Of course we had a golf cart together. That was expected, just like Matt Rivers and his brother Jim, playing with us, also shared a golf cart. The brothers were beefy men who produced monster drives, and they sat squished next to one another. Kevin and I sat apart, making sure our knees and elbows did not touch and, as we drove away from the first tee, we said nothing to each other but the murmured, “Good shot.”
I’d sweated bullets before I even got to the course, convinced this was a very bad, embarrassing idea that would unavoidably highlight my physical deficiencies, even though I was wearing my typical long-sleeved shirt. It was an even worse idea for a gay man determined to stay closeted, but somehow I’d forced myself to show up anyway. As I’d sat in the open door of the car and laced up my golf shoes, and then as I got my not-new golf clubs from the trunk, it had seemed that a finger from heaven was pointing down at me: Look, queer on the course! Going to meet another queer! A shade off-balance, I’d lifted my golf bag, staggered, and then righted myself, telling myself I had as much right to play the ancient game of the Scots as anyone else.
Matt and Jim wanted to bet after the second hole, and I couldn’t blame them, considering the way I’d just inelegantly double-bogeyed. “The two of you,” Jim said, his fingers flicking back and forth between Kevin and me, carefully avoiding pointing to my arm, “against us.” No man would pass up the challenge, pride wouldn’t allow it, and so of course Kevin and I said yes. Betting was common on the course, and I’d prepared myself by slipping an extra twenty into my wallet from my savings jar. They wanted to play a dollar a hole with an accumulated score.
“You mean stroke play?” I asked.
“Sure. We do it all the time.”
That was one of the more unusual ways to bet on the links that I knew of, but Kevin didn’t protest, so I didn’t either.
“You know we’re going to lose,” I said to him as I drove the cart down the third fairway, letting the other two go on ahead of us. Kevin hadn’t contested my desire to drive. I felt a lot more comfortable having something to do with my hands, something to hold on to.
He stuck his hand out from under the cart’s canopy so that his palm was bathed in sunlight. “Great exercise, great weather, great company. I don’t give a damn if we lose. It looks like you might be a good putter. You didn’t miss that last one by much.”
After only two holes, he’d noticed the best part of my game. Well, the only good part, considering I’d always have a parody of a swing. “You know how to get the ball into the air in your drive.”
“Put us together and we’d have a scratch player. We could go on the tour,” he said casually.
Putting us together was what this game we were playing was all about. I focused on my hands gripping the steering wheel and wondered what Kevin thought of them, if he remembered my fingers wrapping around his cock.
The next hole, Kevin was the only one of the four of us on the green in regulation. He stood over his thirty-foot putt and shook his head. “Tom?” he called.
I’d been not-looking at his ass, very carefully not. I was strung up tight as a senior convinced he was going to flunk his final exams. “Yes?”
“Come help me line this up, would you? Since we’re on the same side and all.”
Like hell he didn’t give a damn if we won or lost. I stood rooted to the ground while scenarios danced in my head, and I wondered whether I dared do it. But then I realized the sense of it. It would be normal, right? I glanced toward Matt and Jim, down at the neck of the fairway. “Okay with you two?”
Matt waved his hand at us, the picture of unconcern. “Sure, go ahead,” he called.
So I did it, tentatively, acting like the caddies did on the pro tour as I paced off the distance and noted the breaks in the surface, and then bending over right behind Kevin as he squatted to try to read the undulations in the green. If I’d wanted to, I could have said anything into his ear and not been overheard, like last night I thought about the way you fucked me or I don’t think I can do this or how come a man like you wants to date a man like me? Of course I didn’t, I didn’t even consider it, though it was strangely, subtly arousing to be leaning over him in public like this, knowing what the two of us were and what we wanted from each other, when no one else did.
And I was going to make sure nobody else knew, that was for sure. “It breaks about three feet to the right for the first twenty feet,” I said, “and then it should go left a foot.”
He turned his head and looked up at me from over his shoulder. “You’re kidding, right? You read the greens that precisely?”
I shrugged and remembered that I needed not to fall into him. I straightened. “My brother really is the scratch golfer the two of us together might be. He’s taught me a lot, only I never take the time to practice.”
I backed off and watched Kevin come within five inches of holing his ball. The rest of us double-bogeyed, so that was one stroke up for our side.
During the rest of the round I read the greens for both of us, though I started to carefully measure the distance between us and never got as close to Kevin as I had the first time. Twice I asked him to hold the flagstick for me, and he asked the same of me. We helped each other track our shots in flight, because in the glare of the Texas sun it was easy to lose a two-inch spinning ball against the bleached-out sky. After my ball went wildly right during my drive on the seventh hole, Kevin asked as we took the cart after it, “Do you mind if I give you a tip for when you have the driver in your hand?”
His suggestion—or suggestions, as he had plenty of them—would never be able to cure what ailed me, but he’d noticed a problem with my feet placement, so what he said did help. After that, at least I started hitting them straight again. Ninety minutes later, as we approached the sixteenth hole, we were only two down.
All four of us were on the green, with me being furthest out, at least fifty feet away. I lined up, stood over the putt, and hit the ball, then watched while it traveled up, down, over, and around, and finally into the cup.
“Fantastic!” Kevin exulted. He hauled ass crossing the green to get to me, his hand already raised in congratulations. I stepped back and then forced myself not to look toward the other two. I met his high five with one of my own. Our hands connected solidly, the slapping sound echoing across the grass, and the world did not end because we were touching, our fingers wrapping around one another for a few more seconds. The finger pointing from heaven must have curled in on itself.
As the four of us approached the seventeenth tee, Matt was obviously not happy that he and his brother were only one up on us. He stepped up to address his ball with determination oozing from every pore, a person could see it. He reared back with his Big Bertha club and then drove down with a grunt and all the might in his two-hundred-fifty pound frame. It worked. He hit a big league drive—straight to the right and out of bounds.
Immediately he pulled a second ball from his bag and bent to place it on the tee. “Mulligan,” he muttered.
Kevin and I looked at one another. Throughout the round we hadn’t mentioned mulligans—basically a do-over shot that amateurs often played with—and nobody had taken one before. But there was nothing that said he couldn’t take one.
Kevin shoved his hand in his pocket, looking like a photo from Gentlemen’s Quarterly. “Sure,” he said, but I noticed his eyes were narrowed.
Matt’s second drive split the fairway and went a country mile. He had an easy chip shot to the green and beamed when he drained a birdie, boosting him and Jim to two up. Basically, right there, the game was over.
Kevin and I shook hands with each of them right after the last ball fell into the eighteenth cup. They weren’t bad fellows. Determined, yes, and glad they’d won our little bet, especially when Kevin and I dug into our wallets and handed over the money. I could afford to be generous in my thoughts because this round was over, and I’d survived. Neither of the brothers, I was sure, had a clue they’d just spent four hours and forty-five minut
es in the company of two homosexual men.
“Assholes,” Kevin muttered as we hefted our bags and walked around the clubhouse to the parking lot. On the asphalt, our spiked shoes made a crunch-crunch sound.
I allowed myself an amused smile, my first of the day, but it was so much safer now, off the course. “I’m sure they’ve each got one.”
“I hate that kind of gamesmanship.”
“What? The mulligan?”
“No, the key rattling, mainly.”
“What?”
We got to his pickup and he put down his golf bag by the tailgate, and I did the same. He wiped sweat off his forehead, leaving glistening streaks of perspiration. September in Texas was hot. “Didn’t you hear that? When you were putting on the last three holes, Jim was rattling his keys in his pocket each time you were over the ball.”
That was considered the worst kind of gamesmanship by my brother Grant. “You’re kidding. No, I didn’t hear anything.”
Kevin seemed to check whether I was serious, and he must have decided I was because he gave a little laugh. “You really have powers of concentration, you know that? I should have guessed.”
He heaved his bag into the bed of the truck without much care and then said, “We did okay, didn’t we?”
I shook my head. “One hundred and eight for me, ninety-six for you. We didn’t exactly set the world on fire.”
“Lucky for us neither one of them knew how to chip the ball or we’d be hanging our heads in shame. But I didn’t mean okay on the golf game. You’re not outed yet, are you?”
I couldn’t help myself, I checked around to make sure nobody had heard him speaking in what seemed to be a football-arena-announcer voice.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have. Sorry.”
The Miata was a few spots down from his truck, under a Bradford pear tree with gorgeous, lush foliage. I clomped down there and clicked the tiny trunk open, where there was barely enough room for my Taylor Made irons and woods. Kevin followed me in silence, and then trailed around to the side when I sat down once again in the driver’s seat and began to take off my golf shoes.
“I’ll be more careful,” he said. “Okay?”
“All right.”
“I’m not used to this dating thing, either, you know,” he said as quietly as I could have asked him to speak. “I’ve only ever dated women before.”
I looked at him, blinking as sunlight escaped between leaves overhead to dazzle my eyes and obscure my view of him. I knew so little of him, really.
“Your wife?”
“And one beard or another. I needed them for the job after the divorce.”
That was disappointing to hear. At least I’d never done that to a woman, made her think she was in a real relationship. I’d retreated rather than do that, and I didn’t think I’d be very good at dissembling anyway. I pulled off my right shoe and picked up the Reeboks I’d left in the well of the front seat.
“I noticed you didn’t play any of the games those two did,” Kevin said.
“I guess not. It’s never seemed reasonable to count your strokes, except for the worst ones.” I finished tying the one sneaker and tackled the laces of the remaining golf shoe. “I noticed you didn’t call for a mulligan for yourself on the twelfth hole. You could have. How come you didn’t? It’s common enough.”
He tilted his head to the side and got this look on his face like he was a ten-year-old caught in the act of doing something nice for his little sister. “Ahhhhh…. Because you’re a good influence?”
“Right.”
The shoes were on, the game was completed, the afternoon was more than half over, and it was time for me to go home and do some work. I needed to plan as far out into the semester as I could, since so much of my time would be taken up with the after-hours work of the play.
Kevin stepped back, and I pulled the door closed, but then he motioned for me to roll the window down. I didn’t want to. That would look odd, wouldn’t it? I checked again for innocent or devious eavesdroppers, turned on the ignition, and pressed the button that brought down the glass separating us.
He leaned in toward the window, both his hands on his knees.
“Don’t,” I said.
He pulled back a little, but not nearly as much as I thought he should have. “Can I call you?”
“Sure.”
“In the best of all possible worlds, you know, this wouldn’t be the end of our day together.”
Silent, and tensed to cut him off if I saw the flicker of another person anywhere near us, I simply looked at him.
“In the best of all possible worlds, we’d…. ” His voice had turned low, sultry, sexy, and instant heat streaked through me. “We’d go have a beer with those guys.”
I ferociously grimaced at him and growled, “Now who’s the asshole?”
He backed up, chuckling and holding his palms up. “Hey, I was just saying. Doesn’t that sound good? A cold Bud. Wait a minute, you’re a Miller man, aren’t you?”
“Every day of the week.”
“Will you be wanting any help with the rehearsals this week? I could come out and lend a hand.”
I nodded. “Sure. We start on Tuesday this week, though the rest of the time it’ll be Monday through Thursday, beginning at three o’clock.”
“Okay, I’ll try to make it out a time or two this week, maybe combine the trip with some customer visits.”
He’d have to drive over from his bank to help, so I wasn’t going to count on it. Still, hearing that my lousy play on the golf course hadn’t turned him off was reassuring. “That’d be fine,” I said. “If you can do it. I’ve got to go.”
Kevin straightened and slapped his open hand on the side of the car as if to send me off, but then he was back down in my face one last time. “Do you like Australian?” he asked, his voice a whisper I could barely hear. “I’d like to do that to you someday.”
Shit! I gunned the engine and got out of there, not sure what to think about the man who’d said he’d be careful. He was pushing me too far with that. It was a relief to get away, but also a triumph that the day was finished. I’d done it.
That night, I fell into bed after the TV news, but sleep was off somewhere at the North Pole, not in my bedroom. Finally I gave in to my wildly twisting thoughts and got up without turning on the light to activate my laptop. The wireless connection took me to a GLBT website, where in thirty seconds I found out what Australian sex was. The words glowed in the dark as if imprinting themselves on my chest and belly, and then plunged, sizzling, directly to my cock.
I closed my eyes against my arousal, and swallowed. To be touched….
I didn’t get to sleep until past midnight, helpless before my imagination even after I’d jerked off: Kevin was licking his way very, very slowly, over and over again, down my spine.
“TODAY’S TEST has three essay questions about the nineteen-twenties. We’ve covered all of this in class, so pick two and do your best.”
My announcement in my first history class of the day was met with a chorus of boos and groans—crap, I forgot to study! and why can’t it be multiple choice? and I hate Tuesdays, he always gives tests on Tuesdays—but I was used to that. Those groans didn’t have the sharp edge of despair. Over the years I’d learned to tell the difference between those and this lingering discomfort, when the kids were being pushed by the hard-ass teacher to study and learn more than they wanted to. It was good for them to be stretched.
“No cell phones,” I said right before I gave out the test, and then I stood in front of the blackboard to watch them fidget, chew on the ends of their pens, and stare up at the clock. A few of them went right to work, though. When five minutes had ticked away, I sat down at my desk and looked at the requests for college recommendations that had already come my way. Those were always challenging, because I wanted to give the students the best chance they had to get into a good college, but I tried to be as truthful as possible too. It was
an odd source of pride for me that I always had more recommendations to fill out than I wanted to do. I thought the kids trusted me. I hoped so.
Going back to school after my weekend, making my way through the tunnel of students to my classroom, seeing them pour in for the first class of the day and then calling the roll: it had been like returning home. When I’d left the classroom on Friday, my life had been one way. Now it was turned on its head, and it seemed to me that I was a different person. But the school, and particularly my classroom, was still an oasis of sanity and security. I’d feared the back of my neck would prickle with self-conscious guilt and wondered if everybody would know. I truly did feel more than a little shell-shocked that I was willing to move out of my much-treasured, hard-fought-for safety zone. But as far as I’d been able to tell over the past two days, nobody had noticed any difference. I was plain Mr. Smith. Anyway, to the kids I existed only in the school. It wasn’t hard to remember when I’d been a teenager and been astonished to run across one of my teachers at the community pool or at the grocery store.
In the teacher’s lounge during my free period, George reminded me that Danielle Robertson was coming in to start work on the scenery that afternoon. Over my roast beef sandwich I considered, chewed, swallowed, and then, in as commonplace a tone as I could muster, I reminded him in turn that Kevin might show up too. It seemed a good idea to link his presence with Danielle’s. They were equally non-threatening, weren’t they?
I stayed in my classroom for half an hour after the last bell released the students for the day, as I often did, to give the students the chance to talk to me in private. Over the years I’d counseled them on all sorts of academic problems, talked sternly to a few on the verge of flunking out, and tutored some who wanted extra help. And like most other teachers who tried to make themselves accessible, there’d been a time or two that had broken my heart, when kids had come to me with troubles that weren’t easily fixed. My classroom had seen confessions of anger and despair, but not that day. I spent the thirty minutes grading the tests and then packed up and headed for the auditorium in the arts wing of the school.
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