by Tim O'Brien
There were also liabilities. On the debit side of life's forthcoming ledger, Sandra had imposed the condition that he remain forever Thomas Pierce, literary loner, evasive man of letters. "I've told my mom and dad, both my sisters, my masseuse," she said. "There's a price. If I have to live a lie, then so do you." She gave him a warning frown, allowed the coming decades to take traction in his soul, then primly kissed his forehead.
"And by the way," she said. "Stop eating."
The ceremony, like the bride, was expensive and lovely and thoroughly businesslike. A sunlit day in June. An outdoor wedding. Three hundred guests, all but twelve known only to Sandra.
Blackmail aside, conscience and wisdom long abandoned, Marv Bertel made the best of it. The champagne helped, as did four slices of a superb rum-and-chocolate wedding cake, and after some bleak moments Marv offered up a congratulatory nod to fate and began to bask in the bright side, especially the chance to reprise his much-rehearsed literary role of Thomas Pierce. He took pleasure in the autograph requests, the hushed greetings from longtime fans. One of Sandra's teenage nieces, who came equipped with a suggestive smile and largely bared breasts, represented the day's high-water mark: all the signs of a groupie in the making. She gawked. She fed him oysters. At one point, when the girl's zealous tongue slipped into his ear, it occurred to Marv that to every dutiful husband came the annual responsibilities of the family reunion. And it also struck him, as the admiring niece's breasts opened up to take the curve of his belly, that this unlikely marriage, conceived in Hell, might well prove enduring.
As for Sandra, she was radiant.
During the toasts, Marv's new bride tapped his nose with five carats of compressed carbon. "If you put the scam on that bitch niece of mine ever again," she said gently, almost with compassion, "you're just a dirt-poor ex."
They honeymooned in the Alps. Resolutely, with exhaustive self-discipline, Marv worked his way through the sauces of Switzerland, France, and northern Italy. Sandra shopped. In early July, when they landed back in Denver, Marv stepped on a baggage scale, waited for the needle to settle, and sighed with the satisfaction of a man who, after a long, fugitive absence, had finally found his way home. Or almost home. The sober truth, he perceived, was that his fling with fantasy had put a seal on his life. Except for mere flesh, which might well compound itself even in the grave, he had come to the bitter end of things. Which was partly sad, partly happy. For all those ravenous decades Marv had been governed by gluttony, not solely of the stomach, but even more of hope, a hunger for all that he was not, all that he would never be, a hunger of dream and vision, a rapacious, bottomless, ultimately fatal appetite for an ever-elusive otherness. He had squired fantasy to the dance. He had left alone.
With that ended, and with Sandra now calling the mop and broom shots, Marv settled into what remained. He took solitary lunches. He feasted on anything that presented itself. As before, he waddled through. He had made his own bed. He slept in it. And at the first impossible whisper of reverie, even the most banal little aspiration for himself, he would switch it off as if it were some rigged TV game show that had never paid a winner.
A languid life, yes. And mostly pointless. But not entirely unsatisfying.
To pass the days, Marv sometimes locked his office door, put the intercom on mute, and jotted down memories of his encounter with skinniness. Not for public print, of course. He'd learned his lesson. Still, he had fan with sentences. He changed a few names, his own included, and chuckled over delicacies of motive and meaning. He invented some things. He enlarged upon others. It became in the end a sort of romance, and he a writer, as if by now doing it he could undo a lie, dissolve the fiction of his own disgusting life.
20. CLASS OF '69
THE FAREWELL BANQUET had reached its dessert-and-coffee phase when nine exhausted, fast-aging members of the class of '69 straggled in to take their seats. Marv Bertel had been weeping. Spook led him to a back table, waved others away, touched Marv's cheek, straightened his tie, whispered something.
"Poor guy," said Jan Huebner.
"Poor us," said Amy Robinson. "He's got Spook. What do we have?"
"Each other, I guess," said Jan. "Unless something better shows up lickety-split."
"Something meaty," said Amy.
"Chateaubriand," said Jan, "for two."
Amy made a quick pointing gesture with her chin. "Over there. Look, don't stare."
"What?"
"Paulette and Billy. Can't stop ogling each other. Who would've predicted it?"
Jan sighed. "Private dancer. My kind of preacher."
"Amen," said Amy. "But there goes dinner."
Paulette Haslo and Billy McMann had fallen in wary, could-be, wait-and-see love. Though they trusted each other, and in particular the integrity of their motives, they did not yet trust love itself. They sat at separate tables. They were discreet with their emotions, polite to their table mates, but now and then, at the same instant, they'd glance across the room at each other and then grin at the embarrassment of having been caught glancing. Love was a surprise to both of them. Billy had come looking for revenge. Paulette had come looking for God. Both of them had suffered disappointment. But in another, less literal sense, which was just beginning to unveil itself, they'd found things neither had known were desirable or even possible. That love could happen at all struck them as extraordinary; that it could happen between old friends, so untouched by betrayal or prior pain, so easy, so comfortable, seemed to both of them either a great miracle or a cheap magician's trick. Life had made them skeptical. Neither Billy nor Paulette was yet prepared to believe in whatever this was, or to believe in each other, but at the same time they were finding it hard to disbelieve.
Across the table from Paulette, Ellie Abbott was in muted conversation with her husband Mark, whose expression was amused and expectant, a little perplexed, as if he were having difficulty following the setup to an elaborate but promising joke. Ellie's eyes did not once move from the crème brûlée on her plate.
What she was seeing on the plate, however, was not crème brûlée, and what she was telling her husband was not a joke.
Two tables away, Minnesota's lieutenant governor and his new wife made political small talk with an assistant provost. Directly behind them, too giggly, too garrulous, the lieutenant governor's ex-fiancée, a Lutheran missionary, reached for a bottle of champagne.
"Whatever you do," Jan Huebner told Amy Robinson, "don't get philosophical on me. I'm in pain. I need ... You know what I need."
"How long's it been?"
"That?"
"What else?"
Jan shrugged. "Put it this way. Right now I'd settle for a Jimmy Dean's."
"Sad sacks, aren't we?" Amy said. She took a flask from her purse, swallowed twice, handed the flask to Jan. "I will make one tiny philosophical point. Maybe it's the lawyer in me, maybe the years, but when you look around this room, all these people—and I mean good people, too—nice people, almost all of them, Dorothy not excepted ... And by the way, where is she? Primping, I'll bet. So what I mean is, you can't help but think ... Fuck me, I forgot the point." She blinked at the tablecloth. "Maybe that's the point."
"All you need is love," said Jan.
"I guess. Go ahead, girl. Sing."
"Not alone. You have to help."
When the coffee cups had been replenished, Marla Dempsey passed around a cardboard box. "What we'll do," Marla said, "we'll each draw a slip of paper with somebody's name on it. Friend or foe, creep or otherwise, we swallow our pride and get up and give that person a big juicy kiss. Tongues not required. Make sense?"
The game was a dud. It was too late in the reunion, too late in their lives. There were groans, a few halfhearted catcalls.
Ellie Abbott stopped in midsentence, having just mentioned a lakeside resort called Loon Point. "Mark, I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have started this now. I was afraid I couldn't do it if we were alone."
He stared at her.
"I do
n't get it," he said. "What do loons have to do with anything? Water? All that?"
"Later," said Ellie.
By good fortune she'd drawn the name of Paulette Haslo, and in a rush Ellie pushed her chair back and went off in search of counsel.
Paulette was occupied with Billy McMann. They had pretended to draw each other's names. Elsewhere in the room, a physician and a mother of three had devised the same strategy. So too had Marv Bertel and Spook Spinelli, though they defaulted on the kissing, just held hands at their back table. Marv was feeling better. "Wish you could've seen me," he was telling Spook. "Once in my life I'm a movie star, I'm the Thin Man, I'm Dick Powell or Cary Grant or whoever, no jowls, no belly, didn't need one of those special periscopes to check out my dick. Skinny as all get-out. Would've knocked you dead."
"You knock me now," Spook said. "A writer and an actual rodeo cowboy."
"Calf roping," Marv said, "in between masterpieces."
Spook gave his belly a pat. "If you're interested," she said, "I've got my own wish. I wish I weren't so inexcusably married. Otherwise, periscope time."
Marv looked at her. He wanted to hit something.
"Love you so much," he said.
"Yes?"
"Just so much."
Spook held his gaze for a second, started to smile, raised a thumb to her mouth.
Marv sighed. "Gonna break my heart, aren't you?"
"Oh, God, I suppose," Spook said.
Dorothy Stier arrived late. She'd had dinner at home with Ron, slipped on her prosthesis, changed into a pretty red cocktail dress, taken her evening tamoxifen, fussed with her hair and eye shadow and fingernails. "I won't be too awfully late," she told Ron, "but I don't suppose there's any reason to wait up for me."
"Well," he said, "I could come along."
"You could." Dorothy smiled radiantly. "No reason for that either."
She grabbed her car keys, blew him a kiss.
It was a fifteen-minute drive. At a couple of traffic lights, and as she turned into the Darton Hall parking lot, Dorothy rehearsed what she would say to Billy McMann, how she would concede certain issues, not concede others, and how she would allow chance and opportunity to govern what remained of the evening.
She felt brave. She had survived cancer, she would survive this.
At 9:15, when Dorothy walked into the banquet room, the name-drawing game had just trickled to its end. Only Paulette and Billy still found it fruitful.
Dorothy halted in the doorway.
Instantly, she began revising her speech, the concessions in particular.
She considered heading home.
Simple jealousy, she realized, and a touch of surprise, but the whole atmosphere struck her as too collegiate, too saturated with sentiment. It crossed her mind that these people were strangers, complete aliens, like a new life form dredged up from the bottom of the sea. And they'd always been strangers. Except by an accident of birth, this was not Dorothy's generation. She didn't fit. The generation didn't fit her. Not the music or the politics or the fuzzyheaded ethics. Right now, stepping gingerly into the crowd, she detested that all-you-need-is-love drivel that Jan and Amy were half singing, half screaming to the ceiling. Love, Dorothy thought, was plainly not all you needed. Not by half. You needed a roof over your head. You needed a first-rate oncologist, a dexterous surgeon, a medicine cabinet stocked with some very powerful chemicals. You needed tamoxifen. You needed Xanax and Paxil and a fake breast and luck and guts and something to get you through the fires and thirst, the irritability of instant menopause. You needed brains and common sense.
Dorothy worked her way to the bar, ordered a gin and tonic, drank it down, then fell into conversation with a tearful, nearly incoherent Ellie Abbott. Something about water, something about Harmon.
"I wouldn't bother you with this," Ellie said, "but it's just ... I can't do it. Paulette told me to blurt it all out, not even take a breath, but I can't say the right ... not even ... God, I'm sorry. I should talk to Paulette, I guess, except she's up to her neck with Billy."
"So I see," said Dorothy, and edged off toward David Todd.
David had just returned from the men's room, where he'd indulged in a substance that made him luminous. Half a hit was plenty. He was a kid again, light on his feet, winging a baseball against the garage, and his brother Mickey was saying, "Man, you're it, you're major league," and David laughed and found himself on the shaded bank of a narrow, fast-moving river called the Song Tra Ky, almost dead, getting deader, and Master Sergeant Johnny Ever wouldn't shut the fuck up, the guy kept babbling about this and that and all things between, the curvature of the earth, the reasoning behind pi, why Marla had left him for a shitball on a Harley, and why, in nasty detail, she would never be coming back.
When Dorothy Stier said hello and hooked his arm, David looked up into the slack, insinuating death's-head of Johnny Ever. It was Dorothy's voice, though, that informed him he was looking pale, a little off-center. After a second Johnny's face became Dorothy's.
"No, I'm fine," David said.
"You're sure?"
"Picture perfect. Talking with an angel."
"David, that's so sweet."
"Yeah, it is." A thought came to him. He took Dorothy's arm. "Want to try something interesting?"
***
Marla Dempsey watched her former husband, the man she wanted to love, guide Dorothy Stier into the men's room. It was difficult to know what to feel. As always, therefore, Marla found herself feeling almost nothing.
Anyway, it was her own fault. Mostly her own.
She waited until the men's room door had swung shut, and then she turned and wandered over to join Amy Robinson and Jan Huebner in a last, loud chorus.
Billy McMann and Paulette Haslo had moved into the banquet hall kitchen. The lights were out. Paulette's skirt was at her knees, Billy's jeans were coming down.
"Is this sex," Paulette said, "or something else?"
"Tell you in a second," said Billy.
A number of people were already saying their good-byes, hugging and exchanging phone numbers and moving toward the door to catch cabs or buses or late-night planes. Others planned to stay the night. Minnesota's lieutenant governor was undecided. His new wife wished to leave; his ex-fiancée wished to talk. Not twenty feet away, a former basketball star, now a mother of three, had just called home to say she would be returning a day late. A prominent physician had done the same. The two were now at the bar, toasting their reprieve, elated and ashamed, each feeling the press of tomorrow, each speculating as to whether a day would do it.
Some found it easy to go, and to let go. Some talked about their distaste for reunions, how this would certainly be their last.
Some were crying.
Some were bored.
Two ex-football players, maudlin and drunk, huddled up one last time, slapped hands, and broke for the door.
Paulette and Billy emerged from the kitchen. Paulette was laughing, Billy was pulling on his shoes.
At a littered banquet table, cold sober, a silver-haired chemist and a retired librarian made peace with the frugal laws of temporality.
Better this than nothing, they said.
They said, Maybe next time.
Among those scheduled to depart that evening was Marv Bertel. He had a seat on the 11:30 flight to Denver. "I could always change the reservation," he said, although without much hope or enthusiasm, and when Spook Spinelli fell silent, Marv patted her arm and said, "Sandra'd have my nuts, of course. Which, I might add, would be a very definite first."
Spook didn't laugh.
She would ride with him out to the airport, see him off at the gate.
"Good enough," Marv said.
In the men's room, Dorothy Stier and David Todd enjoyed a meeting of minds. For the next eight or nine hours, he warned her, she would be voting Communist. Dorothy nodded gravely and swallowed half a blotter.
David popped the other half.
"How are the kids?" he said.
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Ellie Abbott took her husband out to the parking lot and confessed it all. She would later remember a yellow streetlight just beyond Mark's right shoulder, a blurry glare, and how the light made his face vanish.
More than anything, he seemed embarrassed.
"If you don't mind," Mark said, "I'll drive back to the hotel alone."
He wouldn't look at her. He took out his car keys.
"Later, then," he said. "I'm sure you'll catch a ride with someone."
***
It hit Dorothy fast.
After twenty minutes she had the amateur giggles. Ten minutes more and she was comparing prostheses with David Todd.
"Nam and putrid breast cancer," Dorothy was saying, "who would've thought it?"
"Same difference," said David.
"Well, of course same difference. And nobody even gives a hot stinking darn, do they? I mean, it's nutty. They've all got their ouchies, their little dings and boo-boos. Stubbed their toes on love. Bruised souls. Mangled egos. Et cetera, et cetera, and blah blah blah." Dorothy tugged her prosthesis down, studied the wreckage. "Beautiful, I'd say. Medal of Stinking Honor. Ron—he's my husband, worthy man, loads of dignity—Ron doesn't care to look at it. Republican. No complaints. Should've married Billy, I guess, but who ever ... These scars here. Zigzaggy, wrinkly. See that? Sort of purply? Real purply?"