A Farewell to Legs (3 page)

Before a fistfight could break out, I gestured to
Mahoney. Stephanie was walking away. Mahoney bit his lower lip, but
walked over to us anyway.

“Well, look who it is,” said Wharton. “Jerry
Mahogany.”

“Knucklehead Smiff,” Mahoney answered, completing
the ritual. The reference to the
Paul Winchell Show
was a
long-standing bit between the two of them. They didn’t shake hands,
but nodded at each other.

I recognized about twenty percent of the people in
the room, and discounting for spouses, that still gave me a
woefully low batting average. No one approached us—and I almost
gave a long-lost-friend greeting to a man who turned out to be the
bartender.

Still, the four of us—Mahoney, Friedman, Wharton and
Tucker (that’s me)—managed to create a mini-reunion in our corner
of the room. Old jokes, half-forgotten, were dragged out and given
one more road test. Stories that were three-quarters forgotten (at
least by me) were retold and embellished. Facts were disputed,
opinions dismissed, and current lives and families, not to mention
the past quarter century, completely ignored. And when Alan
McGregor was spotted walking through the door, our mini-group was
complete.

Mahoney, who had jump-started his sense of humor and
assumed his customary court jester role, bellowed from across the
room: “McGregor!” Heads turned. No one cared. McGregor reddened a
bit, but walked over to us, smiling.

McGregor is about the same height as Mahoney, but
not as muscular. He looks more like Clark Kent, and less like
Superman.

In our group, no one member was more important than
the rest, but it wouldn’t have been “Us” without McGregor. He
provided the humanity in a gang of four who would have gone for the
throat for the sake of a joke had he not been present. He also held
his own, providing puns that would send lesser men running from the
room.

He had barely caught up with the rest of the group
(wife, three kids, some sort of financial job I didn’t understand)
when I spotted a short, trim woman with casually coiffed brown hair
standing by herself in a corner, nursing a ginger ale. I must have
gasped audibly, because Mahoney turned in her direction, and broke
into the nastiest grin I’d seen on his face in six months.

“Gail Rayburn,” he said, and the whole group turned
first to her, then to me. I felt like my face was giving off heat
beams. And they were enjoying my discomfort immensely.

Gail Rayburn, who had been considered something of a
hot number during our tenure at Bloomfield High, had inexplicably
decided one week during our senior year to make me her pet project.
She found me at a party at Bobby Fox’s house, seduced me in some
subtle way the beer wouldn’t allow me to remember (like saying
“come here”), and then given me my first—and to date, last—hickey,
a 24-karat beauty that I’d worn proudly for close to a week. She
had, of course, then moved on to someone else, leaving me to look
foolish, which was not unusual for me in high school, and continues
to be not unusual for me to this day.

“You ought to go over and say hello,” said
Wharton.

“Too bad you’re not wearing a turtleneck,” Friedman
added. “Your wife might find out.”

“Don’t go over,” McGregor chimed in. “You don’t want
to stick your neck out.”

I looked at Mahoney. “Why’d we come to this thing,
again?” I asked.

“
I’m
having a good time,” he said. It
occurred to me that he’d started having a good time when I started
being the object of ridicule, but hey, what are best friends
for?

I assessed them carefully. “I can do better than
this group,” I said, and walked to where Gail was standing.

On my way, I noticed Stephanie standing among five
or six ex-jocks desperately trying to suck in their guts. If you
squinted, it was like a football huddle in
Playboy
. Except
that Stephanie was dressed. Mostly.

Gail Rayburn, on the other hand, was completely
dressed, and, at 43, gave the appearance of someone who was less a
hot number (although still attractive) and more a moderately
successful entrepreneur. She still had a figure she could show off,
but had chosen not to do so, and was wearing her nametag on the
lapel of a suit jacket. The tag read, “Gail Armstrong
(Rayburn).”

“Gail,” I said, and she smiled, somewhat gratefully.
I hoped I also noticed a flicker of recognition in her eye.

“Aaron Tucker,” she said after a moment. “It’s good
to see you.”

She reached over and hugged me. Yes, the figure was
still there. But it was a friendly hug, and I appreciated it as
that.

“I’m glad you remember me,” I told her.

“Of course I do,” Gail said. “You were the nicest
guy in the class.”

“In high school,” I told her, “that generally means
you’re the one who gets the least. . .”

“Hickeys?” she asked, and we both laughed. I glanced
over at the guys I’d left, and they were all looking at us, with
adolescent grins on their faces. Gail raised her ginger ale to them
in a toast. McGregor reddened and looked away.

“It’s twenty-five years later, and I still haven’t
lived that down,” I said.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

“Not really.” Out of the corner of my ear, I heard a
cell phone ring. Stephanie, at the center of the huddle, reached
into her purse (she couldn’t possibly have had pockets in that
outfit) and pulled out a phone.

“You looked so cute with that thing on your neck,”
Gail continued. “You should have been fighting girls off after
that.”

“Was that why you did it?” I asked. “I’ve often
wondered. You just picked me out of the crowd. Were you trying to
see if you could change my reputation?”

She laughed. “I just did it because I felt like it,”
she said. “I was cementing
my
reputation. Your reputation
didn’t need any help. You were always the one with the most
integrity, the one who never compromised his principles.”

It was my turn to laugh. “It’s easy not to betray
your ideals,” I said, “if nobody ever asks you to.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You believed in things,
and you stuck to them. You never did anything you thought was
wrong. You had integrity.”

“Where’s my tape recorder when I need it?”

It was then that Stephanie made a sound that can’t
actually be described accurately. A cross between a cough and a
groan, it was something primal, and every head in the room turned
toward her, wondering if a wild animal had been let loose in the
room.

She was standing, holding the cell phone, but not
next to her ear. She was staring at it in her hand, as if the phone
itself, and not someone on the other end, had just told her
something she couldn’t comprehend. Stephanie dropped the phone,
then picked it up. One of the jocks tried to say something to her,
but she waved him off and started toward the door.

The way to the door was right past where Gail and I
were standing. Stephanie started to barrel past us, but I grabbed
her arm. “Steph. . .” I said.

She didn’t look at me. I’m not sure she was actually
talking to me.

“My husband,” she said. “My husband
is. . . somebody killed him.”

Gail gasped. A couple nearby turned their heads
away, asking each other if either knew what she meant. I maneuvered
myself into Stephanie’s line of sight.

“Somebody killed your husband? As
in. . .”

“Murder,” she said. “That’s what the police
said.”

“Are they sure it was him? Maybe. . .”

She laughed, not a merry laugh. “It was him, all
right,” she said, avoiding my gaze again. “Everybody in Washington
knows Louis Gibson.” And she just kept walking, right out the
door.

I looked at Gail. “Should I go after her?”

“Why? Are you guys really good friends?”

I thought about that. “No,” I said. “Before tonight,
I hadn’t seen her in years.”

Mahoney beckoned me from across the room. He was
pointing into the bar, which was adjacent to the banquet hall.
There was a television over the bar, which normally this time of
year might be showing a baseball playoff game. This time, a news
report seemed to be on, and Mahoney was pointing to it.

“Is that her husband? Is that. . .?”

I looked at the face on the screen, which was
identified as that of Louis Gibson. I was too far away to hear what
was being said, but the inevitable crawl underneath the face
indicated that this Gibson guy was the head of some political
lobbying group in D.C. Mahoney walked to my side.

“Look at him,” he said. “He lost his hair, put on
some pounds, but he’s the same asshole.”

Louis Gibson. It took me a while, because we had
never used that name.

We always called him “Crazy Legs.”

“
C
razy Legs?” Abby was on
the floor in my office/our family room, doing stretching exercises.
After the brouhaha at the reunion, Mahoney and I had left early, so
I actually made it home before my wife had gone to bed, and filled
her in on the melodrama.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m not really sure
who gave him the nickname. I think it was Friedman, but he denies
it.”

“You guys never actually use each other’s first
names, do you?” She lay down on the floor and began doing pelvic
thrusts toward the ceiling. Wearing a pair of running shorts and a
light blue T-shirt, she was making it difficult for me to
concentrate on the evening’s bizarre events.

“It would be considered disrespectful,” I said.
“Anyway, I think we ended up calling him ‘Crazy Legs’ because he
was the least ‘Crazy Legs’ person we’d ever met, and besides, it
pissed him off.”

“Always a. . . plus in your. . .
social circles,” said my wife, thrusting harder now.

“You have no idea what you’re doing to me right
now,” I told her.

“What makes. . . you think. . .
I don’t?”

“You know, I did get home earlier than expected,” I
pointed out. No sense wasting a perfectly good opportunity.

She got up and immediately bent at the waist,
touching the floor in front of her with her palms, stretching her
hamstrings. “A friend’s husband, a guy you actually know, is
murdered, and you’re spending all your energy trying to proposition
your own wife. That’s sad and flattering at the same time.”

“I can’t help it. Your legs can take my mind off of
anything, except your. . .”

We both started, and looked up, when the doorbell
rang. It was after eleven, and our doorbell
never
rings
after eleven. It hardly ever rings
before
eleven. And at
this hour, you could almost certainly rule out the Jehovah’s
Witnesses. Abby stood up, and pointed to the door, as if I didn’t
know what that bell going off in our living room might have
meant.

I went to the door, cursing the fact that we have
neither a peephole nor a door chain. For all I knew, Hannibal
Lecter was standing on my doorstep, but a strange fear of insulting
my guest would keep me from checking on his intention to eat my
liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Being civil has its
costs.

On the way, I tried to see through the divide
between the drapes on our front window, but the BMW parked in front
of our house was unfamiliar. I wondered what Hannibal was driving
these days.

Turned out, it didn’t matter. I opened the door, and
Stephanie Jacobs Gibson was standing there, still in the
gasp-inducing clothes she had worn at the reunion. Her face,
however, was a little wan, and seemed freshly damp on both
cheeks.

“Steph,” I said, more loudly than was necessary.
Across the room, Abby was already sizing up the competition. As if
anyone could compete with Abby.

“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Stephanie said. “I wanted
to call, but I didn’t know if that would wake the kids, or if you’d
be awake, and then I needed to go somewhere, so I got out your
business card. . .”

“Come on in,” said Abby. I stepped aside to let that
happen, then closed the door behind Stephanie. Abby walked to her,
took her hand, and introduced herself. My wife has roughly
seventeen times the social skills that I have.

I got Stephanie a beer, at her request, and we sat
in the living room, Steph and Abby on the sofa, and me on the floor
facing them, backed up to the entertainment center, an imposing
piece of furniture Abby and I have dubbed “The Monolith.”

“I’m so sorry to hear what happened,” Abigail
started. “You must be. . .”

“Shocked,” Stephanie cut her off. “I’m shocked. But
I’m not heartbroken. I’m not even sure I’m sorry.”

Abby and I took a minute to pretend we weren’t
looking at each other, but Stephanie noticed.

“Don’t get me wrong, I never wished him dead,” she
said. “But things hadn’t been good between Louis and me for a long
time. He had affairs. A lot of them.”

I coughed, because it gave me time to think.
Stephanie offered me a sip of her beer, but I shook my head. If I
drink anything after nine o’clock, it’ll be followed by a Maalox
chaser before bed. “I never knew you were married to
Cra. . . to Louis.”

Stephanie grinned. “It’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “I
know you called him Crazy Legs. Even though I never knew why.”

Abby stood up and walked to me, put a hand on top of
my head, the way you would with a little boy who’d just done
something precocious. “Aaron never knew why, either,” she told
Steph. “He explained it to me, and I still don’t know why.” They
shared an “oh, those men” look.

“How’d you end up married to Legs, anyway?” I asked,
trying to shift the conversation away from me as the stereotypical
man.

Stephanie stopped grinning and stared into the neck
of her beer bottle for a moment. “Well, we dated a couple of times
senior year after I broke up with Michael. I didn’t think much of
it, but Louis. . . well, Louis was persistent. Anyway,
after graduation, I went to Montclair State, back before it was a
university, and Louis went to NYU. So he’d come over, or I’d go
into the city, and after a while, it got to be a regular
thing.”