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The fat, chrome-domed idiot in the too-small Paris-by-way-of-Men's-Warehouse-I-Guarantee-It boiled wool suit was standing there sweating, while next to him, the living inflatable doll with the thirty-thousand-dollar conflict diamond dangling from her claw refused to shut up about international adoptions.
"Not that I think there's anything wrong with having your own children," she added lamely, apparently just now remembering that Perry and Jordan Cox had two kids of their own. "It's just that with the constant rape of the Earth's natural resources it can only be described as irresponsible -- "
Jordan nodded, then turned to Perry and bit him on the shoulder. "Yeah, Per," she said, her eyes brimming with laughter. "Don't I always say that? About the natural resources?"
He steps on her toe, hard. "Ya do indeed say that about the raping, Jordy-poo."
"I do," Jordan squeaked.
The nitwit lady, class of '78, smiled vaguely, muttered something obsequious at Jordan and then turned back to the bald, fat guy at her side. Frank Cooper of '77 looked like he wished he'd never been born.
"Now, you're single, right?" she was saying to him. Perry and Jordan peeled away. She wailed and he coughed "moron!" into his fist.
"Now, see?" Jordan slapped the back of her hand against his chest. He looked around and the crowd was a sea of harmless, middle-aged pie-faces with scribbled name-tags. Not one of them could bench 600. Not two of 'em.
Perry nodded. "You're right," he said.
When the invitation came, he didn't want to go, but Jordan insisted that the thrill of making fun of a new and unwarned batch of mindless middle-aged drones far outstripped any misanthropic mystery Perry could possibly want to maintain.
"Awesome, right?" she beamed.
Jordan looked pretty awesome herself, in a green knee-length item with a hooker-height slit up the thigh and some totally obscene green boots. He grabbed her face and kissed her. "I'm definitely glad we came," he said.
She slammed him up against the wall, by the punchbowl and under the giant "One Hundred Years of Crestbrook Senior High" banner that hung with shiny vinyl pride under the migraine-inducing fluorescents.
"Hey, Perry?"
Perry removed his face from Jordan's cleavage long enough to snarl at the intruding voice. It belonged to a dark-eyed woman in a red sweater. She stared patiently up at him from somewhere around 4'11". "Perry Cox?"
Jordan finally opened her eyes. "What now?"
The ninety-pound slip of a woman standing in front of him smiled, and he cursed. This was the face that had scared him away from the fundraiser to begin with, and coincidentally the same face that had tortured nearly all of Perry's early life.
"Jordan," he grumbled. "Meet Teensie McMuffin. Teensie, my ex-wife Jordan."
Teensie held up her hand. "Tinny McAfee," she said. "Dr. Tinny McAfee."
Jordan stared. "Tinny. Really?"
Perry shrugged.
"What do you want, McMuffin?" Jordan squared off with the tiny doctor.
Tinny McAfee, author of "Complications in Short-Term Post-Surgical Healing of Aortic Shunts" and chief of surgery at Philadelphia General Hospital, had been the object of most of Perry Cox's fury for the first eighteen years of his life. At first it was because she beat him up in the schoolyard, but when at age seven he doubled her in size it became more humiliatingly a series of verbal and emotional defeats and disturbingly cruel practical jokes. She'd been ahead of him in every class, and by middle school she had a part-time job with Perry's father, tutoring Perry in knife-handling and French under his dad's watchful eye. He'd retaliated by infecting her with mono and making her lose a semester of school.
By twelfth grade they'd reached a grudging truce; neither had managed to kill the other by that point and besides, both of them were heading off to college. Then she took his spot at Hopkins, took his internship at Cedars-Sinai and graced the covers of just about every magazine that ever did a "best doctors in the country" feature.
"So," she asked, smiling. "What have you been up to for all these years, Perry? I think the last time we spoke you were working as an attending in some crappy hospital in California, but that was ages ago. What new heights have you achieved?"
He could practically remember a time thirty years ago when she'd teased him like this; sort of a deja-vu in reverse. All he'd wanted then was to beat her, and all he wanted now was to pound her tiny body into the ground like a mall jewelry store employee piercing a tongue.
Perry blinked, feeling his heart constrict and thinking he might be able to find a good use for those aortic shunts. His life passed before his eyes. "Well, first of all," he began, weakly. He was contorting his mouth and his jaw waiting for the familiar stream of words to start flowing, but instead Jordan cut in.
"We're mostly gambling on horses while we wait for Perry to quit doing all that crack and find a job," she said.
Tinny blinked.
Perry's mouth opened and words started to spew out. "Jordan's a highly influencial board member at the hospital where I'm the head of the residency program," he practically shouted. "We live in a killer apartment, make an obscene amount of money, and drive wildly impractical cars just to piss off all the pissants around us. And while I don't have the time right now to tell you all the ways in which I'm better than you, you just go ahead and come back to me ten years from now when your breasts have dropped to your teeny little knees and you're on Oprah talking about the life-enriching experience of performing cosmetic surgery on yourself, and I'll be sure to sit down with you and we'll have a snuggly little heart-to-heart. How's that?"
Jordan was staring at him with her glossy mouth wide open. "Perry?"
Tinny McAfee took a shrimp puff from a passing hors d'ouvres tray and bit it victoriously. "I have to go make a phone call," she said. "I'm sorry to leave so abruptly --" and she was gone.
Perry rubbed his hands across his face. Jordan was still staring at him. "What?" he spat.
She shrugged. "What, nothing? You want something to drink?"
He nodded, and they went and took up spots by the bar, which was being absently tended by Jay Watt '78 and Karen Nguyen '78, who were looking at pictures on each others' cell phones and cooing. Perry reached behind the bar and took the first bottle he saw with a grouse on it, and two glasses.
"Listen," Jordan said, before he could say the same thing. Admittedly, he didn't have a follow-up handy, so it was better she went first and he gestured to say so. "Listen. I get it that you feel like a failure in your career. I understand."
Perry sighed. "Thanks a million, there."
She dismissed him. "No excuse! First of all, our relationship is built on a necessary and sound capacity to survive any and all abuse verbal and/or physical that either one of us might try to perpetrate upon the other."
"True," Perry shrugged.
Jordan went on. "But if you're going to go ahead and act like a great big giant girl baby when all I'm trying to do is the crack-gambling routine on some bimbo, Perry, that is not on! How did she do it? What strange power does she wield over you that I clearly need to get myself a big vat of?"
Perry sighed. "We had the same mentor. Eleventh grade science teacher. Mr. Custert."
Jordan refilled her glass and kept the bottle in her other hand. "Yeah?"
Perry growled. "He got to pick one of us to work as a research assistant for a project at the university. Three hundred dollars a week, free meds and course credit, and we got to study pre-med at the college level for a semester. I was dying for it."
"And she got it. And you're unspeakably lame." Jordan made a Lame-shaped L on her forehead and stuck out her tongue.
"It wasn't about that. Mr. Custert was one of the good guys, you know? And I could have used him when I was growing up, lemme tell you, but instead he and Teensie-Weensie were off on campus and I was hiding from my father in the gym under the wise and loving conservatorship of Horse Patterson, a heavyweight second-offender whose parole restrictions included teaching free weight training to high school juniors. And next thing you know I've got this phe-he-he-nominal physique -- " Here Perry lifted his shirt, just to make sure Jordan could see and on the off-chance that somewhere, Tinny was watching -- "and Bitchy McMuffin was taking her APs and applying to colleges."
Jordan threw an ice cube at his forehead. "God, Perry, do you know how boring you sound right now? Have you ever listened to socks drying? Yeah? Laugh riot compared to whatever the hell it is you're going on and on and on about."
Perry sighed and rested both hands on the top of his head. He gazed up at the modular assembly-hall ceiling. "You wouldn't understand," he muttered.
Jordan got up, climbed to standing on her chair and did that two-fingered whistle that always made him feel hungover even if he hadn't been drinking. He finished the grouse straight from the bottle.
"Hey!" Jordan hollered. "Itty-Bitty-Titty-Committee!"
Even Perry had to grin as the bland, pasty-faced crowd looked scandalized and shuffled their feet while they pretended not to stare at Jordan. Jordan trained her sights on Tinny.
"Yeah, you. Get your gumball-sized ass over here."
Tinny, who had been talking with two tall and rather striking men in chinos, strode her tiny strides confidently across the parquet toward them.
Jordan sat down immediately, chin in hand in the pose Perry recognized as "fake-interested therapist." "So, Tinny-tin-tin," Jordan said. "You've managed to accomplish something I've spent a good part of the last decade trying to do myself, that is, to make this mop-topped lunkhead cry."
"Excuse me?" Perry sat up straight at this. "I did not cry. There was no crying."
Jordan pulled a tissue from nowhere. "Blow your nose, Per," she said. And to Tinny, "Anyhoo --"
"Oh," said Tinny. "The big ones are the easiest. This guy here was always so desperate for attention all you had to do was fake a snore during one of his speeches and he'd throw a tantrum for an hour."
"Yeah," Jordan mused. "That doesn't work anymore. I think he's built up a tolerance."
"Otherwise personal attacks are always good body-blows. Something about how his parents never really loved him or about how he spends so much time at the gym because he has a body-image disorder."
Jordan shook her head. "That's all common knowledge," she said. "He doesn't care."
Tinny looked at Perry, who was feeling better and better all the time. "It's true," he said. "I'm a self-hating bastard with daddy issues."
"And then you just do what I did," Tinny said. "Right when he thinks he's got you, remind him that he's never actually accomplished anything, much less anything worth the amount of adulation he thinks he deserves."
Everyone was quiet for a minute. Perry crossed his arms across his chest, pouted out his lower lip and breathed through his nose like a bull.
"Too... mean..." came a weepy voice.
Behind Jordan, J.D. Dorian was standing and holding a yellow file. He was dressed in a cranberry-colored suit with some sort of dark shiny tie, and he looked, as always, like a big cranky baby.
"Dr. Cox --" J.D. said. "Are you just going to let her say that to you?"
Perry looked at the punk kid's big blue eyes. "I don't hit girls," he muttered.
"Liar," said Jordan.
"I don't think we've met," Tinny was saying to J.D. "Dr. McAfee. Tinny."
J.D. squinted. "Dr. Dorian. Hungry. And who gave you the right to talk to my mentor like that?"
"Ah, Jesus Christ, newbie --" Perry started, but Jordan elbowed him in the guy. "Oof."
"In the time I've known him he's trained dozens of eager, clumsy, idiotic baby interns into actual doctors. The kind of doctors I would take my kids to," J.D. stammered. "If we couldn't afford private medicine."
"Kids!" Jordan put in. "We have kids! Two of 'em!"
"Jordan, you're making it worse," Perry whined, and this time J.D. stepped on his foot.
What Tinny had said maybe actually had been too mean, and Perry thought, contrary to his natural instinct and to his own disgust, that this is what it looked like when your friends stood up for you against a bully. Perry grinned and rested his hands on his head again, victorious this time.
"Jack's four," J.D. was saying. "He doesn't like me very much, but I think that over time we're going to be fast friends. As for little J.D. on the other hand --"
"Jennifer Dylan," spat Perry.
"Well, I'm her godfather and her namesake, so we're pretty much joined at the teeny baby hip already --" J.D. stopped and peered down at Tinny. "Oh, no offense," he said. "I mean, just because you're teeny."
Now Jordan looked at J.D.. "Why are we wasting our time with this loser?"
Tinny snorted, red-faced and clearly unused to being ganged up on. "He's the loser! How many papers have you published, Per? How many international symposia have you co-chaired?"
The rage was building again, but Perry just reached out and grabbed it by the throat. Rather, he reached out, grabbed J.D. by the collar, and shoved him in Tinny's face.
"And how many students like this do you have?" he asked. "Attending physician, young father, bright, motivated, owes his career to me --"
"It's true," J.D. said.
" -- pretty much idolizes me and every single thing I do... and is also, you know, a friend?"
Tinny looked stunned, and Jordan looked like she was going to throw up.
"I got a friend," Perry said again. "What have you got?"
Tinny covered her face in her hands. "Too... mean..." she sobbed as she trotted away as fast as her little legs would carry her.
"Oh god," Perry said, laughing. "I wasn't sure I could keep that up for much longer."
Jordan held a hand over her heart. "Do not scare me like that again, Perry. You sounded scarily sincere. Friend. Gross."
"Worked, though," Perry said.
J.D., as always oblivious to the world around him, stood with his head tipped to the side, blinking and obviously in reverie.
"What's he doing all the way here in Crestbrook?" Jordan asked. "It's like a nine-hour drive."
J.D. Wasn't paying attention. "You're my best friend too, Perry," he said dreamily. Perry growled and smacked him on the back of the head.
"Oh, and also?" J.D. snapped out of his fantasy, waving his hands. "Turk and Carla are watching the kids so I could come tell you myself: Jennifer said her first word!"
Jordan wheeled on him. "What? And I wasn't there?"
Perry turned to her. "She'll probably say it again, dear," he said. Jordan shrugged and nodded.
"So, what was it?" she asked.
"Um," J.D. pursed his lips. "'Boring!' She said, 'boring.' Is what she said." He nodded a couple times and went on, as Perry watched, hanging carefully on each word. "I was, um. Well, suffice it to say, she had heard the story I was telling already and was ready to move on to something else, and one thing led to another, primarily with me reminding her how I was there when she was born and was therefore 'kind of another parent' and she... spoke!"
"Boring," said Perry, puffed up with pride. "You hear that, Jordan?" The world flew gently from his lips, and for a moment, he felt closer to his daughter than ever, closer to his family than anything. "Boring."
Jordan tossed her hair. "What was that? I wasn't listening."