Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (5 page)

He picked up the bottle of red he’d bought for the occasion and walked the six blocks to the two-story brick the Bradens had
purchased. Three cars were parked outside, the Bradens’ Buick was in the driveway. Jim answered the bell, impeccable—perfect
as it gets—in a dark blue pinstripe, white collar-barred starched shirt with a yellow-and-black polka-dotted tie. At the bottom
end were black, lightweight wingtips—banker’s shoes. Crisp white hanky in his breast pocket. Michael had already guessed Jimmy
Braden came from old money, and today he looked it.

“Hi, Michael. Jellie and I are pleased you could come. I think you probably know everyone here except for Jellie’s parents,
who flew in from Syracuse. Say, that’s quite a tie!“

Michael hated entrance scenes. His blue-collar upbringing surged forward when he was paraded into a room full of people, and
he’d get sort of stupid and uncomfortable almost to the point of appearing bellicose, which he really wasn’t. His growing
years didn’t provide him with much experience in entrances, that’s all.

A motley little outfit awaited him in the small living room: sociologist (female, unpartnered, acquaintance of Jellie’s),
accountant and wife (“Did you see any cobras?”), the overweight operations research guy with an equally heavy wife and crushing
handshake (double-elimination volleyball genius). Patricia Sanchez was in the middle of the sofa, seated next to a guy she
dated from the student services office. An older man he took to be Jellie’s father sat on Pat’s other side. It was stuffy
warm, with a perfect fire crackling away and everybody looking at him standing in the doorway to the living room. He took
a deep breath and wished he could light up, but there wasn’t a chance in hell of that.

Jimmy took him by the elbow. “I think everybody here knows Michael Tillman from my department.” The voices reached toward
Michael in ragged unison. He gave them all a little wave and handed the bottle of wine to Jimmy.

“Jellie and her mother are in the kitchen. Oh, how clumsy of me, I nearly forgot you haven’t met Jellie’s father, Mr. Markham.”

Mr. Markham was somewhere over sixty, with bright eyes and a firm hand. He grinned. Michael grinned back and judged Leonard
Markham to be all right, as long as you didn’t cross him.

Through an open door and down the hall he could see Jellie in the kitchen. She looked up, waved, and called, “Hi, Michael,
come meet my mother.”

He went back to the kitchen while the living room went back to whatever conversations he’d interrupted. Jellie wiped her hands
on a white apron that had
HI!
and four torn turkeys with big, floppy red combs printed on it. She kissed him on the cheek, whispering, “I’m so glad you
came,” then turned him to the gray-haired woman who was doing something or other with giblet dressing. The kiss and the whisper
surprised him, but he chalked it up to holiday spirit.

“Mother, this is our friend, Michael Tillman.”

Jellie got her looks from her mother. Eleanor Markham was a knock-’em-dead lady about the same age as her husband and with
the same gray eyes as Jellie’s. “I’m glad to meet you, Michael. We’re so pleased Jellie and Jim have made such nice friends
in the short time they’ve been here.”

She turned to Jellie. “Michael’s the one who rides a motorcycle, right?” Jellie nodded. “Where do you ride it, Michael? Very
far?”

“Oh, here and there. Around town, up to the Great Lakes sometimes, Colorado if I’m really feeling sporty. It’s an old buzzard,
and you have to carry a full tool kit if you’re going any distance at all.”

“Don’t you live in an apartment, Michael? Where do you keep the motorcycle during the winter?” Jellie was stirring gravy,
looking over her shoulder at him.

“In my living room.”

Jellie laughed. Eleanor Markham smiled and asked, “Why on earth do you keep it there?”

“Because it’s too big for the John.”

Both of them were laughing now. Michael was grinning, appreciating a nice groove as much as any jazz musician. “Besides, I
can work on it there during cold weather, and if the walls start closing in on me, I sit on it and go ‘vroom, vroom.’ When
I’m not using it, my cat likes to sleep on the seat. I live on the first floor of an old place, been living there for ten
years. It’s hard to find people in a college town who pay their rent on time, and I do, so the landlord puts up with me.”

“Mother, of course Michael would keep his motorcycle in the living room. It all fits, and it’s perfect… unlike this damn
gravy that won’t thicken up.”

He could see they were busy, so he excused himself and ambled back to the living room, trying to adopt a veneer of sociability,
which was just about impossible for Michael Tillman to carry off. The furnishings were typical and a little better than that—
good postmodern prints, agreeable pottery pieces, an abstract bronze sculpture about eighteen inches high, and a black-and-white
print of Edward Weston’s famous portrait of a cabbage, which cost somebody real bucks. A few new chairs, a few old ones. A
Mozart quintet came from a system in the den.

He looked back once at Jellie, who was still fretting over the gravy, and tried to articulate in his mind what he’d seen on
her face. A blend, maybe, of contentment and weariness, of being happy where she was and yet wishing she was somewhere else.
The sense that she was running a long race she believed she was supposed to run but would rather not have been running at
all.

“Come over here, Michael.” Pat Sanchez reached out for his hand. He’d always liked Pat. She’d fought her way out of the Los
Angeles barrios, got her doctorate at Texas, and joined the faculty about ten years before. They’d done a couple of papers
together and ended up naked and laughing and drinking margaritas on her bed when they’d finished the first one late on a Friday
night. After that they’d gone out a few times, then let go of it by mutual, but unspoken, consent. The mathematics of transportation
networks evidently were not enough on which to sustain a loving relationship.

She introduced him to her friend, who had recently become vice-president of student services, but the friend already knew
Michael from their days on the Student Conduct Committee. He had a therapeutic way about him, characteristic of those who
devote their lives to dealing with the pleasures of dormitory havoc and other garbage the university continued to tolerate.
He shook Michael’s hand and said, “I remember you. You’re the one who was in favor of expelling anybody who so much as thought
about writing on the walls. What was it you said?… I used to quote you as an example of the kind of approach that just doesn’t
work with today’s students.”

Michael sighed inside himself, then thought about sticking the sweet fellow’s head up his ass or in the fireplace, depending
on whether he decided the coagulated brain ought to be quick-frozen or hard-boiled, but let it go and leaned toward him, whispering,
“I remember almost exactly what I said. It went something like this: ‘We’re running a university, not a success center or
an asylum for those with pounding glands. Cheats are cheats, destructive teenage drunks are just that, and we ought to throw
the injurious little bastards all the way back to their mother’s tit and let ’em suck on it or boot their asses right down
the street to the cops and press charges.’ That’s what I said. I also said I couldn’t stand all the transactional bullshit
you people seem to believe in. That was after someone from counseling services called me a fascist.”

Sweet Fellow, the veep, turned red while Pat lay back against the sofa cushions, trying to suppress her laughter and failing,
and that cooled him down. Michael was glad she was there. He’d shot his mouth off at a little member of the central administration
who didn’t know what it was like in the gullies of the world, and it could have ruined Thanksgiving at the Bradens, which
was the last thing he wanted to happen.

“Oh, Michael, will you never be tamed?” Pat was still laughing, holding her stomach.

At that moment Jimmy Braden came out of the kitchen, daintily ringing a small silver bell. “Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is
served.”

The crowd straggled off toward the dining room. Michael brought up the rear, wondering what the seating arrangements were
and whether they’d be such that he could look at Jellie now and then, preferably often. After all, that’s what he’d come for,
not to deal with smart-ass little brats from the administration building.

Place cards were on the table, but he decided to let everyone else find their seats and then sort through the residual. The
seat assignments gave the appearance of having come out of a random-number generator. But he knew Jellie too well to doubt
there was an overall plan designed to get certain people away from their wives and dates and husbands and next to certain
other people. Sort of a turkey-centered mixer. Michael watched people seat themselves, the chairs dwindling down to a precious
few. Jellie caught his eye and pointed to the second place down from the head of the table, near the kitchen. He walked over
and looked at the name card, which had
Possible Dean
printed on it in Jellie’s handwriting. The card at the place next to his read
Jellie.

James Lee Braden HI carved, Jellie’s mother poured, Jellie ran back and forth to the kitchen, and everyone else talked nonsense.
Michael sat there watching Jellie move, feeling, for the first time, something beyond hibiscus and a waterfall in the Seychelles,
thinking that maybe the old Darwinian shuffle had some steps to it he hadn’t known about before. The physical attraction he
felt for her was somehow being melded with deeper and quieter feelings of a higher order, a turn of events he hadn’t counted
on. And he became a little sad then in a way he couldn’t grasp. Sad for her, for him, for Jimmy, and for where this might
all lead or probably wouldn’t. The voice of the Absolute sounded less certain, the mantra was beginning to waver. Some things
were better left alone, he thought. He, and perhaps Jellie, if he was reading her correctly, were mucking around in a dangerous
place where they had no business going, a place that was not as harmless as it first appeared. And, for a moment, he wanted
to run, to ride the Shadow somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere that had a warm sun and simple ways.

The great turkey dance went on for nearly two hours. Wine and more wine, food and more food. Eleanor Markham told a funny
story about Jellie’s growing years, and everybody laughed, especially Jellie.

The female sociologist on his right rattled on about her life and times, touching his arm occasionally when she made what
she considered a significant point. That left him feeling cramped and a little aggravated, since he was bound by the circumstances
to be polite and couldn’t look at Jellie out of the corner of his eye while he was talking with this expert on women’s contributions
to early American frontier life.

Somebody mentioned the afternoon football game between Dallas and Seattle. The sports fanatic from operations research moved
into the opening and began citing yardage gained by various running backs, along with other related junk serving only to clutter
up people’s minds and keep them from thinking about anything that really matters. Jellie’s mother was filling her in on what
her old high school friends were doing now.

Jimmy was carving—he never ceased carving, it was his life-way. Jellie’s father was talking to the vice-president of student
services about fishing for brook trout in Connecticut. And the sociologist on Michael’s right was asking him if he ever attended
the lecture-concert series, saying she always seemed to go alone and didn’t like going alone. He said he didn’t go because,
as far as he could tell, it was always the same person on the bill—a “scintillating new” (usually pubescent) Korean violinist
who flawlessly executed memorized scores. The sociologist was all right, though, lonely in the way most of us were or are,
and Michael continued to feign interest in lectures, concerts, and frontier women, once or twice feeling Jellie’s hip against
his shoulder when she got up to make a food run to the kitchen.

The operations researcher was still talking about the game coming on in less than forty-five minutes and said he hoped nobody
would mind if he watched it. Several others said (not directly, of course) they also wanted to see young black men from the
coasts have at one another on the plains of Texas, so that was settled. The sociologist straightened her glasses and said
quietly to Michael, “All this attention given to athletics is just another capitalist plot to keep the masses occupied, don’t
you think?”

He really didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about anything except the next touch of Jellie’s hip against
his shoulder. But he nodded and said, “You’re probably right. On the other hand, it beats having the proletariat out there
stealing hubcaps or sniffing bicycle seats.” She turned her attention to the accountant’s wife a moment later.

During a pause while the jock expert was wetting his throat and summoning up more good
Sports Illustrated
wisdom to tell everyone, Jim Braden said, “Michael, you used to be an athlete, didn’t you? That’s what somebody told me.”

Jellie followed up. “Michael, is that true? You’ve been holding out on us.”

Trapped. He hoped the subject would pass, but it didn’t. Jellie’s father pushed it along. “What did you play, Michael?” The
operations researcher, who wouldn’t know how to pull on a jockstrap if it was required of him, had a hunk of turkey halfway
into his mouth and was obviously in a state of complete surprise, since Michael seldom mentioned his athletic history.

Everyone was looking at him, particularly the sociologist, as if she’d suddenly discovered the real reason why he didn’t attend
the lecture-concert series and why he seemed a little barbarous overall. There was nowhere to go. He would have continued
to look for a way out, but Jellie said, “Tell us about it, Michael.” She seemed genuinely interested, and he couldn’t refuse
Jellie.

He took a drink of wine and began. “The short version is this: I grew up in a small town in South Dakota—“