you’d prefer to give me this hole.”
“Very kind,” Dave Collier said. “But paying gambling losses in public builds a reputation as a good sport and a gentleman. So go fuck yourself.”
“Said like a true sport and gentleman. Good luck with that reputation.” Forrest turned to the others in the foursome. “Anyone else want to take advantage of my thoughtful offer? You won’t even have to humiliate yourselves by teeing off.”
Owen Rowland said, “Thank you, but no.”
Cameron Powers merely shook his head without speaking because Collier was taking a practice swing. They all watched in silence as he smacked the ball and it flew with perverse intelligence straight to the woods, caromed off a tall tree to the ground, and caused a small explosion of dry eucalyptus leaves and shredded bark. His companions guffawed, but he said, “What? That was the tree I was aiming at.”
The others took their turns. No drive was as good as Forrest’s or as bad as Collier’s. This was as it had been all morning, and as it had been for most of the past forty years. It was always Ted Forrest who hit the best drive, or, when they were in high school together, threw the pass for the touchdown, or won the race. It was the natural order of things. The others competed hard, but when one of them won, there was always the same agreement among them that it was an oddity, that the story of the game wasn’t what had worked for the winner, but what had kept Ted Forrest from winning.
The four friends were nearly the same age-all in the last few seasons of their prime. They had already turned fifty, but still looked like hard-worn forty, and each of them felt the poignancy of these games they played together, but expressed it only in jibes and self-deprecating humor. They had all been born to the class who found open sincerity between men to be in poor taste except on the battlefield or in a hospital, but somehow jokes about age had come up more than once in this game, and had dampened some of the group’s exuberance.
Forrest walked with Cameron Powers for their second shot. The Los Ochos Club was one of the old-style private courses where golf carts where not permitted. The members whose physical infirmities or moral laxity kept them from carrying their clubs could hire caddies at the pro shop, but the four friends never did. It was partly because they were all vain about fitness, but partly because the presence of another person would have violated the exclusivity of the foursome, and inhibited conversation. They carried their own clubs, just as they sailed their own boats in the summer and carried their own skis in the winter.
They all worked hard, although none of the four had ever performed services for money. When they spoke of work, it was understood that they meant some form of regular practice to improve their skills or their fitness. Cameron Powers said, “You’ve been working on your drive.”
“That’s right,” said Forrest. “I’ve been working with Dolan, the new pro. I figure we’ve reached the top of the mountain. We joke about age, but it’s going to start being a factor. Strength and flexibility decline. Eventually even stamina becomes a problem. So from here on, it’s all going to be about technique. Whoever goes into middle age with the best technique is going to be the one to beat.”
“Goes into middle age? Aren’t we middleaged now?”
Forrest looked at Powers with an expression of exaggerated concern, moving his eyes from Powers’s golf shoes up his pressed pants, lingering for a second at the way his knitted golf shirt stretched at his belt line, and up to his forehead. “I guess you are. Sorry, buddy.”
“Come on. I mean we’re over fifty. If I remember, you turned fiftytwo last month. In fact, didn’t fifty used to be the end of middle age?”
“Yep. We’re practically dead.”
“I’m not tying to depress you, but hell, Ted. Those of us who don’t have technique by now are just going to have to accept the news that we missed it.”
“Suit yourself,” Forrest said. “I’m fighting it.”
“No, I meant I already have the perfect technique,” Powers said. “I was just feeling bad for you.”
“We’ll have to see whether that’s justified, or it’s just stray voltage in your ancient brain.” They arrived at the part of the fairway where their balls lay. Forrest’s drive had been at least fifty yards farther. They selected their clubs for their second shots and stood patiently while the other players went first.
When it was his turn, Forrest made the green in two. Powers hit a sand trap to the left of the green, topped the ball with his wedge shot and sailed it over the green into the rough beyond. Rowland’s cautious play got him on the green in four and a short putt put him in second place to Forrest’s birdie four.
Afterward, the four men walked to the clubhouse and had lunch together. A membership in Los Ochos was now officially two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but it was whispered that the going price had recently gone to a million, because the bylaws required that a new member be nominated by one member and seconded by two. There were rumored to be some unfortunates who had begun to make a business out of the nominations so they could remain solvent until some business embarrassment reversed itself. The foursome didn’t especially care about the scandal because they didn’t associate often with any of the newer members, and they didn’t care about price because they had all been enrolled at birth. The club had been constructed on land donated by the great- grandfathers of Owen Rowland and Ted Forrest, and the older fake-adobe part of the clubhouse had been built by a consortium of founding members, including a few named Powers and Collier.
When the lunch was finished, the three losers made a show of giving Ted Forrest their long-standing hundred-dollar bets. As always, the winner signed the lunch bill to celebrate, so with the bar charges and tips, the four went to the parking lot about even. Forrest loaded his clubs into his BMW, waved at the others, and drove toward home.
In the ten miles from the club to his house, he passed through several stretches of land that his family cooperative still owned. The land was mostly fallow fields now, with only a couple of the larger properties occupied by caretakers, and used for horse pasture or shooting. Now only the quail and deer came to harvest the wild descendant plants that had once been crops. When Forrest was a teenager, he used to cultivate small plots of high-quality marijuana on remote parts of the parcels.
He would have had a difficult time saying what was growing on any of the Forrest properties now; before his marijuana crops, it had been at least forty years since anything had been planted on any of them.
Two generations ago, the family’s farmland had been permanently allotted thousands of acre-feet of federal water per year from the Colorado River projects. Over the decades, the water had become much too valuable to pipe in and pour over rice, hops, and barley that nobody could sell for a profit anymore. The Forrest family business was selling federal water, and each year business had gotten better. The coast of California from Mexico to Oregon was populated, the Los Angeles basin was full, and the houses just kept going up, farther and farther inland toward Las Vegas. All the water for those extra people had to be bought on the open market.
He reached the gate at the end of his long driveway, pressed the button on the opener in his car to make the gate slide out of the way, and then pressed it again to close it when he had driven through. The house was built on what used to be a ranch bought from a family called Hardin. That had given Forrest’s wife Caroline an excuse to call the place Hardinfield. Seeing the artificially aged bronze sign on the gate’s ornamental pillar always made his stomach tighten.
Forrest had been forced to tolerate Caroline and her pretensions for so many years that most of the time he could barely remember how things had been when he had met her. She had been seventeen and he had been thirty. He could just bring together the sight and feeling by conscious effort now because his memory had been dimmed by years of attempts to keep from looking at her, even when he was talking to her.
He remembered the moment. It was a party in the afternoon at the Sheffield family’s winery. The sun had the peculiar golden quality it took on in the late afternoon sometimes in Napa. She had been a classmate of one of the Sheffields at the Moorhead School-was it Mary Ellen or Jennifer? There had been about five or six of them that afternoon, all in light summer dresses that made them look like girls in a French Impressionist painting. He had not scouted Caroline. She had simply held the center of the group, and he couldn’t look at any of them without following their eyes to her. She had been beautiful that summer. Now he knew that it was because beauty was one of the attributes of the young, only imputed to older people retroactively by an act of the imagination. After about ten minutes, during part of which he had gone to get a fresh glass of wine from one of the roving waiters, and listened to Collier tell a joke badly, he had decided he would meet Caroline Pacquette.
Hundreds of times since then he had strained to reproduce the logic of that moment: First I saw her looks and liveliness, then I listened to her voice and found the sound of it pleasant, and then I thought-But what did I think? There was no way to reclaim it now. He was not thirty and she was not seventeen, and so the eye and what
