It took a tedious two-hour drive to transpose rocky, oaky Cape Ann into Cape Cod’s sand dunes and pitch pines and salt-bleached shingles. But there was golf, on a course that was all rounded hills, grassed-over links-an opulent succession of freshly exposed breasts and thighs, little hill upon hill, with comforting swales and clefts and bulges between them. There were no flat lies, but no bare ones either. The grass under all that early snow had not had time to brown and harden. The greens held frost beneath a thawed quarter-inch that ripped open when a ball hit. I felt masterly and tender, repairing these wounds with a two-pronged plastic U and tamping the scar smooth with my shoe. It was lovely to be out and swinging. Among all these green bulges the flight of the ball felt especially penetrating. A good drive tended to catch a downslope that added yards. Ken hit one that, on a 420-yard par-four, wound up at the 150-marker. Two hundred seventy yards! And this from a silver-haired former pilot who is very deliberate and a bit cautious in all his preliminary moves, as if just before takeoff.
A few surviving white drifts in the sand traps and along the shaded edges of the fairway heightened our sense of adventure. The air was cold but not still-I put on my winter gloves only toward the end of the round. We had the course to ourselves: Ken, Red, and Ben, which made a euphonious scorecard. I was low medalist, by a stroke or two, but lost money at the game of skins we played. On one hole with four skins riding on it, I had a stroke advantage but then three-putted, with hateful senile nerves. Short on my lag, I pulled my four-footer. God, how I hated myself, while Ken and Red crowed.
Driving back through the rush hour was worse than after a ski trip down from North Conway. A hamstring in Red’s left leg began to seize up, but there was nowhere to stop on the Southeast Expressway, full of cars pouring, with red taillights and white headlights, into and out of the ghost of Boston. This approach from the south used to be thrilling, the glass skyscrapers looming closer and closer and then burning rectangular and golden all around you as the expressway climbed upward out of the Chinatown tunnel. But with the completion of the so-called Big Dig in 2002, it became one long tunnel up to Causeway Street and the giant looping connectors to Charlestown and the Mystic River Bridge. Neglect has taken the futuristic shine off of the long subterranean stretch; the dead lights and the fallen tiles go unreplaced. Flickering in and out of shadow, the blue-tinted buried highway is spooky, the spookier for our knowing that above its dim roof rests a blasted swathe-formerly the old elevated highway with its constant traffic jams-of weed-ridden parks, stilled carousels, pot-holed jogging paths, straggling shops and restaurants doing a bankrupt imitation of the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and other such rotting wisps of a vision of civic renewal. Few of the Chinese missiles made it this far, but there were pro-Chinese riots, and the collapse of the national economy has taken a cumulative physical toll. Looking back at the city’s profile from the dizzying cloverleaf above the Charles, we saw the blue-glass, post-modern downtown buildings darkened in their post-war desolation, and rusty stumps of projected construction that had been abruptly abandoned, as too expensive for our dwindled, senile world.
One advantage of the collapse of civilization is that the quality of young women who are becoming whores has gone way up. No more raddled psychotics or puffy, dazed coke addicts for the discriminating consumer: twenty-year-olds who would once have become beauticians or editorial assistants, nurses or paralegals, have brought efficiency and comeliness to the trade. The prostitution rings advertise under such names as Velvet Sensations, Unadorned Fantasies, and the like, not just in the Herald and Phoenix but in the Globe and Christian Science Monitor Anything for a welder in our new world. The commonwealth scrip is sepia, the tint of the former governor’s red hair; it was hastily issued when the dollar hyperinflated, so the frozen wheels of commerce could begin again to turn; the engraver was a Republican.
Deirdre-Deirdre Lee, she confided to me on her last visit, her third, a last name being a treasure evidently as worth withholding as a whore’s kiss on the lips-now moves about on our third-floor love nest with the briskness of a wife, remaking the bed, bundling our used towels for the washer and dryer. I can’t rid myself, as I entertain her, of the uneasy feeling that Gloria will come back, slamming all the doors downstairs, clattering up the steps, exploding with icy-eyed fury at the homemaking prerogatives that Deirdre has usurped. It is not clear to me that Gloria is dead; I have a memory of wheeling and shooting her with Charlie Pienta’s shotgun through the living-room window, but when I went back inside there was no body. It was a moment of measurement. I felt the universe crackle and branch.
Deirdre also steals material things-two silver-plated candlesticks, and an exquisite little French clock with a gilded face and a case veneered in mother-of-pearl-that Gloria had brought to the marriage. I brought nothing from the Berkshires but my maternal grandfather’s china mustache cup and some bone-handled dull cutlery that I can still see my father’s workmanly hands, callused and ingrained with machine grease, plying upon a tough Thanksgiving turkey. My mother’s anxious face is framed between his cocked elbows as she waits to augment each set of slices with mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, and cranberry sauce, on one of those terrible holidays of childhood, those dry-mouthed group penances we owed the calendar’s faded gods.
When I dared reproach Deirdre with her thefts today, she looked me up and down with her expressionless brown eyes-tarry coffee into which some pale flecks of nutmeg had fallen-and said mulishly, “I do plenty for you.”
“But, darling, I pay you. Even more than you asked, the last time.”
Our lovemaking had some of the excitement of an auction, as she volunteered, in a breathless whisper, to perform or submit to a variety of acts beyond the basic missionary in-and-out. She even, as I tried to move my tongue from one lovely smallish uptilted breast to the other-tan but for the little triangles of a thong-bikini bra-specified, “Twenty-five welders extra if you suck both.”
“You bitch,” I panted, liking this and knowing she liked it too, this damp tangle of commerce and hostility amid the friction of our naked epiderms. “Fifteen. Not a penny more. Your tits should be part of the package. I mean, I’m paying you for your time, not for each itty-bitty bit of you.”
“Thirty-five if you suck so hard it hurts me,” she countered.
It had not occurred to me until this moment to hurt her. Now it seemed an inviting idea. The universe had branched.
“Ow,” she said, within a second, looking down maternally from within the massive Sphinx-mane of her bushy black hair, the side nearest the window glinting on the crests of its dishevelled curls. Her broad young face, simply but impressively carved but for its blunt and visibly pored nose, loomed a muddy brown, a sandstone tint, insofar as my eyes could pull color from the murk of the ambient dim windowlight. She was somehow Egyptian in this light, pharaonically opaque.