“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says and disconnects.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HERBIE’S DAILY SESSIONS WITH BILLY STILL DON’T really have much to do with golf. Sometimes, if he’s in the middle of telling her a story, he’ll just kick his golf ball further up the fairway so as not to disrupt his train of thought. He tells her more about Annie, about all the adventures of their life together—how they went from poor to rich and then back to something in between, from being nobodies to big celebs and then back to that gray area of “Hey, weren’t you that guy?” None of that shit mattered, he tells Billy. All that mattered was that were alive and in the game and crazy about each other. Nobody had what we had. Billy just listens, nods her head and hits her perfect golf shots.
He talks about how they loved to live outside the rules, like they had a magic passport that allowed them to travel back and forth between different worlds and different cultures. One night they’d be hobnobbing with billionaires on Park Avenue and the next they’d be eating Chinese take-out in some artist’s loft in Lower Manhattan. They sucked all the fun out whatever situation they were in—they didn’t give a damn what side of the fence they were on.
We never duplicated each other, he tells her. We let our distinct personalities stay distinct. Annie was a self-improver, a seeker, whereas I was a sloth, born and bred. She would spend hours in the morning doing her yoga and meditation, standing on her head, chanting some shit or other. Then she’d eat her yogurt and granola, down her health supplements and she’d be off to her singing lesson, her Pilates class or whatever. I would just sit there like a lump on my kitchen stool with my coffee, doing the crossword puzzle. She was all motion; I was all stasis. She was health food and vitamins; I was fat and salt. And booze. And here I am alive and she’s gone. What the fuck sense is there, he asks Billy. Where’s the fucking sense to it? And he smacks his drive into the lake. Billy tosses him another ball and tells him to hit it harder.
Some days he just trudges up the fairway in silence, head down, ruminating on something or other and Billy lets him be. Other times, she prods him. “So what are you gonna do now? What’s your next move?”
“I’m fucked, Billy. I can’t go this way and I can’t go that way.”
“What’s that about?”
“On the one hand I can’t not be with a woman; I’ve lived too long in the company of a woman to try to remake myself and go it alone; but to go for somebody else I have to let go of Annie and that scares the shit out of me.”
“Why?”
“Being with Annie, having her on my arm when I walked into a room, created a personality—or completed a personality—that wasn’t there before I was with her. Yeah, completed is it. I used to be partly me and then I was all of me, you understand? My identity, my persona, was completed when I was with her. If I let her go, then what’s left of me is gonna be like… Pee Wee Herman or something.”
“Oh Jesus Christ.”
“Well, you asked.”
Another day she asks about his kids and he tells her about Candy, about how terrific she is, about how everyone in the world thinks she’s fantastic except her. “Like she has this little kink or a chink, you know?”
“What’s she got, a kink or a chink?”
“Like a chink in her armor, you know? An Achilles chink. I think it’s because she was Annie’s daughter. When she looked at her mother and how fantastic she was, she lost confidence in herself in comparison. Even though the rest of the world sees her as fantastic, she can’t see it.”
“Give her time.”
Herbie shakes his head. “No, she’s had plenty of time, believe me. She’s got a chink.”
“Now you sound like a father,” and she shakes her head grimly.
“Oh,” says Herbie, and he stops in the middle of the fairway and looks at Billy. “You got a father problem?”
“Not anymore.”
“Now he understands you?”
“Now he’s dead.”
“That doesn’t solve anything. Believe me, death doesn’t solve shit. So what? He had trouble that you were gay?”
“No, I was gay from the get-go; he had plenty of time to get used to that. He was just a father, you know? I was never quite what he wanted me to be. He always expected something more—better grades when I was in school; bigger college with a nationally ranked golf team; then he wanted me to go on the LPGA Tour, thought I could be a big star. Never occurred to him that’s not what I wanted for myself. You fathers have to realize that we don’t live our lives to get you off the hook. We want to live for ourselves—just like you do.”
Herbie gets silent again for a while. He actually starts to concentrate on hitting the golf ball for a change. After a few holes of that, he plops himself down in the golf cart next to Billy. “If your father was here right now I would tell him that you’re plenty good enough.”
On the eighteenth fairway Billy brings up Roxanne—not in any pushy way, just to take a reading on how Herbie reacts. He clams up again and puts a big frown on his face.
“Hey, I don’t mean to put you on the spot; I was just wondering if you guys are having a nice time together.”
“Yeah, we’re having a nice time. She’s a fun woman—fun to be with, but I don’t want to get her thinking that this is going somewhere. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“You’re not ready yet. She knows that.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. Billy is not a person he wants to lie to.
“There’s this other woman. And I’m having trouble getting her out of my mind. That’s one of the reasons I came down here.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Too young.”
“Ah.”
They get to the eighteenth green and Billy deftly putts out. “So you have one woman you don’t want and another woman you’re afraid to want.”
“Yeah. And one woman that’s dead.”
He lines up a three-foot putt and knocks it six feet past the hole.
“You’ve got be the worst putter I’ve ever seen,” says Billy.
“I hate this fucking game.” He kicks the ball into the sand trap and walks off the green.
An hour later, they’re at the bar, still deep in conversation. Billy is telling him about her life with Marianne, about how they were the straightest couple in the neighborhood.
“We were the opposite of you and Annie. All we wanted to do was fit in and be good citizens and not have anybody look at us funny, you know? We were the straightest lesbians in the history of the world. It was pathetic.”
“What did she do?”
“We both taught at the college; that’s where we met. Mari was an intellectual. The real McCoy. She wrote books; scholarly stuff. Eighteenth-century French literature was her field. Ain’t that a kick that she wanted to be with me?”
He smiles at her.
“I’m a jock, that’s all I am.”
“You’re a monster, Billy. She was lucky to find you.”
She looks morose for a minute; then she brightens up and raises her glass. “Here’s to love,” she says and they clink.
Herbie signals the barman to shake up another martini.
“Here’s what I want to know,” he says.
“Shoot.”
“How come you, a little squit of a thing—I’ve got to have forty pounds on you, right? How come you hit every shot thirty yards farther than I do?”
“Ah. Finally comes the question of length, the great male obsession. What took you so long?” She takes her glasses off and cleans them with a napkin. Then she puts them back on and peers at him with an ironic smile. “Maybe you’re not swinging hard enough yet.”
“I know you don’t mean that.”
“No, I don’t. C’mon, let’s go to the range. It’s time for you to learn something.”
“It’s dark out.”
“I’ll protect you.”
They decide to take Herbie’s car because he’s got his clubs in the trunk. But Bi
lly says she’ll drive because she knows the way. As they’re walking across the parking lot, Billy’s got her hands in her pockets and her eyes focused on the asphalt.
“You’re in love with your swing, right.”
“Yeah, don’t change my swing.”
“Okeydoke.”
“Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“You ever watch Ernie Els? Or Vijay Singh?
“Yeah,” he says, getting nervous.
“You notice how those swings look like warmed-up honey, no effort at all, no rush? They’re in perfect balance, in perfect tempo?”
“Yeah. And what’s my swing look like?”
She starts the car, drives out of the lot and turns right. “You ever see that video where the hunters are clubbing those baby seals to death?”
They drive in silence while Herbie chews on that one. She gets onto the service road that parallels the interstate and heads south. Then she pulls into the parking lot of a dilapidated driving range that looks like it’s been closed for years. Herbie gets his clubs from the trunk and Billy goes around to the side of a little shack and lets herself in with a key. A minute later, the lights on the range come up. She brings out a big bucket of beatup balls and sets them next to an Astroturf driving mat with one of those rubber golf tees sticking up through it. She places a ball on the tee.
“Hit away.”
And Herbie takes the driver and starts to hit. Billy keeps putting the next ball on the tee and calling out the distance of his last shot.
“One ninety.”
“One ninety? You gotta be kidding. These balls are no good. I hit it better than one ninety, for Christ’s sake.”
He puts a little more into the next one. Billy tees up another ball. “Two hundred. Maybe two oh five with the roll.”
“Fuck you,” says Herbie, and tears into the next one.
“One eighty-five.”
“These balls are dead. This is ridiculous.”
Billy takes the club from him and effortlessly strokes the ball.
“How far?” she asks.
“Two forty,” he says, squinting into the lights. “Well, past two forty.”
“You’re right. The balls are dead.”
Herbie grabs the club and grimly starts whaling away, barely waiting for Billy to set the next ball up. He breaks a sweat, although the evening is cool. Billy just tees the balls up, saying nothing now, and the harder he swings the more pathetic the flight of the ball is. But that doesn’t stop him from swinging even harder. When all the balls are gone, he keeps swinging, now trying to smash the rubber tee through the mat and into the ground. Finally the head breaks off the shaft of the club and goes bouncing into the darkness. He stands there, breathing heavy, drenched in sweat.
“Who you trying to kill, slugger? Mama or Papa?”
Herbie just stares at her and then tosses the broken club away.
“All right. First, here’s what you should do about your golf game: take two weeks off. Then quit.”
“That’s an old joke.”
“Yeah, but it works in your case. Once golf is no longer about killing your mother with a stick, it’ll lose all its interest for you; you’ll find it dumb. It has way too many Republicans hanging around anyway, with funny-colored pants on.”
“You got that part right.”
“Okay, that’s done. Now let’s learn something.”
Herbie looks at her like she’s about to hit him.
“You like that swing of yours because it makes you feel strong.”
“Right.”
“That’s your ego.”
“Okay.”
“Which is fine if what you want is to stroke your ego, but it doesn’t make the ball go very far.”
He concedes that with a shrug.
“You want to be in control of all that power you feel, right?”
“Sure.”
“Well, here’s the deal—and you felt it tonight, so you know it’s true—the more control you have, the more you limit your possibilities.”
He stares at her. The lights are reflecting in her glasses so he can’t see her eyes. But he knows they are steady and gray, peering at him to see if he got what she just said. He feels dizzy. He sits down on the fake grass mat and thinks about it.
“So, you’re not talking about golf.”
“No, fuck golf.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
OLIVE AND THE REST OF THE CAST ARE BECOMING MORE and more Russian as the rehearsals proceed. During the breaks they sip hot sugary tea—from a glass, not a cup— and yearn mournfully for Moscow. At night, when their work is done, they collect in a dark bar near the theater, knock down shots of Stoli and reveal to one another their deepest insecurities. This is what happens when you rehearse a play—your world narrows down to that particular place and the problems of those particular people and everything else may as well be on the far side of the moon. That’s why spouses and significant others get so furious around the third week of rehearsal—because they don’t exist anymore. They live in what’s called the real world, doing what people consider to be real things while their actor spouses are brooding away their afternoons at a Russian country estate, pretending a couple of coat stands are a grove of poplar trees.
Bob has now ingested Uncle Vanya into his personality and is even more obnoxious than his usual obnoxious self. Olive, who had been having lunch with him every day, now runs in the other direction when she sees him coming because, like Vanya, he’s taking delight in the flaws of everyone else in the company. He even perspires in character, producing tiny drops of flop-sweat on his forehead whenever anyone looks him directly in the eye.
Olive is wearing a rehearsal costume, which is a throwntogether skirt made of cheap muslin that approximates the length and weight of the costumes she’ll be wearing in the show. It gives her the feel, the heft, and the motion of those late nineteenth-century fashions. It flares when she turns, revealing the tops of her high-button shoes, which pleases her no end. She has become the most outrageous flirt east of St. Petersburg and has everyone—men, women, the androgynous second-assistant stage manager—madly in love with her. Sam has failed dismally in his promise to leave her alone. He can’t help himself. He tries to focus when he’s giving notes to the other actors but his eyes are not in his control. His infatuation—and rejection, because Olive refuses to acknowledge his attentions—are now very public and the other actors take turns buying him shots of vodka and stroking his ego. It’s all very, very Russian.
Another thing happens in the third week of rehearsal: the maniacs take over the asylum. Or rather the actors, who have been living twenty-four hours a day in the skins of their characters now know more about who they are than does the director—or the playwright for that matter if, indeed, the playwright is still alive. If the playwright is dead, it doesn’t matter how much he knows.
And this shift, this change in who is holding the reins, has altered Olive’s take on Sam. Whereas she used to be in awe of his intelligence, his knowledge of Russian drama, his theater savvy, his cute accent—now she looks upon him more as an earnest, wellintentioned boy—a smart boy, an adorable boy—but, alas, a boy.
Enter our hero. Herbie knows how to deal with an actress in the third week of rehearsal. He’s made a lifetime of it. He knows that he must never take the wind out of her sails, that she is the captain of her pirate ship and his job is to stay below decks, bailing with a bucket. Olive calls him every night before she turns in. It’s often late because the cast is at the bar long into the night, but when she gets home, she takes off her makeup, goes over her script for half an hour or so, then snuggles into bed and calls Herbie.
They talk about everything. Olive vents to him about Bob, about how impossible he’s become, and Herbie tells her to use it for the play—“Yelena feels the same revulsion for Vanya as you do for Bob, so use it. At this point, your instincts are gold; nothing you do can possibly be wrong; if Bob makes you feel sick, just feel sick; it’s all good.”
“I miss you,” she tells him in Yelena’s most seductive voice. “I wish you were here.”
Herbie doesn’t take the bait.
“You said trust my instincts, right? My instinct is to wish that you were here.”
“I’m where I’m supposed to be. You don’t need any more distractions up there.”
“Are you a distraction?”
“I would be.”
“How’s your golf ?”
“My teacher told me to quit.”
“Oh, honey.”
“I still play every day—more just to hang with Billy. I like her a lot.”
“Still seeing the sister?”
“We go out to dinner.”
She nods but he can’t see it. “Sam told me that the more I play Yelena, the more beautiful I get.”
“He can’t leave it alone, can he?”
“He’s a puppy.”
“Yeah, he likes to play—all those games he had you playing in the beginning of rehearsal. But playful isn’t a bad thing for a director to be. Not so bad for a lover, either.”
“He’s a boy.”
“Just add the word ‘toy’ and you’re in business.”
“Don’t shove me at him, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll manage my own sex life.”
He nods but she can’t see it. “Speaking of which, how’s the Astrov?”
“Alvin McConnell. You know him?”
“I know who he is. Good actor, no?”
“He’s great and he’s a wonderful guy, but I’m having a hard time feeling sexy about him. He’s kind of soft, you know? I mean I love him as a person. I love talking to him, he’s funny and sweet, tells me all about his family, but, you know, Yelena has to feel some heat for him.”
“She does. It’s crucial.”
“It’s frustrating.”
“This is where acting comes in.”
“Yeah, but I’m kind of past pretending right now—like you said, I’m feeling what I feel.”
“Annie had this problem a lot over the years.”
“And?”
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