by Tim O'Brien
"Which means what?" said Jan.
"Who knows? Wait and see."
Again Andrew gave her that strange, mechanical, almost malicious grin, and for the next thirty years, off and on, Jan would find herself wondering if this had been a setup from the start.
"Gotta run," Andrew said, "and so should you. You won't, though. And that's fun, too." He gazed up at her with just a trace of longing. "Can't say I never stuck it to Snow White."
6. CLASS OF '69
IT WAS 2:15 A.M. when they left the dance floor and made their way up to the bar.
"Vodka on ice," Spook Spinelli told the bartender. "Two shots. Big glass. Squeeze in a lime—the whole lime—then crank it to the top with tonic."
"Always the glutton," said Marv Bertel.
"Always thirsty," said Spook. She moved a hand to his rump. On her ring finger, almost overlapping, were two large and pricey-looking wedding bands. Though past the half-century mark, Spook looked terrific in her metallic skirt and frosted hair and pricey rings.
"Your hand," Marv said gravely, "appears to have found my fanny."
"It has."
"You're a married lady."
"More than most," she said. "Hurry up, now. Place your order."
Marv's chest hurt, and he was badly winded, but he tried not to show it. "Bourbon," he told the bartender. "Two shots, big glass, hold the lime rigmarole."
"You all right?" Spook said.
"Fat, not dead."
Spook looked at him. "All the same, we'll sit out a couple. And no more fast dancing."
They had been close friends in college. A one-way romance on Marv's part. Now, three decades overdue, there were signs that she might finally be returning his love. Things had flamed up at an afternoon cocktail party, developed over dinner, ripened on the dance floor.
When the drinks came, they toasted each other.
"What about the wife?" Spook said.
"Denver," he said.
"Think it's worth it?"
"Love?"
"No," Spook said. "The other part. The part with my hand on your butt."
Marv laughed and said, "Dream come true. It's worth it."
"You're positive?"
"Pretty sort-of positive."
They carried their drinks over to a table near the dance floor. The mood had long since dampened, and now an echoing, lonely-sounding radio provided the only music. Just over two dozen exhausted members of the class of '69 still moved to memory in the Darton Hall gym.
Beneath the table, Spook snaked a hand into Marv's lap. "Well, now," she said. "I suppose I should behave myself, shouldn't I?"
"Not essential," said Marv.
"You don't mind, then?"
"I do not."
"Thank you, sir. But you'll be sure to warn me if I accidentally start tugging?"
"I will."
"Is that the correct word? Tug?"
"Very close."
"And you will warn me?" said Spook. "Won't let me make a total tramp of myself?"
"I'll raise the red flag," he said.
Spook laughed and looked out at the dancers. Thirty-odd years ago Marv had gotten nowhere. They'd been the best of pals, as close as people get, but at times it had seemed that he was the only man on campus to be excluded from her romantic orbit. Still, Spook had always been a grab bag, full of endless mini-Spooks, and now she beamed a beguiling smile at him. Her teeth looked either capped or false. "What I don't understand," she said, "is why this didn't happen a long time ago. Before all the complications."
"Because you were in love with Billy McMann," said Marv. "And because Billy loved what's-her-face."
"Dorothy."
"Right you are. Dorothy. He loved Dorothy."
"And Dorothy loved—?"
"Her mirrors," Marv said.
Spook laughed again. "Fair enough. Even back then it was pretty complicated."
"Always is."
"Always, yes. Like now, for instance. This happy business in your lap."
"Happy lap, happy me."
"With Billy watching us. Dorothy, too."
"They're jealous," said Marv. "Three decades—who'd believe it?"
"Yes, but here's the question. Should we go to your room?"
"Why not yours?"
"James might call. Or Lincoln."
"The husbands?"
"Indeed," said Spook. "Married as all get-out. Well-wedded woman."
Marv leaned back in his chair, used a cocktail napkin to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He could feel the drums in his chest. "In that case," he said, "I guess we'd be smart to forget the hanky-panky. Like you say. Complicated."
"Your wife. Another fly in the ointment."
"Excellent example."
"And that sick heart of yours."
"The heart's fine," Marv said, though it was not fine. Six months ago things had been touch and go. He'd seen the famous tunnel up close, very impressive, which in part was what had brought him to the reunion. And Spook. For more than thirty years he'd speculated about the possibilities. Fantasy, of course, but over a lifetime he'd encountered no one like her, a woman so aware of her own force field, so unaware of what she wanted from the world. Even as a college kid Spook had taken huge emotional risks without knowing why, gambling on instinct, man after man, betting big, mostly winning, always trusting in chance and the purity of human motives. In 1969, just before graduation, she'd been suspended for appearing topless on the cover of the Darton Hall yearbook. A week later, after considerable controversy, the provost had seen fit to reinstate her on a freedom-of-the-press issue, plus Spook's very persuasive threat to display the remainder of her assets in a special issue of the campus newspaper. Marv had been editor that year. He'd supervised the photo shoot, personally delivered a packet of black-and-whites to the provost's office.
Through two troubled marriages, off and on, give or take, Marv had loved Spook Spinelli.
"So what we'll do," Spook was saying, "is we'll just pretend. No conjugals."
"It won't kill me."
"Won't it?"
"No. Anyway, I could use the magic." He looked at her. "I'll tell you a story. Promise not to laugh."
"I won't."
"Swear it."
Spook lifted her glass, took the oath.
"All right, then," Marv said. "Ludicrous story, I guess, but back in college, senior year, I got hooked on that dumb card game solitaire. I couldn't stop. This weird obsession or something. I'd tell myself, 'Marv, if you win this game, you win Spook, she'll come running.' A thousand times I did that. Ten thousand."
"Ever win?"
"Of course I won. No payoff. Too fat."
Spook shook her head. "You were my friend."
"Friend, thanks. Always a comfort."
"Sorry," she said. "It is complicated, isn't it?"
Marv stirred his drink for a time. "I'll say this. Those two hubbies of yours, they get high grades for tolerance, tough skins, all that. Don't mean to butt in, but if you ever need to talk about it ... The dough boy, he's still your friend."
"Not tonight. Boring."
"Only if you want to."
Spook put a thumb to her mouth, nibbling on it, gazing across the dance floor at Billy McMann. She seemed to be calculating something, time or distance. Plump flecks of mascara dotted her eyelashes.
"What's to tell you?" she finally said. "Fell in love. Got married. Fell in love with number two, forgot to fall out of love with number one." She chuckled to herself, closed her eyes, sighed and made a little what-the-hell motion with her head. "Give me credit, though. I'm loyal. And I won't stop loving you either."
"No?"
"Never. But you'd have to lose weight, clean out those arteries. Stop drinking."
"May I finish this one?"
"Down the hatch. Then we decide about the sleeping arrangements."
"Thought it was decided."
"Was it?"
"No," he said.
"One more drink," said Spook. "Then we decide."
They sat in silence, remembering things, imagining things, then Marv said, "Lincoln and James. Sounds like an English jam."
"It does, doesn't it?" Spook pulled her hand from his lap and massaged her temples. "Christ, I'm drunk."
"Let's disappear."
"Oh, let's," she said. "Except not quite now. I've promised Billy a dance."
"Naturally you did."
"Stop it. He's got Dorothy to deal with."
"You've got husbands."
"Marv, that's childish."
He looked down at the table and said, "Sorry," but he wasn't. A long time ago he'd been a fat college boy, now he was a rich and unhappy and much fatter manufacturer of mops and brooms. All-American fat cat, he reminded himself, with an inflated, failing heart. He could not help how he felt about Spook's two husbands and Billy McMann and all the other eat-what-you-want bastards in her life.
"One question," he said. "Tell me how you manage it. Two houses? Two cocker spaniels?"
"You don't need to hear this."
"I sort of do."
Spook stared at him. "I'm not apple pie, Marv. Two houses, yes. Two beds. Two diaphragms—at least until a few years ago. Not necessary anymore."
"Both guys know?"
"Sure they know." She hesitated. "Listen, I'm screwed up, I realize that. Miserably and out-of-my-head screwed up. And sometimes—this is the truth—sometimes I just want to make a run for it. Anywhere. Escape." She looked across the gym. "There you are. Haywire. I'll go dance with Billy, then we're out of here."
"Go do that," Marv said.
"One dance. Two max."
"Right."
She clasped his hand, kissed it, smiled, then stood up and moved across the dance floor toward Billy McMann. Marv did all he could to avoid watching her. Eventually, he knew, she'd be back, though not for a while, and probably not for a long while. Both of her husbands, he was sure, would vouch for that.
He went to the bar, commandeered a bottle of bourbon, danced a few times with Amy Robinson, told broom jokes, laughed, made other people laugh. He was jolly. At one point he removed his shirt to allow old friends the pleasure of remarking on his enormous white belly, which was the belly that had preceded him through life and would no doubt precede him to his grave.
At 3 A.M. he called his wife in Denver.
A nightmare, he told her. No more reunions.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing's wrong."
Later, he found himself in a men's room, woozy, examining a soiled square of floor tiling. What the place needed, he concluded, was a good, expensive mop.
It was almost four in the morning when Spook came up behind him. He sat alone at a littered table near the bandstand.
"Marv, Marv," she said.
"No late-night nookie?"
"Next time around, for sure. Thing is, I need to please the whole damn world. Everyone, no exceptions. Man, woman, child, beast."
"Billy McMann. Need to please Billy too?"
"It's my nature."
"What happened to Dorothy?"
"Husband, kids. I'm the sub."
"Many congratulations."
"Marv, don't hate me."
"Pals forever," he said.
Marv tried to stand but couldn't manage it. He dropped back into his chair, looked up at her, made a goofy face that was meant to convey standard fat-guy hurt.
"Keep a secret?" he said.
"For yon, I sure can."
"Those pictures I gave the provost, remember? Bareass Spook. So naked. So young. I've still got the negatives up in my attic."
Spook kissed his forehead.
"Enjoy," she said.
7. WELL MARRIED
SPOOK SPINELLI lived in an expensive brick house at 1202 Pine Hills Drive in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. She also lived in a more modest house at 540 Spring Street in the same suburb. Spook was married to Lincoln Harwood, an attorney; she was married to James Winship, an associate professor of philosophy. Both husbands were aware of the arrangement and more or less accepted it. Spook had married Lincoln in 1985, James a year later. "I love you guys dearly," she'd told them, "and I don't see why we can't invent our own rules. I'll be faithful to both of you."
They were intelligent, open-minded children of the sixties. There was almost no contention. Initially, to be sure, Lincoln had articulated some displeasure at Spook's desire for a second husband, yet he adored her and realized that the alternative was to lose a wife he deeply cared for. Just as important, and much to his credit, Lincoln understood that relationships require fine-tuning, that Spook loved him no less, and that he wasn't losing a wife but gaining an in-law. On July 3, 1986, at a meeting convened in a coffee shop in downtown St. Paul, the three of them had hammered out an informal covenant. James, the philosopher, reviewed the ethical issues. Lincoln, the attorney, discussed problems of law. It was decided that Spook's second marriage, to James, would have to go unaccredited in the strictly legal sense; it would be a marriage of spirit and of domestic fact. Spook would split her time between the two households. She would reclaim her maiden name.
When the meeting adjourned, Lincoln clasped James's hand and said, "Welcome aboard."
By convention, and perhaps out of psychological need, we too often interpret the bizarre facts of our universe as mere farce, beneath belief. Man Marries Pet Bengal Tiger. Every day, in every newspaper, a reader's eye will fall upon some such headline, sometimes less peculiar, sometimes more so, and by and large the average good citizen will chuckle and congratulate himself on his own ferocious realism, his own more modest eccentricities, forgetting that for a man who loves his tiger—and who is to say he does not? you? your adulterous spouse?—the union between man and beast is in no respect whatsoever farcical or absurd or less than wholly solemn.
Whether we choose to credit the bizarre, to take it seriously, is finally irrelevant. The world does its work. The Holocaust. The Amazing Mets.
And so, defying at times their own credulity, Spook and her two husbands made it through thirteen and a half years. There were instances of doubt and jealousy, even outright rivalry, yet both husbands were willing to adapt, willing to pay a price in return for Spook Spinelli's divided attention. They were good men. They loved her. They were also a trifle afraid of her, and afraid for her. They recognized the fragility at the core of Spook's personality, the tenuous grip she had on her mental health and perhaps on life itself. It would have been easy to say, as friends did say, that the arrangement couldn't last, that in the most fundamental sense it violated human nature. But it did last. And it was no farce, not for the principals. Their three-way union was relentlessly real, relentlessly pedestrian, with double the difficulties of any standard marriage: housework, meals, head colds, vacations, quarrels, reconciliations, car repairs. On Spook's part, life was exhausting, almost always hectic, but over time she learned to husband her resources. By nature, she was a woman who could handle it: self-confident, sometimes crafty, dexterous since girlhood in the art of making the men in her life feel desirable and at ease. She was a risk taker. She loved a challenge.
Bizarre or not, the arrangement might have endured indefinitely.
But at a party on the eve of the new millennium, when Spook fell for a young attorney named Baldy Devlin, her genius for romantic calibration collided with common sense. Enough became too much.
Four years out of law school, Baldy was a new hire in Lincoln's firm. He was half Spook's age, a long-distance runner, cowboy-rugged, smart, well spoken, far from bald. The nickname, apparently, was someone's idea of irony. "We're in trouble," Lincoln told James in the early morning hours of January i, 2000. The two husbands, now somewhat testy cronies, stood near a fieldstone fireplace in Lincoln's living room. The party was at its peak, libidos at full burn, and Spook and Baldy had set up shop on a large white sofa Lincoln had purchased only a week earlier.
"She's smoking," said James, "on your new sofa."
Lincoln scowled. "Same crap when she met yo
u. First thing she does, she lights up."
"Not on a sofa. Not with me."
"Right, in my Chevy," Lincoln said. He gave James a look. "That's not the point. Three's a crowd, four's a nightmare."
"Well," James said. "We could intervene."
"Spook Spinelli?"
"Right. True."
Lincoln laughed bitterly. "Look at that head of hair. Baldy, my ass."
***
Decades earlier, in 1969, Spook had campaigned vigorously to end the war in Vietnam, standing in candlelight peace vigils, occupying the Darton Hall admissions office during the spring of her senior year. Though politics bored her, at least in the abstract, Spook had loved the action of it all, the intimacy and the danger and the high passion. Ten of her fourteen collegiate sexual encounters had involved members of the movement, a statistic that did not include a janitor and a politically confused assistant chaplain. She had posed topless for the Darton Hall yearbook; she'd escorted six baffled young men to the senior prom. Not that Spook was promiscuous. Broad-minded, yes, and physically generous to the point of philanthropy, but without exception her heart remained in rough accord with her loins. She had a conscience. She'd loved them all. Yet it was also true that from the time Spook was a girl, she'd had great trouble with the word "no." She did not like disappointing people. She adored men and took pleasure in the knowledge that men adored her.
In the light of history, then, Spook could foresee no real difficulties in regard to Baldy Devlin. She'd been there before, numerous times, and knew how to keep a good many balls in the air.
"What we'll do," she announced on the morning of New Year's Day, "is play it by ear, see how things develop."
The four of them were seated in Lincoln's living room—Spook and Baldy on the new sofa, James in an armchair, Lincoln presiding from a barstool. None of them had slept. The room was cluttered with ill will and the debris of a new millennium.
"It might be a good idea," Spook said, "if we all took a nice, deep, healthy breath. There's no reason to be hasty."
"You spent the night with that man," said James. He flicked his head at Baldy Devlin. "I'd call that hasty."
"Oh, for crying out loud," Spook said. "It's 2000, isn't it? Let's be adults."