin and tucked his feet under his rump. A light shorted out in the kitchen, and he turned to it quickly, then looked outside just as quickly, then back to us, quickly, connecting the dots in his head, making poetry from all he beheld.

Eventually he dozed off. When it was time to leave, I woke him to see if he needed a ride. As we walked down the stairs of Walter’s building, he took your arm and, with a sigh, ran the fingers of his hand along the banister. We propped him up in the backseat, where he stayed, mostly awake, grinning in the rearview mirror. He was looking at the street names and the moon and the twenty-four hour sandwich stores that flew by, but most of the time, of course, he was looking at you. I don’t know whether I was glad to know that people were still young somewhere, or jealous that he got to feel the way he did. Probably both. Because we had been that young once, and we had dressed like fools and suffered through a thousand frantic, lonely nights — and as much as I loved you, that night he loved you more.

About the Author

David Yourdon is a writer based in Canada. His work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, HAD, and Rejection Letters. He posts fiction on his Substack, What Will It Be Like.

About the artist

Matthew Fertel is an abstract photographer who seeks out beauty in the mundane. He likes to go on long walks and use details of his surroundings to create imaginary landscapes filled with the strange characters that live inside his head. You can find Matthew on Instagram @digprod4 or at https://mfertel.wixsite.com/matthewfertelphoto.