“You’re cutting down trees?” Reese asks, gasping only slightly but feeling a sudden urge to shake his body violently.
“I hate them,” Peggy says. “They’re always dropping needles and oozing stuff.”
“That’s sap.”
“Whatever, it creeps me out. It sticks to the lawn furniture.”
“Trees are dying due to development and smog,” Reese protests, feeling the wine heating his face. “Trees can’t survive surrounded by concrete and paving stones! We can’t survive!”
“Whoa,” Scott says. “Why don’t you tell us how you really feel.”
“I’m not cleaning off those chairs another year,” Peggy insists.
“Five thousand’s a bit steep I would say,” Scott comments.
“I don’t care. I want a deck.” The cats meow and Peggy speaks to them. “You’d like a deck too, wouldn’t you, Lulu and Ricki, so you can warm your tumtums in the sun.”
“Did you hear about that guy who stabbed some driver with his car keys?” Scott asks. “He said the guy was driving too slowly. He’s being charged with assault with a weapon, property damage, assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest.”
“You get psychotic around slow drivers,” Peggy snipes.
“Yeah, but I don’t get out and stab them.”
Over dessert Scott tells of one of his cases; a man suing a strip club, claiming he was injured by a “reckless” exotic dancer who kicked him in the head.
“You’re making that up,” Wilda says.
“I kid you not. He’s seeking damages from the club, claiming it was negligent in not posting signs warning the public of the risk of sitting too close to the stage. He was just sitting there minding his own business when she swung around a pole and kicked him. Fractured his nose.”
“My heart bleeds,” Wilda says.
“What was he doing in that scuzzbar anyway?” Peggy asks. “Any man who goes to one of those joints deserves a kick in the head.”
“He was lonely,” Scott says, “was just looking for a good time.”
“All can be forgiven in the quest for a good time,” Reese says, wine pulsing where his blood should be. “Destroy Earth, Mars, whatever’s required, as long as we’re having a good time!” He can’t believe he’s speaking like this when he has resolved not to, to stop scaring his children. He must stop scaring his children.
They all look at him. Wilda Mims smiles. Peggy begins to clear dishes.
“I’m going to a golf day tomorrow,” Reese says in an attempt at normalcy, remembering that, in the event of a divorce, he may require Peggy and Scott as character witnesses.
“Lucky bastard,” Scott says. “Some fundraising thing?”
Reese nods.
“Do yourself a favour, Reesie,” Peggy advises. “Don’t start telling them how much water it takes to keep the green green, or how many pesticides they use and how it’s killing them through their golf shoes.”
“It’s a bit of a turnoff,” Scott agrees.
“Just try to have a good time,” Peggy says.
As Reese leaves them on their pressure-treated, carcinogen-emitting front porch, he knows he will never be invited there again.
Peggy waves. “Take care, Reesie.”
“Keep it real,” Scott says.
After a near-death experience with a white stretch limo, Reese, cycling in slow motion, tries to remember who he was seventeen years ago, driving Greenpeace canvassers around in an unheated van. To pay for gas he would buy beer and sell it for two bucks a bottle to the canvassers. At the end of the night, inebriated, all seemed sublime to him, and possible. Seventeen years later, inebriated, nothing seems sublime, or possible. Being without expectation should be freeing. The problem is the children. What happens to the children?
Annoyed, Sterling will not permit him to drive the golf buggy because Reese was late to register and did not bring his own clubs. When Reese explained that he didn’t own any, Sterling said, “You were supposed to rent them.” Reese could not help noticing Sterling’s golf bag bulging with clubs. “You’re not using mine, boyo,” Sterling said. “It’s against the rules.”
“Who’s rules?”
“USGA. We can’t share clubs unless we’re a team.”
“Can’t we be a team?”
“Not on your life. Buck up. Go rent a set.”
Plodding back to the clubhouse, Reese wondered if this is what we have come to, a world in which each man must own his own house, car, extension ladder, and golf clubs.
On returning, weighted with clubs, he again offered to drive the buggy because he felt it would free him of the obligation to converse. When he admitted his preference for walking, he noted a certain huffiness from Sterling and the players in the other buggy. Apparently, all must go in the buggy, with their own clubs, their own tees and golf balls, and feign amusement at “hooter” jokes.
Teeing off proves easy — driving the ball down the freeway and onto the green. Banging the ball into holes is another matter. The prospect of eighteen holes causes sweat to drip from Reese’s nose. He swings repeatedly, digging up turf. Dirt lands in his eye. Sterling, sniffing for business, bonds with the man with hooter humour who owns a chain of dollar stores. “The mark-up would knock your socks off,” the man says. “People’ll buy anything for a buck.”
Roberta is continuing to ignore him; Gwyneth Proudley, the child psychologist, left a message saying that she would “be willing” to meet with him if he felt that there were “issues” to discuss. She sounded weary, as though returning the calls of fathers accused of molesting their children is a task she would prefer to do without. Reese hurriedly dialled her number, but was thrown again into her voice mail.
Sterling and the dollar store magnate lose interest in watching Reese fumble with his clubs when they discover they both own sailboats. As they compare their yachts’ prominent features, the magnate’s buggy partner offers pointers to Reese in heavily Chinese-accented English, demonstrating when his vocabulary runs out. Reese, hungover and sleep-deprived, rolls his neck to release the tension. He feels the phantom pain from his missing children — his severed limbs — constantly. What would Gwyneth Proudley make of this metaphor? Would she say, “Your children are not an extension of you”? Betsy keeps intruding on his thoughts. And Elena, and Roberta, and Avril Leblanc. Why all these women? The fact that he’s thinking about them indicates that they have power over him. Roberta has justifiable power, but Elena’s dead, his mother’s a nicotine junky, and Avril Leblanc doesn’t bear thinking about. Avril Leblanc is the kind of woman he avoids, who talks about karma and smells of patchouli. Even the non-reactive upstairs tenant keeps lounging around his temporal lobes. Reese tossed the chicken carcass into the backyard hoping that, in between West Side Story numbers, the tenant would stroll in the yard, stumble over the chicken, and scream herself to death. But she didn’t leave her deck. The stench of her sunscreen wafted into his window. And the hum continues. Reese has phoned and spoken to much voice mail at Toronto Hydro, eventually contacting Roman Derbish, a supervisor who joked, “Why do transformers hum? Because they don’t know the words.” When Reese made no comment, Roman said he would “look into it.” And the delinquent boys who live next door entertain themselves by dropping garbage into Reese’s recycling bins. When the bins aren’t available, they litter on the lawn. They play street