“You could say that,” he said, and his sidelong glance did not encourage me to ask more. My heart leaped up gleefully, to think that Ned had come a cropper. One’s own rise offers a precarious happiness, shadowed as it is by the threat of reversal and others’ greater triumphs; but the downfall of another provides permanent satisfaction.
“I could say that, but it wouldn’t be the case?”
“Extended vacation would be the optimistic formulation.” Gary grayly smiled. “He got in the way of the number crunchers. He had too verbal a way of expressing himself.”
“And Pat? She was his assistant.”
“I know who Pat was,” he said, in an overemphatic, peevish manner that may have been a parodie declaration of his own sexual preferences. “She’s made a sideways jump, to Sturbridge, Morrissey, and Blaine. They promised her some accounts, and a cubicle of her own, if she’d take night courses in financial management.”
“She seemed very promising,” I said. “A people person” I have never understood homosexuals: they make their choice, or have it biologically made for them, and then become very caustic and indignant about the party they have chosen not to attend-the party of breeders, of fertile male-female friction.
“She was a tramp,” Gary told me. “You can use this office. But all the transaction codes have been changed; there’s a hard-copy printout in one of the drawers. The crunchers don’t like their numbers used by outsiders, even cherished former insiders like yourself. She really made your heart go pitty-pat, didn’t she, Ben boy?”
He took his leer and his bellied-out logo (EXCREMENT OCCURS, it read) away. As I fiddled and fumbled my transactions into the data bank, I felt suspended in space, with my stinging tail, and a touch agoraphobic. I wanted to scuttle out of this cubicled brightness into a friendly dark crevice. More and more, off my own chronically paced property, I feel frightened and disoriented. Boston for forty years was my second home, but now it seemed hostile and featureless, a void beneath my feet.
This was true even of a golf game in Brookline which Red arranged with a member of the Country Club whom he knows. When Red picked me up in his Dodge Caravan, and began to talk on his cellular phone with Durban, South Africa, and then Perth, Australia-what fish there are on the planet are in the Southern Hemisphere, like sparkling snowflakes settling in a glass globe-I felt vaguely kidnapped. Fear raced at the back of my mind like the trickle of cold water that murmurs throughout the whole house when the rubber stopper in a water closet is imperfectly seated. Ken Dixon sat in the back seat, silent, whether from a wish not to interfere with Red’s loud, rambling discussion about evanescent schools of “product,” or because he, too, on my transmission frequency, heard the murmur of fear, of a fatal leak in things that was draining the world of substance. The course-its limar outcroppings of black pudding-stone, its par-fives wandering past cliffs and up sand-bunkered slopes like metaphors of life’s dreamy, anfractuous journey- seemed hollowed out, a shared illusion composed of electrons and protons spinning in a space that was ninety-nine percent vacuum.
Our host was named Les, for Lester Trout, one of Red’s financial catches when he was trawling the Boston financial community for investors, before the war, in an enlarged freezing-and-packing plant. Les was a happy rich man, in shape and fine fettle. Golf had become his life; he attacked the course once a day in order to bring his handicap down from an eight to a seven, and next year a six. He uncoiled into the ball with a wonderful compact force; and after an especially successful shot would flash a predatory smile, inviting you to share his delight in his game.
On the par-three twelfth, I suffered a moment of delusion: I expected to see his nicely drawing nine-iron shot plunge through the elevated green as if through a drum of green paper or the scummy skin of a pond. But no, there was terra firma there, our ancient accretion of sedimented rock. The ball hopped, and stopped. I kept picturing how an orange forgotten at the back of the produce drawer in the refrigerator shrinks to a grayish-green orb that emits puffs of smoke like a pod of pollen.
My sense of unreality, as I moved through the veils of maya, helped me play a little better than usual; I felt indifferent to everything but returning myself to the matrix of my home surroundings-the curving driveway, the white house, the leafy woods, the kids in the woods, the deer, the wife, the flowers-and so swung easily, winning praise I could hardly hear through the murmur of terror leakily running at the back of my brain.
I exaggerate. The dynamics of the match did burn through to me. I was partnered with our host, who with his expensively developed superiority was giving so many strokes to the rest of us that when he faltered-and he was bound to falter often, with a putt that lipped out or a drive that sucked too far left-the burden fell on me. Whenever the pretensions of our low-handicapper were punctured, it became a match of Red and Ken versus Ben. In my betranced state I held up better than when paired with Fred Hanover against these same two buddies. The three of us, equally strangers to this pudding-stone paradise, had a certain furtive solidarity, though I was the evil host’s ally. My distracted golf took on a quality I can only call coziness. The path the ball should follow was marked as if by broad troughs in the air; it was the reverse of that frequent agonizing feeling of a narrow correct path, a kind of razorback ridge which the ball keeps slipping down one side or the other of. Especially on the second side, beginning with pars on the short, blind tenth hole and the long eleventh with its sheer cliff and grassy transverse ditch, did I help my team; we wound up collecting two welders, which Les Trout tucked into his wallet as gleefully as if he had made another million.
I marvel, writing this down, at with what boyish games we waste our brief lives.
Time, I have read, was believed by Pythagoras to be the soul and procreative element of the universe. And it is true, rail against its ravages as we will, that we cannot imagine our human existence without it: nothing would happen-we would be glued flat against space like the schematic drawings with which mathematical gamesters illustrate the odd consequences if our three dimensions were reduced to two. Descartes claimed to believe that time is a series of ever-perishing instants continually renewed by God in split-second acts of deliberate creation. This grotesque idea occurred to me as a child, and perhaps to most children as their brains awkwardly widen into metaphysics. Science begins with keeping track of time. The Mayans had calendars more accurate in arranging leap years than our own. Dwellers in the Andaman Islands keep a calendar based on the odors of seasonal plants as they bloom and die.
Each morning, I observe, the day displays a few more dead leaves on the driveway, a few more yellow patches in the stand of young maples reflected in the pond. Shaving in my bathroom mirror, I glance down and perceive a slightly more reddish tinge than yesterday’s to the top of the burning bush, Euonymus atropurpureus, which grows in the terraced area visible from this window.
Gloria points out that I shave badly, for all the times I have done it. I skip bristles beneath my jaw and just under my nose; I don’t go far enough down my neck, so unsightly long white hairs protrude above my shirt collar. She also claims, observing me through the rivulets in the steamed-up glass door, that I don’t know how to shower-I don’t use enough soap, and I don’t pull back my foreskin and scrub. The wives of uncircumcised men get cancer of the cervix seven times more than women with circumcised husbands, she claims. So, go marry a Jew or be a nun, I think. It wasn’t my decision; it was taken by old Dr. Hardwick and my mother, back at Pittsfield General on a September afternoon in 1953. Maybe they plotted to give my wives cervica cancer. There was some kind of collusion between dark browed, young-old Doc Hardwick and my petite, sandy haired mother; I could feel it in the way they paired up at my bedside when I had the chicken pox or mumps. I could hear it in their chatting over coffee downstairs, my father off at work and house calls already all but a thing of the past. In the more than three score years that I have had to ponder it, I think being uncircumcised perhaps the most valuable thing about me. My sheathed glans imparts a responsive sensitivity to the entire stumpy stalk that embarrassed me now and then in youth but served me well into advanced maturity; I am Homo naturalis, man unscathed, Adam before the covenant; and I am deeply hurt that Gloria levels these criticisms. Perdita never complained of my poor cumbersome body, though her silences, her increasing reserve, her way of grimacing and keeping her own sweet counsel in the end were more devastating than any utterance.