“We’re both shitty dancers?”
“Right.”
But we kept on, of course, laughing and whirling a few times, and then coming tighter together and just holding each other silently for a time, two human beings getting older and scared about getting older, remembering some things and trying to forget others and trying to make sense of an existence that ultimately made sense to nobody, and then she said, “There’s one of them.”
I didn’t have to ask her what “them” referred to. Until now she’d refused to identify any of the three people she’d sent the letters to.
At first I didn’t recognize him. He had almost white hair and a tan so dark it looked fake. He wore a black dinner jacket with a lacy shirt and a black bow tie. He didn’t seem to have put on a pound in the quarter century since I’d last seen him.
“Ted Forester?”
“Forester,” she said. “He’s president of the same savings and loan his father was president of.”
“Who are the other two?”
“Why don’t we get some punch?”
“The kiddie kind?”
“You could really make me mad with all this lecturing about alcoholism.”
“If you’re really not a lush then you won’t mind getting the kiddie kind.”
“My friend, Sigmund Fraud.”
We had a couple of pink punches and caught our respective breaths and squinted in the gloom at name tags to see who we were saying hello to and realized all the terrible things you realize at high school reunions, namely that people who thought they were better than you still think that way, and that all the sad people you feared for — the ones with blackheads and low IQs and lame left legs and walleyes and lisps and every other sort of unfair infirmity people get stuck with — generally turned out to be deserving of your fear, for there was melancholy in their eyes tonight that spoke of failures of every sort, and you wanted to go up and say something to them (I wanted to go up to nervous Karl Carberry, who used to twitch — his whole body twitched — and throw my arm around him and tell him what a neat guy he was, tell him there was no reason whatsoever for his twitching, grant him peace and self-esteem and at least a modicum of hope; if he needed a woman, get him a woman, too), but of course you didn’t do that, you didn’t go up, you just made edgy jokes and nodded a lot and drifted on to the next piece of human carnage.
“There’s number two,” Karen whispered.
This one I remembered. And despised. The six-three blond movie-star looks had grown only slightly older. His blue dinner jacket just seemed to enhance his air of malicious superiority. Larry Price. His wife, Sally, was still perfect, too, though you could see in the lacquered blond hair and maybe a hint of face-lift that she’d had to work at it a little harder. A year out of high school, at a bar that took teenage IDs checked by a guy who must have been legally blind, I’d gotten drunk and told Larry that he was essentially an asshole for beating up a friend of mine who hadn’t had a chance against him. I had the street boy’s secret belief that I could take anybody whose father was a surgeon and whose house included a swimming pool. I had hatred, bitterness and rage going, right? Well, Larry and I went out into the parking lot, ringed by a lot of drunken spectators, and before I got off a single punch, Larry hit me with a shot that stood me straight up, giving him a great opportunity to hit me again. He hit me three times before I found his face and sent him a shot hard enough to push him back for a time. Before we could go at it again, the guy who checked IDs got himself between us. He was madder than either Larry or me. He ended the fight by taking us both by the ears (he must have trained with nuns) and dragging us out to the curb and telling neither of us to come back.
“You remember the night you fought him?”
“Yeah.”
“You could have taken him, Dwyer. Those three punches he got in were just lucky.”
“Yeah, that was my impression, too. Lucky.”
She laughed. “I was afraid he was going to kill you.”
I was going to say something smart, but then a new group of people came up and we gushed through a little social dance of nostalgia and lies and self-justifications. We talked success (at high school reunions, everybody sounds like Amway representatives at a pep rally) and the old days (nobody seems to remember all of the kids who got treated like shit for reasons they had no control over) and didn’t so-and-so look great (usually this meant they’d managed to keep their toupees on straight) and introducing new spouses (we all had to explain what happened to our original mates; I said mine had been eaten by alligators in the Amazon, but nobody seemed to find that especially believable) and in the midst of all this, Karen tugged my sleeve and said, “There’s the third one.”
Him I recognized, too. David Haskins. He didn’t look any happier than he ever had. Parent trouble was always the explanation you got for his grief back in high school. His parents had been rich, truly so, his father an importer of some kind, and their arguments so violent that they were as eagerly discussed as who was or was not pregnant. Apparently David’s parents weren’t getting along any better today because although the features of his face were open and friendly enough, there was still the sense of some terrible secret stooping his shoulders and keeping his smiles to furtive wretched imitations. He was a paunchy balding little man who might have been a church usher with a sour stomach.
“The Duke of Earl” started up then and there was no way we were going to let that pass so we got out on the floor; but by now, of course, we both watched the three people she’d sent letters to. Her instructions had been to meet the anonymous letter writer at nine-thirty at Pierce Point. If they were going to be there on time, they’d be leaving soon.
“You think they’re going to go?”
“I doubt it, Karen.”
“You still don’t believe that’s what I heard them say that night?”
“It was a long time ago and you were drunk.”
“It’s a good thing I like you because otherwise you’d be a distinct pain in the ass.”
Which is when I saw all three of them go stand under one of the glowing red Exit signs and open a fire door that led to the parking lot.
“They’re going!” she said.
“Maybe they’re just having a cigarette.”
“You know better, Dwyer. You know better.”
Her car was in the lot on the opposite side of the gym.
“Well, it’s worth the drive even if they don’t show up.
Pierce Point should be nice tonight.”
She squeezed against me and said, “Thanks, Dwyer. Really.”
So we went and got her Volvo and went out to Pierce Point where twenty-five years ago a shy kid named Michael Brandon had fallen or been pushed to his death.
Apparently we were about to find out which.
The river road wound along a high wall of clay cliffs on the left and a wide expanse of water on the right. The spring night was impossibly beautiful, one of those moments so rich with sweet odor and even sweeter sight you wanted to take your clothes off and run around in some kind of crazed animal circles out of sheer joy.
“You still like jazz,” she said, nodding to the radio.
“I hope you didn’t mind my turning the station.”
“I’m kind of into country.”
“I didn’t get the impression you were listening.”
She looked over at me. “Actually, I wasn’t. I was thinking about you sending me all of those AA pamphlets.”
“It was arrogant and presumptuous and I apologize.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was sweet and I appreciate it.”
The rest of the ride, I leaned my head back and smelled flowers and grass and river water and watched moonglow through the elms and oaks and birches of this new spring. There was a Dakota Staton song, “Street of Dreams,” and I wondered as always where she was and what she was doing, she’d been so fine, maybe the most unappreciated jazz singer of the entire fifties.