Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

More preppies than punks, though, and not that many of either on this pleasantly warm day. Maybe it was the hour (ten o’clock in the morning) and the time of year (summer school was in session) but Iowa City was relatively deserted. Still, in the generously wide brick crosswalk, I encountered two boys in shirts with little alligators on their pockets, a girl in a light short-sleeve cardigan with a Hawkeye pin, another boy in a yellow and gold “Go Hawks” tank top, a girl in a mohawk and a torn Dead Kennedys T-shirt, walking with a boy in a black leather vest with a backward swastika graffitied on. I figured his swastika and her Dead Kennedys (a punk-rock band) had about as much to do with these kids’ politics as the alligators and hawks did the others’. I wore apparel decorated neither with reptiles nor Nazi symbols, or birds of prey, either; a member of the first television generation, I wore a T-shirt on which was a picture of Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko, the green lettering of which matched my camouflage gym shorts.

The glass facade of ETC., ETC., ETC., looked right in on the main floor. I was somewhat surprised to discover, entering, that it was now devoted to food; once upon a time this had been the head shop area. Now it was cookware, cookbooks, coffee makers and such, with a section of imported foods, particularly pastas, and at the right a bakery counter, currently sending the scent of croissants to mingle with the smell of various exotic coffees sitting in squat bags before me like fat little people on shelves. Center stage was a display case of expensive candy, and at right, toward the back, a small deli case with fancy cheeses and salamis. Behind all the counters were very well-groomed young men with short hair and tastefully “new wave” apparel. They all smiled at me. If I were a nice person, I’d figure ’em friendly; me, I figured ’em gay.

There were four other floors, or levels, linked by wide, gray, all-weather-carpeted, open stairways with black metal bannisters; the basement was a gift shop, running to those airbrushed cards of Betty Boop, movie stars, and hunky males, plus stationery, candles, jewelry, stuffed toys; the second floor was apartment furnishings, lots of pine and burlap cloth this year, and also some starkly modern steel office furniture painted bright reds and blacks; the third floor was women’s apparel, looking expensive, imported, and rather humorless, but up the steps in the smaller, fourth-floor area was more women’s clothing, vaguely new-wave-looking items. I checked a few of the tags on them, finding, next to prices that curled my hair, the names Norma Kamali and Betsey Johnson.

But I wasn’t looking for Norma or Betsey. I was looking for Caroline.

She would most likely be on this fourth landing in a certain office marked EMPLOYEES ONLY behind a certain counter. Also behind that counter was a nicely dressed young man in a rust polo shirt and tan slacks and short razor cut hair and a delicate thin mustache that seemed to have been cut a hair at a time. He smiled at me, till I went behind his counter and knocked on the door.

“Caroline doesn’t want to be disturbed,” he said.

“How do we know till we ask Caroline?”

The door opened and a short, thin, pale woman with hawkish features and severe short black hair that hooked around each side of her face like upside-down beaks, wearing a black pullover and black slacks and looking like Ayn Rand’s photo on the jacket of one of the books Ginnie and I had read back in high school, said, “I don’t care to be disturbed.”

I shrugged at the nicely dressed young man. “You were right.”

Caroline Westin’s eyes narrowed, looking up past my Sgt. Bilko T-shirt, and she said, “You’re Mallory, aren’t you?”

“Right,” I said, impressed. We’d only met once.

“We only met once,” she said, showing me into her small, white, barely furnished office, “but Ginnie had a picture of the two of you on her desk in her office.”

“No kidding?” I sat in a straightbacked chair as she got behind a gray metal desk, nothing fashionable like you could buy a floor down. “I was in her office before... this office, actually, when it was hers. I never saw that picture.”

She shrugged, lighting a cigarette in a black holder. “She probably hid it when she saw you coming. She wasn’t much for showing how she really felt.”

“From your use of the past tense, I take it you know about Ginnie. Her death.”

“Yes. The sheriff in Port City called me not long ago.”

“If you’ll excuse me for saying it, you don’t seem too shook up about it.”

“I couldn’t care less what you say or think,” she said, with a smile so thin and curling it had to mean more to her than me, because I sure couldn’t figure a meaning for a smile like that.

I said, “You were business partners for, what? Five or six years? And didn’t you share a house here in town?”

She nodded, still smiling, the cigarette holder stuck in the thin, curling line of her smile like a catheter.

“So,” I said, “one might expect a little show of grief.”

“I don’t give a damn what one might expect,” she said, in a tone of voice that didn’t give a damn what one might expect. And then sarcasm finally edged its way in: “However, why should the bereaved friend complain of anyone else’s inappropriate show of mourning when he himself chooses to wear a grinning 1950s television personality, instead of black?”

She was in black, but I had a feeling that was her style, not out of respect.

“I deserved that,” I said, smiling a little. “I found out about Ginnie last night. So I’ve had a chance to adjust to it a little. And I’ll be honest with you. Ginnie and I weren’t close in recent years. I feel the loss, all right. But when someone dies who once was close to you — who was part of your daily life, once upon a time, but who has long since left your daily life, a fact to which you adjusted some time ago — well, the loss just isn’t as keenly felt as it should be. As it would be should someone from your current daily life happen to die. I feel a little guilty about that. If Ginnie had died fifteen years ago, it would’ve shattered me. Today, it only saddens me. Saddens, and... confuses me.”

My confession seemed to have embarrassed her; her composure slipped, just a hair, as she said, “I sympathize with your... feelings, Mr. Mallory. But if you’re looking for someone to... bring you up to date where Ginnie’s concerned, to... help you get to know the person she became since high school, well... you’ll just have to look elsewhere.”

“Who could know her better than her business partner? Someone she shared a house with, for Christ’s sake?”

She stood, removing the cigarette from the holder and stubbing it out, in what I read as a surprising show of anger from a woman whose face remained cool, pale, impenetrable.

She said, “I didn’t say I didn’t know her. I knew her very well indeed. But I didn’t like her, Mr. Mallory. And you want to put your head on someone’s shoulder and have someone say, ‘There, there,’ and afterward put their head on your shoulder so you can say, ‘There, there,’ and generally be miserable together and purge whatever individual guilt you might feel in a mutual, sloppy show of sentiment, and that’s fine ... if you liked her. I didn’t.”

Suddenly I knew something. Or at least thought I did.

“ You did once,” I said.

“What?” Her head jerked back, just a little.

“Like her. You liked her once.”

She shrugged. “Sure. We were friendly.” Her fingers searched the desk for her cigarettes, while her eyes looked at me with a cold searching stare. I reached over and pushed the cigarettes, Salems, into the path of her fingers.