Knuckleheads Page 6
Nancy Freiberg is not a lawyer and I’m not in love with her. Nor is she in love with me. We’re both willing to settle. Physically, though she’s not pretty, there’s nothing obvious about her that’s off-putting. She’s a couple inches shorter than I am and she makes adequate money at her public relations firm and she sometimes smiles at the awkward comments I offer as jokes. I’d say we’re compatible, but it’s not even about that. We’re tired of being alone, both of us. We intend to marry, buy a house with a cozy kitchen, present our best selves to the general public, and if we make it seven or eight non-miserable years together, we will have accomplished all we can hope for.
This is an appealing plan. I do not want to do anything to upset it. I’m all about the cozy kitchen, all about the parched forgettable sex. After today and my lucky eagle, I will be on the winning team. I will last another six months at the firm, possibly as much as two years if we break the scoring record, which will give me enough time to put out feelers for another job, and maybe Nancy and I will have children who will be smarter and more attractive than we are.
Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.
More than most, I know how relationships can be spoiled by a single small temptation. I make my living off the hurt, the bitterness. I know—down to the last squirreled-away dollar—the cost of that kind of mistake.
Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.
Nancy may not be a toasty oven-woman of a person, but she’s honest. She’s counting on me. We’ve set a date for next April and our parents are excited. They will help us with the down payment on our house. I have had fun today, no doubt, and a bit of luck, but there will not be any grand moments of defiance. I will not, literally or figuratively, throw any golf bags into a pond and strut blithely from the course of my life as if I’m some kind of fuck-it-all legend. I will not be ripping anything. I will be marrying Nancy and playing it safe.
Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.
A few years ago I represented Gordon during his divorce. It was an easy job. The split was amicable and all Gordon wanted was to keep the health club membership in his name and to have Lenora put it in writing that she wouldn’t work out there anymore. “If I’m gonna have to convince a whole new slate of women that I’m worth doing,” he told me, “I have to get myself in shape. I can’t be spending hours at the gym if she’s there too, if she’s trying to build herself a new body to share with other dudes.”
Lenora saw the logic in that argument and the whole thing was settled in a trio of brisk two-hour meetings. “It’s not that I don’t love you, Gordon,” she said to him as they left my office for the last time. “It’s that I’m not sure I know how to love anyone. I’m not sure I even love myself.”
Gordon described this assessment as both truth and bullshit. “What she’s saying is true, but she has no understanding of it. She doesn’t know how to love anyone, especially herself, and she has no clue about how to learn. She’s just mouthing those words like the doctor told her to in therapy.”
“What will you do now?” I asked him.
“I’ll be me,” he said. “I’ll go to the gym. I’ll make money. I’ll lose more hair. I’ll meet new women. I’ll be all right.”
Immediately after the divorce, we hung out quite a bit. Not at night when he presumably chased women—“I’m having success in that department,” he’d tell me—but we’d meet twice a week for breakfast at a beat-up diner. “Best pancakes in the city,” Gordon said. “Good coffee too. None of that tapioca-machiatto absurdity.”
Once I asked him if he ever heard what happened to Newfeld and Bloch.
“Bloch died. Massive stroke. Newfeld’s still alive. Stopped playing golf though. Ninety years old and still goes to the club to criticize the soup and terrorize the waitresses.”
“How’d you ever make it through loops with those guys? How’d you survive that?”
“How you survive anything, man. How I survived Lenora. You just go inside yourself and think about something different. Think about how the world would be better if you had more control over it, how one day you will.”
He went back to eating his pancakes. He didn’t like to cut the whole stack and then spear large syrup-soaked chunks with his fork. Instead, he separated the pancakes like an Oreo cookie and chewed through them one layer at a time. What he was saying felt to me like truth, but with some bullshit mixed in too.
“That’s all you did?” I said. “Just sucked it up and imagined a brighter day?”
He paused then, mid-chew, looked at me like he’d trusted me with the dissolution of his marriage and I’d managed to prove I was no longer a retard. Then he chuckled. “It’s easier to ignore a couple of bitter bastards when you’re not worried all the time about your hard-on.”
I looked out the window, saw the beginning of snow, how it swirled over the black roof of the hardware store across the street like somebody was puffing soft, mint-flavored crystals.
“Actually, there’s one other thing I used to do,” he said. “You remember how Johnny Jones used to cheat for members and give them better lies?”
I nodded.
“I did the exact opposite. If Newfeld or Bloch hit into the woods and the ball was all right, like it was playable, I kicked it so it wasn’t. I pushed it behind a tree or into a bush. The way I figured was if they were gonna be pissed off at the universe anyway, no matter how many breaks they got, why give them any breaks at all? Why not let every piece of evidence confirm their belief that every molecule in the world was out to get them? Fuckers.”
This I know: I’m no hero. Not even a hero’s sidekick. I’m a family lawyer specializing in amicable divorces. I get them done too fast and my firm leaks income. My teeth are straight now and my limbs are more proportional to my body, but I’m flabby and my nose is overlarge. I look exactly like no one worth trusting. Couples finalize their deals quickly because no one wants to spend time with me. Nancy, at least for now, claims she’s willing to. She’ll sit next to me and watch television. She’ll say, “You’re good at what you do, Bruce. Be proud.”
When Nancy takes her clothes off, her skin is pale and, often, a bit cold to the touch. I’m obviously nothing special either. When our bodies move against each other, there are no fireworks. Still, we are kind to each other. I stroke the hair on the back of her neck and sometimes she cries. She tells me she’s never let herself be vulnerable with anyone else. She trusts me because she knows I need someone to be vulnerable with too. We could be stuffed animals for each other, objects we’d like to grow out of but which, for now, we clutch onto with all we’ve got.
Inexplicably, it happens again on the sixteenth hole.
It’s a short par four and after Lisa’s rocket of a drive we are poised splendidly in the fairway, about eighty yards out. I go last this time. Gordon lobs a wedge to about ten feet. Good enough to let Lisa and Natalie fire dead at the flag. Natalie hits her worst shot of the day, a cut that lands in a flowerbed right of the green. “Sorry,” she says. “Don’t know what I was thinking.”
I’m thinking maybe the beers are getting to her.
Lisa plays a bump-and-run that for a moment looks perfect, but it slows in a clump of grass and winds up about a foot outside of Gordon. “All right,” Gordon says, as if there’s no chance I’ll hit anything closer. “Ten feet. One of us will knock it in.”
I line my shot up and this time I do hit it just like I visualize. My backswing is smooth, the blade of my wedge digs a soft divot from the turf and the ball ascends in a gorgeous soaring arc. “That looks good,” Lisa says and we all watch it, a minuscule dot against a sky that’s swimming-lips blue. In our quiet, we can hear a cheer from a nearby hole. Some other group has made a birdie. Pathetic. Birdies are nothing to us. We are entitled to them. My ball lands half-a-foot from the cup, bounces once and drops into the hole. Another eagle. Lisa jumps high in the air with a shout and Gordon flips his wedge with an oh-my-fucking-
god toss. Natalie scurries toward me on her toes and kisses my cheek, her mouth moist.
One day that caddying summer it was about ninety thousand degrees. The air was broth. I got sent out in a threesome with Gordon, all ladies who couldn’t play to save their lives. They’d hit the ball twenty feet on the ground and then spend two minutes setting up and waggling and addressing the ball, and then hit it twenty feet again. The bag I was carrying was enormous and filled with golf balls and two umbrellas and even a sweater and an extra pair of shoes. The round was hot and endless and with three women and all that waggling, my boner was continuous and painful. In the middle of the fourteenth fairway, I was done. I couldn’t carry that condominium of a bag one more foot and I dropped it a hundred-and-fifty yards from the green and sat down and hung my head. I couldn’t have cared less if my bank account never grew another penny, I’d had it.
Gordon didn’t hesitate. He walked over, scooped up the beastly trunk like it was somebody’s mini change-purse and shouldered it. For the next hour-and-a-half, he carried all three bags, handed off clubs, and raked traps for all three women. All I did was pull pins. At the end of the round, practically in tears, I apologized to him. He called me a retard and told me to shut up. Then he gave me a third of his tips, the only tips I ever got. “Buy yourself some gum,” he said. “Your breath stinks.”
We are nineteen under par as we stride up the eighteenth fairway. Everybody in the tournament has heard rumors about our phenomenal round. Foursomes who’ve already finished and all the firm’s executive partners are clustered on the clubhouse balcony overlooking the green. They cheer lustily and raise beers in salute as Lisa, Natalie and Gordon all hit their second shots within six feet of the hole. We will have three adorable options from which to choose to putt for our inevitable birdie. We will finish twenty under par, at least a dozen strokes better than any other team. No one has ever dominated the tournament in such breathtaking fashion. Our status will be upgraded to mythic. My two eagles will be stitched forever into the firm’s historical fabric. I no longer have to worry about being let go. I will be named an associate soon enough, and perhaps one day, a partner.
Two eagles. Two lucky shots in one day, the right day, and it feels like I’ve found a catch-release net for every failure of my former life. I can scuttle free forever from the kingdom of loserdom. The bag on my shoulder has never felt lighter. I could walk another eighteen right now. Hell, another thirty-six.
Lisa and Natalie talk animatedly to each other as they wait for me to line up my shot. It’s symbolic, really, my shot. Academic. Nobody expects me to do anything. I’ve already done more than enough to earn my spot in the record books.
“Can you handle your end?” Gordon says to me as I pull out my nine-iron. “Because I think there’s a kind of I’ll-do-it-if-you-do-it thing going on here. Lisa wants to go for it, trust me, but she wants Natalie to be complicit in the bargain. If Lisa’s gonna cheat on her boyfriend, she needs a moral accomplice. She doesn’t want to accept sole responsibility.”
“Have you forgotten I’m engaged?”
“Have you forgotten you’re not married yet? If you don’t go for it today, Eugene, when will you ever?”
Gordon’s bald dome is baldy sunburned. I admire the man for refusing to bow to the elements and wear a hat, but his skull nevertheless resembles a maraschino cherry. It’s somewhat difficult to understand how Lisa can be attracted to him. There was a time when Gordon was beautiful, but this is not that time. Still, if Gordon says he’s in with Lisa, I believe him. I also believe him about what he says he needs me to do. This scenario has developed over four hours on a golf course, and if Gordon knows any damn thing at all, he knows his way around a golf course.
Nancy and I met at an awful Indian restaurant. We were both eating alone on a Saturday night. I ate chicken tandoori while reading a murder mystery. She had a vegetarian curry and didn’t read anything. My food was bland, wooly in my mouth, blocky like chunks of tree-bark. We left at the same time and as I held the door for her on the way out, she also looked unsatisfied with her dining experience. I took a risk and said the one charming thing I’ve ever said in my life, before or since. I said, “Hey, I don’t know about you, but there’s a terrific Indian restaurant nearby. You hungry?”
She countered with sushi and we did that, and later, we were in her apartment and the kissing was less tree-barky than the food, but not by much, and she said, “I’ve been hurt a lot. I’m a hurt person. Will you hurt me too?”
“Not on purpose,” I said and, at the time, believed.
This last shot is difficult.
There’s a yawning ravine in front of the green. It’s roughly thirty yards wide and if it swallows your ball, you will never find it among the brambles growing in its throat. It’s true my shot doesn’t matter and that I’ve already contributed enough to my team, still, most of the firm and all my bosses are watching from the clubhouse balcony. If I tank the ball into the brambles, on some level I’m still a loser. I don’t have to get the ball close to the hole, I just need to hit it solid enough to fly the hazard. I just have to be respectable. A respectable shot of a hundred-and-ten yards. I can do that.
“You gonna come through for me?” Gordon asks me again. “Hold up your end?”
“Shut up,” I tell him. “Your breath stinks.”
I swing without paying much attention to what I’m doing. My arms are loose and flowing through contact and the click of club on ball is pure. It’s another perfect shot. Every eye on the balcony zeroes in on it. The ravine sighs in resignation as the ball floats toward the flag. For a second, it looks like it might bounce and roll into the hole again for a third eagle, but nobody’s that lucky. It scoots, then slows, and finally settles about four inches from the cup. A tap-in for birdie. The roar from the balcony is loud and long, the applause lasts for a minute at least.
I doff my hat and bow.
Natalie and I are in the basement of the clubhouse. In a small office that’s empty except for a wastebasket with a handful of cough-drop wrappers and a grayish table pushed up against one wall. It’s as if no one has decided yet what to use the office for. Natalie leans back against the table. I lean into her. Her golf shirt is on the floor and her bra is of a lace and smell that Nancy will never achieve in this lifetime. Gordon and Lisa disappeared an hour ago. “What would you do,” I ask, “if in the middle of a round somewhere, your caddy gets so pissed off at you he throws your clubs into a pond?”
“That would never happen,” Natalie says. “I treat my caddies well.”
Her breath has been overwhelmed by the scotch. It is sweet and leafy, a summer forest at night, a bacchanalia. It is lush and fertile and way beyond the out-of-bounds marker and I think my tongue tastes the same way. Nancy would understand why I’m doing this, which will only make it hurt more when she finds out. I will lie to her, but I will also want to brag. It will be up to her to decide if she still wants to settle for me, and my lawyer’s instincts tell me she will. It will not make her feel better when I tell her this is only a one-time deal, something special for me, kind of like a tip.
Yes, a tip is what this is. I performed well on the course and now I am being tipped.
I take Natalie’s nipple into my mouth. It is alive. I am alive. Her stomach is a steam of fresh-baked bread, warm and gold and rising toward my cheek, my fingers. “Twenty under par,” I say, as she unbuckles my belt.
Her hand holds me and demonstrates the authority of her grip. “This is not something we’ll be telling the rest of the firm about,” she says.
No, it isn’t.
UNDER DANNY ROTTEN
UNDER THIS SHIRT IS SKIN, and under this skin is heart, and under this heart, is nachos, my own full plate with diced jalapeños and the six of us—my two brothers, my sister, my parents and me—heading out to dinner in Mamaroneck on Saturday nights.
It was a twenty-minute drive, the inside of the station wagon warm, dark, fluid, a womb. We’d park for free on the street atop a
hill a couple hundred yards from the restaurant, and walk down through a metered parking lot. Often, I held my mother’s hand, or my little sister’s thin fingers, but what burned was the anticipation of nachos. My own platter. And not a heaping mound of cheese-sauce and fake salsa slop, but a dozen individual chips, each with its own slather of freshly melted cheese, refried beans and a bold jalapeño in the center, juicy and staring, like an eyeball.
The back of the restaurant’s menu taught me Mexican history I never learned in school, tales of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa zooming across the countryside on horseback, shooting rifles and liberating farmers from the heel of fat and greedy landowners. Beneath the restaurant’s faux stone arches, my parents would split a pitcher of Sangria, a quarter-chunk of lemon floating on the surface like a rowboat. A Mariachi trio circulated across the dining room’s smooth ceramic floor and when the three men hovered near our table, my father slipped them a few dollars to play “Guantanamera.”
No dining experience will ever compare to the ecstasy of that one, for years the only full meal I’d eat each week during wrestling season. My mouth would start to water sometime late Wednesday afternoon as I thought of the warm car-ride, the trek through the parking lot, and, at last, the restaurant’s stiff high-backed chairs. Then, minutes after we were seated, the hot metal platter would swoop over my left shoulder and land in front of me, sizzling.
It was always worth it, those nachos. That first tentative nibble of the cheese’s soft goo, then the crisp of the chip’s mildly resistant crunch, the combined flavor filling my mouth with an explosive surge. It was worth the grunt and sweat of a week eating little but lettuce, ice cubes, and raspberry jelly on whole wheat. It was worth the desperation that came with learning how to break down an opponent’s base with a sharp arm-chop, knock the kid off-balance, and dig his shoulder and face—nose-forward—into the mat.