Reunion (9 page)

“Would you like something to eat? Some tea? Or should we just go?”

“Maybe I could leave these here,” said Malinche, going into her black leather over-the-shoulder bag, pulling out the bag of mangos.

“She had this craving for mangos,” explained Buzz.

“Cravings?!?! Ah … maybe she's … you know …” said Fred staring at Malinche's tummy, all hidden under folds and puckerings of suede and velour.

“That's very unlikely,” said Buzz with cryptic cynicism, “unless she was sitting too close to the window the other day when we had a little rare sun, and the sun-god got her pregnant.”

“What?” asked Ellen, going into the closet and getting Fred's coat for him.

“He's being ‘mythological,'” sneered Fred as he struggled to his feet, Buzzy wanting to help him, go over and just give him a goddamned hand, but resisting the impulse, no pity, no scorn, just allow him to keep as much as he could of his old cocky dignity, “I imagine your students love you … just one big mystery tour … ”

“I was going to do a book on Jesus as Sun-God. Born on the day of the winter-solstice, the descent into Hell like Odysseus and Herakles, the ascension into heaven like Hun Hunapu in the Popol Vuh … ”

“I feel a lecture coming on!” sang Fred as he gratefully allowed Ellen to help him on with his coat, turning to Malinche, “How do you put up with the guy?”

“I love him,” she said unhesitatingly.

Something so ‘pure' and ‘untainted' about her, something so straight and totally trustworthy.

“You're a lucky man,” said Fred, picking out a cane from a tall elaborately painted porcelain Chinese cane and umbrella holder, filled with a whole collection of exotic-looking canes, canes with dogs carved on their tops, canes with brass ferrules on them, ivory and elaborately painted Indochinese wood canes,
Fred picking out a very Englishy blackthorn cane full of evocations of moors and white cliffs, “I wish I was so unconditionally ‘accepted.'”

“How about ‘tolerated,' isn't that enough?” smiled Ellen.

40 years. It must have been forty years that they'd been married, Buzz envying their continuity, feeling his own life had been a series of trainwrecks, zealously hanging on to Malinche….the same way she so zealously hung on to him, really nothing, nothing at all, that ‘irritated' him about her, glorying in this totally new sense of total acceptance that he felt toward her and that he felt she felt toward him.

Fifteen years together, married for ten. Auspicious beginning, always the undercurrent speculations about how long they'd (he'd) eventually have, always telling her, “I wish I had it all laid out in front of me, just how long I have, how and when I'll die…,” her always answering “It's better you don't, all you'd do then would be to try to change it … ”

“Ready then are we?” Ellen at the front door.

“One quick last visit!” said Buzz. The omnipresent prostate always there like a little glandular pager, Ellen pointing him down to the end of the hall, and when he came out, it was Malinche's turn.

“At this rate we'll get there by New Year's!” said Fred sarcastically.

“It's January fifteenth,” Ellen cracked back, a vicious little weasel-sharp side to her personality that Buzz didn't find overly attractive. He wanted her to be The Mill on the Floss, period.

“Next year!” countered Fred, ending in a deep, bearlike rumble of a laugh, “ha, ha, ha, ha … ”

Malinche taking five, eight, ten, eleven minutes.

“Maybe you'd better dial 911,” said Joe, almost serious.

“Makeup, perfumes, she's changing skins,” said Buzz slyly, “she's liable to come out polkadot or diamond-backed, like a rattlesnake. She's a lamia!”

“A what?” Fred stumped.

But Ellen knew.

“It's a poem by Keats or someone. A snake-woman … ”

“I knew that,” said Fred, pissed, opening the door, starting down the stairs, “I'll get the car warmed up … ”

“Be careful!” said Ellen.

“Tell that to Buzz,” he said, “you'd better get that snake-bite kit out of the hall closet,” more rumbling ursine thunder, “ha, ha, ha, ha,” as he painfully made his way down the front steps and stumbled through the mounting snow toward the car.

“He's narcoleptic in cars,” explained Ellen as Malinche came out of the washroom exactly the same as when she went in, “he goes into this like a coma the minute the car begins to move. I'm just telling you so you won't panic … ”

“I had an aunt like that, whenever she was in a goat cart,” said Malinche, a quick lipstick out of her purse, instant touch-up, dark, almost black lipstick, the color of dark cherries, blackberries, currants, Ellen wanting to laugh (about the goat-cart) but she didn't … instead shifted the attention over to Buzz.

“He said you're a snakewoman, that's why you were so long in the john.”

“He loves snakes,” she answered, pulling her coat back on, “NAGA, NAKU, that's all he ever talks….that's where the English SNAKE comes from … ”

“The English SNAKE?” Ellen surprised at Malinche's erudition, not expecting the ball to ever come back at her once she had served.

“NAGA. That's Sanskrit. Add an S. SNAGA. Change the ‘G' to a ‘K' and make the ‘A' silent. SNAK-A., “then adding, as she pulled on her gloves, “my bowel doesn't do so well when I travel. Traveller's bowel. I was terrible on the voyage back when we travelled here from Pakistan … ”

“Voyage? As in boat?”

“Didn't Buzz tell you? He wanted to see the islands … ”

“Which islands?” Ellen's attention now pricked, whole new dimensions of Malinche's personality slowly being revealed to her, corridors and stairwells and immense closets that she never would have suspected existed. So she wasn't just some dumb bitch along for the ride.

“Oh, the Maldive Islands, Micronesia, Melanesia … if he could he'd spend his whole life island-hopping … ”

“So how did you ever end up in Michigan?”

“We haven't really ‘ended up' anywhere,” said Malinche, “this is just Phase One … ”

“And when does Phase Two begin?”

“Maybe next year when he retires. He'll have a nice pension and he can always teach English, I can teach Urdu. And if they need doctors … especially like in war-zones.”

“War zones?”

“Like Old Europe.”

“Old Europe?”

“The former Yugoslavia. Romania … ”

Fred outside honking.

Ellen a little confused, checking the lights, the thermostat, putting it down five degrees. If no one was going to be in the house … all lights out except for the front porch.

“Shouldn't you leave one light on, put on a radio,” suggested Buzz, “confuse robbers.”

“We don't have any robberies out here. Especially not tonight. It's the safest night in the year,” walking over to the driveway in Fred's tracks, opening the car door, Fred lying back in the seat, his eyes wide open staring skyward, “revise that,” reaching in and slapping Fred vigorously on the face, no change for the first two or three slaps, then Fred beginning to focus, sputter and fume, “OK, OK,
genug ist genug
, as our friend used to say … ”

“There was one guy in German class in college. All he ever learned the whole year was ES IST ZEIT ZU ESSEN … ”

“It is time to eat!” said Malinche.

“Jesus, so she knows German too?” Fred amazed, struggling to move laterally from the driver's seat to the seat next to the driver's …

“Why don't you get out and go around to the other side,” said Ellen impatiently. “It's so much easier … ”

“Maybe for you!” he said, making it over to the other seat, this whole exchange, Buzz suspected, an exchange that had been played out endlessly before.

“I think it's crazy to even try,” said Ellen as she got in and adjusted the seat, pushed a CD in and Bach piano music filling
the car, “Gould is so great. And I love the way he sings along with the music … ”

Buzz's old Ellen. All the concerts they'd gone to together, all the operas, ballets, plays, Chicago hadn't been “Chicago” at all, but some sort of magic transposition into Dimension Kultur, so it didn't really make any difference where they were at all, they weren't really ‘there' anywhere, but in the eternal gardens of Fragonard or Lully, gold-mirrored Versailles music rooms, or merged into Vaughn Williams English hills, “Constable turned into sound,” the way he used to put it, on Pissarro's boulevards and in Renoir's beer gardens, back home with Wagner and the gods in Valhalla, into the overwhelming green abundance of Bloch's
Chanson d'été
, dying with Mimi in
La Bohème
, ascending into Heaven with Messien, floating past Rachmaninoff's
Island of the Dead
… Chicago merely a door into an endless world of Pure Mind …

“What a night,” said Fred as he put his head down this time, closed his eyes and started to snore.

“Let's see what we can do!” said Ellen lurching out of the driveway, Malinche looking scared, grabbing on to Buzz's arm. No wonder she was constipated. Snow and strange landscapes, strange people and even stranger missions out into the frozen midnight blackness. He patted her on the hand, kissed her forehead, snuggled up next to her. Ellen seemed to know where she was going. “Oh, yeah, Manny, Moe and Jack … who are Manny, Moe and Jack?”

“You know, Jeeyoun's
¹
kids. She gave them all Korean names. I like to get her mad and call them Manny, Moe and Jack. It's a lot easier than Hajin, Jaejoon and Han Woon.”

Which gave Ellen the giggles, she swerved, almost went off the road.

“OK,” she said, no more talking, “pure Zen from here on out!”

And she turned up the Glenn Gould so that he totally filled the padded cave of the car, pure, limpid piano, and the undersinging gutteral grunting voice of Gould barely (but very) audible, undercurrenting it all.

Frascatti's MAZE was just that.

First of all, it was out in No Man's Land, far, far south, far far west, where, as Ellen put it, “the Blacks haven't gotten to….and for a reason….because it's not worth getting to … ”

Malinche must have said it five times, “All these roads. I never saw so many roads … and cars … ”

And little shopping strips. Burger Kings and Taco Bells and water bed places and hot tubs and fencing, Builder's Squares, satellite disks. What always amazed Buzz was how you got water out to all these places. You could still turn on a tap and water would come out. You could flush the crapper and the crap would still disappear. That invisible underground infrastructure that made it all possible.

But she finally got there. Salt, snowplows, a thousand little possible disasters that didn't happen, and then there they finally were and she pulled into the overfilled parking lot and slid to a stop, Fred instantly waking up like trumpets had sounded.

“So where are we?”

“I envy you,” she said to him, “It must be nice to be a three-toed sloth … or a petrified forest … or … ”

“Come on! Give it a break, willya, sixty-six is old, OK? Old. The life-expectancy in Tasmania is … ”

She didn't wait, was out into the shredding, abrasive wind like a rabbit over the hills, “You'd think they'd at least shovel or salt-down or something the driveway!”

Malinche hesitating as she opened the door and looked out, Buzz getting out and coming over to her and helping her out, Ellen already in the doorway, Fred getting left behind, struggling out of his seat, the parking lot surface all snow and slick, tire-indented ice, like once upon a time it had been slush and they could have shoveled it up easily, but instead ran cars through it all day and then let it solidify into treacherous ridges and furrows.

Buzz got Malinche inside and then went back to help Fred. Who didn't resist the help, looking very old and half-frozen, shaky.

“All I've gotta do now is break the other hip. My father was already dead for two years when he was my age. Women don't get the idea, they've got this little extra gene that gives them all that edge. It's like I'm some sort of other species…… I'll tell you the truth, I look forward to death. It'll be like staying in bed on a Sunday morning that lasts for all eternity … ”

“Perchance to dream!” answered Buzz as he carefully opened the front door and Fred came hobbling in, breathing hard, at the end of every exhalation a long thin spirit-trumpet wheeze.

“Yeah, Hamlet, yeah, yeah … I've been around the track a few times too,” starting to laugh, the laugh terminating in a serious phlegm-choked cough.

Ellen worried.

“You OK, baby?”

Fred leaning back against the wall a moment looking scared, looking like he wasn't sure what was coming next.

“I guess … ”

Buzz all curious now, asking this very Italian-looking (Southern Italy … Tunis) guy at a podium in the garishly-lit (red-bulbs in all the torchier fixtures) entrance, “The Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows reunion?”

“Straight ahead, sir.”

Pointing down a long red-torchiered veneer-clad corridor.

“OK, troops. Here we go!”

Taking Malinche by the arm, walking down the corridor richly laden with the smells of pastas and anchovies, oregano, cloves, hard old mouldy cheese and dried tomatoes, spilled beer and layers, streams, strata of heavy, fruity wines.

“It smells good, huh?” she said, small, yes, but when it came time to eat, if the food hit her just right, all of a sudden she was Queen Kong.

Into a densely populated room at the end of the corridor, trying to recognize faces, this tall ditzy-glitzy blonde in this bush of a wig all full of little multi-colored bows. It couldn't be Mary Jane Cummings … ? May-be …

“Hey, howyadoin'?” Giving her a little buzz on the cheek. That was where he'd gotten his nickname, after all. Mr. Buzzer. Just like his Mom. Ms. Buzzer. Change that to Buzzard!