Giving Back (Guest Post)

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Alas_my_lost_love_by_CountElmo

“Ricks! Come on in! Jeez, you look good. Forty years are not a day, or whatever it is. How’ve you been?”

John Ricketts gave the man a bear hug. “Damn, it’s good to see you.”

“Likewise, and double. The turnout’s pretty good, and we’re still a quarter of an hour before it’s supposed to start. This is going to be a great time.”

Ricketts agreed and, feeling a catch in his breathing, scanned the room.

“Mrs. Ricketts. couldn’t make it?”

“Nope. Minor surgery last week. She said she didn’t feel up to it.”

“Oh, man, that’s too bad. I wanted to meet the woman who taught you to eat with a knife and fork.”

“Got pictures, though.”

Ricketts pulled an envelope from his pocket.

The other man looked wide-eyed at the picture of Ricketts’ wife. “You did ‘way better than you deserve. You know that?”

There were pictures of tall, impressive sons flanked by the kind of wives tall, impressive men frequently attract.

“They’re even bigger than you. “

The gravely smiling daughter and her husband rated a comment, and then there was the granddaughter.

She’d been born with a profusion of ash blonde hair which, not characteristic of infants, she’d kept. Her mouth was perfect with a hint of a cupid’s bow. Brows arched over eager, smiling eyes which looked through the camera into the viewer’s reverent gaze.

“Good God almighty! She’s not seeing anybody just now, is she?”

“Remember rugby?”

“Oh, yeah. Right, Rick. I don’t really go for one-year olds. Truly.”

Ricketts laughed. “I’ll have more trouble than you in a few years.”

“You can bank on that. Hey, I’ve got to talk to the caterer. The committee has some old pictures at the other end. Few of us have aged. Except the guys who went into the academic world. All that thinking marks a guy. They look awful. That’s probably why you seem so young.”

Ricketts stopped to greet several classmates, recognizing a surprising number of them but finding it hard to put a name to a face. “Getting old,” he thought.

Pictures of the graduating class in their various activities on and off campus, in and out of school, were set up on tables across one end of the room. He sought for pictures of the rugby team, the only winning team the college had had during his senior year. He found a pair of pictures, including him standing in the rear, smiling and triumphant. He presumed it must have been after they had taken the league.

At the extreme left was a poster board with only one picture. It was a snapshot of a woman standing in the in the shallow end of a swimming pool. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. She was smiling at the camera. It was a brilliant smile, open, happy, and defenseless. Her aristocratic features told how delighted she was to see the person taking the picture. Or so it seemed to Ricketts. She seemed neither conscious nor self-conscious of her spectacular figure, a mood Ricketts had rarely encountered.

“That’s my smile,” he swore to himself. “Mine. She smiled at me like that. Sometimes.”

He stared, feeling as if he might be sick.

“When you start as friends, it usually doesn’t go anywhere.”

He looked around at the speaker. Yes. Marilyn Snethwick, a small, moderately attractive woman. He recalled thinking she’d seen more and said less about what she saw than anybody he’d ever met, then or later. And one way she saw was to cheat in conversation.

After her statement, Ricketts remarked, “I’ve heard that.” in a tone which, he thought, sounded surprisingly controlled and casual.

Then, of course, it was up to her to respond. But she didn’t. She was silent, waiting, just as a psychiatrist might do. And her conversational partners, tumbling into the silence, found themselves explaining whatever they had said in far more detail than they would later think had been wise. It rarely failed. Ricketts wondered briefly if it was a deliberate tactic or if she had, instead, been inadequately taught human interaction.

Given his emotional turmoil, he felt he would have a better chance of covering himself if he forged ahead. As in judo. “You want to go that way,” he thought to himself, “so we’ll go.”

“Yeah. After we graduated, I decided to charge into life. I worked at my job like three men, and I did terrifically well. I did white-water rafting, solo mountain climbing, and sky diving. Women seemed to like me. A lot.”

Snethwick looked up at him with a casual, sideways glance. She continued to say nothing.

“But after a while it seemed there had to be more to life than first-rate quarterly reviews, adrenalin rushes and squealing women. I know it wouldn’t look like that from the outside,” he noted she smiled at that, “but it’s true. I saw that Sarah, who was a friend of a friend, was having a good life without being crazy. So we got crazy together for a while. Then we settled down. That almost killed it, but she got used to me not being crazy. “

“But I don’t think she liked me very much, there at the start.”

“I think I, or some of us, saw that crazy in you before you graduated.”

“Yeah. When I was in the process of settling down, it felt as if I’d tamped something down before, and I remembered. I could have been a lot of trouble on campus.”

Snethwick was silent.

“Might have been a lot of fun to watch, from a distance,” he said.

Snethwick was silent.

“Hey, can I get you a drink?”

He wanted to leave the picture, which was burning in his breastbone, before she did and left him alone mooning at the picture of a fabulously beautiful woman in a bathing suit barely adequate for going out in public. Left him looking at his one-time friend by himself in front of scores of old classmates.

“Port,” said Snethwick.

He decided her odd conversational pattern was a matter of poor socialization. He wondered if she ever wondered why people spilled their guts to her day after day. At least she kept it to herself, or if she did not, he’d never heard.

He got through the cocktail portion of the evening wonderfully well, he thought, considering he was looking at the entire thing as through a fog bank.

Dinner was better, there being several conversations to keep track of at any one time.

At about dessert, somebody asked, “Anybody know what Al McQuinn’s up to?”

“He was killed overseas about twenty years ago,” said another man, “so I heard from a guy in his fraternity.”

The diners were silent. That generation knew the construction “killed overseas” was, by custom, reserved for military issues. They subtracted twenty years from the present date and tried to think of any war that might have been happening.

A woman asked if anybody knew what happened.

“Rolled his Humvee,” said the first man.

“Crap,” said another, “that’s an excuse. You can’t roll one of those puppies. Maybe today, with the armor and a power turret up top to raise the center of gravity. But not then. He was poking around in the dark places. But they can’t say.”

“You know this? About the Humvee, I mean,” Ricketts asked.

“Yeah. I drove one. It will go sideways across a forty percent slope.” He held his hand up, slanted sideways at a severe angle. “Nobody with an ounce of sense would go sideways across a forty percent slope, but if you had to, you could. To be more accurate, it would be tough to make yourself do it, it’s so steep. And if it can do that, you can’t roll it. He may have rolled it by going ‘way outside the parameters, but he wouldn’t have done that without being in contact. And if he got killed rolling it, somebody shot him just to make sure.”

“Damn,” said several of Ricketts’ classmates. Some of them, at least, were aware that America was, for better or worse, “poking around in the dark places” as the man with the Humvee experience said.

A woman who seemed sadder than she might have been on learning of the demise of an acquaintance two decades earlier said, “I thought he’d be going places, in a different sense. He always seemed to have things in hand, cheerful and competent and unhurried and unworried.”

“I know,” said the man who’d told them of the soldier’s death. “When I was starting on my term papers, he’d be stapling his final drafts together and heading off for the professors’ offices. He was always ahead of things.”

“I’m like that, once in a while,” said a man who’d been quiet until then. “It’s pretty neat. Sort of like being invited to go from coach to VIP business class on an airline. It’s a hell of a lot easier to maintain being ahead than to be playing catch-up all the time. Which I usually do.”

“Another one like that,” said the woman who’d been unaccountably subdued at hearing of McQuinn’s fate, “was Susan Bennington. Always ahead of the situation. Never worried. Got things done. Top ten percent of the class, too.”

“Top five percent,” said another woman. “I worked in the academic dean’s office. I did the math.”

Ricketts noted, as from a hazy distance, that Snethwick had stopped at the table and was listening. She spoke a longer sentence than many of them had heard from her. “Bennington was on my floor our sophomore year. She used to get up and work two hours on Saturday mornings.”

One of the men stared. “The least-used time of our entire college experience is Saturday morning. And she was using it. No wonder she was on top of things. Didn’t hurt to have an IQ of four hundred or something, either.”

“It wasn’t all good,” one of the women said. “She was so beautiful that it was a problem. Especially her figure. That’s why she seemed so standoffish. It was as if she were saying ‘Don’t even think it.’ With her expression and her voice and her gaze. Things have to be tough, or, I don’t know, maybe difficult, for a woman to develop that kind of self-presentation.”

“Hey, Ricks,” said the man who’d been so informative about the Humvee, a subject Ricketts had entirely forgotten by this time, “you were friends with her. Wasn’t she okay with friends?”

Ricketts wrenched himself into a kind of normalcy. “Um, yeah. I suppose,uh, yeah. She was fine when we were together. You know. Smiling and cheerful. Talkative. Not defensive.”

“That’s because you took care of that stalker,” said one of the women, “ and we all thought that was a great thing. Those guys creep out all women, no matter who they’re chasing.”

“Um, I talked to him,” Ricketts said.

“ ‘I talked to him’ the man says and then the guy leaves school and town altogether.”

Ricketts had an urge to take his hands off the table. Several of the other s seemed, he thought, to be staring at his hands, big and competent, as if there were more to the stalker story than just a warning and that the hands could tell it.

One of the men said, “I bet she was grateful,” in an insinuating tone. Ricketts looked at him for just one moment too long for politeness. The man dropped his eyes. “I didn’t tell her. I heard she found out about it from somebody else. But I don’t know because she never said anything.”

“She should have,“ a woman said, “ It’s not a small thing.”

Ricketts shrugged.

“Okay, it’s small for you. But it’s a big thing for women, for a woman. And that’s what counts.”

Ricketts shrugged again. “You’re right about it being a minor issue for me. But I’d have been embarrassed if she thanked me. I’d have felt as if I were being over thanked or something. That makes me nervous.”

Ricketts found he was sweating. He stopped talking.

“McQuin was a success,” said the man who’d mentioned their friend’s death, “and Susan isn’t.”

“Success? Hell, man, he got killed.”

Ricketts, looking at his hands and remembering conflict, didn’t see who spoke.

“Yeah, he did. But he wouldn’t have been in that position if he hadn’t been good. I mean, really good. And he wouldn’t have been there if he hadn’t wanted to be. Everybody dies.”

“So, Susan,” said one of the women.

“I ran into her younger brother a couple of years ago at the varsity club alumni reunion. He played football four or five years behind us.”

Ricketts was listening with complete intensity, absolutely still.

“She met a guy after we graduated. They got married. He was cheating from the beginning.”

The table was silent as the diners looked down and formulated their various versions of “He what? He didn’t want to come home to that?”

“The divorce was final right about what would have been their first anniversary.”

“If it’s that fast,” one of the women said, “everybody but Susan must have known ahead of time he was no good. And told her.”

“Anyway, she’s been in longish relationships with a couple of guys, dated some, and not, but mostly been alone. And not happy.”

Ricketts noticed that one of the women was looking at him with what might have been reproach. He could think of no reason for it, and the question was overwhelmed by a savage satisfaction whose appearance stunned him.

“Maybe you should have talked, as you put it, to that guy, Ricks.”

Ricketts noted that the woman who’d been looking at him strangely, possibly as if blaming him, shook her head as if disagreeing with the idea.

“Would you,” he said, trying to shift attention from himself, “try to change a woman’s choice of whom to marry? That would be a parent’s thing, and even then they shouldn’t do it. Probably drive their kid closer to the other person, rather than do any good warning. Besides, would you have listened to me? I mean about a potential spouse.”

“Wasn’t talking about her. It was about running the guy off.”

“Crap,” said a man, “that stuff was forty years ago. What I can’t figure is what happened to her that she couldn’t find a good guy among the million or so who must have been doing backflips for her attention.”

The table was silent for a moment.

Then a woman spoke up, with a hint of a quiver in her voice, “Speaking of years ago and not being able to figure. Can you picture the McQuinn you knew sneaking through the dark like a, a panther, his face intent on killing? I can’t. He was just too…regular a guy. I don’t know.”

The man who’d originally mentioned McQuinn’s fate sat up and spoke angrily, “That’s just it. Regular guys know that that stuff has to be done. So the best of them do it. And they have the capacity. Don’t let cheerful college days fool you.”

“I’ve been to cheerier wakes,” somebody said, “this is a reunion.”

The woman who had been watching Ricketts since the discussion of Susan Bennington’s later years left the table. Snethwick took her seat.

“She liked you,” Snethwick said.

Ricketts’ gut twisted. “We were friends,”. Snethwick would know. If anybody did.

Snethwick looked down at her drink and smiled slightly.

“Should have said something.”

Ricketts drank coffee during the post-dinner cocktail session. He needed to be able to drive home and he didn’t want to start babbling, almost certainly about Susan Bennington. Especially if it were to Snethwick.

He thought about it for a week. He decided he could hide it by sending the email to half a dozen of his classmates who hadn’t attended, among them Susan, telling them how the evening had gone. And, just for the fun of it, including a few pictures of his family. Who wouldn’t take the opportunity?

The body of the message, which took several days to perfect, was cheery and gossipy. He ribbed several of the recipients about one or another mildly unfortunate incident they would probably recall.

And he attached pictures. He included the pictures he’d taken to the reunion, and a dozen more besides. He made it a point to send what one of his sons called “The Miracle Picture”.

“Dad, the camera sometimes screws up. Sometimes it favors a person. But, in this one, all three look really, really great. Hollywood couldn’t do that without makeup specialists and lighting and all that other stuff. “

The camera had indeed befriended Ricketts’ wife, daughter, and perfect granddaughter. They looked good and their personalities were apparent in their smiles.

Ricketts’ son had not referred to the background. By some trick, possibly a miracle, of framing and lighting, the polished wood and the corner of the fieldstone fireplace spoke of baronial splendor.

Ricketts lived in a nice home. Indeed, it could easily be said to be a very nice home. It did not, as the picture hinted, resemble the set for yet another Masterpiece Theatre production of life in the stately homes of England.

That was fine with Ricketts.

He insured that the pictures were set to go as an attachment. Then he moved the cursor around the “SEND” button. “If her situation is as explained and if it’s the thought that counts, this is the vilest thing I have ever done. Why am I doing it?”

He sent the message.

Within a few days, several of the recipients had responded, thanking him for fleshing out the reunion committee’s report.

Susan was last. She thanked him as the others had. Then she said, “I take the pictures in the spirit in which they were sent.” She named two women with whom Ricketts had had a dating relationship which went nowhere, for no reason he could now recall. “These women and I were members of the Move On From Ricketts Club. To join, you had to say that you found Ricketts too dim to take yes for an answer, and you’d moved on.”

“You fool.”

“Best. Susan.”

“P.S. Marilyn returned the picture. ”

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