We had not seen each other since the 12th grade, 30 years ago, when both of us were slim, dark-haired and unlined. And single, of course, and poor. Now one of us was well-to-do and still attractive, and the other one scraping by and looking more worn than 47 years of living should have caused. But we had once been very close and it affected both of us to be here like this now and see the changes in each other.
We had eyed each other since yesterday, when the reunion began with a picnic in a park, but we hadn`t spoken until now, at the dance in the hotel. We hadn`t sought, either one of us, to be together like this, in a quiet eddy of the lively current of music and laughter about us, but had somehow drifted into it like pieces of flotsam after a storm. Or, perhaps, unconsciously, we had both wanted it.
I had been returning from ”powdering my nose.” He had gone to get another drink for his wife, who, bored and pouty, had already had too many.
THE EYES STILL HAVE IT
One thing that hadn`t changed were his eyes, the leaping light in them. Nor, as he told me, my quick, irrepressible smile.
”Well,” we both said, as if we were a little out of breath.
”Connie. Thirty years have gone by and you haven`t changed,” he lied.
”Will.” I took him in, his blue gaze that, once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, had made my knees weak.
”You have,” I said. ”You`ve gotten so much better.”
”You`re lying,” he said, balancing his wife`s drink, ”but thanks. We really lost touch, didn`t we? My father died, and Mother moved, and I took a job on the West Coast. But you know, I still have your name in my address book. I keep transferring it.”
”Not really!” I laughed, remonstrating with him as I had used to do.
IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH
I could feel the smile fade a little from my face. ”Tell me, Will, how have you been, really?”
He looked over my head for a moment at the blur of the room and I looked at his chin, under which, at a dance, my head had used to fit so well.
”I can`t complain,” he said. ”Oh, you said `really.` ”
I thought I detected a note of bitterness in his voice.
”I wish right now we were back in high school, with our lives ahead of us, and we could do it all over again,” he said, and let his eyes show whatever I could read in them.
I was silent for a moment. Then I said, ”I wonder how our lives would`ve been different.”
We both stared out at our graying, paunchy, aging classmates, dancing with each other, their heads thrown back, laughing.
I was thinking, ”Poor Will. Lucky me.”
And in his mind was, I suspect, the nagging but far from unpleasant thought that he had to, positively could not wait to, get back to his wife. –
