by Tim O'Brien
Billy nodded. He took his hands from her waist.
"You can turn me in," she said. "I don't care anymore."
She unlocked the door to her apartment, looked at him briefly, made a strange slashing gesture with her hand, and went inside. Billy followed. They sat in her kitchen, on barstools, facing each other across a countertop.
Billy still heard crickets, even with the windows closed.
"All that time went by," Alexandra said, "and then one day I had to do something. Saw your help-wanted ad in the paper. Walked in. Asked for the job. Because—who knows—because finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to face you, or it, or whatever." She looked up. "Please say something."
Billy shook his head.
"You can turn me in," she said again.
"I won't turn you in."
"But you can. Should, I guess."
Alexandra sat still, watching him, waiting. "Do you want to kill me?"
"No," said Billy.
"I wouldn't blame you."
She pushed to her feet, filled two glasses with water, carried them over to the countertop. "This is hard, but I'll say it. She jumped. Your wife, I mean. On purpose. One second she was on the curb, just standing there, then she sort of lifted up one of her hands, sort of winced, sort of smiled, and then she was right there in front of me. Jumped. I'm seventeen years old—poisoned my life."
Billy wasn't surprised. It made sense.
"Well," he said. "I poisoned hers."
"You did something?"
"Yes. Or didn't."
They were quiet for many minutes. They listened to the crickets. Alexandra drank down her water and looked at him. "You want to sleep with me?"
"I do."
"Will it be evil?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
He called his babysitter, and Alexandra put a frozen pizza in the oven, and they took off their clothes and had sex at the kitchen counter. Later, they ate the pizza in bed.
Alexandra told him about her childhood, about an absent father and a mother who wanted her daughter to be a majorette. "That's all my poor, nutso mom ever talked about," Alexandra said, "all that majorette twaddle, like it was a life goal or something, like it was some special career. Crazy, you know? My mother. She called me Allie, not Alexandra, because the last thing she wanted was a complicated majorette."
Billy talked, too.
He talked about Dorothy Stier, and about obsession. He explained how his wife used to stare at him, maybe intuiting, maybe knowing, and how in the end a ridiculous grudge had destroyed both her life and his own, as if he'd murdered her, as if he'd pushed her in front of the car.
"You didn't," said Alexandra.
"Almost."
"This Dorothy, you should call her up. Tell her what happened, what she's involved in."
"It's three in the morning."
"What's the number?"
He gave Alexandra the number and she dialed and passed the phone to Billy. It was a surprise when Dorothy answered. Her voice came from 1969, girlish, untouched by what time can do to voices.
Billy listened for a moment and hung up.
"Answering machine," he told Alexandra.
A few seconds later the phone rang.
"Star sixty-nine," said Dorothy. "A different world, Billy. Can we finally talk?"
"Not now."
"When, then?"
"Someday," he said.
There was a hesitation. "Billy, I can't see why ... We're getting old."
"You'll survive."
"Old, Billy."
"I suppose so," he said. "How's Ron?"
Billy and Alexandra saw each other for five months. They shared the burden of guilt, which was a comfort, and over time Billy came to appreciate Alexandra's sad blue eyes, and her courage, and her tentative smile, and the way she approached the world from the inside out. In the end, however, there was too much between them. Sometimes it was as if Billy's wife were sitting on the couch with them, or curled up at the foot of their bed. There was Dorothy, too.
"Maybe I'll head for Dallas," Alexandra said. "Become a Cowgirl. Not quite a majorette, but close. Develop a cleavage. Make my mother happy."
Billy said, "You made me happy."
"A little, I hope."
"A lot."
"Well, that's good," she said. Her eyes were ancient and sad and wise. "Except we both know too much. Sometimes it's best not to know things."
"We could keep trying," said Billy.
"And Dorothy?"
"Forget Dorothy."
"Lovely thought," Alexandra said, and shook her head. "But it's like somebody died and you're still hugging the corpse. She must've been pretty phenomenal."
"No. Pretty ordinary."
"Too bad for me. I'll work on ordinary."
Alexandra smiled. She was very beautiful, Billy decided, and very, very kind, and it crossed his mind that on top of everything else he had now lost the rest of his life.
"The thing is, I love you," Alexandra said. "But I need a guy who can look at me."
Billy's mother died on September 19, 1992. Two days later, with his daughter in the car beside him, he crossed the border at International Falls.
"Your eyes seem weird," Susie said, and Billy said, "Are they?" and after a moment his daughter flicked her eyebrows and said, "Weirder than weird. Old-man weird."
They attended the funeral in Billy's hometown, stayed a few days with his father, then drove north to the Twin Cities.
Billy called Dorothy from their room in the St. Paul Hilton.
"Let's have a drink," he said. "Meet at the airport."
"You're after symmetry?"
"No," he said. "Show up."
Dorothy laughed a deft little laugh, flirtatious but meaningless, the way she laughed in college. "Well, fine, but I'm too smart for stacked decks. Anywhere else. Not the airport."
They met in the hotel's coffee shop.
It was no surprise, really, but Dorothy looked just about as he'd imagined: expensively dressed, expensively tanned, her hair cut short and colored to the ivory blond of her college years. She tried to kiss him, but Billy wouldn't allow it.
They sat in a curved corner booth, which made it easier to avoid excessive eye contact, excessive emotion.
"Ron knows you're here?"
Dorothy's gaze went to the table. "Well, no," she said. "Not yet."
"Do me a favor," Billy said. "Don't tell."
She moved her jaw slightly, that rotating action, then unfolded her napkin and spent a few moments spreading it in her lap. Her eyes were glittery and shrewd.
"All right, fine," she said.
"Fine?"
"I won't say anything."
Billy nodded. It struck him that he was fortunate not to have married this woman.
They ordered vodka tonics, their old drink, and then for what seemed a very long while he listened to Dorothy chat about their Darton Hall classmates, about her two boys and Ron's triumphs at Cargill. The whole time, though, Billy had trouble concentrating. For more than twenty years he had envisioned this conversation, all the ways he'd make her hurt, but now he was unclear about what he wanted. He couldn't locate the bitterness. As Dorothy discussed her insomnia—how she'd get up at two in the morning and bake bread—Billy found himself gazing at the smooth, glossy tip of her nose. It was as if he were watching a muted TV, a close-up of some familiar, weathered actress in a skin cream commercial.
At one point, after she'd thoroughly explored the topic of vacation homes, Billy reached out and pushed a thumb against her nose. "Let me ask something," he said. "Do you mind?"
She shook her head. He took his thumb away.
"One question. If you look at your life, the whole ritzy deal, can you think of anything—I mean, anything at all—that you regret? One item? One mistake? Anything?"
She looked at him sourly, puzzled, as if he were administering an exam for which she'd forgotten to study.
She sighed. "I guess you're talking about water ov
er the dam."
"I guess I am," Billy said.
Dorothy crossed her legs and beamed at him; she had already composed herself. "Ron's been a dream, if that's what you're getting at."
"Not exactly."
"What then?"
"Nothing," Billy said. He beamed right back at her and raised his glass. "Salute to Ron."
"Do you want me to say I made a huge mistake? That I should've run away with you?" She gave him a look he couldn't decipher. "I don't wish for that, Billy."
"My loyal buddy Ron."
"Well, he was."
"Was."
Dorothy glanced away. "You've made a point. Maybe now you feel better—I hope so—but it doesn't change anything." She stopped for a second. "I'm happy."
"A committed woman?"
"Of course."
"No affairs, then?"
"Me?"
She laughed.
She was lying.
It didn't matter now.
Billy let her maneuver the conversation back to her kids, who were fantastically and terrifically astounding.
After ten minutes he said he had to go.
Dorothy took his arm as they crossed the lobby, erect posture, smiling, looking up at him as if she expected an invitation. It was not a come-on, Billy realized. It was sexy and rigid and empty; it was Dorothy's way of being polite. She asked if his daughter was upstairs, and Billy told her no, that Susie had gone off to a movie, and then again there was a meaningful void while Dorothy waited for the opportunity to be both nostalgic and perfectly content with her life.
"Billy, if you're ever in town again—"
"I sure will," he said.
"Come to dinner. Seriously. Ron likes you."
"Ron would."
He walked her outside, said goodbye, went up to his room, took a shower, turned on the TV, lay down, and thought about all the squandered years.
It was an hour before his daughter returned from the movies.
"So how was it?" Susie asked.
Billy said it was fine.
"Tried to seduce you, right?"
"Unh-uh."
"What does 'unh-uh' mean?"
"It means no. She wanted a tennis partner."
For a few minutes Billy stared at the television, a cartoon of some sort, then he chuckled and asked his daughter if she'd like to take a road trip, maybe see something of her father's country. Maybe the Grand Canyon. Maybe Texas.
"You're Canadian," Susie said.
"That's true."
"Why, then?"
"No special reason," Billy said. "Because I lived here once."
10. CLASS OF '69
AT 8 A.M. on Saturday, July 8, 2000, a scant eighteen members of the class of '69 assembled for a buffet breakfast in the Darton Hall student union. Among the absent were Spook Spinelli, Dorothy Stier, Billy McMann, Marv Bertel, Amy Robinson, Jan Huebner, a prominent physician, a mother of three, and the morning's breakfast speaker, Minnesota's lieutenant governor.
Paulette Haslo arrived late, haggard and regretful. She sat down with Ellie Abbott and Marla Dempsey. Only Marla had an appetite.
"About last night," Paulette said. "I'm really, really sorry. What a nincompoop."
"Sorry for what?" said Marla.
"God," Paulette said, "I'm not even sure. That's what I'm apologizing for."
They laughed and sipped their watered-down college coffee and made small talk, sliding from topic to topic, avoiding the hazardous. After twenty minutes, David Todd rattled a spoon in his glass. He stood up, steadied himself, and delivered a short, mostly comical talk as a proxy for the scheduled speaker. He said he regretted dropping out of Darton Hall after his junior year, but there was a war to win and he'd felt obligated to bludgeon to death myriad VC with his amazing right leg. Lethal leg, he said. Westmoreland had offered big moola for the patent. In any case, he'd finally graduated with the class of 1992, whose reunions he also attended, but whose females were decidedly inferior to those of '69. A fraction younger, he said. A fraction lighter on the scales. More acrobatic, by far. But all in all, he said, the class of '92 was not blessed with a single female graduate who could compare with, say, just for example, Marla Dempsey. "As you know," David said, "I majored in Marla here at Darton Hall, and then for almost ten years afterward. Mostly got D's, I'm afraid—ended up with a big fat F—but I'll love her forever."
People applauded. When he sat down, Marla excused herself and went over to David's table.
"Pity," Paulette said. "What's it take to be happy these days?"
"Happy?" Ellie said.
The two women exchanged a look. Neither of them had slept much.
"Listen," Ellie said, "you're a minister, right?"
"In a manner of speaking. Unemployed at the moment."
Ellie nodded, drew a breath, and said, "Want to take a walk?"
Just after 9 A.M. Spook Spinelli woke up in a tiny, concrete-walled dorm room on the top floor of Flarety Hall. Billy McMann lay snoring beside her. For a few minutes Spook watched him sleep. She felt some regret, and mild embarrassment, and a strange sadness just behind her eyes. Pity, she thought. Even dear Billy—bless his heart, bless his willie—even this sweet, wonderful man could not relieve the pressure on her heart, the need to drink from a fire extinguisher, to become a dead sister. For years the fantasies had come and gone. Now they were constant.
She kissed Billy's forehead. She got dressed and took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked across campus toward her own dormitory. Fifty-blank years old, she thought. Options running out. In the pale light of morning she felt bleak and ugly, a little ridiculous. She wore last night's metallic miniskirt and spike heels and see-through red blouse. Her head hurt. She wondered if her husbands had called, and if tonight she would find someone new to sleep with, and if there was anything at all she might do to stop from destroying herself.
It was a hot morning, midsummer, very still, and the campus had a silent, sleepy, suspended air, lifted above history, as if all the clocks had stopped.
Paulette and Ellie strolled past the gymnasium, past the new science building, and then turned onto a gravel path that wound up into a small wooded park above the school. Years ago, in these same urban woods, they had built bonfires and plotted peace and sung folk songs to the accompaniment of guitars. Time had annulled all that. Their dreams were now middle-aged dreams, their politics personal. Neither woman said much. They left the gravel path, turned up into the trees, and stopped in a little clearing where Ellie and Harmon Osterberg had once wrestled with problems of innocence and desire. Out of the blue, Paulette said, "You talk, I'll listen."
"I don't think so," Ellie said.
Paulette took her hand. "One thing I've noticed. Men these days, it's blow job first, let's get acquainted later."
"Not always," said Ellie.
"No?"
"Harmon."
"Right," Paulette said. "Time to talk."
"I can't."
"You can. One word, then another word."
"In a minute. I'll try."
But then Ellie cried.
David Todd and Marla Dempsey lingered over coffee in the student union. They'd been divorced since 1980, yet for all their history they still loved each other. David's love was fierce and excessive, Marla's was dispassionate, which was the subject when she said, "I used to wonder if maybe I was gay or something. You know, because I couldn't seem to—what's that expression?—I couldn't get my hot water turned on." She looked at him. "Did you wonder?"
"Sometimes," David said.
"I'm not."
"Not?"
"What I just said. Girls don't do it for me either."
"Excellent," he said. "That's an important thing to know." David tilted back in his chair and grinned at her. "Speaking of which."
"Yes?"
"It's personal."
"Too personal?"
"So-so. Medium."
"All right, go ahead. That's why we're sitting here. To be personal."
/> David nodded. "That's why."
"Ask away."
"It's a hypothetical," he said. "If I begged you—if I told you I'd hang myself or maybe jump off a roof—I mean, if it were life or death—I need to know if you'd marry me again."
"Is it life or death?"
"No," he said.
She grinned back at him. "Then sure. The answer's yes—I'd marry you again. Life or death, though. Which I gather it's not."
"Marry me hotly?"
"Of course hotly. Steamy Marla."
"May I ask something else?"
"It depends."
"Well, see, here's the program," David said. "Tonight. I plan to set up a launching pad between your legs, set off rockets, fly to Jupiter, go bowling with your ovaries."
"That," said Marla, "is not a question."
***
"It's all right now," Paulette said.
"Nothing's all right," said Ellie Abbott. Her breath came in quick, messy spurts. "My God, I can't stand a single second more. Never quits. All day, all night."
"What?"
"I'm afraid to go to bed, afraid to wake up. It won't ever, ever stop."
"What?"
It was 10:30 A.M. when Marv Bertel finished shaving. Flarety Hall had no air conditioning, and already the morning had gone sticky hot. Marv inspected himself in the mirror, thinking of Spook, wondering if he should shower again, but instead he sprayed on some deodorant, popped three tiny pills for his heart, and shuffled back to his room. Spook's face waited for him there—in the closet, under his pillow. Tonight, he thought. Screw the heart. Screw solitaire.
"Look, I'm single," Paulette Haslo said. "Never been married, never even close, but if you want to take a chance on me, just talk things over, I'm pretty sure I can identify. I've got tons of time, sweetheart."
Ellie shook her head. "It's not my husband. It's me."
"Fair enough."
"I just can't—I don't dare. That's what makes it so terrible." Ellie shook her head again. "Did you ever have to keep a secret? Really have to?"
