Читать книгу Gettysburg - Kevin Morris - Страница 8

In his dream, John Reynolds Stanhope held the fine and fabulous gun, the giver and taker of America. He held it sideways and ran his hand from the very butt of the stock, over the comb, past the percussion action, along the forty-inch barrel with ramrod underneath, to the tip of the bayonet. It seemed so rudimentary and beautiful now, the same way the soldiers and the generals seem when you look at the gone-to-yellow daguerreotypes. When he closed his eyes, he was with them; they were not of a different world. They were of this world, but they were long gone. In that small difference everything lay. They were not as foreign as they seemed, they were just here long ago. Before we knew the things we know now because of what they went through.

He was semiconscious. It was the flip side of magic hour, the time between day and night when the movie directors say they get the best light. Scenes filmed in that light crackle with life. He peeked with one eye at the television at the foot at the bed and saw his reflection in the flat screen. He had not surrendered to the idea that he couldn’t sleep, so he put his head back on the pillow.

He knew the time between night and morning had a magic hour as well. Night or day, he knew what the directors were talking about. He thought of the films he loved, of British Olympians sprinting along the beach, of gangsters stopping to buy oranges. He wondered if they’d been shot at night or in the morning. It didn’t matter to him. Not as someone caught up in the narrative flow of a story: a viewer, a filmgoer. Or did it matter? Would it cheapen things if you learned that a romantic scene set in the early evening was filmed at five in the morning? He could lie around like this for hours, mind half-alive, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, thinking about fact and fiction.

He opened his eyes. The master bedroom with just him in it. The girls were gone. He looked out the glass doors to his left, to the east, a vast yard—rare in Malibu to have such a yard—surrounded by a canyon creating a rocky amphitheater around the property. It was dry here, even with the beach less than a mile away. He rubbed his forehead and then felt his beard, two months old and thick.

Reynolds found the remote, and the TV came to life. His reflection was overpowered by high-definition graphics. He had entered one of the Lifestyle channel’s six-minute commercial breaks. He squinted. The commercial that was on had a rendering of a male human torso depicted in profile against a graph with the torso’s spine along the x axis. The torso turned slowly to face the viewer as the narrator said, “Do you suffer from abdominal fat?” With that, the stomach grew in the same slow steady pace at which the polar ice cap melts over the earth in films warning of global warming, resulting in a neck-down, waist-up view of a pre-cardiac-arrest man. A quick graphic of the lifetime evolution of Boris Yeltsin’s body.

He walked past the entrance to his wife Stella’s bathroom to his own, smaller bathroom in the back. He looked in the mirror at his own abdomen and saw the resemblance. He stared at his image, as he did every day. He didn’t like waking up any more than sleeping. He had learned to accept this state as well, but some days were worse than others, and with the insomnia this figured to be a bad day. He looked at the bags under his eyes. He surveyed the beard. It was beginning to resemble a patchy coat. Most of his attempts at facial hair had been harebrained schemes, and this one was looking to be more of the same. He tried to decide if it was different this time, whether he could grow it beyond the comfort zone of a well-insured man. He heard lyrics.

Come out West.

It was from a Lucinda Williams song he couldn’t get out of his head, and like many songs, it was having an effect on him long after the last time he’d heard it. He had come west almost without thinking about it. And he had stayed. And here he was. Twenty-five years gone by, a small fortune made, a family built. A wife for his best friend, many good people in his life, a daughter for whom his devotion towered.

It was Friday. Bella was off with her friend Heather, and Stella was on an overnight set visit in Vancouver. They were both coming home today. They expected him to be on a golf weekend in the desert. It was all going as he’d planned. He just didn’t know whether he had the balls to do it. His mind clouded again, before he snapped into purpose.

He headed to the garage. It was overflowing with the necessities of their Malibu life: luggage, beach chairs, surfboards, a horseback-riding helmet, boogie boards, old golf clubs, a croquet set, lacrosse sticks, a softball helmet with a face mask—he could never get used to the softball mask. He mounted a stepladder and reached to the back of the upper shelf and pulled out the hidden long black case. He sat cross-legged on the garage floor to open the bag, removed its contents, and stood up. The first thing that someone watching surveillance video would notice would be the rifle’s length. Standing on its end in front of him it reached his chin. It smelled like high school metal shop. Next, he fixed the bayonet. Reynolds knew a lot about this gun. It weighed nine pounds, and the most expert riflemen could reload and fire it three times in a minute. More than seven hundred thousand had been made at a time before there were paved roads, electricity, or light bulbs. The gun was real, not a cheap facsimile made for folks who didn’t have the money to get a real one. He had chased it for six months until a collector in Seattle had agreed to sell it. The man was in his seventies, and he said it had been his father’s. They had both kept it locked up except for an annual firing and cleaning.

And now it was here in his garage in Malibu. The genuine article. A killing stick. He had no way of knowing where it had been, what action it had seen, but he could tell it was real. He’d seen enough of the rifles to know by the age of the wood, the imperfections of the trigger, the wear on the grooves of the barrel. He detached the bayonet and set it in the case, followed by the rifle. He popped the trunk of his Mercedes and put the long case in.

Next came the wardrobe bag and a small suitcase on rollers. Both were innocuous; it looked like the luggage any middle-aged man would take on a weekend trip with the boys. Inside, though, was the most authentic reproduction of a Union general’s uniform money and Internet searches could yield. Quietly over the past year, he had been acquiring the elements, mainly through eBay, a few from vintage-clothing sites, businesses operated by interested-in-history types. He’d found First Corps tunic and trousers from a buff in Maine, a cap sold on a site based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The perfect riding boots, which he spit polished when no one was home, that he’d overpaid for on an eBay auction.

Inside the house, the phone rang. They still had a landline. Four extensions in total: one each for Stella, Reynolds, Bella, and the housekeeper.

“Hi.” It was Stella.

“Hi,” he said.

“How are you? Did you watch?”

“The Globes? I did. I turned it off.”

“Who thinks that English guy is funny?” Stella said. “Why do they do that?”

It was January, and January was the worst of times in Hollywood: awards season.

“He’s horrible.” The Golden Globes had been on this past Sunday, and they had recorded it on DVR.

“I know. Why do I hate it so much?” she said.

“Horrible people in a fake world making the rest of the world feel excluded,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And we’re not there because we are too old to be relevant anymore?”

She laughed. “OK, you’ve made me feel better.”

“When are you getting back?” he said.

“Leaving in an hour. Are you coming home first or driving straight from the office?”

“From there. We can play nine if we get there by four thirty.”

“OK. I talked to Bella. I’ll take them somewhere for dinner.”

“Did they have fun?”

“They were in Rosarito,” Stella said. “What do you think?”

“OK,” he said. “I’m cringing and hanging up.”

He put a robe on and walked to the front gate to get the papers. The delivery kid, or guy—whoever it was that threw newspapers out of a truck at five thirty in the morning—always tossed the papers same way. They lay right outside the gate at the base of the containing wall that circled the property. The kid must throw them hard and fast, he thought, because they hit the wall and go straight down to the ground. They were always right at the foot of the gate, at the base of the wall, as though placed there, like pitched pennies.

He was a fat guy in the morning, like Tony Soprano. He looked the papers over as he made coffee. He took in the front page of the New York Times, noting the president’s shifting position on clean air and a subcommittee vote on net neutrality. More chaos in Syria. He followed with a story about Connecticut quadruplets admitted by Yale, then skimmed the op-eds, weary though he was of the daily drumbeat of the Times columnists. The LA Times was next: with nothing but a casual look at its front page, he moved on to its business section, which covered Hollywood.

It was a lifelong instinct, this immediate and urgent desire, once he got lucid, to start consuming information. This was the influence of his father, who taught English and read three papers in the morning. Unlike most academics, his father was not into politics or finding news that fed self-righteous anger or kooky theories about politics. His dad read the papers for real estate prices, stock prices, local tax breaks, government auctions, foreclosure sales, and sways in the value of the dollar. He always had a new get-rich-quick strategy that would rocket the family beyond the limits of an English professor’s salary.

They had lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the great battlefield of the Civil War. Their house was right next to the battlefield. Everything in Gettysburg was right next to the battlefield. It dominated life there the way chocolate owned the town of Hershey or the Johnstown Flood dominated Johnstown. His mother was a graduate student when she met his father, Robert Reynolds, then a young professor. Both were single and in their twenties, so the affair was scandal-free. They became the much-loved husband-and-wife team of the Gettysburg College English Department. His dad was the big gun, teaching the survey course, 101, covering Shakespeare to Steinbeck. His mom tended to Jane Austen and ran the Film Club.

English at Gettysburg College was like baseball at Ohio State: not what people came for. While giants in the field of American History came to the school for its proximity to the grounds and sense of place, for the possibility of finding a minié ball with every turning of soil, whether from plowing or touch football. Literature was off to the side, what the devastated turned to. His dad was a gifted teacher, preparing for lectures as if they were Broadway performances, practicing well into the night, his stage voice rumbling from the attic. But his wife and son suffered as Robert blew money on one idea after another, often forcing them to put their plans for the summer or the semester break in abeyance to support him, like vassals to the king.

The summer when he was fourteen, his dad had the idea to purchase a Dairy Queen franchise on Hagerstown Road. Robert depleted their savings account to the tune of ten thousand dollars and used it to buy the exclusive right to sell Dilly Bars in Gettysburg County. When Reynolds expressed his doubts to his mother, she said, “C’mon, it’ll be fun.” The small building was next to the Little Dutch Family Inn, an eighteen-room motel fronted by a big neon windmill. The [No] Vacancy sign was in a jarring red that stood out more as the night came, while the painted figures of the little Dutch boy and girl holding wooden buckets in green grass disappeared.

Now, in Malibu, he shook his head, thinking about how his mother had washed the pots and blenders and ice-cream machine components every night after closing. She would drive Reynolds out to open around two, then returned home or to her office to grade papers for her summer-session courses. Business was completely drive-through, and he started each day with change for a twenty—a ten, two fives and a one—in the register. He read novels and waited for customers, worrying both about the lack of customers and his lack of change.

He got hungry after an hour or so from boredom. All packaging for the hot food had the trademark Brazier emblazoned on it—one of the weirdnesses of the Dairy Queen milieu Reynolds never understood. The brochure from HQ said that DQs served only “Fine Brazier Foods.” Neither his father nor his mother could explain how Brazier fit into the Dairy Queen picture. He spent hours wondering how it worked, whether Brazier was part of the Dairy Queen family. For that matter, he wondered whether the Gettysburg-Hagerstown franchise and, ultimately, his family—Drs. Robert and Susan Stanhope and son, Reynolds—were themselves members of the Dairy Queen family, when it came right down to it.

He loved popping Brazier frozen hamburger patties into the mini-oven. His dad hadn’t bought the standard grill that DQ franchise rules called for, which made Reynolds nervous. The rolls came in plastic bags with a slice of cheese inside, which you weren’t supposed to open before heating. When the timer went off, he took the meat patty and the plastic-wrapped bun out with metal DQ tongs. He tore the plastic open, doused each side of the bun with ketchup from one of the squeeze bottles his mother made him wash out and refill each day, separated the melted cheese from the wrapper, and put the whole combination together. The burger roll browned a bit at the corners and its sesame seeds toasted when he did it just right. He closed the sliding-screen service window, put his feet up, and watched the cars drift by, knowing in his gut they wouldn’t stop and worrying, there in the shadow of the windmill, that his father’s Don Quixote syndrome would doom them all. To make matters worse, he was eating up any pitiful profits, one frozen Brazier cheeseburger at time.

Robert arrived at five each day to check in on things. He asked about business and fretted when Reynolds showed him how little there had been. “What is wrong with these people? They’re Americans for Christ’s sake. And they’re tourists. And it’s hot outside. Why wouldn’t you stop for ice cream?” Around six the old man would calm down and sit behind a desk in the back corner, away from the service window where Reynolds waited for customers. Robert would go through the inventory ordering forms provided by Dairy Queen corporate and make sure they were supplied with soft-serve mixture and cups and straws and strawberry topping. He brought Whitman or Wordsworth or some other dusty book with him. They had a transistor radio, and as the sun went down they listened to the Phillies game. Like a valve loosening, Reynolds felt his dad drift away as the dinner hour passed, free verse and sonnets sweeping him away.

Susan Stanhope would arrive at seven-thirty, with dinner in a Crock-Pot, or sandwiches, or salads or other foodstuffs in Tupperware containers. “Comin’ in with Fine Brazier Foods,” she said, to try to cheer his father up, and most days it worked. They were corny like that. On her birthday that summer, his dad wrote on her card, “To my once and forever Dairy Queen.” Post-cheeseburger, Reynolds wasn’t hungry. So his parents ate together at the little desk amid the invoices and bills, laughing about faculty gossip, while Reynolds manned the window by the windmill, on the lookout for an army that never came.

From that summer on, Reynolds spent his free time reading books. He was interested in everything. He read nonfiction for fun, eating up biographies and business and sports books in one or two sittings. But his main passion was fiction—it went back to his days as a kid. He loved the Pennsylvania authors, especially John O’Hara and Updike. He read about the lives of all the writers, and worried that he liked their life stories as much, even more than, their fiction.

Stella and Bella knew Reynolds’s true nature was artistic. Norman knew it too. But to everyone else he was a lawyer—Norman’s lawyer. And he was an excellent lawyer. Deep down, he had always felt that practicing law was a temporary thing, a stopover he was making to earn some money until he moved on to something else more to his liking. Lawyering was not in his heart. But this had a different effect than he thought it would. He found he was a very good negotiator and, because he was more aggressive than the opposing side, more willing to walk away. He was not attached, not worried all the time, not scared—after all, this was not what he wanted to do. In spite of all the screaming and bravado that went on between Hollywood lawyers, the real secret was indifference.

Reynolds made a lot of money and changed jobs, and in that new job he made a crazy amount of money. The same happened to Stella—who went from assistant to producer and landed a giant production deal at Paramount, where she produced a spy picture with Brad Pitt that was now shooting the third sequel. Reynolds and Stella had become very rich from their combined success, and for twenty years now when he talked to the accountants to ask if he could afford one scheme or another, the answer was yes, and he thought of his father. It made him well up, and soon he was crying.

Reynolds thought of his dad’s morning papers, which Reynolds picked up when Robert was done. When he was a boy, his father read the Gettysburg paper, the Pottstown Gazette, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. On Sundays his father would bring home the Philadelphia Inquirer with a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts. Reynolds read about Nixon and Watergate, about fights in the Philadelphia City Council, about Abscam. He knew everything about sports, from the NBA to Penn State football to the Gettysburg College varsity lacrosse standings. He read movie reviews and book reviews and comics. He could tell you the names of the little kids in Family Circus and the college kids in Doonesbury.

There was nothing new in this morning’s papers, just gradations of newness, this not being one of the days when a few actual new things happen, a fresh story line that, depending on the force of the wave, spawned days, weeks, or months of further stories. He sat at the French farm table and picked at a bran muffin, the kind of sawdust food the girls ate for breakfast. He became wistful. I am, he thought, a sneered-at character from a book: a well-insured man standing by an SUV, dropping my kid off at a college on the hill. As you look at that long line of other people dropping their kids off, you don’t think that they have stories, are interesting, have had life happen to them. They are just blank, boring faces. But the truth is you are the same, just like anyone else in the line. What about that? Turn around, and you’re not that man who has done things. Turn around and look up, and you’re an insured man with secrets and regrets.

Reynolds walked outside and surveyed the Astroturf putting green in his backyard, situated where the Santa Monica Mountains stop just short of the beach in southern Malibu. The putting green was the size of a volleyball court. Reynolds placed ten balls in a circle, ten yards in diameter around the pin.

“Chambersburg,” Reynolds said. He brought the club head to a backswing and hit though the ball with a click. Without waiting for the result, he moved to the right and set up over the next, “Emmitsburg.” Click. Move, set up. “Baltimore Pike.” Click. “Taneytown.” He pronounced it the correct way: “Taw-ney Town.” Next came Biglerville, then York. He holed it at Hanover. Table Rock. Hagerstown. Click, click, click. A circle of routes leading to the goal. He looked at his phone.

“Get up fat boy,” It was a text from Jim Mulligan, his neighbor.

Reynolds thumbed a response. “I’m up. Where U?”

“Coming over in five.”

Reynolds set his circle of putts again and was beginning when a voice called to him. “To be a truly bad golfer you have to be a truly bad putter.” It was Mulligan, who appeared with two paper cups of coffee, the green of the label matching the green of the grass. Mulligan did not use cardboard hand protectors.

“Shut up. I’m concentrating,” Reynolds said.

Mulligan watched and then rendered a verdict. “It could be worse.”

“I’m done. Let’s go in.”

Mulligan wore professional-caliber sports gear: a San Diego Chargers rain-resistant poncho and mesh running shorts with a pair of those nylon leggings that look like tights that athletes and amateurs who think they are athletes wear to work out. He moved with the tanned energy of someone predetermined by good genes to be slim and in shape.

“What happened to you?” Mulligan said, as he took the lid off.

“What?”

“You were supposed to meet me. To run.”

“What?”

“Yes. We said it Tuesday.”

“Shit. Sorry.”

“What’s with that beard?”

“Trying something new. Sorry, I was up on Tuesday and everything,” Reynolds said.

“Don’t worry about it. I knew you’d forget.” Mulligan looked around. “No girls?”

“Stella went away for the night, and Bella is coming back from Mexico.” Reynolds headed to the kitchen. “What do you want to eat? We have these awful fucking muffins.”

“Just some water.”

Reynolds returned and handed him a glass. He gestured at Mulligan’s legs. “Really, man? With the yoga pants and everything?”

“Shut up,” Mulligan said. He worked the remote until ESPN’s college football coverage came on. “I’m watching the Washington game later.” Mulligan oriented his outlook on sports, and to a certain extent on life, in relation to UCLA football. The world divided into camps. Either you were for UCLA or you weren’t. Mulligan was born in Connecticut and had been a monster linebacker and fullback at high school near Hartford. After college at UCLA, he blew through business school at Stanford before returning to LA, where he became an investment banker at the time when junk bonds and leveraged buyouts were making investment bankers lots of money and Beverly Hills was part show biz, part West Coast, and part Wall Street. Mulligan put together banking deals between banks, as far as Reynolds understood it.

Reynolds loved Mulligan. When Reynolds and Stella and five-year-old Bella had moved to the neighborhood, they’d felt the usual isolation from their neighbors. Reynolds had struggled enough with the oppression of Hollywood types when they’d lived in Brentwood, and when they’d moved here, to Madera, the horsey and secluded estate-filled canyon tucked just east of Surfrider Beach, he’d realized they could be in for more of the same. There were five houses on their road; two were occupied by movie stars and two by directors of special-effects-driven event pictures. Mulligan and Lucy lived a half mile away with their twin girls, who were the same age as Bella. The girls became close and the parents followed course, and before long the two families were very close, enjoying a constant flow of communication and no-permission-necessary sleepovers.

Reynolds and Mulligan became friends because of, rather than despite, the lack of business intersection. After years of obsessing about everything and everyone in Hollywood—the comings and goings of studio executives, the latest firings of talent agents by actors, how “unwatchable” or “unreleasable” a new movie was—Reynolds found talking to Mulligan as fun and relaxing as taking a Xanax. Mulligan and Lucy were removed from Hollywood, lived a different life, and had different politics and social circle. They belonged to the LA Country Club, which was so Waspy that no one from Hollywood was even allowed to apply. That said it all.

Reynolds looked at Mulligan’s football outfit again. “Um … Jim … the UCLA-Washington game was in November. It’s January.”

“So what,” Mulligan said, “it’s a recording but I watch it like it’s live. Come over and watch with me. Lucy and the girls are gone for the weekend.”

“Nah, thanks. I got to go do something.”

Mulligan studied him. “Like what? What do you have to do that’s more important than watching football with me?”

Reynolds did not want to repeat the phony golf trip story to Mulligan. “Just a thing I got to go do.”

“What, like a kid thing?”

“Sort of. Well, not really.”

Reynolds thought about how the two men existed within a zone of familiarity that in Los Angeles can be shared only by guys who have played—really played—contact sports at a major level. There was an exclusivity to the way they could deal with each other that in previous eras was shared by men who had been in the service and fought together. Though Mulligan had more of the kill-or-be-killed banker’s personality and Reynolds was more easygoing, they both knew the other could take a hit. And this knowledge manifested in respect, and that respect led to true friendship.

“What are you up to?” Mulligan said, not satisfied with what he’d heard.

After months of secrecy, Reynolds decided to open up. “Let me show you something,” he said. He grabbed his iPad, typed in a few words, and found a YouTube video. Holding it where Mulligan could see, he hit Play. The chords of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” started to play over a shot of an old American flag, the kind with many fewer stars, blowing in the wind. Then it cut to a title card: The Battle of Gettysburg, Enchino California.

Mulligan didn’t say anything as he watched the six-minute video of guys with heavy beards dressed up as soldiers fighting back and forth. Interspersed were still shots of these impersonators around campfires, in bleached white tents, drinking from tin cups, and shooting rifles.

When the video ended, Mulligan stared at Reynolds. “Jesus,” he said.

Reynolds smiled back at him, a little too eager.

After a moment, Mulligan said, “Wait. You’re not …” Reynolds nodded, smiling. “Yup,” he said.

Mulligan started to get up from his chair. “You’re going to do it? Like … be in it?”

“It’ll be kind of fun. It’ll be funny.”

“You’re signing up for it?”

“I’ve signed up for it,” Reynolds said.

“In Enchino?” Mulligan said.

“This weekend. Starts today.”

“You drive out there?”

“Yup.

Mulligan paused, ducked his head and rubbed his hair with both hands, and then stepped in close and looked at his friend. “Reynolds,” he said, “Let me be very straightforward with you.” His hands were now clasped in front of him as though in prayer. “No fucking way in hell, you fucking jackass.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“Look, I know you’re from back around there somewhere …”

“I’m from there, literally.” Reynolds said. “Gettysburg. You know. My name? Remember? John Reynolds.”

“Who’s John Reynolds?” Mulligan said.

“Me. My name, remember? It’s the guy I’m named after.”

“Right, right. Sorry. The soldier?”

“He was a general.”

“Right. Was he, what, your ancestor?”

“No, butthead, I’m just named after him—my dad just liked him. He was very cool.” Reynolds could see Mulligan was struggling. “He was shot at Gettysburg. I was thinking, you know, that I could, I don’t know, that I can honor him.”

Mulligan did not seem to be getting any more sympathetic.

“Look,” Reynolds said, “I know it’s, like, not exact. The event takes place out here, for one thing, in California and not in Pennsylvania.”

“No, Reynolds, it’s not exact.”

Reynolds looked away. “I don’t know. It’s where I’m from, you know?”

“No man, I don’t know,” Mulligan said. He waited for Reynolds to bring his eyes back to him. “From there, whatever. Doesn’t matter. You have to understand something. We—you and me—we are normal people. We have normal families. We play golf, watch sports, lease foreign cars. This thing you’re talking about, this is weird. Not our kind of weird. Our kind of weird is being left-handed, or rooting for the Bengals, or some shit. This, this Civil War reenactment kind of thing is for serious nuts. Whatever is going on with you, you have to stifle these thoughts, and whatever you do, don’t vocalize anything. Tell me, fine. But don’t fucking repeat this. Have you told anyone else?”

“No.”

“Thank God. Because given your background, people will pigeonhole you with lightning speed as nothing more than one of these bearded kooks. They’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, Reynolds, he grew up with that kind of thing. He’s like an avid reenactor. I’ve heard he flies around the country doing it.’ Next thing you know, it’s all over. You have a lifetime tattoo on your neck just below your jaw that says ‘For the Union’ or something. Is that what you want for your family?”

“You don’t want to go, then? I know it’s kind of last minute, but I thought maybe …”

“No, I don’t want to go.” Mulligan stood up and made like an umpire calling safe. “No one is going to go. Not you, not me. Get it out of your head.”

Reynolds broke into a smile, like he had been joking. “All right, relax.”

Mulligan smiled back. “Say it, dickhead. Promise me.”

“OK, whatever. I promise.”

“All right. Let’s go out back and putt.”

They walked through the kitchen, where Mulligan picked up one of the muffins and took a bite. “Jesus Christ,” he said, throwing it into the trash can. “Really, Reynolds. You’re a grown damn man. How are you going to get control of your life if you can’t get control of your own breakfast?”

Once outside, Mulligan asked, “How’s business?”

“You know,” said Reynolds. “There’s show, and there’s business.”

Mulligan picked up Reynolds’s putter from the grass and took his stance over an eight-footer. “Hey, how’s that Gargantor? I kind of want to see it.”

“I heard it’s unwatchable,” Reynolds said.

Mulligan snorted. “Such a fucking snob.”

“Hey, who’s your insurance guy?” Reynolds asked.

Mulligan kept putting. “For what?”

“I don’t know. Life.”

“Life insurance?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t have life insurance?”

“Of course I have life insurance. But I read that you can do it like an investment.”

Mulligan looked up. “Who’s selling you life insurance policies as an investment? Tell me you didn’t do that.”

“I didn’t do anything. I just want to know who your guy is.”

Mulligan handed him his putter. “OK, big boy. I got to go get ready for the game.”

“It’s in two hours,” Reynolds said. “What do you do, get into a uniform? Put a helmet on when the game starts?”

“Funny,” Mulligan said, not smiling. “I’ll send you my insurance guy’s name.”

He jogged across the lawn, thumbs by his waist and up, just like a wide receiver, and was gone. Reynolds, alone now on the turf, in shorts and sandals, lined three golf balls up on the turf and tried to focus. Golf was just about being consistent. Stroke it the same each time. He had a perverse relationship with consistency. He wanted to wake up every day in a different place, but he hated flying. He wanted variety, yet as he aged he found himself preferring a morning routine: newspapers, coffee, information gathering. He had a dream job, but he wanted to quit. His phone buzzed.

It was Mulligan. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, why?” said Reynolds.

“I don’t know, you’re fucking buying life insurance, talking about Civil War impersonations, acting crazy in general. What’s this all about?”

“Nothing. It’s Civil War reenactments. The people are reenactors.”

“Glad that we’ve got that straight,” said Mulligan.

“Let me ask you something. Do you remember the name of the first Playmate you loved? I mean, like really loved?”

“Wow, you’re completely insane today.”

“Just answer. Don’t think.”

“Patty McGuire. August seventy-seven.”

“Ooh, good one,” said Reynolds. “She married McEnroe or something.”

“Jimmy Connors.”

“Right. OK. You answered my question. What time is your game? Maybe I can get there.”

“It’s at one sharp. I wish you would come. You’re squirrelly.”

“All right. Later.”

With Mulligan off the line, Reynolds put the golf balls in his pocket and looked around. He was a well-insured fat man putting outside his mansion. The house was beautiful. It was a single-story Mediterranean with a red-tile roof and two ancient oak trees in the yard. A two-bedroom guesthouse with lounge chairs covered in terry cloth sat on the side. He walked toward the pool, thinking of a swim. But he needed to get ready: he had breakfast with Norman at ten thirty. He saw a copy of Vogue on one of the poolside recliners. On the cover was a dark-haired beauty with a red hat and black-mesh veil, looking like Audrey Hepburn crossed with one of those French actresses with multiple names that ran together who seemed to erupt into stardom every few years. The kind of ageless, unattainable woman who would reemerge later, now Reynolds’s age, doing art films with the New Wave directors who were still around, married to the president of France or to one of those dashing, uncompromising writers living on the Left Bank in a fabulous, rambling apartment full of books.

He went inside to dress.