American Wife (52 page)

We went to drop our suitcases in the dorm room, which was actually a suite and perfectly serviceable except that the bathroom was a floor below us, and though we’d been gone only a few minutes, the tent seemed twice as crowded on our return. I helped Ella get food. Kip Spencer and his wife, Abigail, had a daughter Ella’s age named Becky, and the girls soon paired off and were racing around. They reappeared with their faces painted, then they appeared again with the paint smudged, and by that point they were part of a gang of ten or more children, and Ella seemed to be having a ball.

I was surprised to be able to relax, settling in to the afternoon. All around me the men in their ridiculous orange-and-black garb seemed to be getting drunk and jolly, Charlie himself was in high spirits, and the other wives and I would exchange indulgent smiles. By four
P.M.
, the idea of ending my marriage seemed less a definite plan than a fragment of a dream. The tension between Charlie and me had dissolved, and though I was on the periphery of most conversations, this had never been a dynamic I minded; I’d always liked to be around loud, laughing, friendly people. When the men broke into a locomotive, or when they referred to Princeton as “the best damn place of all,” which was a line from a school song, they seemed terribly sweet to me. And Charlie was solicitous in a way he rarely was anymore, asking whenever he went to get a refill of beer if I’d like one, too. (Everybody drank out of plastic cups whose tiger icon was different, depending on which tent you were in.)

Dinner was a pleasantly mediocre buffet in the tent, chicken and scalloped potatoes and salad and brownies, and then a Motown band got started, and they were terrific: seven black men in matching pale blue suits and one black woman in a white tank dress who sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

The kids were the first to start dancing, Ella and Becky and the other children, mostly arhythmically but quite happily, punching the air and jumping up and down, and soon the adults had joined in. Charlie was a wonderful dancer; I hadn’t discovered this until a few months into our marriage, when we attended his brother John’s thirty-fifth birthday party, a black-tie gathering at the country club. It wasn’t that Charlie was necessarily the best dancer in any setting, though he was good. But what made him so much fun to watch and to dance with was how uninhibited he was, how thoroughly he seemed to enjoy himself, how he was both confident and extremely silly at the same time. For “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” he shimmied several feet away, turned his back to me, bumped out his rear end, looked grinningly over his shoulder, and hopped backward, one hop for each line—“Ain’t no mountain high enough / Ain’t no valley low enough / Ain’t no river wide enough.” He soon was sweating profusely, and then he was dancing with Pam Sheldon, the wife of his classmate Theo, and I was dancing with Theo, and then Charlie was dancing with Theo, and Pam and I were standing there laughing. Around his peers, it was striking to me how fit and young-looking Charlie still was—many of them were bald or heavy or just seemed worn out beneath their cheer, but Charlie was as handsome as when we’d married. Really, his appearance had hardly changed.

Around nine-thirty, to Ella’s delight, our nephew Harry and our niece Liza showed up, Harry in the beer jacket for that year’s graduating class, and they both were festive and, I suspected, inebriated, Harry more so than Liza. Liza and Charlie danced while Harry and Ella danced, then Harry danced with me—like his uncle, Harry was deft on his feet (I’d have to tell Ed and Ginger that forcing him to attend dancing school had paid off ), and he was flirtatious in the meaningless, endearing way that rich, handsome, self-assured twenty-two-year-old men can be. He would be spending the summer in Alaska, the bulk of it working at a hatchery (this was something else I hadn’t been exposed to before marrying into the Blackwell family, the inclination to travel great distances and invest substantial amounts of money in order to do strenuous and possibly grubby work that subsequently would make for excellent storytelling: my nephew Tommy, Harry’s brother, had spent a summer in high school in a program that built roads in Greece; Liza had volunteered at an orphanage in Honduras; and several of them had participated in Outward Bound or NOLS trips). After the hatchery, Harry would be met by his two brothers and Ed, and the four of them would go on a two-week chartered fishing expedition in northern Alaska; on their return, Harry would start a job as a researcher at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan. Given all this, of course the world looked to my nephew like a joyful and inviting place, of course he was drunk and happy on the eve of his Princeton graduation.

After Harry and Liza moved on, I was surprised to look at my watch and see that it was after eleven. I scanned the tent for Ella—she and a little boy were doing their nine-year-olds’ approximation of a tango—and I told Charlie I was taking her to the dorm to go to bed. I felt a little negligent that it was as late as it was and tried to absolve myself by recalling that in Wisconsin, it would be an hour earlier.

“After you get her settled, come back out.” Charlie almost had to yell to make himself audible above the music. “It’s completely safe, you know that, right?”

I shook my head. “I’d rather not leave her alone, but stay out and enjoy yourself.” I was sure this was what he’d do anyway, without my encouragement, but I wanted to be generous toward him for a change, to give his pleasure my blessings. I’d heard some of the men talking about heading over to the eating clubs—Charlie had belonged to one called Cottage—and I was just as happy to miss this portion of the evening. The eating clubs seemed to me like nothing more than pretentious fraternities (as the place where upperclassmen ate their meals and held parties, they occupied a row of mansions on Prospect Avenue, and to join, a student “bickered,” a process that appeared negligibly different from rushing), but the clubs inspired such passionate feelings that surely I was missing something. As an undergraduate, Charlie had served as Cottage’s bicker chair, and all this time later, the only bill in which he took real interest—he’d make a point of asking if I’d paid it—was the club’s annual dues, then eighty-five dollars. Cottage had started admitting women in 1986, following a lawsuit filed by a female student, and while Charlie was disdainful of this woman’s “strident feminism,” he didn’t seem to mind that Cottage had gone coed.

Standing beneath the twentieth-reunion tent while the band played “Dancing in the Street,” Charlie said, “You sure you don’t want to come back out? It’ll be more fun with you around.”

It was such a kind, plain statement that I felt my breath catch. I did not see myself as fun anymore, certainly not from Charlie’s perspective. I stepped forward and kissed him on the lips. “I wish I could. Don’t forget to pace yourself—there’ll be a lot going on tomorrow, too.”

He gave a salute. “Bring Ella over here to say good night.”

Eventually, after I’d pried Ella from her new friends and she’d kissed Charlie on the cheek, we walked back to the dorm. As we went down a flight of stairs and under an arch, she said dreamily, “I
love
Princeton.”

THE P-RADE
—the heart and soul of Reunions—started around two on Saturday. Thousands of us had lined up by class year on Cannon Green, and as we waited, there was much rowdiness, much drinking of beer (Princetonians are the only people I’ve ever encountered who can drink as much as Wisconsonians and still remain agreeable and upright), and classmates were constantly running into one another and exchanging excited greetings. It was a sunny day in the high seventies—the weather was always of great interest beforehand, whether it would be brutally hot or torrentially rainy—and by the time the parade finally started, the energy of the crowd was uncontainable. Leading the parade were members of the class of ’63, who were celebrating their twenty-fifth reunion—the year considered to be a pinnacle of sorts, though really, I thought, these men were only forty-seven! I looked for Joe Thayer; amid the chaos of bodies and noise and sunshine, I didn’t find him. Next came the oldest graduate who’d made it back—in this case, a gentleman named Edwin Parrish, from the class of 1910—who had the honor of holding a particular silver cane; Mr. Parrish rode in a golf cart driven by a current student, and as he passed, people roared their approval. After the oldest graduate, the order continued chronologically, oldest first, and each class was announced with a class-year banner that ran between poles, the fabric black with orange trim, the numbers orange. For the older classes, known as the Old Guard, the banners were carried by undergraduates or alumni’s grandchildren; for the subsequent classes, they’d be carried by the alumni themselves. Many of the Old Guard were ferried by golf cart, and in some cases, it was not the men but their widows who rode, a sight that I was scarcely the only one to find poignant; I noticed people all around me tearing up. When a member of an older class was walking—a remarkably spry fellow from the class of 1916, who had to be well into his nineties, was practically tap-dancing—the crowd would cheer at a deafening level. In every direction, as far as you looked, there were orange warm-up suits, orange and black blazers and pants and T-shirts, baseball caps, straw boaters encircled by orange and black ribbons, children and adults alike wearing furry tiger tails. Some graduates drove antique cars that they honked jovially, and in celebration of themselves, the major reunion classes had arranged for special performers—brass bands from local high schools, a belly dancer, even a fire-eater—who preceded the class. Charlie leaned over, grinning, and said, “Rich people are bizarre, huh?” This was, of course, my drunken comment to him at Halcyon, and as he squeezed my hand then dropped it to applaud for the class of 1943, I thought that at least in one way, I had not been wrong when I agreed to marry him: He had made my life more colorful.

We waited, and waited some more, and then the class of ’65 passed by, the class of ’66, the class of ’67—they were to our left, they’d been beside us all this time—and at last it was our turn. We fell into step behind them, and Ella got Charlie to start up a ’68 locomotive:
Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Rah! . . .
All the classes younger than Charlie’s cheered as we walked by, and we waved as if we were dignitaries. The parade route ended on the baseball field, where we stayed—Ella insisted, so that we could see Harry—until the last class, the graduating seniors, sprinted out and were officially decreed by the university president to be Princeton alumni. “When I go to Princeton, I want to live above Blair Arch,” Ella said.

“Then you better get a good draw time,” Charlie replied.

“And you better work hard in school,” I added.

BECAUSE I TRIED
to be an organized person, I had always appreciated organization in others, and I must say this: Princeton reunions were spectacularly well executed. All those tents and temporary fences and folding chairs and tables, the beer kegs and matching outfits, the academic talks and the a cappella groups performing around campus at thoughtfully scheduled intervals! The planning that went into the weekend boggled the mind, yet it all proceeded beautifully, seamlessly. For kids, two movies were being screened that night in McCosh 10,
Back to the Future
and
Splash,
while a Beatles cover band played in our tent for the adults. As we ate dinner—tonight it was barbecued pork, potato salad, corn on the cob, and corn bread—Charlie was both fidgety and extremely affectionate. I ended up in a long conversation with a classmate’s wife, Mimi Bryce, whom I’d first met at the tenth reunion and who was a fourth-grade teacher at a private girls’ school outside Boston; we spoke for probably forty minutes, during which Charlie approached me three separate times, saying, “Come on and shake your groove thing, Lindy” or “Charlie Blackwell waits for no one, and he won’t wait for you.” Finally, he just tugged at my hand, and I apologized to Mimi as I let him pull me toward the dance floor.

“I was enjoying talking to her,” I said.

“They’re playing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ and you’d rather discuss a fourth-grade curriculum?”

The band was actually near the end of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and they segued into “Twist and Shout,” which Charlie knew all the words to and animatedly serenaded me with, pointing at me, contorting his face into soulful expressions: “You know you twist so fine (twist so fine) / Come on and twist a little closer, now (twist a little closer)—” He beckoned with one finger, and when I stepped forward, he twirled me. For the “shake it up” part at the end, he raised his arms above his head and really shook them—he wore the orange warm-up pants and a white polo shirt, and there were large sweat spots beneath his arms. At the conclusion to the song, he pulled me to him, grabbing my rear end, kissing me hard on the mouth, and he said, “You want to go fuck in the dorm really fast before Ella gets back?”

“Charlie.”

He grinned. “Why not? Won’t take long, I promise.” And then he reached up and squeezed my left breast. “It’ll be fun.” I took a step backward. The dance floor was crowded, the whole tent was crowded, and no one seemed to be paying attention to us, but still, I was stunned.

“Charlie, we’re not animals,” I said. “You can’t do that in public.”

“Maybe you’re not an animal. I’m a tiger, baby.” His face was flushed.

“I hope you won’t drink anymore.”

He smirked. “Why don’t you go talk to Mimi again? I hear she has some fascinating insights on Dr. Seuss.”

I took a deep breath. “I’ll try not to ruin tonight for you if you try not to ruin it for me.”

He still was smirking. “Lindy, you couldn’t ruin it for me if you wanted to.”

At that moment, a classmate of his named Wilbur Morgan approached us and jabbed his thumb toward Charlie—he seemed unaware we’d been arguing—and said to me, “Word on the street is that this guy just bought a major league baseball team.” He turned to Charlie. “All right, Mr. Hotshot, true or false?”

“Morgy, I’m hoping you’ll play shortstop.” Charlie patted Wilbur’s gut. “You need to start training, buddy.”