A Shroud for Aquarius (11 page)

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.

Port City Cablevision lurked behind the massive modern community college library, across an access road; behind Cablevision was sprawling Weed Park (named after a guy named “Weed,” so help me), making quite the impressive back yard for so undistinguished a structure, a one-story white frame building with satellite dishes growing around it, like strange mushrooms.

I was not here to complain about the service, even though ever since they added the Disney Channel and scrambled it, the channels on either side were constantly visited by a rolling tweed pattern. One of those disrupted channels was the all-Spanish network, and the other was twenty-four-hour stock quotations; since I was not a wealthy Mexican investor, I could live without either.

I was here to see Jill Forest. This morning, at the inappropriately sunny graveside services at Greenwood Cemetery, she had been there, wearing a black suit and dark glasses, the only other person there besides me remotely Ginnie’s age; none of the Iowa City friends had made it, Flater and Sturms included. Oddly absent too were John “J.T.” O’Hara, the hippie poet Ginnie married, and their daughter Malinda; Mrs. Mullens had told me at the funeral home she expected them, but I didn’t see them. Sheriff Brennan was on hand, though, and I asked him if he
knew Jill, saying, “I used to go to school with her, but had no idea she was still in town.”

“She isn’t still in town,” he said. “She’s
back
in town.”

Turned out Jill had been in the cable TV business for five or six years, going into communities like ours and putting things in motion for a year or so, then moving on. Perhaps it was a coincidence that one of her myriad jobs had been Port City, her old home town. Or maybe not. That was one of the things I planned to ask her.

So far all I’d asked her, on the phone, was if she remembered me, and if she might entertain an invitation for lunch. In a pleasant but businesslike manner, she’d said yes to both.

Now here I was at Cablevision, going in the side studio entrance as she’d instructed me, wondering what to say to the shy girl in Junior Miss dresses I’d dated in high school who had become a lady executive in outfits by Kamali. I, by the way, was not going the Bilko and camouflage route today—as at the funeral, I wore a black polo shirt and gray slacks, the same slacks I’d worn to the reunion. The day was warm, and I’d rather worn shorts, but I needed to make a better impression than that on Jill, or anyway I wanted to.

The air conditioning inside Cablevision was welcome. A modest studio with a modest glassed-in booth was at my right as I walked down a narrow hall to a door with JILL FOREST, STATION MANAGER on it; that her job was temporary was indicated by her name and rank being on a sliding piece of plastic that fit in steel grooves on the door.

I knocked.

“Yes,” her voice said, noncommittally.

I spoke to the door. “It’s Mal.”

“Come in,” her voice said, just as noncommittally.

Not that it was an unpleasant voice; it was a warm mid-range voice that had to work at sounding all business. But she managed it.

Feeling a little intimidated and not really knowing why, I went in.

It wasn’t a big office; thinking of her as an executive was an exaggeration. And she wasn’t wearing Kamali or any other designer clothes. Just a simple white blouse with a black dress (she stood as I came in) with a geometric copper necklace the only new-wave fashion touch of the day. Her short black hair still had a vaguely punk look to it, and her lipstick was redder than Dracula’s wildest dreams. Her eye makeup was subdued compared to at the reunion, though; with those cornflower blue eyes, who needed it?

And she had a great tan.

“You have a great tan,” I said.

I couldn’t help myself.

She sat back down. “Is that what you wanted to talk about, Mal, after all this time? My tan?” Her tone wasn’t exactly unfriendly. It wasn’t exactly friendly, either.

“That was dumb,” I said, sitting down myself. “I don’t know why I said it.”

She shrugged, her expression revealing nothing. “I don’t have that much of a tan. I’ve always been on the dark side. Don’t you remember?”

That was the problem: I didn’t remember. I’d gone out with her back in school, yes; more than once—and then called it off. I didn’t remember her looking even remotely this good. I was thirty-four and unmarried and here was one of the first
of many prize catches I’d foolishly let get away over the years. Feel free to kick me.

“Sure I remember,” I said.

Now she smiled, just a little. “You don’t, do you? I didn’t make much of an impression on you when we were kids.”

“That’s not true! We used to go out, and have a lot of fun.”

“We went out two times, and probably said ten words to each other, total. We did not have a lot of fun. We didn’t even have a little fun.”

I sighed. “We didn’t, did we?”

She shrugged again, looking at a desk piled with neatly stacked work. “I was quiet, then. Like they say in the old movies: too quiet.”

“Your parents kept you on a pretty short leash.”

Something flickered in her eyes, but she kept her face impassive. “Maybe that’s because I was a ‘dog,’ hmm?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. You were a cute kid; I never thought of you like that, ever. But your parents were the have-her-home-by-ten-on-weekend-nights types. Uh, how are your folks, by the way?”

“Dead.”

She meant that to shock me. I didn’t say anything.

She said, “How are yours?”

“My what?”

“Parents.”

“Oh. Dead.”

I meant that to shock her. She didn’t say anything.

Then she smiled a genuine smile. The white teeth in her dark face, like the light blue eyes, made quite a contrast; this was one striking-looking woman.

“Why am I giving you a hard time?” she said. “You were always nice to me, Mal. It’s just that I wanted more than nice.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had a monster crush on you, all through high school. When you finally asked me out, I almost died with joy. Then when the time came, I got nervous, and clammed up, and blew my chance.”