Rabbit at Rest

Harry Angstrom tries to imagine the world seen through his granddaughter's clear green eyes, every little thing vivid and sharp and radiantly new, packed full of itself like a satin valentine. His own vision feels fogged no matter which glasses he puts on, for reading or far vision. He wears the latter only for movies and night driving, and refuses to get bifocals; glasses worn for more than an hour at a time hurt his ears. And the lenses are always dusty and the things he looks at all seem tired; he's seen them too many times before. A kind of drought has settled over the world, a bleaching such as overtakes old color prints, even the ones kept in a drawer.

Except, strangely, the first fairway of a golf course before his first swing. This vista is ever fresh. There, on the tee's earth platform, standing in his large white spiked Foot-Joys and blue sweat socks, drawing the long tapered steel wand of the Lynx Predator driver from the bag, he feels tall again, tall the way he used to on a hardwood basketball floor when, after those first minutes, his growing momentum and lengthening bounds and leaps reduced the court to childlike dimensions, to the size of a tennis court and then a ping-pong table, his legs unthinkingly eating the distances up, back and forth, and the hoop with its dainty skirtlike net dipping down to be there on the lay-ups. So, in golf, the distances, the hundreds of yards, dissolve to a few effortless swings if you find the inner magic, the key. Always, golf for him holds out the hope of perfection, of a perfect weightlessness and consummate ease, for now and again it does happen, happens in three dimensions, shot after shot. But then he gets human and tries to force it, to make it happen, to get ten extra yards, to steer it, and it goes away--grace, you could call it, the feeling of collaboration, of being bigger than he really is. When you stand up on the first tee, it is there, it comes back from wherever it lives during the rest of your life, endless possibility, the possibility of a flawless round, a round without a speck of dirt in it, without a missed two-footer or a flying right elbow, without a pushed wood or pulled iron; the first fairway is in front of you, palm trees on the left and water on the right, flat as a picture. All you have to do is take a simple, pure swing and puncture the picture in the middle with a ball that shrinks in a second to the size of a needle prick, a tiny tunnel into the absolute. That would be it.

But on his practice swing, his chest gives a twang of pain and this makes him think for some reason of his son, Nelson. The kid jangles in his mind. As he stands up to the ball, he feels crowded but is impatient and hits it outside in, trying too hard with his right hand. The ball starts out promisingly but leaks more and more to the right and disappears not far enough from the edge of the long scummy pond.

"'Fraid that's alligator territory," Bernie says sadly. Bernie is his partner for the round.

"Mulligan?" Harry asks.

There is a pause. Ed Silberstein asks Joe Gold, "What do you think?"

Joe tells Harry, "I didn't notice that we took any mulligans."

Harry says, "You cripples don't hit it far enough to get into trouble. We always give mulligans on the first drive. That's been our tradition."

Ed says, "Angstrom, how're you ever going to live up to your potential if we keep babying you with mulligans?"

Joe says, "How much potential you think a guy with a gut like that still has? I think his potential has all gone to his colon."

While they are thus ribbing him, Rabbit takes another ball from his pocket and tees it up and, with a stiff half-swing, sends it safely but ingloriously down the left side of the fair way. Perhaps not quite safely: It seems to hit a hard spot and keeps bouncing toward a palm tree. "Sorry, Bernie," he says. "I'll loosen up."

"Am I worried?" Bernie asks, putting his foot to the electric-cart pedal a split second before Harry has settled into the seat beside him. "With your brawn and my brains, we'll cream these creeps."

Bernie Drechsel, Ed Silberstein and Joe Gold are all older than Harry, and shorter, and usually make him feel good about himself. With them, he is a big Swede, they call him Angstrom, a comical pet gentile, a big pale uncircumcised hunk of the American dream. He, in turn, treasures their perspective; it seems more manly than his, wiser and less shaky. Their long history has put all that suffering in its pocket and strides on. Harry asks Bernie, as the cart rolls over the tamped and glistening grass toward their balls, "Whaddaya think all this fuss about this Deion Sanders? In this morning's paper, he even has the mayor of Fort Myers making excuses for him."

Bernie shifts the cigar in his mouth an inch and says, "It's cruel, you know, to take these black kids out of nowhere and give 'em all this publicity and turn them into millionaires. No wonder they go crazy."

"Yeah, he flipped out at some salesclerk who said he had stolen a pair of earrings and even took a pop at her."

"I don't know about Sanders, but with some of them, it's drugs," Bernie says. "Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere."

"You wonder what they see in it," Rabbit says.

"What they see in it," Bernie says, stopping the cart and resting his cigar on the edge of the plastic ledge for holding drinks or beer cans, "is instant happiness." He squares up to his second shot with that awful stance of his, his feet too close together, his bald head dipping down in a reverse-weight shift, and punches the ball with a four iron: all arms and wrists. It stays straight, though, and winds up within an easy chip in front of the elevated green. "There are two routes to happiness," he continues, back at the wheel of the cart. "Work for it, day after day, like you and I did, or take a chemical short cut. With the world the way it is, these kids take the short cut. The long way looks too long."

"Yeah, well, it is long. And then when you've gone the distance, where's the happiness?"

"Behind you," the other man admits.

"What interests me about Sanders and kids like that," Rabbit says, as Bernie speeds along down the sunbaked fairway, dodging fallen brown fronds and coconuts, "is I had a little taste of it once. Athletics. Everybody loving you as long as you're out there."

"Sure you did. It sticks out all over you. Afraid you made the palm tree, though. You're stymied, my friend." Bernie stops the cart, a little close to the ball for Harry's comfort.

"I think I can hook it around."

"Don't try it, kid. Chip it out. You know what Tommy Armour says: Take your stroke in a situation like this and go for the green on the next one. Don't attempt a miracle."

"Well, you're already up there for a sure bogey. Let me try to bend it on." The palm tree is one of those whose trunks look like giant braids. It breathes on him, with its faint rustle, its dim smell like that of a friendly attic full of dried-out old school papers and love letters. Harry takes his stance with his hip almost touching the jagged rough trunk, hoods the five iron and imagines the curving arc of the miracle shot and Bernie's glad cry of congratulation.

But, in fact, the closeness of the tree and maybe of Bernie in the cart inhibits his swing and he pulls the ball with the hooded club so it hits the top of the next palm along the fairway and drops straight down into the short rough. The rough, though, in Florida isn't like the rough up North; it's just spongy pale grass a half inch longer than fairway. They tailor these courses for the elderly and lame.

Bernie sighs. "Stubborn," he says as Harry gets back in. "You guys think the world will melt if you whistle." Harry knows that "guys" is polite for "goys." The thought that he might be wrong, that obstacles won't melt if he whistles, renews a dull internal ache of doom he has been lately bothered with. As he stands up to his third shot--an eight iron, he estimates--Bernie's disapproval weighs on his arm and causes him to hit a bit fat, enough to take the click out of the ball and leave it ten yards short.

"Sorry, Bernie. Chip up close and get your par." But Bernie fluffs the chip--all wrists again, and too quick--and they both get sixes, losing the hole to Ed Silberstein's routine bogey. Ed is a wiry retired accountant from Toledo, with dark upright hair and a slender, thrusting jaw that makes him look as if he's always about to smile; he never seems to get the ball more than ten feet off the ground, but he keeps it moving toward the hole.

"You guys looked like Dukakis on that one," he crows. "Blowing it."

"Don't knock the Duke," Joe says. "He gave us honest government for a change and the Boston pols can't forgive him for it." Joe Gold owned a couple of liquor stores in some city in Massachusetts called Framingham. He is stocky and sandy and wears glasses so thick they make his eyes look like they're trying to escape from two little fish bowls, jumping from side to side.

Ed says, "He wimped out when it counted. He should have stood up and said, 'Sure, I'm a liberal, and damn proud of it.'"

"Yeah, how would that have played in the South and the Midwest?" Joe asks. "In California and Florida, for that matter, with all these old farts who all they want to hear is 'No more taxes'?"

"Lousy," Ed admits. "But he wasn't going to get their votes, anyway. His only hope was to get the poor excited. Knock away that three-footer, (continued on page 155) Rabbit at Rest (continued from page 78) Angstrom. I've already written down your six."

"I need the practice," Harry says, and strokes it, and watches it rim out on the left edge. Not his day. Will he ever have a day again? Fifty-five and fading. His own son can't stand to be in the same room with him.

"He was going for those Reagan Democrats," Joe continues explaining. "Except there aren't any Reagan Democrats, there're just simple rednecks. Now that I'm down South here, I understand better what it's all about. It's all about blacks. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, the Republicans have got the antiblack vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with, barring a massive depression or a boo-boo the size of Watergate. Ollie North doesn't do it. Reagan being a total airhead didn't do it. Face it, the bulk of this country is scared to death of the blacks. That's the one gut issue we've got."

After that episode with Skeeter 20 years ago, Rabbit has had mixed feelings about blacks, and whenever the subject comes up, he tends to hold his tongue lest he betray himself one way or another. "Bernie, what do you think?" Harry asks while they're watching the two others hit from the second tee, a 136-yard par three over that same scummy pond. He finds Bernie the wisest of the three, the most phlegmatic and slowest to speak. He never came back totally from some open-heart surgery he had a few years ago. He moves cumbersomely, has emphysema and a bit of a humpback and the slack look of a plump man who lost weight because his doctor told him to. His color isn't good, his lower lip in profile looks loose and moist.

"I think," he says, "Dukakis tried to talk intelligently to the American people and we aren't ready for it. Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, 'read my lips'--can you imagine such crap in this day and age? Ailes and those others, they made him into a beer commercial--'head for the mountains.'" Bernie sings his last phrase, his voice quavery but touchingly true; Rabbit is impressed by this ability Jews seem to have, to sing and to dance, to give themselves to the moment. Bernie concludes, "To my mind there are two possibilities about Bush--he believed what he was saying or he didn't. I don't know which is more terrifying. He's what we call a pisher."

"Dukakis always looked like he was sore about something," Rabbit offers. This is as close as he can bring himself to admit that, alone in this foursome, he voted for Bush.

Bernie maybe guesses it. He says, "After eight years of Reagan, I would have thought more people would have been sore than were. If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich or you want to be, or you think you ought to be."

Rabbit liked Reagan. He liked the foggy voice, the lopsided way he smiled, the way his head kept wagging during the long pauses, the way he floated above the facts, knowing there was more to government than facts, and the way he could change direction while saying he was going straight ahead, pulling out of Beirut, getting cozy with Gorby, running up the national debt. The strange thing was, except for the hopeless down-and-outers, the world became a better place under him. The Communists fell apart, except for in Nicaragua, and even there he put them on the defensive. The guy had a touch. Harry dares say, "Under Reagan, it was like anesthesia."

"Ever had an operation? A real operation."

"Not really. Tonsils when I was a kid. Appendix when I was in the Army. They took it out in case I was sent to Korea. Then I was never sent."

"I had a triple bypass three years ago."

"I know, Bern. I remember your telling me. But you look great now."

"When you come out of anesthesia, it hurts like hell. You can't believe you can live with such pain. To get at your heart, they split your whole rib cage open. They crack you open like a coconut. And they pull the best veins they can find out of your thigh. So when you come out of it, your groin's killing you as well as your chest."

"Wow." Harry inappropriately laughs, since while Bernie is talking to him on the cart, Ed, with that pompous fussy setup he has--laying his hands on the club finger by finger like he's doing flower arrangement, and then looking toward the hole five or six times before swinging like he's trying to shake loose cobwebs or a tick in his collar--looks up during the swing so the topped ball scutters into the water, skipping three times before sinking, leaving three interlocking sets of rings on the water. Alligator food.

"Six hours I was on the table," Bernie is urging into his ear. "I woke up and I couldn't move. I couldn't even open my eyelids. They freeze you, so your blood flow is down to almost nothing. I was, like, locked into a black coffin. No. It's like I was the coffin. And then into this darkness comes this creepy voice, with a thick accent, the Pakistani anesthetist."

Joe Gold, with his partner's ball in the water, tries to hit too quickly, to get a ball in play, jerking the club back in two stages like he does and then roundhousing with that flat swing stocky guys tend to have. He pushes the shot off so he catches the pot bunker on the right.

Bernie is doing a high, Pakistani voice. "'Ber-nie, Ber-nie,' this voice says, so, honest to God, I think maybe it's the voice of God, 'operation a success!'"

Harry has heard the story before but laughs anyway. It's a good, scary story about the edge of death.

"'Ber-nie, Ber-nie,'" Bernie repeats, "like it came out of the clouds to Abraham, to go cut Isaac's throat."

Harry asks, "Shall we keep the same order?" He feels he disgraced himself on the previous hole.

"You go first, Angstrom. I think it shakes you up to hit last. Go for it. Show these nudniks how it's done."

This is what Rabbit hoped to hear. He takes a seven iron and tries to think of five things: keeping his head down, keeping his backswing from being too long, moving his hip while the club is still at the top, keeping his downswing smooth and keeping the club face square on the ball, at that point on the sphere where a clockface says 3:15. From the whistly instant way the ball vanishes from the center of his held-down vision, he knows the hit is sweet; they all together watch the dark dot rise, hover that little ghostly extra bit that gives the distance and then drop straight down onto the green, a little to the left but what looks pin high, the ball bouncing right with the slant of the bowl-shaped green.

"Beauty," Ed has to admit.

"How about a mulligan?" Joe asks. "We'll give you one this time."

Bernie asks, pushing himself out of the cart, "What iron was that?"

"Seven."

"Gonna hit 'em like that, my friend, you should use an eight."

"Think I'm past the hole?"

"Way past. You're on the back edge."

Some partner. The old soldier in Harry, the masochistic Christian, respects men like this. It's uncritical love, like women provide, that makes you soft and does you in.

"For me, I think a choked-up six," Bernie says.

But in trying to take something off the shot, he takes off too much and leaves it short, over the water but on the bank where it's hard to take a stance. "Tough chip from there," Harry says, unable to resist a gentle needle. He still blames Bernie for parking the cart so close on that attempted deliberate hook.

Bernie accepts the needle. "Especially after that last shitty chip of mine, huh?" he says, pushing his cut-up, deflated, humpbacked old body into the cart, Harry having slid over into the driver's seat. The guy who's on the green has earned the right to drive. Harry feels momentum building, they're going to cream these creeps. He glides over the-water on an arched wooden bridge with red-rubber treads laid over the planks. "From where you are," Bernie tells him as they get out, "the green slopes down. Hit your putt too hard, you'll slide miles beyond."

Ed, with a ball in the water, is out of it. Bernie's stance on the steep bank is so awkward he whiffs the ball once, shanks it sideways on his next swing and picks up. But sandy Joe Gold, in his element, waggles his feet to plant himself and manages a good blast shot out of the pot bunker. With Bernie's advice preying on his mind, interfering with his own instincts, Harry strokes his long approach putt tentatively and leaves it four feet short. He marks it with a dime while Joe two-putts for his bogey. Joe takes his time and gives Harry too long to study his four-footer. He sees a break, then doesn't see it. In trying to avoid lipping out on the left like he did on the last hole, he loses his par putt, very makable, an inch to the right. "Son of a son of a bitch," he says, frustration pressing from behind his eyes so hard he thinks he might burst into tears. "On in one, and a crappy three putt."

"It happens," Ed says, writing down the four with his trained accountant's primness. "Tie hole."

"Sorry, Bern," Harry says, climbing back into the cart, on the passenger side.

"I screwed you up," his partner says. "Should have kept my yap shut about the green being downhill." He unwraps another cigar and, pushing the pedal, leans back into a long day.

Not Harry's day. The Florida sun seems not so much a single thing overhead as a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination. Even directly under palm trees and right up against the 12-foot pine fences that separate the village from the rest of the world, the sun finds you, reddening the tip of Rabbit's nose and baking his forearms and the back of his nongloved hand, which is dotted with little white bumps of keratosis. He carries a tube of number-15 sunscreen in his golf bag and is always dabbing it on, but the ultraviolet rays get through anyway, cooking his squamous cells into cancer. The three Jews he plays with never use anything and just get a comfortable tan, even the bald top of Bernie's head, smooth as an ostrich egg as he bends over his shots with that awful reverse-shift, squeezed-feet stance of his. Harry feels Bernie's steady, mechanically repeating ineptitude--short shots, chunked chips--as a burden today, since he can't quite carry him, and wonders why somebody who exudes suffering wisdom the way Bernie does never learns a thing about golf or even seems to try. To him, Harry supposes, it's just a game, a way of killing time in the sun at this stage of his life. Bernie was a boy once and then a man making money and children (a carpet business in Queens, two daughters who married nice solid guys and a son who went to Princeton and the Wharton School in Philadelphia and became a hostile-takeover specialist on Wall Street), and now he's at the other end of life's rainbow, and this is what you do: Bernie endures retirement fun in Florida the way he's endured his entire life, sucking that same tired wet-cigar taste out of it. He doesn't see what Harry sees in the game--infinity, an opportunity for infinite improvement. Rabbit doesn't see it himself today. Around the 11th hole--a dog-leg par five that he butchers, slicing his second shot, a four wood, so wildly it winds up in a condo's side yard, between some plastic trash cans and a concrete slab with some rusting steel clothesline poles sunk into it (a German shepherd chained to the clothesline barks at him, lunging toward him so the taut wire sings, and Gold and Silberstein loafing in the cart cackle, and Bernie chomps deeper and looks morose), taking the out-of-bounds drop for a four while the dog keeps barking and barking, trying to hit a three iron so hard he digs six inches behind and sprays sand all over his shoes and into the tops of his socks, pulling the next iron to the left into a bed of parched and shedding azaleas beside the 12th tee, taking a drop for another stroke, skulling the chip clear across the green (all three playing partners keeping a ghastly silence now, shocked, mourning for him, or is it holding in their glee?), plunking the next sand shot against the trap lip so it dribbles back, and picking up in disgust, and even hitting himself on the knee when, after raking, he flips the sand rake to one side--after this hole, the game and day begin to eat him into a state of depression. The grass looks greasy and unreal, every other palm tree is dying from the drought and dropping stiff brown fronds, the condos line every fairway like tall stucco outhouses, and even the sky, the sky where your eyes can usually find something unpolluted, is dirtied by jet trails that spread and wander until they are indistinguishable from God's clouds.

The hours pile on, noon comes and goes, the klieg lights begin to dim, but the heat is turned up higher. They finish at quarter to three, Harry and Bernie $20 down--both sides of a five-dollar Nassau, plus the 18 and a press on the second nine that they lost. "We'll get 'em next time," Harry promises his partner, not really believing it.

"You weren't quite yourself today, my friend," Bernie admits. "You got girlfriend trouble or something?"

Horny, Jews are: He once read a history of Hollywood about their womanizing. Harry Cohn, Groucho Marx, the Warner brothers, they went crazy out there with the sunshine and swimming pools and all the Midwestern shiksas who'd do anything to be movie stars--participate in orgies, blow a mogul while he was talking on the telephone--yet his golf partners are all married to the same women, 40, 50 years, women with dyed hair and big bangles on both wrists who can't stop talking when you see them all dolled up at dinner, Bernie and Ed and Joe sitting smilingly silent beside them, as if all this talking their women do is sex, which it must be: pep, life. How do they do it? Wear life like a suit made to fit exactly. "I guess I told you," Harry tells Bernie, "my son and his family are visiting."

"There's your problem, Angstrom. You felt guilty horsing around with us, you should have been entertaining your loved ones."

"Yeah, entertain 'em. They just got here yesterday and are acting bored already. They want us to live next door to Disney World."

"Take them to Jungle Gardens. Up in Sarasota, down Forty-one from the Ringling Museum. Fern and I go there two, three times a winter and never get bored. I could watch those flamingos sleep for hours--how do they do it? Balanced on one leg two feet long and thinner than my finger." He holds up a finger and it seems thick. "Thinner than a fucking pencil," he swears.

"I don't know, Bernie. When I'm around, my kid acts like he doesn't want my own grandchildren to have anything much to do with me. The little boy, he's four, is pretty much a stranger, but the girl and I could get along. She's almost nine. I was even thinking I should bring her out in a cart sometime and let her try to hit the ball. Or maybe rent a Sunfish, Ed, if your son over at the Bayview could write me up as a guest."

The foursome is having beers and free munchies in Club Nineteen, next to the pro shop, on the bottom floor of Building A of Valhalla Village. The darkness inside--the dark panels and beams in the style of an English pub--is intensified by the subtropical brightness outside, at the round white tables under umbrellas saying Coors. You can hear the splashing from the pool, between buildings A and B, and the throbbing of a generator housed on the other side of the wall, beyond the rest rooms and dart boards and video games. At night, sometimes, Harry imagines he can hear the generator throbbing through all the intervening apartments, carpets, air conditioners, conversations, mattresses and peach-colored hall. Somehow, the noise curves around and clings to the walls and comes in his big sliding window, the crack that's left open to the Gulf air.

"No problem," Ed says, as he totals their scores. "Just show up at the front desk and ask for Gregg Silvers. That's what he calls himself. They'll let you walk through the lobby and downstairs to the changing rooms. I don't advise wearing bathing suits into the lobby; they try to discourage that. Do you have a day I can tell him to expect you?"

Harry gets the impression this may be a realer favor than he thought, a bigger deal than it's worth. "Friday, if ever," he says. "Does Gregg have to know for sure? Tomorrow I thought we'd head up Sarasota way."

"Jungle Gardens," Bernie insists.

"Lionel Train Museum," Joe Gold contributes. "And right across from the Ringling Museum, there's Bellm's Cars and Music of Yesterday, is I think what they call it. Over a thousand music machines, can you imagine? Antique cars from 1897, I never knew there were cars then. You're in the car business, aren't you, Angstrom? You and your boy. You'll both go ape in there."

"I don't know," Harry begins, groping to express the curious cloud Nelson carries with him, that dampens any outing.

"Harry, this is interesting," Ed says. "Giving you a seven, two over par for handicap purposes, on the eleventh, where you picked up, and a courtesy six on the sixteenth, where you put two balls in the water, you scored an even ninety even so. You weren't playing as bad as it looked. Waste a few less drives and long irons and you'll be in the eighties every time."

"I couldn't get my ass into it, I couldn't release," Harry says. "I couldn't let go." He has an unaskable question for these wise Jewish men: How about death? He asks them, "How about that Pan Am jet?"

There is a pause. "It has to be a bomb," Ed says. "When you've got splinters of steel driven through leather luggage and wreckage strewn across fifty miles of Scotland, it has to be a bomb."

Bernie sighs, "It's them again. The Shiiteheads."

"Arabs," Joe says. A patriotic glee lights his wobbling eyes. "Once we got proof, the F-111s'll be flying into Libya again. What we ought to do is go right into Eye-ran and stick it to the ayatollah."

But their tongues are less quick than usual; Harry has made them uneasy, with what he hadn't meant to be a political question. With Jews, everything in the papers comes back to Israel.

"I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?"

"I bet it wakes you up," Bernie says.

"They didn't feel a thing," Ed 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 sea-blue intertwined Vs. Not just dry-roasted peanuts and almonds but pretzel sticks and salted pumpkin seeds and tight curls of something like Corn Crisps, only finer and sharper in the mouth in that blissful instant when the tongue works it 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 most 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? 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 fawnlike young Hispanic wearing an earring and a limp gold chain on one wrist, nods in a frightened 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 Pennsylvania, 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 Ronnie had to drop his membership because of their medical expenses and Cindy Murkett got fat and Webb divorced her so you never saw her anymore. 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 19th-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 says, "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-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 take-away."

That was Bernie talking; Ed Silberstein tells him, "Work on shortening that backswing. 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, Angstrom, like you got some tsuris. Not full-grown yet, not gehakte 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 hot-shots 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 screens. He sees his white fingers, with the big moons on their fingernails, absent-mindedly dabble at the bottom of the bowl of munchies, as if he is trying to pick up the intertwined Vs. 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 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 may at any minute buy another condominium and move to it, or else up and die.

"Rabbit liked Reagan. He liked the foggy voice, the lopsided smile, the way he floated above the facts."