The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. He had an unbidden moment of wondering whether it wouldn’t be a good thing to let Le Tour go ahead with his designs on the world of fame and celebrity, in the name of whatever he cared to express to the world. He almost said as much to Edna.

  They got to her room door. She opened it and they went inside, and she dropped her coat and flopped down on the bed, turned on her stomach, and reached for the phone. He stood by the door, still in his coat.

  “Should I — ” he said.

  She held up one hand. Then she spoke into the phone. “Thomas Franklin’s room.” She waited. He strode to the window and looked out. You could see the golf course — most of the front nine — from this height. There wasn’t anyone out there now.

  She hung up the phone. “There’s no answer.”

  “We could go down and look for him.”

  “You get the feeling we shouldn’t rest.”

  He nodded, though his heart sank.

  “Did you see To Catch a Thief and The Pink Panther? All those romantic movies set in expensive places? I saw them all when I was a teenager; I was obsessed with them. We bought all of them on video and I’d watch them over and over.”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “It used to strike me as odd that people could make love and romance each other while their lives were threatened, or bad guys were shooting at them or chasing them. You know?”

  “I always thought it was unrealistic.”

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s the whole point of it. They aren’t supposed to be realistic. If it’s realistic Cary Grant falls off the roof. Splat. Dead Cary Grant.” She lay over, lazily, on her back. “Sometimes I wonder if Americans have the subtlety necessary for romance.”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “You want to go downstairs.”

  “No,” he said.

  Rita undressed and crossed the room to the wet bar and poured herself a tall glass of malt scotch. Not her drink, but then she was loading up for Alfonzo. Outside the window it was raining. A downpour that had started as mist. On the sofa in the sitting room part of her suite was Thomas Franklin, holding his own drink, a glass of tonic water, which he drank nervously, watching her come back to his part of the room. She sat down in the chair at his left and sipped the whiskey. It went down smoothly.

  “So — ” Franklin said. “You took the ball out of your bag. Was the bag ever out of your hands?”

  “Of course it was, honey. You don’t think I’d carry that thing with me, do you?” She crossed her legs. There was a perverse kind of joy in making men she had no designs on feel as though she had such designs. She liked to do it to nice men who would not cross the line and whose fright gave her a strange thrill. Of course, in a way, this was what had happened with Alfonzo the first time, and it had gotten out of hand. Well, she had been drinking. Lots of things happened when she had been tooting up, or drinking. She sipped the whiskey and leaned slightly toward Franklin, smiling, while he tried to think of the next question. The poor castle security man, the Castle Man, she had called him. She looked at the odd way his eyes were, the unevenness of them. She thought of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She’d never seen it and supposed it was a football movie.

  “Can you not think of how or when someone would have put an explosive in one of your golf balls?”

  “Somebody could have slipped it to me anywhere. They make them in the novelty shops.”

  “Exploding golf balls.”

  “I already told you this,” she said. “Sprague told you this. Alfonzo told you this.”

  “I just — you see, there’s a situation — well, never mind.”

  “You can tell me,” she said.

  “No, I — listen. Who has — if you can give me the names of whoever has or had access to your golf bag.”

  “Well, no.” She leaned even closer. “Lots of people had access.” She paused for effect. “To my golf bags.”

  “I see.” He swallowed.

  “Are you sure you don’t want something a little stronger?”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  He wasn’t such a bad-looking man, really. The eyes were actually kind of interesting. His nervousness made him almost cute. He stood and sighed and seemed discouraged. “We’ll have to examine yer other golf balls.”

  “You want to look at my balls?” she said.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to check them.”

  Such a funny way of talking. “You want to check my balls.”

  He seemed to be walking in place. “If you don’t mind.”

  She said, “I don’t have any more than the ones that were in my bag, and you already looked at those.”

  “Yes,” he said. He excused himself and moved to the door.

  “Anything else?” she said.

  He paused and seemed confused. “I’ll — I’ll let you know.”

  “Bye,” she said.

  He went out with an alacrity that was like flight. One thing she had learned about men was that they seemed to lose intelligence in direct proportion to how aroused they were. There were all the jokes about it, of course, but she had concrete proof that the jokes were only slight exaggerations. You could not get a thought from a man while he was in that state; whereas she could wander the world of thought and ideas while fucking. It had nothing to do with her sometimes. It was a form of relaxation or it was a working out of frustration or it was a rage or a tantrum or an attack — or simply an aspect of an old habit, routine as eating. A little hunger, a little itch. She was tremendously good at golf when she was right, when she was on, and the world had laid things at her feet as a result of this. She had taken what she wanted, and it seemed that she always wanted more. And if sometimes she lay awake in the dark and felt the terrors of having gone so far over the line of the rest of practical society and social law, she awakened each morning with a fresh hunger, and a fresh sense that she would find a way to make it all come out right. It wouldn’t be reform, quite. She would be a woman of experience, who had come to a sort of plateau. She liked to imagine herself like Kate Hepburn, having reached this stage after a lifetime of doing exactly as she wished. What puzzled her was the price — the price of the last few years had been so heavy. She wondered how others managed it without falling into the consequences so heavily. Her drug use was not anything but a way of trying to keep the consequences of the other thing at bay, the sense that she had been such a bad girl, a girl who would break Daddy’s heart, as she had in fact done. She had, as a matter of astringent fact, seduced her own father out of a wish to get back at her mother for being strict with her. Well, she hadn’t actually seduced him. She had made him nervous. She had caused him to leave the house, and her mother had never guessed at any of it. Her mother thought he was going through male menopause. He was terrified. And now he lived in Spain and went to bullfights and had grown a beard, a gray beard like Hemingway’s had been, and he was writing bad fiction and calling younger women “daughter.” Rita addressed her letters to him as “Papa.” It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

  He sent her his stories. Stories with opening lines like: “Jim Weatherby’s hands were big and red and hairy as lobsters.” Or, “The woman danced across the floor, her legs screaming.”

  Bad, bad.

  Poor man. She had ruined a perfectly nice CEO. She thought of him, swallowing the whiskey. Alfonzo would be at the door soon enough, planning a week’s stay. Alfonzo was part of the price. She wished for some clarity, and had more of the whiskey. It never quite provided any clarity, but it made the wish for it dissolve. Nothing was working. She went into the bathroom and looked at herself. Billy Sprague had been nice. She had felt something with him, a little something. There had been a desperation about him. After the putt, and the exploding ball, he seemed changed, if she could be assumed to have known him well enough to notice a change. His attitude about the bet with Alfonzo, and her part in it, was nearly cavalier. It was as if the whole thing no longer mattered.
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br />   She brushed her hair with her fingers, looked into her own mouth. She cleaned her teeth, then went with her whiskey back into the living room. She turned on the television. Movies, movies, sitcoms, CNN. The newspeople were strangers, faces she didn’t recognize — how odd to realize that the important ones were all here, in these posh rooms. And in the rooms of all the hotels in the surrounding towns.

  The knock at the door did not surprise her.

  She poured more of the whiskey, then thought better of it and went to her purse for some Valium. She took that, then swallowed more whiskey. The knocking sounded, peremptory, louder than before.

  She looked through the peephole. Sprague. Quickly she opened the door and pulled him in, then looked out, up and down the long corridor with its fake gas lamps going on as far as she could see. She stepped in and closed the door. Sprague was standing with his back to her across the room, looking out the window.

  “The putt would’ve gone in,” he said.

  She said, “Yes.”

  “Son of a bitch if it wouldn’t.”

  “It was dead solid perfect,” she said.

  He turned. “I feel good.”

  “Want a drink?” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’m glad you feel good.”

  He stood there gazing at her, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  “So,” she said.

  “So we have to make Alfonzo admit that.”

  She drank. “Good luck.” Her head spun and made her have to look for the chair. She found it in the sudden swirl and sat down. She remembered when this same sudden sense of disequilibrium had caused her to falter backward and then tumble down the bank and into the water surrounding the seventeenth green at Sawgrass, in front of a national audience. She held both arms of the chair and tried to fix her eyes on Sprague, who had divided and become liquid.

  “I’m here to convince him,” Sprague said out of the blur he had become.

  “You’re nice.”

  “I love you, Rita.”

  “Gawd,” she said. She tried to stand but couldn’t. She did not want any talk of love. Not now. Maybe not ever. Sprague had interested her — still did — but she wanted no talk of any love, or any of that endearment stuff, the small talk of married couples. It appalled her. It was something to run from. “Go,” she said. Or thought she said.

  He had come to her side. He actually knelt there and took her hand. “Rita, I want to marry you. Let’s play this one round of golf and then go somewhere far away and start over.”

  She was completely speechless. She seemed to look through a long tunnel at his face, his earnest, newly confident face. “You would’ve sunk a fucking putt,” she tried to say. “And that’s changed your life?” She couldn’t get it out.

  “Rita, tell me you’ll marry me.”

  “You know what would be fun?” she said. “It’d be fun if the whole fucking world blew up. Not jus’ a fucking golf ball but the whole goddamn thing. Boom. All of us trailing off into space. Think of it.” Had she said any of this? He still held her hand. He had taken both her hands, and she had no recollection of when he had done it.

  “Rita?” he said.

  “What.” He had heard that. She said it again. “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fucked.”

  “No,” he said. “We’re gonna fix it. Alfonzo has to admit that ball was going in. Rita, for the first time in my life I feel really free. I can’t explain it. I feel like I can breathe out — for the first time in my life, Rita. And it’s this — this feeling I have for you. I love you.”

  She said, or tried to say, “I’ve fucked enough different men to people a small country.” It wouldn’t come out. He kissed her hands, then leaned over her knees to kiss her cheek. “Hey,” she said. “Lighten up.” None of it quite got out. He kissed her mouth now, pulled her up out of the chair, and then lay her down on the floor. He was kissing her mouth, and something else was happening. She closed her eyes and then opened them again. The kissing went on, and she realized with a start that he was blowing into her mouth, frantically administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. That was what it was. She had tried to reach down to take hold of his prick, and he was saving her life. Or he thought he was saving her life.

  “You stopped breathing,” he said. “You were gone.”

  “I was not. Will you let me get up?”

  “Darling, I’m sure you’d stopped breathing.”

  He pulled her to a sitting position, then to her feet. He had his hands under her arms, and it tickled. “Stop it,” she said.

  “I thought you were dying,” he said. “I asked you to marry me and you stopped breathing.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You’ll marry me?” he said.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I love you.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Jesus. I’m dizzy,” she said. “I can’t stand up.”

  “Darling,” he said. “What’ve you taken?”

  “Taken a lot of shit,” she said. “Almost fucked the castle guy.”

  “I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Sprague told her.

  “Castle security guy was a citizen.”

  “Yes? The answer is yes, right? — you’ll marry me.”

  “You’re a citizen.”

  “What?”

  “Bed,” she got out.

  He moved with her into the bedroom, and she lay down in the spinning of the room. Sprague was there, going by and going by. It was as if she were on a train platform, watching eleven Spragues go by one after the other after the other.

  “Can I stay with you?” he said.

  She could see how gallant he felt. They were all so pathetic when they were gallant, all wound up trying to get into position to use their little tallywackers. Who was it who had called it his tallywacker? She couldn’t remember. Someone she didn’t like very much had called it his tallywacker. Somebody else had called it his mashie. Another had said it was his driver. Christ, she was sick of all of them. The only true feeling was standing there watching the little ball disappear into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, flying, landing so slow so far away. Go away, she wanted to say, but he sat down at her side and was resting one hand on her hip. That felt good; it was tactile. His hand was warm. She looked at the back of it, and then she touched it, almost curious.

  “Oh, my love,” Billy Sprague said.

  In another room on the same floor of the castle, Ned Gorman and Edna Zuckerman lay quiet, listening to the rain on the windows. Thomas Franklin had called the room, and Edna had answered. She had told him she was going to sleep for an hour. She had said she didn’t know where Ned Gorman was; she hadn’t seen him since they came back from the ride up into the bluffs surrounding the castle. She didn’t think the exploding golf ball was connected to Le Tour, or the missing plastique, and people had to rest. Every now and then people had to lie down and go to sleep.

  As she spoke in this manner to Franklin, Gorman thought about the strangeness of what she was saying — even in war, in battles, ongoing conflicts, people had to lie down, and be unconscious for hours at a time. Le Tour would have to rest too. The implacable enemy would have to spend hours in a state of perfect helplessness. Edna Zuckerman hung up the phone and lay back down, and for a long interval neither of them had spoken.

  “You were involved once,” Gorman said. “Right?”

  She sighed. “Once.”

  “Married?”

  She sighed again. “No.”

  “But intimate.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business, I guess.”

  “You think this is recreational.”

  “Pardon me?”

  She leaned up on one elbow. “You think this is casual?”

  He couldn’t find anything to say.

  “Oh,” she said. “I get it. It’s casual for y
ou.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’ve wanted you for real ever since the train platform, and I think Thomas knows it, too.”

  “Is Thomas likely to get jealous?”

  She lay back. “Yes.”

  After a pause, he said, “And what form is his jealousy likely to take?”

  “Oh,” she said. “A rather violent form.”

  He sat up. “As in?”

  “When we were together and I was teaching — I had this job teaching, as undercover — we were trying to catch a professor of engineering who had secrets and who we thought was selling them to the highest bidder. Anyway, the professor turned out to be innocent and kind of charming, and I had this fling. Nothing serious. We didn’t even sleep together. We had a couple of romantic dinners on the sly and tried to decide if we wanted to. You see, he was married and rather honorable and all that, and so was I. But we were drawn to each other, and so we met those two times, and — well, Thomas found out about it, and he went over to the professor’s house and bashed in the door and just generally knocked him about a bit, you know, for an hour or two.”

  “An hour or two.”

  “Something close to it.”

  “He doesn’t look like he could do a thing like that.”

  “Oh, he can.”

  “I mean he doesn’t look like he’s strong enough.”

  “Well, he had help.”

  “He had . . .”

  She nodded. “A seven-iron, I believe it was.”

  Gorman lay there with an ache deep in his stomach, thinking about an hour or two with a man wielding a seven-iron.

  “Now you know why I hate golf.”

  “Wait a minute . . . He wouldn’t . . .”

  “Do you have any fags?” she asked. “I could use a smoke. I mean I quit smoking a year ago and still when I get nervous I want a smoke, and I usually carry them for that reason and just now I feel like a smoke and I’m out.”