by Jancee Dunn
“Okay,” I said, relieved. “I really am sorry.” We made stilted small talk until she was surrounded by a noisy group of math club kids, one of whom, it was rumored, had rented a white stretch limo for his arrival.
I made my way to the bar for another white-wine spritzer as various classmates called my name and motioned me over. I realized that the last time I had been in a room in which every person knew me was at my wedding. Some classmates were defined in my head by a single incident. Hey, there, John, who threw up on my new Tretorns at a Violent Femmes concert! Hi, Amy, dogged by an absurd but persistent rumor that you once had an erotic encounter with a frozen hot dog at a party!
I shouted my drink order to the beleaguered bartender and gathered my thoughts.
“Hey,” said the person next to me. It was a guy named Andy whose last name, I was almost positive, started with a V. Andy had hung out in the art crowd, although if memory served, he wasn’t necessarily arty. What I mostly remembered is that he used to spend Friday nights going to midnight showings of Pink Floyd The Wall and that he had a small port-wine stain on his arm. He always sat in the back row of every class and actually pulled off a fair amount of legitimately funny jokes. His specialty was whale and dolphin noises.
“Remember me? Andy Wells. Your home ec partner from, what was it, sophomore year? Mrs. Wenstrom? I hope it doesn’t offend when I tell you that you were a lousy cook.” He was angular and pale, with brown hair that flopped over his eyes—in a sloppy rather than hip way. I glanced involuntarily to his arm and confirmed that he still had the port-wine stain on the skinny wrist that poked out from his brown suit.
“So, what are you up to?” I asked as I monitored the elevators. Was that Ankur? No. I had rehearsed my conciliatory speech to him, but no sign of him yet.
“Do you want the embellished story that I’ve told six times so far, or the straight-up story?”
“Give me the straight-up story.”
“I live in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, and I’m a freelance animator, so I go to places like VH1 and work on some project for six weeks. Then I spend another two weeks in a coffee place, worrying about where my next gig is coming from.” He took a deep breath. “I was once married and it lasted for eight months, so I suppose that’s all I need to say about that. I don’t know why it’s still hard to say. It was a while ago. Plus half the people I’ve talked to tonight are divorced.”
“I’m divorced,” I volunteered. I halfheartedly provided my update, keeping my eyes on the door. At this point, my patter was so polished that I actually believed an apartment was waiting for me back in Manhattan.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he suddenly said.
“All right, then.” I looked at him expectantly. He didn’t say anything and I cleared my throat. “Maybe you’re making the announcement later?”
He laughed. “No, no. I just wanted to say that, I mean this is probably the whisky talking”—he held up his glass and rattled the cubes of his drink—“but I had the most raging crush on you back in the day.”
I looked away from the elevators and faced him. “You did?”
He sighed. “I knew it,” he said. “You had no idea.” He looked down at his drink. “God,” he muttered.
“I love that you did,” I said. “I wish I had known.” Why did I say that? How would that have changed anything?
“You seemed different to me than all of your friends,” he said. “You were the only teenage girl I knew who used to like old movies. And medical museums. Remember how we rallied Mr. Seymour to take a class trip to Philadelphia to see the Mutter Museum and those twins who were joined at the head? To me, you were just kind of an oddball. Which I liked. In fact, I still have a book you loaned me.”
I couldn’t recall any specific encounters with Andy aside from an ongoing series of comics that we would draw in history class, passing them back and forth, starring Mr. Seymour, aka “Mr. Semen,” in various compromising positions.
“It was Franny and Zooey.”
I laughed. “Oh, I remember. I believe I was congratulating myself on how edgy I was.”
“I’m embarrassed to say that I named my cat Bloomberg.”
I laughed. “Did you really? That’s so high school. I love it.” I took a gulp of my drink and smashed my teeth on the glass.
“Whoa, there,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I put my drink down. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Although losing my teeth is one of my biggest fears. You want to know something that haunts me a lot? It’s going to sound insane.”
“I love insane.”
“When I’m crossing the street in New York, I have this deep-seated fear that someone on a bike is going to crash into me and I’m going to fall forward on my face as my bloody teeth fly everywhere.”
He thought for a moment. “Is this based on anything? Did you have some sort of playground accident once?”
“No. It’s just my own imagination. Now you tell me one of your irrational fears so I’m not self-conscious.”
He frowned in concentration. “All right,” he finally answered. “I always wonder: What if I’m home in my apartment in Brooklyn, and I order takeout, as many bachelors do, and I start choking on a Chinese spare rib? You can’t make any noise, because you’re choking, and you’re alone, anyway.” He stroked his chin absently, hypnotized by his vision of horror. “I suppose you could knock on your neighbor’s door as you’re gasping for breath, but if they look through the peephole and you have a peculiar expression on your face, they’re not going to open the door,” he said. “And, you know, knocking without explaining—that’s odd. You’re pounding on someone’s door, and you’re just sort of grunting. It’s disturbing. Who can blame them for not opening the door? Then you slowly sink to the floor and die in the hallway, surrounded by piles of supermarket flyers and bags of recycling.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. “That’s not completely irrational. I mean, there’s no drill for choking, so you’re completely unprepared if it happens. It either”—I looked toward the elevator and abruptly stopped.
Christian.
chapter twenty-two
He didn’t see me and I quickly looked away. Holy shit he looks great he looks so great, what do I do, do I keep talking to John, I mean Andy?
Andy leaned forward. “What?” he said. “What’s your deal? Are you okay?”
“Excuse me,” I mumbled. “Ladies’ room.” I grabbed my drink and speed-walked to the restroom.
I stared at my reflection and tried to breathe. Get a grip, I told myself. You’re thirty-eight years old.
A bathroom stall opened and Dawn emerged. “Dawn,” I said urgently, searching in my bag for my lipstick. “You’re not going to believe this. Christian’s here. He looks amazing. I don’t know what to do.”
“Wow,” she said. “This is what you want to talk to me about right now? Did you already forget our awkward meeting earlier? Or how about the fact that we were supposed to come together? I’ve got to tell you, it’s real fun coming to your reunion with your husband. As a matter of fact, I have to get back to babysitting him. You’re on your own.”
I put on my lipstick and smoothed down my hair, half listening. “You’re still upset?” I said, my eyes on my reflection. “What, because we didn’t walk in together? Jeez. Now who’s acting like high school?”
She looked at me mutely and walked out.
I gave my hair one last swipe, gulped the remainder of my drink, and took a shaky breath.
I returned to the bar but Andy had left. I ordered another drink, and there he was, it was Christian, walking toward me with a slow smile. Kimmy, Lynn, and Sandy had their eyes trained on me like sharpshooters from various points in the room. He was wearing a slim black suit and a simple white shirt, open at the neck. His dark hair, still thick, was cut short and messy, and his face had faint creases around the eyes that gave him, as Vi termed it, “a little seasoning.” When I had used my own mental age-enhancing equipment, I had thinned his hairl
ine and dulled his eyes. It was inconceivable that he should look better than he did in high school.
Then he was right in front of me, grinning. Instantly I focused on the crooked tooth to the right of his front incisor, the one I hoped he would never get fixed. It was him. He was here.
“Well, well,” he said, measuring me with a lingering glance. “Lillian Curtis. If I had known you were going to look like this, I would have married you right out of high school.”
He leaned over and put his arm behind me on the bar. It was almost touching me. I could nearly feel its warmth.
“So, Christian,” I began in a high voice that I tried in vain to lower.
“So, Lily,” he said softly, as the room swayed.
I steadied myself. “Are you living here now, or are you planning on returning to—London, is it?”
He smiled again and my stomach turned over. “Lily,” he said. “Come on. You didn’t check up on me before tonight? I checked up on you.”
“Oh? What do you know?”
“That you’re a TV producer and you got divorced from some guy named Adam.”
I laughed. “Okay, I guess I might have heard that you work for an agency in London, and that you moved to New York. Where they also have an office, yes? And you were engaged to someone with an exotic name.” I pretended to think. “Suki?”
His smile vanished. “Saskia,” he said. “Engaged is a strong word. But yeah, it’s over.”
I looked at him expectantly.
He took a sip of his drink and looked around the room. “You know,” he said, shrugging. “It ended the way these things usually end.”
What way? Infidelity? Money problems? She wanted children and he didn’t?
He shrugged. “But nothing is ever really over, is it?”
Was he talking about Saskia? Or me?
He took a sip of his drink. “So, where are you living?” His amused gaze was fully focused on me again.
“I’m in the process of moving right now,” I said. “So I’m at my parents’ house until an apartment opens up. And you?”
“You remember how my folks had a place at the shore, in Sea Girt?” Oh, I remembered. Whenever they weren’t using it, Christian held parties for a select few. As his girlfriend, I was co-host, enjoying the power of being present before the others pulled up the driveway. “Well, I’m squatting there for the time being. Eventually I’ll move into the city, but might as well live rent-free for a while, right?” I struggled to keep my eyes on his face as I heard Vi’s voice in my head: Use your eyes to fascinate a man. Keep your head still, follow him with your gaze, and try not to blink. Every actress worth her salt did her close-ups without blinking. Mark my words, you will bewitch him!
“And you’re an ad man?” I said in what I hoped was a playful tone. The ice cubes in my drink were clinking, and I realized it was because my hands were trembling slightly. I put my glass on the bar.
“No, I’m a branding strategist.” He scanned my blank face for comprehension. “Say that Sony creates a video game, and they need to clearly convey the look of it, and the attitude, and what it’s trying to say. Well, then, they call us. You can brand or rebrand anything. We’ve done bands, sports gear, charity campaigns, all sorts of stuff. Or we reinvigorate some old brand that nobody cares about anymore, like Cadillac, or this British luggage company we just did that’s two hundred years old.”
I was hanging on to the conversation by the barest thread because I was now watching his mouth as he talked. “What’s the name of the company?”
“Have you heard of Edj? That’s E-D-J.” He smirked. “We tend to use guerilla tactics sometimes, so we can’t seem to stop getting in trouble. Which is a good thing. Anyway, they sent me to the New York office, I don’t know for how long.”
Michael Garrett lurched over and the room stopped spinning. “Hey, man,” he boomed to Christian. He moved in for the frattish handshake that starts high as if you’re throwing a baseball and ends with a low clapping of palms. Michael, my former third-string crush, was still trim, but his skin was leathery and dappled with brown spots from years of baking in the sun, and he had a hungry, haunted look. Or maybe he was sun-dazed. He owned a fleet of boats on Cape Cod and took groups out for sportfishing expeditions. Instead of wearing a suit as Christian was, he sported a Hawaiian shirt to convey that he had opted out of the rat race and was going the Jimmy Buffett route.
“Hey, Lily,” he said, giving me a grudging kiss on the cheek. His demeanor was slightly frosty, as it had been in high school when I monopolized too much of Christian’s time. Twenty years later and still threatened. Dope. How could I have ever had a crush on this guy? No wedding ring, I noticed.
Michael ignored me and homed in on Christian. “Hey, later we’re going up to my room. I’ve got some great weed from a client of mine. He’s a doctor and he prescribes it for cancer patients. That medical shit is so much more potent, it will blow your freakin’ mind.”
Christian held my gaze for a brief second that said Too bad about Michael.
“Yeah, sounds good, we’ll see,” said Christian. Michael gave me a look of triumph.
“So what are you up to, Michael?” I asked.
“Well, you know I run sportfishing trips. I’ve got eight boats. Sometimes we do bachelorette parties.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a business card. All night long, people had been passing me their cards. If I ever needed my pool cleaned, my house sold, and my computer updated, I was covered. “I got divorced last year,” he added.
“I’m divorced, too,” I said, but he kept going.
“Now I’m doing the online dating. You know, at first I resisted, but you can’t believe the good-looking girls that send photos.” He whistled. “Wow, look at Pam Sardi. Still hot.” He made his way over to her, and we were alone again. Christian’s arm had not moved. Arm behind me almost around me not moving arm.
“So, are you going to go get baked in Michael’s room?”
He rolled his eyes. “I think he’s baked enough.” He looked at me. “Listen, I’m taking you home later, right?” I made a quick calculation: If I stayed in the hotel room with Sandy, I’d never be alone with Christian. Change of plans.
I nodded. “Yes.”
It’s happening. It keeps moving forward and it’s happening.
During the next hour, Christian remained at my side as knots of classmates approached us. I needed to go to the bathroom but refused, so afraid was I that he would drift away. Finally I could stand it no longer and raced to the john. When I returned, he was still in the same spot at the bar.
Our class president, Hugh Futterman, walked briskly through the crowd, urging everyone to go to their seats for dinner. Lynn, Kimmy, and Sandy materialized, and we quickly commandeered a table.
“What the hell is going on with you two?” Lynn said in a low voice.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
The moment we sat down, a swarm of bored teen catering employees thunked down glass plates of salad in front of us.
Kimmy stopped a waiter. “Um, can I have the dressing on the side? There’s so much of it that you can’t even see the lettuce. I thought it was soup at first.”
“Sorry,” said the teen. “The salads are, like, put together ahead of time and then we just take them out of the fridge.”
“Good evening, class of 1988, and welcome,” Hugh intoned. “The dictionary defines reunion as a gathering of friends, relatives, or associates after separation.”
Where would bad speechwriters be if they couldn’t lead off the proceedings with a dictionary definition?
“But this is so much more than just a simple gathering. 1988 was the year we left to make our way in the world. It was the year of endings, but also of beginnings.”
As he droned, a PowerPoint presentation flashed behind him on a large screen of photos from our senior year culled from the year-book committee. Hugh’s words were drowned by the crowd commentary when each new photo appeared. Kurt Sebalius wearing a
lilac bandanna as a headband, a look that had captivated me at the time. Pam Sardi in a FRANKIE SAY RELAX T-shirt. Why was it that the popular group got the majority of the slides, even when the person who put it together—Kathleen, the class treasurer, in this case—wasn’t popular?
I caught my breath. A photo appeared of Christian and me at our lockers, him unsmiling, me beaming. It must have been late spring, because I was wearing a pink Forenza tube skirt with a huge faded jean jacket, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, while he had on a green military jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He had just gotten his right ear pierced (the right ear, as suburban kids everywhere knew, indicated that you were straight). I looked quickly at Christian, two tables over, and met his gaze. My whole body felt tingly and numb, as if the anesthesia was kicking in. Okay, now, close your eyes and count backward from ten.
“What’s Hugh up to, anyway?” Lynn whispered to me.
“Didn’t you read the website? He raises ferrets and he’s a Civil War reenactor.”
The swarm of teens reappeared to swap our salad for plates of congealed beef slices that curled at the edges and a desiccated squiggle of mashed potato. “Let’s get room service later,” said Kimmy, throwing down her fork. “I can’t eat this shit.”
“Listen up, everybody,” Hugh said as his mic screeched. “If you haven’t yet voted on your classmates, please visit the table where we have set up a ballot box. You’ll get a kick out of some of the categories, like Most Changed. Thank you, Kathleen, for coming up with this idea.” Polite applause. “We’ll announce the winners after dessert.”
I snuck a few furtive looks at Christian. It was just like being in class, when he was right in front of me and I could gaze at him whenever I wanted. He was looking at the podium, so I watched his right hand, which held his wineglass. He had the most beautiful hands, substantial and masculine but still graceful. Hands were so important. He looked over and I quickly glanced down at my potato squiggle.
After dinner, DJ Noyz, aka Craig DiMartino, a Paramus computer programmer by day, got the party started with “Blister in the Sun” as people crammed onto the miniscule dance floor. Sandy was the only one of us girls who liked to dance. Kurt Sebalius was flinging her around the floor, and she was laughing helplessly. Her hair had completely escaped her tight bun and flew in all directions. Christian was also at the bar, perhaps three people away. I knew exactly where he was located at all times.
