if Ed Phelps isn't dead by then too. Ed Phelps will be dropping in often after he's retired (like Horace White with his wheelchair and metal canes after he falls ill, or pushed into the office on a stretcher on wheels, waving hello limply as he rolls past, by an inscrutable Black chauffeur in meticulous gray livery. How will I look when I'm eighty and toothless? I'll have no teeth — periodontal work will not preserve my deteriorating jawbone forever — and my ankles and arches grow worse. My nose will be closed, and I'll breathe through an open mouth. My fingers will roll pills. I've met me already in hospitals and photographs. How will I smell? I know how I will smell. I smell that smell now and don't like it) because he will have no place else to go. It would not surprise me if Ed Phelps began showing up at my army reunions (in place of me. I've never gone) as another surplus survivor. (We really have no need for that many survivors anymore.) 'I'm not sure what it was,' he'll keep repeating about Red Parker. 'I wonder who'll take care of the children. How many did he have?'
No one will know or care. With everyone else at the company these days I try to maintain an artless and iridescent neutrality. Jane knows I've stopped flirting with her.
'What's the matter, big boy?' I hear her on the verge of baiting me. 'Get cold feet? Afraid your mean little wifey might find out? Or maybe you're just afraid you can't get it up often enough for a young girl.'
Jane is not a person to say anything like that, or even think it, but I witness the scene anyway and wonder how I can get out of it. Outside the office, I have begun training myself assiduously and realistically for the higher responsibilities that lie ahead: I am organizing speeches and I am playing golf. I am outlining the speeches I will need for the convention (mine and Kagle's) and for the corridors at the company.
'Gee whiz,' goes one. 'You're surprised? How do you think
(I wrote that one in a minute.) And I have got myself new golf clubs and clothes. My daughter thinks I look good in my whites and pastels and in my peaked caps. (My daughter is most pleased with me when I look handsome.) My wife is perplexed. She thinks I've gone back to golf because I want to flirt with college girls at the different clubs I'm invited to. I don't know how to flirt with college girls anymore and wouldn't want to if I did. They're kids. (And none seem to be sending out signals to me or any other golfer my age. They send them out to good tennis players. I have decided not to flirt at parties or anywhere else if my wife is with me and might be embarrassed, and I wish she would stop flirting when drunk and stop embarrassing me.) I'll give her more money. I take private lessons secretly on public courses weekends and accept invitations I get to private clubs. My wife won't take up golf again because she knows she won't excel at it, and she hates going to a club for lunch or dinner because of the people she finds there. All of them are divorcing. Everyone everywhere seems to be coming to an end. I'll buy another house. My wife wants that. It will please my daughter, who is keenly sensitive to friends in families with more money and not mindful at all of those with less, like the college graduate on the land-fill truck who says he wants to get her into a car at night in order to give her driving lessons. (I know the kind of lessons he wants to give her. I'd like to kick him in his stomach and jaw with my knee. How dare be deal in dirty thoughts about my buxom sixteen-year-old? How can she know so many people and still be lonely?) We'll have to buy a bigger house because the kitchen table in this one is too small.
'Golf?' says my boy, in squinting confusion.
'It's a game.'
'He's playing again,' my wife says. My boy looks hurt, my wife is crabby. He isn't used to seeing me all dolled up and raring to get away from home so early on a Sunday morning.
'If I wasn't going,' I say to him, 'is there anything you would want me to do with you?'
He shakes his head pensively. 'You can go. Swimming, maybe.'
'It won't be hot enough. Mommy can drive you to the beach club.'
'I don't like it there.'
'Do you have anything else to do?'
'Watch television. I saw some golf on television.'
'You hit a ball in a hole.'
'Like pool?' he ventures hopefully.
'Pocket pool,' I joke.
'Don't start,' warns my wife.
'What's pocket pool?'
'Not on Sunday. Not at breakfast.'
'The Lord's day,' my daughter intones in mocking solemnity.
'I'll tell you Monday.'
'I know,' my daughter brags.
'I'll bet you do.'
'Are you getting angry?' she asks me with surprise.
'Of course not,' I answer, dissembling a bit. It doesn't please me that she knows. (And I remember again that I saw her the night before riding around town in the back of a car with boys. I'm just not able to talk to her long these days without wanting to say something stinging. There is latent animosity between us always. I don't know why.)
'I'll leave the table if you are.'
'Don't be silly.'
'I am,' my wife declares.
'I've made my date. I can't help you today. I'll go to church with you next week.'
'We're away next week.'
'Do you like it?' my boy asks.
'Church?'
'Golf.'
'No.'
'He hates it,' my daughter tells him.
'You got it,' I praise her. 'I even hate the people I play with.'
'Why do you go?' His face furrows with puzzlement.
'It's good for me.'
'For your health?'
'For his business,' my daughter guesses correctly, mimicking me with comical accuracy.
'You got it again, daughter,' I praise her again. 'It gets me better jobs. It helps me make money, for all of you honeys.'
'Will you buy me my own car, since you're making so much money?'
'When I lower my handicap. This table's too small. I don't see why we can't eat in the dining room.'
'I didn't know we'd all get here at the same time. Usually I have to eat breakfast alone, along with everything else.'
'You sound bitchy.'
'I don't see why you have to play on Sunday morning.'
'It's when I'm invited.'
'You go for lessons.'
'It's when I can. Go alone, can't you?'
'I don't want to go alone. I have a family, haven't I?'
'You're going with God, remember?'
'Don't make jokes about it.'
'Go with them.'
'They won't go either unless you go. You influence them.'
'You'll go with her, won't you?'
'Don't make them.'
'Don't be a hypocrite, Dad.'
'We'll all go on Mother's Day.'
'And that will make it Father's Day.'
'We hate the people we have to pray with,' my daughter wisecracks brightly, and my boy giggles.
'That's good,' I compliment her, laughing also. 'I'm proud of you for that.'
