A Shroud for Aquarius

9

The class reunion had been held at the local Elks Club, a massive two-story brick building facing Mississippi Drive, overlooking Riverview Park, which overlooked a Mississippi River view, as chance would have it. It was a cool June evening, and under a full moon the river looked gray and was stippled with gentle waves; I felt strangely detached. Somewhere between an out-of-body experience, and watching a rerun of a TV show you hadn’t much cared for the first time around. I was alone. Most of the people getting out of the cars filling the Elks parking lot were paired off. I wasn’t half of a married couple, however; I was a complete single male. Technically complete, anyway.

I felt a little awkward about the whole thing. I’d purposely missed the ten-year reunion, having just had a rather nasty experience with an old girl friend from my high school days. Actually, she went back to my junior high days, but had haunted me through high school as well. Then, ten years later, she and her larcenous husband reentered my life, and, well — that’s another story.

Anyway, on the off chance that Debbie Lee would be at the ten-year reunion, I’d made sure I was out of town that weekend; later I learned that she hadn’t attended (probably ducking me just as I was ducking her) but that a number of my old buddies had made a trip back to Port City, some of whom I hadn’t seen since graduation. I was sick about missing them, and pledged (to myself, and a few people who checked up on me later to see why I’d stayed away) to attend the fifteenth reunion.

And, so, now I was here. There was to be a dinner, a banquet, so I’d worn a navy sports coat and gray slacks and white shirt, and a skinny red tie I’d had for years, but which was passing these days for “new wave.” Even so, I was a little underdressed. It was like a latter-day prom — guys in suits, their “ladies” in gowns, or damn near. There were, of course, a few exceptions; Ginnie, among them, in her layered earth tones and funky jewelry, the late sixties meets Annie Hall in a health food co-op. Her red hair was a mid-sixties shag, and she wore almost no makeup, just freckles and a face that I suddenly realized for the first time in my life was very beautiful. Before this, I’d always looked at it and had just seen Ginnie; now I realized she was a stunning girl. Woman. She hadn’t been a girl for a long time, really — not since I was a boy.

“Looks like you’re another single-o,” she said, finding me in the mob in the wide Elks hallway, slipping her arm in mine. “Let’s pair up.”

“Why not?” I said, and pecked her on the cheek.

A hundred or so “kids” thirty-three to thirty-five, most of them my former classmates, were waiting to go into the dining room. The walls herding us in were papered in a garish red with brocade fleurs-de-lis; in big fancy gold-filigreed mirrors, we looked back at ourselves and saw how old we were; subdued electric lighting hiding in elaborate glass chandeliers attempted to work a soft-focus magic on us. But it wouldn’t take: we just weren’t eighteen anymore. We weren’t even twenty-five anymore. Nobody thirty-three to thirty-five likes to think it, but we were middle-aged.

“Shit,” Ginnie said.

“You’re that glad to see me?” I asked.

We were still arm in arm.

She said, “I was just thinking how old we’re all looking.”

“You look about thirteen.”

“It’s the freckles. You’d never know I was a thirtyish junkie.”

I looked close at her, trying not to seem to be, wondering if she was kidding.

She looked around her, a child taking in her surroundings. “Boy, I haven’t been in the Elks Club since the prom. They remodeled since then, didn’t they?”

“Appears so. Quite the decorating scheme.”

“Early Whorehouse,” she smirked, nodding toward the red brocade paper. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dolly Parton came down those stairs with her personality hanging out.”

We were in fact at that moment being herded slowly past a wide stairway on which some of our former classmates sat, uncomfortable in their suits and fancy dresses, looking like old kids, but chattering like young ones. The racket in the hallway was less than deafening, but just barely. Faces were overly animated, as current personalities faded and old, younger ones reemerged; the return of youthful personas made the age lines stand out even more.

“Wishing you’d stayed home, Mal?”

I found a smile. “No. I’m getting to see you, aren’t I? I don’t see Jim Hoffmann or Mike Bloom anywhere, do you?”

“No. I doubt they made it back. Hoff’s in Colorado, isn’t he? And Bloom’s in Council Bluffs or something? A lawyer?”

“Yeah. With a bank, I think. Ron Parker probably won’t be here; he’s still in the service, running an officer’s club in Hawaii. Tough duty, huh? But I wonder if John Leuck’ll make it, and Wheaty, and the rest of the guys.”

“They were here at the ten-year,” she said. “All except Wheaty — rumor is, he became a circus clown. But that’s probably just a story.”

Somehow it surprised me she would attend the ten-year reunion — even though here she was at the fifteenth. “So you made the tenth?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “It was a great reunion. Just about everybody was there, except you.”

“I wish I’d gone.”

“And stayed home tonight.”

“Not at all. I’m sure I’ll see plenty of the guys.”

“Not to mention the gals.”

“You forget, Ginnie — I didn’t date much in high school.”

“Ah, yes — stuck on Debbie Lee. Will she be here tonight?”

I shrugged. “Probably not. She moved to Michigan or Wisconsin or someplace. I get those states mixed up.”

“Yeah,” Ginnie said, smirking again. “I get states with more than one syllable mixed up all the time, myself.”

I grinned at her. “You never change, do you?”

Her smirk turned to a smile; on reflection, I think it may have been a sad one.

“That’s not necessarily a compliment, Mal.”

“I meant it as such.”

“I know. At least you didn’t mean it meanly. But some patterns are tough to break out of, when you’ve been locked into ’em since you were a kid.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How’s the writing coming?”

“Changing the subject on me?”

“No — just wondering what a girl has to do to get a book dedicated to her. I was there when it all started, kiddo. I always believed in you, you know.”

I sensed she was apologizing again for her long-ago tactless putdown in the cafeteria, but I didn’t say as much. Not in so many words, at least.

I just said, “That’s nice to know. Thanks, Gin.”

“Don’t mention it.” She stood on her tiptoes; the crowd was slowly moving into the dining room. “Is that Brad Faulkner up ahead?”

I looked, but didn’t know why; I hardly knew Faulkner back in school, and wouldn’t recognize him today if he came up and introduced himself.

But I said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I hear he’s divorced.”

I didn’t know he was married.

“No kidding,” I said.

She was still on her tiptoes, presumably looking toward Faulkner.

“Tell me something, Ginnie.”

“Anything, my sweet. Or anyway, damn near anything.”

“How’s life treating you these days? ETC.’s must be making you a bundle.”

Shrugging, she told me, briefly, about selling out to Caroline Westin.

“I thought you’d hang onto that place forever,” I said.

“Nothing lasts forever,” she said. She assumed a tough-guy, side-of-the-mouth expression. “‘Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.’”

“Willard Motley, 1947,” I said.

“Right! Knock On Any Door! Great book! You remembered that?”

“Ginnie, I gave you that book.”

Her smile melted. “That’s right,” she said, strangely sad. “How could I forget?”

“Ginnie, it’s no big deal. We both turned each other onto a lot of books.”

“He was black, did you know that?”

“Who?”

“Motley. Willard Motley.”

“Yeah, actually, I did know that. He usually wrote about white people, though.”

“It was the times,” she said. “He was better off passing for white, in his way. He could get his book read more widely, I guess. It’s better now, don’t you think?”

“How do you mean?”

“The world’s improved. Things have changed for the better, a little.”

“Maybe, a little.”

“It wasn’t all just talk.”

The crowd was moving faster now, toward our meal, and though I was following along like a good sheep, I wasn’t able to follow Ginnie’s line of thought.

“What are you getting at, Gin?”

“Just thinking about the sixties, those days. The things we marched for, and protested about; things really did change, we really did stop a war.”

“I suppose.”

We were jostled close together; her eyes looked wide and blue and empty and yet fathomless. Freckles or not, she looked suddenly old. I didn’t know she was the oldest person in the room, that she had a month to live, when she said, “I’m dreamin’, aren’t I? It really isn’t much better. We didn’t really accomplish much, did we?”

“We’re just another generation, Ginnie. Like most generations, we thought we were special.”

“And weren’t?”

“Maybe we were. Maybe we weren’t. But I know one thing we most certainly were.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Kids.”

They alternated serving plates of rare roast beef with well-done, giving you the opportunity to barter with your neighbor; we sat in the huge dining room, passing plates around, children in coats and ties and fancy dresses, exchanging food as if in the high school cafeteria. (“Trade you my dessert for your roll.”) Like all children, we weren’t content with what we were given; we had to change things to our liking.

“You know, we did change things,” I said to Ginnie, who was sitting beside me, with whom I’d swapped my well-done beef for her rare (she wasn’t eating the beef anyway, as she was strictly veggie).

“What?” she said, through a mouthful of lettuce. I’d given her my salad for her cherry cobbler. She was busy eating and had already forgotten our “heavy” conversation out in the herd.

“We changed the world,” I said, “but not to make things better for the common man. Just for ourselves.”

That got her going.

“What about Vietnam?” she said. “It wasn’t rich kids dying over there, you know.”

“No, it was some middle-class kids and lots of poor kids. White and black alike. Most males of the ‘love’ generation were at least threatened by that war, Ginnie. Guys my age were against the war because they were afraid of getting drafted. So they protested. A purely selfish move.”

Smiling with cute smugness, Ginnie pointed a lettuce-tipped fork at me, thinking she had me. “You protested after you went to Vietnam. After you got back. Was that a purely selfish move?”

“A partly selfish move. We were after better benefits from the V.A., as well as wanting to end the war. And, besides, I wasn’t a kid anymore.”

“So automatically you were unselfish, being an adult.”

“That’s a position I’d rather not try to defend,” I said, working on the lumpy mashed potatoes; the dark gravy was also lumpy. More cafeteria nostalgia.

She sighed. “You’re right. Why argue about it? We were as self-centered a generation as this self-centered country has ever known.”

“You obviously haven’t heard of MTV.”

With a gentle, short-lived laugh, she said, “This generation isn’t as smug as we were. They don’t think they know it all, like we did.”

“Unfortunately, they don’t seem to want to know it all, either. They don’t seem to want to know anything, much.”

“You’re sounding like an old man, Mal.”

“There’s a reason for that. Ginnie, tell me. Are you happy?”

She was working on her mashed potatoes now. She shrugged, forced a little smile. “I’m happy. Business is good — though I haven’t made my million yet.”

“What the hell,” I said.

“Goals were made to be ignored,” she said, shrugging yet again. You shrug a lot at class reunions; people ask you that sort of question.

“Or,” she said, “anyway, adjusted.”

“Is money still your main goal?”

Shrug.

“What about your personal life, Gin? How goes it?”

She told me she was married, but not living with her husband; she gave me no details, other than she had a little girl, four, named Malinda — Mal for short. And so on.

Upstairs, after the banquet, in the ballroom there was a dance. Crusin’, a popular local oldies band, began cranking ’em out: “Wooly Bully,” “Time Won’t Let Me,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” They had a good, big, authentic sound, but they were loud, and another sign of how old we were getting was that some of us complained. Not me. I just sat out in the bar and drank too many Pabsts and talked to everybody I hadn’t known very well in high school but who suddenly were back-slapping old pals. My whole crowd had stayed home — in their new homes; out-of-state success stories, they left me here alone to swap memories with a guy from study hall named Joey Something, who if I remember right said nary a word for two semesters, and now was the successful — and vocal — owner of three gas stations; half a dozen heavyset women who turned out to be “whatever happened to” half a dozen svelte attractive girls, former cheerleaders, prom queens and the like; half a dozen svelte attractive women who had once been wallflowers and, having bloomed late, were tasting the revenge of living well, and thinly; a great big fat guy who used to be a little bitty skinny guy, and grew after graduation, in various directions; several people who told me who they were, and summoned a mental picture of who they’d been, but I’ll be damned if I could spot who they used to be in the faces they wore now; a good number of people who hadn’t changed much, really, though potbellies were the plague of the males, all in all the women holding up better. It was an evening of cruel thoughts (“Thank God I didn’t end up with her — to think she turned me down for the prom!”), bittersweet regrets (“Why didn’t I date her — she liked me, and I shunned her, and now she’s beautiful!”), petty jealousy (“How could a jerk like him end up with a dish like her?”), pure jealousy (“He must be worth half a million by now — and I gave the son of a bitch his history answers!”), and genuine sorrow (“I wish John were alive and here...”).

Ginnie had split off from me as soon as we got upstairs, wanting to go in and dance; the blare of the music had sent me to this small table in the bar area, where friends came and went, and most of the evening I spent with Michael Lange, a guy I’d been in chorus with. He used to wear a suit to school and carry a briefcase; he’d left the briefcase home tonight, and brought a mustache, but otherwise looked the same — of course, he’d looked thirty-five in high school, so maybe we just caught up with him. He was into computers, but I liked him anyway, though I understood little of what he said; as the evening wore on, and Michael drank a few too many Dos Equis, he began understanding little of what he was saying himself. No matter. I wasn’t listening.

I was watching as Ginnie, over by the ladies restroom, was having a rather heated argument with an attractive woman whom I hadn’t placed. Ginnie was pointing a finger at the woman, and the woman was pointing a finger back; they weren’t shouting, but it was intense.

Their arguing had caught my attention, but it was the woman who maintained that attention. She was about five-six, had black punky hair and cute features and a sweet little shape; she was not wearing a prom gown, but a wide-shouldered designer number, Zebra stripes above, black skirt below, really striking. She had red lipstick so dark it was damn near black, and green glittery eyeshadow.

“Who is that?” I asked Michael.

In a tone that sought to be pompous, but had dos Dos Equis ago turned just plain silly, Michael said, “How should I know? Am I her keeper?”

“Could that be Jill Forest?”

“I’m afraid I can’t see Jill Forest for the trees.”

“Right, Michael. Have another beer.”

It was Jill Forest, but she was gone now, and so was Ginnie, back in the ballroom.

I’d dated Jill a few times in high school days, but she’d been a quiet girl, and her parents had been strict, and, for reasons that now escaped me, we’d never clicked. She’d been too cute to be mousy, but, even so, this was a shock: Jill Forest a trendy stand-out in a crowd where it wasn’t unusual to see a woman wearing the same hairstyle she’d worn to the senior prom. On the other hand, I was wearing the same tie I’d worn to the prom, so who was I to condescend? I was just a cheap bastard, trying to pass for trendy.

I spent the rest of the evening looking for Jill out of the corner of either eye, and not seeing her.

I did see Ginnie, though we didn’t speak again that evening. She was spending a lot of time at a table for two in the ballroom, huddling with a dark, not particularly handsome man who I took to be Brad Faulkner. A little drunk, she seemed to be flirting outrageously — and he seemed to be liking it, giving her a shy smile while she did almost all the talking. They were dancing slow, to “Easy to Be Hard,” a song from Hair, when I left around midnight. Walking home, leaving my car in the Elks parking lot. I was damn near sober by the time I got home, and lay awake till two wondering why Ginnie had spent so much time with Faulkner, a guy I didn’t remember being anybody she had dated or run around with or anything way back when. It seemed strange.

A month later, with Ginnie dead, I was again awake at two in the morning, and it seemed even stranger.