Reunion (2 page)

Reached over and picked up the cellular phone next to the bed, dialed Memory 10—The Berceuse Travel Agency (“Let Us Cradle You to Sleep for the Perfect Vacation”), Binny answered.

“Hey, Binny! Howya doin'? Hey, hey!”

“Buzzy, howya doin'?”

This big act that always went on between them, although it was true, she was the squishiest ripe tomatoish blonde he'd ever known, at that perfect mature peach-tomato age when just squishing down in her computer chair was an act of delirious eroticism.

“OK, babe … listen, I'm going down to Chicago on the weekend of January 12th. Big grammar school reunion. 50 years.”

“Don't bullshit me, Buzz, that'd make you … ummmm … sixty-fourish … ”

“Only my barber and you know, babe, and let's not leak it to the evening news, OK?”

“And you want your favorite hotel, The Bismarck.”

“Any deals on the Palmer House?”

“Dream on!”

A hundred and twenty a night at The Bismarck, add on another hundred a night for the Palmer House, although the Palmer House … it was like a trip to Versailles, all the old mirrors enclosed in Baroque gold curlicued frames, the ballroom (where they'd had their senior prom from St. Michael's High), the pool, hot-tub, oh, brother, get Malinche into one of those
black second-skin bathing suits and heat her up a little bit, turn on the tambourines and …

“OK, the Bismarck it is! And I've gotta come into Midway because the Reunion's out on the Southwest Side somewhere, a place called The Barn, so I thought I'd go down on Friday afternoon, just dismiss my class for a change, send them on a wild footnote chase to the library or something, let Mal the Knife get a sub for a change, should she have anything scheduled for that afternoon, go to the reunion, then spend Friday and Saturday night at the Bismark, give us a chance for a little second honeymoon … ”

“You mean umpteenth, don't you, Buzz? It seems like you've got another honeymoon every other week … ”

“You know how it is when you're one of those uncontrolled forest fires, you've just gotta burn yourself out, babe!”

As if there was anything to burn out. That miserable little recalcitrant stub of his that refused to obey the most minimal commands from Headquarters any more. What he'd liked to have done was to court martial it and take it out and give it to the firing squad, “Ready, aim, blow that fucker off the face of the mother fucking EARTH!!!!”

But Malinche was kind and patient, wanted him to get prosthetic implants, the kind that inflate when you push a little button, so that Señor Thing would become a kind of remote-controlled automaton, a venereal robot, but he was against that, would bring in The Divine.

“What curses God has visited upon me … I do the best I can.”

And once she herself got going, with a combination of dildos, prayers and her unbridled HEAT, something, anyhow, usually happened.

Sometimes he felt like forgetting about it altogether, just retire Señor Thing into oblivion, not even try any more, but if there was one thing he had it was WILL: “Move, you bugger, or you're history!” And he'd usually have a little explosion, get the poison out of him. Like his old friend Jerry Dombrowski (male nurse, Boston) used to tell him: “You don't fuck, you don't survive, all that radioactivity in the semen builds up and that's how the tumors begin.” He'd even made up a little song about it years before:

S
EMEN IS THE DEMON
,
A
ND IT'S GOTTA GO
,
N
O MATTER HOW YOU DO IT
,
I
T'S GOTTA BLOW
,
R
ECOGNIZE THE KILLER FOR WHAT IT IS
,
C
LEAN THE FUCKER OUT IF YOU WANNA LIVE
…

Which was the half-assest little song that Buzz had ever heard in his life.

“How you gonna rhyme IS and LIVE!” he'd objected to Dum-Dum, and Dum-Dum had turned to him with that Bostonian literary sneer of his, “Ever heard of Emily Dickinson, asshole?”

“OK, Buzz, I'll get you in there on Sparrow Airlines. They've got these weekend specials, you know … ”

“Come on, Bin, I want a real plane, not one of those coffins with wings. OK?”

“Then I'll have to route you through Detroit on Northwest.”

“Whatever. Whatever you can do.”

“And two nights at the Bismark?”

“Great.”

“I'll have it for you by tomorrow.”

“Beautiful. You're a beautiful person … ”

“I try.”

Over and out. He could just see her cross her legs and secrete a little. Buzz knew he had that effect on Les Girls. One of the great ironies in his life—oodles of ammunition and a wounded gun. Wounded warrior, that's Sally used to say about it.

“Maybe you should just retire him [heem] to the Old Soldier's Home.”

Would have made the perfect parish priest, man. If you make it a sin to use it, he'd like be an automatic saint. Six kids, though. That was the miracle of miracles. Started drifting off into dreamland, drifting down the Indus River out of Afghanistan, his head starting to fill with year-symbols. He had this “thing” about year-symbols, the whole solstice-oriented sweep of the year, the year's death and rebirth, King Sun fucks Mother Earth and it all begins anew.

Only he was almost an Aztec when it came to this dying-sun time of the year when the days got shorter and shorter and then they really screwed the whole thing up with Daylight Savings Time so that there essentially wasn't any more afternoon, just High Noon and High Midnight.

Halloween weather.

Mercury/Hermes descends into the Underworld and all the channels are open into Hell, time for the demons to make their visits, the Hopi feast of Wuwuchim, put out a little milk for The Dead when they come to visit. His literary enemies (and N.Y. agents) said that all he was was garrulous erudition. But what did they know? Did their spiritual life hang on the ancient hinges of the year the way his did?

He'd said it a million times: “Man hasn't been in contact with The Real since the Middle Paleolithic.” Caves and spirit and you take The Sacred Drug and the transformations begin….

Just drifting off into dreamland, descending into the Underworld to meet his Dead, when the phone rang, he reached over and reluctantly lifted it off its cradle.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Buzz, this is Ellen. I just got this invitation to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Fifty Year Reunion. Are you coming?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah … ”

“So, listen, why don't you stay here. I mean, when are you coming in?”

“Like Friday morning to Midway, hit the Art Institute, do a little shopping, Water Tower Place, then take the ‘L' back to Midway, pick up a cab to The Barn … then down to the Bismark … ”

“Too complicated. You're staying with us, OK? So you come into Midway, go downtown, OK, then take a train out to Howard. I mean call me before you leave. As you come out of the station at Howard there's a bank across the street, I'll be waiting for you there … OK?”

“Well, I had wanted to … ”

“I had wanted to have ten kids until I had one. Just call me, say, noon … you can come out here, get settled in and then we'll drive to the reunion together, you come back out here. I don't want you wandering all over Chicago like a lost lamb … ”

“What are you, the Good Shepherd!”

“Close! I'm anxious to see you. It's been, like … ?”

“I don't know, a couple of years … ”

“OK. Over and out … ”

And she hung up. And he was pissed. Get Malinche into a hotel and something biochemical happened to her. It was like she left her entire collective past behind and she was the lewd, primal Earth Mother again, The Mother of the Caves, juice and bean sprouts and rutting rabbits. Here on the everyday level … she was studying for Neurosurgery Boards now, always getting more and more and more specialized, like taking the Great Out There and slowly fencing it in, wrapping the fence around her tighter and tighter until all she could move was her index finger. How much do you have to make a year before it's enough? What was she trying to prove?

Redialed Binny at Berceuse.

“Hi, Bin, it's Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz … ”

“You're going back to Mohenjo Daro?”

“No, everything else the same, only cancel the hotel. This old compañera de classe called and wants we to stay at her place … ”

“Oh, that's a shame, I know what a hotel room means to you.”

“I talk too much,” he said.

“Not enough! But OK, I'll jettison the hotel. Seeya!”

One of those women right off the ancient cave-walls, clothed an overweight Chunk, but stripped The Earth Incarnate. What do you expect The Earth Incarnate to be, an anorexic, aerobic string bean?

Hung up and went downstairs, Malinche in the kitchen putting dishes in the dishwasher.

“Ellen just called. We're staying with her. She insists.”

“OK,” she said but didn't mean it.

When they were in Pakistan the summer before, in spite of the poverty and smells, visiting Harappá and Mohenjo Daro (and family), every time they went into a hotel she'd open her suitcase and out would come body-stockings and veils, impossibly high heels with laces that crawled up the legs like black suede snakes, long, dangling garnet and ruby earrings and necklaces, a little portable CD-player with tambor, drum and flute music CD's, her nipples got darker and her skin whiter, she began to purr and the poorly painted hotel walls became the walls of ancient labyrinthian caves.

Tiny Tim even got Brobdingnagian a few times and it simply happened, flowed and climaxed and overflowed into long exhausted hours afterwards in each other's arms in a kind of exhausted coma.

And now all he got was a fatalistic “OK.”

“Maybe we can go to Toledo some other weekend, just the two of us,” he suggested by way of amelioration.

“Toledo? Spain?” she said, her face brightening up again, like she could scan back and forth between 20 and 70 depending on her mood.

“Ohio!” he answered and, whoosh, she made it to 72 in an instant.

He looked outside, then his watch.

“It's six. Come on! I've got our picnic dinner all ready!” he said, went into the refrigerator and took out a big bag of stuff, chicken sandwiches on rye (with caraway seeds), garlic (and dill) humus, baklavah, four cans of Dr. Bronner's Natureade—Cherry, her favorite.

“OK.”

The dog already taken out and fed his catfood. Wouldn't eat anything else but Pussycrat—For the Aristocat in You! Scruffy little terrierish mutt that had followed him home one day 10 years before. Already oldish. Malinche estimated his age at 84 in dog-years.

Hardly moved. Stayed under the dining room table or under chairs. More like a mole or hedgehog than a dog.

He'd get home at a little after five, put together a picnic-something, she'd get home by five-thirty, maybe …

And he'd made a ritual, these last weeks of October, of taking the whole show outside, Something out there calling to him “Here I am, you really want to see Me, face to face, follow the fellow who follows the leaves … ”

A Something she almost heard at times too, although mainly she complained about the cold, in spite of wool pants and Harris tweed jackets and Scottish sweaters, a wry little grimace and a shudder: “It's cold … ”

“It's not the equator,” he'd sometimes answer and then be filled with remorse as her face fell, she “took it,” interiorized,
part of her fatalism, whatever came came, whatever happened happened.

No kids, that was one of the problems. Just the two of them. She came from a family of nine and her life had been full of not just sisters and brothers but all their progeny, a veritable army of nephews and nieces, and then their kids.

And here it was just two of them and their rat-dog and every day the light getting snipped just a little shorter. Just a little colder. And she didn't really want to have kids now. Had wanted to five years earlier, but now he was just four months away from sixty-four and his father had had his first heart attack on his sixty-fourth birthday, collapsed face down into the birthday cake, almost suffocated on frosting, hair and face singed by the candles, his mother's brother was already dead from prostate cancer at 63. “There are certain statistical inevitabilities,” she'd even said to him one night after a pitifully aphonic sexual performance, adding somewhat hesitatingly, “If things don't happen in their due time … I don't see myself re-marrying, and raising children by myself … ”

“So bury me already,” he'd said, “Let's call in Kevorkian … why wait?”

Glanced outside the kitchen window at the sugar maple, a riot of red and yellow. Hardly like leaves at all, but as if it were festooned with ribbons. An urgency in him to get outside.

Which she almost shared.

Left the dishwasher, into the front closet for a capacious black suede coat she'd bought the winter before. Liked black. Which made her very dramatic. The tapioca-pudding-colored skin and raven (dyed) hair, lots of nose and cheekbones, a
Pakistani Medea/Lady Macbeth … the words of the Song of Songs winding through his head for a moment, your hair as black as goats, your teeth a flock of sheep … who is she, bright as the white moon … yafa kalkana … the Hebrew running across his tongue for a moment, wanting to voice it, but staying mute. One word of Hebrew and it was like Sally was in the room, Sally and five thousand years of Judaism … unable, himself, to understand why there should be any enmity between Jews and Moslems seeing they were cousins, the languages (and beliefs) so close that sometimes you could hardly separate them with the point of a dissecting probe …

Out the front door into her car, the old Pontiac.

They'd leased a second car (brand new blue Ford Escort) the summer before when Itzak came to visit for a month. Had kept it after he'd left. He'd wanted her to have the new car. He didn't even need a car, could walk to campus. But she'd insisted on staying with the old car.