Was that Waldo’s toothbrush that Lorraine found in the motel bathroom? It was. Also the traces of whiskey in the water glass, the half-full (always the optimist) flask from which it came now tucked in his back pocket. But had Dutch called to warn him? He had not. Their decampment in the old station wagon parked out front had been the bright idea of the gum-smacking charmer in the raggedy cutoffs whom his shotgun-toting spouse had nicknamed Sweet Abandon and whom Waldo, but only to himself, called Sassy Buns. She it was who’d lured him out here to the darkened country club this moonless night because she said her biggest fantasy was to get balled on one of those velvety golf greens, or maybe on all eighteen, a hole at a time, how many corks you got to pop, Pop? Haw. He wasn’t sure yet he’d get to pop one. She was something of a mystery, hard to figure. When he’d poked his finger in one of the gaps in her shorts back at the motel, making some good-natured crack about holing out with a clean stroke, she’d leapt off the bed, yelling: “Hey, I came for the high, man! What are you, some kind of sex maniac?” “Naw, only when I’m awake,” he’d said with a sad grin, and she’d laughed at that and snapped her gum and picked her shirt up off the floor, her handsome bare tits, dusted with spilled coke which he’d hoped to snort directly therefrom, bouncing freely, and said: “This dump sucks, come on, let’s split!” When he’d told her he was disappointed, he’d sort of hoped to get laid, she’d said, all right, no problem, and told him about her fantasy which had to do with an early sex experience with a caddy. Or did she say, her daddy? Never mind, here they were, approaching the first green, and he felt in good form even if wick dipping in the wild was not his wont. “What’s par for this hole?” she asked. “Four,” he said. “With a good drive and a bit of luck you can be on the green in two.” As a rule, he counted himself lucky if he was on in five with nothing worse than a pair of putts to go. But if he was going to have to go the round, he wanted to keep his strokes to a minimum. “Have you ever noticed,” she said, “how the first holes on golf courses are always the easiest and most inviting? It’s like the first stages of puberty when it’s all just a lark. Only after you’ve left the clubhouse far behind do you realize, led on by the easy openers, what you’ve got yourself into.” Waldo paused and unscrewed the cap of his hip flask, took a hit, and contemplated this pale half-naked waif skipping down the fairway in the darkness before him. She wasn’t exactly what she’d seemed. “Do you sometimes wish you’d stayed back in the clubhouse?” he called out. She turned around. He could just barely see her nipples, black pinpoints on her narrow chest. He couldn’t tell if she was smiling or not. “Oh no. But sometimes I wish the people I was out on the course with had a better sense of how the game was played.” He supposed that was a dig, like many he’d heard before, but what he said, trying to revive her fantasy and his plainer hopes (he hadn’t been around one of this sort in a long while and he wasn’t sure he could handle it), was, “I know what you mean, baby, a big driver might separate the pro from the duffer, but the game’s won or lost around the greens.” “What separates the pro from the duffer,” she said, “is knowing how to change your stroke when the old stroke fails. And how to find your balls again when they’re lost in the rough.” She laughed, sounding more like her old sassy self, and added: “Drop your pants.” “Hunh?” “Come on, old man, you wanted it so bad, let’s get to it!” She stripped off her own shorts, kicked them away. “Your lie!” She was beautiful but he couldn’t see much: a kind of ghostly cartoon cutout with two dots on the chest and a black patch down in the middle. Instead of green and hole, though, he was thinking sandtrap. Nevertheless, he worked his shoes off, moved the flask to his breast pocket, lowered his pants and drawers, and stepped out of them. He didn’t know if she could see how things stood with him, but if she could she had to be impressed. “Okay,” she laughed, “catch me if you can!” And she turned those saucy cheeks by which he’d christened her and was off and running down the open fairway. Not too fast. More like a glowing hop, skip, and, if he ever caught her, a jump. She looked like a flitting moth, rare and tender and just aching to be pinned, as they used to say back in the old chapter room, and with his trusty one-eyed scout pointing the way, Brother Waldo, yawhawing boldly in the hollow night, went galumphing after.
One-eyed Trevor, home alone and still monstrously hungover, his bloodshot good eye nearly as blind as his bad, sat huddled over his actuarial charts, searching for some sort of reassuring pattern, a set of probabilities he could count on, but it was like trying to read underwater. Nothing stood still, everything flowed into everything else, it was making him nauseated, or rather, more nauseated than he already was. When Alf dropped him off on his way to the hospital, the first thing he’d done was wolf down half a box of brown sugar, he didn’t know why, it just tasted good. Then he’d swallowed some aspirin and antacids with cold coffee and rinsed out with mouthwash and sat down with his volatile actuarial charts to wait for Marge to come home. That image of the fluttering moth that had occurred to Waldo would have applied as well to Trevor’s headachy experience of the points on his charts: not only John’s wife’s now (he couldn’t even find hers), they were all dancing capriciously all over the charts, sometimes flying right off the page, other times sinking like stones or bloating like spilled ink. He tried to trace his way, step-by-step, back to the source of his despair, and though it hurt him to think at all, never mind in any systematic way, it seemed to him that the root cause of it all was his clandestine pursuit of the photographer’s clandestine pursuit of John’s wife. A whimsical and innocent game at first, it had become an unconscionable obsession, having little to do with pursued or pursuer, but all to do with himself. The buried treasure he had sought to uncover was his own sick soul. It was horrible. He could hardly bear to sit in the same room with himself. Where was Marge now that he needed her? Marge—? The question finally penetrated his miserable self-absorption. She’d left the barbecue early, begged him to go with her, he’d been in no mood to caddy for her while she worked off her temper, had scornfully refused. She was obviously in pain. How could he have been so insensitive? And where was she now? It was the middle of the night! Good heavens! Something must have happened! He was suddenly on his feet, wobbly as he was, and out the door. Trevor hated driving by night even more than by day, but he had no choice, he had to find Marge. His sudden anxiety made him tremble so, he could hardly get the key into the ignition, but at the same time he felt energized, strong (maybe it was the brown sugar), and ready for come what may. He headed straight for the country club, hunched over the wheel, to see if her car was still there, and come what did, before he reached the turn-in, was that girl from the barbecue who’d been excited by his eyepatch. She was standing on the road that ran alongside the course with her shirt over her shoulder, a bundle under her arm, and her thumb out, radiantly aglow in the beams of his headlamps. The excitement her excitement had engendered had long since left him along with his barbecue supper, but she was, as he was, alone in the night, so what could he do? Though it gave him a strange feeling, as if he were being willed by his action, not willing it, he swerved to a stop to let her in. “Hey, look who’s here!” she laughed. “My knight in the shining eyepatch!” She kissed him on his cheek, her bare breast brushing his arm, and the car stalled, then he flooded it. “So what’re you doing out here, big time? I was afraid for a minute you were going to run me down! Have you been following me?” “Oh no, no! I, uh — my wife! She hasn’t come home and—!” “Your wife? You didn’t tell me you were married — well, but what does it matter, right?” She popped her gum and gave his thigh a squeeze. “Anyway, you won’t find anybody in their right mind out here, man. Nothing but chiggers and spiders and gross crawly things. It’s the pits!” She brushed off her breasts, her legs, peered inside the waistband of her raggedy shorts, an expression on her face of mild annoyance, or else (it was familiar somehow) of placid consent. “Some old drunk dragged me out here and tried to rape me — you know, the make-out-or-get-out kind — I had to run away. It was awful! I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t come along!” She snuggled closer, stuck her gum under the dashboard, laid her head on his shoulder. “Hey, I don’t mind if you were following me,” she murmured. “Really. I’m flattered that a cool guy like you would even be interested.” She reached up and nibbled at his ear. He had the strange sensation that she was reminding him of something he’d forgotten. Or that she was correcting a flaw in his computations: something certainly was shifting. “I’ve got the key to a motel room in this bozo’s pants,” she whispered. “Wanna go?” “Well, I, uh, never…” “You don’t like me—?” “Oh no, I do! But—” “Don’t worry, then. I know how to show a guy a good time, honest, just give me a chance.” Her tongue was in his ear and her hand inside his shirt. Her bare leg crossed his thighs and nudged between them like an eraser scrubbing away an error. “But what?” she breathed. “Tell me, killer. You never what?” He hesitated, closing his good eye. “I have never,” he confessed softly, feeling everything come round for him at last (perhaps he had followed her out here!), “I have never … known delight…”