David Wallace - Oblivion

Fortunately, Hope’s stepfather and myself had just completed the ‘front’ nine and were washing our balls in the Tenth tee’s device when the thunderstorm broke, and I was able to get him into the Club-house before the worst of the wind and the rain of the storm commenced, and to get the cart checked back in while my stepfather-in-law dried off, changed clothes and telephoned his wife about another adjustment in his morning schedule due to our having gotten ‘in’ only nine holes. The old fellow had originally wanted to tee off at almost dawn, and I had found myself unable to explain why this could represent a possibly untenable hardship without opening the whole ‘can of worms’ of the conflict in front of Hope, who was there at the prior evening’s restaurant’s table as we finalized arrangements; and now, in the Club-house vestibule, there was an air of, as it were, ‘triumphant’ grievance in the retired M.D.’s posture at the bank of phones when I found him there, freshly changed except for his visor and spikes, which he had also worn when driving us to the Raritan Club at 7:40 A.M., insisting on our taking his red Saab coupe pace the fact that it was my own vehicle which had the ‘Member’ parking sticker, resulting in administrative delays in parking which caused us to miss our scheduled ‘Tee time,’ adding to the incompleteness of our round.

Then we were seated together, Hope’s stepfather and myself, at a window-side table in the club’s 19th Hole Room, picking small salty things out of the table’s bowl as we waited for Jack Bogen’s youngest daughter to bring the draft lagers which ‘Father’ (which is what Hope, together with all of her ‘true’ and ‘step-’ siblings and their respective spouses, addressed him as, though I myself had my own Father in Wilkes Barre, and, in actual practice, made a point of attempting to avoid addressing Dr. Sipe directly whenever possible) had ordered. The old septuagenarian had again made a point of referring to a draft Feigenspan lager as ‘[a] P.O.N.,’ and I had therefore had to explain the slang term’s origins to Audrey Bogen while ‘Father’ examined his German wrist watch and held it to one ear, expressing concern over the rainstorm’s moisture damage and referring once more to the watch’s retail price. Heavy, torrential rain struck the 19th Hole Room’s large ‘bay window’ and ran down the leaded panes in lustrous sheets which overlapped complexly, and the sound on the glass and canvas awnings was much like a mechanized or ‘automated’ Car wash; and, with all of the fine, imported wood and dim light and scents of beverages and after shave and hair oil and fine, imported tobaccos and men’s damp sports wear, the 19th Hole felt both warm and cozy and ‘snug’ and yet also somewhat over-confined, not unlike the lap of a dominant adult. It was approximately then that a fresh wave of disorientation and, in a manner of speaking, distorted or ‘altered’ sensory perception from nearly seven months of severe sleep disturbance struck once more, as it had on the Fourth fairway with such embarrassing results, the symptoms and sensations of which were nearly impossible to describe, except perhaps to say that when these periods hit they were not unlike a cerebral earthquake or ‘tsunami,’ an, as it were, ‘neural protest’ or ‘-revolt’ against the conditions of emotional stress and chronic sleep deprivation which they had been forced to function under. At the present time, everything in the 19th Hole’s respective colors seemed suddenly to brighten uncontrollably and become over-saturant, the visual environment appeared to faintly pulse or throb, and individual objects appeared, paradoxically, both to recede and become far-away and at the same time to come into an unnatural visual focus and become very, very precisely configured and lined, not unlike scenes in a Victorian oil. (Hope and her younger stepsister, Meredith, had once co-managed a Gallery together in Colts Neck.) The Raritan Club’s distinctive escutcheon and motto, for instance, appeared both to recede and come into an almost excruciant focus on ‘the Hole’’s opposite wall, beneath a perceptually tiny stuffed tarpon whose every imbricate scale seemed outlined or limned in an almost ‘Photo realist’ detail. There was the more quotidian dizziness and nausea, also. I gripped the small maple table’s ‘burled’ or beveled sides in a show of distress as ‘Father’ pored over the contents of the snack bowl, touching the contents of the bowl with his finger as he stirred them about. It was then at which I tried to bring up in conversation to Dr. Sipe (Sipe being my wife’s original or ‘maiden’ name), in some kind of ‘male-’ or ‘familial’ confidence, the strange and absurdly frustrating marital conflict between Hope and myself over the issue of my so-called ‘snoring.’

Whereupon: ‘Do not even take up my time in mentioning this, as any man knows what an absurd and trivial issue it is compared to many other marital conflicts and problems. In other words, “de minimis non curat,” or, the whole matter is, ultimately, beneath my notice ’—for such was the gist or ‘thrust’ of the dismissive hand gesture which Hope’s stepfather made in response to my broaching of this delicate subject, making the derisive gesture which all of my wife’s other siblings still associate with him from throughout their youths, and which her eldest stepbrother, Paul, a successful entrepreneur in automated, out-sourced Medical and Dental billing, can imitate so uncannily to this day when our families all get together over the Holiday season at Paul and his wife Theresa’s extraordinary vacation home in Sea Girt, where the Winter surf booms against the rocks of the light-house tower which the Coast Guard closed once G.P.S. or ‘satellite’ navigation rendered its functions redundant, and where all of the both ‘true’ and ‘step-’ siblings and their spouses and families will gather in Norwegian sweaters with insulated thermi of hot cider on the basalt outcroppings amid gulls’ pulsing cries to watch the booming surf and the distant lights of the Point Pleasant ferry moving north-ward up the Inter Coastal Waterway towards Staten Island, the vistas all iron greys and profound maroons and, privately to myself, desolate in the extreme. Consciously or otherwise, it is a hand gesture ideally designed to make its recipient feel like an otiose moron or bore, and ‘Father’’s feelings about myself and my place in the overall ‘family dynamic’ had never been what one would call well disguised. Audrey Bogen, whom our own Audrey had played closely with as small children before Jack Bogen’s affairs had unraveled and their lives took such dramatically different paths, and was now already an ‘unwed’ mother and a career beverage waitress at the Raritan Club’s 19th Hole (she was, to many of the nubile adolescents in our own Audrey’s peer circle, a kind of cautionary tale, one of her children being plainly inter-racial), now appeared with our Feigenspan lagers on a small, oaken blonde-wood tray, and Hope’s stepfather exercised a prerogative exclusive to men of advanced age with young women, which was to look frankly and speculatively at the young, voluptuous waitress’s face, uniform and physical body as she set down the frosted steins and stated her intentions to bring us more snack mix. ‘Father’’s advanced age and physical senescence, in other words, making the frankness of his gaze — which, in Wilkes Barre during my own youth, was termed ‘Look[ing] her over’—appear ingenuous, child-like and apparently almost ‘innocent’ or harmless to young women instead of salacious or lewd. This was a quality (or, as it were, lack of it) which I myself was, of course, all too conscious or aware of, since, as our own Audrey had entered the adolescence whose onset, in contemporary times’ girls, seems to become earlier all the time, and had physically ‘matured’ or (in my wife’s phrase) ‘fill[ed] out,’ so also, of course, had the other members of the peer group whom she ‘hung’ around with or brought to the house or along on seaside vacations and\or inland canoe trips in June, July or early August; and, in the case of some of the more prematurely ‘mature’ or voluptuous of these peers, the conflict between the natural urge or instinctual drive to look at them as would any adult, ‘red-blooded’ man, v. the obvious social restrictions erected by my role as their friend’s adoptive father, became, in some cases, so awkward or painful that I could scarcely bring myself to look at or scarcely even to acknowledge them at all, a phenomenon which our Audrey, not surprisingly, rarely even noticed, but which sometimes vexed Hope to the point that once or twice, during marital arguments, she would mock my pained confusion, and would aver that she’d prefer it — or the term she used might more aptly have been that she would ‘respect’ it more — if I would simply, openly ogle or leer rather than the stricken, affectedly casual avoidance which I feigned as if I expected it to fool anyone with eyes in their head as they watched my sad pantomime with pity and disgust. Because of the severe sleep disturbance, discord with Hope and trouble in my Dept. of the company for which I served as Assistant Systems Supervisor (which provided out-sourced data and document storage facilities and systems for a number of small- and mid-sized insurance providers in the Mid-Atlantic region), my chronic distress had reached the point at which sometimes I felt near tears, which, of course, in the 19th Hole with Hope’s stepfather, would be an unthinkable happen-stance. Sometimes, often while driving, I feared that I was going to have an infarction. Next, in a predictable yet far more disturbing stage of the wave of disorientation, came the appearance of a strange, static, hallucinatory tableau or mental ‘shot,’ ‘scene,’ Fata morgana or ‘vision’ of a public telephone in an airport or commuter rail terminal’s linear row or ‘bank’ of public phones, ringing. Travelers are hurrying laterally past the row of phones, some bearing or pulling ‘carry on’ luggage and other personal possessions, walking or hurrying past while the telephone, which remains at the center of the view of the scene or tableau, rings on and on, persistently, but is unanswered, with none of the ‘bank’ of phones’ other phones in use and none of the air travelers or commuters acknowledging or even so much as glancing at the ringing phone, about which there is suddenly something terribly ‘moving’ or poignant, forlorn, melancholic or even foreboding, an endlessly ringing and unanswered public phone, all of which appears or seems to occur both endlessly and in, as it were, ‘no-time,’ and is accompanied by an incongruous odor of saffron.