stained sidewalk perhaps she sensed, between her legs or at the limbic back of her brain, my adoration. She flinched, or stiffened, as if walking through an automatic door. I would more than have died for her-I would have lived for her.
Born poor, I suppose I am fascinated by the upper classes. Lazily they accept me among them, too confident themselves to care that I am an inwardly sardonic alien. Golf season has begun, and I am over at the club three or four times a week, mingling at lunch, blending into the Wednesday and Saturday foursomes. Some of these men have never held a job. Their life stages have been marked by a succession of games: the child, introduced by his nursemaids to croquet and badminton and then given tennis and sailing and equestrian lessons; the boarding-school boy, hardened at soccer and ice hockey and lacrosse; the college man, persuaded to risk his bones in the football line and test his eyes and nerves on the baseball team, while skiing becomes second nature on beery weekend trips into the White Mountains and the underwater high of scuba-diving is assimilated during rummy winter vacations to the tropics; the suburban husband, partnered with his wife at paddle tennis and matched against his old college roommate at squash; the country squire, ten pounds heavier and rosier in the face, caught up in the physically lighter but financially heavier exertions of polo and yachting; the paunchy man of distinctly mature years, passionate for the pedestrian challenge of golf and the poky interplay of Sunday-morning mixed doubles; and the stoop- shouldered dotard, still amiably feisty, extracting competitive thrills from billiards, bridge, backgammon, and yes, croquet again, in a more formal, white-clad version.
When St. Peter still sat guard at the pearly gates, how would he have judged these lives so devoted to regulated frolic? Not to mention the time-consuming fussing at the fine details of personal comfort, appropriate costume, fashionable vacation site frequented by like-minded others, and three sufficiently ceremonial meals a day?
The summer cycle of, to amuse us old guys, weekend sweeps and senior tournaments has begun, and last week I found myself playing in the third-flight finals against my buddies Red Ruggles and Ken Dixon. My partner was Fred Hanover, a dear, dimly known fellow-member considerably older than I, itself endearing. He is a former club champion. Flashes of calm prowess flicker between spells of topping the ball and of obsession with the sound his pacemaker is making in his chest; he has trouble not listening to his own heartbeat as his life is mechanically ticked away. He and I had avoided simultaneous collapse and ding-donged well enough to beat two previous pairs of oppponents. But playing against Red and Ken was strange for me, on a Sunday morning when the grass was still soaked and a chill breeze cut through my ill-chosen golf shorts.
We teed off in a flurry of friendliness but by the second nine, with the holes even, I had no trouble hating our opponents. My having played so many rounds with them fanned my smoldering fury at Red’s sloppy, muscular whacking- his forearms thickened by a youth of scale-scraping and oyster-shucking-and Ken’s excessively deliberate, time-wasting style, as if running through a long mental checklist before taking off. While the retired pilot hung for what seemed minutes over the ball before unwinding into it with his maddening mechanical consistency, I could not stop staring at, and detesting, his shoes, white shoes which were oddly thick-soled, like the single shoe a cripple wears to even out his stride. But these were
The pin was on the front left of the green, perhaps twelve feet in. I planned a little bump-and-run down through the medium rough that on the second bounce would dribble onto the green and ooze to within a tap-in of the hole. It was as vivid in my mind as a tinted, crosshatched illustration in a how-to-play-golf book. Fred slouched over to my side, with his kindly, sun-battered, games-wise face, his thatch of dry old bleached hair pointing this way and that in the breeze. He pleaded in a soft voice, “Go for the center of the green, Ben. Get safely on.”
He had not in the two previous days ever ventured advice, however in need of it I might have been. He felt pressure, and was communicating it to me. My cunning little bump shot, which had tingled like a done thing in my hands as they lightly gripped the pitching wedge, went up in smoke. “Really?” I said.
The former club champion didn’t back off. “Get it on the dance floor,” he said, his jaw clenched as if these were his dying words.
With masterful self-control I did not chunk the chip but flipped it down the safe, close-cut part of the slope so that the ball skipped onto the green, winding up twenty-five feet from the hole. “Grrrreat,” my partner gratefully growled. He had been so insouciant these two days, his anxiousness grabbed at me now. It was only a game, wasn’t it? I felt almost dizzily tall, walking onto the green with my putter. Fred had picked up, Red had skulled his chip clear across the green, but Ken had methodically-after hesitating so long I thought his cogwheels had jammed-chipped to within six or seven feet. If he sank it, he would salvage a par, and that thought led me, just under the scum of consciousness, not to lag but to try to sink, for an unbeatable birdie.
I was too stirred up to take note of the slope of the green here, or the close mowing that had left the grass the color and texture of toast. I charged the putt and in utter horror, as Fred grunted in the side of my vision, watched the ball (an unlucky found Ultra) skim across the left edge of the hole and nightmarishly keep rolling until
“Sorry, Fred,” I said aloud, wishing him and all witnesses to my wretched three-putt dead. Even Ken’s missing his makable seven-footer did not assuage my shame; it had been my hole to win and I had blown it. I had blown it, I secretly believed, because my partner had inserted his own competitive passion into the Zen zone I was attaining; but there was no way of saying this, and no way of redeeming my jejune blunder but by winning some holes. The harder I tried, the worse I got, overswinging, lunging, “swishing” the clubhead at the last fractional second, letting my right elbow roam away from my side to gain imaginary leverage. In the face of my uselessness, Fred plucked up some ancient proficiency; we scrambled and scrabbled up the slopes of this Sunday-morning match and ended two down on the seventeenth hole. We could have won it, and all my fault we didn’t. Three-putting from twenty-five feet. I couldn’t stop replaying the hole in my head; I took a sleeping pill but woke up at three in the morning back on that tenth green, dizzyingly tall above the receding putter-head, whacking the ball over and over again miles and miles past the hole while Ken, in his unbearable shoes, looked on in smiling wonder, as if a stewardess had just told him she would spend their London stopover in his hotel room after all, and my partner just out of sight around the corner of my skull grunted as if I had punched him beneath his pacemaker. I writhed; I thought of shaking soundly snoring Gloria awake; my eyes cursed the blank ceiling while my teeth suppressed a scream; I wondered what the point of human life was at all, if such dreadful things could happen under the sky.
Next morning, Memorial Monday, while saluting rifles rang out in unison in the town cemetery and television commentators put on their solemnest faces to chat for a minute about the millions who had given their lives
Give up golf? I love those men. They alone forgive me for my warts and stiffnesses, my tainted breath and protruding nostril-hairs, my tremors and white-capped skin cancers. My golf companions too are descending into deterioration, and trying to put a good face on it-joking, under the striped tent the club has erected, with a cold
