by Howard Owen
“Three times is a lot to be misunderstood,” Cully Dane tells him. “It hurts me to say this, Milo, but I do want to suggest that maybe, just maybe, they understand you perfectly.”
“Well, at least they all had the good grace to get married again. Three divorces and no alimony. How about that?”
“You’re just a lucky man, Milo Wainwright.” Cully reaches over and rubs his mostly bald head.
Jack keeps looking toward the front door.
“Speaking of divorces,” Milo says, turning to him, “do you think at least one of your wives might be making an appearance tonight?”
Jack gets his meaning after a couple of seconds.
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so.”
“Or hope so,” Milo and Cully say almost in unison.
He gives them a hard look. “I doubt if she’ll make the trip from London.”
“She’s busy spreading the word of the Lord,” Milo says, holding his hands as if in prayer.
Jack has already determined, through Martha Sue, that his first wife and former classmate, Charlotte Hamner, has sent her regrets.
“I believe there’ll be enough excitement for me without Carly showing up,” he says.
Mack McLamb comes over with a bourbon-and-water in each hand. He has the same look he always used to have when he was about to lure someone into trouble. He motions for the three of them to come with him.
Milo and Cully go toward the parking lot, where Jack imagines they’ll pass a joint around, that being about as far as any of them has ventured into the exciting world of illegal drugs. Jack says he’ll catch up with them.
Every time someone else comes in, there’s a brief uproar, more so for the out-of-towners. The women on the reunion committee proclaim their delight in seeing people they might not have thought of in years.
By the time these new arrivals have gotten as far as Jack’s corner of the room, where he sips on a Coke, they look a little dazed and wilted, overloaded from reconnecting with several dozen old acquaintances in a matter of minutes.
He has begun to wonder if Gerald Prince is actually going to appear. The reunion started at 5:30 and is supposed to last until, as Susan Edmonds put it, nobody’s left standing. It’s 6:45 now. People are still grazing at the buffet line and the band is getting ready to go into its first set.
Then, he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns around to see a shorter man with wispy brown hair, looking soft as a baby’s, atop a well-tanned head. He’s wearing a silk shirt and a jacket that appears to be worth several hundred dollars. The thin, younger woman beside him has a blonde page-boy cut. Despite a smile as perfect as the rest of her, she looks as if she would rather be somewhere else.
The make-over is so complete that Jack takes a couple of blinks to recognize his old classmate.
“Well, Jerry Prince,” he says, shaking his hand. “My God. Jerry Prince.”
“Gerald,” he is corrected.
Gerald Prince introduces his wife, Caitlin.
“We must have gotten lost,” Gerald says, looking around. “We found a door open down the hall, by the gym.”
“Well,” Jack says, “you’d better go get your name tag.”
Gerald looks at Jack’s, with the old picture on it. He twitches his nose. Jack had forgotten how he used to do that when he was discomfited.
“Ah, maybe I’ll just enjoy being incognito for a while, you know?”
“You don’t wear glasses any more.”
“Lasix surgery. Wonders of modern medicine.”
Caitlin, it turns out, is from Massachusetts. They met when they were both junior editors for HarperCollins. She says she’s never been to Speakeasy before.
“I get down here for Christmas every year,” Gerald explains. “We bring Mother up to Sag Harbor every summer.”
“Every summer,” Caitlin says.
The three of them try to talk above the din. Caitlin and Jack have trouble communicating, even before the band starts playing.
“When Gerald told me he was from Speakeasy, Virginia, I had to make him spell it,” she says. “I thought it must be Italian or Native American or something. And then when he spelled it, I thought they must have had bootleggers here, you know, like Al Capone?”
“Well,” Jack says, “of course, it really is named after an Indian, er, Native American.”
He’s sure Gerald has told her and everyone else at a hundred cocktail parties up North about Speakeasy Lightfoot, whose store lent its name to the high ground and then to the lesser of the two creeks that flanked it. There is an historical marker on Main Street, next to the Exxon station: “On this site, Speakeasy Lightfoot ran his General Store in the early 1800s. Lightfoot, half Indian and half white, warned settlers of a planned slave revolt and saved many from perishing.”
Speakeasy Lightfoot knew which side his bread was buttered on, Jack’s father used to say.
Caitlin laughs as if it’s the funniest story she’s ever heard, and also as if she hasn’t heard it many times before. Gerald smiles slightly, standing to one side and watching as his old classmates are lured on the floor by “Louie, Louie.”
Just then, Martha Sue Levens Bain walks by, looking this way and that, as if she has lost something. The strand of graying hair is loose again, dangling in her face.
She sights Gerald and sees that he has no name tag.
“Hi,” she says, extending her hand, seeming to smile and frown simultaneously. “I know I ought to know you.”
Gerald tells her who he is and sends her into a screaming ecstasy. She calls two female classmates and their husbands over.
“You probably ought to have made up a name,” Jack tells him.
He leans closer to Gerald, just before the greeters close in. “Listen, before you leave, there’s something I want to talk.…” But his old neighbor can’t hear him over the noise. The voices rise above the music, and the music comes back, stronger, so everyone shouts a little louder, the cycle ongoing until the song ends.
“Later,” is all Jack can hear as Gerald Prince is dragged off to meet people he probably couldn’t wait to leave behind. Caitlin follows him, a slight scowl on her otherwise-perfect face.
Jack looks around. He estimates half his class is here, most of them, it appears, with spouses.
Just before another song starts, he jumps as someone squeezes his rear end.
“Hi, big boy. Wanna fuck?”
Susan Edmonds is only an inch or so over 5 feet tall. As always, she says whatever comes to mind. It probably goes with being the judge’s daughter, a little outside the usual and customary Speakeasy rules of conduct.
“You talk the talk,” Jack tells her, “but can you walk the walk?”
She smiles back, a plastic drink cup in her hand.
“A few more of these and I won’t be able to walk, period.”
“Just as well,” Jack says. “I didn’t ask her, but I’m pretty sure Gina wouldn’t approve.”
“OK. How about a dance, then?”
“No harm in that, I suppose.”
But the next number, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” seems either too slow or too fast for dancing, and they talk instead.
She tells him more than he wants to know about her latest boyfriend. She and Milo have been married and divorced six times between them, and it is one of the great wonders of Speakeasy that they haven’t at least accidentally married each other yet.
“So,” she says, “I was kind of hoping ol’ Carly Charlotte was going to be here.” Rather than answer her, he takes the empty cup and goes to get another bourbon and ice for her and a Coke for himself.
She’s back on the same topic when he returns, though. Jack remembers that she and Carly were both cheerleaders. From time to time, he made out, even did some fairly heavy petting, with both girls. The cheerleaders and football players would get together at Susan’s house after practice. The judge was widowed by then, and he usually didn’t breeze in until at least eight o’clock, a couple of martinis wor
se for the wear.
They never went all the way, though. Jack wonders if anyone any more, past the age of 12, just makes out and plays with each other, maybe a little mutual masturbation, for a couple of hours without going any farther. He is sure the world in which he grew up would be insufferably quaint to most of the high school students he sees around town and down by the creeks.
He is so afraid for Shannon when he hears the stories other parents tell him about the parties that seem to spontaneously combust, complete with kid bands and all the beer they can drink, whenever anybody goes off to New York or Cancun and leaves teenagers behind without armed guards. We did that, too, Milo reminded him when Jack voiced his concern, and Jack had to concede that they had, at least once.
“It’s funny, how it works out,” Susan says. “I always figured ol’ Charlotte would spend the rest of her days here in Speakeasy while I, the bon vivant, girl most likely to wind up in drug rehabilitation, would be living in Paris or London or at least New York.”
You did live in New York, Jack doesn’t say, and you have been in drug rehabilitation, twice.
“Well,” he tells her, “she’s doing the Lord’s work, I guess.”
Susan snorts a laugh, and gets choked. Bourbon is running out her nose.
“Whoa,” she says when she gets her breath. “Don’t say shit like that when I’m drinking.”
Talk of Carly inevitably leads her to Brady.
“Daddy said he’s done all his community service work.”
“Good. He got off easy.”
“I think he was mostly picking up trash alongside the Route 34.”
Jack has seen him there when he’s out making deliveries, wearing the bright orange jacket, lethargically poking at candy-bar wrappers and soft-drink cups, his bald head bobbing to sounds from the Walkman.
Brady Stone is 25 years old. He has his GED, a string of short and unpromising jobs, and, as of May, a rap sheet.
Brady had been living with Jack’s mother at the farm house, for lack of better prospects. After Ellen died, there wasn’t any sense in his moving out, or anywhere for him to go. Gina was pretty adamant about that.
When he was arrested in May, in possession of enough marijuana that he was either dealing or seriously hoarding, Mike and Sandy told Jack that they wanted to sell the house and the land as soon as possible.
“What’s he been doing,” Jack’s older brother said, “selling dope in our mother’s house?”
Like you’ve cared, Jack thought but did not say, as long as you get your third. The truth was, he couldn’t swear that Brady wasn’t doing exactly that. He tried to talk Mike and Sandy into waiting at least six months, but they went out that same Saturday and got a real estate agent.
Their father ran a successful truck farm, owned 120 acres and a larger house than the one for which Jack and Gina barely make the mortgage payments. Meanwhile, he thinks, I deliver pissant packages, a job for minor-league baseball umpires supplementing their income in the winter or kids working their way through college. My son, who has Judge Edmonds to thank for his freedom, is picking up trash alongside the highway and changing jobs every other week. Jack jokes with Gina about his family’s downward mobility, but it hurts. He knows what he’s doing, and he knows it’s going to pay off, but he wonders if Brady wouldn’t just quit legitimate work completely if holding a job weren’t a condition of his probation.
Eventually other old friends are drawn into Jack and Susan’s circle. They come and go, dancing a dance or two, getting a drink and returning. Susan pulls up a chair and takes off her shoes, and the next time Jack looks her way, she is sitting perfectly upright, asleep.
Jack does not like parties very much any more. He views them as something to endure. Fortunately, they seem to pick up momentum. He’s noticed that the second hour passes more quickly than the first, the third more quickly than the second.
Even so, he is surprised to look at his watch and see that two hours have elapsed since he last peeked. It’s after 11.
Mack McLamb and Cully Dane have temporarily and unsteadily joined the circle. Paula Stark, now Paula Stark Weathers, is there, too. She and Cully went steady from eighth grade until almost before they graduated. Her head is resting on Cully’s shoulder, as if 30 years haven’t passed.
“Damn,” Cully says. “Remember the night we got drunk at Winston’s, you and me and Bobby and Posey, and we drove all the way to Virginia Beach? Didn’t even get a motel room, just sat out there along the boardwalk and drank and talked and watched the sun come up.”
There is an uncomfortable quiet. Cully says “Damn” again, and pretty soon someone changes the subject.
It had to happen, Jack figures. Bobby Witt and Posey Atkinson could not stay buried on a night like this.
He looks around the room. Some of those not hell-bent on defying their age are leaving. He has a brief moment of panic.
“Hey,” he says to Cully. “You see Gerald Prince?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cully says. “He’s over there in the corner. I have never seen anybody so goddamn impressed with himself. You know the SOB has got a Mercedes parked outside. Probably rented it just for the occasion. Hey, why don’t we sneak outside and tie some cans to it, put a potato in the tailpipe or something? A nostalgia trip, you know?”
But nobody seems to have the energy or will any more to torment Gerald Prince, who has a group around him and does appear to be enjoying holding court. His wife is nowhere to be seen.
Eventually, Susan Edmonds either comes to or wakes up, and soon afterward, a small group is making plans to reconvene at the all-night truck stop.
Jack tells them he’ll meet them later.
CHAPTER SIX
Jack sets his course across the dance floor, dodging inebriated former classmates. It’s almost 1 a.m.
At least half the partiers have left. The ones who remain are not in the best of shape. Milo Wainwright seems to be dancing with the papier-mache Gladiator. Martha Sue Levens Bain is trying to wrest it away from him, although it is almost surely beyond saving at this point. Each tug back and forth sends chunks of red and white debris falling to the floor.
Jack and Martha Sue are able to take his car keys away from him, and Ray Bain finally earns his keep by insisting on driving him out to the truck stop.
“Jack can drive me,” Milo says. “Jack’s sober. Jack’s always sober. Hey, we got to talk about the code. Remember the code?”
They see each other all the time, and Jack can’t remember anyone mentioning the code in 20 years.
“Damn,” Ray Bain says, shaking his head. He obviously hasn’t thought about it in a while. “You need to drink either more or less, Milo. You’re startin’ to have flashbacks.”
The small crowd around them includes Gerald Prince and his wife, who has reappeared and hangs on his jacket sleeve. She holds up her wrist and checks her watch, then yawns.
Ray finally gets Milo out the door.
Jack watches them work their way toward the car. They look like an entry in a three-legged race. He walks back toward Gerald and Caitlin.
“So, what’s it like, being a big shot in New York and all?” Jack cringes at his own clumsiness.
Gerald looks at his wife, shakes his head and smiles like a man indulging a graceless child.
“I’m not a big shot,” he says. “It’s taken me 25 years to get this far.”
Me, too, Jack thinks.
“Your own imprint. That’s really something, isn’t it?”
Gerald smiles. He seems pleased.
“Can I tell you a story?” Jack asks him.
“Stories are my life,” Gerald says. He leans back against the cafeteria wall and tells him to fire away.
Jack starts with the old man, working his way through his disappearance, and then Jack’s decision to quit his job, sell his truck and spend all the time he can spare writing his novel. He tells Gerald the title and as much of the story as he can summarize without risking boredom.
“Lovelady,�
� Gerald says. He says the name again and looks down at his shoes. His wife is now sitting in a chair a few feet closer to the door.
“So, do you think that if I sent you a copy, you, or somebody at Mayfair, or Gerald Prince Books, could, you know, look at it, tell me if it’s any good?”
“Sure. Sure. Send it on up. Here.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a card with his name embossed in gold. “Just mail it to me when you’re finished, or whatever.”
“Oh, I’m finished already.”
“Really?” Gerald Prince raises his almost-nonexistent eyebrows. “Well, that’s something. Now, don’t expect to hear from me overnight or anything like that.
“You know, I thought I wanted to be a novelist. That’s what got me to New York. You probably don’t even remember I did write one—well, I wrote several, but I got one published.”
Jack nods, although he’s long since forgotten someone telling him Gerald Prince had written a novel.
“I was 25, and I thought I owned the world. I thought if you had a novel published, they’d just come and carry you away in a golden chariot.
“It didn’t sell enough to cover the advance, and the advance wasn’t that great. It was a sign. Those who can’t write, edit. But send me what you’ve got. I’ll take a look at it.”
Topic A out of the way, Jack asks how he enjoyed the reunion.
“Well,” Gerald says, scratching his head and looking around the fast-emptying room, “it was interesting. I don’t think I’d have come if it hadn’t been for you writing me. And I might not come to another one for another 30 years.”
He leans closer to Jack. “You know, everybody’s got to grow up someplace, but when I got down to Duke, about two days after I got there, I knew there weren’t enough wild horses to drag me back here. Hell, you might remember I got jobs waiting tables up on Nantucket in the summers.”
“I wasn’t around those summers, either.”
“Oh, right. The Navy, right?”
Gerald looks up at Jack, who is staring off into the distance. He lowers his voice. Maybe, Jack thinks, he doesn’t want his wife to know that he was class weenie a million years ago. How, though, could that matter now?