Reunion (8 page)

Willy Bocanegra.

There had been two main groups in their grammar school class, the solidly middle class Irish, and the uncertain, wildly
fluctuating, anything-possible Italians. And Willy Bocanegra had been like solidly in the middle of the anything-possible, lots of hair, a round, tough bull-face, an expression that varied from threatening to very threatening. No one ever messed with him. Even the nuns had backed off, let him alone, some kind of tacit agreement agreed on for his eight years of grammar school—this guy was gonna pass, get him outta there, that was the main objective.

“He's probably loaded, Cosa Nostra … who knows … ”

“Louise Gentry?”

“Don't ask me! You're the only one I've kept any ties with over the years.”

“It didn't take a lot to impress us in those days. Like they had a summer cottage someplace in Michigan, remember that. ‘We'll be spending the summer at our summer cottage in Michigan.' And her father had a Buick Roadmaster, the one with the four holes in the side. We always had a Super. And they belonged to the South Shore Country Club. And she always wore everything beige and talked with a little lisp … ”

“That impressed you, the lisp?” laughed Ellen as they pulled into the driveway of their little brick house, as unpretentious as possible, just plain brick, an iron railing (painted black) on each side of the steps that lead up to the front door, smoke coming out of the chimney, the front steps, driveway, even the sidewalk all shoveled clean.

“I see Fred's been busy. He'll be all exhausted and grumpy now, sound asleep in his big chair by the fireplace. We'll be lucky to rouse him at all … or maybe I should say unlucky to rouse him at all … ”

Parking in the driveway, all of them tumbling out into the snow. It really would be a great day for snowmen. If it had been just a little warmer …

Maybeworld. Maybe unlucky to rouse Fred, maybe just a little warmer, maybe better to never have come at all, Buzz remembering back almost fifty years, when Fred had just moved into their neighborhood, from where he didn't have the slightest idea, his mother either a widow or divorced, working for a liquor company downtown somewhere so there was always a cabinet in the dining room of their apartment filled with fancy liqueurs that they'd sometimes sample a little when his mom wasn't there, Buzz in third year high school when Fred had first moved in, Fred a little older than Buzz, already done with high school (he'd been in a seminary), working nights as a dispatcher for Yellow Cab downtown, going to Loyola by day, a couple of courses a term, slowly working his way toward a degree in English which somehow, somewhere along the line, got switched to a degree in Sports Medicine, Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, the world-center for sports EVERYTHING.

He forgot how they first met. Maybe in church. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. He'd gotten interested in Ellen, they'd gotten engaged, he'd gone into the Navy and they'd gotten married with him in his Lieutenant J.G. (Junior Grade) whites. The Korean Conflict, wasn't it? Like remembering Caesar's Gallic Wars, Rome against Carthage, the Barbarian Sacking of Rome …

For years Fred and him getting together every Saturday afternoon and “talking books.” Fred read like a maniac. All the new things.
Ten North Frederick
. John O'Hare. He was the hot one. And Hemingway's
Old Man and the Sea
. And Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited
, which Buzz had always seen as a kind of replication of his own life, everything so Catholic, and him in love with Petra Rossini who lived on the Near North Side and whose father was this big surgeon and they were loaded. The latest Waugh, the latest Graham Greene, Mauriac, Sigrid Undset. They seemed to always be reading more Catholic authors than anyone else. It was really such a Catholic world, but there weren't any American Catholic authors of note, so they always turned to the French and English and (Undset) even Scandinavians. It hardly made any difference where they were from as long as they were Catholic. Catholic meant universal anyhow, didn't it? Fred always aspiring to be a writer. And he was great. Great satirist. When he satirized Frank O'Hare, he really nailed him like a hawk to the barn door. Would send everything out to the
New Yorker
and the
Hudson Review
. Mainly to the
New Yorker
. And they'd never taken anything. In fact the most they'd ever done was move the paper clip on one of his submissions. Which had been a major event in itself: “Look, Buzz, you can see the original indentation and where they moved it to. They actually moved the paper clip!”

But that's all they ever did, he kept writing for a couple more years, always the same printed rejection notices, and finally moved into Sports Medicine, had gotten the job at Northwestern, mainly working with their football team. Doing research on leg injuries. A Fulbright professorship to Stockholm, he'd fallen, slipped in front of a bus and had lost a leg. But not quickly. Endless operations. Casts and splints and therapy, the leg finally just giving up the ghost. He used to always laugh about it, “It just gave up, committed suicide!”

Fred, for his part, submitting his crap everywhere, getting published everywhere—
The Paper Towel Review: Read It, Wipe Your Ass With It, Discard It, Only the Best in Discardable Literature
. He loved the titles:
The Nipple Review, Merde, Outer-Inner Space, Dogbite, Broken Knuckles, Down the Drain, Underside
, even some of the university quarterlies like
Tri-Quarterly
from Northwestern itself, Fred one time almost pushing Buzz a little too far when he'd sneered (after three snifters of Cointreau): “You think all that crap means anything? It's like pissing into the sea. You might as well submit to the local toilet, flush it down the drain for all the difference it makes!!”

But instead of getting pissed at Fred, Buzz had developed this tremendous feeling of compassion toward him. Compassion on the edge of pity.

Five years since Buzz had seen him?

He was almost afraid to open the front door and see what was inside. Ellen opening up, maternally insisting, “Wipe your feet on the doormat, I hate everything all tracked up!” Buzz wiping his feet perhaps a little too vigorously, almost like he was doing some sort of Czech folk dance, Malinche looking lost and overwhelmed, a tiny black speck emerging out of the immensity of the white landscape, up the stairs, stomping her feet on the mat like she was satirizing Buzz, always this satirical little genie in her, waiting (wanting) to be activated …

Walking inside like walking into a cover of
Country Living, The American Home
, everywhere big plush sofas covered with quilted covers, little quilts folded and draped over armrests, little maple chairs with quilted seat-cushions, big oval twisted rag-rugs all over the highly polished bare oak floors, a grandfather clock
over in one corner by the fireplace, the fireplace itself ablaze, one log falling apart in a cascade of fiery flickers just as they walked in, Fred sitting in an extra-plush, winged-back chair next to the fire with a big Buster Brown quilt all over his knees (knee) like a crumpled, white haired (what there was left of it) rag-doll, as they walked in Ellen holding her hands up like a symphony conductor begging for PIANO-PIANISSIMO … going quietly over to Fred, standing in front of him, “Fred, Freddie … Freddie … we're here,” Fred not moving, her finally getting louder “Fred! Fred! We're back, Fred!,” a strident note of desperation in her voice, for a moment Buzz thinking “Christ, the poor bastard's dead!”

He sure looked dead enough. Not a bad way to go. The Kiss of God way to go, that's how the Jews put it, no pain, you just stop … like turning off the TV …

Ellen finally getting nasty. Obviously this was something she had to deal with a lot.

“Fred, for god's sake!”

Shaking him awake, him opening his eyes like he'd just been attacked by a grizzly bear.

“Wha … wha … what?”

“Time to go to bed, honey!”

Fred looking around, seeing them, the look of horror slowly giving way to recognition, acceptance, then even amused irony.

“She likes to do that to me. Kind of a cardiac test. If it doesn't just arrest, it bodes well for you … ”

“Bodes … ?” Malinche a little discombobulated.

“It's Lit Prof talk,” laughed Buzz, “Elizabethan big talk … it means like … ”

“Bodes as in the Icelandic Boda. Fortells … you go to one of these reunions, I tell ya, and it gets you full of forebodings. It's like looking in the mirror of your own collective, social history,” said Fred, starting to get up, only somehow misjudging, miscalculating, losing his balance, falling off the chair, knocking over a little quilted-doilie-covered coffee table next to him with an big elaborate teapot on it, white, filled with little blue fleurs de lis, spilling the tea all over the floor. Only it wasn't just tea, was it? The room suddenly filled with the pungent, acrid high-octane smell of Gordon's gin.

“Sonofabitch, I forgot my leg was off,” he said, struggling to right himself, like a capsized tugboat in high seas, Buzz rushing over to help him, but he didn't want any help, “I'm OK, I can do it, for crissake, God knows I've had enough practice!” Pulling himself up, grabbing on to the chair, somehow simultaneously reaching behind the chair and getting his beige human-fleshy-looking leg, sitting back down and sticking the leg up his pants leg, unzipping his fly, opening his belt, strapping the thing back on to a support-belt around his waist, rezipping, re-belting-up, sitting back with a mixed scowl/look of amusement scrolled across his face, “And now, folks, for the next feat of the evening, I will send my eyeball into your midst so that it can peer into your problems, and then The Great Frederick will reveal all,” reaching up, pretending he was pulling out his eyeball, keeping his eye closed as he threw an imaginary eyeball Malinche's way, her ducking, not quite sure what was going on, Fred just a little too much for her.

Ellen went over and picked up the teapot, cup and saucer, sugar bowl.

“Jesus, Fred, you broke off one of he handles of the sugar bowl.”

“That's been broken for years, darling,” he answered, opening both eyes, returning to his version of ‘normal.' “I'll glue it all back together tomorrow … after our long lost friends are gone,” then suddenly coming down, down, down inside, repentant and depressed and very, very sunken-eyed, dejected, old, “sorry I'm such a fuckup, you guys. I really had planned it all to be so well-tuned, a veritable Viennese musical clock …” Ellen with a vacuum cleaner out of the front closet, portable, no plugging-in needed. A sudden high-pitched whirr, a quick, deep series of serious passes, and that was finished, then two towels out of the kitchen, one to blot up, the other to wash, blot, wash, blot, wash.

“Jesus!” said Fred, watching her, “you're so efficient, you oughta run for the presidency … ”

“That ought to be inserted into Apocalypse,” she smiled, ‘“and when a woman or a black or a Catholic shall become president of these United States, then you shall know that the final days are at hand …”'

“Nicely spoken!” Freddy smiled, applauding a soft little patty-cake applause, “I couldn't have done it better myself,” up again, and then a sudden deflation, like waves, Up and Down, Up and Down, “maybe I'll stay home tonight. I don't really feel up to it. And besides, they're not my classmates … ”

“But!” shouted Ellen from the kitchen, “you are the soul of curiosity. You're dying to see the whole living museum … ”

“True enough!” he admitted, reached over and pulled back the curtains and drapes, looked outside, “it's really a winter wonderland isn't it? I wonder if anyone will get through … ”

“They've got the snowplows out, it's a piece of cake,” said Ellen, one last dry towel in her hand, one last final blotting, then a quick once-over with a hair-dryer and the mess was vanquished.

“So, my little friend,” said Fred, suddenly turning to Malinche, “what do you miss most of your native Pakistan, exiled here in these frozen wastelands … ?”

“Miss?” Malinche sitting down on one of the giant, plush sofas.

“Family, curry, the call of the muezzin … ?”

Malinche looking inside, a thorough examination of consciousness, the answer coming from her inner depths.

“I miss the goats!”

Fred laughing.

“The goats?!?” calling in to Ellen, “Did you hear that, Ellen, Ellen … the goats!,” then somewhat catching himself, moving from mocker to sympathizer, “that's so cute.”

Malinche laughing at herself.

“That's one of the first things I thought when I came here, ‘How can a big country like this be so successful without goats?'” laughing one of her high-pitched little cockatoo laughs, Fred looking at her hungrily, the black boots and legs and black suede coat, such a delicious jumble of inviting softness, thinking he'd rather lose a leg than the easy, smooth functionability of the little matador between his legs.

“That's understandable, though,” said Ellen, coming out of the kitchen with a paper towel in her hands, the final drying up, cleanup mission accomplished. “I remember when we were in
Bangkok, I came back here and wondered how we ever got along without canals … ”

“Or llamas,” smiled Buzz, “or … coca, yayé, teonanacatl, the mushroom flesh of the gods … ”

“I hope you're not still …” Ellen suddenly gravely maternal toward him.

“Of course not,” he protested, “but once you've gone through the clashing gates of rebirth … you're never really ever un-reborn again … the Spirit comes, and it's very sticky, you never really can wash it off,” walking over, looking out the window, everything covered now, the bushes in front of the house like cowled monks, the trees like giant sentinels, the sky like a winding cloth wrapped around the sleeping Lazarus-earth, waiting for the messianic voice of spring to reawaken it, everything out there suddenly full of ‘presences' and ‘messages,' feeling a little too drawn into attempts at decipherment, the room, his friends, the warmth suddenly beginning to dissolve, making an effort, succeeding in coming back into the warm cordiality of the room and the fireplace, these two who he'd known for most of his life, who knew practically all there was to know, and who still unconditionally accepted him …