The Stories of Richard Bausch (14 page)

He swung, missed once more, hitting behind it again, another clod of mud. Now he stepped closer and with no waggle at all, swung again. He made contact this time: the very tip of the club head sent the ball on a direct line at a ninety-degree angle from him, hit the tee marker slightly to the right of its curve, ricocheted, and seemed to leap in a white trailing streak toward the ball washer standing ten feet away and behind the tee.

The ball bounced off that, came back like a shot, and struck him in the groin.

He went down on all fours, then lay down, and she was at his side, hands on his arm, trying to turn him. For a few very awful moments he was aware only of his pain, and of the spreading area of pain in his middle. He held his hands around his upper abdomen, out of sheer humiliation. She was saying something, but he couldn’t hear it. He was sick to his stomach. The rain pelted his face, and then it was water pouring from her hair; she had put her face down to his.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Okay,” he managed.

He did not look okay to her. She knew the ball had struck him, but hadn’t seen exactly where. Because he was holding his stomach, she assumed it was there. It had all happened so fast.

“Can you get up?” she said.

“No,” he said. “My ball—” He stopped, and tried to hide what he had almost said in a gasp for air.

“I don’t know where it went.”

“No,” he said. “Please.”

“It hit you,” she said. “I didn’t see.”

“My balls,” he said. It had come out in spite of him. He wanted to sink down into the wet grass and mud and disappear. From where he lay, he could see the divots and dug-up places where he had tried to be someone other than who he was.

“Can you get up?” she said.

He found that he could. He had imagined that they would play the fourth hole, and he would help her. The whole thing seemed like an idiotic kid’s dream now. All of it, including ever getting any good at this game.

She was helping him walk. “My clubs,” he said. “Damn. Everything’s getting wet.”

“Here,” she told him, moving him slightly. She got him to sit on the bench. He saw his golf club lying where he had dropped it, and the ball, a few feet away, in a perfect lie, the surrounding drenched greenness.

She had placed herself on the bench next to him, and held his hands in her own. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Really.” It was clear to her now where he had been hit. She put her arms around him. They might have been huddled there against some great grief. The rain kept coming.

He couldn’t speak quite yet.

“Someday when it’s dry,” she told him.

At the house
, she helped him out of his clothes, then got him to lie down in the bed with the blanket up to his shoulder; he lay on his side. His hair soaked the pillowcase, and he began to shiver. The nausea had subsided somewhat. He remembered his clubs and tried to tell her about them, but she had anticipated him. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

When she had been gone a few seconds, he got himself out of the bed and limped to the window to look out at her, beyond the little row of fir trees, making her way along the wet fairway in the rain, hurrying, her arms folded tight about herself. He had never felt so naked. She disappeared into the misty, raining distance while he watched. Then, moaning low, feeling sick again, he went into the bathroom and looked at himself, all gooseflesh. He pulled a towel off the rack and began drying his hair. There wasn’t anything to put on, nothing to do to get out, get away. In her closet he found a man’s clothes—the second Bruce’s clothes. They were all way too big for him. The sleeves hung down, the shoulders sagged. He put them back, and went along her hallway to the drier, his clothes tumbling there. He opened the door and looked in; they were all still very wet. Closing the door with a barely suppressed moan, he pressed the button to start it again. It would be an hour at least. He struggled—it was still very hard to walk—back to the window. She was nowhere. Here was her small patio, with its wrought-iron furniture. A round table, four chairs, a closed umbrella. He saw citronella candles, an overturned glass, a small statuette of a bird in flight. The gas grill had a black cover over it, like a cowl. The water ran down the sides. It all looked alien, so much not his, not home. He got himself back under the blankets and waited. His eyes burned; he discovered that he was deeply drowsy, and wondered if he might pass out.

She had started down the fairway, uncomfortable and even irritable in the rain, wondering what would happen now. She felt oddly that some serious change would come, and she recalled how her grief over the first Bruce had included an element of anger at him for getting killed in that bungling way. She had always felt guilty for that unacceptable emotion, and perhaps she had put up with the second Bruce’s casual mistreatment of her as a kind of atonement. Nearing the fourth tee, she had an image of Dallworth flailing
at the ball on its little yellow tee; it made her begin to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. She went to the bench and sat down, sopping wet, her dress flapping on her thighs with every movement, and she put her hands to her face and laughed helplessly, almost hysterically, for what seemed a long while. It would be hard to explain what took so much time. But she felt confident of his kindness, his wish to please her, and anyway she couldn’t move. The muscles of her rib cage seized up, and she went on laughing.

Finally she picked up the club, the ball, and dropped each, one by one into the bag. Then she began trying to haul it back to her house. For a slow, pouring, almost painful fifteen minutes she was just moving in the heavy mist and rain, surrounded by the soft, sodden, close-clipped grass; the base of the bag created a dark mud streak, like a plow blade, behind her. She didn’t care. Her back ached; her arms felt as though they might pull out of the sockets.

She found him curled up in her bed. She set the bag of clubs under the eave of the patio and stepped inside, dripping. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she said. “Want to join me?” He was asleep. She stepped to the edge of the bed, gazed at him, then reached down and shook his shoulder, a little more roughly than she meant to. “Hey.”

He rose up out of a dream of being jostled in a crowded place and was startled to find her looming over him, water beaded on her face, running down her jaw, her hair matted to her cheeks. He noticed that her ears stood straight out from her head, and oddly this made him ache under the heart. He almost reached up and touched her cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was all a lot of lying.”

“What?”

“I’m not any good at it,” he told her. “I’m awful. And I’m not getting any better.”

“You’re okay,” she told him.

She went in and took a brief shower, toweled off, and put a bathrobe on. She found him still in the bed.

“Those other clothes are all too big for me,” he said, and began to cry.

This startled them both. She got into the bed with him and held him, like a little boy. When he had gained control over himself, he said, “I don’t know.”

She resisted the urge to be sharp with him. She said, “John, are you physically damaged?”

He turned to look over his blanketed shoulder at her. “What do you mean?”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Do you know what aspect of golf I’ve never understood and would like to understand?”

He waited.

“Putting.”

“I’m even worse at that,” he told her, with a disconsolate sigh.

“I’ve heard people say it’s the hardest thing.” ““I thought Bruce never played.”

“Let’s not talk about him. Or anybody named Bruce,” she said.

A moment later, he said, “It
is
hard to do, putting.”

“And I bet you could show me a lot.”

He understood perfectly well what she was doing now, and he knew that he would never question it or examine it very closely. She lay breathing into the base of his neck, here, under the blanket, her arm resting on his abdomen, the elbow causing the slightest discomfort, but she was this friendly presence, trying to give him something. He said, “Can I stay here tonight?”

“You know you can.”

He shifted a little, and she moved her arm so that her hand rested on his hip. “If it stops raining, maybe in the morning we can spend some time on the practice green,” he said.

She murmured, “That would be fun.”

They went to sleep at almost the same time, and dreamed separately, of course. She saw herself leading children through a sunny field of flowers, and too many of them were misbehaving, breaking the stems off; he dreamed that he was dreaming, in her bed, while she emptied the closet of clothes that were, as things often are in dreams, outlandish, out of all scale, and too big for any normal man.

Here are Marlee
and Ted, married one year tonight, walking into the Inn at New Baltimore, an exclusive establishment on the main street of this little village in the Virginia hunt country. Ted’s ex-wife, Tillie, recommended the place, calling it the perfect surrounding for spending a romantic evening. A wonderful setting in which to celebrate an anniversary. The fact that it was Tillie who did the recommending is something Marlee didn’t know about until five minutes ago.

They get out of the car and walk across the parking lot in the cool early spring sunlight. Ted’s hand rests just below her elbow, guiding her, and she moves a little to step away from him. In the foyer of the restaurant, they are greeted by a tall, long-faced man. He offers two menus and leads them into a dim corridor whose walls are lined with the heads of stuffed animals and heavy gilt-framed paintings. The paintings remind Marlee of the ones in the student union at the University of Illinois, where she was a part-time student when she met Ted, only eighteen months ago. It seems worth mentioning to him—it’s something to say, anyhow.

“These remind me of the union,” she says.

Her husband gives her a puzzled look. He’s sixteen years older than she is, and this is an expression she has become fairly accustomed to.

“The paintings,” she tells him. “The student union at Illinois has paintings like this. It’s like they were all done by the same artist. I wonder who these people are.”

“Madison,” Ted says. “Adams. Monroe. They’re presidents of the United States.”

“Where’s Lincoln?” she wonders.

“Come on,” Ted says, taking her by the wrist.

The long-faced waiter stands watching them from the entrance to the dining room. “This way, sir,” he says.

Everything is dim. The room is low-ceilinged; there are dark wooden beams and heavy oak tables and chairs, a thick carpet. On the tables, the little candles in their holders give off almost no light at all. Violin music seems to be leaking in from outside somewhere, it’s so faint. The waiter seats them, then takes Marlee’s folded napkin, snaps it open, and carefully places it across her knees. He does the same with Ted’s napkin. Then he moves off, and in a moment another waiter walks in and approaches them. He’s also tall, but more imposing, leaning forward slightly, as if his center of gravity were at the top of his head. He has widely separated, small dark eyes. There’s something triangular about his face. In a voice that to Marlee seems a trifle ridiculous—it’s very high-pitched and thin, like that of a boy—he asks if they’d care to see the wine list. Ted nods. Marlee covers her mouth with her hand and pretends to cough. “I feel like a Coke or something,” she says.

The waiter is stone quiet. Ted turns to him and says, “Bring the wine list.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marlee watches him stride back through the entrance. “Has he been breathing helium?” she says.

“Shhh. He’ll hear you.”

“I don’t think I ever had anybody put the napkin in my lap until I married you. Isn’t that strange? A whole aspect of eating out, and I’d completely missed it. Can’t get service like that at the Red Lobster.”

He looks around the room. She can see that he’s not interested in talking about the Red Lobster.

“Did Tillie say what we should order here?”

“She said everything’s good.”

“Well, and Tillie certainly knows what’s good. If there’s one thing about Tillie it’s her vast knowledge of all the good things there are to do and eat in the world. And she eats so wonderfully. I don’t remember when I’ve seen such an elegant eater.”

“There’s no need to take that tone, Marlee. I’ve known the woman since nineteen forty-nine. We’re friends. For God’s sake, she’s had four other husbands since me.”

“Well, I think I’d still rather eat at the Red Lobster.”

“Please,” Ted says. “Don’t embarrass me.” He says this good-naturedly, like a joke.

“Do I embarrass you?” she says.

He touches her wrist. “Kidding,” he says. “Come on.”

“I do though, sometimes. Huh.”

He’s quiet, frowning, thinking. There’s a way he has of seeming to appreciate her youth and beauty while being the tolerant older man, with knowledge of the world that’s beyond her. “No,” he murmurs finally. “Though I do get a little puzzled now and then about what you’re thinking.”