'Right,' he said, getting a tee and sliding a gleaming Ultra-flite Gold out of his expensive leather bag.
He had a pro swing. Fluid. Grooved. Beautifully smooth. The contact was solid and full, that great feeling when you know it's dead bang on. He didn't even lift his head for a second, just stayed down over the tee, arms in the top of his backswing arc, wrists cocked, not having to look, knowing he was there even before he heard the oohs and aahs of the other envious players.
Unconsciously, as he took a tee out of his left trouser pocket, he'd let his fingers slide across his groin, feeling for the small growth he'd noticed that morning. When you're pushing the big five-oh and you have everything to live for, the way he did, you become very aware of your mortality.
That's not quite true. He'd noticed it the night before. Late for a dinner party neither of them really wanted to go to, Warren Childress had said to his wife, who was carefully applying makeup in the next room, 'Do you know what really hurts?'
When there was no answer, he pulled his long silk socks on, and then she said, after a few beats, 'What hurts, darling?' She held her mouth in that funny way women do when they talk while applying lipstick.
'I'll tell you later,' he said, knowing that he wouldn't. His wife was even less interested in him than he was in her. He didn't give two hoots in hell about Lois and hadn't for years. His mistress never wore lipstick. She never smeared herself with that coating of orange-looking crap that seemed to end right at the neck on so many women of Lois's age. God, how he loathed that look. The hair so meticulously coiffed, every strand sprayed in place just so by the idiot at the beautician's, and then that orange mask of thick makeup and the bright lipstick and the green eyes. Jeezus.
'Tell Mother,' she said patronizingly as she waltzed into the room, 'what hurts Daddy?' Her voice carried through the master bedroom with a theatrical echo.
'Nothing.' He smiled with fake whimsy. 'I was grumbling and bitching. The Levitt account.'
'What else is new?' She smiled back. 'Now what?'
He'd have to make up something. 'It's the same old song and dance. They want the impossible — ' And he began improvising.
Warren didn't feel like sharing his irritations with her any more than he felt like sharing anything else with her, so he ad-libbed something about one of his proverbial nightmare accounts, his brain on autopilot and hers disengaged entirely.
He missed Jacqueline desperately. She was twenty-two. Beyond fabulous-looking. So gorgeous his heart hurt to think about her. She loved him and she could suck the brass off a table lamp and her greatest joy in life came from playing slave for him.
A twenty-two-year-old
Warren Childress had been pulling on the silk briefs when he'd spotted a dime-size mole on his groin. Something he'd never seen before. Sort of an ugly little purple-brown cauliflowerlike growth. Nothing to concern himself about, but it paid to watch these things.
A few years ago he would have said something about it to Lois.
'Hon, are you too busy to come in here and help me with this tie?'
'Ek-shually I yam.' He could hear her coming in. She made a grand entrance in a swirl of French perfume. They were both forty-nine. 'But I'll take time.'
'You look very nice,' he told her.
'Thank you,' she replied indifferently, working on his tie. True romance for the nineties, all right, each partner loathing the other. No, that wasn't true.
Just cold ashes, gray hairs, too many resentments and harsh recriminations. A man and woman weren't made to stay together for a quarter century. It was too long even for a good relationship, and theirs had withered long ago.
Jackie, on the other hand, was something else. Tall. Legs up to her neck. Showgirl busty. God, he never tired of touching those beautiful breasts. Kissing them. And she was so much more than just a great-looking young woman with nice boobs — she was exciting. She was inventive. Wild. And the lady was crazy about him.
His mind returning to the present, he decided he would finish the front nine and then he would drive on to the subdivision where his mistress kept an apartment. The idea of lovemaking was already beginning to turn him on.
He putted out and picked up his ball, moving to the 9th tee. He was still up.
He wiggled his two-hundred-dollar brogues into a comfortable stance, compensating with the grip just so, pulling it over so he wouldn't slice, and smacked his tee shot toward the clubhouse.
It arched into the blue sky, the perfect, cloudless Brook Hollow landscape a classic background as the small white ball fell into the green fairway some two hundred and fifty yards away.
'Not too shabby,' one of the guys in his foursome said, as he stepped up to tee his ball.
'It'll play,' Warren Childress said, thinking of Jackie and what they would do together, as he walked toward the clubhouse. The stirrings of an erection felt delicious, and he fantasized about the way the afternoon would go and he was hard, thinking about their last session together.
She had coaxed him out of his controlled facade, turned him, made him so hot he forgot to stifle his inhibitions, reached down into his darkest corner and pulled the wild and nasty and twisted Warren out of there. Made him sit up and beg for it and roll over and be her puppy — Jeezus, who's kidding here, she was
'I'm Daddy's girl,' she said, putting on, playing little nympho Lolita, doing what some beautiful women do so well, so achingly well, so organically, naturally, enticingly, heartbreakingly well, and she smiled coquettishly; she pouted, preened, posed, played like she was a fast, fuckable fourteenybopper, and she touched him like a man touches a woman, controlling, manipulating him, her incredible cover-girl face, movie-queen bananorama face, seductive stiffener of a tanned, young, Ipanema-beach-bossa-nova face that said let me eat your lips and suck on your delicious ice cream cone of a mouth — a mouth opening and a tongue coming out and touching him just so.
'Mmmmmmmm,' he moaned.
'Daddy?'
'What. Jeezus!
'Daddy, will you do anything your little girl wants?' she asked, pouting with her mouth still there.
'Yes.'
'Tell Daddy's girl.'
'Anything.'
'Make-believe things for his little girl?' He wasn't sure what she said, but he answered again — his breath coming in ragged gasps.
'Yeah. Anything, baby.'
'Here's what I want Daddy to do,' she whispered, and she told him awful, weirded-out, mondo bizarro things, and he did them for her, letting her enslave him, and when it was all enough for her — finally — she kissed him softly, and he held her and cherished her face and tried to tell her so, but a long and hot and delicious tongue was inside his mouth and spearing his soul, the pink and wet tongue of this movie star piercing into him and inflaming his desire, and within the next couple of minutes of Fucking Standard Savings Time, which is when time compresses in on itself and ceases to tick within those unaccountable sweeps of the second hand, there was an eruption, and he felt her hand on him and the volcanic surging lava from his loins was spurting uncontrollably all over them, splashing on the pretty flowered sheets and getting them all gooey and sticky, and the heat of her hand on him was causing his exploding fluid to shoot out prematurely, and she moved the hand up and down quickly and each move threatened to tear his guts out of his body, and each move killed him a little, and each movement of her small, fragile-boned hand pumped out another couple of c.c.s of the hot, cloudy, milky jism, and each movement got him off again and he'd never come like this and, ohmygod, he was afraid she'd opened some physiological door with her beautiful body and face and tongue, and now this and what if he could never stop coming and he'd die like this, the first man to break through the come barrier, the test pilot for the Mach 4 Jack Off, the pioneer of a brave new
