Bringing back milk and orange juice from the so-called convenience store-their convenience more than ours, I think-I was startled as I exited (now that warm weather is here, one has to step over baby strollers parked just outside the door and dodge ungainly boys sucking on candy bars and soda cans while squatting wearily on skateboards) by a long-legged woman in shorts, her hair grayed in quietly dashing stripes, a smile springing into her face like an advertisement for faithful flossing. Did we know each other? I thought not, but we well might have. Her lean, purposefully conditioned body and crisp tan Bermuda shorts, her canary-yellow polo shirt and discreet pearl earrings bespoke the clean and breezy class I had aspired to. We might have met in hallways muffled by plush carpet, at a fast-moving get-together in a Boston apartment before Friday-night Symphony, or beside the striped straightaway at a girls’ day-school track meet, she young enough to be my mistress but old enough to have discarded a couple of husbands, each of whom had left her more comfortably off than she had been before. Or perhaps she had proved true to her first cotillion partner, and together they sat out the world’s recent meltdown like a fast dance they did not have the taste for. They settled for a sloping lawn, a heated swimming pool, twin Mercedes whose vanity plates say HIS and HERS or RAM and EWE. As we passed at an angle there on the soda-stained sidewalk perhaps she sensed, between her legs or at the limbic back of her brain, my adoration. She flinched, or stiffened, as if walking through an automatic door. I would more than have died for her-I would have lived for her.
Born poor, I suppose I am fascinated by the upper classes. Lazily they accept me among them, too confident themselves to care that I am an inwardly sardonic alien. Golf season has begun, and I am over at the club three or four times a week, mingling at lunch, blending into the Wednesday and Saturday foursomes. Some of these men have never held a job. Their life stages have been marked by a succession of games: the child, introduced by his nursemaids to croquet and badminton and then given tennis and sailing and equestrian lessons; the boarding-school boy, hardened at soccer and ice hockey and lacrosse; the college man, persuaded to risk his bones in the football line and test his eyes and nerves on the baseball team, while skiing becomes second nature on beery weekend trips into the White Mountains and the underwater high of scuba-diving is assimilated during rummy winter vacations to the tropics; the suburban husband, partnered with his wife at paddle tennis and matched against his old college roommate at squash; the country squire, ten pounds heavier and rosier in the face, caught up in the physically lighter but financially heavier exertions of polo and yachting; the paunchy man of distinctly mature years, passionate for the pedestrian challenge of golf and the poky interplay of Sunday-morning mixed doubles; and the stoop-shouldered dotard, still amiably feisty, extracting competitive thrills from billiards, bridge, backgammon, and yes, croquet again, in a more formal, white-clad version.
When St. Peter still sat guard at the pearly gates, how would he have judged these lives so devoted to regulated frolic? Not to mention the time-consuming fussing at the fine details of personal comfort, appropriate costume, fashionable vacation site frequented by like-minded others, and three sufficiently ceremonial meals a day? Nothing achieved, St. Peter might have inscribed in his golden ledger, his ever-write quill of angel feather checking off one more admissee to the voluminous, red-lined columns of the damned. But no; his angelic pen hesitates above the lambent parchment, then, moving across the ledger’s gutter to the opposite page, indites with smiling resolution, No harm done, adding a checkmark to the cerulean tabulation of the saved. The elect of New England expect no less, and it is hard to imagine how Heaven could be an improvement for them over their earthly days. The minds of these purely ornamental men are well fortified for the playful monotony of chorally praising God, where sinners, accustomed to variety in their fortunes, would be driven mad.
The summer cycle of, to amuse us old guys, weekend sweeps and senior tournaments has begun, and last week I found myself playing in the third-flight finals against my buddies Red Ruggles and Ken Dixon. My partner was Fred Hanover, a dear, dimly known fellow-member considerably older than I, itself endearing. He is a former club champion. Flashes of calm prowess flicker between spells of topping the ball and of obsession with the sound his pacemaker is making in his chest; he has trouble not listening to his own heartbeat as his life is mechanically ticked away. He and I had avoided simultaneous collapse and ding-donged well enough to beat two previous pairs of oppponents. But playing against Red and Ken was strange for me, on a Sunday morning when the grass was still soaked and a chill breeze cut through my ill-chosen golf shorts.
We teed off in a flurry of friendliness but by the second nine, with the holes even, I had no trouble hating our opponents. My having played so many rounds with them fanned my smoldering fury at Red’s sloppy, muscular whacking- his forearms thickened by a youth of scale-scraping and oyster-shucking-and Ken’s excessively deliberate, time-wasting style, as if running through a long mental checklist before taking off. While the retired pilot hung for what seemed minutes over the ball before unwinding into it with his maddening mechanical consistency, I could not stop staring at, and detesting, his shoes, white shoes which were oddly thick-soled, like the single shoe a cripple wears to even out his stride. But these were two, two shoes exaggeratedly shoelike, like the corny shoes in old-fashioned comic strips, though unimpeachably serious and white. Still, some unfair advantage, or sneaking presumption, seemed involved, and when my turn at last came to drive on the par-five tenth I could not control an impatient quickness in the backswing and on the downswing an overeager boost from the right hand, my right elbow flying. The ball was pulled to the left but, by the same bad mechanics, sliced so that it curved back into the center of the fairway. I settled into the fairway wood with a restricted backswing and moved the ball over the traps and mounds to within fifty yards of the green. Meanwhile, Fred, with a good drive, muffed his second, third, and fourth shots, looking up each time and producing an agonized yelp and an agitated gesture as if to pluck the ticking heart out of his chest. His fifth shot made the transverse bunker and he picked up; the hole was on me. Both Ken and Red had been scrambling and it looked as if a par would win it.