The Stories of Richard Bausch (13 page)

“Mack, do you want me to stop calling you?”

“I don’t want to talk about Regina, bro. Okay?”

With Regina, Dallworth
talked about his travels to distant places to play golf. They became regulars at a Mexican restaurant at the entrance to the Skyline Drive. The restaurant was owned and run by a Bulgarian gentleman, and they sat in the window, sipping red wine. She wanted him to talk; she would ask about his day and then insist that he recount what he could remember of his round. She was learning about the game in this fashion, and for her it was so much better than watching it. So he would go through the day’s shots, being exact and honest. Eight strokes on the par four first hole; thirteen on the par five second; nine on the par four third; seven on the par three fourth. She had a way of lazily blinking as he talked, which at first made him nervous. “You can’t want me to go on.”

She said, “I do, too.”

“You’re not bored?”

“I’m not bored. I’m calm. It calms me to listen to you. I like to picture everything.”

So he tried to be more clear about the lay of the land—the look of things. He had discovered in himself a capacity for description. Whereas, once he had talked to release a tension, he was now indulging himself, and he began exaggerating a little. He scrupulously kept his own score, but when he spoke to Regina about his day, the shots began to straighten out, the pars came more often, with slowly increasing regularity, and birdies began to happen, too.

One afternoon, he scored an eagle on the long par five fifteenth at Skeeterville Trace in Charlottesville (it was actually a twelve, but it would have taken too long to tell her each shot, the three that he hit in the water, the two that were lost in the brush at the dogleg, the four mulligans he’d taken—the first he had ever allowed himself—to keep the number at twelve). He described for her the long, looping drive off the tee—no feeling like it in the world, he said—and the chance he took on the approach, using a three wood, uphill, the ball rolling to the fringe of the green, and then the forty-five-foot putt, through tree shadows, downhill. It was all vivid in his mind, as if it had actually unfolded that way, and she sat there gazing at him, sweetly accepting.

Perhaps he had begun to believe it himself.

Regina, of course, was unimpressed. Not because she felt any superiority, but because she wasn’t really listening to the words. She basked in the sound of his voice, and she could listen to him without really attending to the details. He was so gentle. He was careful of her; and she liked the way his chin came to a little cleft, liked the blue sparkle in his eyes, which gave her an idea of the little boy he must have been. She thought about him when she was alone, felt glad looking forward to him, waiting for him to arrive after his day.

He seldom talked about the business, except to mention casually that Mack was having new phones installed, and they were about to be audited again. Mack handled everything. Mack had been the one, all their lives, who was good at things: captain of the football team, co-captain of the basketball team, the star third baseman. Mack had been born sleek, fast, quick of foot, agile, and he had possessed a cruel streak, a killer instinct. John told her about him without mentioning what must have been apparent by contrast,
that he himself had been too thin, too gangly and slow, almost dopey. He made self-deprecating jokes about his dreadful youth, but these things were dropped in conversation as if they didn’t matter very much—offhand as talk about the weather. Dallworth was happy. And perhaps she had never known a really happy man before.

He spent a lot of time imagining them together, married. But it was painfully difficult to find the courage: He would plan exactly how he might ask her, would head for her house with resolve beating in his breast, and then when they were together, each time, he’d lose his nerve.

He would end up lying about what he had done on the golf course again.

This was beginning to bore him. It was also getting out of hand. They talked about other things, of course, and she had a way of observing people that made him a little apprehensive about what she must be able to discern in him. But they were more often glad than they were uncomfortable, and she would eventually lead him back to talking about the game, his day’s game. And she sat there staring, blinking slowly, with such wonderful attention. He would have gone on forever, to keep that soft look on her face.

The rainy afternoon
of her birthday, they slept together for the first time. It was exactly as awkward as she had feared it might be. But it was considerate, too, and rather more tender than had ever been her experience. They lay quiet for a time, and then began again, and she found, to her surprise, that she could forget herself. Later, while he held her, she told him of her early marriage. How her husband—a man she had loved and who had come with her out of her adolescence—had been killed in Australia in a freakish accident. An accident which, nevertheless made a certain kind of terrible sense. His name, she said—she still believed it was purest coincidence—was also Bruce. This Bruce, her first love, had traveled to Sydney as a panel member for a conference, sponsored by an insurance group, concerning the different rates of occurrence of auto accidents under various traffic conditions and controls. Not fifteen minutes after he arrived at his hotel, he had gone out for a walk and, stopping at a curbside, had looked left, where right-lane traffic would be in the United States, and then stepped out in front of a bus, which was of course oncoming in the left lane, since this was Australia, where everything was backward.

“Well,” she said, “not backward. You know what I mean.” It had been a long time since she had spoken of this, and it was her thirty-sixth birthday. Her own sadness surprised her; she felt the tears come.

Dallworth hurried to say how sorry he was. Perhaps this was the opening, the chance he could take, to ask for her hand. He mustered all his nerve, took a breath, staring into her brimming eyes, opened his mouth, stopped, breathed again, and heard himself say, “I had another eagle this morning.”

Somewhere in the synapses of his brain, there was what he’d meant to go on and say: that he wouldn’t consider an eagle—or a hole-in-one, for that matter—to be much of an accomplishment if he couldn’t have her for a wife. The absurdity of it made him stop at the word m
orning,
and anyhow she hadn’t heard him. She was still thinking about her first love.

She said, “You know the last thing Bruce said to me? He lived for a couple of weeks. I got to see him. The last thing he said was, ‘Reggie, do you believe how ridiculous this is?’ He always called me Reggie.”

Dallworth was at a loss. It occurred to him that if they remained here, in this small brick house with its patter of rain on the roof, she would just grow more sad. He could not ask her to marry him while she wept over being thirty-six and a widow—while she continued to think of her first love.

The rain ran down the window. His inheritance check wasn’t due for another week. Mack wasn’t letting him have any income from the glassware business. It might have been so wonderful to say, “Let’s go down to Florida and play a few holes at Sawgrass.” He supposed he could arrange it. But now, in the moment, the idea seemed too extreme, and even, in some obscure way, aggressive. He said, “Let’s go out and play the fourth hole.”

“It’s raining.”

“So? There’s no lightning or anything.”

“I’ve never even held a golf club.” She seemed amused by the idea.

“I’ll show you.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

She stared at him.

“I’ve got my clubs in the trunk of my car.”

She got up and walked naked to the window and looked out. The rain streamed on the glass and made a reflection of itself trailing down her skin. She looked lovely, he thought, though somehow wounded, flawed; too vulnerable.
He averted his eyes, with some effort of seeming casually to glance at the clock on the wall. “Well?” he said.

She gazed at the intricately folded grayness hanging over the wet trees, the dragging ends of clouds sailing away in the breezes.

She said, “All right.”

The warm rain
soaked them before they got very far down the fairway to the tee. The leaves of the maples and oaks flanking the lawns of the newer houses drooped: they looked black. A thick mist obscured the descending slope off the tee, and to the left, the sixth green seemed half-absorbed into the whiteness of mist and ground fog. They heard traffic in the near distance, and the far-off hum of a groundskeeper’s tractor. But nothing moved nearby. He carried his clubs on his shoulder, and she held onto his other arm, keeping close. He felt rather amazingly good. Her dress, a blue cotton one with short sleeves, hung on her, as did her hair, which was two shades darker. She looked like a little girl.

He set his bag against the wooden bench, got two Maxflis out, pocketed them, selected the driver, gripped it, waggled it slightly. She stood a few paces away, arms folded, watching. Back in high school, when Mack had been best at all the sports, Dallworth used to watch his older brother strut and achieve for his beautiful girlfriend, who was not a cheerleader but could have been, and who was always right there, watching him. Dallworth had never been granted the experience. He propped the club against his leg, and brought out his glove and a couple of tees.

“You need a glove?”

“Especially today,” he said, peering off into the rain and mist, aware of her gaze on him. As he stepped up to the hitting area, it occurred to him that in all the thousands of attempts he had made to hit the ball right, he had succeeded so little and so few times. Abruptly, and with something like the feeling of terrible discovery, he had a moment of knowing how slim his chances were of striking the ball right under any circumstances, much less these. He hesitated, remembering, as a little spasm worked in the nerves at the base of his neck, all the lies he had told her in the last few weeks. He had for some reason not felt them as lies until this second. The rain poured over his head and shoulders, and he looked at the water-soaked ground and was afraid. He
took a practice swing. He felt rusty, though he had played thirty-six holes yesterday. Perhaps he should let her try to hit it first?

Steeling himself for what he was now almost certain would be a humiliation, he gripped the ball with the tee, and set it down into the soft earth.

“I’m excited,” she said. The rain had drenched her. Mascara streaked her face. She looked like a crying clown.

“Here goes,” he said.

She nodded. Water poured past her chin.

He stepped up to the ball, planted his feet, then stepped back to take another practice swing. The club felt wrong; the grip was wet now. Everything ran with the rain, water beading up on the clean aluminum shaft. He stepped back to the ball, held his head still, eyed the ball, its whiteness in that rainy light, thinking to keep the left arm straight. He pulled back slowly, trying to remember everything. And he felt as he reached the top of his backswing that he was going to smash it, he was going to knock it disappearing into the mist, the longest and best hit of his life—because this was Romance, and how it ought to be, and God would give it to him. He felt it in his bones; it was meant to be, something they would talk about many years from now, the perfect smack of the ball, its flight into the obscure distance.

He brought the club down with huge force and caught the wet ground about a foot behind the ball.

The club head dug into the mud, and the shock of it went up his arms. It took some effort to pull it out, and as he did so it made an embarrassing sucking sound, but he kept his balance and tried to seem casual, waggling the club head, with its clod of dirt clinging to it. The dirt looked like a wet rag. He tapped the club head against the ground, twice, and the clod dropped off. There was now a deep gash in the turf behind the ball. Bending down, water pouring from him, he moved the ball a few inches farther along. She was a dark blue shape in the corner of his eye, standing very still.

For her part, she had understood that things were going wrong, and had attributed this to the weather. His swing looked nothing like the few she had seen on television; there was something too deeply swaying about it, as if he were trying something balletic. She wanted to encourage him, but kept silent for fear of distracting him, knowing that people kept still while a golfer was getting set to hit the ball.

She was a little surprised when he turned to her.

“You okay?” he said.

This touched her. That he could be worried about her at such a time, contending with the rain. Someone so serious about what he was trying to do. “Sure.” She smiled.

He thought she was trying not to laugh. “Sorry this is taking so long,” he said. “I’m not usually this slow.”

“I’m fine.”

He addressed the ball, attempted once more to keep all the instructions in his head, left arm stiff, weight evenly balanced, head still, concentrating. He brought the club back, told himself to swing easy, and shifted too much, nearly lost balance, bringing the club around with far more speed than he intended, and missed everything. The bright wet aluminum shaft made a water-throwing swish. He stepped back. “Another practice swing.”

“You really look violent,” she said.

“It’s a violent thing,” he told her. “The swing.”

“I can see that.”

This had been the wrong thing to do. He tried forgetting that she was there, and swung, and hit wide of the ball this time, taking another very large, muddy divot that traveled a good forty yards.

She watched it arc out of sight into the mist, and understood that this, too, was not a good thing. She could hear the distress in his breathing. “Wow,” she said, because she could think of nothing else to say.

He waggled the club, put it up to the ball, and accidentally bumped it off the tee. It rolled an inch or so. “Damn rain,” he said, bending to set it right again.

“It’s really coming down,” she said.