The quintessential class reunion anxiety: here's this grinning, ruddy-cheeked guy, distinctly middle-aged, poking a chummy hand in my direction, calling my name out over the cocktail roar. Wanting to know how I'm doing these days.
For the life of me, I can't remember who he is. I scan his chest for a name tag, but don't find it. Perhaps, like me, he's one of those defiant souls who refuses to wear one, thinking them childish and embarrassing.
There's a mischievous glint in his small, probing eyes. The bullish posture and world-weary expression, that broad New York accent all stir some faint memory. But his nondescript attire, jacket and tie, gives nothing away. Is he genuinely glad to see me, or just mocking an old familiar target?
A medley of '70s' pop tunes continues to wash over the lamplit patio, augmenting the din. The crowd mills around brimming buffet tables, and coils into desultory conversational knots. Still I can't quite complete the connection. Can't recognize the expectant face. Some synapse isn't firing. I've always cringed at the notion of class reunions, and this is just one more reason, I tell myself. Less than a quarter of one's classmates ever show. And it's never the ones you want to see. No old-time chums, lost to the rolodex. Still less the campus idols you admired from afar.
No, I have convinced myself the ones who infallibly attend are the bores, bullies and windbags whom memory has blessedly effaced, but who now rematerialize like graveyard ghouls to flaunt their dazzling curricula vitae and opulent lifestyles.
The geeky computer nerd has become a software tycoon with a bombshell bride and a corporate Lear jet. The waspish wallflower is now taut, tan and tailored, with a venture capitalist husband, a townhouse on the Île St. Louis and three perfect blond children who take ski lessons at Gstaad.
And, boy, are they eager to fill you in on every tedious detail.
Or else you find yourself alone in the midst of an unfamiliar mob, a featureless commuter on a subway platform, wondering how you managed to matter so little, to make so faint an impression, at a time when your young destiny seemed the most important project in the universe.
This was my cynical appraisal when I tossed the first reunion solicitation into the trash can. But I had to admit it said more about my own social defects and defensiveness than the alumni function itself.
Half a lifetime beyond their undergraduate careers, most of my peers had reached their zenith of accomplishment, their golden plateau. Fat stock portfolios and Christmas-card families.
My own position seemed more muddled, less enviable -- certainly less presentable on paper. I'd had two happy long-term relationships since my college days, but was unmarried and had no children. My first partner had been a man (not something easily confided to my former frat buddies), now I lived with a woman 10 years my junior. Was I confused? Not in the least, but my life seemed to be.
I'd found middling success as a magazine editor, a sometime academic and a high-priced marketing consultant. But I'd been forced to close my business earlier this year by a corrosive neurological disease that had put me in a wheelchair and raised the specter of an early mortality. However, my early retirement (what else to call it?) had given me time for the reading, writing and teaching I cared about most and had long neglected. A blessing in disguise, perhaps. I had a comfortable house, a burgeoning garden. I continued to travel.
My life found no equivalent in the patternbook of the alumni magazine's Class Notes. I flattered myself that this made me interesting. I feared it made me a freak.
That was the problem with class reunions, I reasoned. Not just my problem, but a universal dilemma. And that was why so many people shunned these events. A real life is far too complex to convey to a roomful of quasi-strangers in the course of an hour or two. Yet our bond, however attenuated, was too authentic to travesty with some airbrushed palaver.
I remembered the electric moment in Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill when the frustrated housewife, played by JoBeth Williams, hears her former college flame, now a network star, confess to the gaping emptiness behind his public relations facade.
JoBeth has just finished mechanically reciting the comforts and consolations of her married life. Now she looks disconcerted. "Oh, we're telling the truth?" she tartly remarks, acknowledging that the rules have suddenly changed.
I was dreading just such a challenge. From one vantage point, I'd be gloating over blessings the years had bestowed on me, picking out classmates who'd suffered an early and obvious decline, like the drooping stalks in an otherwise healthy floral arrangement. But in relation to the best-manicured lives in my peer group, I'd be feeling the pinprick of envy, coveting their unmerited ease and prosperity. Above all, I didn't want to be the token gimp, belt-level in the teeming throng, object of sympathetic clucks or unconscious shivers of distaste.
Any response I or my old friends might engender in each other promised to be ignoble and egocentric, or even worse: pathetic. A 20th reunion seemed calculated to bring out the worst in us.
So I declined, at least initially.
As it happened, though, the event organizer was one of my oldest, dearest friends, part of the priceless harvest I'd taken away from college in those years when the soul is most ardent and least armored. Since Val is a close neighbor these days, she'd had ample opportunity to upbraid me for my negativity and persuade me to reconsider.
"Get over it," she told me. "One way or another, we all feel the way you do."
In the end, I caved in.
So there I was on the reunion patio, scrutinizing the lamplight, the crudites and the fellow with the outstretched palm, whom, after a few more moments of embarrassed silence, I did manage to place.
Stanford in Italy, Villa San Paolo, sophomore year.
Don hadn't really changed much. The shaggy hippie locks had been trimmed back sometime before biz school, and he'd ditched the torn overalls and head bandanna that had made him look like a ticket hawker at a Jerry Garcia concert.
Today he worked on Wall Street, lived in lower Manhattan, had a family, two kids. He looked a little drawn and harried, a hazard of his trade I guess. But he'd retained the merry prankster quality that had made him unofficial captain of the bad-boy squad during that memorable Florentine winter.
A flood of disconnected images drifted to the surface of consciousness, like warm oil pooling on a sheet of water. Midnight wine bars in a cobbled piazza. Chianti and bruschetta at a Tuscan country inn. Fiat races down hairpin hill roads. Motorbike expeditions on Elba. The obligatory Oktoberfest debauch in Munich.
Don had traveled with a pretty fast pack, six or seven guys hell-bent on adventure, sometimes raunchy, always provocative. There were run-ins with police, tussles with hookers, liberal quantities of drugs and alcohol. American youth running wild in those golden, affluent, wholly unrecoverable Wanderjahre.
Some of the adventures came to me by hearsay, some were doubtless the product of defective memory or hyperactive imagination. For some, I'd hovered on the awestruck periphery. Don wasn't always the ringleader, often wasn't involved at all. But for me, he was a kind of paragon, someone more daring, irreverent and worldly than I could ever be.
At a time when I was riddled with insecurity and ill at ease in any group, I'd figured he regarded me as a straight-laced prig. Which is why it amazed me now, as other voices crowded into our conversational circle, to overhear him telling my girlfriend quite a different, more charitable story. Incredibly, it appeared, he hadn't felt contempt for me at all. Had even admired me.
Or perhaps he'd just forgotten.
I'd never seen Don again. Years after our common graduation, he confided, he'd spotted someone who looked like me running in Central Park, but the context was so unexpected he hadn't shouted a greeting. It was me, of course, several life changes later, living on the Upper West Side.
I was aerobically obsessed then, in the fashion of the time, training for my weekly half marathon, physically transformed since my stringy, anemic Florentine days, but miserably alienated in anonymous Manhattan. I could have used a friend.
Don looked like he could use one now. He'd flown five hours west for this reunion, without his family, and was putting up for three days alone in a local hotel. His best buddies from college days, some of that same wild bunch with whom he'd stayed in touch, hadn't been able to make it. So here he was, marooned with people like me with whom he'd never shared 10 consecutive words, and yet to whom he had a peculiar sibling connection.
It might have been like one of those ghastly Thanksgiving gatherings where you wonder how you ever earned a seat at this particular family table. Don was managing the strange situation with his usual good nature and social grace. But I felt a twinge of sadness, not at all patronizing, somehow cognizant of our common predicament, the sheer tenuousness of life.
How ineffably odd it was, a score of years onward, to stumble onto common ground again, like flood victims swept down six staircase rapids, washed around six bends in the river, coming up for air at last, gasping for breath, clambering onto the boggy shore only to encounter each other.
Why had he come at all, I wondered aloud. I've still got my hair, he answered with a laugh. In five more years, I might not. So I figured it was now or never.
If I make much of this encounter with a former foil who might have been a friend, it's only because it was so exemplary of the reunion experience which proved a revelation. Over several hours, I chatted with dozens of former classmates, many at first unidentifiable, then, as I drifted closer, intimately familiar.
Sometimes it was just a chin or cheekbone that recalled the lost face, like a scrap of jigsaw puzzle from which you try to extrapolate the entire picture. Sometimes the features were absolutely unchanged, just a little wearier or warier, not as convincingly cherubic.
Some had grown soft and magnanimous, some gaunt and cynical. Some of the handsomest had grown creased as old leather, others had acquired a new rigor and complexity, like an urn that's taken its final glaze.
I felt a little like Dante exploring the shadowy amphitheater of the inferno during his famous midlife crisis, stumbling repeatedly over old friends and consorts, rivals and allies, some at close range and some from afar, at first hardly recognizing them in their new incarnations.
Across the patio shimmered the blond pixie face of a woman half the campus had been smitten with, or the chummy basketball jock who'd lived down the hall from me. I hadn't known them well enough to hail them across the crowd, but I made a conscious effort now to gravitate in their direction, hoping for an eventual encounter.
Sometimes it happened: The person with whom I'd once shared a dozy midafternoon Shakespeare class, a roast beef dinner or a sail on the lake would suddenly materialize before me, now a chiropractor in Maui, an attorney in Portland, a filmmaker or developer or statistician or priest.
Sometimes the face would elude me, drifting away like a capricious balloon above the swirling blur of bodies. There wasn't time or opportunity to address them all, and the ones that got away, I realized with a pang, I'd probably never see again.
That was the beauty of the event, in a way. We didn't, for the most part, exchange phone numbers or e-mail addresses. We were just far enough out in life to have lost our sentimentality.
Like swimmers well beyond the riptide who gaze back on the beach where they first waded in, we could appreciate the gleaming contour of the shore without any illusion that we'd be returning there. On the contrary. Just making eye contact again alerted us keenly to how deep the waters around us had grown.
If we hadn't kept touch in two decades, we were unlikely to now. Our lives were too hectic and overcommitted. We scarcely had time to register and recover from each shock of the breakers.
Still, it was pleasant to swim in a school once again. To see ourselves reflected in each other's eyes, and measure our own maturity. It was uncanny to be surrounded, just for a time, by so many people of exactly the same age and era. To realize, in spite of all the variation, how much we had in common.
These were the thoughts that accumulated in my mental cloud cover on the reunion evening. All of them colored by memory, addressed to the past. All of them struggling to come to terms with youth, its meaning, its promise, its passing.
Midway through the event, I realized with a shock that I was enjoying myself. It was the absence of sham and affectation that pleased me most. I kept recalling the voluptuous dimwit who'd attended my class reunion a decade before, the only such event I'd ever been lured to. She'd braved the stifling heat of that Indian summer in an ostentatious fur, as if to underscore in felt marker the fact that she'd finally arrived.
This time, nobody was dressed to kill. Nobody seemed to give a damn about anyone's affluence or influence. As for the wheelchair, I can't say it disappeared. That would be a sentimentality. But it didn't seem to matter much.
One old acquaintance who drifted by wore the same rumpled clothes and expression of amiable surprise he'd affected 20 years ago, like someone who's just crawled out of a sleeping bag, awakened from an afternoon nap.
Dick was a handsome devil, with a clear, pale complexion, a Prince Valiant haircut, irrepressible good spirits, a charismatic grin. But in his sloppy sweats, shoes never quite tied, he'd moved in a kind of self-generated dust storm, as perplexed and apologetic as a St. Bernard knocking over table lamps with its tail.
How cheering it was to see him again, scarcely touched by the years, friendly and intent as ever. He told me about his house in California's Coast Range, the design and improvements he'd supervised over the years, the effects of the Loma Prieta quake. But when I asked him about his work, he seemed disinclined to elaborate.
Maybe he'd been laid off in one of the Silicon Valley downsizings, I told myself. Maybe he was unemployed, or wrestling with a midlife career change, and embarassed to talk about it.
I was rapidly disabused by one of the little riplets of gossip that seemed to foam up like a boat's wake at each classmate's retreat. Dick, it turned out, had become a noted inventor of medical technology. His eccentricity had made him rich. Modesty, and a thorough indifference to material success, were the only explanations for his nonchalance.
That's how I chose to see him anyway, perhaps for the last time. Like some shadowy, romantic figure out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The details I could never know, the end of the story was mine to play with in imagination, like the denouement of an unfinished novel.
One classmate had shared a lost weekend with me on the isle of Capri, where we swam in the Blue Grotto, feasted on spaghetti puttanesca, then cowered in a deserted pension during a midnight thunderstorm while our landlord, drunken and unhinged, stalked the Gothic corridors with a butcher knife.
Another had met me at a friend's wedding in Los Angeles, spring of our senior year. I remembered the big temple on Wilshire, the snap of the wine glass under the canopy, the smell of Swedish meatballs in the reception line, the sunshine in Griffith Park where we'd spent an afternoon riding the miniature train. How round and soft her eyes had looked, gazing at me with a face that wanted to be kissed.
One classmate had raced me cross-campus by bicycle on a sultry freshman evening, chasing the wail of fire engines, popeyed on screwdrivers, screaming Venceremos into the smoky wind.
Another had smuggled a wicker hamper full of seedless grapes into a Joan Baez concert and carved out a picnic spot front and center. As the folk goddess mingled her ballads with paeans to Cesar Chavez, Ann had popped the forbidden fruit goadingly into her mouth, like Cleopatra defying Rome.
These memories were random snapshots, without coherence but suffused with meaning. Most of the people involved had passed completely out of my life, leaving no trace. But as they reappeared now, heaving along their valises of midlife baggage, I realized that there were secret corners of their existence, dark and bright, into which I -- sometimes I alone -- had a privileged glimpse.
I'd seen them falling in and out of love, rage or innocence, in some of the most exposed and vulnerable moments of their lives. I knew things about them that no friend or lover, parent or child, would ever know. As though we shared a secret compact, buried in some forgotten chest to which the key had been permanently misplaced.
I felt a violent respect for this unanticipated intimacy, almost ashamed to look my old acquaintances in the eye. I felt protective toward them. This, I think, is what reunion really means.
I also felt a dawning admiration for the risk we'd all engaged in coming here, allowing others to unearth our secret selves. The miracle wasn't how few of our classmates had made this pilgrimage, but how many. Given all the hurdles life throws up. Divorce, disease, depression, death. The sundry versions of despair, all seeming to begin with the letter "D."
In spite of the inevitable wreckage, here we were together again, smiling through an evening.
At the beginning, I hung out with an old friend and soulmate who'd nursed me through the late-teen doldrums with omelet breakfasts, midnight movies, Pescadero field trips. The Cuban spitfire had been my platonic paramour. Now she was a big-time L.A. labor lawyer.
"She's gorgeous," Luz said with a hint of acid, when my girlfriend wandered out of earshot. "What happened, you went straight in middle age?" A silent two-beat. Then we both roared with laughter.
Toward the end of the evening, I crossed paths with a guy I've known since kindergarten: handsome, successful, impeccably polite. The kind of model citizen that everyone admires. He probably hates that.
Charlie grew up six houses away from me in San Francisco. We went to the same elementary school, same summer camps, joined the same scout troop. As it happened, we wound up in the same overseas group, the same college class. Our lives have intersected at a thousand points, but we've never had anything approaching a friendship. We've remained indifferent strangers.
And yet, we mean each other well. When we meet infrequently, Charlie gives me an earnest and affectionate hug. Then we talk a bit about this and that, about nothing. In years past, I was inclined to dismiss these exchanges as phony. What did we know about each other, after all?
But in a world so often stripped of continuity, shared history alone has blue-chip value, gathering slow interest over time. Endurance is a big part of the game, a form of heroism. This time, when we shook hands, I think we really meant it.
Then the automatic lawn sprinklers came on. It was early yet, but someone had forgotten to apprise the groundskeepers of our gathering.
Jets of water cascaded over the buffet tables. Women screamed and grabbed their bags. The caterers tried to stifle the spigot heads with tablecloths. The music faltered. The candles sputtered. The crowd surged east.
That cloying old radio tune washed over me, the one about MacArthur Park melting in the dark. Someone leaving a cake out in the rain, the sweet green icing rolling down.
"I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to make it and I'll never have that recipe again."
Exactly. Timing is everything. The party would drag on for an hour or two, but this seemed like the perfect moment to depart. And so I did.
Matthew Soyster, '75, is a freelance writer who lives in the Bay Area. His last article for Stanford appeared in the March 1994 issue and won a gold medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
