by Dan Deweese
If that’s what Grant meant by “sometimes things don’t work out,” then yes, I suppose I understood that sometimes things didn’t work out. I didn’t think that was what he meant, though.
“I hope you and Sandra know that I really like both of you, and I’d like to stay friends with you,” he said. “I know you’ve known Gina longer than you’ve known me, and that she’s probably going to be pissed off and say all sorts of angry things about me. But I’m being serious when I say it’s been fun to hang out, and I’d be disappointed if that had to end. Though I guess I would understand.”
Ending my friendship with Grant because of something that had happened between him and Gina seemed preposterous. What would the point be? The reality of their breakup, and of how we would or wouldn’t continue to know each other in the future, seemed entirely theoretical and irrelevant. “I can’t say how Sandra will feel, but I’d definitely like to keep hanging out,” I said, noticing again how often, when speaking to Grant, I found myself uttering sentences that embarrassed me.
He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Good,” he said, and then headed to the front of the store to pay Mr. Anthony for the suit he’d picked out.
We said nothing more about Gina, but in an impulsive show of solidarity, I told Mr. Anthony I would go ahead and buy the suit he had measured me for, too. “It’s a beautiful suit,” he said, nodding. “And you’ll be able to wear it to just about any kind of event, so you know you’re going to get your money out of it. I think it’s an excellent decision.”
He was right. I wore that suit countless times over the years. And even though I stopped being able to fit into it a few years ago, it still hangs in the back of my closet.
I was not so assured of my decision at the time, though. The amount of money I’d just spent made the suit the single largest purchase I had ever made, eclipsing even the price of the used Dodge Dart I was driving in those days. I felt simultaneously dizzy and grown-up as I drove across town in that very vehicle, and a belated sense of financial prudence—or penance, probably—might have spurred me to cancel the round of golf I was heading toward, had Grant not already assured me the whole thing would be taken care of that day: we were going to play with his father, whose club membership allowed anyone in his party to golf for free.
So when I next parked my humbled Dart, it was in the lot of the Pheasant Valley Country Club. It was autumn by then, but the air at the course was heavy with the scents of damp soil and cut grass. Summer had been coaxed into lingering, it seemed, and though there had been scattered showers earlier in the day, the clouds had cleared by the time I arrived, leaving the place a carefully mowed, still-dripping Eden. Finches whirred among the trees and golf carts trilled in the distance. I found Grant at the driving range—he’d already spilled a bucket of red-striped range balls across the dark grass for me. I pulled a driver from my vinyl bag and squinted out toward the flagsticks set at short, intermediate, and long distance. The trio of flags lent the range exactly no resemblance to golf as actually played, but I sized them up as if they were of importance while I asked Grant when his father would join us.
“Oh, he doesn’t believe in the driving range,” Grant said. “He’s probably having a drink right now.”
A smattering of laughter carried from the direction of the first tee, among it a laugh that was deeper and louder than the others. I wondered if it might be the laugh of the source of Grant’s career and fashion advice, and when Grant and I made our way to the first tee a few minutes later, I was happy to find that I was right: the foursome ahead of us was trading a few last quips with a tall, broad-shouldered man shouting rejoinders to them as they sped off in their carts. Grant introduced the man to me as his father. “It’s nice to meet you, sir,” I said.
“Don’t bother with the mister or sir stuff,” he said. “Call me Lon.”
If I’d seen them together on the street, I wouldn’t have guessed Grant and Lon were related at all. Grant had the compact build of a distance runner, but his father, a few inches taller than Grant and heavier by a good fifty or sixty pounds, looked like a retired football player gone comfortably soft. His wide face was dominated by an open smile, and he chatted unhurriedly, as if a round of golf were best undertaken as casually as a conversation over a backyard fence.
“Grant tells me you’re a banker,” Lon said. “That’s a fine line of work to go into. Always a need for a good banker.” When I told him I wasn’t sure it would be a career I stuck with, but that it was fine for the short term, he shook his head. “Don’t dismiss it. Markets can go down and businesses can go under, but banks are always there. There’s nothing wrong with a small compromise in the direction of long-term stability.”
“Or with using it as a short-term position before moving on to something else,” Grant said.
Lon raised a brow as he tapped a divot back into the soil with the head of his driver. In his grasp, the club looked as if it were intended for a child. “I suppose,” he said. “Though my first business was auto parts distribution, and I wasn’t really interested in auto parts at all. But making that company work is how I bought the house your mom and I lived in. And it’s how I clothed and fed you when you were just a kiddo. We had to buy you that little plastic suitcase so you could pretend it was a briefcase full of sales pamphlets and rate sheets like your old man’s briefcase.”
Lon laughed heartily, and though Grant forced a smile at what was clearly a familiar anecdote, the confidence I had come to expect from him seemed replaced that day by a moody remove. Grant examined the toes of his shoes, picked through a handful of tees he extracted from his pocket, and studied the trees that lined the fairway—he directed his gaze anywhere, it seemed, other than at his father. Meanwhile, Lon adjusted the fit of his golf glove, a worn leather item that made my own glove—new, soft, and glaringly white—look painfully effete. Addressing the ball, Lon peered down the fairway with the nonchalance of someone looking for a bus, then frowned down at the tee. Bringing his club slowly up and back, he exhaled as he uncoiled, striking the ball with a percussive note that carried through the afternoon air like the sound of a hatchet splitting wood. We watched the ball rise and hang against the blue sky, suspended and seemingly motionless, until it drifted slowly back to earth and bounded eagerly down the right side of the fairway. I told Lon it was a nice shot, and he nodded. “It’ll play,” he said.
Not only did that shot play, but so did his next, and the next after that. He moved around the course as if completely at home, and continued to indulge in every opportunity to release his booming laugh across the fairways. Everyone we crossed paths with seemed to know him. He called the teenage snack cart girl by name, and when he asked if she’d think less of him if he ordered another drink, she said, “I brought the pitcher of Bloody Marys out here because I knew you’d want one.” He told her to give Grant and me whatever we wanted and put it on his account, and though Grant asked only for orange juice, I decided to try a Bloody Mary of my own. If it helped Lon’s game, I thought, it might help mine. “We’ll have a fresh pitcher waiting for you guys at the turn,” the girl said brightly as she handed me my drink. Then she clicked the cart into gear and sped away.
Grant took one look at me after my first sip. “Have you ever had a Bloody Mary before?” he said.
“No,” I admitted. “What’s in it?”
“Tomato juice,” he said. “And other things that I, personally, don’t think belong in a drink. Enjoy.”
I was just managing to finish the drink while we waited to tee off on a par three toward the end of the front nine when Lon, after finishing an anecdote about Grant throwing a club into a pond when he was a teenager, asked if I’d been taught to play by my own father. I felt the usual wariness rise in me as I admitted I’d mostly taught myself, though Grant had been giving me some pointers recently. “Your folks live here in town?” Lon asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m from New Mexico. I came out here for college.”
“You
ever think about going back?” he asked. “Or are you here for good?”
Grant was standing nearby, apparently absorbed in the task of using a tee to clean mud from the grooves of one of his irons, though I could tell he was listening. “There’s nothing to go back to,” I said. “My parents are both gone from New Mexico now, too, so that’s all over. My mom’s in Florida, and my dad’s in Texas.”
Lon nodded sagely, glancing again at my cheap golf bag. I didn’t quite have a complete set of clubs in those days—I had enough to be allowed on the course, but I was a little light. I knew Lon was appraising the situation, but one drink into a nice autumn afternoon, I didn’t particularly care.
“They’re just about done, Dad,” Grant said. It was true that the last member of the foursome on the green ahead of us was putting out, but it also seemed that Grant was maybe less comfortable with his dad’s questions than I was.
“Well, I can’t say I have much knowledge about either Florida or Texas,” Lon said, “but I’ve heard they have some nice spots. Hurricane country, though, in both of them.” He pulled an iron from his bag and stepped into the tee box. “We should make sure to get out on the course together a few times this summer, since it’s free for you gentlemen when you’re with me.” He hit a clean drive that we watched drop onto the green one hundred eighty yards away. I again complimented him on the shot, and he laughed. “That one was pretty good, wasn’t it?” he said.
Lon downed three more Bloody Marys, had one birdie, five pars, and triple-putted only twice over the rest of our eighteen holes. Two other snack cart girls knew him by name and beverage, and players traveling along parallel fairways continued calling out friendly hellos to him. Grant, on the other hand, seemed bored. The longer we walked the groomed fairways, and the more Lon spoke to me with amiable easiness, the more profound Grant’s boredom seemed to become. I studied Lon’s gestures—the trophy pose he held after completing his swing, the rhythms with which he spoke, the way he walked the course—but throughout the entire back nine, Grant hardly traded a word with us, and played largely on his own, as if completing a chore. I was baffled by his mood that day, but in recent years I’ve seen Miranda assume the same demeanor when I linger for any amount of time in a room in which she is with her friends—the presence of a parent can’t help but flatten the child’s carefully constructed façade of adult sophistication. So though I thought Grant’s silence was the result of an uncharacteristically dark mood that day, I can see now that Grant was actually closer to being in no mood at all. It made no sense to think of him as possessing a mood, because it made no sense to think of him as even being himself that day. He was just his father’s son, golfing for free.
When we finished and Grant added up the scores, I was surprised to learn that Lon had beaten Grant by only four strokes. Grant delivered the news as if it were a trivial detail, but Lon seemed pleased, and told us that even though he had to leave, Grant and I should have dinner at the club and charge it to his account. He shook my hand, thanked me for playing, and ambled toward the parking lot.
“I’m sorry if he was distracting,” Grant said after his father was gone. “Half of what he says is just meant to mess with your focus, because he wants to win.”
“He was messing with my focus?” I said. “I didn’t realize it.”
“Well,” Grant said, “he may only have been messing with mine.”
“Have you ever beaten him?”
“Once. He was less than thrilled. He didn’t speak to me for two weeks.”
Two weeks didn’t strike me as a big deal, but I understood my expectations regarding communication with a father were set low. “Did you want to stay to get something to eat?” I asked.
Grant just shook his head. The idea was out of the question, it seemed—he and his father were involved in some ornate series of signifying gestures I wasn’t going to catch the subtleties of. And I would never even get another chance to study them, because that October afternoon was the last I ever saw of Lon. Although I went golfing with Grant a handful of times every year, never again was it at the invitation of, or paid for by, his father.
I ended that day with Sandra. When I told her about the breakup, she seemed less surprised than I. Her roommate had gone out of town for the weekend, so it was one of the rare times she and I had her apartment to ourselves, and she had made dinner for the two of us, complete with candles on the table. She first asked whether Grant had said who broke up with whom, and when I told her I’d gotten the impression it was Grant who had ended things, she wanted to know how I’d gotten that impression, what Grant had said that gave me that impression, how he had said it, and so on, until eventually I just repeated the entire conversation to her.
“Well, I’m glad,” she said as we ate our dinner amid candlelight.
“You’re glad?”
“Because I don’t have to keep pretending to be friends with her. She was your ex-girlfriend. It was weird.”
“She was hardly a serious girlfriend, Sandra.”
She shrugged. “Let’s take Grant to Bristol’s some evening. Gina can take care of herself, and besides, Grant’s the person you’re friends with now, right?”
I agreed, though I couldn’t help but feel I was somehow betraying Gina. “I think it’s cute that you’re jealous,” I said.
“I’m not jealous,” Sandra said. “It’s just that with her, I was having to be polite and friendly with someone that I didn’t really care about. Grant, at least, gives you tips on new clothes and takes you golfing or whatever. The golf sounds like it’s fun for you, and I like the new clothes. But what do we lose if we don’t see Gina anymore?”
“It always thought the two of you were getting along.”
“That’s what women do,” she said. “We pretend, to be nice.”
“Did you think it was dangerous that we were all going out together?”
She smiled. “Dangerous? No. No offense, but I don’t think she was after you. Were you after her?”
“No,” I said. “I’m after you.”
She raised her head defiantly. “Prove it.”
I don’t know whether Sandra ever considered it, but the sex life she and I were enjoying at the time had certainly been made possible, in part, by the two months of instruction Gina had given me a few years before. So though I wasn’t allowed to say it, and though I understood Sandra’s desire to be free of playing nice with Gina, I knew that Gina was someone who had contributed positively to our relationship. Because when I moved my fingers beneath Sandra’s dress as we stood there kissing next to the table, I knew where and how to move my fingers once they reached their destination because Gina had shown me how. And one of the reasons Sandra was able to feel pleasure that evening in her apartment was because Gina had shown me how to make a woman feel pleasure. But I suppose that’s usually true: the pleasure we find in another person is only possible because of the pleasure that person has already found, with others.
I HAD THOUGHT THE university district would be empty on a Saturday morning, but driving through it, I found the sidewalks filled with knots of people, all headed in the same direction. There was much chucking of shoulders and fake-wrestling among the college boys in the groups, and whatever they were anticipating, it was clearly a struggle for them to contain themselves. Driving past, I watched to make sure no one darted or was thrown into the street. The day’s heat was gathering itself in earnest, and the college kids were dressed for it. The women wore shorts and bikini tops or spaghetti-strap halters, while the men favored baseball hats, baggy shorts, and slogan-emblazoned T-shirts—the more confident young men wore no shirts at all. I hadn’t the slightest idea where everyone was headed, but it was obviously an event at which the sun would have ample opportunity to do damage to skin.
I pulled onto campus at the south end of the Quad, an immense rectangular lawn surrounded by the university’s oldest buildings, and parked along the curb. Massive oaks bordered a concrete walk that ran lengthwise down the center of
the area, their wreathed branches forming a vaulted arboreal hall the university featured in its marketing brochures each year, and I felt myself break into a sweat as I walked across the lawn toward the trees. The only other visible human was someone riding a bicycle along the opposite end of the Quad, two hundred yards from where I stood. When the rider steered his bike over the edge of the curb and onto the sidewalk, the clatter of wheel and frame arrived a quarter second after the act, and I was surprised, as always, at the phenomenon of sound lagging image. And then I was surprised again when I arrived at the walkway and found there was actually another person present, hidden within the trees and shade: Catherine.
“I thought you were talking with the security people,” I said.
“It was a brief conversation,” she said. “So I thought I’d stop by here just in case. How is Miranda?”