Museums and Women (20 page)

I think maybe if I got beaned. That’s probably what the wife is hinting at with the gorilla mask. A change of pace, like the time DiMaggio broke his slump by Topping’s telling him to go to a nightclub and get plastered. I’ve stopped ducking,
but the trouble is, if you’re not hitting, they don’t brush you back. On me, they’ve stopped trying for even the corners; they put it right down the pike. I can see it in the pitcher’s evil eye as he takes the sign and rears back, I can hear the catcher snicker, and for a second of reflex there I can see it like it used to be, the continents and trade routes and state boundaries distinct as stitches, and the hickory sweetens in my hands, and I feel the good old sure hunger. Then something happens. It all blurs, the pitch sinks, the light changes, I don’t know. It’s not caring enough, is what it probably is; it’s knowing that none of it—the stadium, the averages—is really there, just
you
are there, and it’s not enough.

The Pro

I
AM
on my four-hundred-and-twelfth golf lesson, and my drives still have that pushed little tail, and my irons still take the divot on the wrong side of the ball. My pro is a big gloomy sun-browned man—age about thirty-eight, weight around 195. When he holds a club in his gloved hand and swishes it nervously (the nervousness comes over him after the first twenty minutes of our lesson), he makes it look light as a feather, a straw, a baton. Once I sneaked his 3-wood from his bag, and the head weighed more than a cannonball. “Easy does it, Mr. Wallace,” he says to me. My name is not Wallace, but he smooths his clients toward one generic, acceptable name. I call him Dave.

“Easy does it, Mr. Wallace,” he says. “That ball is not going anywhere by itself, so what’s your hurry?”

“I want to clobber the bastard,” I say. It took me two hundred lessons to attain this pitch of frankness.

“You dipped again,” he tells me, without passion. “That right shoulder of yours dipped, and your knees locked, you were so anxious. Ride those knees, Mr. Wallace.”

“I can’t. I keep thinking about my wrists. I’m afraid I won’t pronate them.”

This is meant to be a joke, but he doesn’t smile. “Ride those knees, Mr. Wallace. Forget your wrists. Look.” He takes my 5-iron into his hands, a sight so thrilling it knocks the breath out of me. It is like, in the movies we all saw as children (oh, blessed childhood!), the instant when King Kong, or the gigantic Cyclops, lifts the beautiful blonde, who has blessedly fainted, over his head, and she becomes utterly weightless, a thing of sheer air and vision and pathos. I love it, I feel halfsick with pleasure, when he lifts my 5-iron, and want to tell him so, but I can’t. After four hundred and eleven lessons, I still repress.

“The hands can’t
help
but be right,” he says, “if the
knees
are right.” He twitches the club, so casually I think he is brushing a bee from the ball’s surface. There is an innocent click; the ball whizzes into the air and rises along a line as straight as the edge of a steel ruler, hangs at its remote apogee for a moment of meditation, and settles like a snowflake twenty yards beyond the shagging caddie.

“Gorgeous, Dave,” I say, with an affectation of camaraderie, though my stomach is a sour churning of adoration and dread.

He says, “A little fat, but that’s the idea. Did you see me grunt and strain?”

“No, Dave.” This is our litany.

“Did you see me jerk my head, or freeze at the top of the backswing, or rock forward on my toes?”

“No, Dave, no.”

“Well then, what’s the problem? Step up and show me how.”

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly;
at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows. I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. “Smothered it,” I say promptly. After enough lessons, the terminology becomes second nature. The whole process, as I understand it, is essentially one of self-analysis. The pro is merely a catalyst, a random sample, I have read somewhere, from the grab bag of humanity.

He insists on wearing a droll porkpie hat from which his heavy brown figure somehow downflows; his sloping shoulders, his hanging arms, his faintly pendulous belly, and his bent knees all tend toward his shoes, which are ideally natty—solid as bricks, black and white, with baroque stitching, frilled kilties, and spikes as neat as alligator teeth. He looks at me almost with interest. His grass-green irises are tiny, whittled by years of concentrating on the ball. “Loosen up,” he tells me. I love it, I clench with gratitude, when he deigns to be directive. “Take a few practice swings, Mr. Wallace. You looked like a rusty mechanical man on that one. Listen. Golf is an effortless game.”

“Maybe I have no aptitude,” I say, giggling, blushing, hoping to deflect him with the humility bit.

He is not deflected. Stolidly he says, “Your swing is sweet. When it’s there.” Thus he uplifts me and crushes me from phrase to phrase. “You’re blocking yourself out,” he goes on. “You’re not open to your own potential. You’re not, as we say,
free
.”

“I know, I know. That’s why I’m taking all these expensive lessons.”

“Swing, Mr. Wallace. Show me your swing.”

I swing, and feel the impurities like bubbles and warps in glass: hurried backswing, too much right hand at impact, failure to finish high.

•  •  •

The pro strips off his glove. “Come over to the eighteenth green.” I think we are going to practice chipping (a restricted but relaxed pendulum motion) for the fiftieth time, but he says, “Lie down.”

The green is firm yet springy. The grounds crew has done a fine job watering this summer, through that long dry spell. Not since childhood have I lain this way, on sweet flat grass, looking up into a tree, branch above branch, each leaf distinct in its generic shape, as when, in elementary school, we used to press them between wax paper. The tree is a sugar maple. For all the times I have tried to hit around it, I never noticed its species before. In the fall, its dried-up leaves have to be brushed from the line of every putt. This spring, when the branches were tracery dusted with a golden budding, I punched a 9-iron right through the crown and salvaged a double bogey.

Behind and above me, the pro’s voice is mellower than I remember it, with a lulling grittiness, like undissolved sugar in tea. He says, “Mr. Wallace, tell me what you’re thinking about when you freeze at the top of your backswing.”

“I’m thinking about my shot. I see it sailing dead on the pin, hitting six feet short, taking a bite with lots of backspin, and dribbling into the cup. The crowd goes
ooh
and cheers.”

“Who’s in the crowd? Anybody you know personally?”

“No … wait. There
is
somebody. My mother. She has one of those cardboard periscope things and shouts out, ‘Gorgeous, Billy!’ ”

“She calls you Billy.”

“That’s my name, Dave. William, Willy, Billy, Bill. Let’s cut out this Mr. Wallace routine. You call me Bill, I’ll call you Dave.” He is much easier to talk to, the pro, without the sight
of his powerful passionless gloom, his hands (one bare, one gloved) making a mockery of the club’s weight.

“Anybody else you know? Wife? Kids?”

“No, my wife’s had to take the babysitter home. Most of the kids are at camp.”

“What else do you see up there at the top of the backswing?”

“I see myself quitting lessons.” It was out,
whiz
, before I had time to censor. Silence reigns in the leafy dome above me. A sparrow is hopping from branch to branch, like a pencil point going from number to number in those children’s puzzles we all used to do.

At last the pro grunts, which, as I said, he never does. “The last time you were out, Mr. Wallace, what did you shoot?”

“You mean the last time I kept count?”

“Mm.”

“A hundred eight. But that was with some lucky putts.”

“Mm. Better stand up. Any prolonged pressure, the green may get a fungus. This bent grass is hell to maintain.” When I stand, he studies me, chuckles, and says to an invisible attendant, “A hundred eight, with a hot putter yet, and he wants to quit lessons.”

I beg, “Not quit forever—just for a vacation. Let me play a few different courses. You know, get out into the world. Maybe even try a public course. Gee, or go to a driving range and whack out a bucket of balls. You know, learn to live with the game I’ve got. Enjoy life.”

His noble impassivity is invested with a shimmering, twinkling humorousness; his leathery face softens toward a smile, and the trace of a dimple is discovered in his cheek. “Golf is life,” he says softly, and his green eyes expand, “and life is lessons,” and the humps of his brown muscles merge with the
hillocks and swales of the course, whose red flags prick the farthest horizon, and whose dimmest sand traps are indistinguishable from galaxies. I see that he is right, as always, absolutely; there is no life, no world, beyond the golf course—just an infinite and terrible falling off. “If I don’t give
you
lessons,” the pro is going on, “how will I pay for
my
lessons?”

“
You
take lessons?”

“Sure. I hook under pressure. Like Palmer. I’m too strong. Any rough on the left, there I am. You don’t have that problem, with your nice pushy slice.”

“You mean there’s a sense,” I ask, scarcely daring, “in which
you
need
me
?”

He puts his hand on my shoulder, the hand pale from wearing the glove, and I become a feather at the touch, all air and ease. “Mr. Wallace,” he says, “I’ve learned a lot from your sweet swing. I hate it when, like now, the half-hour’s up.”

“Next Tuesday, eleven-thirty?”

Solemnly my pro nods. “We’ll smooth out your chipping. Here in the shade.”

One of My Generation

S
OMETIMES
, to test my courage, I face students; they gaze at me with those drug-begentled eyes that have seen Krishna and the connection between a baby-pink dean and a canister of napalm, and their polite (more or less) silence poses the question “And what of
your
generation?” In search of an answer, I see myself climbing, nearly twenty Septembers ago, the five flights to my college room and finding, bent-necked and narrow-shouldered in an island of light, in a chamber bare but for the bleakest sticks of institutional furniture, my new roommate writing a poem. I tiptoe closer and peek over his shoulder. He writes with a tensely gripped pencil very tiny letters with long, gouging descenders. Now, as then, I cannot make out the poem, but it had a rose in it, and a cross, and a mother, and a lot of compacted backward phrasing. His poems, of which I was to read many, usually struck me as instances of misapplied force, like screws hammered into wood. However, through the mist of years certain images still wink: a father’s arm outflung like a lighthouse beam, a ferret suddenly
twisting in a nest of religious imagery, an orchidaceous canopy dappling the water (“lizarding / the glissant scum”) during an imaginary trip down the Amazon. Writing on with his strange neat vehemence, my new roommate completed the stanza before rising to shake my hand. His name was Ed Popper and he came from Nebraska. He had been raised a Baptist but had become an Anglo-Catholic. He was a disciple of Robert Lowell—the early, Boston Lowell, the Lowell of
Lord Weary’s Castle
and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” I learned all this later; as he rose to shake my hand I knew only that his shoulders were narrow for the width of his hips and that, though alone in a drab dormitory room on the day before registration, he wore a rose-colored shirt with a tight starched collar and a silver collar pin beneath the tiniest, driest, most intense necktie knot I had ever seen. His glasses were so thick the flesh of his sockets formed concentric circles around blue bull’s-eyes. His domination of me began at once: he was composed and intense and I panting and weak-kneed, for in those days I made it a point of honor always to run up the five flights two steps at a time, without stopping.

He had read everything, it seemed. His father was a grain farmer, and Ed’s companions in his rural isolation had been Eliot and Lowell, Valéry and Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Anaïs Nin. I pictured him carrying the books down the aisles of cornfields and settling to read in the shade of a creekside willow. As an adolescent he had written letters East to great men (signed answers had come from John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams) and to Manhattan booksellers. He owned Knopf’s lovely first edition, bound in pastel clown stripes, of Wallace Stevens’
Harmonium;
the war-time pamphlets, in four different dusty colors, in which Faber had issued each of the
Four Quartets;
the dove-gray booklet, printed in Dijon in 1923, containing three stories and ten poems by
Ernest Hemingway; and a polychrome row, from
To the Lighthouse
to
Between the Acts
, of Hogarth Press’s delicately designed Virginia Woolfs. The acquisition, physical and mental, of these works belonged to Ed’s past. Literature had ceased to be his study and had become his essence, an atmosphere he effortlessly breathed. In the year we lived together I never saw him read a book or heard him say a respectful word about any author save Lowell and, once, Lord Byron. We were building—Ed was building in my presence—a ladder of the English poets, ranking them by excellence. Tennyson? “Altogether soft,” Ed said—“a Victorian moonbeam manufacturer,” and placed him on the rung below Cowper. Browning, then? “A rhyming O. Henry,” Ed pronounced, and banished him to the nether region below Cowley. I timidly offered him Pope. “Twaddle, and his only saving grace was that he knew it. A notch above Wordsworth and no higher.” Hopkins received Ed’s favorite verdict: “Minor. Except for two or three stanzas of the ‘Deutschland,’ a thoroughly unmajor poet. Better than Longfellow, worse than Sidney.” Sidney in turn was better than Shelley, worse than Keats. Keats weighed in under Donne, who was inferior to Milton (on the sole strength of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; Ed detested
Paradise Lost
and thought “Lycidas” unpleasantly homosexual), who, if we followed the guidelines of Eliot’s rather overrated essay on the breakup of sensibility, was less worthy than Dryden, who could not in good conscience be ranked above Thomas Traherne. At the session’s end, through the pewter haze of cigarette smoke, George Gordon, Lord Byron, emerged by negative deduction as the greatest of all English poets. Ed considered this unexpected result and thoughtfully nodded assent. “He has the necessary hardness,” he said, adding, “We’re speaking pre-Lowell, of course.”