The essence of nathan bi.., p.28
The Essence of Nathan Biddle, page 28
Even before he hit a ball (or, more accurately, tried to hit a ball), he cleaned his club like he was planning to eat with it. He also had a nervous habit of rotating his left shoulder and wobbling his head around. I was working at a bunker just in front of the lake and Dr. Goolsby was trying to hit across the part of the lake where the water narrows to the creek. He was in a twosome with a younger guy, maybe thirty-five years old, who had laid up in front of the lake with his first shot and then hit his ball over the lake, covering probably two hundred yards with his second shot.
Dr. Goolsby had already drubbed the ball several times when he plopped another one in the middle of the lake. Frankly, I couldn’t see how he hit the ball at all. On his backswing he brought the club straight up as though he were throwing a sack over his shoulder. Then he lurched forward on the downswing, keeping his weight on his right foot. The usual and expected result was a slice off to the right. In an apparent effort to offset the slice, he addressed the ball at an angle as though planning to hit it into the woods on the left side of the fairway.
The younger guy playing with Dr. Goolsby was trying to offer consolation and golfing tips without much success. It was clear that Dr. Goolsby was the senior and that the young guy was obliged to be solicitous and diplomatic. “Doctah Goolsby,” he said. The young guy had that thick, r-less drawl that some people have around here. My mother says it’s a carryover from British brogue, but the Brits haven’t been here in a while, so I don’t know. Anyway, the young guy said, “You might want to take a nine ahn and just pop it ovah the lake.”
Actually, I like accents. Uncle Nat pronounces out and about like oot and aboot. There’s always some social reason for it. My mother never said oot and aboot, so I don’t. Anyway, I’m watching Dr. Goolsby’s effort to hit his ball over the lake and I’m thinking that he’s going to take the young guy’s advice and try to pop the ball over with a nine iron. But he doesn’t. He ignores the advice and walks over to the golf cart and pulls out a fairway wood. He then goes into his strange windup and efficiently and inexorably places his ball in the lake not too far from where he had hit the previous ball.
Dr. Goolsby was muttering something about needing a caddy when he yelped and began jumping and running and swinging his arms. I thought he might have finally come undone after one too many bad shots into the lake. Then I saw the yellow jackets, about ten or twelve of them, making menacing sweeps at Dr. Goolsby’s skinny legs. After the first couple of yellow jacket strikes, Dr. Goolsby did some free-style choreography and dashed back toward the tee. When he was sure the bees hadn’t followed, he stopped and looked down at the welts on his knees and lower thighs and he made a little whimpering sound. “It might have been good to warn me about hornets,” he said. The young guy didn’t bother to answer. He just went to his bag and got a bottle of Benadryl. Dr. Goolsby took the bottle and sat on the ground a few yards from my mower and began dabbing his wounds.
At that point, I took the small mower and went around the lake and down the fairway to the next bunker. I wasn’t supposed to run the mower in the presence of golfers, and, in spite of the fact that Dr. Goolsby didn’t really qualify as a golfer, I decided that I should continue my work at a different sand trap. It seemed likely that Dr. Goolsby would resume his flailing as soon as he recovered from his stings, and I had no way of guessing how long it would take him to clear the lake. So, I hiked on down the fairway.
I was working at a fairway bunker just across the lake and on the right side of the fairway when I heard a ball do the familiar kerplush in the lake. I continued to work until I saw the golf cart and the younger guy signaling for me to cut the mower engine. When the sound dissipated, he said, “My friend hit a ball ovah this way. By any chance, did you see it land?”
I think I should get at least half credit for trying. I made a sincere effort. I wanted almost desperately to take the question seriously. Regrettably, I failed. “It didn’t land,” I said after a brief pause while I struggled for a soft answer. “It watered.” I know that was not a good answer, but sometimes I just can’t do any better.
“You mean I didn’t clear the water?” Dr. Goolsby said.
“Well,” I said, totally losing any semblance of a grip on my good intentions, “you cleared 95 percent of it. The 95th percentile ain’t that bad.” You don’t have to tell me. I know I shouldn’t have said it, but it was one of those days. To some extent, I think I was set up by circumstance. Dr. Goolsby’s question required a lot of pretense about his game that I might have handled on some days, but on that particular day I couldn’t muster the requisite quantity of delusion.
“Are all the hirelings at this club smart alecks?” Dr. Goolsby said, turning to the younger guy, who was already red in the face.
“No, I nevah, evah encountahed such.” Then he turned to me with a stern expression. “Fellah, you’ll be heahin’ moah about this encountah.” Then he wheeled the golf cart around and drove a few yards off where the fairway was flat. “I think you should just drop a ball and take a stroke. It’s open from heah on.”
When Dr. Goolsby pulled out a fairway wood and began looking for a place to drop, I started trying to figure out where to go to avoid his ball. I couldn’t very easily get behind him because he was only a few yards from the lake. I knew he was likely to slice right, but his stance to the left created a quandary: What if a miracle happened and the ball inadvertently and inexplicably went straight or at least straighter? Ultimately, I decided to edge over toward Catawpa Creek on the right side of the fairway and hope for a shallow slice.
Unfortunately, the slice was not shallow at all. Fortunately, the ball that ricocheted off the maple I was standing near missed my head by a good ten inches. I heard the wet thud of the ball as it hit the bank of the creek, and I looked just in time to see it roll back into the shallow water on the far side. I was edging down the creek bank when the golf cart screeched to a stop beside me. “Did you see the ball?” the younger guy asked. I made a mental note that he avoided the word “land” in his question. I also noted that his tone was less than congenial.
“Yes, sir,” I said humbly, trying to be conciliatory, “and it may be reachable.” I could see a ball retriever on the back of the cart. “Your retriever may be long enough.” Since I knew where the ball was and they didn’t, I decided to try to earn some needed brownie points. I went over to the cart and got the ball retriever, pulled the recessed segments out of the handle to the maximum length, and started trying to pick up the ball, which was just barely visible in the murky water at the far edge of the creek. The ball had muddied the water, and I was having trouble getting the retriever under it. Dr. Goolsby had dropped another ball and was looking off down the fairway when I said, “I think we’re going to have to go around to the other side to get this ball.”
“I think probably not,” Dr. Goolsby said brusquely. “Give me the implement.” I handed him the retriever and he stalked over to the bank of the creek. He leaned forward over the creek trying to maneuver the head of the retriever and then suddenly lost his footing and stepped off the bank into Catawpa Creek. He stood there in knee-deep water looking distressed and helpless but also strangely indignant. The younger guy looked like an obstetrician who’d dropped the baby.
He was just standing there looking flustered, so I decided to help Dr. Goolsby out of the creek. I put out my hand and he gripped it and said, “Look at this,” as though I had caused him to fall in the creek. He was holding my hand and seemed to be leaning backwards. He was either trying to pull me in or he was sinking in the sandy bottom of the creek. I don’t know which it was, but I couldn’t hold him. I tried to shift my weight to counterbalance his, but I was standing on the very edge of the bank, and I had no way of holding him or acting as a counterweight. I was about to lose my balance when I loosened my grip on his hand, and he fell backwards into the deeper water and sank like a stone.
He came up sputtering and gasping, but he managed to get over to the bank where the younger guy and I helped him out of the creek. He pointed at me and said, “You … ,” and coughed up some water and then finished the epithet, “nitwit!” That’s all he said to me. He turned to the younger fellow and said, “I’ve obviously got to go in. This is the way back to the clubhouse, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” the young guy said, “we can cut th’ough numbah one and we’ll be almost theah.” Dr. Goolsby glared at me as though about to unleash another attack and then, waving his arms in a gesture of disbelief and dismissal, turned and stalked back toward the golf shop, rolling his shoulder and wobbling his head in an obvious fury. His shoes made a squish-squish sound with each step. His floppy green hat had floated off down Catawpa Creek. I confess that I intentionally let it float away. His bald head was now sparkling with beads of creek water, and his hair, which had been carefully combed over his balding head, now hung limply over his left ear almost down to his left shoulder.
“Have a nice day,” I said earnestly. You probably won’t believe it, but I was innocent. I really wasn’t trying to be sarcastic. I can see how it might have seemed that way to them, but I just wanted to say something conciliatory and that’s the best I could come up with at the time. Both Dr. Goolsby and the younger guy turned and stared at me like I had cussed them.
“Nevah,” the young guy said, “have I encountahed the likes of you at this club.”
After they stalked off, I went back to the mower and continued my work. I had completed all the trim work around the bunkers on the fourth and fifth fairways when Phoenix drove down the service road and got out of the truck. “I don’t know what you did, Biddle, but you got trouble. Mr. Harbo wants to see you now. Come on, hop in the truck.” I didn’t say anything to Phoenix, but I was thinking that I had done it again. I was also worrying that I was about to be fired and that the news would get back to Dr. Bob and by relay to my mother.
Actually, neither my mother nor Dr. Bob ever said anything about it, but I did in fact get fired. When I walked into the maintenance shed, Harbo shouted in my face, “Whatta hell do you thank you doin’? Dr. Ware’s on the Grounds Committee, and he’s a hell of a nahce guy. So whatchoo do? You try to drowned the guy he’s recruitin’ fo’ the universty.” He grimaced in a failed effort to fake remorse in making a tough decision. “I’m ’fraid Imo hafta letcheego, Biddle. We just ain’t got no place here fo’ you.”
I started to try to defend myself, but I just turned and walked out of the maintenance shed. Harbo had dogged me from the first day I worked for him. Most of it wasn’t justified. I sort of appreciated Dr. Bob’s help getting me the job, but I knew pretty quickly that it probably wasn’t going to work. Harbo was just another manifestation of the chaos that had been stalking me.
And where did my firing lead? I was hardly home an hour when my friend Lichtman called and asked whether I’d like a summer job with him at his father’s furniture warehouse. I told my mother that I’d decided to work at the furniture store rather than the golf course, advertently omitting the part about being fired. I thought that a divine hand had delivered me from Harbo. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t a hand at all; the phalanges were actually the tentacles of the twin demons of havoc and despair maneuvering Anna into my life.
“Bravo,” Dr. Gross said and started clapping like someone at a concert. “That’s a great story. You’ve told it before, haven’t you?”
“How’d you know?”
“You have it down pat, pauses and all.”
“I’ve told both Lichtman and Q. Ball. They thought it was funny.”
“Is it all true?”
“I think so. Most of it anyway.”
“Did you learn anything from the encounter with Dr. Goolsby?”
“What was I supposed to learn? That Dr. Goolsby is an ass who can’t play golf?”
“Did you learn anything about yourself?”
“I don’t know. Did you learn anything about me from the story?”
“I ask the questions,” he said, smiling broadly.
“All right, but I don’t know what, if anything, I learned. Sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out what I ought to have learned.”
“I see why you expected Dr. Goolsby to be, shall we say, disdainful, even antagonistic, but you may have given the episode more weight than it deserves. We all have little run-ins that seem significant at first but over time diminish virtually to nothingness, sometimes even to humor. I see why you have Dr. Goolsby in the anti-Kit contingent, but what about Dr. Glans? You seem to have conflict with him also.”
“Not really,” I said.
“You don’t resent him?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Do you regard him as an intruder?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“That’s fairly common, you know?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Is there anything specific to Dr. Glans that would not be applicable to some other person dating your mother?”
“I don’t know. He probably overdid the stress fracture ruse.”
“Ruse? If you don’t mind my asking, how did he overdo the stress fracture treatment?”
“Well, for one thing I really didn’t have a stress fracture at all. He unnerved me. No, he scared the hell out of me.”
“How did he scare you? I don’t mean to press the point unduly but there has to be something you’re not saying.”
“You won’t understand. You’ll probably just think it was normal or something. But it wasn’t. He had me coming to his office and he kept calling my mother. He examined me, x-rayed me, asked me questions, and then talked to my mother. Then I kept going back. He had me coming to his office almost once a week for a stress fracture. He was calling my mother all the time talking to her, which unnerved me because I thought at first that he was really talking about me. I was imagining all kinds of terrible things because Dr. Bob was calling and they were conferring, quietly and confidentially, way too much for a stress fracture. Turned out, he was talking just to be talking but nobody told me I wasn’t the main subject. It was just verbal canoodling but I wasn’t clued in on the ruse.”
“That is unfortunate. I’m sure that neither your mother nor Dr. Glans intended to scare you. It appears you were a victim of a moment’s distraction. All’s well that ends well, huh?”
“I guess. You’d think they’d at least tell me.”
“That would have been the thoughtful thing to do, but they probably didn’t imagine that you were really worried. The good news, of course, is that they weren’t really talking about you.”
“I was just happy when Dr. Bob told me I didn’t have to come back and that I could get back to running track. After all those weeks, Dr. Bob revealed that I did not have a stress fracture after all and that I was a growing teenager who should take aspirin for any recurring pain in my legs. He’s been hanging around ever since, and I can truthfully say that the other insights he has shared with me have been equally valuable.”
“I find it hard to believe that he’s made no positive contribution to your life. Are you being fair to him?”
“Well, let’s see. He gave me some golf lessons at the country club and played a few rounds of golf with me. And he helped me get my driver’s license.”
“Those are positive things, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, I guess so, but those positive things produced more snorts and grunts than a pig farm.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling broadly, “maybe you gotta take the snorts and grunts with the gifts and gains. I hear what you’re saying.” He picked up my folder and began scribbling notes. “You know you’re doing well. I hope you feel that. You’ve shown a sense of humor and a lot of perspective that I didn’t anticipate. Despite some tendency toward isolation as a solution to social interaction, you’re dealing with relationships fairly well. Unless you have some other relationships to talk about, we now need to go to the incident that brought us together, the Sunday you wrecked the truck. I want you to think about it and then tell me next week if you’re ready to talk about it.”
“I didn’t try to kill myself,” I said. “I can talk about it now if you want.”
“No, we’re done for the day, and I want you to be sure you’re ready. Next week, come prepared to tell me what happened or to tell me we need to talk about some other stuff. Either way, we go forward.” He stood up and stuck out his hand. “We’re even on schedule this time. How about that?”
“We’re getting good at this,” I said. We both smiled and shook hands. It had taken me five weeks to learn to like Dr. Gross and to get comfortable with the process. I had thought that Dr. Gross was just another of those demons that seemed always to be lurking in the shadows of my life. I didn’t want to talk to him, even if I knew I needed to address some of the crazy stuff in my life. I had never talked to anybody about Nathan. My mother and I didn’t discuss it, and Newt acted like it was a theological issue run amok. Of course, I didn’t tell Dr. Gross everything about Anna, but I wouldn’t know how to explain some of it. Our sessions together weren’t perfect, but they helped me to feel normal, and I really wanted to be normal. I had come grudgingly to respect Dr. Gross and to tolerate the process. I already knew what I was going to say at the next session. I had been thinking about the wreck from the beginning, and I was ready.
THE BREAKDOWN
At our next session I told Dr. Gross everything I could remember about how I’d almost killed myself rolling the country club’s maintenance truck.
I woke up that Sunday morning after only a few hours of sleep. My eyes were burning and I had a dull headache. I also had an acute sense of having lost something significant. I had never felt so bereft. It was as though a large part of the meaning in my life had disappeared, and I had been left staring into a void. I had an idea of Anna in my mind that I couldn’t make work, and I had a feeling of rejection and loss. My idea of Anna was so real to me that I vacillated between trying to cling to it and despairing at the recognition that it wasn’t real, that it was a phantom. But the sense of loss was less surprising than the painful guilt that hovered over me like a shroud. Somewhere a voice was telling me that I had done something wrong, and I searched for the voice and tried to make it speak more specifically. It remained vague.
