“Hey, don’t let Norm get to you.”
He waves away my remark and turns to face me, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “You know what Norm and I have that you don’t have?” he says. “Nothing. And like the song goes, when you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. No job, no girlfriend, no circle of friends. We’re both alone, and so maybe what you consider fearlessness is actually just an expert level of loneliness.”
“You’re alone by choice,” I say.
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“And maybe I actually do need to lose something.”
He looks at me and grins, nodding his head. “The grass is always greener.”
We begin making our way down the next fairway, which descends away from us in a set of graduated slopes, and in the distance we can make out another group of golfers congregating on the green.
“You see him down there?” Jed says.
I cup my hand over my eyes to block out the sun and peer at the figures on the green below. They’re four men, but at this distance, it’s impossible to make out any details. “I don’t know. Could be.”
We’re about to continue down the hill when we hear the rumble of an engine, and a gas-powered golf cart with a flashing yellow light emerges from behind the tree line to the rear of the green, heading up the hill in our direction. From our vantage point, we can make out the two men in their gray-and-blue uniforms, the driver watching us intently as his partner talks into the radio clipped to his shoulder.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
“That was quick,” Jed says.
“Should we run for it?”
Jed shakes his head. “Never make it. They’re only rent-a-cops. Maybe we can bribe them.”
The cart arrives and parks a few feet in front of us. The guards step out and approach us cautiously, game faces on, hands resting threateningly on the billy clubs dangling from their belts. The driver is tall and fair, with a lean, athletic build, while his partner is rotund, with a frowning, dimpled baby face. “Are you gentlemen members of the club?” asks the driver.
“Not exactly,” I say.
“You’re trespassing on private property,” Baby-Face says. “How’d you get in here?”
“You fellows want to make some money?” Jed says, pulling out his wallet.
“Excuse me?”
Jed counts the bills in his wallet. “It’ll be the easiest three hundred and sixty-three bucks you ever made.”
The driver takes an angry step in Jed’s direction. “I know you didn’t just offer me a bribe.”
“We need to find someone,” Jed says, ignoring him and proffering the cash to Baby-Face. “He’s golfing here now.”
Below us on the green, the four golfers are still putting away, oblivious to the action developing up the hill. Even if it is Dr. Sanderson down there, the idea of approaching him under these conditions now seems iffy, at best.
Baby-Face eyes the cash and looks at his partner uncertainly, but the larger man’s scowl ends the discussion before it can start. The driver pulls his radio off his shoulder and points it at Jed like a weapon. “These are your choices,” he says. “You can get in the cart and be peacefully escorted off the premises, or you can resist, in which case we will radio the police and then forcibly restrain you until they come.”
“Why don’t we all just relax for a second,” Jed says, holding out his hands in a placating manner. “Take it down a notch.”
“Choice two, then,” says the driver, reaching for the handcuffs on his belt.
“Holy shit!” says Baby-Face, staring up the hill behind us, causing us all to turn around. And here comes Norm, tearing red-faced down the hill toward us in his undershirt, eyes crazed, hands flailing, with two security guards running behind him. One of the guards is clutching Norm’s red sweatshirt, which flaps in the wind behind him like a cavalry flag.
“Let’s get him,” the driver says, and the two guards step into Norm’s path, bracing themselves to grab him. This is probably the perfect time for Jed and me to make a run for it, but the sight of Norm racing down the hill at high speed is mesmerizing, like a rare natural phenomenon, and we stand there transfixed as he collides with the guards like a charging bull, and the three of them go down, sliding a good fifteen feet in the wet grass before friction finally stops them just a few feet from us.
“Now, that is something you don’t see every day,” Jed says.
Norm is the first to his feet, looking like a swamp creature, his arms and shoulders caked with mud and wet mown grass. “Run for it!” he shouts hysterically before taking off down the hill again with all four guards in hot pursuit. “Holy shit!” I say as Jed and I belatedly run down the hill after them.
He almost makes it to the green. The four golfers on the green stand frozen in place, staring upward at the approaching melee with mouths agape, forgotten clubs limp against their legs. The guards catch up as Norm hits level ground, and it takes three of them to bring him down. As before, they slide appreciably in the wet grass, a rolling tumbleweed of arms and legs. As Jed and I come flying down the hill, I can see the billy clubs come out, pointed briefly skyward before coming down on Norm’s prone, wriggling form, so there’s nothing to do but launch ourselves head-on into the fray, sliding across the green with the guards, trying our best to grab at their swinging arms, slimy with grass, to divert their blows. A slippery scuffle ensues, mostly a lot of grappling on the ground, since the slick grass makes standing up a great disadvantage. At some point, dialogue is reinstated as the guards shout at us to stop resisting while we scream at them about brutality and lawsuits. Jed and I are each faced off with one guard, while two of them are standing on either side of Norm, who is on one knee between them, his breath labored, his face flushed and splattered with mud. Something seems wrong with his posture, his head lolling uncharacteristically on his shoulders, eyelids fluttering spasmodically. “Norm!” I shout to him, tearing away from my guard. “Are you okay?”
The guard makes a grab for me but then, seeing Norm, releases me. The guards back away from him, allowing me access. “Norm!” I call to him again. “Dad!”
He looks up at me, and his expression momentarily clarifies as our eyes meet. “It’s okay,” he gasps, his voice nothing more than a rasp of empty wind. “I just need to catch my breath.” Then he grins at me, his eyes rolling up into his head, and says, “Fucking Nazis,” before collapsing onto the grass.
Chapter 29
They take Norm to the infirmary, where Jed and I watch as the skinny black nurse helps him pull off his undershirt so that she can apply her stethoscope. There’s a long, raised scar down the center of his heaving chest, pink and cylindrical, ending just below his sternum. “You’ve had open-heart surgery,” the nurse says.
“Eight years ago,” Norm says, still concentrating on his measured breathing, which he’s been doing ever since he regained consciousness as we were loading him into the golf cart. His belly is scraped up and grass stained from his fall, his skin crusted with grass and muck.
“What medications are you on?” she asks him.
“Lipitor and Toprol,” he answers.
“No nitroglycerin tablets?”
“I don’t get chest pains.”
“You’re not having any chest pains now?” she asks skeptically.
“I’m just a little winded,” Norm says.
“They said you were running pretty fast,” the nurse says, pointedly eyeing his naked paunch. “You don’t look like someone accustomed to running.”
“That’s true.”
“Maybe not such a good idea for someone with your medical history.”
“You’re making me miss my mother,” Norm says with a weak grin. The nurse isn’t amused.
“I think I should call you an ambulance.”
“I’d rather you just called my doctor. His name is Larry Sanderson, and he’s a member here. He’s actually somewhere on the golf course.”
“He’s here today?”
&
nbsp; “That’s right.”
The nurse quickly excuses herself, and as soon as she steps out of the room, Norm’s face brightens and he smiles at us. “You see,” he says. “There’s a method to my madness.”
“I don’t believe it!” Jed says, shaking his head and laughing. “You faked the whole thing?”
“Always have a backup plan,” Norm says.
I’m not amused. “That’s not a fake scar on your chest,” I said.
“No,” he says, looking down at it. “That’s the genuine article.”
“What happened?”
“I had a heart attack. Passed out during a business lunch. Ended up having triple bypass surgery.” He pulls himself off the table and pulls on his sweatshirt.
“You had open-heart surgery and you never thought of calling me,” I say. “Didn’t you think maybe you need your family around at a time like that?”
Norm looks at me, his expression grave. “I was dying to call you. I was terrified of dying, of never having the chance to make things right with my family again. Believe me, it’s all I thought about.”
“So why didn’t you call?”
He looks at the floor, frowning and shaking his head. “I had no right,” he says, his words thick and weighted with untold anguish. “Let me tell you, there’s nothing in the world that compares to waking up in post-op with no one waiting to see that you’ve made it. You feel like you don’t matter, like you don’t even exist. I could have died that day, and no one would have missed me. The doctors were all congratulating me, and I was just wishing I’d died on the table.” He clears his throat, wiping at a possible tear with the back of his mud-stained hand. “The worst day of my life was the day I came through that surgery,” he says. “And that’s coming from someone with more than a few bad days to choose from.”
“You should have called me,” I say.
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”
“You’re an asshole, Norm.”
He looks up at me. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Our conversation is interrupted as the door swings open and the nurse returns, leading Dr. Sanderson into the room. His presence here, after the day’s misadventures, is so shockingly surreal, so out of context, that I’m rendered speechless. He looks the same, maybe a little wider in hip and thigh without the benefit of his doctor’s coat. He’s dressed like the other golfers, in a white club sweatshirt and brown chinos, and his expression is singularly perturbed as he takes in our mud-soiled clothing and splattered faces. “I’m sorry,” he addresses Norm curtly. “Do I know you?”
“You know my son,” Norm says, pointing to me.
“Hi,” I say stupidly. “I’m Zachary King. I’m a patient of yours.”
“I remember you,” he says, the creases in his brow deepening as he struggles to assemble the facts in an order that will make sense. “What the hell is going on here?”
“I was supposed to get my biopsy results today,” I say. “But you weren’t there, and no one else could tell me.”
His eyes widen as realization sets in. “Wait a minute. You came here to see me?”
I nod. “I just need to know.”
The purple vein in Sanderson’s temple throbs, and his jaw muscle flexes mechanically in his cheek as he stares at me. “This is absolutely unheard-of,” he says angrily. “It’s unacceptable.”
He turns abruptly on his heel, but Jed has anticipated him and steps forward to block the door. “Listen,” he says. “Mistakes happen. I’m sure you would never consciously leave someone to sweat out biopsy results for an extra three days if he didn’t have to. I know you’re upset, but there are larger issues here, don’t you think?” He pulls his cell phone off his belt and extends it to the doctor. “Make the call, okay?”
Sanderson stares at Jed for a second, and then pulls out his own cell phone, walking into a corner of the room to speak in privacy. My heart pounds out a patter of distressed Morse code against my chest and the air becomes oppressively thick, like I’m inhaling syrup, as I wait for the doctor to get off the phone. I try to form an instant prayer, a single coherent message with impact, but when I think of God, I picture this book about creation and the Garden of Eden I had when I was a kid, where Adam had dark eyes and reddish hair and Eve was a brunette with cherry-red lips and these wide blue eyes that looked so naÏve that even as a kid, you wanted to just shake her and tell her that any fool could see the serpent was up to no good. God was presented as a ray of tapered light beams emerging from the clouds like a special effect, but the kid I was didn’t get that. Instead, I associated the picture of Adam with God, and at this very moment I realize that the image of God I’ve been carrying around since childhood is actually the crudely rendered drawing of Adam, complete with his fig leaf briefs, and that’s who I’ve been praying to on those rare occasions that it’s occurred to me to pray, and the implications of this case of mistaken identity are briefly staggering from a theological point of view.
Sanderson flips his phone shut and comes over to face me, his expression utterly inscrutable. He will speak in the next moment, but this one seems to be frozen, we can’t get out of it, and I can see the dark pores in his nose as if I’m looking through a magnifying glass, the round follicles of his beard, the scattered razor nicks around his Adam’s apple. There’s time to follow each individual wrinkle in his skin and to discern the cracks just forming beneath the surface, the tentacles of a burst capillary in his left eye.
“Your biopsy was negative.”
Norm throws his arms around the doctor in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet, while Jed lets out a strangled whoop and pounds my back. Inside me, doors open and close, armies advance and retreat, and as relief floods the streets, my vital organs vibrate, morphing and reorganizing, adapting to the new reality. “What a team!” Norm says exuberantly, leaving the doctor’s reluctant embrace and throwing his arms around Jed and me. “Are we good or what?”
“We came, we saw, we got our asses kicked!” Jed says, laughing along with Norm.
Sanderson nods at me. “It’s most likely just some aggregate blood vessels,” he tells me. “If the hematuria continues, we can remove them, but it will probably just resolve itself.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome,” he says. “Now, why don’t you guys go home and get cleaned up.” He offers up a small smile as he leaves, proving that even uptight pricks like him aren’t immune to the pleasures of bearing good news.
The nurse procures three club sweatshirts and orders us to exchange them for our wet shirts, an act of hospitality that seems incongruous until an officer of the club steps into the room with three liability waivers for us to sign. Norm makes a show of scrupulous perusal that causes the officer to shuffle his feet nervously, but ultimately we sign the waivers and leave the club, this time through the front door.
“You see?” Jed says, throwing his arm around my neck as we walk back to the car. “No cops, no cancer. It’s all good.”
I smile and nod, all the while wondering why it doesn’t feel that way at all.
Chapter 30
“I don’t get it,” Jed says to me. “You just found out you don’t have cancer. So why do you seem less than thrilled?”
We’re having a late celebratory lunch at Cafe Luxembourg. Norm, exhausted from the day’s prior excitement, asked to be dropped off at the brownstone for a shower and a nap, instructing us to bring home a doggy bag.
“Of course I’m thrilled,” I say.
“You look thrilled,” Jed says sarcastically. “You haven’t even called Hope to tell her the good news.”
“Hope isn’t aware that there’s a need for good news.”
His arched eyebrows are two question marks. “You never told Hope about the biopsy?”
“Nope.”
Jed doodles shapes into his ketchup with the blackened tip of a burned french fry. “So,” he says, “what’s up with you and Tamara?”
“Nothing,”
I say automatically, but Jed’s uncompromising stare forces me down a new path. “Except I think I’m in love with her.”
He sits back in his chair, staring down at his plate. “Are you fucking her?”
“Jesus, Jed!” I say. “It’s not like that.”
“What is it like, then?”
I sigh, leaning back in my chair. “It’s like a big, fucking mess,” I say. “I love Hope, and I know she loves me. But I could have been anyone, really. She had this checklist of requirements and I filled some and she figures I can be molded to fit the rest. We got along, we were attracted to each other, so we decided to fall in love. It’s different with Tamara. We understand each other without having to explain. It’s not something we decided on; it was already there all by itself, waiting for us. It’s like this pure love, and it feels the way I always thought it was supposed to until I decided I was being unrealistic and gave up on it.” I pause to catch my breath. “Turns out, maybe I gave up a little too soon.”
“And it probably doesn’t hurt that she’s a little hottie,” Jed says with a frown.
“I’m not going to pretend there isn’t a strong physical attraction.”
“Fuck, Zack. This is Rael’s wife you’re talking about!”
“No,” I say. “It’s Rael’s widow.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he says, getting angrily to his feet. “She’s grieving and lonely and you’re her white knight, riding in to rescue her. That’s not love; it’s a fucking Band-Aid. Hope can’t compete with that, because she only loves you; she doesn’t need you. Tamara’s hurting and scared, and instead of being a friend, you’re taking advantage of it because it makes you feel like a hero.”
“Rael’s been dead for almost two years!” I say, standing up to face him. “You don’t need to keep reminding me, because I was there. I watched him die. And it’s killing you that Tamara and I are moving on with our lives, because for whatever reason, you can’t seem to do it. You’re still hiding behind your grief, only it isn’t even that anymore. It’s like some sick, narcissistic tribute to your grief. Rael’s dead. Get over it, and while you’re at it, get over yourself.”
Jonathan Tropper Page 20