She believes me. “Then why do you feel bad?”
I explain my symptoms in terms of my discovery: that when one records the thalamic radiation, a good index of one’s emotional state, it can register either as a soaring up, a sine curve, or a dipping down, a cosine curve. “Mine registers both at the same time, sine and cosine, mountain on a valley.”
She laughs, thinking I am joking.
“Why should that be?”
Since I am in love, I can feel with her, feel my sacrum tingle when hers hits the wall.
“Well, I’ve won, you see. Won the big one. But it’s Christmas Eve and I’m alone. My family is dead. There’s nobody to tell.”
“Tell me:”
“Do you know what I planned to do tonight?”
“No.”
“Go home and watch Perry Como’s Christmas show on stereo-V.” Perry Como is seventy and still going strong.
Lola nods sympathetically, ducks her head, drinks, and hisses a tune in her teeth. I bend to listen. It is the Dvořák cello concerto.
Trays pass. I begin to drink Ramos gin fizzes with one swallow. At one time I was allergic to egg white but that was long ago. These drinks feel silky and benign. The waiters too are dressed as Santa. They grin sideways from their skewed Santa hoods and shout “Christmas gif!” I give them money, a dollar, ten dollars, whatever.
“Listen to this,” I tell Lola and hum the Don Quixote theme in her ear.
“Very good. You have absolute pitch. And you look better! Your face is fuller.”
I feel my face. It is fuller.
“I feel fine. I am never happier than when I am in love.”
“Are you in love?”
“Yes.”
“Who with?”
“You.”
“Ah huh,” says Lola, nodding, but I can’t tell whether the nodding is just to get her sacrum off the wall.
“Christmas gif!”
Another black Santa passes and I take three gin fizzes. The tingling sacrum should have been a warning, but love made me happy, love and the sight of tiny jewels strung along the glittering web of saliva. Her membranes are clear as light, the body fluids like jeweler’s oil under a watch crystal. A lovely inorganic girl.
Her company stabilizes me. Abstracted still, my orbit becomes lower. Bending close to her, close to the upper reaches of her breast, is like skimming in silence, power off, over the snowy slopes of Kilimanjaro. I close my eyes.
“When I close my eyes, I can see you teaching cello in the Texas A & M cello class, a drafty gym-like room, the cello between your knees. It is during a break and you’re wearing a sweatshirt and resting your arm on the cello.”
“Ah huh.” She nods. “It gets cold in there.” She believes everything I say, knowing it is true.
Handing Lola her gin fizz, I touch her. A hive, a tiny red wheal, leaps out at the point of touch, as if to keep touch. The touch of her is, as they say, a thrill.
“Why did you bring your physician’s bag here?” Lola asks me.
“I haven’t been home yet. The first working model of my lapsometer is inside, can’t afford to lose it.”
“Can you really measure a person’s innermost self?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Can you measure mine?”
“Sure.”
“Do it.”
“Where? Right here?”
“Yes.”
“Well — over here.” Taking her by the hand, I lead her through the bridge women to the pro shop. We stand behind Gene Sarazen while I take a few snapshots of her with my Brownie.
She registers zero anxiety — music saves her! she goes dreaming through the world as safe and sure as Schubert’s trout — but her interpersonal wave is notable in two respects: it is both powerful and truncated, lopped off at the peak like Popocatepetl.
“Well?”
“You see?” I show her the snail tracks on jade, a faint cratered Fuji in a green dawn.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you have a heart full of love and no one to give it to, but that is not so bad because you have your music, which means a great deal to you.”
“Yes. I don’t. It does. Yes!”
Now it is she who does the hemming up and I who am backed up against the cypress, sacrum fiery and quilted. My head is turning against the wormholes. Hairs catch and pop.
“Why is that?” she asks, brown eyes level with mine.
“Why is what?”
“Why is there — no one?”
“Well you’re a bit much, you know. You scare most men. Also, your music is hard to compete with. You always hear singing.” I show her the lilting curve of her aesthetic radiation.
“Yes! I understand! It is true! Can love be like that?”
She takes my hand urgently, her cello calluses whispering in my palm.
“Yes, it can, if the love is like that, singing.”
“Do you love me like that?”
“Yes.”
“How do I know?”
I kiss her hand. My lip leaps out to keep touch, ridges with a wheal.
She feels it. “Good heavens!”
We are laughing and touching.
“Christmas gif!”
A waiter comes up. We take four gin fizzes. Under the monk-like Santa hood, I recognize a Negro named Willard Amadie. Long ago he used to be a caddy, before the electric surreys came along. A very strong short black man, he would stand down the fairway for the drive and with the heavy bag still on his shoulder take a full swing at the clover with an iron. It is a surprise to see him. Years ago he went off to the Ecuadorian wars and became, I heard, a career soldier. Somber even as a youth, he’d stand waiting at the lie, club selected and proffered handle first, face bitter-black, bee-stung, welted laterally like an Indian’s.
Now he’s dressed like Santa and grinning a ghastly grin.
“Christmas gif, Doc!”
I look at him.
“What’s wrong, Willard?”
“Nothing, Doc! Christmas gif to you and missee.”
“Missee?” The outer corners of my eyes are filling up with hives, forming a prism. Willard and Lola are edged in rainbows. “What in hell are you talking about?”
Willard doesn’t leave but stands watching. His sclerae are yellow as egg yolk. At last I give Willard ten dollars, blushing, as I do so, with rage or shame, I’m not sure which.
“Thankee, Doc!” says Willard in the same goofy Gullah accent. “May you and missee have many a more!”
I refuse to look at Willard, watching instead sections of a road map, pieces of highway, dots of towns, drifting across my retina.
But Lola is pleased. She sees Willard’s courtliness (what is wrong with him?) as a sanction. Christmas is sanctioned. Our love is sanctioned. Willard’s nutty good manners (something is up, I know that, like the vines sprouting, but what?) are part of the singing, life made to lilt.
“Let’s go outside,” I say, to go outside but mainly to get away from Willard, and take her again by the hand, her left hand, her fingering hand, calluses whispering in my palm.
Out into the gloaming we go.
It was a warm Christmas Eve. A south wind blows fat little calypso clouds over a new moon.
We kiss in the grassy bunker. She kisses oddly, stooping to it, developing a torque and twisting down and away, seeming to grow shorter. Her breath catches. What she puts me in mind of is not a Texas girl at all but a smart Northern girl, a prodigy who has always played the cello ten hours a day, then one day finds herself at a summer festival and twenty-one and decides it is time to be kissed. So she stoops to it with an odd, shy yet practiced movement, what I fancy to be the Juilliard summer-festival style of kissing.