They had a good time. Each ball was a small celebration of their gratuitous, so far successful affection above the moat of moping: each ball said, “Here, you sad sacks, here.” They were probably, in their hand-holding glee and innocent kissing mirth, only minutes away from hurling themselves like badly hit balls down into their broken brethren, but for the moment they felt fine and superior, lucky and happy, the way a new couple is supposed to feel.
Mr. Albemarle addressed each ball with a little wiggle of his butt and hands, a steadying sigh, arm straight, head down, slow uptake, pause, how long will it he before she and I are back to normal, at each other instead of on, whap! ball going God knows where, anywhere but straight. Mr. Albemarle could somehow induce a golf ball to wind up behind him. Dale Mae, in her red, fringed skirt, the fringes snapping like tiny whips when she cracked a ball into the ozone of ruined love before them, did better: her balls went forward.
That’s how it is with women, Mr. Albemarle thought. They want forward, they get forward. Not so with me, which is where all the bluster obtains. Talk forward if you achieve backward. Bluster and cheer, the man’s ticket to the prom. Bluster and cheer take reason and balls to the dance of life, and it goes reasonably well as long as the corsage is fresh. Then reason divorces cheer, and balls beat bluster, and the long diurnal haul to mildew of the heart is on. Mr. Albemarle teed up an X-out and hit it, smiling, best he could.
When they got back from the range, such as it was — the glowing ball dispenser, the ball baskets like Amazon brassieres, the clubs on the honor system — they prepared to frolic naked. Mr. Albemarle dropped his wallet on a chair beside the bed and out of the corner of his eye saw the wallet move. “Look,” Dale Mae said, “there’s a lizard.”
There was a lizard coming out of Mr. Albemarle’s wallet. It was nearly the color of the dollar bills from which it emerged, its head made quick birdlike assessments of the situation, and it ran.
“What was that?” Mr. Albemarle asked.
“That was Elvis,” Dale Mae said, “in a green one-dollar cape. Get in the bed.”
Mr. Albemarle did as he was told.
There is much to be said for doing as one is told. Mr. Albemarle had come to see life as a parabola of sorts plotted over time against doing and not doing as one is told. Roughly, infancy and maturity were close to a base line of obeying what others expected of you, and puberty and its aftermath, which was a variable period, took you on the upward part of the bell-like curve away from the base line of doing what you were told. You soared on a roller-coaster hump of doing not what you were told and it felt good, but finally your stomach got a bit light and uneasy and you started, through natural forces and not reluctantly, to come back down toward agreeability. Having ridden around with your hands off the bar and screaming, you were now willing — it was even exhilarating — to do precisely as you were told. It was fun in fact to subvert the voice telling you what to do a little by being instantly agreeable, by even anticipating instructions. This was pulling the wool on the bourgeois.
This was one reason Mr. Albemarle did not object to his current job, walking all along the watchtower. He still had no good idea what he was doing, despite the large assurances and hints supplied him by the aliens of affection, but he found doing it agreeable because he had apparently been, however mysteriously, told to do it. So he did it. Living well was not the best revenge; doing exactly what you are told is the best revenge. The blame or fault in your doing it, if any obtains, rests upon those telling you what to do. The masses of folk going over cliffs in the name of this or that religion were on to the beauty of this revenge, but Mr. Albemarle liked the less obvious vengeance of obeying the smallest whim, the fine print of commandments that were issuing like radio signals from everyone and everything around him, from the very fabric of civilized life. From utter strangers on the street to foreign governments, everyone had ideas about what you were supposed to do. Your job, as baseline parabola wire walker, was to divine their (sometimes tacit) wishes and appear to obey them. This is what civilized human life boiled down to.
Animals, Mr. Albemarle had noticed, and it was not surprising, were immune. They could not hear the radio. They heard only their “instincts,” which excused all their nasty behavior. Periodically an animal would be trained — i.e., forced — to listen to the radio. Animal trainers were, ironically, those most wont on earth to speak of human freedom, iconoclasm, nonconformity as summa bona. And they were, appropriately, dirtier than most people, unruly, outspoken in hard-to-follow ways, united beyond these traits in their insistence that tuning in a horse or a bear or a dog to hear the radio of doing what it was told somehow increased its freedom. These notions gave Mr. Albemarle the idea of opening an obedience school for dogs all along the watchtower. He would train all the dogs all along the watchtower to leap into the moat and become brokenhearted-man’s best friend. He liked this idea very much. Training a dog to leap into space would be a test, probably, but it would be imminently possible if you weren’t soft-headed. The larger problem with the idea was that he hadn’t seen a dog in all his days all along the watchtower.
When Dale Mae woke up, looking ravishing, he said to her, “Do you think we need a dog?” She said, “I don’t think we need a dog.”
That was that.
“I’m like one of those Iroquois steel workers,” Mr. Albemarle said. “I just naturally put one foot down in front of the other, straight, without looking down, all along the watchtower, whether there are dogs on it or not, and all along the parabola of doing what I’m told. I can walk that line as steady as Ricky Wallenda on a wire, but no leapfrog.”
“No leapfrog?”
“No leapfrog. Ricky Wallenda quit leapfrog. He fell doing leapfrog.”
“I see.”
“Just do what you’re told, but no leapfrog.” I see.
The amazing thing about Dale Mae, about any tough woman who could still smile after enduring her own time on the parabola of doing and not doing as she was told, was that she did see. They could see right through a fog of nonsense to the rock or reef behind it. They’d abandoned radar in favor of a finger in the wind. This is why men liked them and were driven crazy by them. Men were content with a finger in the wind only when they were defeated or tired. Women used a finger in the wind cinching victory first thing in the morning. Without women, men would be giant raw quivering analytical anuses. Mr. Albemarle was comforted by this summation he had formulated and went to sleep on Dale Mae’s bosom.
Mr. Albemarle found a writing desk all along the watchtower and stationery inside it so sat down to write a letter. “Take a letter,” he said to himself, and by way of sexual harassment palmed his own butt and sat down.
Dear [blank; he couldn’t determine to whom to write],
I know you think ill of me. That is because I am weak and mean. But keep in mind that…[here he faltered]…that…[he could think of nothing now in his behalf, in his defense, to say to the person or persons whom he could not think of either]…
Love,
Troy
Troy was not his name, nor did he want to assume it. He looked the letter over and liked it. It summed up his position nicely. It was all you could say if the worm of your passion was twisted, your affections were all mismanaged and always would be. “Keep in mind that…that…” that nothing. Love, Troy. Did he mean the city, the myth of epic war over an impossibly beautiful woman? Who cared.