Knuckleheads (7 page)

This surreptitious tipping only further embittered Newfeld and Bloch and hardened their determination to be nasty and demeaning to whomever carried their bags. None of the veterans would do it. Gordon, who could wring a hefty tip out of anyone else, invariably stepped up. “I’ll take ’em,” he’d say, and the weathered veterans would shake their heads as if he were the stupidest moron on the planet.

But Gordon was playing a different angle. “If I take these clowns,” he told me, “Stan will feel like he owes me. Watch what happens the rest of the week. I’ll get out early and often. Two loops a day, sometimes three. I’ll be getting loops with carts. Johnny Jones will always be number one, but check out who’s gonna be number two. Just watch.”

I did, and he was right. Gordon got loops before guys who’d been lugging bags for thirty years. Gordon got the big tipping couples like the Ginginfelds and the Sterns, who bought their caddies fat condiment-sloshed cheeseburgers at the snack-bar. Gordon got it all and his bank account doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, all in one summer. He caddied for the biggest assholes at the club once a week, sucked up the miserable five hours without a tip, and the rest of the time he was golden. Stan loved him and the other caddies did too. He took the bullet for all of us.

It happens on the seventh hole. It’s a par five and with Gordon’s monster drive and Natalie’s laser-stroked five-wood, we’re on the fringe in two. Fifty feet from the cup. A birdie feels inevitable. I chip first so I can get my hack out of the way and let the others show off how close they can nestle the ball to the hole. That’s my attitude when I line the shot up: just don’t waste time, scurry through the motions and let one of your so-called teammates get the job done. Still, somewhere deep in my ribs—like old Stan hoping I can miraculously transform into a more heroic version of myself—I believe.

My short game’s as lousy as any other part of my game, but occasionally I get lucky. I visualize a high floating lob that will land four feet from the hole, bounce minimally and roll within six inches. The shot I hit looks nothing like that. My backswing is balky and I jab at the ball and blade a one-hop line-drive that speeds toward the flag. If it misses hitting the pin it will skitter over the green and into the surrounding sand, but it doesn’t miss the pin. Smacks it with a resounding clack and drops straight into the cup. The eagle has landed and we are eight under par after seven holes. At this rate, we will break the all-time tournament record. Gordon offers a hardy high-five but I suspect he’s irritated. Lisa whistles and Natalie squeezes my shoulder and says, “Good aim, young man, superior aim.” We skip lightly, all four of us laughing, to the next tee.

In the Flintmoor caddy tent, cheating was a much-discussed topic. Johnny Jones and other career guys advocated in favor of it. Johnny would say, “You gotta be sneaky. You want the members to play well. Lower scores mean higher tips and if they have a good round, they’ll request you the next time. You can’t let them know you’re cheating for them though. It’s only when they can’t see you. It’s only just if the ball’s in the woods and stuck behind a tree in an unplayable lie, you just kick it a few feet so it’s sitting in an open clearing with a shot at getting back to the fairway. Same thing in the high rough. If the lie’s bad, nudge it a few inches so the shot’s playable. The key is you don’t just do it for the guys you’re carrying for. You gotta do it for
all
the players in the foursome. That way everyone’s happy. That way nobody complains about the supernatural luck everyone else seems to be having.”

Gordon disagreed, though he never said so in the tent. He’d explain his theory to Lennie and me over spades games. “Look,” he’d say. “These are guys who were living here, in America, during the Holocaust. They already feel like they cheated fate, like their whole life has been based on supernatural luck. What they want now is struggle. They want challenges to overcome, even bullshit ones like a golf ball behind a tree, because they survived Hitler without having to overcome anything. They’ve got relatives who were killed while they were over here eating pot roast with their mothers. Eating noodle pudding. The best thing you can do, when they’re behind a tree, is to encourage them to take some crazy shot. Go for it, you gotta say, what’ve you got to lose? Listen, they’ll probably miss the shot and then you can give that shrug that says, oh well, the whole world hates Jews anyway, and then you drop and take a stroke penalty and move on. But what if they hit the shot? What if they make that one miracle swing that makes them feel like Arnold Palmer? That’s joy for them. In the middle of all this guilt they already live with, that’s one hundred percent pure joy. It’s the thing they search for when they come out here. They’ll talk about that shot for the rest of their lives. Trust me, if they hit a shot like that, they’ll tip you for days, maybe set you up with their nieces. Maybe sign over the papers to their Cadillac.”

We’re ten under par after nine holes. I haven’t hit another good shot, not even close, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t need to. I have achieved my magical moment. We stop at the turn for a beer. Heineken. Lisa and Natalie quaff theirs in about twelve seconds and order another. “I think I’m in,” Gordon says to me, nodding toward Lisa.

“She’s dating another attorney,” I say. “Good guy. Environmental law. Keeps our drinking water pure.”

“He’s not about to keep her pure, trust me.”

When we finish the round, the four of us will sit in the clubhouse banquet room and be awarded a large trophy. We will also be awarded a case of aged scotch and various and sundry gift certificates. We will break open one of the bottles of scotch and relive the glories of our record-breaking day, especially my miracle chip shot on the seventh. Our in-firm band, The Sharks, comprised of oh-so-clever tort specialists who strum guitars and sing lyrics with smug puns about how smart we are and how stupid our clients, judges and jurors are, will play a twenty-five minute set and we will grow drunker and drunker and at some point I will realize it’s just me and Natalie at the table, that Gordon and Lisa have slipped away to her BMW in the parking lot where he surely has two hands under her skirt. Natalie will look at me with slurred eyes and rivulets of scotch drool on her chin and say, “Hey, partner, care to demonstrate any more of your superior aim,” and the sticky issue here, the high tangled rough, is that I’m already engaged.

Nancy Freiberg is not a lawyer and I’m not in love with her. Nor is she in love with me. We’re both willing to settle. Physically, though she’s not pretty, there’s nothing obvious about her that’s off-putting. She’s a couple inches shorter than I am and she makes adequate money at her public relations firm and she sometimes smiles at the awkward comments I offer as jokes. I’d say we’re compatible, but it’s not even about that. We’re tired of being alone, both of us. We intend to marry, buy a house with a cozy kitchen, present our best selves to the general public, and if we make it seven or eight non-miserable years together, we will have accomplished all we can hope for.

This is an appealing plan. I do not want to do anything to upset it. I’m all about the cozy kitchen, all about the parched forgettable sex. After today and my lucky eagle, I will be on the winning team. I will last another six months at the firm, possibly as much as two years if we break the scoring record, which will give me enough time to put out feelers for another job, and maybe Nancy and I will have children who will be smarter and more attractive than we are.

Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.

More than most, I know how relationships can be spoiled by a single small temptation. I make my living off the hurt, the bitterness. I know—down to the last squirreled-away dollar—the cost of that kind of mistake.

Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.

Nancy may not be a toasty oven-woman of a person, but she’s honest. She’s counting on me. We’ve set a date for next April and our parents are excited. They will help us with the down payment on our house. I have had fun today, no doubt, and a bit of luck, but there will not be any grand moments of defiance. I will not, literally or figuratively, throw any golf bags into a pond and strut blithely from the course of my life as if I’m some kind of fuck-it-all legend. I will not be ripping anything. I will be marrying Nancy and playing it safe.

Still, I have never touched a woman as beautiful as Natalie.

A few years ago I represented Gordon during his divorce. It was an easy job. The split was amicable and all Gordon wanted was to keep the health club membership in his name and to have Lenora put it in writing that she wouldn’t work out there anymore. “If I’m gonna have to convince a whole new slate of women that I’m worth doing,” he told me, “I have to get myself in shape. I can’t be spending hours at the gym if she’s there too, if she’s trying to build herself a new body to share with other dudes.”

Lenora saw the logic in that argument and the whole thing was settled in a trio of brisk two-hour meetings. “It’s not that I don’t love you, Gordon,” she said to him as they left my office for the last time. “It’s that I’m not sure I know how to love anyone. I’m not sure I even love myself.”

Gordon described this assessment as both truth and bullshit. “What she’s saying is true, but she has no understanding of it. She doesn’t know how to love anyone, especially herself, and she has no clue about how to learn. She’s just mouthing those words like the doctor told her to in therapy.”

“What will you do now?” I asked him.

“I’ll be me,” he said. “I’ll go to the gym. I’ll make money. I’ll lose more hair. I’ll meet new women. I’ll be all right.”

Immediately after the divorce, we hung out quite a bit. Not at night when he presumably chased women—“I’m having success in that department,” he’d tell me—but we’d meet twice a week for breakfast at a beat-up diner. “Best pancakes in the city,” Gordon said. “Good coffee too. None of that tapioca-machiatto absurdity.”

Once I asked him if he ever heard what happened to Newfeld and Bloch.

“Bloch died. Massive stroke. Newfeld’s still alive. Stopped playing golf though. Ninety years old and still goes to the club to criticize the soup and terrorize the waitresses.”

“How’d you ever make it through loops with those guys? How’d you survive that?”

“How you survive anything, man. How I survived Lenora. You just go inside yourself and think about something different. Think about how the world would be better if you had more control over it, how one day you will.”

He went back to eating his pancakes. He didn’t like to cut the whole stack and then spear large syrup-soaked chunks with his fork. Instead, he separated the pancakes like an Oreo cookie and chewed through them one layer at a time. What he was saying felt to me like truth, but with some bullshit mixed in too.

“That’s all you did?” I said. “Just sucked it up and imagined a brighter day?”

He paused then, mid-chew, looked at me like he’d trusted me with the dissolution of his marriage and I’d managed to prove I was no longer a retard. Then he chuckled. “It’s easier to ignore a couple of bitter bastards when you’re not worried all the time about your hard-on.”

I looked out the window, saw the beginning of snow, how it swirled over the black roof of the hardware store across the street like somebody was puffing soft, mint-flavored crystals.

“Actually, there’s one other thing I used to do,” he said. “You remember how Johnny Jones used to cheat for members and give them better lies?”

I nodded.

“I did the exact opposite. If Newfeld or Bloch hit into the woods and the ball was all right, like it was playable, I kicked it so it wasn’t. I pushed it behind a tree or into a bush. The way I figured was if they were gonna be pissed off at the universe anyway, no matter how many breaks they got, why give them any breaks at all? Why not let every piece of evidence confirm their belief that every molecule in the world was out to get them? Fuckers.”

This I know: I’m no hero. Not even a hero’s sidekick. I’m a family lawyer specializing in amicable divorces. I get them done too fast and my firm leaks income. My teeth are straight now and my limbs are more proportional to my body, but I’m flabby and my nose is overlarge. I look exactly like no one worth trusting. Couples finalize their deals quickly because no one wants to spend time with me. Nancy, at least for now, claims she’s willing to. She’ll sit next to me and watch television. She’ll say, “You’re good at what you do, Bruce. Be proud.”

When Nancy takes her clothes off, her skin is pale and, often, a bit cold to the touch. I’m obviously nothing special either. When our bodies move against each other, there are no fireworks. Still, we are kind to each other. I stroke the hair on the back of her neck and sometimes she cries. She tells me she’s never let herself be vulnerable with anyone else. She trusts me because she knows I need someone to be vulnerable with too. We could be stuffed animals for each other, objects we’d like to grow out of but which, for now, we clutch onto with all we’ve got.

Inexplicably, it happens again on the sixteenth hole.

It’s a short par four and after Lisa’s rocket of a drive we are poised splendidly in the fairway, about eighty yards out. I go last this time. Gordon lobs a wedge to about ten feet. Good enough to let Lisa and Natalie fire dead at the flag. Natalie hits her worst shot of the day, a cut that lands in a flowerbed right of the green. “Sorry,” she says. “Don’t know what I was thinking.”

I’m thinking maybe the beers are getting to her.

Lisa plays a bump-and-run that for a moment looks perfect, but it slows in a clump of grass and winds up about a foot outside of Gordon. “All right,” Gordon says, as if there’s no chance I’ll hit anything closer. “Ten feet. One of us will knock it in.”

I line my shot up and this time I do hit it just like I visualize. My backswing is smooth, the blade of my wedge digs a soft divot from the turf and the ball ascends in a gorgeous soaring arc. “That looks good,” Lisa says and we all watch it, a minuscule dot against a sky that’s swimming-lips blue. In our quiet, we can hear a cheer from a nearby hole. Some other group has made a birdie. Pathetic. Birdies are nothing to us. We are entitled to them. My ball lands half-a-foot from the cup, bounces once and drops into the hole. Another eagle. Lisa jumps high in the air with a shout and Gordon flips his wedge with an oh-my-fucking-god toss. Natalie scurries toward me on her toes and kisses my cheek, her mouth moist.