A Shroud for Aquarius (14 page)

“I’m very embarrassed,” I said. Admitting it.

She smiled a little. “Me, too.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

She cocked her head, curiously, the smile fading just a bit. “Are you sorry?”

“No! No. It was terrific.”

And it had been terrific. She’d dropped by for a late supper around nine, after a city council meeting at which she’d announced a projected rate hike for the cable system, looking a little weary from the battle that followed, but sultry, alluring, in a clingy blue dress the color of her eyes and a lot of makeup and no hose. I’d cooked pasta for her, dazzled her with my homemade sauce, wooed her with red wine, garlic bread (not much garlic, though, mostly bread) and spumoni ice cream. (This is one of three dinners I taught myself to prepare for company, preferably female; otherwise, as a chef, I know everything there is to know about frozen food and a microwave.)

I’d showed her around my little house. She’d been amused by my eccentricities—the Seeburg 200 jukebox stocked mostly with Bobby Darin records, the Bally pinball machine with its garish lit-up illustrations of Chicago gangsters and their bosomy molls—both machines out in the entryway area near my fireplace; the living room where a stereo, its speakers, a TV, and several video recorders were dwarfed by a wall of books—Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane; the tiny green lights on several walls, indicating that key windows and doors in the house were closed, the remnants of a burglar alarm system the former owners had installed, a service I’d let lapse as far as having the alarms tied by phone line to the police was concerned (I explained to her) ever since I’d set them off accidentally three times and was charged fifty bucks per visit by the city; my small cluttered office where my word processor sat on a desk, printer and typewriter on a table, and manuscripts in progress scattered everywhere, the original cover painting
for Roscoe Kane’s
Murder Me Again, Doll
hanging on the wall facing my work seat.

“You must like those fifties babes,” she said wryly, nodding toward the vintage paperback cover painting. Her smile, like the girl in the painting, reminded me of somebody else.

“I guess. But I seem to be living in the eighties.”

“Nobody in Port City’s living in the eighties.”

“Stuck in a time warp, are we?”

“Rod Serling meets you at the city limits,” she said, and I led her out of my office, back into the living room, to a sofa that faced the TV/stereo area.

She lit a filtered cigarette, crossed her dark, sleek, unnyloned legs. “Coming back to the Midwest after five years out east was a shock to my system.”

“I bet.”

She gestured with her cigarette. “It’s not so much that Port City’s stuck in the fifties or anything. Rather, it’s… timeless, in a creepy midwestern sort of way.”

“Now that you’ve brought the modern wonder called cable to the community, that all should change.”

Little laugh. “Have you checked out what’s playing on most of the cable channels? Old movies and TV shows. Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Sgt. Bilko.”

And here she hadn’t even seen my T-shirt.

“Sure,” I said, nodding toward the tube, “and it’s the best stuff on.”

“True. But when I see those old shows while I’m in Port City, I wonder what year it is. I feel like I could look out the window and Eisenhower would still be president.”

“Maybe he is.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry I came back.”

“Why
did
you come back?”

Her mouth twitched a smile. “To show people.” She looked at me. “Like I said this morning… to show you.”

I smiled, shrugged. “Consider me shown. I’ve been kicking myself all day that I didn’t take you more seriously back in high school.”

She was shaking her head again. “That’s the weird thing about it. If you
had
paid attention to me, if you
had
gone with me, if all my dreams
had
come true, and I’d married you and we’d settled down, I wouldn’t be who I am.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t be this smart, modern woman you’re so impressed with. I’d probably be a frumpy housewife with five of your kids. You’d probably have left me by now. We’d probably be divorced.”

“I’m surprised we’re even speaking.”

That got a laugh out of her, and broke the slightly depressing spell she was weaving for herself.

“You know what I mean, though,” she said.

“Sure. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone to Vietnam. Maybe I wouldn’t have traveled around like I did, getting the experience that allowed me to be a writer. And I can’t imagine me doing anything else but writing.”

She put her cigarette out in the one ashtray I keep on hand for smokers; she kept it with her after that. “So what we’re both saying is, we don’t really have any regrets.”

“I think that’s what we’re saying. I think we’re both glad we are who we are.”

Nodding, she said, “We agree it’s a good thing we were never an ‘item,’ back in school.”

Nodding, I said, “Best thing that never happened to us.”

And she said, “Kiss me….”

“You fool,” I said.

And we both laughed.

And both kissed.

And I’ll be damned if half an hour later we weren’t both embarrassed to be sitting naked next to each other in my bed, having made sweet, tender, enjoyable, and, ultimately, passionate love, more about which I decline to say, only to point out that despite its sweetness, tenderness, enjoyability and passion, we both were incredibly embarrassed about the whole thing, and neither one of us really understood why. Or did I say that already?

“If it was terrific,” she said, “why are we both embarrassed?”

“What do you mean, ‘if’ it was terrific? Didn’t you think it was terrific? I thought it was pretty terrific.”

“Mal, you were terrific. The earth moved, okay? So why do I feel like shit?”

I touched her arm. “I can’t agree.”

With a one-handed swing, she hit me with her pillow, in a fairly friendly way, a few embers off the cigarette in her other hand landing on the sheet.

“Okay, okay,” I said, flicking away the ashes. “Watch the cigarette, will ya; you’ll burn the place down.”

“You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather die some natural way.”

“Like getting hit by a bus, you mean?”

“I’m holding out for a heart attack during orgasm at age one hundred five.”

“You’ve always been a wise guy, Mal.”

“Are you complaining?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Jill. This is very confusing. We’re almost fighting now.”

“Almost,” she said.

I gestured toward the bed and us in it. “If we’d met today, and had tumbled into bed—and I’m not saying either one of us is of loose enough moral character to do such a thing, mind you—but if we had, it wouldn’t feel so awkward now. There’s four of us in bed, tonight. You and me yesterday, kids; and you and me today, grown-ups.”

She put her cigarette out in my one and only ashtray, currently on the nightstand beside her, and rested her head in the hollow of my shoulder.

“There’s really five of us in bed,” she said.

“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.”