"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.
Joe Gold, his hair a sandy mane, his magnified eyes surging back and forth within his squarish spectacles, bends down a bit, as if rooting his feet again in a trap, and says, "Here's a Jewish joke for you. Abe meets Izzy after a long time no see. He asks, `How many children do you have?' Izzy says, `None.' Abe says, `None! So what do you do for aggravation?"'
Their laughter seems speeded-up, like the action in a beer commercial; their mockery in its unnatural unison holds a premonition for Harry, that he has wasted the day, that now he must hurry, hurry to catch up, like when he used. to run late to school with a watery flutter in his stomach. The three other men, returning to their solid domestic arrangements, in farewell cuff at him, even pinch the nape of his neck, as if to rouse him from a spiritual torpor. In Florida, he thinks, even friendship has a thin, provisional quality, since people might at any minute buy another condominium and move to it, or else up and die.
You leave the clubs with the pro shop, and the shoes. Rabbit -walks in his moccasins, worn so loose his feet move in them without seeming to rub leather, across the parking lot and a striped piece of driveway and one of the complex's little traffic islands covered in green outdoor carpeting to the entryway of Building B. He uses his key and punches in the code on the panel in the narrow space where two closed-circuit television cameras are watching him, pulls the door – it doesn't buzz, it goes ding ding ding like a fire truck backing up – and takes the elevator to the fourth floor. In 413, his home away from home, Janice and Pru and the kids are playing Hearts, that is three of them are and Roy is holding a fistful of cards while his mother tells him what to do and which to discard. His face has a puffy look as though it's been an afternoon of frustrations and disappointments. They all greet Harry as if he's going to rescue them from death by boredom, but he feels so beat all he wants to do is lie down and let his body soak in nothingness. He asks, "Where's Nelson?"
It's not the right question, at least in front of the kids. Janice and Pru glance toward one another and then Pru volunteers, "He's out doing a few errands in the car." Down here they only have one car, the Camry, leaving Harry's Celica back in Penn Park. It works out, since most everything they need -drugs, magazines, haircuts, bathing suits, tennis balls – they can find within the Valhalla complex. The little food commissary in Building C charges airport prices, so Janice usually does a big shopping once a week at the Winn Dixie a half-mile down Pindo Palm Boulevard. About once a week also they visit their bank in downtown Deleon, on a plaza two blocks back from the beachfront where elevator music is always playing, both inside the bank and outside; they must have speakers hidden in the trees. Maybe twice a month they go to a movie at a cineplex in a giant mall over on Palmetto Palm Boulevard two miles away. But days at a stretch go by when the car just sits there in its parking slot, attracting rust and white splotches of birdshit.