Lessons that Imogen took when she and Garth moved here, weekend golf being de rigueur in this town, where not much else ever happened. Tennis, swimming, bowling, workout gyms with weight machines, even squash courts and a baseball stadium were available, but John’s crowd, the men anyway, were all golfers. Golfers and drinkers. Imogen was convinced that the reason John took Garth out of small arms contracting and distribution and brought him to town to run the racetrack and related enterprises after John’s cousin got sent to prison was because Garth had beat him over eighteen holes one day down in New Orleans and John wanted to get him up here where he could have another shot at him. In fact, her husband hadn’t won a round since, learning something out there on the links about John’s fierce competitiveness, his powers of concentration, his stubborn quiet force, though he’d done well enough to earn John’s respect and friendship. She and Garth had bought a home in a new development called Settler’s Woods across from the playground in Peapatch Park, which was either where the original pioneer, whose statue lorded over the place, had his vegetable garden or else where his wife grew sweetpeas and other flowers; this town was full of hokey stories like that. It was a friendly place, though, easy to settle into and made easier by John’s wife, who was certainly the person to know around here. She threw a big welcoming party for them, introduced them to all their friends and everyone at the church, proposed them for memberships at the country club, took Imogen shopping, helped her enroll her two girls by a previous marriage in the local schools and invited both children to her son’s birthday party, connected them to doctors, dentists, insurance agents, and bank managers, coaxed Imogen into joining the church choir and took her to her first PTA meeting (Imogen was immediately elected treasurer), and had her over for bridge nights when the men were out of town. Which was fairly often. John had inherited from a former partner some swampland in Florida and they often went off there for what they called business meetings and to do a little deep-sea fishing and sailing. Whatever else they did, Garth didn’t say, and Imogen didn’t ask. Garth could sometimes be a bit scary. Instead, whenever he was away, she amused herself as best she could, which included taking golf lessons out at the club from Patch, a middle-aging man with a damaged hand, possibly a war wound, a randy sense of humor, and an intimate teaching style that included cuddling up from the rear and reaching around to help with the grip and backswing, which took Imogen back to her days of dry-humping at high school dances. Patch would plant one foot on the outside of her front foot to hold it in place, then push at her back foot with his other one, his knee between hers, thigh bumping the cheeks of her ass apart, his calloused hands stroking hers around the stiff leathery thing in her grip, proxy for the chunkier one bumping at her butt. Patch was not exactly her type (John was), but was attractive enough in a meaty sort of way, so finally, when he proposed it, she gazed down at their four intertangled feet shuffling in the grass below them and said, Okay, but my husband will kill you if he finds out. Patch just chuckled wickedly in her hair. So what the hell. Can’t say he wasn’t warned.
John‘s suburban development of Settler’s Woods where Garth and Imogen later lived provoked the usual knee-jerk protest from Marge, who accused the mayor and his police of doing John’s work for him by torching the woods on purpose, then clearing it for him at the city’s expense, but most noticed that Mad Marge’s heart no longer seemed in it. John, as Garth was to discover on the golf course, was tenacious and hell to beat, so maybe she’d finally just given up, her strong will worn down at last by a will yet stronger. Which John was famous for, along with his cool daring, his unbending loyalty, his attention to detail, his appetites, his broken nose, his generosity, his killer instincts, his love of the bruising battle. To which list he would add, though others might demur (Maynard, for example, in spite of all that John had done for him to get his sentence reduced and take care of his family in his absence), his compassion. Edna was one who would agree that he was a compassionate man, even though she’d not been directly told who’d paid off her mortgage when Floyd disappeared from town, and Dutch was another, a survivor in spite of himself, who’d been well compensated by John for the loss of his motel and distracted finally from his other deprivations by their codevelopment of Getaway Stadium, a new ballpark and sports facility built on the site of the old motel, originally for summer youth programs and Little League baseball, but large enough that they were eventually able to lure to town a minor league farm club, one that Dutch, owning a piece of it, later helped to run. Nevada, the popular aerobics instructor who took over the new health club at the expanded civic center, would never have described her former boss as a compassionate man (no such thing, she would have said), but she knew him to be flexible in his negotiations and not without feelings: like Otis, John had lost his best friend, and though he never mentioned it, Nevada knew he was hurting. Maybe it was the only serious loss that fortunate man had ever suffered, and as there was nothing he could do about it, his grief, like hers, could be ignored but never wholly assuaged, though his basic principle—“Caring too much for another is a bad investment”—helped. “Everyone and everything’s expendable, including yourself,” he liked to say. “The important thing is to keep your eye on the game.” An expression his wife had never heard, though she had heard him instruct her to keep her eye on the ball. Did she believe him to be a compassionate person? Who could say? She was never asked the question nor ever volunteered an opinion, though she herself was judged to be, as Ellsworth put it in an article on her many charitable activities following the devastating fire at Settler’s Woods, “the very paragon of compassion, grace, and civic virtue,” a woman loved by all no less than John was by all esteemed.
When Ellsworth dropped by Gordon’s studio to ask for a recent photo of John and his wife to accompany the article and to schedule a shoot of the charred and spectral woods, where bulldozers were already rumbling in like robotic predators, eating up the historical moment, he found his friend much changed. Gordon was suddenly an old grizzled fat man, stooped and broken like the ancient humpback bridge they were tearing down out there, and Ellsworth wondered if he himself seemed as changed in Gordon’s eyes. The shutdown photo shop was a shambles. Ellsworth had never thought of Pauline as much of a housekeeper or business manager, but her absence was clearly being felt. Photographs and curling negatives littered the floor, albums lay open on chairs and countertops, the bead curtains had been torn away, the portrait studio was a wreck, and there was dust and clutter everywhere, yet Gordon, poking lugubriously about, seemed hardly to notice. His sagging jowls were covered by a dirty gray stubble and his eyes were filmy and unfocused. Ellsworth commiserated with him on his bereavement, remarked that his place looked about as chaotic as his own Crier offices (“storm-tossed” was the word that came to mind), and expressed his indignation at Gordon’s unjust treatment at the hands of the police, which he said he intended to write an editorial about. “Artists are always misunderstood.” “Jail,” Gordon said dully. “I’d never been there. But I recognized it. It had the smell of death in it. It was my own darkroom.” He picked up a photo from a pile, studied it, set it down again. Ellsworth saw that it was a picture of John’s wife in the Pioneers Day parade, one he might use, but that Gordon had been looking at it upside down. “I felt terribly wise and terribly stupid at the same time. And very much alone. I kept hoping you might come by.” “I’m sorry. I only just found out. At the time, I was, well, somewhere else. Some time else. It was, I don’t know, like I was locked into a certain day, if that was what it was, one I thought would never end.” Ellsworth meant to say no more, but realized that what he’d just said made no sense. “I was writing a novel.” Gordon seemed surprised by this and a glimmer of his old self returned. “You mean The Artist’s Ordeal? Is it finished?” He hesitated. “I don’t know. I think so. But I can’t find it.” He’d returned from the grim desolation of smoldering Settler’s Woods to the grimmer desolation of his own offices, shocked afresh by what had met him there. His shelves and file drawers were all spilled out and he’d evidently ripped up the sole remaining archival copies of the precious wedding issues, among many others. Perhaps, he’d thought, he was mistaken about the importance of the official chronicler to the keeping of the communal memory, but he’d shaken off his doubts and set about putting his and the town’s lives back together again. He’d just been pasting up the scraps as best he could when, around noon, she came in. While sitting all night at the hospital bedside of her child, she’d composed a little essay for his paper on “The Kiss of Life,” she’d said, looking up at him as she used to look up at him when they were children, adding with an apologetic smile that she hoped it was not too badly written. Suddenly, he’d wished to hold her hand and read to her as he used to do, this time from his own work, and she’d seemed pleased when he’d suggested it. But when he’d gone looking for the novel, it wasn’t there. Only traces. A sheet or two. Scrawled notes. A few mad ravings tossed helter-skelter. “I guess I burned it after all.” He glanced again at the photograph on the top of the pile, but saw now that it was of Gordon’s dying mother. Gordon must have shuffled them about. The old lady seemed to be staring accusingly up at him, her flesh sunken, toothless mouth agape. A shriveled breast scissored between her gnarled fingers. In his novel, he had written about “the unspeakable things” the Stalker was doing with the Model, but, no, wrong, everything was speakable. “What did you want from her?” Gordon asked suddenly. He’d picked up a soupy grayish photo that seemed to have no image on it at all. “Her?” “You know.” “I–I’m not sure.” His friend’s sorrowful gaze dropped to the murky photograph. “Nor I.”