Reunion (7 page)

“Too cold,” he said in Korean, “Chupta.”

“Why are we alive??” the old man asked, “We uriga saningoka?”

One of those totally-at-peace-with-himself faces.

Lots of breathing exercises. The peace of the Buddha filling the whole store.

Buzz's mind automatically answering the old man's question, “What are we doing here?” “We're doing penance, purifying ourselves, getting ready for the next life,” the old Catholic Via Negativa, Blessed Matt Talbot wearing chains around his body to tame his flesh. Only that wasn't how he answered.

“Eating mangos,” he said, “that's what we're doing here … eating mangos./Mango mugmee.”

Which the old man laughed at.

“Very good,” he said, “very good … eating mangos … ”

“See you later,” said Buzz as they walked out, Malinche already into the bag of mangos, Buzz remembering Mitzi, Wife Number 2, her face that promised so much when they'd first met, but then after five years of Michigan winters, beginning a long process of alienation, withdrawal, interiorization … and along had come Sally and all her intensity, and pulled him back into the Big Now, in New York now working for Korean Airlines, sometimes Sally and Mitzi having lunch together, more worlds he was missing out on, feeling that he was like some sort of archaeological dig, and that the earlier levels were best … both that (Past) and futures that he wasn't/couldn't be part of … like the dwellers of his site had moved on and colonized other areas and there would be other middens to fill with the refuse of other lives that he would never experience … wondering … if he'd married one of the girls from his grammar school class and had stayed in Chicago, had gotten a job teaching English at Loyola. This lost ideal he was always dreaming of. The call of the small towns around where they lived in Michigan. The old
houses. Generation after generation lived in continuity, like a river instead of a patchwork quilt the way he'd really had it. A ragged patchwork quilt. Like Teresa McIntosh. Or Mary Jane Cummings.

Teresa like super-developed by the time she was 13, always some sort of “stain” on her life, the one year she'd missed in high school, everyone saying she'd gotten pregnant, no one knew with whom … or Mary Jane Cummings, the tall, distant blonde, La Belle Dame Sans Merci/The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy …

“Listen, you stay here,” he told Malinche at the door of the station, “and when she gets here, I'll come back for you, OK? Are you alright?”

Already half through one big juicy mango.

“A little crazy, maybe …” she said, half smiling, half crying.

“Don't be silly, we're both starving. We should have stopped and had a steak somewhere.”

And why hadn't they?

The streets were full of places. Instead getting lost in the cavernous emptiness of Fields and Carson, Pirie and Scott they could have had a pastrami sandwich or something. They'd even found a Payless Shoes and a T.J. Maxx, but a lot less interesting than their equivalents in Grand Junction.

“I love you,” he said, but didn't kiss her.

He could just imagine, one kiss and his lips would swell up and he'd end up at the reunion nick-named Big Lips forever.

Back out into the cold. Why didn't he stay inside with her? It was only four o'clock but was already feeling like midnight. The wind merciless. Pulled on his gloves, his hood over his head. But
nothing helped. Remembering the years of his frozen childhood. All his goddamned cousins. Jesus Christ! His father had four sisters, two of them married, one unmarried, one crazy, and the two married sisters had had eight kids between them, and his mother had one brother who had had two kids, and there was his mother's father's brother, her Uncle Frank, who they used to always visit on Thanksgiving, there had been a whole stable world out there, like the magical house on the hill in Our Town always filled with marzipan and pfeiffergnussen and people … him always the only child. And now his only link with love a mango-eater from the other side of the world …

What the fuck had he ever come down to Chicago for this reunion anyhow?

Getting colder and colder, fuller and fuller of regret, as the snow began to get serious, from flurries to a heavy goose down blanketing of flakes. At this rate it would be two or three feet by the next day and all flights would be cancelled … postponed …

Feeling like Scott at the South Pole just waiting to freeze and die, when Ellen pulled up to the curb and started maniacally honking, a big smile stretched across her mummified face.

Her face had always looked like a ripe little beige cherry with the features painted on. Still did. Only now there were lines etched into the skin, like Moari scarification patterns, the entire face covered with these rows of lines, not just around the mouth and eyes, the flexing-areas, like you'd expect, but everywhere …

A young guy in the back seat getting out. Short lamb-suede jacket and purple knit cap.

“Howya doin', Buzz?”

Shaking Buzz's hand, and then running off down the street.

“Who was that?” asked Buzz as he opened the door.

“Get in, darling,” said Ellen. And he almost did. Almost forgot Malinche.

“Let me get my wife, she's inside, out of the cold,” closing the door again, running back across the street, the snow so thick now he could barely see across the street at all, Malinche standing there shivering, reluctantly coming out into the bleached, dead, white world.

“So she came?”

“No, we're gonna make snowmen!” he said.

“Snow men?”

“She's here,” he said, his hand hooked under her arm so she wouldn't/couldn't fall. His precious little mango in the deep freeze. Cars slipping all over the place now, very carefully negotiating across the street. It was like walking through a frozen goose down pillow, tapioca, rice pudding.

Getting her tucked into the back seat, getting up front with Ellen.

“I don't know if I'll be able to make it to the reunion tonight, really,” said Ellen, “I hate to drive in this stuff. They're predicting twenty inches.”

“What happens when the petroleum runs out?”

“What?” asked Ellen as she cautiously pulled out into the street. Like exploratory surgery, really, in the dark with mittens on.

“Who was that young guy who got out of the car?”

“Freddie, Freddie Jr.,” she said.

The guy who was supposed to follow in Buzz's footsteps, be his big rival in pre-Columbian studies. The last time Buzz had
seen him was, what, eight, ten years before and he was talking big then: “Archaeoastronomy, comparative epigraphy, Semitic Pimas and Numidian Zuñis …” Sounded good, getting his mouth wrapped nicely around them big words, ar-qui-o-astronomy, comparative ep-i-graphy …

“So how come he disappeared so quickly?”

“Well, he's a little shy and disoriented. He's just ‘coming out,' so to speak,” said Ellen elusively.

“Coming out of what?”

“He's gay. He just decided last year. He finds it hard to confront The Past.”

“I'm not ‘past,'” objected Buzz, “I'm people. I always liked the kid. Did he go into archaeoastronomy and all that stuff?”

“Nah. He works on this Newsletter for Burger King and does a little freelance photography on the side. Police calls. First on the scene of the crime and/or disaster … we help him out a little,” Ellen very purposefully turning the conversation over toward Malinche, obviously the whole Freddie Jr. business a very recent, still uncoagulated wound, “So this must be a big change for you … ”

“Oh, I'm used to it by now,” said Malinche, “only up there I dress for it. Here I decided to dress ‘cute.'”

“Cute eskimo, you mean,” said Ellen, putting the heat on higher.

Driving over past Northwestern, block after block of impressive not particularly old buildings. Not Harvardish. More like Boston University, the University of Michigan. Impressive, impressively new, like it was still emerging from its cocoon, 90% future, 10% glorious, well-heeled past …

“Fred's retired, but he's still teaching one course. They're flexible. You know. Ever since he lost his leg in Stockholm … ”

“Yeah, how's he coming along?”

“Well, it's hard to be in Sports Medicine with one leg, but … and I'm retired for two years from my brother Jerry's construction business … ”

“Where you did?” asked Buzz, thinking ‘office,' billing, general secretarial, something ‘normal.'

“Mainly roofs,” she answered.

“I don't know, I just can't … ”

“Well, I couldn't either. Especially with my arthritis and vertigo. But I did it for almost twenty years. We still work out, of course, over at the gym every night, swim a little, run a little. I mean Fred walks fast … cardio-pulmonary, you know … I suppose you keep busy, huh?” asked Ellen, then directed herself again to Malinche, enunciating very carefully as if to make sure she'd pick it up, “I suppose you keep him busy!”

“Mainly we sleep,” said Malinche, “we put on the TV, CNN mainly, and sleep. And when I don't sleep and actually watch the news I get terribly depressed.”

“I quilt a lot these days,” said Ellen, turning north on the lake now, the lake of Buzz's youth, grey, endless, dead, frozen a little way out and then open water, white on white on grey, on white again, the lake of his youth, but not up here in Upper Middle Class-ville, south, South Shore, Middle-Middle … Ellen and Fred had edged their way up a few significant rungs on the social ladder, “keeps my joints loose … and it's so ‘homey,'” then refocusing on Buzz, “When are you going to retire?”

“A couple/few years. I want to build up as much equity as possible in my retirement account. I'll probably move to New York to be with Sarah and Itzak, Hannah's in Israel, but she'll be back—hopefully—in another year. And Mitzi's in New York with Jeeyoun and Manny, Moe and Jack … ”

“Manny, Moe and Jack?!?!” Ellen laughed, swerved the car momentarily over toward the center line, almost head on into a big cement truck with its mixer turning dolefully (where the fuck were they going to pour concrete in this weather?) in the feathery, frozen air, “Oooooop … that was close … we'll end up having a reunion in heaven. Four are dead already, you know that, huh?”

“That's what Fat Franny's letter said,” remembering The Dead so vividly, little squirrely smiley Randy Foreman and Mr. Big, Moe Belucci (keep upwind from him on a hot day, his flesh always smelling like rancid cheese), Jim O'Halleron, Mr. Clean, and Little Benny O'Callaghan, kind of a little boy-Donald Duck blend.

“I guess Benny was an alcoholic. And Belucci was so huge. Remember how he used to overflow off the seats, and every time he walked he'd squish, squish, squish, squish, squish.… ”

Requiest in Pace.

Not that he and Ellen and the rest had that much longer, Buzz very aware of his own tick-tock mortality, feeling invaded, in fact, right now by memories of his mother, not here, but out in California, Happy Valley Retirement Center out in Pomona, 5,400 ancient ones all plopped down in a 40-acre retirement colony, surrounded by a ten-foot-high stone wall, simply waiting
to die. His mother invading him now, in fact, sitting there next to them, between him and Ellen.

Grimore Park, the far North Shore, where his mother had always aspired to live, but had never even come close, no matter how hard she pushed his M.D. father to pull in the cash. Behave yourself now, she was saying, in some hollow funeral parlorish precinct in his mind, behave yourself, don't tell them you're Moslem, leave Ms. Urdu at Ellen's place to ‘rest,' you never know who might react to you at the reunion, or what you may want to do, almost feeling that he could use the services of an exorcist, get rid of the old grey witch once and for all. She'd haunted his whole life while she was alive, and now the haunting went on even more maddeningly because he couldn't walk away from it, it rose up from inside, like mists off of swamp waters …

“Maybe we ought to just stay at your place and watch CNN,” said Buzz, kidding around, sure, but if she'd taken him in earnest.

“I'm curious, aren't you? Like that snot, Jean Korzenowski. I've got to find out what she's been doing in the last fifty years, remember her?”

“My arch rival!” laughed Buzz.

Laughed, but Korzenowski had been his arch rival, her and her hair all up on top of her head, this jackknife beak of a nose, the nuns uniformly loving her because she always had all the answers to everything rolling off her tongue like freshly minted gold coins, all the presidents of the United States in the correct order, when did the Romans invade England, who killed Julius Caesar, recite the beginning of the Gospel of St. John in the original Latin, what is the Mason-Dixon Line, when did Illinois
become a state, in what Shakespeare play do the words “To Be or Not To Be,” take place, what is the name of the pond where Thoreau lived, what is the name of the police force at the Vatican, the Tiber River flows through what city, what are the names of the three Persons in the Holy Trinity, define “marsupial,” who discovered the South Pole, what color are polar bears under their white fur, what makes a marsupial a marsupial … ? And Little Joannie Korzenowski would know it all, smug and prim and superior.

“She probably ended up a waitress!” said Ellen sneeringly, Buzz wanting to answer,
So, waitresses are just as sacred, just as much of the sacred divine universal flesh as anyone else
, but instead clammed up as they moved from Upper Middle Class neighborhoods into Lower Upper and she turned off the lake west, into frozen wastelands of imitation chateaux and imitation Tudor mansions, French Provincial, mansard roofs, gables, brick, brownstone, slate roofs, even a rare Prairie School/Maya temple set solidly into the landscape like it had grown there.

“I wonder whatever happened to Willy Bocanegra …” Buzz breaking the silence as they started moving back down the social scale, from C two octaves above Middle C, down to one octave above, C, B, A, G, F, E … stopped solidly on E … everything small, neat, perfect in its own way, but more ‘umble, shopkeepers and old professors, not robber barons, M.D.s, administrators, wheelers and dealers … now they were in the world of those being administrated, wheeled and dealt with …