I Can't Complain (13 page)

In my midtwenties I married Bob, who’d played since childhood. My father treated him to nine holes at Mount Pleasant on spring and summer visits. Affection and a little bit of duty seasoned the pairing. “No one who’s played as long as your dad,” Bob marveled, “has ever had a worse swing.”

Bob and I were a good pairing, leisure-time-wise: I liked the house to myself, and he liked nine holes a few times a month, thoughtfully scheduled so childcare wouldn’t be all mine on a weekend. “Want to hit the white ball today?” he’d ask his various golfing buddies, always at the last minute, always scrambling for a tee time. With his long drives and low handicap, he galloped up the fairways, finishing in record time. “Back so soon?” I often murmured. “You know how other wives complain about being a golf widow?” he’d ask with a wry smile. “Mine says, ‘Golf? Why don’t you go to Scotland?’”

I took group lessons one spring at a local course because my newest novel had a minor golf theme. I was put most gratifyingly into the subdivision of women who weren’t pathetic. Inspired, my friend Janet and I signed up for private lessons with the club pro. I bought myself clubs, golf shoes, a Nancy Lopez glove, balls with a pink-ribbon motif, and two golf shirts at a sportswear outlet in Manchester, Vermont. After a few weeks of lessons on weekday afternoons, we ventured out to play nine holes. I was terrible. We let every man play through. I didn’t return for that kind of golf—the real thing, on a course, the game as actually played.

Still with something of an itch, I worked on my swing at the driving range. I hit the ball longer when Bob wasn’t there. “This is what you’re doing”—he’d demonstrate, club slicing, hips akimbo. Bob was not a man who believed that golf was for everyone. He wanted poetry in motion, the kind of thing he feared could not be coaxed from the daughter of Louie Lipman, perennial duffer.

How do two fans of a game—one who played well and the other not at all—find common ground and marital accommodation? We sat on the same couch, Bob biting his nails and me knitting, watching Tiger Woods.

Bob had little interest in the rest of the field, no feel for the underdog. If Tiger wasn’t on the leader board by Saturday, Bob would give up, pull weeds, go to the driving range, leave the tournament watching to me. “Tiger just got a birdie,” I’d yell. “Come back. He’s within three. It’ll be okay.”

Bob died in September 2009, not unexpectedly—he had a rare and fatal brain disorder, frontotemporal dementia—but still too fast. When Tiger crashed his SUV into a tree two months later, I was expecting the worst. Something was missing from the reporting, I suspected. How could he survive if eyewitnesses saw him lying in the street? Would breaking news announce any minute that Tiger Woods—too talented for this earth—had lost his life? I thought, prematurely and melodramatically,
Thank goodness Bob doesn’t have to see this.

I was wrong. It wasn’t fatal. It was a cut lip, a ticket for careless driving, and a fine of $164. Soon enough came the reports of his philandering, a gossipy topic I enjoy when the cheater is an officeholder or man of the cloth. I understood why everyone was talking about Tiger’s moral lapses, but shouldn’t they be talking neurology? Might he who is famous for brains without charm and robotic behavior be a little Aspergian?

Months passed, and then the announcement came: Tiger would play in the Masters. On the Monday before his much-anticipated return to competition, I set my iPhone alarm for 1:55
P.M.
so I wouldn’t forget his 2
P.M.
press conference. All agree: He seemed human and was unscripted. When he smiled it was just to the right, remorseful degree.

A day later, commentators and pundits are annoying me with their criticism of the Nike commercial where Tiger’s late father speaks to him. What’s wrong with that—a dead person exerting a little influence over those left behind? I will eat dinner Sunday night in front of the television, like all the other tournaments when Tiger had the lead. I try not to anticipate the widow quotient in this upcoming weekend, but I know it will be high. An essay I wrote about Bob, his illness, decline, and death, appears in the
New York Times’
Modern Love column on this Masters Sunday. And while the camera pans the famous Augusta azaleas, I am watching the budding of thirty-four Barrett Browning daffodils—a gift that a friend planted a few weeks after Bob died, one for every year of our marriage.

Bob would have been so happy with Tiger on Thursday, his lowest score ever at Augusta on day one. By Friday he is still high on the leader board, and after fifty-four holes on Saturday he is within reach. An announcer reminds me at the end of Phil Mickelson’s third round that both his mother and wife are being treated for cancer. By Sunday I’m beginning to feel that kind and faithful Phil is my man this year. Still, I am nervous whenever Tiger addresses the ball. He is Bob’s man. His bogeys kill me.

Bob isn’t present in any otherworldly way, but old habits fade slowly. I yell as if he’s just out in the yard, “A hole in one!” And then correct myself, the worst announcer and color commentator golf ever had—“No, sorry—it was an eagle.” Eyes lowered onto my knitting, I had missed his first shot.

Phil is everyone’s sentimental favorite, a lefty, the nice guy with three children, the embodiment of family values. Already in the lead, he birdies the eighteenth and wins. He hugs his faithful caddy and then strides, purposefully, devotedly, into the arms of his wife. I haven’t forgotten that she almost died in childbirth, and an interventional radiologist saved her life. I’m a big fan of radiologists. Bob was one. They hug for twenty-seven seconds, and then they kiss. The camera zooms in. Tears are streaming down his sunburned face. No eye tuned to CBS is dry.

How would a post-scandal, post-hiatus Tiger win have looked? In my own version, I had dared to picture dishonored Elin surprising him, one beautiful child in each arm, at the edge of the eighteenth green, inspiring a sob of old like that between Tiger and Mr. Woods.

E-mails come in every few minutes about my essay in the
Times.
The condolence daffodils are near full bloom outside the window where I watch TV. Some readers write and tell me Bob must be smiling down at the loving portrait I’ve written. Smiling down? Even if I believed in that sort of thing, it would not be true today. Tiger has come in fourth.

I
T MIGHT HAVE BEEN
our Merrimack Valley connection—I was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he in neighboring Lawrence—or simple pride for Jews on TV (Sandy Koufax, Michael Landon, Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Gertrude Berg). But mostly the draw was how Leonard Bernstein spoke directly to me at home, live from Carnegie Hall. In a family that had no hi-fi, no stereo, just an FM radio and classical leanings, I was put before our black-and-white TV to watch Bernstein’s
Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic,
which CBS began broadcasting in 1958. Most memorable moment? A child in the audience (Imagine living in New York! Imagine sitting so close to the stage!) asks Bernstein how Beethoven could have composed such beautiful music if he was deaf. “Think about how
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
sounds,” our teacher said, then turned around and played its first seven notes. Unlike me, he could play by ear without looking at the keys. “You can hear it in your head, can’t you?” he asked us. “Well, Beethoven could hear the notes in his head, too.”

What other lesson from a television show do I remember almost fifty years later? None. And what was my attention based on? Not professional dreams. (When my piano teacher had what used to be called a nervous breakdown, she winnowed her students down to a list that didn’t include me.) Not Bernstein’s wild exuberance on the podium, because my father, whose opinions I was prone to adopt, found Bernstein too theatrical. My loyalty was something closer to a biographical infatuation that a little Jewish girl might have for a celebrated Massachusetts man with humble roots, who played his first notes on a secondhand upright piano.

Decades later I let Tom Wolfe’s brilliant, scathing, and hilarious book of essays,
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,
tarnish Mr. Bernstein in my affections.
“Radical Chic” describes a cocktail party at the Bernsteins’ thirteen-room duplex apartment on Park Avenue, its goal to introduce the Beautiful People to the Black Panther Party and perhaps aid their cause. Wolfe quotes Black Panther speaker Donald Cox lecturing, “Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can’t find a meaningful life . . . maybe we can have a meaningful death . . . and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.”

Wolfe continues, describing the scene. “Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, ‘When you walk into this house, into this building’—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doormen downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front—‘when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!’

“Cox looks embarrassed. ‘No, man . . . I manage to overcome that . . . That’s a personal thing . . .’

“‘Well,’ says Lenny, ‘it makes
me
mad!’”

Uh-oh. Did I let his noblesse oblige color my portrait of the great man? I’m afraid I did during the judgmental 1970s. Now I say, so what? The record shows energy, generosity, genius, and selflessness. A normal Bernstein Saturday, as reproduced on his handwritten calendar page for December 1, 1956, reads, “11
A.M.
Young People’s Concert at Carnegie. 8
P.M.
‘Candide’ opening.”

I live across the street from Carnegie Hall now, in the very apartment building where Bernstein wrote
West Side Story.
For months the opening bars of “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)”—background music for an oft-running TIAA-CREF commercial—brought tears to my eyes.
I always knew you’d end up here,
this anthem said.

W
HEN I STARTED WRITING
my tenth novel,
The View from Penthouse B,
it was going to be about four unrelated strangers living under one roof, a tale told in the third person by a young woman I couldn’t quite get a grip on. After my husband’s death, after not writing for six months, I reconfigured the story. Soon it was about middle-aged sister roommates; its first-person narrator, Gwen-Laura Schmidt, had been widowed eighteen whole months longer than I, and her late husband had died suddenly, nonautobiographically, from an undiagnosed malformation of a heart valve.

Gwen, though lovable, was stagnating socially. She hadn’t started dating nor did she want to. She barely left the apartment. Unemployed as well, Gwen had a bad moneymaking idea—to create a mild-mannered escort service for people seeking nothing more than a platonic dinner and a peck on the cheek. As she says herself as early as page 2, “So far, it’s only a concept, one that grew out of my own social perspective . . . The working title for my organization is ‘Chaste Dates.’ So far, no one finds it either catchy or appealing.”

Meanwhile, in my nonfictional life, the months passed. Unlike Gwen, I didn’t mope around. My son told me it was time to travel, so I did. I applied and received a fellowship for one month’s residency in Italy. I went to Mexico to teach a workshop and to Aspen for another. Soon enough, a year had passed, the span of time in all cultures that signals to your friends that you should at the very least consider dating.

I told them I was not interested. Had no inclination. When pressed I said, “Maybe, if that day comes, I’d be okay with a high school romance.”

When asked what that meant, I said, “You know: someone likes you and you like him back. You go out on dates. Dinners in a well-lit restaurant. Maybe you’ll kiss.”

“Sex?” they often asked, not the least bit tentatively.

“High school romance,” I repeated, which in my late-blooming case meant no.

Meanwhile, back in Penthouse B, my narrator wasn’t moving forward socially either, which meant the plot was in danger of what in fiction workshops we call stasis. I knew what I had to do: send her out on a date and eventually get her laid, despite her disinclination.

She had two counselors in this matter: her sister and the other boarder in Penthouse B, Anthony, age twenty-nine, gay and helpful. I launched her with a tiptoe into classified waters. Under pressure from her roommates, she would write a personal ad. Finally, she composed one to run in the dignified
New York Review of Books.
The headline in boldface was
Nervous.
Below that: “I was widowed 2+ years ago & have been sitting on the sidelines of my own life. This ad has less 2 do w/ me wanting 2 find love & more 2 do w/ pushing myself out the door. Looking for kind M 40–60 with similar ambivalences.”

At the same time, in real life, one year and five months into widowhood, I told a very close friend that I might accept her invitation to meet the man she’d once mentioned, the nice one she’d served on a committee with/had spoken so highly of.

Thus I told people I was going on my first date since the Nixon administration. I Googled the fellow. The good news was interesting job and “Yale graduate.” The bad news: he’d been a member of the class that made him seventy-five years old. I called my matchmaking friend and said a little indignantly, “He’s seventy-five!”

“Is he?” she asked airily. “I don’t notice those things,” adding, “He’s adorable. Think of it as a training date.”

I did go to dinner with the man, who
was
extremely nice, interesting, smart, a good conversationalist—and he laughed at my jokes. I said yes to a second date and then a third, reasoning that if I turned him down merely because I had no interest in being his lady friend, what did that say about my character?

When the request came via e-mail for a fourth date, I worked hard to compose a turndown that would signal
no mas
rather than
rain check.
After much revision, I wrote back that I was “busy for the next few weeks” (true) and also “experiencing off-season hibernation inclinations.” The very well-brought-up gentleman grasped what I was saying and wrote back politely if not elegantly.