Ed Gorman: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

Around eleven that night, the hostess broke out the Johnny Mathis and the Frank Sinatra, and everybody quit talking about their kids and their jobs and their mortgages and their politics, and got down to some serious slow dancing out on the darkened patio in the warm prairie night of summer 1961.

It was like all those groping, grasping ninth-grade parties we’d always had in some kid’s basement, where the mom was gracious and the old man cast an evil eye on anybody who danced too close with his sweet blooming daughter.

The difference now was that we were adults, or rumored to be, or hoped devoutly to be. Andre Malraux once asked an old priest if he’d learned anything from sixty years of hearing confessions and the padre said, “Yes, there’s no such thing as an adult.” He was probably on to something there.

There were only three single women there that night, and only one single guy. Me.

I took turns dancing with all three of them and all three of them said pretty much the same thing when I slid into their embrace, “Gosh, McCain, you always make me feel so tall.”

And then a giggle.

There’s nothing worse than being insulted by people who don’t mean to insult you. At five-five a guy can be awfully sensitive about short jokes.

We danced.

Back in high school the only girl I wanted to dance with was the beautiful Pamela Forrest, the girl I’d loved since grade school. But since she went out with older boys, I didn’t get to dance with her very often.

As I saw it, my prospective dancing partners were divided into three groups. Girls who were shorter than I was and therefore good for my public image; girls who were fun to dance with no matter how short or tall they were; and girls who didn’t mind a little dry-humping in the darkness.

There weren’t many in the last category, at least not many available to me, anyway, but when you came upon one you immediately fell to your knees sobbing in gratitude.

Tonight, I was hoping I’d find a girl who, at twenty-five, had moved beyond the dry-humping stage. The best bet was Linda Dennehy, who was divorced and worked as a nurse in Iowa City, well known to be the capital of all great-looking girls in our state. I mean, you had girls there who’d been to Paris and London walking around in heartbreaking Levi cut-offs openly reading Kerouac and Ginsberg. I spent as much time there as I could.

Linda was a little bit drunk and a little bit sentimental. She smelled good, too. Very good.

“You ever wish you could go back, Sam, you know, to when we were in high school?”

“All the time.”

“I thought it was going to be so neat. You know, growing up and going out on my own.”

I paid all the attention I could. The feel of her flesh beneath her silk blouse and silk slip made certain parts of my body more alert than others. There was a bonus to her slender but very female form. I liked her. Always had. She was one of those quiet, decent girls who, oddly enough, looked better with eyeglasses than without them. Nobody paid a lot of attention to her back then is what I’m trying to say. But on hayrack rides and at skating parties and on Fourth of July starburst keggers, we’d drifted together sometimes, friends and maybe a little more, but never enough little more that it ever went anywhere.

“You still have your ragtop?”

“I sure do.”

“I don’t suppose you’d feel like going for a ride?”

“I sure would.”

“I have to tell you something, though.”

She didn’t finish the sentence, leaving me to wonder what she wanted to say but didn’t quite have the courage to. (a) I have to tell you, though, that I’m three months preggers. (but) I have to tell you, though, that I somehow picked up a venereal disease. (can) I have to tell you, though, that if I meet somebody who’s taller than you, I’m going to dump you in a minute.

“Tell me what?”

She put her arm around my neck and kissed me. She had a very soft mouth and a very deft tongue and I have to say that I went a wee bit cuckoo standing there on that patio. Not only hadn’t

I had sex in some time, I hadn’t had any companionship. And right now in that shadowy darkness, I felt as if Linda was the best friend I’d ever had.

“God, I can’t believe I did that,

Sam.”

“You don’t hear me complaining, do you?”

“It’s-embarrassing.” She glanced about. A few of the other couples had taken note of our kiss.

The song ended.

“I need to go to the bathroom first,” she said.

“Will you wait here?”

“I’m nailed to the floor.”

I watched her walk away, a pleasing sight indeed. Slender but not without some elemental curves. We’d grown up in the Knolls together.

That’s the section that the proper citizens of Black River Falls try to forget about. A lot of tiny, rusty shacks and hundreds of scrubby little kids doomed to live out the same kind of grim, gray lives of their parents and enough violence to inspire the daydreams of a dozen generals.

Even by Knolls standards, Linda’s father was a bastard. My dad and a lot of other dads took turns hauling his drunken ass off his fragile little wife, whom he seemed to enjoy beating up on the front lawn of their shacklike house. When he was very drunk, it’d take a couple of dads -maybe even three of them-ffput the monster down because he was not only big, he’d once been a good amateur fighter.

Linda would hurl herself upon him, screaming, literally tearing hair out of his head, scratching his eyes, biting his shoulder-anything to stop him from smashing punches again and again into her tiny mother. On summer nights, long after her old man had been laid low by one of the dads and lay passed out on the front stoop, I could hear Linda crying into the night. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. If she had friends, I never saw them or heard about them.

She liked to fish, God did she like to fish, and growing up, before my dad started making enough money to move us into town proper, I always saw her down on that old deserted railroad bridge, so solitary in her T-shirt and jeans it’d break your heart that way your little sister could break your heart. And if you approached her, she’d jump up and run away.

Her father was dead now and her two younger brothers were driving for a trucking company. She’d gotten a scholarship to nursing school and had done well for herself. Her drinking tonight surprised me. The few times I’d seen her at social affairs she’d always made a point of drinking nonalcoholic things.

I went over and poured myself a little bit of nonalcoholic punch myself. My dad and I share the same ability to get absolutely stoned on three cans of 3.2 beer, so I generally stay away from alcohol.

A hot August breeze came and ruffled all the pines that surrounded this expensive fashion plate of a house. Two vast stories done in a mock-Plantation style. The Coyles’ house.

Jack Coyle was a lawyer who’d inherited a good deal of money when his father, also a lawyer, died recently. He’d also inherited the family manse. In a town of 27eajjj like Black River Falls, the Coyles passed for royalty. They were nice, unassuming folk with a pair of twin girls everybody said should be in Tv commercials, they were so damned cute.

I didn’t like Jack Coyle. In the old days I would’ve felt class anger. He’d gone back east to school-allyale-and clerked for a Supreme Court Justice and had come back here to become the dominant lawyer of his generation. He was in his early forties. He’d had all the breaks.