by Michael West
“—your husband? How long have you been— ”
“—vice president of an internet company. Aren’t you—”
“—divorced. Then we got re-married. Then we got divorced again.”
Mary sat just as he left her, staring out at the dance floor. There were two things Paul could never get her to do: bowl and dance. She was quick to agree to a slow dance, to spin in place with her head on his shoulder, but she was afraid to get out there and just move to the music. She’d said she was scared she’d look stupid, to which Paul would always ask her if she’d ever watched him dance.
“This music,” she said when she saw him. “Pop Music” by M blared from the speakers. “It’s like I’m at a skating party and I’m ten years old.”
“A what?” Paul asked.
“A skating party. You know, roller-skating. The school had a night where everyone would go to the United Skates of America.”
“There’s no United Skates in Harmony.” Paul held out her drink. “One Diet Coke, Ma’am.”
She smiled as she took it from his hand. “Did you have to squeeze it yourself?”
He pointed to Robby. “You said I should talk to people.”
“Hey, Robby.”
Robby raised his glass. “Hello, Mrs. Rice.”
Mary chuckled. “Oh, please. His mother is Mrs. Rice.” She motioned across the table to the many empty chairs. “Have a seat.”
“So who’s that girl at the table taking names?” Paul wanted to know.
Robby laughed as he sat down. “Oh her. That, my friend, is the new English teacher.”
“What happened to Mrs. Riley?”
“Retired.”
“Polk still principal?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I thought his heart would have given up on him by now.” Paul said it as if he were afraid of being overheard. Old habits died hard.
“Somebody told me he’s gonna have his stomach stapled.”
Paul grimaced. “Maybe I should go buy stock in staples.”
Robby coughed; he’d taken a drink from his scotch and a burst of laughter caught him by surprise.
“You all right?” Paul asked, starting to get up.
“I’m fine,” he said, still coughing as he tried to laugh. “I’m a trained medic. If worse comes to worse, I can give myself the Heimlich.”
Mary laughed as well. She reached out, took Paul’s hand in her own. He was glad she was with him. Very glad.
“So, they let you have the night off from the fire station?” she asked, turning the conversation from private Harmony High insights.
“Off from the fire station, yes. They’re not gonna need me tonight, anyway.”
“And why’s that?”
“There won’t be any big runs.” He nursed his drink a bit more, then went on. “It’s gotten to the point where I can usually sense when something’s gonna happen. I call it my Spidey Sense.”
Mary laughed. “Like the Incredible Spider-Man?”
“The Hulk’s Incredible,” he corrected. “Spider-Man’s Amazing.”
She rolled her eyes and giggled. “Whatever.”
Robby’s face fell. “Speak of the devil, my Spidey Sense just kicked in.”
Paul shifted his weight, laughed. “And what danger lies ahead, oh Amazing One?”
“Deidra’s coming.”
“I know.”
Robby nodded over Paul’s shoulder. “No, I mean she’s coming this way.”
Paul turned, saw Deidra walking toward their table. When she saw his face she stopped. She didn’t know it was me, he thought. My back was to her. She saw Robby sitting here and decided to walk over, but she didn’t know it was me until I turned around. She only hesitated for a moment, but to Paul it seemed much longer. He let his eyes drink her in. She wore a red party dress, two thin straps over her shoulders to hold it up; the fabric – silk or satin, he couldn’t tell by looking – gathered in smiling folds across her breasts, and the skirt barely kissed the tops of her knees. She looked taller than he remembered, then he saw her red stiletto heels. Her skin was pale as a white candle and her hair burned a bright red around her freckled face. She was thinner than he’d imagined, than he’d hoped. She looked fantastic.
Deidra weaved between the remaining tables that separated them and walked up to the back of an empty chair. Her pale eyes greeted Robby, skated past Mary, and landed squarely on Paul; her voice didn’t seem the least bit shaky. “Hello there.”
Paul felt his neck and face grow warm, remembering how he had looked in his mother’s mirror before leaving. He looked older, by much more than ten years. He was about twenty pounds overweight and the gray in his hair had spread since he’d seen Deidra last, conquering much of the brown and vanquishing it. Worst of all, looking at her, he felt older.
He pointed to the woman in the chair next to him. “This is my wife, Mary.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mary told her pleasantly, going so far as to even offer up a welcoming grin.
“Nice to meet you,” Deidra said, moving her eyes from Paul.
At least she’s acknowledging her existence, he thought.
Her eyes whipped back, however, like two snapped rubber bands. They were almost jovial. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”
He tried to smile. “How could I pass up an open bar?”
Her cordial expression tottered a bit at that. He could almost see her sprockets turn, wondering: Was he honestly trying to make a joke or was he throwing my past problems in my face? To be honest, Paul didn’t know which it had been. Not really. His eyes went to the glass of clear liquid in her hands and she said “club soda,” as if she felt the need to tell him she still wasn’t drinking.
Deidra sat down, left a few empty chairs between them, and crossed her legs beneath the white tablecloth. Her right shoulder strap slipped from its perch and Paul could not help but look at her bare skin. Having not had much experience with women, Paul wondered how people who slept together could remain friendly afterward. It seemed an alien concept. Once you’d bared yourself to another person, weren’t you always naked in their eyes? She raked the strap back into place with her fingers and looked at him in silence, as if she were not sure how to approach a conversation.
Paul could offer her no assistance. It’s like the first day of school all over again and we’re total strangers. Whatever we shared, whatever closeness we had, seems to be part of some past life.
“So how is everybody?” she asked at last.
“Fine.” Paul squeezed Mary’s hand. “We just had a little girl about two months ago.”
Deidra nodded and offered an unenthusiastic grin. “Congratulations.” Her eyes shot to Mary for a moment. “To both of you.”
“Thank you,” Mary said.
“Our son’s three now,” Paul continued. “And on the twenty-second we’ll have been married six years.”
“Six years?”
“Six, yeah.”
Deidra brushed a few rosy strands of hair from her face and tucked them behind her ear. She no longer sported the angle cut. Her hair had grown down past her shoulders. There was still a whisper of curl to it, but nothing like the perm she’d donned when he’d loved her. “So what’s it like to be back in Harmony?”
“Some of us never left,” Robby huffed.
Deidra looked over at him and Paul took the opportunity to draw in breath. “Sorry.”
“No worries. The town’s starting to take steps into the twentieth century. By the time we have our twenty-fifth reunion, it might actually be up to the ’80s.”
All of them chuckled at that, although Paul and Deidra’s laughter was nervous at best.
Robby went on, “You know, for what I pay for my ranch home with full basement and DSS I couldn’t even pay rent in Indy.”
“DSS?” Paul chafed. “Where’s my Superbowl Invite?”
Robby smiled. “Next year.”
Deidra looked at Paul’s wife with interest. “And what do you do, Mary?”
�
��I’m a counselor at a home for abused children.”
“That’s great.” Deidra’s voice was so low it barely registered above Kenny Loggins singing, “I’m all right, nobody worry ’bout me.” She looked back at Paul. “You must be proud.”
“I’m very happy,” he told her.
“What about you, Deidra?” Robby asked. “We’ve shown you ours.”
She looked at her glass. Paul thought she might be blushing, but it was probably the mood lighting. “Well, I went to school for graphic design. I married a man I went to school with.” She looked at Mary. “We had no children.” Then her eyes returned to Paul’s. They were sad eyes, almost apologetic. “We had a house in San Diego with a pool and a maid who came in once a week to change the sheets and we started to drift apart. One day we woke up and realized we didn’t have anything to talk about and so we did something very Californian: we talked to our lawyers and nullified our little marriage contract. Now the only contact I have with John is the check he sends me every month. I work for an advertising firm in Cincinnati now.” She brought her drink to her full, red lips and sipped. “Just a hop, skip, and a jump away.”
“Depends on how high you can hop and how far you can skip,” Robby said.
“Well, at least we’ve all managed to move on after graduation,” Deidra pointed out. “We’ve all become productive members of society. We haven’t slit our wrists or hung ourselves.”
Robby and Paul offered her dubious looks.
Mary didn’t seem to notice.
“Not yet anyway.” She pointed to Paul. “You two don’t have to live with this guy.”
“Aren’t we the lucky ones,” Deidra said with asperity, then took a drink.
Robby spoke up. If you dangled a loose thread of conversation in front of him, he had to pick it up. “Back in ’87 there was this sixteen-year-old. Her name was Lisa.” He drank from his half-empty glass. “Lisa Hayden. She turned the car engine on with the garage door closed, took some pills, slashed both her wrists.”
“At the same time?” Mary asked, uncomfortable with the direction the conversation had taken.
He chuckled humorlessly. “No. Different times. But see ... she didn’t really wanna die.”
“Sounds like she had a death wish to me,” Paul said.
“No. It was all so she could get her mother’s attention ... her mother’s love.”
“Did it work?” Deidra asked.
Robby blinked and looked up from his glass. “Sorry?”
“Did it work?”
“Sure. Sure it did. Her mother was a little distant, but she loved the girl. They got counseling. Became best buds. Best buds.”
“Why don’t I sense a ‘and they lived happily ever after’?” Paul asked.
“A few months ago, she was back in town visiting Mommy Dearest and decides to listen to her little portable boom box while she took a bubble bath.”
Mary brought her hand to her lips. Deidra lowered her eyes.
“Blew a transformer. The whole west side of Harmony was without power for a day.”
Paul sipped his beer, his eyes on Robby. “Ahh, the irony.”
Robby smiled. “Killing yourself without really killing yourself.”
“What?” Paul looked at Robby’s glass of scotch. “How many of those have you had?”
“I’m serious. It’s what I like to call throwing yourself on the ‘foreseeable bullet.’”
“‘The foreseeable bullet’?”
“Right,” Robby nodded. “Say I’m Joe Depressed, and I want to be done with this sorry ass life. Do I slit my wrists? Hell no! I go run with the bulls. Now, it’s foreseeable that the bulls could trample me. It’s foreseeable they could gore my little dejected heart out. But, if it happens ... is it really suicide? I didn’t put a pistol in my mouth. I didn’t swallow a handful of pills, or hang myself. In everybody’s eyes, I was living life to the fullest.” He took another drink. “Was it suicide for Lisa to bring her stereo into the bathroom? It was foreseeable it might fall in the tub, might kill her, but the death gets ruled an accident. An accident.” He looked at Paul. “Driving your car at sixty-five miles an hour, jumping hills on Route Six might get you killed too.”
Paul glared back at him. “So could running into burning buildings for a living.”
Robby held his glass aloft in a toast. “Touché.” He upended what was left until the ice cubes smacked his lips, then slammed the glass down on the table. “Either way, death isn’t for certain, but it is foreseeable.”
Paul looked at his own drink. “You can drop the sledge hammer, Oliver Stone. I get your message.”
Robby stared at him a moment, then his eyes drifted to Mary’s sad face. “Well, I’ve just brought this party to a screeching halt, huh?”
“I’ve worked with a lot of kids over the years that’ve attempted suicide,” she told him. “They get so depressed they can’t see any other way out, they can’t see they have their whole life and so many choices ahead of them. But I think all of us have thought of suicide at one time or another. I know I remember getting depressed, thinking how I might do it.”
Paul looked at her. “And how would you have done it?”
She shrugged. “Pills. Take a bunch of sleeping pills and wake up singing with the Heavenly Host.”
“Suicides go to Hell,” Deidra pointed out.
Paul’s eyes whipped to her, surprised once again by her attitude.
Robby’s grin grew wider. “Another reason why the ‘foreseeable bullet’ theory works so well. If it’s not really a suicide, you can’t really go to Hell.”
“I don’t know about any of that,” Mary said. “But the point I was trying to make is that, when you’re in high school, it all seems so serious. Every little thing has cosmic ramifications. Everything is life and death. It’s only when you get some distance from it that you realize it wasn’t really that way at all.”
The three classmates looked at each other silently, memories waltzing across their faces. Mary looked at them; aware she had touched on something she shouldn’t have. “Now I’ve hit the party brakes.”
Deidra changed the subject. “I’m just dying to dance.” Her eyes shot to Paul. “Would you mind?”
Paul’s lips parted, so did Robby’s, both struck dumb by the curve ball. Paul’s eyes shifted sideways to Mary, tried to see the expression her face held, startled to find her smile.
Deidra forced herself to look at Mary. “Would you mind me dancing with your hubby?”
“Hell, no,” Mary said with a cheerful laugh. “I don’t like to dance anyway.”
What is she thinking? Paul wondered, then thought, This is her idea of therapy. Throw me into the lion’s den and let me work out my problems. Damn her psych degree.
Deidra’s glance quickly reaffixed itself to Paul. “How ’bout it?”
He nodded nervously. “Sure.”
Deidra rose from her chair, walked around the table to him, and held out her dainty hand. He stood up quickly, too quickly, then smiled at Mary and Robby as if to apologize for making an ass of himself. He took Deidra’s hand and allowed her to lead him out onto the dance floor.
***
Mary sat at the table and watched them walk away, still uncomfortable with the situation, more uncomfortable now that she’d seen this other woman. Until tonight, Deidra had just been someone Paul talked about in hushed tones, someone who’d hurt him deeply, someone whom he still cared for, even if he wouldn’t fess up to it. Now she had a face – a pale, beautiful face – and she had a body, a gorgeous figure with hips that had never borne the weight of children and a flat belly that had never been stretched.
We share a life, she reminded herself. All he shares with Deidra is a memory.
It had become her mantra over the last few days.
“You’re a brave woman,” Robby said.
Mary blinked and turned to look at him. “How so?”
She didn’t feel very brave. At that moment, she felt quite the opposite.
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“Don’t you know who Deidra is?” he asked, shocked.
“Paul’s first love,” Mary said matter-of-factly. “We do talk, you know.”
“And you’re okay with them ...” He moved his hands together, intertwining the fingers.
She laughed nervously. “What? They’re going to throw off all their clothes on the dance floor?”
Robby shrugged and smiled at the absurdity of it. “Guess not.”
Mary’s eyes drifted back to Paul. He looked stiff as he tried to move to the beat. He looked uncomfortable with Deidra. Good, she could not help herself from thinking. Paul glanced back at her, gave a little wave, as if he’d read her mind and wanted her to know she had nothing to fear. She smiled and returned the gesture, then returned her eyes to Robby.
“The way I see it, I can either be a jealous bitch from Hell, or I can let them move past whatever it is that’s still haunting them. Paul will be happier for it, and so will I.”
Robby’s face was aghast. “You’re the Amazing One. Dump him, marry me.”
At that, they both laughed.
***
On the dance floor, Paul and Deidra moved to Escape Club’s “Wild Wild West.” Deidra held her arms high above her head, her wrists almost touching one another. Her hips and torso swayed and snaked, the red silk of her dress hugging her form, her eyes shifting between Paul’s face and the floor. Once he saw her panties clearly outlined beneath her thin skirt and looked away.
The song changed, became Peabo Bryson’s “If Ever You’re In My Arms Again.” Paul stopped moving. He looked at Deidra, tossed a glance to the DJ table, then turned to walk off the floor.
“Not so fast.” Deidra wrapped her hand around his wrist to stop him. “We only danced to half a song.”
“This one’s too slow.”
She stepped close to him, close enough that she had to tilt her face up to look at him. “You scared?”
“Scared?”
“Your wife said she wanted you to dance.”
“I’m sure she’ll –”
“– be fine with it.” Deidra took his hand in hers and placed her other hand on his waist. “Just keep your hands off my ass.”
Paul looked at the ceiling, let her lead. A mirrored ball hung from the rafters; it caught the spots, created a snowfall of light all around them as they moved. It reminded him painfully of the day he’d asked Deidra to marry him. The day she’d said “yes.” When Deidra began to sing along with the words of the song, he came to the realization that everything had been orchestrated.
