“Who is that?” I asked Michael.
In a tone that sought to be pompous, but had dos Dos Equis ago turned just plain silly, Michael said, “How should I know? Am I her keeper?”
“Could that be Jill Forest?”
“I’m afraid I can’t see Jill Forest for the trees.”
“Right, Michael. Have another beer.”
It was Jill Forest, but she was gone now, and so was Ginnie, back in the ballroom.
I’d dated Jill a few times in high school days, but she’d been a quiet girl, and her parents had been strict, and, for reasons that now escaped me, we’d never clicked. She’d been too cute to be mousy, but, even so, this was a shock: Jill Forest a trendy stand-out in a crowd where it wasn’t unusual to see a woman wearing the same hairstyle she’d worn to the senior prom. On the other hand, I was wearing the same tie I’d worn to the prom, so who was I to condescend? I was just a cheap bastard, trying to pass for trendy.
I spent the rest of the evening looking for Jill out of the corner of either eye, and not seeing her.
I did see Ginnie, though we didn’t speak again that evening. She was spending a lot of time at a table for two in the ballroom, huddling with a dark, not particularly handsome man who I took to be Brad Faulkner. A little drunk, she seemed to be flirting outrageously — and he seemed to be liking it, giving her a shy smile while she did almost all the talking. They were dancing slow, to “Easy to Be Hard,” a song from Hair, when I left around midnight. Walking home, leaving my car in the Elks parking lot. I was damn near sober by the time I got home, and lay awake till two wondering why Ginnie had spent so much time with Faulkner, a guy I didn’t remember being anybody she had dated or run around with or anything way back when. It seemed strange.
A month later, with Ginnie dead, I was again awake at two in the morning, and it seemed even stranger.
10
Port City Cablevision lurked behind the massive modern community college library, across an access road; behind Cablevision was sprawling Weed Park (named after a guy named “Weed,” so help me), making quite the impressive back yard for so undistinguished a structure, a one-story white frame building with satellite dishes growing around it, like strange mushrooms.
I was not here to complain about the service, even though ever since they added the Disney Channel and scrambled it, the channels on either side were constantly visited by a rolling tweed pattern. One of those disrupted channels was the all-Spanish network, and the other was twenty-four-hour stock quotations; since I was not a wealthy Mexican investor, I could live without either.
I was here to see Jill Forest. This morning, at the inappropriately sunny graveside services at Greenwood Cemetery, she had been there, wearing a black suit and dark glasses, the only other person there besides me remotely Ginnie’s age; none of the Iowa City friends had made it, Flater and Sturms included. Oddly absent too were John “J.T.” O’Hara, the hippie poet Ginnie married, and their daughter Malinda; Mrs. Mullens had told me at the funeral home she expected them, but I didn’t see them. Sheriff Brennan was on hand, though, and I asked him if he knew Jill, saying, “I used to go to school with her, but had no idea she was still in town.”
“She isn’t still in town,” he said. “She’s back in town.”
Turned out Jill had been in the cable TV business for five or six years, going into communities like ours and putting things in motion for a year or so, then moving on. Perhaps it was a coincidence that one of her myriad jobs had been Port City, her old home town. Or maybe not. That was one of the things I planned to ask her.
So far all I’d asked her, on the phone, was if she remembered me, and if she might entertain an invitation for lunch. In a pleasant but businesslike manner, she’d said yes to both.
Now here I was at Cablevision, going in the side studio entrance as she’d instructed me, wondering what to say to the shy girl in Junior Miss dresses I’d dated in high school who had become a lady executive in outfits by Kamali. I, by the way, was not going the Bilko and camouflage route today — as at the funeral, I wore a black polo shirt and gray slacks, the same slacks I’d worn to the reunion. The day was warm, and I’d rather worn shorts, but I needed to make a better impression than that on Jill, or anyway I wanted to.
The air conditioning inside Cablevision was welcome. A modest studio with a modest glassed-in booth was at my right as I walked down a narrow hall to a door with JILL FOREST, STATION MANAGER on it; that her job was temporary was indicated by her name and rank being on a sliding piece of plastic that fit in steel grooves on the door.
I knocked.
“Yes,” her voice said, noncommittally.
I spoke to the door. “It’s Mal.”
“Come in,” her voice said, just as noncommittally.
Not that it was an unpleasant voice; it was a warm mid-range voice that had to work at sounding all business. But she managed it.
Feeling a little intimidated and not really knowing why, I went in.
It wasn’t a big office; thinking of her as an executive was an exaggeration. And she wasn’t wearing Kamali or any other designer clothes. Just a simple white blouse with a black dress (she stood as I came in) with a geometric copper necklace the only new-wave fashion touch of the day. Her short black hair still had a vaguely punk look to it, and her lipstick was redder than Dracula’s wildest dreams. Her eye makeup was subdued compared to at the reunion, though; with those cornflower blue eyes, who needed it?
And she had a great tan.
“You have a great tan,” I said.
I couldn’t help myself.
She sat back down. “Is that what you wanted to talk about, Mal, after all this time? My tan?” Her tone wasn’t exactly unfriendly. It wasn’t exactly friendly, either.
“That was dumb,” I said, sitting down myself. “I don’t know why I said it.”
She shrugged, her expression revealing nothing. “I don’t have that much of a tan. I’ve always been on the dark side. Don’t you remember?”
That was the problem: I didn’t remember. I’d gone out with her back in school, yes; more than once — and then called it off. I didn’t remember her looking even remotely this good. I was thirty-four and unmarried and here was one of the first of many prize catches I’d foolishly let get away over the years. Feel free to kick me.
“Sure I remember,” I said.
Now she smiled, just a little. “You don’t, do you? I didn’t make much of an impression on you when we were kids.”
“That’s not true! We used to go out, and have a lot of fun.”
“We went out two times, and probably said ten words to each other, total. We did not have a lot of fun. We didn’t even have a little fun.”
I sighed. “We didn’t, did we?”
She shrugged again, looking at a desk piled with neatly stacked work. “I was quiet, then. Like they say in the old movies: too quiet.”
“Your parents kept you on a pretty short leash.”
Something flickered in her eyes, but she kept her face impassive. “Maybe that’s because I was a ‘dog,’ hmm?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. You were a cute kid; I never thought of you like that, ever. But your parents were the have-her-home-by-ten-on-weekend-nights types. Uh, how are your folks, by the way?”
“Dead.”
She meant that to shock me. I didn’t say anything.
She said, “How are yours?”