Let Me Finish (16 page)

Something encouraged me to go on. I was an O.K. sailor, I said, better than my sister. These Brutal Beasts
ould capsize in races sometimes, but mostly you could sail them home again after a squall, with the main reefed way down, even if they were half swamped. One time, I'd rigged a beer jacket between a stay and the mast and run home under that. I couldn't shut up.

She gestured apologetically at the boats and the long sweep of Eggemoggin Reach and the dark line of Deer Isle at its farther rim. "I don't know the first thing about sailing," she said.

Our game finished too quickly—I loved it by now. I can't remember our scores, but she was better by eight or nine strokes. After our last putts had rattled home, I asked if we couldn't play on for another few holes. No—too bad, but she couldn't, she said, making it sound friendly. Something was on with the family that afternoon. She had become a woman again, a stranger.

She pulled off her golf glove, and when I reached in my pocket for the bandanna the lightness of it gave me a shock. When I took it out—my mouth was open—it was partly unfolded, with no weight to it: nothing at its center. "Jesus," I said. I scrabbled in the empty pocket, then pulled it inside out. Nothing.

Her hand was up to her face. "Roger—you'd never?" she said. She'd gone pale.

"It's just got to be—" I cried, pulling out my other pockets, madly frisking myself. "I never touched it—not once."

She seized the pocket where the handkerchief had been, shaking it now and rubbing it frantically through her fingers, and in the same instant we saw that there was a
fraying along the seam—a place where you could push the tip of a little finger through. She'd folded the ring away but hadn't tied it, and the repeated motion of the packet against my leg while I walked and swung and walked again had worked the weighted thing free and allowed it to drop. It was gone.

She'd begun to make quick little circles around this last green, staring about intently, as if the ring had only now slipped out of my pocket. She made an anguished sound and stared back down the narrow meadowy stretch toward its tee—the way we'd just come—and then off to the left, her gaze sweeping over the rising grassy spaces and the brushy and sloping wood edges we'd walked, now whiter in the midday sun.

"I'm so sorry," I said over and over as we walked back slowly toward our cars. Fred and Bus had finished and gone home. "How could I have—" She held up her hand and I stopped.

"I can't begin to tell you how bad this is," she said. "This is very, very serious. You have no idea. I can't believe I was so stupid."

She shook away the cigarette I was offering. She couldn't do anything about this now, not today, she went on. But we had to meet again, she said—come back here and walk over the course again, foot by foot, where we'd gone just now, and find the ring. Every shot, every place we were. Agreed?

I nodded—yes, agreed. For a moment, I thought I might be the one to cry.

She kept shaking her head. "Can't God-damned be
lieve
it," she whispered. "Jesus H.
Christ
!" She looked at me
miserably, staring at my face. "It's all my fault, not yours," she said. "Don't even think such a thing—O.K.? And one more thing: don't tell anybody. Don't tell a single soul. Not your family or your friends. Nobody."

I promised, nodding my head again. She could count on me. We'd meet here at the first tee again, first thing in the morning. Eight-fifteen—no, eight. No one would notice—they'd think we were out there for a fast early round. I'd see her again.

 

Nobody asked. I'd said "Golf" at lunch with my mother and stepfather and kid brother, but they rarely pressed me for details about my days. Before evening, I went back and walked the first couple of holes again on my own, swinging an iron through the tufts and furrows and sedges where I thought I'd been. If anyone stopped to ask I'd say I'd lost a couple of balls. It came to me that a ring was going to be hundreds of times harder to spot than a golf ball; only a gleam, a moment's flicker from the sun, might give it away. I swivelled my gaze to and fro as I tramped, peering intently at grass roots and pebbly shadows and bits of twig. What a triumph if I could produce the ring for her tomorrow morning, holding it up between my fingers like a jeweller: "Voilà!"

It rained in the night, and there was a thick, wet fog everywhere the next morning. I was there first and watched the soft globes of her headlights grow more distinct as she wheeled up quietly, the tires whispering on the wet road. She was wearing red duck pants and an oilskin top, its hood back behind her neck, and when she got out we
looked at each other like conspirators. She needs a name here, though I've searched my memory in vain for it. "You sleep?" she said.

We left our clubs locked in the trunk of my car and set off, each swinging an iron back and forth through the sopping grass in front of us as we walked. Within ten strides the road had vanished. "Over here, I think," I said, angling off toward the right. I led the way to the flat ledge and the junipered rough beyond, where we could look in wider circles. Nothing. By the time we'd jumped the trickly stream below the first hole and walked up the patch of rough, our pants were soaked to the knees, and our hair and shoes speckled with weeds and grassheads. She peered down into the first hole, actually lifting the flagstick—you never know—and we turned away and went on, leaving our trails across the whiter sheen of the wet green.

At the third, we had to visit the bog where I'd lost a ball, then cross the fairway to the edge of the opposite woods, where my next shot had landed. Each bush and branch we touched showered us icily, and when we got back to the edge of the fairway my shoes were making squashy noises. She stopped to pull up one sock, then shook her head like a dog and pulled her hair free of her neck. We scarcely spoke, muted by the hopelessness of our work. Every twenty or thirty strides we had to stop to straighten our backs and waggle our wrists, aching from our ceaseless swashings. Anger thickened inside me—this was insane—but I said nothing. Neither of us could be the first to stop. She'd moved out ahead now; perhaps she didn't want me to see her face. I didn't say it, but the fog made it hard to be sure
where I was, once I'd stepped off the fairway in search of a reconstructed slice or clunker. The course had gone two-dimensional, a gray page with only the odd birch limb or moldering stump to let me venture a guess.

On the short seventh, we had to climb the steep side of the granite cliff just to the right of the green, where another errant shot of mine had landed amid thick trees. I gave her my hand at the top, pulling her up behind me. There was a touch of breeze off the cove, closer to us now but still invisible in the all-surrounding fog, and you could hear the balsams and the smaller spruce branches beginning to stir overhead. The fog would lift soon. Then we heard another sound, steps and rustlings behind us, and with one instinct dropped to our hands and knees on the crumbly granite together, out of sight. There was the startling plock! of a golf shot, back on the tee, then a pause and the softer sound of a ball invisibly striking the green to our right. A man appeared below us, foreshortened, striding out of the mists with a putter and a single midiron in his hand. For a crazy moment, I thought it was her fiancé, what's-his-name, come to find us, but this was a tanned white-haired man, perhaps in his sixties. He had a canvas sailing hat pulled down almost to his ears and wore waterproof golfer's pants. I'd never seen him before: some demented rich friend of Don Parson's who thought he knew this course well enough to play it blind. Perhaps he'd even rowed across the cove from the stone Parson house on the point, and clambered up to the holes here at the back of the shore.

His ball must have rolled off the green after it hit. We could hear him sighing and muttering under his breath as
he cast about beyond the green, looking for it, and then a private expletive—
grasht!
or
brasht!
it sounded like—when he gave up and walked away, not bothering to drop a fresh ball for his putt. Perhaps he'd been too intent on his game to mark our path before him through the wet or to wonder why it had stopped.

I was laughing, my hand over my mouth. "God, wasn't that something?" I whispered. "He never knew. Did you hear him!"

She turned toward me, rising from her knees. "It's no use!" she said fiercely. "It's gone forever. This is crazy—we'll never find it. I'm leaving tomorrow and it will never turn up. Now I've got to think of something to tell them. This is all so like me—you have no idea."

I couldn't go on watching her, up so close. I dropped my gaze and saw the minute reddish-blond hairs on her wrist and the backs of her hands. Perhaps the wet on her cheeks was from her dank and darkened hair or from the fog. I must have looked as strange and small to her as she did to me. We were helpless, children on a bad outing. She bent to pick up her iron, and, my heart thumping, I walked away.

We didn't leave the fairway for the rest of our round, but when we came downhill on the eighth I took out a ball I'd been carrying, dropped it on the green, and putted it, with my iron turned upside down to make a blade. The ball threw up a little wheel of water as it rolled across the green and past the cup. I held out my club, inviting her to play, but she shook her head.

Back at her car, I told her I'd call her fiancé's family if the ring ever turned up: Bus Willis would know how to reach them. She may have given me a slip of paper with her name and address on it. We shook hands once again, then she took hold of my arm, next to my chest, with one hand. "You've been—" she began but stopped. "Everything's going to be fine, Roger," she said. "You know what I mean."

 

We raced the next day and I did well. Not a win but maybe another one of the little red cotton burgees they handed out in those days—red for second—or a third-place yellow. I used to smoke fifteen-cent cigars during the races then: Blackstones. When my regular girlfriend, Evelyn, came back—she'd been in New Hampshire, visiting her grandmother—I told her that I'd played golf with this woman who'd showed up and asked in, and next day went back with her to look for some lost keys. Fred and Bus asked me how we'd come out that weird day and I said she'd been too tough for me. I didn't tell anyone that I'd driven out to Naskeag the last morning and parked my car near where I thought her new family's driveway might be. She didn't come by. The next year, I had a full-summer job in New York and only got to Maine for a few days, and the year after that the war came and everything was changed. At some point after Evelyn and I were married, I told her about the ring. After the war, the Donald Parson course was abandoned—now there's a patch of alders down where the first hole was, a driveway in place of the third fairway, and a cottage on the granite ledge above the shore. Nobody
remembers a visiting young woman who might have lost something valuable on the forgotten old golf course once.

For a time, I wished I'd paid more attention to things she had told me the first day we played golf. She lived in New Jersey, I think, and she'd met her fiancé ... well, perhaps on Cape Cod. She'd gone to some college in Ohio. But none of that mattered. Our two walks together stayed with me, and felt stranger and more intimate as time went by. I kept losing the image of her, but when I thought of her golf swing she'd reappear. I've grown suspicious of some of the colors and details that have worked their way into this account, which may be overpaintings intended to hold a fading work. I was about to start my junior year at Harvard that fall, but in my version of the story I am younger than that, more boyish; she is the expert and I the apprentice. In time, our morning in the fog became more abstract and significant, almost leaving memory for some other place in my mind. She and I, a strange couple, had had a few hours in common and a secret—something no one else could guess. A woman and a younger man, myself at nineteen, had become intimate by association. I'd done my part, held up. Was this what she'd meant with those strange parting words—that I would grow up and be trusted?

Like everyone else, I traveled a lot during the war, and sometimes I caught myself looking for her in a crowded San Francisco restaurant or among the people pushing onto a downtown Denver streetcar. I was a soldier now, no longer a boy, and if our paths should cross we would meet as equals. In wartime, surprise encounters happened all the time. Early one morning when I was heading home on furlough
before going off to the Pacific, my train stopped in a place called Ottumwa, Iowa. I lifted the window shade next to the seat where I'd slept all night, and there was Kornie Parson, in uniform, standing on the platform, six inches away outside the glass. He was a flight instructor at a naval air station there, heading to Chicago for a day at the track.

T
HE
martini is in, the martini is back—or so young friends assure me. At Angelo and Maxie's, on Park Avenue South, a thirtyish man with backswept Gordon Gekko hair lowers his cell as the bartender comes by and says, "Eddie, gimme a Bombay Sapphire, up." At Patroon, a possibly married couple want two dirty Tanquerays—gin martinis straight up, with the bits and leavings of a bottle of olives stirred in. At Nobu, a date begins with a saketini—a sake martini with (avert your eyes) a sliver of cucumber on top. At Lotus, at the Merc Bar, and all over town, extremely thin young women hold their stemmed cocktail glasses at a little distance from their chests and avidly watch the shining oil twisted out of a strip of lemon peel spread across the pale surface of their gin or vodka martini like a gas stain from an idling outboard. They are thinking Myrna Loy, they are thinking Nora Charles and Ava Gardner, and they are keeping their secret, which is that it was the chic shape
of the glass—the slim narcissus stalk rising to a 1939 World's Fair triangle above—that drew them to this drink. Before their first martini ever, they saw themselves sitting on a barstool, with an icy mart in one hand, one leg crossed over the other, in a bar where a cigarette can be legally held aloft, and a curl of smoke rising above the murmurous conversation and the laughter. Heaven. The drink itself was a bit of a problem—that stark medicinal bite—but mercifully you can get a little help for that now with a splash of scarlet cranberry juice thrown in, or with a pink-grapefruit-cassis martini, or a green-apple martini, or a flat-out chocolate martini, which makes you feel like a grownup twelve-year-old. All they are worried about—the tiniest dash of anxiety—is that this prettily tinted drink might allow someone to look at them and see Martha Stewart. Or that they're drinking a variation on the Cosmopolitan, that Sarah Jessica Parker–"Sex and the City" craze that is so not in anymore.