Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“Oh?”

“Ginnie’s here, too.”

She was right. I’d consciously not brought Ginnie up, wanting to spend the evening with this beautiful young woman from my high school past without that, hoping to get around to one touchy point eventually, but preferring to try to get to know Jill for Jill.

“I talked to Brad Faulkner,” I told her.

“What did he have to say?”

I told her all about it; pretty soon she was sitting up in bed, listening too intently to notice, or anyway care, that the sheet was around her waist and her breasts were showing. They weren’t large breasts, of the sort this culture worships; rather the sort of nice handfuls that seem to resist gravity despite age beginning to set in. In the flicker of candlelight her dark skin looked too beautiful to be real; she looked too beautiful to be real. The nicest part, however, was, she was real.

And I was telling her about Faulkner.

Stunning her, actually.

“Good God,” she said, whites of her eyes showing all around the blue. “Who’d have thought it? Brad Faulkner knocked Ginnie up!” Again, she was reverting to high school terminology. “And she had an abortion. God. Must’ve been pretty rough on her.”

“She pretended it wasn’t,” I said, remembering that night under the stars with Ginnie. “But it was. Why do you suppose she didn’t tell him?”

“That’s easy,” she said, lighting another cigarette, worldly wise. “He’d never’ve allowed the abortion; he would’ve married her. Junior year or not. If the parents wouldn’t consent, they’d go out of state.”

“And Ginnie didn’t want that. She wasn’t ready.”

“Not a free spirit like Ginnie, Mal, no. And if she’d told Brad about the abortion afterward, he’d have been furious with her. They’d have broken up for good. And he was her Mallory, remember.”

“What do you mean?”

A shrug; her breasts bobbed prettily. “The love of her life, high school style.” Archly, she added, “Of course, she and Brad obviously consummated their love a little sooner than we did...”

“Jill, why did she tell him about that abortion, after all these years?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“It was a cruel thing to do, considering the loss of his kid not long ago, his marriage breaking up because of it.”

“Mal, we both know Ginnie could be cruel, at short notice.”

“You said you’d been having lunch with her, off and on, these past six months. And that the topic of conversation was often ‘old times.’”

“That’s right. Brad’s name came up — but nothing about the abortion. She was looking forward to the reunion, to seeing Brad after all these years.”

“Why?”

“She was entertaining fantasies — at least I thought they were fantasies — of getting back together with him.”

“What? I don’t believe...”

“Mal, she was looking for a fresh start. She felt her life was at something of a dead-end, and she was floundering around for something new. She knew Brad was single again, and she made vague reference to his running a business, that hardware store” — she shrugged elaborately — “which may mean she had notions of pooling their collective business acumen in some new venture. Or something.”

“But she was way out of Brad Faulkner’s league! You can’t convince me that Ginnie wanted to come back to Port City and settle down with the likes of Faulkner. And, what — run a hardware store together? Besides — he’s a religious fanatic, for Christ’s sake. What was she thinking of?”

“You want my opinion?”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“I think she’d led a fairly decadent life these last ten or fifteen years. I think she was tired of all that, and had glowing memories of her childhood, including her high school days, and she was fantasizing about returning to Port City and climbing inside a Norman Rockwell painting.”

“It never would have worked.”

“Of course it wouldn’t have. She knew that, too. But it didn’t stop her from looking forward to seeing Brad at the reunion.”

“But why Brad?”

“I told you! He was her Mallory!”

Her Debbie Lee. I guess I could understand it, after all. Old obsessions are something our brain never quite sorts out of the filing system, never quite discards.

“There’s something I should’ve told you,” she said, with an embarrassment that wasn’t remotely sexual.

“Which is?”

“That I’m the one who called Brad Faulkner and told him you were asking around about Ginnie.”

“I’ve been trying to think of a nice way to ask you about that.”

“I’ve been trying to think of a nice way to tell you.”

“Why’d you do it? Is he a friend of yours or something?”

“No. I just felt I owed it to him, since I gave you his name. Common courtesy. Nothing sinister, Mal. Quit thinking like a mystery writer.”

“I am a mystery writer.”

“I know. I’ve read your books.”

“No kidding? You’re the first person I’ve met lately who has.”

“I didn’t say I liked them.”

“Thanks a lot.”

She grinned. “I did like ’em. Even the one that was all about Debbie Lee.”

“Debbie Lee. When you mention her, and I remember how stupidly I behaved when she reentered my life, I can believe that Ginnie might honestly have hoped to get something going with Brad Faulkner again. After all these years. At a high school reunion, no less.”

“I’ll bet that’s exactly what she did,” Jill said. “I bet she came on to Brad, bubbling about old times, eventually gushing forth some of her dreams about new times, and it didn’t take. He wasn’t having any.”

“He seemed to be,” I said. “They were dancing close at the Elks, hanging all over each other.”

“That would’ve been the ‘old times’ phase. But after an evening with Ginnie — with who Ginnie had become over these fifteen years — conservative, religious Mr. Faulkner would eventually be turned off. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I said. “And their reunion began turning sour at the Sports Page.”

She snapped her fingers, pointed at me. “That’s when she got pissed off, and blurted out the abortion story! To hurt him!”

I thought of the cafeteria, years ago, and knew Ginnie was capable of that. Not upon reflection, not with malice afore-thought, but with the quick trigger of temper, with the impulse decision of the born risk taker, the gambler, that was Ginnie, all right.

“She would’ve been sorry later,” Jill said. “But she did have it in her to lash out at him that way. If he’d hurt her, disappointed her, crushed her fantasy of him, you can bet she’d have opened the closet and let the skeletons come rattling out.”

She was right.

“You,” I said, “are one of the smartest women I’ve ever met.”

“If you weren’t such a sexist boor,” she said, smiling, “that would’ve come out ‘smartest persons’ you ever met.”

“If you’re so smart, how come you’re in bed with a sexist boor?”

“Ya got me there, Mal. Why’s that little green light gone out?”

“Huh?”

“The little green light you told me about. The burglar alarm.”

I clutched Jill’s arm and whispered: “Somebody could be in the house.”

She breathed my name back, some fear in it; I didn’t blame her.

“Just sit tight.” I whispered in her ear; hardly a sweet nothing. “Don’t make a sound.”

I slipped out of bed, my right toes touching my jockey shorts on the floor where I’d discarded them in a considerably more carefree moment. I bent down, found them with my hand, climbed into them, bumping against the chest of drawers as I did. The sound of it was like bumping unwittingly into the car behind you as you parked, but louder. The silence that followed was louder still.