Rabbit at rest (10 page)

The hours pile on, noon comes and goes, the klieg lights begin
to dim but the heat is turned up higher. They finish at quarter to
three, Harry and Bernie twenty dollars down-both sides of a
fivedollar nassau plus the eighteen and a press on the second nine
that they lost. "We'll get 'em next time," Harry promises his
partner, not really believing it.

"You weren't quite yourself today, my friend," Bernie admits.
"You got girlftiend trouble or something?"

Horny, Jews are: he once read a history of Hollywood about their
womanizing. Harry Cohn, Groucho Marx, the Warner Brothers, they
went crazy out there with the sunshine and swimming pools and all
the Midwestern shiksas who'd do anything to be movie stars -
participate in orgies, blow a mogul while he was talking on the
telephone - yet his golf partners are all married to the same
women, forty, fifty years, women with big dyed hair and thick
bangles and fat brown upper arms who can't stop talking when you
see them all dolled up at dinner, Bernie and Ed and Joe
-sitting smilingly silent beside them as if all this talking
their women do is sex, which it must be - pep, life. How do
they do it? Wear life like a ready-made suit that fits
exactly. "I guess I told you," Harry tells Bernie, "my son and his
family are visiting."

"There's your problem, Angstrom: you felt guilty horsing around
with us. You should have been entertaining your loved ones."

"Yeah, entertain 'em. They just got here yesterday and are
acting bored already. They want us to live next door to Disney
World."

"Take 'em to jungle Gardens. Up in Sarasota, down 41 from the
Ringling Museum. Fern and I go there two, three times a winter and
never get bored. I could watch those flamingos sleep for hours
- how do they do it? Balanced on one leg two feet long and
thinner than my finger." He holds up a finger and it seems thick.
"Thinner than that," he swears.

"I don't know, Bernie. When I'm around, my kid acts like he
doesn't want my own grandchildren to have anything much to do with
me. The little boy, he's four, is pretty much a stranger, but the
girl and I could get along. She's almost nine. I was even thinking
I should bring her out in a cart sometime and let her try to hit
the ball. Or maybe rent a Sunfish, Ed, if your son over at the
Bayview could write me up as a guest."

The foursome is having beers and free munchies in Club Nineteen,
next to the pro shop, on the bottom floor of Building A of Valhalla
Village. The darkness inside - the dark panels and beams in
the style of an English pub - is intensified by the
subtropical brightness outside, at the round white tables under
umbrellas saying Coors. You can hear the splashing from the pool,
between Buildings A and B, and the throbbing of a generator housed
on the other side of the wall, beyond the rest rooms and dart
boards and video games. At night sometimes Harry imagines he can
hear the generator throbbing through all the intervening
apartments, carpets, air-conditioners, conversations,
mattresses, and peach-colored hall wallpaper. Somehow the
noise curves around and clings to the walls and comes in his big
sliding window, the crack that's left open to the Gulf air.

"No problem," Ed says, as he totals their scores. "Just show up
at the front desk and ask for Gregg Silvers. That's what he calls
himself, don't ask me why. They'll let you walk through the lobby
and downstairs to the changing rooms. I don't advise wearing
bathing suits into the lobby; they try to discourage that. Do you
have a day I can tell him to expect you?"

Harry gets the impression this may be a realer favor than he
thought, a bigger deal than it's worth. "Friday, if ever," he
says.

"Does Gregg have to know for sure? Tomorrow I thought we'd head
up Sarasota way."

"Jungle Gardens," Bernie insists.

"Lionel Train Museum," Joe Gold contributes. "And right across
from the Ringling Museum there's Bellm's Cars and Music of
Yesterday, is I think what they call it. Over a thousand music
machines, can you imagine? Antique cars from 1897, I never knew
there were cars then. You're in the car business, aren't you,
Angstrom? You and your boy. You'll both go ape in there."

"I don't know," Harry begins, groping to express the curious
cloud that Nelson carries with him, that dampens any outing.

"Harry, this is interesting," Ed says. "Giving you a seven, two
over par for handicap purposes, on the eleventh where you picked
up, and a courtesy six on the sixteenth where you put two balls in
the water, you scored an even ninety even so. You weren't playing
as bad as it looked. Waste a few less drives and long irons, and
you'll be in the eighties every time."

"I couldn't get my ass into it, I couldn't
release,"
Harry
says. "I couldn't let go." He has an unaskable question
for these three wise Jewish men: how about death? He asks them,
"Hey, how about that Pan Am jet?"

There is a pause. "It has to be a bomb," Ed says. "When you've
got splinters of steel driven right through leather luggage and
wreckage strewn across fifty miles of Scotland, it has to be a
bomb."

Bernie sighs, "It's them again. The Shiiteheads."

"Arabs," Joe Gold says. A patriotic glee lights his wobbling
eyes. "Once we got proof, the F-111s'll be flying into Libya
again. What we ought to do is keep going right into Eye-ran
and stick it to the old Ayatollah."

But their tongues are less quick than usual; Harry has made them
uneasy, with what he hadn't meant to be so much a political
question. With Jews, everything in the papers comes back to
Israel.

"I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting
there and having the plane explode?"

"Well, I bet it wakes you up," Ed says.

"They didn't feel a thing," Bernie says, considerately, sensing
Harry's personal worry. "Zero. It was over that quick."

Joe says to Harry, "You know what the Israelis say, don't you,
Angstrom? `If we got to have enemies, thank God they're Arabs.'
"

Harry has heard this before but tries to laugh. Bernie says, "I
think Angstrom could use a new partner. I depress him."

"It wasn't you, Bernie. I came depressed."

Club Nineteen puts out a wonderful array of nibbles, in little
china bowls monogrammed with Valhalla Village's logo, two seablue
intertwined V's. Not just dry-roasted peanuts and almonds and
hazelnuts but tiny pretzel sticks and salted pumpkin seeds and
tight curls resembling Corn Chips, only finer and sharper in the
mouth in that blissful instant while the tongue works one around to
be crunched between the molars. The other men take only a pinch of
this starchy salty salad now and then but soon the bowl is empty,
Rabbit doing eighty per cent of the eating.

"That crap's loaded with sodium," Bernie warns him.

"Yeah, but it's good for the soul," Harry says, about as
religious a remark as he dares put forth. "Who else is ready for
another beer?" he asks. "Losers buy this round."

He is beginning to feel expansive: his dark mood is thinning
like a squirt of ink in alcohol's gentle solvent. He waves for the
waiter and asks him to bring along with four more beers another
bowl of munchies. The waiter, a faunlike young Hispanic with an
earring bigger than Nelson's and gold chains on both wrists, nods
in a timid way; Harry must seem enormous to him, menacingly white
and pink and sodden with sodium-retained water. The whole
quartet must seem loud and potentially unruly: ugly old gringos.
Another squirt of ink. Harry feels heavy again. Good times in
Florida are never as good as those boozy late afternoons at his old
club back in Diamond County, the Flying Eagle, before Buddy
Inglefinger married that lanky crazy hippie Valerie and moved to
Royersford and Thelma Harrison got too sick with lupus ever to show
up and they dropped their membership and Cindy Murkett got fat and
Webb divorced her so you never saw anybody any more. In Florida the
people are so cautious, as if on two beers they might fall down and
break a hip. The whole state is brittle.

"Your boy play golf?" Joe is asking him.

"Not really. He's never had the temperament. Or the time, he
says." And, Rabbit might have added, he never really invited
him.

"What does he do, for fun?" Ed asks. These men, it dawns on
Harry, are being polite. By ordering another round of beers he has
stretched the nineteenth-hole camaraderie beyond where it's
effortless. These guys' sexy elderly wives are waiting. Gossip to
catch up on. Letters from dutiful, prospering children to read.
Interest to add up. Torah to study.

"Beats me," Harry says. "Hangs around with a bunch of Brewer
creeps, swinging singles sort of. I never see him having much fun.
He never went in for sports."

"The way you talk about him," Bernie said, "he could be the
father and you the son."

Rabbit agrees enthusiastically; with a boost from the second
beer he almost has a vision. "Yeah, and a delinquent son at that.
That's how he sees me, an old juvenile delinquent. His wife looks
miserable." Where did that come from? Was it true?
Help me,
guys. Tell me how you've got on top of sex and death so they don't
bother you.
He goes on, "The whole family, the two kids too,
seem on edge. I don't know what's up."

"Your wife, does she know what's up?"

That mutt. Harry ignores the question. "Just last night I tried
to talk to the kid in a friendly fashion and all he did was bitch
about Toyotas. The company that feeds us, that saved him and his
old man and his shady little crook of a grandfather from being
bums, and all he does is complain about how Toyotas aren't
Lamborghinis! Jesus, that beer went down fast. It felt like the
Gobi Desert out there."

"Harry, you don't want another beer."

"You want to get home and tell your family about Bellm's. B, E,
L, L, M, apostrophe, S. I know it sounds like I can't spell. Every
old car you could imagine. From before steering wheels. Before
gears, even."

"To be honest, guys, I've never been that much into cars. I
drive 'em, I sell 'em, but I've never really understood the damn
things. To me they're all alike. Great if they go, lousy if they
don't." The other men are standing up.

"I want to see you out here tomorrow afternoon with your little
granddaughter. Teach her the basics. Head down, slow takeaway.

That was Bernie talking; Ed Silberstein tells him:

"Work on shortening that backswing, Harry. You don't need all
that above the shoulders. The hit is right in here, right by your
pecker. Best advice I ever had from a golf pro was, Imagine you're
hitting it with your pecker."

They have sensed his silent cry for help, for consolation, and
are becoming more Jewish on Harry's behalf, it seems to him as he
sits there.

Bernie has pushed up from the table and towers over Harry with
his gray skin, his loose dewlaps full of shadows. "We have an
expression," he says downward. "Tsuris. Sounds to me, my friend,
like you got some tsuris. Not full-grown yet, not
gehoketh
tsuris, but tsuris."

Pleasantly dazed with alcohol, his chest distantly stinging, the
tip of his nose beginning to feel sunburn, Harry has no inclination
to move, though the world around him is in motion. Two young
college-kid hotshots who were pressing them from behind all
afternoon have finished and are making the video games over by the
rest rooms warble, zing, whistle, and bleat. Animated automatons in
many colors appear and disappear on the screen. He sees his white
fingers, with the big moons on their fingernails, absentmindedly
dabble at the bottom of the bowl of munchies, as if he is trying to
pick up the intertwined V's. The junk food has been consumed. He
cannot be absolutely sure, in memory, if the waiter ever brought a
new bowl.