Authors: Hugh Fox
Reunion (15 page)
Timmy O'Toole spotting them, coming over.
“What happened to you, Ellen? A lot of people just didn't want to say anything, but I figured you'd have something prepared ⦠and you too, Buzz ⦠”
Buzz for a moment, faced with even the theoretical possibility of facing this bunch, transported back to age 14 when he was just beginning to stutter, not really equipped psychologically to confront the brutality that was just beginning to surface around him, him and his briefcase and/or violin case and/or opera lessons, all of his little artsy, haute-culture extras like a challenge, an affront in the face of Armed Macho Catholicism. A funny way to react to getting his briefcase torn to shreds, his white shirts and ties ripped off ⦠f ⦠f ⦠f ⦠fuck you g ⦠g ⦠g ⦠guys ⦠wanting to escape into some lightless tunnel-world inside himself â¦
Buzz barely getting it out.
“N ⦠nah ⦠that's OK.”
“Me too,” said Ellen, “Fred broke a strap on his plastic leg, we ought to get going⦠”
“Well ⦠once every fifty years!” said Timmy.
Birdy Grub zeroing in on them, something wickedly mahogany-colored in his hand, with a bright red pickled cherry in it.
“That looks good,” said Buzz.
“One of my inventions. Root beer and gin. Sometimes with an onion in it, most of the time with a cherry, depending on my mood,” obviously wanting to get Buzz off by himself, Fred rather gracefully sitting down, “Go ahead ⦠it's been fifty years,” Malinche staying next to Ellen, Birdy walking Buzz just a few feet away, next to the door â¦
“So where do we go from here?” asked Birdy.
“What do you mean?”
“Is it just going to be HELLO and GOODBYE or ⦠don't you ever miss Chicago up there in the wilds of Michigan?”
“You bet!” said Buzz suddenly confronted with this strange vision of Chicago as someplace as ancient as Rome or Tiawanaku, ancient streets and catacomb warehouses, endless cycles of aging and rebirth and re-aging, as if it had been there for millennia instead of, what, a couple of hundred years ⦠this strange illusion of antiquity patinaed across most of what was hardly a hundred years old â¦
“So come down and visit. You can stay with us ⦠”
“You still play piano?” asked Buzz, Birdy and him in this piano prowess war the whole time they were growing up.
“Yeah, but without your gift!” said The Bird.
“Yeah, but I couldn't really âread' music.”
“Didn't have to.”
True enough ⦠didn't have to. Hear it, play it. But some kind of strange musical dyslexia that had kept Buzz from ever going down that other corridor that he'd always longed to go down ⦠into composition ⦠conducting â¦
“Well, I don't know.”
“But, really, keep in contact,” said Birdy, pulling back a couple of curtains, opening up a couple of shades that he usually kept pulled down over his essential Who-ness, this delicate, kindly, empathetic old man, not really a trace of the dustings of Señor Faggot, “faggot” having been transmuted into “empathy,” so he'd become a kind of self-negated listener, counselor, Padre Confessor, Buzzy suddenly filled with an awareness not just of what he'd missed vis-à -vis The Bird, but all the other friends he'd just let drop, not just from grammar school, but high school, college, graduate school, whole sci-fi galaxies of “love,” then his Los Angeles world, the worlds of Caracas, Buenos Aires, Valencia, Spain, the Colombian jungle, the Santa Marta mountains, the Atacama Desert, as if today had nothing at all to do with yesterday, and even less to do with tomorrow, always wanting that little village Sarajevo of the mind where it was all contiguous and continuous, a seamless continuum from birth to death, but which seemed always doomed to being shelled and evacuated, pulverized, decimated â¦
“Why don't you give me your address and all that!” said Buzz.
“Well, we've got these books we're going to get. In fact, let's get them now. Everyone's address and bio-crapo,” a little laugh. Bio-crapo. Not bad. Going back in with the rest of them, Birdy grabbing Tim's arm, “Listen those books we're supposed to get.”
“Well,” said Tim, “not books. Loose-leaf folders,” going over to a big pile up by the podium, bringing back copies for Birdy, Buzz, Ellen, “and now we're going to take a picture,” voice suddenly turned up to High, “OK, EVERYBODY, LET'S GET INTO THAT LITTLE PICTURE-TAKING-ROOM NEXT
TO THE DINING ROOM, THE PICTURE GUY HAS HIS DEVELOPING TRUCK OUT IN THE PARKING LOT, WE'RE ALL GONNA GET PICTURES FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER THEY'RE TAKEN ⦠”
And sure enough, there was a little kind of “parlour” next to the dining room, even a two-tiered wooden “stand” they all started fitting themselves on to, somehow Theresa McIntosh, all blonde and bounteous getting paired up with Buzz, looking like a giant blonde cat just waiting to be stroked, purring to him “I expect you to call me. I live up in Minneapolis in this huge old house all alone, except when I have grandchildren around. It's hell to be a widow, really, you want to talk and there's no one there to hear you ⦠”
“I'm in my fourth marriage,” he answered, making his voice as tiny and furry as he could.
“That's the whole point,” she said, “if ⦠that last night we were together ⦠I remember, it was late fall, I was wearing my mother's coat. And one of the last things she said before she died, after she'd seemed to have forgotten practically everything else, one of the last things she said was âToo bad you let that Buzzy guy get away,' as if it were my fault and ⦠”
“OK,” said the photographer, “everyone in place now.”
“Yeah, come on you two lovebirds,” said Willy Bocanegra, “you'll have plenty of time for that kind of stuff later.”
Getting a big laugh from everyone, Buzzy thinking to himself that no, he wouldn't, they wouldn't have plenty of time for anything, it was finally coming down to the last lap, the last act, Boris on the palace stairs, Mimi coughing up her lungs, Valhalla crumbling away into nothingness, Francesca da Rimini getting a
sword in her gut, Bluebeard alone, “Alone forever ⦠and of all you were the loveliest!,” feeling, at the same time, that they were a couple, that they had always been a couple, per omnia saecula saeculorum ⦠what IF he had simply flowed into a marriage with her, no one and nothing else, just the two of them, and he'd never left Chicago, no Andes, no Himalayas, no jungle trails and magic mushrooms and treks across the Negev, and his kids had been just Manny, Moe and Jack ⦠? Would it ultimately have made any difference, you always get to the same deathbed scene, the final Medicine, the final pain, clarity, and then as if you'd never been, as if Death itself reached back and wiped you forever off the Big Blackboard of Existence, making everything you'd ever done or been ultimately meaningless. Is that all he had gotten out of all his dives into the depths of the world's great religions ⦠? Breathing in and out of Nothingness, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, like Buddha escaping the endlessness of endless reincarnations, that's where The Buddha had gone wrong, wasn't it, trying to escape from eternity ⦠Buzz thinking to himself that if he really had the chance for an endless succession of existences, he would have grasped them to his chest and held on to them and lived them out as fully as he could, forever and forever (“OK, everybody, let's have a big SSSSSSS through your teeth!” the big explosive flash) Amen, Amen, Amen â¦
“One more for good luck,” said the photographer.
A deep breath, Terry putting her arm around him, under his coat, obviously as horny as hell, this hot, sex-starved widow.
“Fifteen minutes!” shouted O'Toole, “and be sure to get your address book loose-leaf folder ⦠”
“Gee, you guys really organized this thing beautifully. It's a well-oiled machine,” Buzz said to Timmy.
“Thanks to old Franny here,” said Timmy, giving Fat Franny a big squeeze of a hug.
“âOld Franny?' Not on your life!,” she smiled, pushed him away, Buzz thinking she was probably still a virgin, had lived all her life inside the ideal of undefiled celibacy.
“So, listen, my number's in your little book ⦠it's been ⦔ Terry reaching up and brushing her hand across Buzzy's face, looking deep into his soul with her green cat eyes, full of North Palm Beach swimming pools and little cocktail hours in little bars at the tops of tall hotels, black silk sheets and lace legs, endless choruses of OOH's and AAH's, looking over at Malinche all pale and patient like a small yellow candleflame.
“OK, pal, listen, it's been ⦔ reaching over and starting to give Terry a little kiss on the cheek, but she took advantage of his momentum and held him up close against her, these barrage balloon breasts that had given suck to so many children, wondering, if, if, if he'd ever couple up with her, how would her still-faceless children take to him ⦠stepfathers, stepmothers ⦠Malinche had been so great with all his kids, generous to a fault, if they'd all move in she'd build a palace for them and fill it with minarets and fountains, Paradise Now, Now, Now â¦
“OK, break and go to your respective corners and wait for the bell for the next round,” O'Toole coming up to them and mock-separating them. It was all a big joke for him. Did he have a wife with him? Buzz hadn't even noticed.
Terry folding back into the crowd now, blowing him one last purr of a kiss, as statuesque Mary Jane Cummings sidled up to
him, Buzz wondering was she just surface cold, or did the freeze go all the way into the center of her soul ⦠?!?!
“Things are kind of heating up around here, huh?”
“Well⦠”
“Could I tell you something?” whispering, pulling him by the tie over into a corner.
“Sure.”
“I've been divorced for five years now. We were married for thirty-five years. He's a lawyer. And then he started having some problems with his âplumbing,' thought he'd fix the problem by changing âplumbers,' got involved with his Chicano secretary from L.A., had a few months of fireworks, and now they're in the process of getting a divorce too. I can just see him at age 70 going into sleaze-bars and picking up what he can get, always with big hopes and broken spigots ⦠”
“Well ⦔ not quite connecting with the angle of her serve, almost letting the ball go by, but, “it's kind of a built-in problem. I mean there are exceptions. Like my old mentor, Menke Katz, the great Kabbalistic scholar, he was still going strong at 85, until the day before he died But he was like the Dalai Lama or something, Mind over Matter ⦠”
All of a sudden Mary Jane totally thawing.
“You don't read me. You never did. I'm not just all one big OOZE, like ⦔ nodding Terry's way, “it's a little difficult to imagine the molten core of Mother Earth when you're freezing to death at the South Pole, but there's all kinds of volcanoes even down there, and ⦠you've had such a crazy kind of lifeâ¦don't you want to just be HOME in your old age, know all the names of the flowers in your own secret garden?”
“Yeah, well, you're right ⦔ he fumbled around indecisively, when the fact was that he was almost as comfortable in Urdu as he was in English, and curry was as everyday as corn flakes and the Koran made as much sense as the Upanishads or IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND THE WORLD WAS GOD, AND THE WORLD WAS WITH GOD, which was such a stew of Neo-Platonism anyhow ⦠and Malinche was dandelions and daisies for him now and “strange” was only “strange” until you took on the skin and face and language, eyes, of The Other â¦
“Anyhow, write and/or call me. There's still a lot of life ⦠years ⦠left in both of us. It's time to âcome home,'” and she looked down at the floor for a moment, pecked a kiss on his cheek and then quickly scurried out toward the cloakroom/restroom.
Willy Bocanegro coming over to him, at first all brisk and “surfacey,” like a brisk surf, “So, listen, it's been great to seeya and all that,” then looking around, looking to see who was looking at him, lowering his voice, “If, when you retire, you wanna get in on a little ⦠you know ⦠”
“What?” Buzzy completely, totally in the dark about Willy, like he was the inhabitant of some sort of subterranean anti-world under this world, caverns and swamps and rivers and palaces, the Hopi Underworld before the Emergence, and had just popped up to the surface for a few laughs, was about to twist his nose and the ground would open up underneath him and he'd redescend.
“You find out WHAT when you're on the edge of WHEN! OK?” said Willy, looking uncomfortably penetratingly into Buzzy's eyes.
“OK, pal,” said Buzz, on purpose looking around, looking at legs and ties and decors, totally psyched-out by Willy's Bela Lugosian stare. Still managing one last quick look in Willy's eyes, as Willy broke out into this wide grin and Buzz saw a mouthful of gold caps and fillings, Buzz wanting to ask him how he did the pigeon trick, like where had the pigeon been, up his sleeve or, and where was it now? He'd been kind of looking around for it ever since it had flown out the doorway. Wanted to ask, butâ
One last smack on the shoulder and Willy was gone with a quick, “So call me!”
As the photographer came back in and started handing out pictures.
“You didn't think I was going to come through on this, did you?”
Buzz going over and getting his. Looking at himself and Terry. No shit, they looked like the classic couple. Hindsight always so easy, looking back at the road already travelled, but the same old fluttery doubts about the road up ahead. Mary Jane just behind him and Terry in the picture, not looking at the camera at all, but over at them, the look on her face something like, “You wait and see ⦔ a face full of plots and debacles, putting the photo in his loose-leaf folder next to the other picture in the folder of the original class 50 years before, looking back and forth between the two versions of everyone around him ⦠at least the survivors â¦