Southern Cross Read online

  “You forgot the A.A. meeting.”

  “Right.” Seth squinted and looked at me. “That of particular interest to you?”

  “Not yet. You?”

  He shook his head. “Booze is the least of my problems.” Solemn for just a moment, Seth’s look quickly turned mischievous. “I forgot the most important item.”

  “Which one?”

  “Faculty open house—five o’clock at the library. Be sure to get there early, so you can exchange affectionate recollections with some of your favorite profs.”

  I swore. “There isn’t a member of this faculty who has ever known my name. Maybe we should sneak off to … what was the name of that place?”

  “The Jabberwock. So soon you forget your home away from home.”

  “Actually I always hated that joint. Smelled like kerosene or something.”

  “I think it was mostly the stench from gouging starving students.” Seth looked at his watch again. “I’ve got to make some calls. If I don’t see you at dinner, meet me here at nine? Maybe we can get away from the hubbub and chat for a time. Catch up and all that.”

  “Sure.”

  “And maybe just you? For an hour or so? If he wants to join us, tell Gil we’ll see him at the Jabb at ten.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. See you later.”

  “Right.”

  Seth started to walk away, then paused and looked back, not quite meeting my eyes. “I’ve missed you, Marsh. I wish I’d done something about it a long time ago.”

  “Me, too.”

  “We’ll have to make up for it from here on out.”

  “Right.”

  “Right. Well. See you later.”

  “Yeah. See you.”

  As he hurried off to make his calls, I wondered what was going on, not with the concert or the open house or the panel discussion, but with my friend Seth Hartman.

  THREE

  Suddenly I was alone, deep in the midst of people I’d once envied and avoided, admired and feared, coveted and shunned. It was hard to remember why it had all been so complicated.

  I lugged my bag to my room, decided I’d been in jail cells more inviting, then returned to the common area. As I made my way through the crowd, I was bent on a cup of coffee and an easy exit; luckily, only etiquette prevented me from either.

  Styrofoam in hand, I opted for a stroll among the buildings and through the groves and gates and gardens, to wallow in such memories as bestirred themselves. My route was random and unfocused, a fit with both my current mood and my academic career. The day was partly cloudy, which was a mutual match as well.

  The battered lounge in the student union where I’d wasted eons playing Hearts, the Gothic dorm in which I’d lolled away my senior year, the Bauhaus library where I’d spent too many evenings in resentful deference to the inclinations of the institution, the antique appointments of the Tea Room where we’d flaunted the latest flowering of our brilliance after the library shooed us off—over the next hour I revisited those and other venues, including the chapel I’d haunted the winter of my sophomore year in the grip of a variety of religious experience I hadn’t approximated since.

  It was pleasant enough on an aesthetic level, and the recollections that came and went were not entirely repugnant. The good times had mostly been adventures—forays to other dorms or other schools in search of harmless booty, parties where something poignant or preposterous had occurred, performances where timeless marvels were revealed to my unenlightened mind. The bad times were more memorable because they seemed more searing—goals unachieved, friendships squandered, romances severed, caves of knowledge overlooked or, once explored, forgotten.

  If asked as a freshman, I would have said my goals were simple—I wanted to become witty and intelligent, sophisticated and erudite, philosophical and comical, articulate and ironic. I wanted to know something about everything and everything about something. I wanted to be liked, and I wanted to be loved. Then four years slipped past, and when I said good-bye to all that, I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t know why.

  Despite the rush of memory, the expectancy that spurred my walk, the hope that I would be informed or even altered by the journey, went unrequited. I was visited only by the realization that the life I’d aspired to and the one I was living had only trivial points of congruence, and were in many ways polar opposites. In contrast to the world of reason and restraint toward which my education had directed me, the world in which I lived and worked was marbled with violence and cruelty, jealousy and greed, outrage and addiction, pain and degradation. Which raised the possibility that, at least for me, the time spent on this campus, acquiring a host of misperceptions I still labored to be rid of, was less a blessing than a curse.

  The rose garden was my last stop, the only mise en scène I’d scripted, the only site that needed special notice. I entered the arboretum with reverence, made my way along cool pathways toward its center, then saw that I was not alone.

  As though we were featured players in the sequel to a classic film, with cameras rolling to the rear and grips and gaffers in the underbrush, Libby Grissom stood beside a hybrid tea, at the spot where I’d first dared to voice my feelings for her. Then as now, the moment toyed with time, created fusion and fission simultaneously, compressed the present like a concertina, then stretched it thin like taffy. Short of breath and tingling with uncertainty, I waited for something to happen without knowing what I wanted that something to be.

  Locked in a time dance of her own, her hands flighty at her sides, her eyes fixed on a perfect yellow bloom, Libby didn’t notice me at first. From the expression on her face, the accompaniment to her trance was more a dirge than a minuet. I had no doubt that I was the source of the song.

  She seemed taller than before, perhaps because she was as trim as a rake. Her once-blond hair was now a golden brown; the once-lush locks were chopped to a wedge above her ears and neck. Her clothes were sporty and simple: the running shoes well worn, the shorts tanned just lighter than her slim and muscled legs, her top imprinted with a sassy slogan. Her hands were without adornment other than the dollops of pigment that age deposits; her eyes seemed wayward and unplugged.

  Once again, my impulse was to turn and go, to postpone an encounter until I was armed with quips and counterpunches, until I had reprised our past sufficiently to know where the equities lay and whence the apologies should flow. But a bird flew off, a tree branch trembled, a leaf fell lazily to earth, and Libby’s spell was broken.

  When she turned my way, she trapped me; I was as atremble as a rabbit. “Marsh.” A hand went to her throat. Her eyes were as astonished as the bird’s, then leery as my own. “My God.”

  I waved inanely. “Ms. Grissom.”

  “I didn’t … they told me you weren’t coming.”

  “I didn’t think I was.”

  She shifted left and right, like me in the grip of an urge to flee. “Well. I’m glad you did.”

  “So am I. You look great, Libby.”

  Her laugh was terse and deprecating. “After I decided to come, I doubled my aerobic schedule and lost ten pounds. If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have lost five more.”

  I was flattered but didn’t know what to do about it. “So how are you?” I mumbled, shifting about so avidly I pricked my elbow on a thorn. “I mean, you know, has life been gentle with you and all that?”

  She frowned and looked away, toward the chapel lordly on the hill above us. “It’s not supposed to be, is it? ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ remember?”

  “You always were too literary for your own good. All I meant was, are you happy?”

  A brow lifted as she regarded me the way she had regarded the yellow rose. “Now?” She shrugged. “Not particularly. But I have been, on and off. And I hope to be again.”

  “Is it something you want to talk about?”

  “With you? Here? Now? I don’t think so.” Her smile turned firm, then crumpled. “About a yea
r ago I wanted to talk to you so much it became an obsession. I was hysterical about it for some reason—I got out all the yearbooks and looked at the pictures and dug out all the letters we exchanged the summer before senior year, and, well, it was crazy. Monomania or something. One night I downed three shots of bourbon, then looked up your number and dialed it, then hung up the second you answered. I did it four times in a row before I got control of myself. You must have thought I was the CIA.”

  “I wish you’d persevered.”

  She met my eye. “Then why didn’t you call me?”

  “You’re married. Or were.”

  “That didn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  The exchange revived the taste of our final weeks, when conversation inevitably rose to confrontation, when our views of everything were disparate, when we’d seemed compelled to hurt each other. At the time, I hadn’t understood why we’d suddenly become so alienated, but in retrospect the cause seems simple—we were afraid of what was coming next, and each blamed the other for that fright.

  As I was remembering how hurtful our qualms had made us, Libby tried to lift the mood. “It’s a moot point anyway,” she said airily. “My second divorce was final a month ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be; I’m the one who filed. It’s what I wanted; what I needed, even. It’s just that I still seem to be … ‘reeling’ would be a good way to put it.”

  “Divorce is never easy.”

  She frowned. “I didn’t think you’d married.”

  “I haven’t. But I’m around it a lot. In my work, I mean.”

  Her smile slid toward a sneer, or maybe I was just projecting. “Keyhole peeping.”

  Since I’ve had a lot of practice, I didn’t take offense. “Not quite. But too close for comfort, sometimes.” I scrambled for another subject. “I don’t even know where you live,” I said finally.

  “Baltimore.”

  “Like it?”

  “It has its good points. How about you? Still in San Francisco?”

  “Yep.”

  “Like it?”

  “Less and less.”

  “That’s pretty much true of everywhere, don’t you think? I mean that nowhere is as nice as it used to be?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Though actually Baltimore has gotten better in a lot of ways.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  Irritated at our turn toward irrelevance, Libby took a breath, looked at the rose or maybe at the thorns, then shook her head as though to derail her train of thought. “God. I spent lots of nights hoping this would happen and lots of days praying it wouldn’t. Now here you are, and I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “Me, either.”

  “Maybe we should retire and consider the options.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “And convene later and report our conclusions.”

  “Sounds a lot like independent study.”

  For the first time, her smile was an expression I’d seen before, an expression I’d once cherished. “Right,” she said. “A term paper. ‘Love Later On,’ we could call it. Libby and Marsh, thirty years thereafter.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-nine, actually. We met the first week of freshman year.”

  “Barely.”

  “Barely for you, maybe; I’ve thought about you every day since I drew your name for the sack race during orientation.” She made a face at her hyperbole. “That’s a lie, but the truth’s not far from it.” She shook her head and sighed. “I hope they’ve gotten rid of that sack business. It was very demeaning to women.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for feminism. “When do you want to meet?”

  She shrugged. “Tonight? There’s a dance or something, isn’t there?”

  “Sock hop. Gym.”

  “You don’t seem enthusiastic. But then you never were.”

  “Not about dancing, at any rate.”

  “Not about much of anything, as I remember.”

  “Enthusiasm gets tempered by good sense on occasion,” I rebelled. “How about if we meet by the stadium? The ticket booth.”

  Libby stuck out her tongue. “I know what used to go on in that place, don’t think I don’t. The bleachers by the tennis courts?”

  “Fine.”

  “What time?”

  “I have to see Seth at nine, so … ten-thirty?”

  She nodded. “Ten-thirty’s fine. I’ll take a nap.”

  “Great. See you then.”

  “How’s Seth, by the way?”

  “He seems to have something on his mind.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know; I’ll probably know more when I see you.”

  “So will I,” Libby said simply, then waved good-bye and disappeared behind a hedge, leaving me with a bleeding elbow and an ochre rose and a host of reckless emotions about a woman I hadn’t laid eyes on during the most recent half of my lifetime.

  FOUR

  I wandered back toward my room, my brain stuffed with tufts of memory, my inclination still to abdicate the enterprise so that at least this portion of my past would remain where it had lain for a quarter-century, in a shallow grave from which it could do no further harm. But the past is never truly buried or even truly dead, and part of me still wanted to war with it some more, to make it explain itself more fully so it could in turn explain the present. Since I wasn’t making progress on my own, I detoured to the lounge and found people who held their collegiate experience in sufficient esteem to want to talk about it.

  And so it went for the remainder of the afternoon and early evening. In the garden of his stately home, the president made a subtle but pointed plea for funds. On a more elevated plane, the pianist was worthy of his hire, the poet didn’t show for reasons unexplained but rumored to involve cocaine, the film was blessedly brief, and the futures panel was commandeered into a debate on the Thomas/Hill confrontation and Gil Hayward was hooted from the room.

  The ad hoc ethic of the occasion found me talking volubly to people I’d barely known in the early days, while struggling to chitchat with people I’d once considered friends. Along the way I made small talk with an heir to an oil fortune, a self-styled schizophrenic and a similarly branded genius, a playboy who plied his trade from Buenos Aires, and a woman who’d forsaken pediatrics to farm herbs and spices up in Oregon. Inquiries concerning my own vocation were easily finessed—I think most people thought I was joking when I told them what I did. At one point, I decided I was the only person in the room who didn’t own a house.

  For the most part, discussion was oddly guarded and carefully circumspect, as though we had such glittering reputations to protect that candor was out of the question. Although bubbles of humor and pathos and even profundity surfaced along the way, after eight hours of conviviality the results were mostly disappointing. What I was looking for was perspective, a sense of what people felt about their world and their lives and themselves, but despite the buzz of easy patter and an occasional spike of introspection, I couldn’t get a reading—the more direct the inquiry, the more slippery the evasion. In general, the women seemed happier or at least more open than the men; the men seemed numbed and somewhat cowed, by the occasion or by their lives, it was hard to tell which. Maybe those were simply the types I was drawn to, for reasons of self-defense.

  My basic impression was that twenty-five years hadn’t changed anybody very much, and the evolutionary stasis made me sad—if a good education and twenty-five years of putting it to use had no effect on philosophy or psyche, what was the point of it? What I guess I hoped was that someone would confront me with proof that contrary to the evidence I regularly accumulate in my work, life is both benign and consequential. But if such proof were to be had at the reunion, I hadn’t found it by the end of the evening even though I fancy myself a good detective.

  By the time the dinner speeches were over, I needed a drink more potent than pilsner. Luckily Seth
was waiting in his room when I got there. It took five minutes to realize the dorm wasn’t conducive to communication, so we headed for the local bar.

  When our drinks had come, we toasted each other. “It’s been a long time,” Seth said.

  “Too long.”

  “Why’d we let it get away like that?”

  “Because we live three thousand miles apart, for one thing. Because we’re cowards, for another.”

  “What are we afraid of?”

  “Amending memories,” I suggested, then wondered if Seth regarded our friendship as nearly as hallowed as I did.

  “We should step up the pace,” he was saying. “Schedule a rendezvous from time to time.”

  I recalled my recent humiliation at the bank. “My budget may not have a rendezvous in it for a while.”

  “I could cover your expenses, no problem.”

  “It would be a problem for me.”

  Seth laughed. “Still the noble savage.”

  “More the latter than the former, but I work on it.”

  We drank.

  “So how’s your life, Marsh?” Seth asked, as earnestly as I had inquired the same of Libby. “I mean basically.”

  “Basically it’s good. Not great, but good.”

  “Why not great?”

  “Too lonely, too selfish, too ordinary to be great. But good is good enough. Most days. How about you?”

  “I’ve had my ups and downs.” He quickly reversed the focus. “What’s the best part?”

  “Of my life?” I shrugged. “The fact that I get people out of trouble once in a while, I guess. That I do what I want to do the way I want to do it and make enough money to qualify for Social Security but not so much that I’m tempted to vote Republican.”

  Seth laughed. “I know what you mean—back home I’m considered a traitor to my race and class. I may be the only Caucasian Democrat in town. Me and the mayor,” he amended. “Speaking of which, why don’t you come South with me?”