Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“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.