The Big Sleep: Class Reunion

The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, which was already a bad sign. Tuesdays are when the world sends you bills, medical test results and news that somebody you used to know has died in a particularly undignified fashion.

Rusty Regan, for example. The missing Irishman, General Sternwood’s son-in-law, who was enjoying the big sleep before I even got involved in that whole sordid affair.

Owen Taylor, the Sternwood family chauffeur, found dead in a car in the ocean. Arthur Gwynn Geiger, the pornography dealer and blackmailer murdered in his own house. Harry Jones, a small-town crook who met an unpleasant end at the hands of Lash Canino.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Philip Marlowe’s the name, sleuthing my game. A common man and yet an unusual man. My calling card reads: Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Unfortunately, the type had to be so small to accommodate this mission statement that hardly anyone can read it without the magnifying glass last wielded by Sherlock Holmes.

This case, in any case, was more personal than most. It was an invitation to the 60th reunion of my high school graduating class.

Sixty years. Half a century, with a ten-spot added on for good measure. Long enough for a promising young man to become a disappointing old one. Long enough for your hair to desert you, your knees to file for divorce and your internal organs to begin negotiating separate tariff agreements with the Almighty.

Long enough for the girls who wouldn’t give you the time of day to become matrons and dowagers who wouldn’t give you the time of day without first checking whether you had your hearing aids switched on. You know how they bristle, don’t you Steve? They just put their artificial hips together and sew.

I read the invitation twice. Then a third time, on account of the cataracts.

It was official. There would be dinner, drinks, dancing, a commemorative photograph and an opportunity to renew old friendships.

That last part struck me as particularly ambitious. Most of my old friendships had been declared missing in action sometime before 1950.

Lindsay Marriott, a shady society gigolo and blackmailer whom I knew casually, had been lured into a trap and beaten to death. The life of Roger Wade — an alcoholic author whose psychological unravelling and dangerous ties to my hard-drinking, war-veteran pal Terry Lennox had lured me in — ended in an apparent suicide linked to the dark underbelly of the marriage of the onetime Miss Grundy, that horse-faced English teacher we all had in Grade 11. And so on.

Oh, this was sure stirring up some ghosts for me. I put the invitation down and looked in the mirror.

The mirror looked back with the expression of a man who’d just been handed my case file and discovered there wasn’t enough evidence to convict me of having enjoyed my life.

Still, I decided to go. A man should face his past. Particularly if his past has started collecting Social Security.

The reunion was being held in a hotel ballroom, one of those places with wall-to-wall carpeting, artificial flowers and the dispirited atmosphere of a courtroom where nobody expects a fair trial. There was a banner over the dance floor. BALD EAGLES ’47, or something equally optimistic. I didn’t look too closely. I was busy checking the exits.

There was a bar in the corner. I headed for it.

I have always believed a man should establish a relationship with the bartender before he gets involved with anybody else. The bartender is usually the only person in the room who knows what’s going on, but as time goes on, even he is frequently lying. A song blasted over the PA system.

“Sam,” I said. “I thought I told you never to play …”

The bartender stared at me blankly. “I’m Randy,” he said.

“Of course you are,” I said. From the way he was staring at some of the preening old birds, that much was obvious.

The room was full of people. They were laughing, hugging and exchanging names with the enthusiasm of hostages being reunited with their families.

But for all my heightened powers of observation, I still didn’t recognize a soul. Maybe it was the incipient glaucoma. Maybe the resident bourbon.

As is my wont, I stood near the entrance and took inventory.

There was a short, bald man with a face like a collapsed soufflé. A tall woman with a neck that looked as though it had been installed by a roofing contractor who’d walked off the job halfway through. Two men in expensive jackets were arguing about who was better, Sam Snead or Walter Hagen, although neither appeared physically capable of locating a golf ball without assistance from a search party.

An elderly gentleman was leaning on a cane and wearing a tie that suggested he’d recently lost a bet. His loose belt suggested he was about to lose another one with a snug adult incontinence brief.

I scanned the room again for familiar faces. Nothing. Not even a vague sense of criminal recognition.

I checked my fly. It was halfway open.

At least something was familiar.

Ordered another bourbon.

“Celebrating something?” Randy asked.

“Not yet.”

“Waiting for somebody?”

“”It would seem so.”

He nodded. He’d seen plenty like me before. Men who’d come to a class reunion in a hotel ballroom looking for their lost shaker of salt and found a cash bar instead.

A woman approached. She was wearing a blue dress and a smile that might once have caused traffic accidents but now resembled a single-vehicle rollover. I would have put money on speed and alcohol as contributing factors. She had the sort of face that suggested she’d been a looker in a previous administration. Nero’s maybe.

“Hello, dahling,” she said. “Been absolutely ages.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

She looked me up and down. I was regretting the open fly, but she seemed to have mixed opinions.

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

I took that as a compliment. It was the first one I’d received since a doctor told me my liver was merely enlarged and not, as I’d feared, preparing to receive Holy Orders.

“Neither have you,” I said.

Wrong answer. As I learned later, she’d shed two hundred pounds, acquired a new face and had several ribs removed in the process. I decided not to pursue the matter.

She drifted away, leaving me with the unpleasant feeling that I’d just been interviewed for a job I hadn’t applied for. And been found wanting.

I picked up my name tag. It said HELLO, MY NAME IS, followed by my name in black marker.

I pinned it to my lapel.

This was supposed to solve the problem. It didn’t. Nobody looked at it. Nobody cared. I might as well have been wearing a notice announcing that my prostate was on its last legs and available for parts. Which, by the by, it is.

I decided to try the direct approach.

I found a man standing beside the buffet, examining a tray of shrimp with the concentration of a bank examiner investigating staff embezzlement.

“Remember me?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“Should I?”

“We went to school together.”

“What was your name?”

I told him.

He stared at me for a moment.

“Never heard of you.”

“That’s funny. I never heard of you, either. What are the odds?”

He considered this, then nodded as though we’d successfully resolved an international dispute. But me, I was beginning to suspect something was wrong. Occupational hazard.

A reunion is supposed to be a sentimental affair. People are expected to remember the good old days: football games, dances, teachers, girls, boys, heartbreaks, victories, humiliations and the time somebody set fire to the chemistry lab blinds with a Bunsen burner. Glory days.

The trouble is that after 60 years the memories have gone soft around the edges. The faces are gone. The names have been misplaced. The football heroes look like retired accountants. Half of them are.

The cheerleaders look like they’ve been appointed to a congressional committee investigating stitch n’ bitch needlepoint cozies. The class clowns have mostly stopped laughing, and the people who used to sit at the back of the classroom expelling gas are now sitting at the front of the funeral home. And still expelling gas.

I found a group of men discussing their former classmates.

“Remember Charlie Wilson?” one asked.

“Sure,” said another. “Great guy.”

“Dead.”

“Really?’

“Three years ago.”

“Too bad.”

Then they went back to talking about Palmer and Nicklaus. This was the emotional high point of the evening.

A woman wearing an imitation pearl necklace came over. She had the look of someone who’d spent her life being disappointed by men and was now conducting a retrospective.

“What have you been doing for the past 60 years?” she asked.

“Keeping out of trouble.”

“How nice for you.”

“Mostly.”

She exuded a small, uncertain laugh, like a nuthatch that had flown into a window and was now recalibrating its options.

“Do you have children?”

“Somewhere in the world, I imagine.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

“You’re a funny one.”

“I’ve been called worse. Usually by people with warrants.”

She studied the lines on my face. I must admit I felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the laces of my black leather cap-toe oxfords.

“What’s your name again?”

I muttered something underneath my breath.

She shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Maybe it’s broken.”

She scuttled away like an Italian poet from the 13th century. Possibly to the ninth circle of hell.

I was starting to feel like a man who’d wandered into the wrong saloon and was waiting for somebody to tell him he’d been dead for 20 years.

Then came the photograph.

The reunion organizer, a woman with a clipboard and the air of a prison warden who’d been promoted to parole officer, announced that it was time for the official class picture.

“Everybody gather around!”

People shuffled into position. Some were looking for their spouses. Some were looking for their glasses. One man was looking for his teeth. A woman was looking for her husband, who was standing directly behind her, holding her purse.

I joined the crowd.

A woman beside me asked if I was somebody’s husband.

“No,” I said. “I’m a veteran.”

“Of what?”

“Must have been the Boer War.”

She smiled uncertainly and moved three inches away.

The photographer told us to scooch over. I scooched. She scooched some more.

A man in the second row complained that he couldn’t see. Another said he couldn’t hear. A third couldn’t remember why he was there.

My peeps.

“Could everybody please smile?” the photographer called. A collective expression of mild suffering passed over the room.

“Big smiles!”

I hadn’t seen that many big yellow teeth since Man ’o War went off at 1-5 odds at the Belmont Futurity.

The flash went off.

There we were. Fifty people who had supposedly shared four years of their lives together, frozen in a single photograph, none of us looking particularly certain about the arrangement.

Naturally, I went back to the bar.

Randy had begun to recognize me. This was progress. In another 60 years, he might even remember my name.

I was halfway through another bourbon when the reunion organizer approached. She had the clipboard tucked under her arm and the expression of a woman who’d just discovered a body in the ladies’ room and wasn’t sure whether it belonged to the catering staff.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Could I see your invitation?”

I looked at her.

“Is this about the shrimp?”

I handed her the invitation.

She examined it. Then she examined me. Then she examined the invitation again, as though one of us had been forged.

“You’re from the Class of ’48?”

“So they tell me.”

She looked at the banner over the dance floor.

Then she looked back at me.

“Oh, dear.”

I never liked those two words. They generally precede a confession, a diagnosis or a bill from somebody who doesn’t accept insurance.

“What is it?”

“This is the Class of ’47 reunion.”

I stared at her.

She pointed to the invitation.

I read it again.

There it was. The date. The year. The damning evidence. I’d come a year too early. Story of my life, according to plenty of dames willing to testify to this effect.

For three hours I’d been circulating among strangers, pretending to remember people I’d never met, answering questions from women who thought I was somebody’s husband, and posing for a photograph with a group of people who were wondering why the hotel had allowed a vagrant into the ballroom.

I’d even noshed on the shrimp.

I looked around. The faces were still unfamiliar. The stories were still meaningless. The shrimp were still cold. But now I knew why. Another case solved. A cold case.

“You’re saying I’m not supposed to be here?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Is there a refund?”

She blinked.

“For what?”

“My forfeited youth.”

She didn’t laugh. Former senior pins who grow up to become office managers never do.

The night was cool. The street was empty. Somewhere a siren wailed. I turned up my collar and headed down the street, flagging down the first cab to appear.

The driver took one look at me. “Long night?”

“Sixty years.”

He pulled into traffic.

I settled back and closed my eyes.

There would be another reunion next year. Another ballroom. Another bartender named Randy. Another opportunity to discover that the people who’d once known me best couldn’t remember me at all. Nor I them.

I was looking forward to it. Or possibly having a colonoscopy. At our age, there isn’t much of a difference.