Missing links, p.13
Missing Links, page 13
I will only say that seeing a gorgeous woman strip in front of you on an immaculate green while you put up a very nice flagstick of your own and then consummating your lust for the first time by rolling madly around in a rich, warm blanket of fog until you both end up sweat-pooled in the luxurious white sand of a bunker is a good bit better than a kick in the throat with a frozen shoe.
Big rake job, though.
That night, that whole next week, felt like a Wilt home movie festival. Madeline ran one of the great penile enlargement services around. We had sex on the cart late at night. She committed wondrous lockjaw on my pipe while we hid in the range tractor, golf balls from 200 yards away raining down on us. I committed acts illegal in seven states upon her in the trees just off the 12th.
I heard her whole story. Straight-A student. Fell in love with a med student. Married him. Helped him through med school. Hated all the gowns and the hors d’oeuvres and the hospital parties and the functions that she needed to go to with him on his way to someday being Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Boston General.
Fell out of love. Divorced. Alcoholic mother. Dad finally got smart and divorced her. She was sticking it out in Dorchester, waiting for the job offers to come flooding in, waiting for the straight A’s and all the good med school karma and all the politeness to rich, polyester jerks to pay off in the round world of space.
We’d screw, talk, screw, talk, not screw, talk, whatever. We’d hardly leave the bed except to answer the door for Thai delivery.
I don’t know why I didn’t quite tell her my whole story. I mean, I told her most of it, I just left a few parts out. I told her how much I hated my father, I just didn’t mention that he was a member of the Mayflower Club. I told her all about Travis, just not that I sometimes felt weird things going on inside, too. I mentioned Deisha, I just forgot to mention that it took me until two weeks ago to throw away her old sleep T-shirt. And I didn’t mention Dannie at all.
I mentioned all my buddies at Ponky, I just forgot to mention about the bet. I didn’t want her to think I was sneaky, I guess. Maybe I was trying not to make any mistakes and have another Deisha not on my hands. I never thought it would matter.
Other than that, things just couldn’t have been better. So, naturally, I screwed it up.
MY CADDIE CAREER ended the day I got this pure, unadulterated hack for my loop, a balding little guy who was so bad he made Hoover look like Nick Price.
Fletcher rolled his eyes when he gave me the bag, because it was the approximate size of Delaware and, as all club caddies know, the bigger the bag, the worse the player. This thing would’ve floated a boatload of Cubans.
Now, at the Mayflower, the 11th tee box was way up a hill, which allowed us to forecaddie, which meant that the caddie could give his man the proper club and then go and stand about 200 yards down the fairway and wait for the Man to hit, thus saving the poor, underpaid caddie the long walk up and back down the hill with the bag on his back. Well, my yo-yo got up and jerked one over the trees, over the maintenance shack, over the wall and over the hedge, clean into Ponky, totally O’Brien, which is golfgeek for out of bounds.
“Carl!” my guy hollers. “I need the bag!”
It was obvious what had happened. The cheesebrain didn’t think to put another ball in his pocket in case this happened. And now he wanted me to lug his condominium bag 200 yards back up that hill so he could get a ball out and then lug it all the way back down. Wrong.
I took his 3-iron, got a ball out of his pouch, tossed it down, squared up and hit one to him. As Dannie might’ve said, “I hit a purity,” because the thing took off with that pro trajectory, starting low and then climbing straight up, landing soft as left-out butter about twenty feet in front of the guy. It hopped twice, skidded a little and rolled, calmly and sweetly as you please until it stopped dead right between his spikes.
He looked down at the ball, looked out at me, looked at the others and laughed an embarrassed laugh.
The one thing I didn’t know was Fletcher happened to be over in the maintenance shack, watching the whole thing. He walked over to me.
“Good goddamn thing you doesn’t play the game,” he said. “You and your Gene Littler ass perfect swing just fucked up. Only way yo ass is gettin’ back inside these walls is wid a parrychute.”
Seeing as how I was out of ideas, I very much believed him.
The failure of Dr. Alfred A. Dingsby to get Dannie on the Mayflower course hit her like dysentery and it was almost a week before she was on her feet again.
But it wasn’t until her Tuesday mornings were ruined that Dannie got serious. After the misadventure of the Midnight Mulligan Marauders, the Mayflower erected a green fence, three inches thick and solid, in front of the hole in the hedge. Naturally, the rest of the Chops saw this as tragic in that they could no longer sit by the hole and dream.
But to Dannie, it meant they had pulled the plug on BrowningVision. She realized she might never see her prince again and her desperation went off the charts, all the way to inspiration.
Remarkably, that inspiration came from a very odd source—Blu Chao. She was trying to practice her English with one of Dannie’s unwanted and unsubscribed-for Ladies Links magazines, which offers hard-hitting features like “How to Make the Perfect Centerpiece for Your Next Nine-Hole Event” and “Golf and Cooking: When to Use the Spoon.”
Dannie was moping around the Pit one day—when she saw the back of what Blu was trying to read. It said,
Show us that your club has one of the 10 best-dressed men in golf and we’ll feature you on the cover of our January issue!
Dannie snatched it from Blue and said, “Sorry, but I gotta borrow this,” and sprinted out the door.
Dannie camped outside the gates of the Mayflower for three days, each day looking absolutely nothing like she did at Ponky. She actually let her hair out from under her Titleist hat, wore some makeup, got out of her usual baggy golf shirt and into a swirly miniskirt thing, actually let her wondrous cleavage have a look around, not to mention the pegs that won her ten straight Indian leg-wrestling championships at Ponky. Most Chops could’ve happily been stuck in a phone booth with her and not recognized her.
On the third day, she finally caught Browning cruising out of the gates in a red BMW convertible, his blond locks blowing back in the breeze, wearing a light $300 cashmere Polo sweater, a Bill Blass blazer with crest, a pair of screw-you Ray-Bans and the perfect pair of pleated pants. Dannie was so absorbed in the vision of him that she nearly forgot to follow him at all.
Browning Sumner lived in a sprawling four-story mansion that overlooked the Mayflower course, one of the rare old homes inside the course grounds itself. It was all stone with wrought-iron everything and about fourteen chimneys.
Dannie got her courage up, rang the doorbell, cleared her throat and waited for her opening.
But when Browning answered the door, Dannie went deaf-mute.
She had been in love with him before, but this was different. This was a spell. Dannie thought his face was evolutionary checkmate. “Evolution just hit the wall with him,” she said later. “It ain’t going no further than that.” She had almost forgotten about his perfect nose, his GQ chin and those blue eyes you could easily go snorkeling in. Apparently, it would’ve buckled the knees of the entire graduating class at Swarthmore.
“Yes?” he said.
Silence.
“Uh, yes?” he said again, louder.
“Yes. Yes, I’m Dannie, Danielle Higgins.” Her voice was cracking. She was perhaps the worst liar on the eastern seaboard and she knew it. “I’m a photographer and writer with Ladies Links magazine and I was told at the Mayflower Club that you …”
“Oh, magazines?” he said. “No, thanks.” And he closed the door quietly.
End of bet. End of love. End of life.
Dannie knocked louder.
He peeked his head out of the etched Steuben door window.
“Yes?” he said, only fractionally less polite.
“I don’t want you to buy our magazine,” she said. “I want you to be in our magazine.” And she held up the page with the contest in it.
Browning’s eyes brightened, if that’s possible.
“I get that magazine!” he said, delighted. “You know, the golf tips for women are often better than the ones they give for men. The swings aren’t so huge, more in control, you know?”
“Oh, oh, well, hell yes, we know!” said Dannie. This was actually working out well.
Dannie proceeded to explain the whole thing, how she’d been told that he was among the best-dressed men in the entire Mayflower Club and, possibly, the nation, and how magazines run these contests, but of course, to make them succeed, they have to scout out real talent themselves or they’d end up with four men who dressed the way most golfers dress, which requires a plaid vaccine to cure.
“Very nice,” said Browning Sumner. “Come in.”
Inside that old stone home was the most gorgeous, postmodern, spare decor any Metropolitan Home magazine could have found. It was done entirely in black and white, with unsittable but beautiful chairs next to unusable tiny cone-shaped tables, which were situated next to spartan steel lamps that shot their light at the ceiling, which did nothing for your ability to read, but made a very dramatic impression.
“Cozy,” said Dannie.
“Yes,” said Browning.
Over the next four hours, Browning and Dannie got to know each other and discovered how much they had in common. Dannie’s wealthy Atlanta heritage, the boarding school in Maine, the debutante party at the Rainbow Room. The deeper she got, the worse she felt, until she was almost bursting with guilt, squirming in her chair. To do this to this lovely man who had helped her, to lie to him for money, was almost more than she could bear.
At last, Browning asked about the magazine contest. “The contest?” said Dannie. “The contest,” said Browning.
“Oh, oh,” she said. She could feel her bottom lip start to quiver the way she does when she cries, which is almost never. “You see, to get out to that ol’ course out there and shoot some snaps, why …”
She began to wave her hand in front of her face to try to dry the tears.
“Are you crying?” said Browning, leaning forward, stunned.
“No, don’t be crazy, just allergies …”
And right about then she burst like a dam.
“What? What?” Browning said, taking her against his chest, but not so close that she might dampen and thus shrink the Polo. And Dannie heaved, “Oh, none of this is the truth! I’m so crooked I could stand in the shadder of a corkscrew. I just made all this up to meet you!”
Browning pulled back a little. She pulled a little further away, too, to show him her face.
“Don’t you ’member me?” she said. “I was in a gold Plymouth Duster and it stalled out right in front of the Mayflower and you were just nicer’n you could be and you helped me get it to the side and I just felt stupid as a box a rocks because it was only a stuck butterfly valve but you just showed so much kindness that day that I just haven’t been able to forget you and then one day Hoover, that’s this little guy over at Ponky, which is the club right next to yours, though it’s really nothing, made this hole in the hedge with his ball retriever, which I personally have regripped three times now for him, and we could see into the Mayflower through the hole and there you were and when the bet came up to see who could play 18 holes here first I just thought well, maybe if I stood to lose a lot of money it would force me to act on the one thing I wanted to do in life, which was to come and meet you and so that’s all it is.”
And Dannie Higgins hoped against hope that a nova might melt her this very minute and save her any further embarrassment.
And Browning Sumner said, amazed, “I pushed a car?”
Well, after another two or three hours of talking, Browning could not remember pushing her car out of the road, but did admit he liked Dannie too much to be mad and, why not, he’d help her win the bet and they’d celebrate together. He arranged for the first tee time he could get, which was two days forward, on Thursday morning.
“Might be fun,” he said.
Dannie was beside herself.
“You’re just sweeter’n Sugar Babies,” she said, and she offered her lips for him to do with what he liked.
He kissed her on the cheek. “I respect you too much to rush things,” he said, gallantly.
Dannie swore she heard a harp.
With me out of the club and only four days left until The Bet was over, I got itchy. I hated not seeing Madeline during the days. I missed rummaging around the course, boinking in interesting places, having her sidle up to me and say, “Pssst, caddie. Want to get it up and down?”
I had no car, no caddie job, no money and I couldn’t concentrate on these idiotic reviews.
The inside story of the Royal Family as only the sister-in-law of the cousin of the Royal Hairstylist can tell it!
“I know,” Madeline told me. “But we’re still together.”
But that night, waiting outside the club for Madeline to drive out and pick me up, I saw something that changed my mind—my father.
He didn’t see me. He was very enraptured with the way he was pulling out of the Mayflower in his biggest, goldest Cadillac with whitest leather yet. It had personalized license plates: BLUTEES.
For some reason, it fried me, my father inside those gates where I wanted to be, where I deserved to be, where Madeline was, and me outside, waiting like a gardener for his ride.
That whole night I thought about him. I thought about how he had tried to explain Travis. How he had said it was an emergency situation, that Travis would’ve never gone to the psychiatric hospital on his own. That the doctors were considering forcibly taking him themselves. That if he hadn’t tried to do something, he would’ve surely tried to kill himself. The doctors all said he would try soon enough, he’d said. He actually called it a “blessing, when you really examine the situation.”
I held my tongue, but just barely.
Travis changed us all. My mother just sank into a kind of little ball. She stopped going to movies with her friends and stopped working at the hospice. She hardly spoke to my father when he called. She hardly spoke to anybody. Eventually, she fell in love with her therapist and they moved almost as far away as they could from that day, that car, that moment, to nearly the furthest point away from Boston, and started over.
I never spoke to my father after that day, but people told me that he was a little humbled. He no longer tried to coach them on where to park or the proper way to tie a Windsor or assault them with all the little sayings he had on life that were taped to every edge of his bathroom mirror.
And it occurred to me that he and I were the only two that were alone now. Travis was wherever muddy little boys go, someplace with no soap, I hoped. My mother was happy and gone. It was only he and I now, skeletons of that old life. He’d gotten what I guess he deserved. Loneliness. If a man lectures in his home alone, does he make a sound? Me, I’d gotten loneliness, too. Is that what I deserved?
Madeline was asleep when it hit me. How bad could it hurt? How much self-respect could I lose if I just asked him? I didn’t have to be cordial. I didn’t have to forgive him. I only had to use him. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be the ultimate revenge?
The next day, I swallowed two blimpfuls of pride. I took a Mayflower Club directory Madeline had and looked up the First Boston Bank.
I was off. When I walked into his office, the size of a small par 5, I got hit by the Republican Hall of Fame again, only this time everything in the office was two notches past cherry up to mahogany, up to and including the painting frame that opened up into a bar and sink in the back. The entire office had the smell of one Newport and Aqua Velva and suddenly I was thirteen years old again.
I felt vaguely like yakking right then on his lush green carpeting, but I kept it down. Suddenly, this all seemed like a very bad idea. The very thought of coming back to this man after six years. Me coming back to him.
I was about to bolt, when the secretary greeted me with the big hello. I had her announce Raymond Hart to my father. She laughed like I was making a joke.
He took a minute to let me in. Maybe he was gathering himself after not seeing me for six years. I know I was shivering with nerves.
And yet when I walked in, it was like I’d been to camp for two weeks, nothing more.
“You’re looking healthy, Raymond,” he said. That was a puzzler, since he never looked up from his paperwork. The bald spot speaks. “Did you get an outdoor job?”
Lovely. His way of saying, “How much does mowing lawns pay anyway?”
“I’ve got to get the cabana boy to give me a higher SPF,” I said, trying to be clever.
He motioned to sit down in a plush chair in front of his desk. “Now,” he said, finally looking up, his eyes older and sadder than I ever remembered. “What can I do for you?”
So that is the way it was going to be. No “How’s your life?” No “Heard from your mother?” No “Are you married now? Do I have any grandkids?” Just “Now, what can I do for you?” as though I were applying for a second mortgage.
I took a deep breath.
“Well, Father,” I said. This was definitely going to hurt. “I passed you on the street the other day. You were coming out of the Mayflower Club. And I just wondered if I might invite myself to play a round of golf with you there someday. I’d pay my own way, of course.”
I cursed the moment I ever agreed to this satanic bet, a thing that would make me do something like this.
