by Shane Lusher
I was beginning to think that it had all been a dream when Kelly emerged from the bathroom, wearing the robe she’d had on the night before.
“I carried her back over when I got up,” she said. She put her arms around me, nestling the side of her face in my chest.
“I ordered room service for breakfast,” she said. “I hope that was alright.”
“Only if you ordered about a gallon of coffee,” I said. “Can I have my phone back?”
She walked over to her purse and took it out. With her back to me, I thought briefly at trying to have another go, but then banished the thought, realizing that I was going to really have to move in order to get down to Joliet in time to play golf with Diane Trueblood. Ligezinski. That was her name now, I reminded myself.
She handed me the phone and I turned it on and went into the bathroom for my shower.
When I got back, breakfast was already served, a full spread with all the works: bacon and eggs, toast, pancakes and waffles, and smoked salmon with a plate of fruit next to it. Kelly had taken everything from the tray and set the table. There was indeed a gallon of coffee.
“You order this, too?” I asked, pointing to the single rose in the vase that sat on the table between us.
“Nope,” she said as she spread butter on her toast. “It’s just the classy establishment you’ve booked us into.” She smiled. “I’m going to wake up the girls as soon as you drag your ass on out of here.”
“Speaking of which,” I said and stood up. “I really need to go.”
“How long is the drive?”
“Theoretically? An hour, max. It’s only forty miles or so. And it’s Saturday, so there shouldn’t be much traffic, but you never know.”
“You wearing that?” she asked, pointing with her toast toward the plaid shorts I’d donned.
“Yeah, why?”
“Just asking. You know, people wear normal clothes when they golf nowadays. You might want to go less Caddyshack.”
“I don’t have anything less Caddyshack,” I said.
I drank my coffee and grabbed a piece of toast.
“Be back by three,” I said. “You want to have Thai for dinner?”
“I’m not all that into Thai,” Kelly said.
“You’ve never had it like this.”
I kissed her and went out into the hallway and down to the elevator bank. While I stood there, I looked at my phone. There was a missed call from Percy the previous night at ten P.M., around the time we had been leaving the Hard Rock. Once I’d made it all the way down into the parking garage, however, I had no reception.
I would have to get back to him later. I didn’t like to talk on the phone while I was negotiating Chicago’s labyrinthine series of junctions, overpasses and express lanes. It was one of those things I’d never gotten used to, no matter how many years I’d lived there.
In the end I surprised myself. It had only taken me forty-five minutes to get there, hitting I-94 and then 57 and finally 80. Chicagoans all had names for those numbers, names like the Dan Ryan and the Eisenhower and the Stevens, but I’d never figured out which was which. Consequently, radio traffic reports were a useless thing for me, since they went by names and not by the numbers.
Still, virtually no one had been leaving the city at seven-thirty, and it was eight-thirty on the dot when I found Cambridge Estates, which was just east of I-55 on Jefferson Street.
The downtown gave way to artificial rolling hills and a high rent subdivision where dew was still glinting off the grass, even at this late hour of the morning.
I had to give my name and show ID at the gate. When I mentioned whom I was meeting to play golf, I thought the guard’s serious demeanor might have cracked briefly into a grin, but he wrote down my name, handed me back my driver’s license and waved me through without saying anything other than “It’s about a mile in that direction, over that hill.”
The hill in question was more of a bump with a stand of trees on it, but once I’d gotten around it, I realized its purpose: to shield the view of the country club from the rest of the world.
Set in the middle of the golf course, with hole one on one side and the back nine finishing up on the other, was a huge complex of adjoining buildings, terraces, two swimming pools and a driving range.
The structure was made to look Victorian, with sweeping gables and porches and little turrets, and though the architect had obviously been somewhat gifted, everything looked too new, and the buildings were trying too hard.
I found the guest parking area and left Kelly’s SUV with the card the guard at the front had given me sitting in the windshield, and ambled over a small bridge with a pond and lily pads beneath it. On the other side were double electronic doors that slid open at my approach.
The girl behind the front desk was wearing a pair of khakis and a peach golf shirt which bore the name tag Amber. She looked up and smiled at my approach.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for Diane Ligezinski. We have a T-time at nine?”
“Okay,” she said, showing no response whatsoever to the name. She clicked around on the flat screen monitor that sat before her and then pinched her eyebrows. “That’s strange,” she said. “It says that it’s been cancelled. Do you want to try to get in at 9:30?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m not actually a member. Diane had invited me to-”
A short, balding man in his early thirties wearing the same peach shirt and khaki pants emerged from the office behind. His tag said that his name was Bruce.
“Saturday morning,” he said. “Diane doesn’t usually keep that T-time.”
“Well, do you know if she’s here?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, she’s usually here,” Bruce said, wiggling his head quite a bit. He seemed uncomfortable. “She’s, ah, just not usually, ah, well enough to play golf.”
“I see.” This seemed to be Bruce’s way of communicating that Diane Ligezinski was a few sheets to the wind, and the stifled grin Amber now wore seemed to confirm it. “Well, maybe you could just tell me where to find her? I can’t stand golf, anyway.”
Both of them looked at me as if I had just pissed on the Bible, but Bruce recovered quickly enough.
“She’s, ah, either in the bar or she’s going to be out on the terrace behind it. Amber, do you mind showing Mr.?”
“Hartman,” I said. “Dana Hartman.”
“Mr. Hartman, thank you,” Bruce said. “Amber, would you mind showing Mr. Hartman the way?”
I thanked Bruce and waited for Amber to come around the reception counter and lead me past the deep leather chairs of the entranceway and back into the bowels of country club living.
We walked through another set of sliding doors into a shop selling golfing equipment: about twenty bins containing golf balls of various sizes, two walls loaded with golf clubs of various sizes, and sportswear of various sizes, with an emphasis on extra-large.
In the middle of the room were displays of golf knickknacks with which one could decorate the home, if one were so inclined: golfing dolls, golfing pictures, golfing calendars, golfing key chains.
“This your first time at Cambridge?” Amber asked. She had a well-fed farm girl face that was not unpleasant. She looked out of place in her khakis, however, considering that the people we had passed were wearing anything from camouflage cargo pants to chinos and blue work shirts.
“Yes, it is, actually,” I said.
“Would you like the tour?” she asked as we left the shop and entered a glass-enclosed veranda.
To the right I could see another desk with an electronic list of T-times and names on the wall behind it, and to the right was a broad entrance beyond which a massive U-shaped oak bar had been set into a classic pub setting: books, or fake ones at least, from floor to ceiling, ships in glass bottles on shelves, and at least two wide screen televisions airing golf matches.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
We walked into the bar, which was empty except for two elderly men sitting in the corner with shot glasses in front of them. They were both sweating. Golf bags leaned against the wall next to them.
“The veranda,” Amber said. “She’s usually out here.”
We walked out into the glare of the sunrise, which wasn’t going to last long, judging by the cloud cover moving across the plains to the west. Several groups of people were here, mostly women, eating breakfast or just having coffee, chatting with one another. Off in the corner, at the point farthest away from everyone else and overlooking the eighteenth hole, sat an older woman.
She was hunched over, with a slight bump on the back of her neck, and for a moment she gave the impression that she was sitting in a wheelchair. She might have seemed frail had she not been overweight. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt the same peach color as the staff uniform, with nonexistent shoulders, the muscle all gone to fat and hanging down toward her elbows.
“That’s Diane Ligezinski,” Amber said, pointing slightly and slowing her pace, as if we were approaching a sleeping animal in a zoo. “I’ll let you make her acquaintance on your own, if you don’t mind.”
I glanced over at her, a questioning look on my face, but she was still smiling her impervious smile. I thanked her and she went back on her way through the bar.
I watched her go for a moment and then stepped carefully closer to Diane.
When I got around to where I could see her face, it appeared that she was asleep, but when she brought a glass up to her mouth and sucked at it with a wrinkled lip I knew that she wasn’t.
“Diane Ligezinski?” I asked. “Dana Hartman. We spoke on the phone. They said the nine o’clock T-time was cancelled. I hope you still have a little bit of time to talk to me.”
“Shh,” she said. She drank again from the glass and crunched an ice cube between her teeth. “Don’t talk so loud. Sit down.”
I sat and looked at her face.
If you hadn’t already met Percy, you might have thought that the smirk she wore, impressed permanently in folds on her face, came from age, or perhaps a bad face job, but it was, apparently, just part of the chromosomal makeup.
She exhaled loudly, her eyes still shut.
“Get a drink,” she said. “You probably need it.”
I looked around for a bartender, but he was already walking toward me, dressed the same as Amber and Bruce, except he was wearing a peach button-down shirt with a white bow tie.
“What can I get for you?”
“I’ll just have a cup of coffee,” I said.
“He’ll have the same as me,” Diane said, opening her eyes for the first time. “I don’t talk to people who don’t drink.”
The bartender looked at me for confirmation, and when I nodded he went away.
“Don’t trust people who can’t hold their liquor,” she said by way of explanation. In spite of the reaction up front at her name, and in spite of the fact that she was surely drinking a hefty amount of gin or vodka with her tonic, her voice was steady.
She laughed. “Sounds like a load of shit, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. The bartender was back in a flash, and when I thanked him he did not wait to see if we wanted anything else.
“He’s a good boy,” Diane said. “There when you need him, gone when you don’t. They rarely make them like that anymore.”
“Diane, I-”
“Just be quiet for a minute. I need the sun. Better than hair of the dog any day. Well, almost,” she said. “Have a drink.”
It was gin and tonic, and thankfully the bartender hadn’t put in much gin, in deference to my original order. I knocked back a third of it and set it down and waited.
“You’ve had sex recently,” Diane said, smiling around her smirk. “I can smell it.”
“What?” I said. I’d showered, shaved, put on deodorant and a bit of cologne. “There’s no way you can smell that.”
She snickered. “Lucky guess. Or maybe it’s just your demeanor. You don’t stay married to a sex maniac for years without developing a certain understanding of human behavior.”
Maybe she was drunk. I’d certainly never had someone open up a conversation like this.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. They were bloodshot and swollen. If she hadn’t been obviously intoxicated I would have thought she’d gone a couple of rounds with someone.
“How am I supposed to know about that?”
“What?”
“Who you had sex with?”
I drank another third of my glass and licked my lips.
“Diane,” I said. “I’m talking about you. You said your husband was a sex maniac. Were you referring to Wayne?”
was drunk.
“Of course I was referring to Wayne,” she said. She watched as a lone man crouched down and lined up his put on the green in front of us.
“Wayne Trueblood,” she said and leaned over in my direction. “You know I wasn’t like this then?”
“Like what?”
She snickered again. “A drunk. You can say it. I don’t give a shit. I never touched the stuff before I met him. Alcohol really wasn’t my thing until after we’d had Percy.”
She moved closer to me, wiggling her chair in my direction with her backside. “I was more into poppy seed tea,” she said.
“Poppy seed tea?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Takes the bite off of life much better than booze any day. You have to be careful, though, because you never really know what the concentration is. It’s not like they’re required by the FDA to put labels on poppy seeds.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are you talking about the kind of poppy seeds you buy in the store?”
She looked at me, one eye open, the other closed against the sun. “What other kind of poppy seeds do you think a person like me could get in Pekin?”
“Why did you need to take the edge off?” I asked, trying to steer her back to the subject at hand.
She looked at me. “If you have to ask that question, then you haven’t lived long enough yet,” she said.
She poured the rest of the contents of her glass into her mouth and, true to her word, the bartender was there with a fresh one. He nodded in my direction and I shook my head.
“What was the specific edge in your case?” I asked. “With Wayne? You said he was a sex maniac. Was that it?”
Diane shook her head. “And then some. You see, when he caught me with that joint—I assume Percy told you about that, right? He was too young, but I told him often enough-”
I started to say something but she cut me off. It seemed she wasn’t really interested in hearing an answer from me. This was drunk talk. I’d been on the giving and the receiving end often enough, and I knew when it was best to just shut the hell up and listen.
“Told him often enough, so he would have known. No. I smoked the joint because I was trying to get over the stomach cramps. You get addicted to poppy seed tea, just like you do to any kind of opiate. As far as the body is concerned, it’s the same as shooting morphine. Only I didn’t know that. Couldn’t go to anyone about it, not being married to Mr. My-Shit-Don’t-Stink, and I didn’t know any doctors who would’ve kept their mouths shut about it, nobody who didn’t also know my husband.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are you talking about the-”
“So, I started smoking pot. Helped with the cramps, helped with the nausea. Helped me get out of bed in the morning.”
She drank half her gin and tonic and set it back down and looked at me.
“What do you want to know about him?”
“Start with telling me about his sex mania,” I said. “Was that why you had an affair with Randall Dubois?”
She opened her mouth and closed it, a curious look on her face. “Randy Dubois,” she said. “So, now I had an affair with him?”
�
��Didn’t you?”
She shook her hand. “Wayne. S and M. That’s his thing. Back then it was more taboo. Nowadays it’s the new black. Everybody’s doing it. But in the seventies, in Pekin? I don’t even know where Wayne got all his shit.”
“What shit?” I asked.
She ignored me. “Thing is, I thought it was fun at first, but then when I found out that it wasn’t something fun for him, when I found out that he had to do that every single time—with me handcuffing and beating him and wearing boots and everything—it got old fast. Especially when you’ve got a kid in the next room and you just want to get your jollies and then maybe get some sleep.”
I watched the lone man finish his putt. He was replaced immediately by a group of golfers, two women and two men in plaid shorts just like mine. I would have to tell Kelly that I wasn’t too Caddyshack, after all.
I realized then when I looked at the whole panorama of the scene, with the sixty or so people spread out around the golf course involved in various activities, that the place resembled a kind of geriatric, latter day golfing Garden of Earthly Delights, that Hieronymus Bosch painting of all that is sin under the sun.
“The shit he had to use in order to get off,” she said finally, answering my earlier question. “By the time I left, he’d gotten himself a whole basement full of it. I always called it the dungeon. He called it the ‘rumpus room.’”
I thought about the night at Trueblood’s. “I’ve been to the rumpus room,” I said.
“You have?” she asked. She moved away from me slightly. “Then you know about all of them?”
“All of whom?” I asked.
“‘All of whom,’” she said. “You don’t sound like a Pekin boy.”
“All of them,” she went on. “All the people he surrounds himself with. You think they’re there because they like him? You take away his money and what he calls his charity, and there’s not much left. Just a guy who likes to get beaten in order to get off.”
“Or beat people,” she added.
That hung between us for a moment before she stood up.
