Reunion (10 page)

“Fine, and you?”

This strangely rich contralto voice when what he remembered was a tiny little Miss Moffatt falsetto.

“OK. It's been a while … where's,” reaching back, who was he the most curious about, ah, yeah, “Joan Korzenowski?”

“Joan … mmmmmmmmmm …” scanning the room like a radarscope, “yeah, yeah, yeah, over there in the corner … ”

This tiny little diminutive blond with a flat, weeping willow wig on. Weeping willow … maybe a little more like pancake batter had been poured all over her head then dried in the middle of glopping down all over her shoulders. Black sequin dress, long green saber nails.

“I'll be back,” he said to Mary Jane, walked unsurely over to Joan. “Joan … ?”

Super-Brain had ended up as Super-Glitz? He'd expected her to be all tweeds and pens and glasses, some kind of physicist out at the Argonne labs, an inhabitor of space stations, an environmentalist on a holy mission to save the sturgeons in the Baltic Sea.

“Yes?”

“It's me, Buzz … howyadoin'?”

Reaching over to give her a little buzz too. Only she pulled away.

“I don't know any Buzz!”

Again a rich, reedy bassoonish contralto, G below Middle C.

“Buzz Lox, your old intellectual rival. What was the monetary unit that is the equivalent of the dollar in ancient Israel?”

“Really … I need a refill,” said Joan, walking toward a bar over in the corner, another tall bewigged blonde as bartender, a
crappy looking sign (marker on a bedsheet) taped up on the wall: 30
^TH
A
NNUAL
R
EUNION
—G
REATER
C
HICAGO
C
HAPTER,
T-S P
OWER.
Joan whispering something to the bartender, the bartender dialing 0, starting to whisper into the phone.

Buzz knowing TROUBLE when it was coming, little dwarf-voices inside him urging him GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE, MAN, THERE'S NO GUYS … THEY CAN'T ALL BE DEAD.

TS wasn't Our Lady of Sorrows.

“Let's get outta here,” Buzz said to Malinche, steering her by the elbow.

“But we just got here!” she objected.

“It's the wrong place,” he said, increasing the force on her elbow. No time for her usual meditations and confusions before she ever came to a conclusion, making disorientation a fine art, as he got to the door asking the blonde who obviously wasn't Mary Jane Cummings, “What does TS stand for?”

Getting the answer in a guarded whisper.

“Trans-sexual … ”

“Ahhhhhh … OK.”

Out into the corridor again, kept going, another turn, two grizzly-looking guys in almost-cop-looking uniforms hurrying past them into the TS convention, Buzz trying to look as casual as he could, singing under his breath, “Singing in the rain, I'm singing in the rain, I guess I'll never be young again,” Malinche trying to stop, insisting, “What's going on, why are you singing?”

“It was the wrong place. It's a transsexual convention.”

“You're kidding!?!” getting the giggles, “I thought it was Norwegians. I thought ‘Gee whiz, I didn't know Buzz had gone to a Norwegian Girls' School.'”

“They're not Norwegians, they're guys.”

“I know, I know, I did one of those surgeries once in London. I mean didn't do it but assisted … when I was doing my residency at St. Bartholomew's … ”

“You're amazing,” he said and kissed her, another turn in the corridor, and there it was 50
^TH
R
EUNION,
O
UR
L
ADY OF
S
ORROWS
G
RAMMAR
S
CHOOL.
Ellen and Fred in the doorway.

“What the hell happened to you?” asked Ellen.

“Detour,” said Buzz. He didn't feel like any long explanations that would make him seem stupider than he really was.

Coming in. Not recognizing anyone. Just a bunch of old people. Very solid-looking, very middle-middle class, pillars (Doric, no fluting) of society, the kinds of people whose different clocks in different rooms all tell the same time, the kinds of people who recycled milk-cartons and cans, who slept easily and long, contributed to the American Cancer Society and always flushed the toilet twice when they were doing their private things, had the furnace man out every fall to check the furnace “just in case,” who traded in their cars every five years, period, never had learned a foreign language, had never been to Cancun or anyplace further than Toledo, people who, when you said the word CHEESE to them thought either Velveeta or a small green container of pulverized parmesan, who always voted for city council members, never left dishes in the sink, hooked same color socks together with a safety pin before washing
them, had their cemetery plots already bought and had never eaten a falafel sandwich in their lives …

And the worst part was that some kind of Judgement Counter inside Buzz registered the whole bunch of them en masse as GOOD, and registered himself as IFFY.

If he'd followed his gut instincts, he would have turned tail and kept walking down the corridor to some back EXIT and walked out into the frozen prairie that he knew had to be out there, and just kept walking.

“Here, let me get your coat there, Buzz, and give you a little name tag,” this tall, svelte, somewhat elegant-looking Irishman coming up to them, starting to help Malinche off with her coat, handing Buzz a name tag, “You must be the fourth Mrs. Lox. Doctor Lox … I'm sorry … I read all the bio-datas, but …” Buzz without a hint as to who this guy was, straining to catch a subtle glimpse at his name-tag …

“So you don't know me any more, huh, Buzzy!” he said, quick, very quick on the uptake, sticking his name-tag practically up against Buzz's face: Timothy O'Toole D.C.

“Ah, Timmy!” said Buzz, practically shifting into an Irish brogue, Ah, Timmy, so how in God's name areya, me boy, whole worlds of lost modalities suddenly activated and set in motion, four years, after all, in St. Patrick's High School after Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, the Christian Brothers of Ireland, not a man of them not imported directly from the Old Sod itself, “so what's the D.C. for?”

Doctor of … ?

“Drain Commissioner. It's something I've had my claws into for almost 25, no 28 years … but I'm letting go next month,
retiring to Rockford …” Retiring to Rockford?!?! But no one retired to Rockford!!! Just the thought of retiring to Rockford sending chills up Buzzy's back. Buzzy trying to remember Timmy the way he was, this skinny, anemic-looking Irish punk turned into this silver-haired noble-looking drain commissioner, like there was no connection whatsoever between the Had Been and the Now, it wasn't continuity and evolution, but the development of a whole new animal, “And this is the little lady?”

“Malinche!!” Buzzy snapping into action, “Malinche, Timothy, Timothy, Malinche.”

“My pleasure,” she said holding out her hand.

Which Timmy kissed, Malinche starting to pull back and away, but (almost) catching herself in time.

“Do I detect a trace of an accent?”

“May be,” smiled Malinche.

“Chicano … ?”

“Urdu,” said Malinche.

Which totally nonplussed Timmy.

“Which is … ?”

“My language, what I speak. I mean, I speak English too, a leetle, but,” Buzz swearing that her accent had increased ten-fold since she'd started talking, as if she were spreading the homus on thick, just on purpose.

“And, pardon my ignorance, but where do they speak it?”

“Karachi. I'm from Karachi!”

“Ah … Karachi … ”

Timothy absolutely unwilling to let them know that he didn't have a hint as to where Karachi was. If he never found out it was
better than showing yet another blank on the globe of his knowledge.

This busty blonde with the Chinesey eyes coming up to Buzz with a two drinks in her hands, one hers, handing him the other. A cherry in it. It must have been a Manhattan, something he hadn't even seen for, what, thirty years.

“Here, try one of these.”

Buzz refusing to strain to look at another nametag. He'd be like O'Toole, fake it through. Although he did know her, didn't he, he'd taken her out once, early fall, they'd gone to see Mozart's
Magic Flute
down at the Civic Opera House on Wacker, and she'd worn her mother's mink stole, although she was only, what, fifteen, sixteen, in high school, that's right, he'd maintained contact with her a little while after grammar school, only his mother had been so adamantly against her that he'd never taken her out again, “Look at her father, what is he, some stupid insurance man, he doesn't even have his own company,” as if he was dating the father instead of the daughter, as if something father and daughter were one and the same, there wasn't any person at all, just this socio-economic dyadic abstraction …

“Theresa McIntosh!”

“McGrath now, although I might change it back to McIntosh again. I'm a widow … ”

Opening her arms and receiving him up against her, Buzz feeling this sudden rush and blush of sexuality. Jesus, all the women he'd had and he could have had this one and never left “home” and satisfied all his needs, kept it all continuous, one single, painless flow, instead of …

“You're looking great, like a great big pussy cat!”

“Oh,” smiled Theresa, loving it, “what a thing to say!”

“Yeah, she's right, Buzz, what a thing to say!” seconded O'Toole, as this little old man came up, big forehead, white curly, almost kinky hair, all kind of tottering and doddering, the soul of benevolence and carefulness, like God the Watchmaker, taking careful care of his Big Watch Universe, Buzz wondering who the hell's that, Grandpa God, no, it couldn't be, but it must be, running over and giving him a hug, looking unabashedly at his name-tag, yeah, it was, his best buddy all through grammar school, endless hours together, the only other nerd like Buzz himself, pianist, poetry-lover, reader of Eliot and Aldous Huxley, listener to the Saturday afternoon Texaco opera broadcasts from the Met, just him and Ellen and …

“Birdy [Burton] Grub, how the fuck areya, man?”

“I'd be just a little better without that language,” said Birdy, giving a slight hug back.

“Ah, come on, Birdman, loosen up, chill out!”

“I see you watch a lot of TV,” said the Birdman, careful and fragile and old, but no trace of the effeminacy that had hung over him as a kid/young man, Buzz always expecting him to have turned into a flaming homosexual, but it didn't look like it now, all he was was the soul of brittle, careful old age benevolence.

“So what have you been doing with yourself for the last fifty years, Birdy?” Buzz asked The Bird.

“The main thing I've been doing is divesting myself of the name BIRD! There's nothing wrong with the name Burton. Although Grub wouldn't have been my choice either. Especially
Bird and Grub together, like birds go grubbing for grubs in the grass. A number of times I was tempted to revert it back to its original form, Grabowski … or go through the phone book and pick a random name like … ”

“Espinosa!” suggested Buzz, “Guttierez!”

“Hardly. I, we all, have this Gaelic-Anglo-Saxon bias … something like Stradford, Stratman … ”

“Stradivarius!” suggested Malinche brightly, Buzz always amazed at how well (most of the time) she followed along the drift of ideas…almost followed along the drift of ideas…always just a little “blurred,” but close …

“Well, hardly Stradivarius either, but … you must be the Doctora everyone has been talking about,” Birdy graciously shaking Malinche's hand, Theresa following suit, Malinche suddenly feeling very much a part of the action, contact, closeness, intimacy.

Until you were squeezed and poked a little you were hopelessly outside The Action.

“So what have you been doing for the last fifty years?” Theresa asked Bird.

“Oh, insurance, there's nothing shameful about the insurance business, is there?”

“Not at all!” said Theresa, “My husband was in the insurance business too. And what I did, mainly, was to raise kids. Five. All grown now, of course, which makes it a little bit hard. But now the grandchildren are coming along, three already, the fourth on the way. I guess all I am is just a big mother-grandmother hen!”

Buzz thinking nice ‘thingees,' as his son Zak (Itzak) would say, really beautiful and ample breasts, very mother hennish. He
could imagine her very easily in all sorts of interesting lingerie variants, lots of net, lots of lycra, lots of little holes for important items to stick out of, for access into important areas, easy to imagine all sorts of evenings he could design just around the two of them and a gigantic black silk sheeted bed, pissed at all the years he'd missed out on with her … and she'd been so anxious to pair up with him…his goddamned mother and all her social inaccuracies … misconceptions … if it hadn't been for her he probably never would have married Maria del Carmen the first year he'd been at the University of Georgia, feeling so totally “abandoned” and alone that Maria del Carmen had seemed not just a Love Goddess, but almost messianic … menospreciar lo familiar y uno busca lo desconocido como si fuera “normal” … downgrade the familiar and you look for the unknown as if it were “normal” … which it eventually becomes … after all, if he hadn't married Marie del Carmen he never would have been “hispanized,” never would have learned Spanish, gone to the Andes, Amazonas, ever taken the sacred drugs that had brought him into the world of the real gods …

What if he had married, say, Theresa, it would have been all the same, uninterrupted sameness …

But he could have drawn on his “Chicagoness,” like Algren, Studs Terkel, James T. Farrell, whole universes in his own back yard that he'd never explored …”OK, everyone, let's get to our places and see if we can't get the show rolling!”