Old Men Playing Golf With Their Wives Inside Them

One:

of the old men, the one whose mind is elsewhere, writes in a little notebook while sitting in a golf cart next to the practice green, waiting for his partner, an old man who believes in God, to finish missing a succession of six-foot putts, as the sun peeks over the trees.

Their story:

does not have a plot because old men’s lives do not have plots, just one colon after another with frequent asides.

What the first old man wrote:

Failure:

carries men forward more fallen each time, and then they are old.

So much:

of their power lies in testosterone’s capricious nature that it sometimes gets silly.

The parable of the butt-plugged judge:

goes like this: Judge (name unimportant) presided for many years over a dull municipal court in an insignificant Midwestern suburb. One day he was caught, perhaps by a squeak or a sigh, employing/enjoying an inflatable butt plug under his robe while court was in session. His job, his supposed life’s work, had become such a sluggish daily hell that it transformed him into a parody of need, stumbling toward delirium, searching for some shred, one butt plug’s worth, of thrill, entertainment, and hope. He was removed from the bench at sixty-three, allowed to retire as a concession, and finally retreated into a state of functional humiliation, living alone in a condo, interacting only with the few who would still have him: his gay son, his golfing buddy, and his wife, who kicked him out but remained his friend.

So:

it’s a universal problem, the unsatisfactory nature of it all.

Please:

say hello to Bill and Lawrence in Atlanta.

Today:

is Wednesday, golf day, a reliable and occasionally invigorating routine.

Their lives:

have not been upended by any one disastrous spectacle but instead have proceeded logically in line with their personalities, marred only by the tragedies and embarrassments of any human life.

Lawrence:

puts his little notebook back into the cart’s cubbyhole next to a pack of cigarettes, one of which he pulls out and lights. Bill finishes up on the practice green and gets in the driver’s seat beside Lawrence, who turns and asks: “Remember that judge who got caught using a butt plug in court?”

Bill:

waves smoke away and says no and asks Lawrence not to read what he just wrote. Or anything he might write later. Not today.

Bill and Lawrence:

arrive at the first hole of Greenview Municipal Golf Course in Atlanta’s aging southeast where they both grew up and stretch one last time before teeing off. It is a cool, clear, dew-covered morning, touch-football weather. Old bones creak, old tendons groan, old penises awaken. Nothing quite like the first whack of the day.

There:

is an undercurrent of sadness always.

Four main characters:

Lawrence Bass, Liz Bass, Bill Turner, Helen Turner. Between and through and within these four people, love is always present in some form. Helen is the only one not still living. Bill and Lawrence get the most screen time.

Thirty minutes earlier, still dark out:

Lawrence walks softly into the bedroom where he no longer sleeps, and Liz mumbles from under the blanket, facing away on her side: “Have fun. Did you get your notebook? You can’t survive without your little notebook. And, Lawrence, why don’t you wear underwear today so you don’t dribble on your pants. Maybe wear your thong. Bill might like it.”

Lawrence:

walks to the side of the bed and whispers, “You’re a laugh riot,” leaning in and kissing her warm, soft cheek. His lips feel her cheek smiling. The quiet stink of her breath he has known for decades floats from under the blanket. Their schedules never coincided. Lawrence breathes her in and lifts himself to standing. Their cats reposition on the comforter next to Liz’s curved shape. He kisses their foreheads and kisses the fabric covering Liz’s butt. The cats love both of them but will only sleep with mom because dad sounds like a nineteenth-century locomotive. Lawrence walks out feeling like an old marriage and, in the kitchen, remembers his notebook because of her.

Hostility:

morphs into sarcasm, one of the ways of love.

One hour earlier, still dark out:

Bill stands in the kitchen at the back door and says “I love you, Helen” articulately to the empty house, double checks that he has his keys and double checks the locked door, then heads to the course an hour away in his Cadillac, driving past his own country club in North Atlanta, then hopping onto I-285, the highway of all humanity, through the city’s shabbier side where he lived until his early thirties.

As cars and trucks stream past, Bill feels nothing except alone. He barely looks forward to seeing Lawrence, who is simultaneously driving his Subaru the shorter distance from his childhood neighborhood near the course, where he and Liz and the cats have lived forty-three years. They are now known as the old white couple with all the cats. Most of their neighbors are Black and Hispanic, and most of the golfers at Greenview are the same. One of their original foursome, Bronson, was a soft-spoken Black guy about their age who disappeared into a different life.

The earth:

beneath Bill and Lawrence’s feet has changed little. It holds disappointment, glory, and comfort.

The sun:

has been up a half hour, and the sky beyond the dew-covered green fairway drops pink clouds unto pale blue atmosphere just above the treed horizon dotted with mildewed roofs and junky houses, then in the farther distance half-vacant strip centers, mini-marts, a formerly glorious theater, exhaust-stained roads, and the old brick hospital where Lawrence and Bill were born seventy-two years ago. They both played this course as teenagers but never crossed paths—different high schools, different cultures, Lawrence a pothead, Bill in ROTC.

The sunrise’s tired, repetitive beauty:

is acknowledged by Bill and breathed in by Lawrence. The old municipal course has its charms, a commoner hosting the game of kings and not giving a shit what the kings think. Bill and Lawrence met in a random-pairing tournament and didn’t care for each other at first and, even now, remain hospitably hostile. But they have managed to stay together once a week going on two years, perhaps linked by upbringing, perhaps by their friendly antagonism. There used to be four of them, then three, then two. Bill was slumming it from his country club at the invitation of his old high school friend Frank, now dead. Greenview is the only course Lawrence plays, the only golf he plays period, every Wednesday with three other old men, then two, now one.

Bill:

dislikes randomness, any unexpected shifting of events, flashbacks in movies, veering off course on vacations. He wants time and tasks standing at attention before him. He would dislike and probably not be able to follow this story’s nonlinear structure, especially its resurrection of Helen as his living wife. Bill is a retired civil engineer. He guided oil pipelines in their underground journey through great swaths of our nation. Lawrence calls him a Whitman poem, a middle-management Man of Industry. Bill takes the backhanded compliment in stride and issues his own statement. A life without faith, a life that ambles, spent writing poems or dancing, is not a useful life.

Lawrence:

writes poems every morning except Wednesday, usually naked or wearing a thong with a cucumber stuffed in it. Liz has known about it since their early married years and gets up early enough sometimes to see him “prancing around.” Lawrence always justifies it with variations of “Whatever it takes” and “Why does it matter” and often includes examples of other artists arousing the muse, but that doesn’t wash with Liz, who has seen his muse and his sagging butt cheeks too many times for too many years. Liz hates the thong, the kind of succulent hatred that becomes the bottom note of long marriages.

Helen:

dances alone in a cotton robe in the twirling breeze of inside air every Wednesday after Bill leaves.

Bill:

doesn’t dance, never has.

Marriages:

that endure for a lifetime veer toward malignant isolation unless another path emerges over decades, a means of intersecting without destroying, like two snails sharing slime trails in a crisscross fashion and occasionally spitting at each other while deciding where to go. Who knew snails could spit, who knew slime could be so lovely, who knew isolation took so many forms.

Lawrence:

puts away his notebook, tees up his ball with one hand steadying his lower back, puts his old body into its ostrich stance, and smacks a worm-burner strafing the dew before rolling to a stop in wet grass just past the ladies’ tee.

Bill:

hits a high, straight drive down the middle barely farther than Lawrence. “Nice rip,” Lawrence jokes, and Bill smirks, “I’ll take it.”

Both of them:

have old-man swings. Bill’s is shortened but remains circular and precise. Lawrence’s crashes down like a hatchet trying to decapitate the ball after a backswing so slow it could pause for a smoke.

In old age:

the two men’s lives slow down sometimes to nothing except the television show they are watching with their equally old wives and both of them getting up during commercials for a snack or to pee. Fifty years of each other in worn, comfortable furniture. At other times, their lives and thoughts drift through the great expanse between sadness and joy and past and present. That last one, the drifting, applies more to Lawrence than to Bill. Bill never drifts or at least never shows it, and of course Helen doesn’t sit beside him anymore.

Liz and Lawrence:

sometimes talk about How do people keep going, just as a general topic of discussion. The world outside seems thin, stupid, weak and dying, to Lawrence more than to Liz. She still sees good in people, often at the chain furniture store where she was the senior accountant and where they still shop on her retiree discount. Young couples buying sofas wondering whether their dogs will like them. Old women with good taste who still care about design. Lawrence admires her commitment to routine joy, while living his own life mostly downward, barely within earshot of his surroundings. Neither fully comprehends the depth and peculiarities of the other’s love. They had no children, only dozens of rescue cats over decades, did not travel as Liz hoped, did not stay romantic and fun but perhaps never were, more subversive in their playfulness. They still sometimes look into each other’s eyes and break into private laughter.

Bill and Helen:

never talk about keeping going. Theirs is a willful momentum through days and years because that is how responsible Christians behave, even when sadness dwells inside. They love each other because that is what responsible married Christians do, even when sadness dwells inside.

Bill:

is driving the cart, top speed five miles per hour over bumpy terrain. The fairways at Greenview are less than pristine. Bill always drives, a hierarchy established without resistance after they shook hands and said “Nice to meet you” two years ago. Bill wanted to, Lawrence didn’t care.

Bill on this morning:

“How’s Liz?”

Lawrence:

“Well, let’s see. She can’t stand being around me and is permanently pissed about the cucumber thong and an affair I had forty-five years ago and doesn’t think I love her because we don’t have sex, but other than that, I think she’s fine.”

Bill:

“Sorry I asked. You should thank God you still have her.”

Silence:

falls between them, and they wait for the foursome ahead to finish putting.

Helen, before she told Bill her cancer was back:

“Go play golf, Bill. Go. I’m fine. Just a little down. You know you want to and you can handle Lawrence, just like you always do. Go. And anyway, I think maybe he’s been good for you. Expanded your horizons a little. Go to the golf course, Bill. Get your weekly dose of Lawrence.”

Bill smiles his acquaintance smile—oh, how she hates the acquaintance smile but never says anything—then leaves through the curtained kitchen back door.

Helen exhales, leaning on the kitchen island, and smiles to herself. She dances from the kitchen to the living room, enjoying the foolishness of being alone with cancer.

Helen, the Wednesday morning after she told Bill the night before:

took a magazine quiz, and one of the questions asked her to describe her husband in one word. Helen wrote down RIGID in all caps and then crossed that out and wrote down kind in lowercase cursive, remembering the long-ago boy and the old man last night who was sadder than she was, more angry, fighting her enemy—Bill’s way of being kind. He played golf the next morning because Helen told him she needed time. Helen did not dance that day.

Helen, just before she left this Earth:

when she could barely perceive him, heard Bill say “I love you” for the first time since they were teenagers.

Liz:

once got drunk enough on wine with her friend to speak her nagging truth to Lawrence later in the night: “You have a passion for the cats and for your poems, but you don’t seem to have any passion for me,” and Lawrence responded: “That’s not true at all. I love you more than anything in the world,” but then later realized she was talking about sex instead of love, sex as love, the intertwining men do not know.

Lawrence:

spent his twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties working, shopping, running errands, going out to eat, mowing the grass, having sex—often good—with Liz, and being forgiven or at least grudgingly restored to livable status, all the while trying to accomplish something on the side in the few hours remaining. So sex at this stage in his sixties and seventies feels a bit like been there done that, and accomplishing something has moved to the fore because there’s not much time left on the clock. He is embedded in Liz, but the two-minute warning is nigh. There’s still time for a winning drive.

Liz:

is remembering, admiring really, what she said to Lawrence a few days ago, the latest flare-up of their longstanding rift:

“You know it’s never been okay for our entire marriage, Lawrence. Never. I say to myself I accept it, but I really don’t and shouldn’t. It’s just a weird thing for a husband to do and just another thing that makes it feel sometimes like it’s all been a sham. I mean, I’ve gotten used to it, or just learned to live with it really, the always being naked and the betrayal, the affair, but wearing a thong with a cucumber stuffed in it is idiotic. It’s not a requirement for great art. And I don’t care if William Carlos what’s-his-face danced naked in front of a mirror. That’s just bullshit from another bullshit man. It makes me feel like crap and always has. We haven’t had sex in five years. And for God’s sake, Lawrence, you’re seventy-two years old. At least in your thirties you had a decent body.”

Shame:

is not something a poet should feel, even a not-very-good poet who keeps trying for decades while working in public relations and in the process makes his marriage twice as miserable as it needs to be.

Lawrence:

rescues his pitiful drive with a screaming 3-wood that clears the creek and nearly reaches the green.

Bill:

lays up like always, an unwavering advocate for responsible golf.

Bill:

looks like Lawrence’s father and plays golf like his father’s worldview: a high fade straight down the middle 150 yards every time off the tee. Slightly above average distance for a man his age, always safe and in position for the next shot. Unless he pops it up or shanks it, which is rare. Bill is too disciplined to fail extravagantly, only by increments. He doesn’t putt well, actually gets the yips, very much against his nature, and tries to hide it, but Lawrence knows.

Lawrence:

looks like an aging hippie who works in Lowe’s garden section wearing back support. He sprays his drives all over the place because he swings as hard as he can just like he did fifty years ago, but now with balance problems and sciatica and limited shoulder flexibility. He gets out of trouble sometimes through a five-yard gap in the trees but more often lands himself in deeper shit. Lawrence putts better than Bill, with a strange stance, legs wide apart, arms nonchalant, as if he doesn’t care if the ball goes in.

Lawrence:

could be Bill’s son if the universe shifted and all relationships changed and time disappeared and nothing mattered except essence.

Father and son:

wait for the foursome ahead of them to putt out, and hippie son writes in his little notebook.

Nothing:

is more energizing and triumphant to a male animal than an erection. Baboons and billionaires become scheming violent children in pursuit. This simple truth governs everything everywhere.

Lawrence:

reads the erection theory to Bill after a disclaimer that it’s nothing new, just newly stated.

Bill:

turns on Lawrence sharply like he sometimes did with Helen and says, “What did I just say about the writing, Lawrence? And what you just read is the reason why. I have no interest this morning or any morning in your thoughts on erections. It’s an affront to God and to me. Could we just play golf?”

Writing:

in his little notebook is Lawrence’s sustaining erection.

Christianity:

in its least-fun form is Bill’s.

Lawrence:

has fallen, some would say risen, into a phase of emotional sanctuary with Liz, wanting her to nurture his failings. Liz wants to add maybe one orgasm a month to the mix with the man who supposedly loves her. All the while, abrasive irritants are hurled nonchalantly from both sides.

Bill:

believes sex doesn’t seem necessary and maybe not even appropriate for a Christian man his age. Also, he can’t.

Liz:

delivered Lawrence from impotence when they were in college. It was a restoration of blood.

Lawrence:

is starting to feel emaciated from all the smoking he’s done in his life, six hundred thousand or so cigarettes burned and inhaled since the age of sixteen. When he does his half push-ups against the kitchen counter—naked or wearing the cucumber-infused thong—what tautens and strengthens feels more like metal than muscle. Everything seems to be converting to an industrial state, stiffening, rusting, and expelling toxic gas. He looks at his ribs and sees scaffolding. The oversized penis is a design feature based on consumer surveys.

Liz:

wishes they still had sex but isn’t sexually attracted to Lawrence anymore. Certainly the smoke oozing from every pore is part of it, and of course the fantasy thong and his affair in their twenties repel her, but it’s not his betrayal or weirdness or diseased smell that keeps her desire in neutral so much as his loss of all charm and sweetness. Only occasionally is he fun to be around. Despite all this, Liz is comforted by the fact that Lawrence and his absurd penis are still part of her life.

Bill:

constructs intricate models of clipper ships but is thinking of quitting after the current one, another Cutty Sark, his third, this time inside a bottle. He once considered selling his completed models online, but he doesn’t need the money and doesn’t know the internet well enough to do it. The little business plan had seemed like a task worth tackling after Helen died but over time became the second-rate endeavor of a lonely old man. He isn’t as steady anymore with a draftsman’s hands and fumbles pieces down into the bottom of the bottle too often, enraging him working alone in his basement workshop. A quiet, controlled rage. Bill sometimes feels as if his framework is cracking. He barely reveals it even to himself alone in the basement but has come close to throwing the ship and the bottle to the wall.

Helen:

was never sexually attracted to Bill in any luscious, hungry way because that’s not how she thinks, and Bill never did the things that would make her think otherwise. The first year, maybe, when he was just out of the Navy and still played the clarinet, but that soon faded as Bill moved deeper into his engineering job and the church that she introduced him to. Helen was the pastor’s secretary for twenty years, and became so close to him—his kindness, his artistic manner—in the years after she married Bill that she once had a dream about an affair with him that she cherished secretly for a long time. Bill tried to show love and hoisted himself on top of her a couple of times a week, producing one child who saved Helen like water for thirst. When their son came home from college on his nineteenth birthday and told them in a restaurant that he was gay, Bill called him an abomination and walked out, and their relationship never recovered. Without sex, in old age, Bill has become more loving but still doesn’t really know how, and Helen looks upon him with smiling acceptance that passes for love and is indeed love.

Helen:

hated Bill, the only true hatred she has ever felt, when he called their son an abomination. The ferocity of it faded to become a nugget lodged inside, just like it did for Liz with Lawrence’s affair, a one-night pickup. He had thought he was in love, and that last part became the nugget’s dense core.

Helen:

saved Bill from a gruesome leg injury once in their fifties, when panels of drywall tilted back against his shin in the garage, and Bill could not lift them alone and screamed for her thinking of his bone snapping and jutting out exposed, and she came and somehow summoned the strength of five men, lifting the drywall with Bill lifting too. As he stood there post-panic, he told Helen that God was inside her, and Helen said “Please don’t try that again, Bill,” and went back into the kitchen to finish cleaning up after dinner.

Bill:

dreamed about an affair once, too, a woman he worked with, and woke in deepest shame as if he had really done it. He believed God was punishing him and never told Helen, who remained the pastor’s secret lover.

Bill:

drops a 6-iron onto the safe middle of the green.

Lawrence:

fluffs his wedge into the bunker.

Lawrence:

wrote half a poem, jotted down stoned thoughts, masturbated occasionally, and read various articles on the computer in the early morning hours. This went on for decades. At some point he knew his best was not quite good enough and that he would continue being not quite good enough, and disappointment would become his home.

Liz:

masturbates gently every Wednesday while watching The View. She can do two things at once. Lawrence has to focus like a brain surgeon putting away groceries. She feels loved with her hand pressed on her old warmth, and it has become a regular thing.

Bronson and Frank:

were the other two guys in the foursome.

Bronson:

out of the blue on the 18th green one cold day a year ago at the end of a terrible round came out as gay after forty-something years of marriage and two kids and four grandchildren. He only told Lawrence at first, and they told Bill and Frank together, drinking beers in The 19th Hole. Bill’s and Frank’s faces fell but they said nothing, stunned and slightly humiliated by it. They both felt they had a true Black friend in Bronson, something neither of them had had before, now shattered. Bill thought of his son. Bronson kept playing for a few weeks, but everything was so changed he just didn’t show up one week and never came back.

Lawrence:

became the one who would call Bronson, but his wife said he didn’t really want to talk, and she also said without prompting that she still loved him.

One month after that:

Helen died a few seconds after Bill told her he loved her for the first time since they were teenagers. He’s not sure why he never said it because he always felt it. Something inside stopped him. Helen’s face looked like heaven’s arrival when she died.

Bill:

kept playing, even the Wednesday after she died, needing a task in front of him.

Liz:

had only talked on the phone a couple of times with Helen, but she was sadder than Lawrence, who had met Helen several times. Lawrence saw her death as something that occurred, sad but nothing could be done. Everything to Lawrence is something that occurs, as if he’s a passenger on a train. Liz saw Helen as heroic to have lived with and loved Bill for so long, and her death was more to Liz than something that occurred.

Five months later:

Frank had a heart attack and died almost instantly in the sand trap bordering the 10th green. He had just blasted out, and the sand flew back upon his anguished face collapsing forward. Bill knew CPR from his Navy days and flipped Frank over and tried on all fours in the sand to revive him, but Frank vanished instantly. The anguish retreated, and the old Frank returned with white sand caked on his face, and Bill, thinking on it later, saw heaven in Frank’s face, too. In the moments after, he also noticed the ambulance cart had damaged the green and chided himself for thinking it, trying desperately to feel. He misses Frank’s laughter at his jokes. Lawrence and Bronson barely smiled at them.

Bill:

once in the pale, orange dusk after eating dinner at The 19th Hole, saw Frank’s wife standing on the 10th green looking down into the sand trap where Frank died, just standing there looking down, appearing to cry, shuddering a little, her back to Bill, and he stared at her for a long time without her knowing, almost seeing Helen standing there.

Lawrence:

said “Fuck you” far too loudly and meanly to Liz in the midst of yet another kerfuffle a few days ago. Something about never going anywhere. Liz said “Fuck you” back and Lawrence said “I’m sorry” and Liz said “No, you’re not.”

Liz believed in another life with another wife Lawrence could have been an abuser.

“Never, no way,” said Lawrence. “I would never hit anyone. That’s what weak, pathetic men do.”

“That’s not the kind of abuse I’m talking about, I’m talking about a deep anger at the world taken out on me.”

After a moment of rest and silence Lawrence told Liz that their oldest cat Simon had a good stool that morning. The little man had been constipated and straining. Their conversations moved between epic and quotidian as minutes and years flowed beneath them. Afterward they kissed with reluctant, warm lips.

Bill:

once slammed his son to the floor, backward in a kitchen chair, with Helen sitting there, surprising all three of them, the sudden violence, after their son came home from high school wearing earrings and eye shadow and Bill said he was going to Hell. Their son rolled his eyes a little and in a burst of fury Bill pushed him backward in his chair to the floor, but it only happened the one time. “You’re an abomination” only felt like a fist.

Bill:

two-putts for a solid bogey.

Lawrence:

takes three shots to get out of the trap but the third time hits a soft-landing beauty and taps in for a triple bogey. On to the next hole again and again and forevermore.

Bill and Lawrence:

keep playing, desultorily, talking very little until the 18th tee.

Bill, quite suddenly:

“I wasn’t able to have sex with Helen for our last five years. And I wanted to. And I think I knew what she wanted. She wanted a Christian act of love.”

Lawrence:

“That’s an interesting way to put it.”

Bill:

“No, not really. I wanted to give her my love. That’s what it means. A generous act. Sex as an expression of love. And I couldn’t. It’s shameful, really. I’m ashamed of it.”

Lawrence:

“You’ve never been ashamed since I’ve known you. It wasn’t your fault.”

Bill:

“Maybe it was. Maybe I deserved it. When God looked at me.”

Lawrence:

“Well, we haven’t had sex in years, either. I think Liz resents it deeply, and I should do something about it. The thing is, we have different concepts of love. I think most men and women do when they get old. I think it almost reverses. We just want to be held and they want to be desired.”

Bill:

“Lawrence, please be quiet.”

Bill:

stares at nothing and talks as if Helen is listening:

“I knew she danced when I wasn’t there. I went back one time to get a sleeve of balls, and I saw her through the window. She started right after I left. It was kind of like ballet, but she was too old and stiff. But it was beautiful, no question it was beautiful. I decided to leave and just buy some balls here. I didn’t want to interrupt her. But I knew she danced.”

Bill’s chest and shoulders tremble in little heaves but he stops them, his body still upright in the driver’s seat. “I never thought it would be like this. I don’t feel God inside anymore.”

Four young men:

pull up to the tee, laughing about something.

Lawrence:

tells them to play through, and they do, concerned but quickly on their way, all hitting solid young-man drives.

Lawrence:

gets out of the cart, walks to the driver’s side, and nudges Bill over. Bill shifts himself without protest. Lawrence drives them back to the clubhouse and then to their cars, their first unfinished round.

Bill:

puts his clubs into the trunk and hugs Lawrence standing behind the Cadillac. It feels weird to both of them, but neither pulls away and neither says See you next week.

Bill:

falls asleep in the empty bedroom and dreams Helen sleeps beside him, slightly above him, her arm around his shoulder, saying nothing, but somewhere a thousand voices sing. When he wakes up he thanks God for sending her to him. He sits on the edge of the bed and reaches for the phone on the nightstand to call his son and tell him that he loves him, but stops halfway and doesn’t know what to say. Just say it, Bill, just love your son, for God’s sake. Helen is still inside, and with uncertain courage Bill calls his son.

Liz:

does not leave with the cats although she imagines it often, smiling at the thought. Nowhere else to go. No one else to be with. Just a thought, nothing more, the same as suicide is for Lawrence. Just a thought.

Time:

has never flown for Lawrence, moving instead excruciatingly and sometimes beautifully slow, simultaneously observed and lived, year upon year, success coming just once, perhaps only in his eyes. On this day in these dying years with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, Liz remains with him, somehow remains, his beneficent, belligerent, bountiful God.