David Wallace - Oblivion

Hope’s stepfather, a career Medical executive for Prudential Insurance, Inc. — or, ‘The Rock,’ as it is often popularly known — as his own father before him evidently was, as well, as well as being a ‘Fourth Ward’ historical district native born and bred, knew Feigenspan lager by its original trademark, ‘Pride of Newark’ (or, ‘P.O.N.’), and made rather a point of referring to it in no other way, also affecting to brush across his upper lip with a knuckle after drinking, in the way of the city’s ‘working-’men, reaching then into a pocket of his vest and producing his cigar case and clip, as well as his slim, modernistic gold lighter, a gift from his wife (and accordingly inscribed), and commencing the ritual of preparing to smoke an expensive Cohiba cigar with his draft lager, gesturing peremptorily in the direction of the bar for an ash-tray, at which juncture I noted once more how exceedingly thin, sallow and, as it were, escharotic or flaky the flesh of his left wrist and hand in the air appeared. His ears, which had always been quite large or protrusive, were flushed from recent exertion. When asked if, upon reflection, he thought a cigar this early in the day was perhaps such a good idea, Dr. Sipe, who was due to turn age 76 this coming July 6th (his birth stone was known to be ‘the Ruby’), responded that the sole indicator of his desiring my input on his personal habits would consist in his explicitly coming to me and requesting it, at which I cleared my throat slightly and shrugged or smiled, avoiding Audrey Bogen’s dark (our own Audrey’s being grey-green or, in certain lights, ‘Hazel’) eyes as she placed on the table a small bowl of very shiny nuts and an ash-tray of clear glass on whose bottom was reproduced the Raritan Club’s escutcheon, which Dr. Sipe pulled closer and rotated slightly to satisfy some obscure criteria in his ritual for enjoying a cigar. Twice already, I had yawned so violently that a popping noise and sudden, as it were, ‘stabbing’ pain manifested just beneath my left ear. ‘Father,’ whose physical health’s minutiae were a topic of endless colloquy among his different children, had apparently suffered a number of tiny, highly localized strokes over the previous several years — or, in the language of Health Plan underwriting, ‘Transient ischemic accidents’—which Hope’s younger brother, ‘Chip’ (whose actual given name is Chester) had confirmed, in the bland, almost affectless or subdued way evidently characteristic of practicing Neurologists everywhere, were almost ‘Par’ for the ‘course’ for a septuagenarian male of Dr. Sipe’s history and condition, and were, evidently, individually of little account, producing little more in the way of symptomology than transient dizziness or perceptual distortion. Empirically, the evident result of this was that ‘Father’ was now one of the particular sort of well to do elderly (or, as some prefer, ‘Senior’) men who appear well preserved and even still somewhat distinguished from a certain distance away, but whose eyes, on closer proximity, reveal a subtle lack of focus, and whose facial expression or affect appears to be, in some subtle but unmistakable way, ‘off,’ resulting in a perpetual ‘queer look’ or mien which sometimes frightened his younger grandchildren. (This notwithstanding the fact that our own Audrey, now 19 and Dr. Sipe’s second oldest grandchild, had, on the other hand, never once reported being frightened of or by her ‘Greatfather [a childhood sobriquet which had stuck],’ who had, in turn, addressed Audrey as— sans any detectable trace of irony or awareness—‘My little Princess,’ and had, together with his wife, ‘spoiled’ Audrey with such lavish and excessive indulgence as to sometimes arouse tensions between Hope and this latest Mrs. Sipe, the two of whom were not [as Hope would have it] the ‘closest of friends’ to begin with. [By mutual and unspoken consensus, our Audrey customarily addressed Hope as ‘Mother’ or ‘Mom’ and myself as ‘Randall,’ ‘Randy,’ or, when angry or trying to make some ironic point in the perennial struggle for youthful control v. independence, as ‘Mr. Napier,’ ‘Mr. and Mrs. Napier’ or (with decided sarcasm) as ‘the Dynamic Duo.’]) Besides his forehead’s four distracting, pre-cancerous spots, or lesions or ‘keratonesis,’ it was only in recent years, too, that Hope’s stepfather’s mouth had developed the habit of continuing to move slightly after he had ceased speaking, either as if savoring the words’ taste or silently reprising them, and these movements sometimes reminded one of some type of small animal which has been struck or run over and continues to writhe wetly in the road-way, which was, to say the least, disconcerting. There is also the issue or matter of ‘Father’’s bowed upper back and consequent jutting head, which causes him to appear to be thrusting his face and mouth forward directly at one in an aggressive, almost predatory fashion, which is also disconcerting, which may be a matter of geriatric posture or disc compression or else the beginning of an actual ‘hunch-back’ or ‘hump,’ which he is evidently very vain and sensitive about and which no one in the ‘family’ is ever under any circumstances permitted to mention except his wife, who will suddenly touch or push at his jutting head impatiently and tell him, ‘For God’s sake, Edmund, straighten up, ’ in a tone which makes everyone at the table uncomfortable. Then an extremely brief and almost ‘strobe’-like associative tableau in which Hope’s stepfather and herself, at some past or distantly prior point in time, are seated together in an unfamiliar coupe or sports car which is speeding along a rural or markedly under-maintained inland State route in the sultry light of August or late July, and an interior scene of a somewhat younger and unescharotic ‘Father,’ with his iron grey hair, small, cruel mustache and thin, calf-skin gauntlets or ‘driving’ gloves, driving the vehicle, as well as views of the exterior vistas and divided center or median line distending and rushing past at an unnatural rate of speed, as if the vehicle were traveling far too fast for extant road conditions, and of a younger and noticeably more lissome and voluptuous Hope applying facial products in the small, inset mirror of the sun shade or visor as ‘Father,’ posture erect and distinguished and gazing stolidly ahead at the road, assures her that it isn’t so much dislike or ‘disapproval’ of the fellow per se, while the powerful vehicle recedes up ahead in the radiant late Summer haze, the whole brief tableau or interior ‘vision’ or shot so rapid and incongruous that it can only be truly, as it were, ‘seen’ in retrospect.

According to my own pocket watch, no more than five or six minutes had passed since we had first entered the 19th Hole. The rain against the window’s convex and mullioned and glass window came in what now appeared to be vascular or peristaltic ‘pulses’ or ‘waves,’ and during the brief, rhythmic lulls or troughs of these, one could make out the Eighteenth fairway’s ‘dog leg’’s copse of trees being bent and wrung by the storm’s violent winds, as well as tiny and fore-shortened golfing foursomes running hard for their carts or the Pro-shop’s shelter, their shoes’ spikes producing the exaggeratedly high stride of men almost running in place. Those wearing hats held them down with one hand. The 19th Hole’s long, mahogany bar and tables began gradually to fill as more and more men chased in off various parts of the course by the storm came in to get warm and wait out the rain before going home to whatever was left of their families. ‘Father’’s hand trembled as he manipulated the clip, which supposedly required great precision. Much of the more recent entrants’ conversation appeared to concern lightning and inquiring whether anyone had seen or heard lightning on the course, as well as whom among the Raritan Club’s regular members might still be ‘out there.’ Many of the men’s faces appeared unusually smooth and pinkened, their color high from the adrenaline of sudden flight. Actuarially speaking, lightning kills an average of over 300 denizens of Western industrialized nations per annum, more than the average number of accidental deaths due either to recreational boating or insect stings combined, and a substantial number of these electrocutions occur on the nation’s golf courses.