Karen Lane and I had come from the Highlands, but we were smarter and, in her case, better looking than most of the people from the area, so when we went to Wilson High School — one of those nightmare conglomerates that shoves the poorest kids in a city in with the richest — we didn’t do badly for ourselves. By senior year we found ourselves hanging out with the sons and daughters of bankers and doctors and city officials and lawyers and riding around in new Impala convertibles and attending an occasional party where you saw an actual maid. But wherever we went, we’d manage for at least a few minutes to get away from our dates and talk to each other. What we were doing, of course, was trying to comfort ourselves. We shared terrible and confusing feelings — pride that we were acceptable to those we saw as glamorous, shame that we felt disgrace for being from the Highlands and having fathers who worked in factories and mothers who went to Mass as often as nuns and brothers and sisters who were doomed to punching the clock and yelling at ragged kids in the cold factory dusk. (You never realize what a toll such shame takes till you see your father’s waxen face there in the years-later casket.)
That was the big secret we shared, of course, Karen and I, that we were going to get out, leave the place once and for all. And her brown eyes never sparkled more Christmas-morning bright than at those moments when it all was ahead of us, money, sex, endless thrills, immortality. She had the kind of clean good looks brought out best by a blue cardigan with a line of white button-down shirt at the top and a brown suede car coat over her slender shoulders and moderately tight jeans displaying her quietly artful ass. Nothing splashy about her. She had the sort of face that snuck up on you. You had the impression you were talking to a pretty but in no way spectacular girl, and then all of a sudden you saw how the eyes burned with sad humor and how wry the mouth got at certain times and how the freckles enhanced rather than detracted from her beauty and by then of course you were hopelessly entangled. Hopelessly.
This wasn’t just my opinion, either. I mentioned four divorce settlements. True facts. Karen was one of those prizes that powerful and rich men like to collect with the understanding that it’s only something you hold in trust, like a yachting cup. So, in her time, she’d been an ornament for a professional football player (her college beau), an orthodontist (“I think he used to have sexual fantasies about Barry Goldwater”), the owner of a large commuter airline (“I slept with half his pilots; it was kind of a company benefit”), and a sixty-nine-year-old millionaire who was dying of heart disease (“He used to have me sit next to his bedside and just hold his hand — the weird thing was that of all of them, I loved him, I really did — and his eyes would be closed and then every once in a while tears would start streaming down his cheeks as if he was remembering something that really filled him with remorse; he was really a sweetie, but then cancer got him before the heart disease and I never did find out what he regretted so much, I mean if it was about his son or his wife or what”), and now she was comfortably fixed for the rest of her life and if the crow’s feet were a little more pronounced around eyes and mouth and if the slenderness was just a trifle too slender (she weighed, at five-three, maybe ninety pounds and kept a variety of diet books in her big sunny kitchen), she was a damn good-looking woman nonetheless, the world’s absurdity catalogued and evaluated in a gaze that managed to be both weary and impish, with a laugh that was knowing without being cynical.
So now she wanted to play detective.
I had some more bourbon from the pint — it burned beautifully — and said, “If I had your money, you know what I’d do?”
“Buy yourself a new shirt?”
“You don’t like my shirt?”
“I didn’t know you had this thing about Hawaii.”
“If I had your money I’d just forget about all of this.”
“I thought cops were sworn to uphold the right and the true.”
“I’m an ex-cop.”
“You wear a uniform.”
“That’s for the American Security Agency.”
She sighed. “So I shouldn’t have sent the letters?”
“No.”
“Well, if they’re guilty, they’ll show up at Pierce Point tonight.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Why?”
“Maybe they’ll know it’s a trap. And not do anything.”
She nodded to the school. “You hear that?”
“What?”
“The song?”
It was Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red.”
“I remember one party when we both hated our dates and we ended up dancing to that over and over again. Somebody’s basement. You remember?”
“Sort of, I guess,” I said.
“Good. Let’s go in the gym and then we can dance to it again.”
Donna, my lady friend, was out of town attending an advertising convention. I hoped she wasn’t going to dance with anybody else because it would sure make me mad.
I started to open the door and she said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“What?” I sensed what it was going to be so I kept my eyes on the parking lot.
“Turn around and look at me.”
I turned around and looked at her. “Okay.”
“Since the time we had dinner a month or so ago I’ve started receiving brochures from Alcoholics Anonymous in the mail. If you were having them sent to me, would you be honest enough to tell me?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Are you having them sent to me?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You think I’m a lush?”
“Don’t you?”
“I asked you first.”
So we went into the gym and danced.
Crepe of red and white, the school colors, draped the ceiling; the stage was a cave of white light on which stood four balding fat guys with spit curls and shimmery gold lamé dinner jackets (could these be the illegitimate sons of Bill Haley?) playing guitars, drum, and saxophone; on the dance floor couples who’d lost hair, teeth, jaw lines, courage and energy (everything, it seemed, but weight) danced to lame cover versions of “Breaking up Is Hard to Do” and “Sheila,” “Run-around Sue” and “Running Scared” (tonight’s lead singer sensibly not even trying Roy Orbison’s beautiful falsetto) and then, they broke into a medley of dance tunes — everything from “Locomotion” to “The Peppermint Twist” — and the place went a little crazy, and I went right along with it.
“Come on,” I said.
“Great.”
We went out there and we burned ass. We’d both agreed not to dress up for the occasion so we were ready for this. I wore the Hawaiian shirt she found so despicable plus a blue blazer, white socks and cordovan penny-loafers. She wore a salmon-colored Merikani shirt belted at the waist and tan cotton fatigue pants and, sweet Christ, she was so adorable half the guys in the place did the kind of double takes usually reserved for somebody outrageous or famous.
Over the blasting music, I shouted, “Everybody’s watching you!”
She shouted right back, “I know! Isn’t it wonderful?”
The medley went twenty minutes and could easily have been confused with an aerobics session. By the end I was sopping and wishing I was carrying ten or fifteen pounds less and sometimes feeling guilty because I was having too much fun (I just hoped Donna, probably having too much fun, too, was feeling guilty), and then finally it ended and mate fell into the arms of mate, hanging on to stave off sheer collapse.
Then the head Bill Haley clone said, “Okay, now we’re going to do a ballad medley,” so then we got everybody from Johnny Mathis to Connie Francis and we couldn’t resist that, so I moved her around the floor with clumsy pleasure and she moved me right back with equally clumsy pleasure. “You know something?” I said.