by Mitch Cullin
Now she hesitated in front of the closet, peering ahead, squinting. One arm kept the towel from falling while the other arm stretched for the light switch. But it wasn't her fingers which hit the switch; rather, it was Hollis who cast light on himself, illuminating in an instant what, to his mind, was surely a hysterical vision: a hulking she-beast made even bulkier by a full-length long-hair beaver fur coat—the shawl collar bunched along the neckline, framing Hollis's deliberately dour and absurd face (a thick layer of crimson lipstick shining on his mouth, the beehive wig camouflaging his thinning hair and tilting to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Except Debra didn't react as he had imagined she would; she didn't start at the looming, ridiculous sight of him and then cackle wildly. Instead, a gasp of true horror escaped her, released at the very second her body jolted as if she had received an electrical shock—her arms reflexively flailing outward, her eyes widening—and the towel dropped away from her body, exposing her pale, vulnerable flesh. Fixing him with an unforgiving glare, her entire body began trembling. “Don't you do that!” she yelled, seething at him as her hands curled into fists. “Don't you ever do that to me!”
“Sorry—I—it isn't—”
“Damnit, Hollis!”
In a way, it was Hollis who was the more startled of the two, for he had miscalculated badly, and, as such, he was promptly consumed by embarrassment and an increasing shame—as if he, too, were viewing himself like Debra was at that moment: a suddenly confused man stammering near his naked, sick wife, grimacing under a beehive wig, shoulders slumping beneath a fur coat.
“I didn't mean to—I was only trying—”
She shook her head while bending to retrieve the towel. Then she faced him again, her head shaking less and less, searching his flustered expression.
“I'm sorry,” he said, steadying his voice, wiping the lipstick from his lips with the back of his hand, unintentionally smearing a crooked trail of red across his chin. “I guess I'm just not very funny today.”
And that, for reasons which were completely lost on Hollis, finally moved her to laughter. “Deb—?” Her fingers clicked off the closet light, her hand pulled the closet door shut; her laughter continued for a while elsewhere as he remained standing there alone, frowning at himself in darkness.
9
So another year with cancer passed for Debra; the once bare surface of her head had gradually been replenished, sprouting fine, short gray-blond hair which never grew very thick or long. But the rounds of chemotherapy were already exhausted—various first-line treatments using Taxol and carboplatin, Doxil, topotecan, carboplatin and Gemzar—allowing for just a single clinical trial as the last resort (the wishful belief in hope dwindling into the marginal territory of miracles). And now an early winter has come—arriving without warning like a presentiment of something inexorable, making the backyard desolate—and Lon, as if not to be outdone by Debra, has also fallen ill with cancer, leaving Hollis wanting for his friend's summer companionship, that gruff humor and intoxicated bombast: the continuous derision regarding the clean streets they drove together, the monotonous homes they tenant, or—as was often the case—the other retired men who had regularly patted their shoulders on the golf course greens.
“Metaphorical fascists, most of them,” Lon had said inside the hut, scratching at an earlobe with the rim of an empty Tecate can.
“How so?” Hollis responded.
“Lord, just take a good look at them sometime. Look how they act so damn smug, how they dress almost identically. Reminds me of ham actors all auditioning for the same lousy part.”
Lon sighed with disgust, shaking his head amid the shadows as Hollis said, “What the hell are you talking about? That's how we dress. It's golfing attire, Lon. What else are we supposed to wear?”
Lon's head-shaking transformed into an emphatic nodding. “Exactly,” he said. “That's my point right there. Hand me a beer, would you?”
In a way, they were like a pair of bothersome teenagers last summer, restless and hardly content, rippling still waters—withered adolescents racing their customized golf carts (Lon's black Humdinger, that prized miniaturized Hummer; Hollis's replica ‘57 Chevy, baby blue with canopy top, bucket seats, and coat frame), speeding on cart lanes, driving by parks where the only children they ever saw were attentive retirees strolling beside a feeble parent. Few streets were spared their wheels, their fateful bleating horns which created such a ruckus beneath the palm tree rows—the clarion call of two men intent on sailing kamikaze golf balls through the air, shooting them at the roofs of uninhabited homes, where the balls landed hard on reddish-tiled shingles and quickly dropped into yards marked with for sale signs.
“How do you think they went, Hollis?” They had parked at the end of a cul-de-sac, bringing themselves to stand several yards away from three recently vacated homes—a Ponderosa, a Cheyenne, a Durango. Lon set a ball on the asphalt, squinting while he considered his target. “Think Alzheimer's caught up with them?”
“Maybe.”
Taking a stance like a pro, Lon readied his hulking body for the shot. “Or a massive coronary?”
“Could be.”
Coiling his knees, hips, and shoulders when turning into his backswing, Lon soon launched the ball neatly from the ground. “Or harboring grand-kids without the association's permission?”
“Beats me,” Hollis said, watching as the ball arched beyond them, curving downward, promptly striking the Cheyenne's roof with a thack—bouncing twice on the shingles, over the roof, out of sight.
“I'm putting my money on Alzheimer's. What about you?”
“I don't know,” Hollis replied. Could easily be a stroke, he thought.
Could be a fractured hip. Could be death absolute—like the rapid demise of fellow golfers who had swung their clubs near them, like Jeff Turman who scored an ace just minutes prior to total heart failure, his final words being, “Oh, boy—man, this really smarts,” before his eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed while still clutching his five-iron. Or there was quiet, austere Chris Mayhew—complaining of a migraine during tee time, pressing thumbs against his temple—who had changed his mind about playing, deciding instead to return home; shortly thereafter, his wife found him in the living room while ESPN broadcast sports highlights, seemingly napping on his leather recliner chair but, in fact, quite dead (the migraine having apparently been the first rumblings of a cerebral aneurysm).
“Well, better him than us,” Lon had insisted after Mayhew's funeral, unaware then—relaxing inside the hut, reeking of Coppertone and alcohol—of the disease already consuming his prostate, a malignancy which would inevitably lead to the gland's elimination; it was a rather minor impasse in comparison to the more troubling plight of Debra, a common ordeal for the men of Nine Springs: “A tonsillectomy for the aged,” he would end up calling it. “A real pain in the ass, literally.” But throughout the summer Lon had exuded an able-bodied, robust bearing—always maneuvering to get ahead of Hollis while driving their respective carts, clapping louder than everyone else when Anita Mann, a Peggy Lee impersonator, performed at the Sun-palace Arena (the melody of “Is That All There Is?” stuck in his head for days following the concert, piping from him as an off-tune whistle whenever silence prevailed inside the hut)—then mocking the Grim Reaper with deftly aimed golf balls which pelted homes he envisioned as modern, spacious mausoleums.
At least three evenings a week were spent in the indigo hue of Nine Springs’ Starlight Grill, the pair sitting at the bar and cooling their sunburned foreheads with frigid swipes of dripping Corona beer bottles. They went on those nights when Mr. Tom Kat played his rhythm-laden Casio in the middle of the dance floor, taking requests and reviving the golden hits of yesteryear beneath a slow-turning mirror ball, crooning to the golf-tired patrons as his deep, often faltering voice was aided by repetitive, syncopated electronic beats. Only later in the summer did the small groups of college-age women breach the security gates of the community, appearing a
t the grill late into the evenings, dressed casually in cutoff jean shorts, tight T-shirts or tank tops; the girls were always accompanied by one or two tough-looking young men who kept themselves sequestered discreetly at corner tables—baseball caps pulled low or with the bills turned backward—watching apathetically as their female friends danced and sang and flirted with much older, more intoxicated men.
“See, look at that, there's the downside of Viagra,” Lon had joked, motioning his beer bottle at one of the girls slinking her way across the dance floor. “Right there in front of us, the inevitable by-product of our reborn hard-ons.”
“What do you mean?” Hollis asked.
“They're whores. We've got whores now.”
“Really?” Hollis said, squinting to peer out at the dance-floor crowd. “I had no idea.”
Another girl sang along to Tom Kat's rendition of “Moon River”—long black hair hanging past her eyes, skinny pale white legs illuminated with the streaking reflections of the mirror ball—as a retiree old enough to be her grandfather recorded her singing into a portable cassette player: the two swayed together on the dance floor, the man holding a microphone at her lips while she lazily wrapped both arms around his wide, hunched shoulders.
“My god, this town is pathetic,” Lon chuckled, shaking his head. “What am I doing here?”
And if the answer hadn't been learned early on, Hollis might have then asked Lon why it was he ever chose Nine Springs to begin with. The serenity of the desert, Lon had already told him when they first met on the driving range, their friendship sealed immediately with the knowledge that they had previously served their country with distinction (Hollis in Korea, Lon before him during the Bikini Atoll atomic tests). Moreover, Lon and his wife, Jane, had picked Nine Springs because of the weather—seven glorious months, two cold months, three months of hell—and to improve Jane's overall health (the dry air did wonders for her rheumatism, keeps her in the pink) and, of course, for the fully stocked pro shop, not to mention the rare chance of having a well-kept putting green twenty-five feet from the back porch. Plus, their only child, Michael, lived nearby in Tucson, running an antique shop with his long-term partner. “My boy's gay—lovely kid, though, really wonderful, and so is his companion, Ben. Anyway, the way I see it is that evolution has had enough of my gene pool—mine and Jane's—and probably for good reason, you know.”
But when it came down to the elegant yet cozy clubhouses, the fitness center, the world-class amenities—Lon couldn't stand any of it, especially after two or three drinks. “Contrary to what we want to believe, it's an America that never really was,” he had said, resting on an adjacent deck chair, lounging with Hollis beside the swimming pool at dusk. “Just a fantasy of something imagined in hindsight, hallucinated by folks desiring safer neighborhoods, tidy lawns, no noise. See, I didn't know I was fighting a war for this kind of outcome, didn't foresee ending up in a modern version of what some developer thought my country was once like. You know, it's like Disneyland—it's a theme park we've invested in, that's all. I mean, you realize there aren't any springs near here. I bet they draw these names from a couple of hats. Oak—Ridge. Saddle—Springs. Nine—Oak. Saddle—Ridge. Nine—Springs. Really, honestly, it should be called Eighteen Holes.”
The words of a Jewish liberal—Hollis had thought—spoken at a Sono-ran oasis populated mostly by Baptists who, like Debra, zealously bought Kleenex, chicken tenders, melatonin, and Saint-John's-wort in bulk; they were the knee-jerk opinions of a cynical man who had more than once referred to himself as the Tin Robot God, because of the large collection of rare 1950s Japanese windup toy robots he had amassed over the years. Still, Hollis pointed out, their kind of escape wasn't anything new; and Lon, too, remembered well enough the suburbs of their younger years, the developments expanding for miles and miles from overcrowded city centers—updated army barracks, voguish, economical, affordable, and available to those returning as boyish veterans from distant battles.
“Fought a war too,” Hollis said. “Glad I'm living anywhere, if you want to know the truth.”
“Fair enough,” Lon said, shrugging his shoulders, his face now darkened by the evening. “I'm sure William Levitt would be proud. That bastard isn't spinning in his grave, I'm positive of that.”
They brought their arms behind their heads. Hollis scanned the sky for stars, but only succeeded in finding the full moon hanging above the desert. Lon farted and, at almost the same instant, sighed to himself before rising to retrieve another beer.
During the course of that summer, the subject of William Levitt had occasionally worked its way into their conversations, invoked by Lon who always uttered the famous housebuilder's name with a disparate mixture of reverence and contempt. But while Hollis and Debra had actually lived in a Levittown during the mid-1950s, Lon and his wife never did; his oldest brother, Joseph, however, had known Levitt, the two having become acquainted as sailors at the end of World War II. “My brother honestly felt that that guy heeded our best wishes, our fundamental needs and desires.” So the story Lon was quick to tell concerning his brother and Levitt—the story he was prone to repeat with increasing degrees of hyperbole—went something like this:
Drunk one night from tequila shots yet clearheaded about what the future required, Levitt was surrounded by other Seabees at a bar, wondering aloud, “What's wanted when this war is done? You want a car. What else? You want that nice house. That's right.” Beg, borrow, or steal the money, he urged them all before the night was finished, and then build and build. “Build for yourself, return to civilian life and build for those like yourselves. Our country is a bountiful pasture, we're so blessed. Go build!” From that night on, Joseph imagined Levitt as an avatar of noble plans, considering him to be someone touched by a great vision—someone who was so much more than a fellow sailor, more than just the industrious child of Russian Jewish immigrants.
After the war a handful of men joined Levitt, among them Lon's brother: converts like Christ's apostles, coming back to a homeland which was desperate for rooftops. They, too, lamented the housing crisis, scouting the countryside for suitable property to develop. Wearing gray flannel suits, they struggled up hillsides and gazed across open fields; they recoiled at the sight of trolley cars being sold as homes in Chicago, the antiquated brown-stones and packed apartment buildings, the undisturbed plains and bucolic meadows. They acquired their own machines to get the job started, burrowing under the land, bulldozing the soil into a uniform flatness; it was Levitt's decree: seventeen thousand new homes built on Long Island, the largest housing project in America; seventeen thousand reasonably priced dwellings, twenty miles from New York City.
“The will of mass production,” Lon has called it. “The General Motors of the housing industry.” And, as it happened, Levitt ruled benevolently as that general of the General Motors of the housing industry, triumphantly sweeping all the pieces from the Monopoly board, catching them and grasping them in a fist, and then sprinkling them like identical box-shaped seeds over the terrain—from Long Island to the outskirts of Philadelphia, turning potato farms into sprawling Levittowns; his homes never once varied, each floor plan design was exactly the same—seven color selections, trees spaced at twenty-eight feet (two and a half trees per house); every home was adorned with a stove, a refrigerator, a Bendix washer, and an Admiral TV.
“You don't have to tell me,” Hollis said. “We were there, we know.”
“How long did you stay?” Lon asked.
“Almost six years in Philadelphia, I guess. Then my job brought us on out to the West Coast.”
“Six years, huh? That long?”
“Really, it wasn't so bad. Pretty ideal for newlyweds, actually. We'd put off any thoughts of starting a family unless we could buy a house of our own. Luckily, we found a Levittowner for around ten grand—before that we were stuck in a cramped little apartment on South Broad Street in Hamilton. In fact, that first house felt like a piece of heaven to us.”
It wa
s, Hollis had believed at the time, appropriate modern living for modern lives. Although the commandments were inflexible and absolute, the deeds unwavering: lawns must be mowed every week, laundry could only be hung on rotary racks and never on clotheslines. But most of the residents flourished adequately and multiplied in number; they had willingly entered Levitt's dream without any reservations and thereafter occupied that dream until it became a pervasive reality, as did their newborn children and, eventually, their children's children; this was William Levitt's vision, Lon asserted, this was the future he bequeathed—subsequent generations would know little else besides variations of that expansive, indistinct world of his. Yet, Hollis interjected, there was one man who had rebelled in his own way, who—amidst the many other ticky-tacky homes of Levittown, Pennsylvania—had taken it upon himself to mount a 16” ⨯ 12” ⨯ 16” gargoyle statue above his porch awning: the stone-chiseled grotesque existing as a unique expression of singularity, so much so that families from other streets hiked blocks out of their way just to stand on the sidewalk, pointing and marveling at it.
“That man wasn't a Hollis by any chance, was he?”
“It's possible,” Hollis said, grinning in the light of a full moon.
And it was enough to bring laughter, an incredible guffaw bursting from Lon—such a contagious racket was created, instantly penetrating Hollis's woolly belly button, working its way up to his throat: two balding, hysterical Buddhas, sunburned and intoxicated with something other than just beer, two deck chairs shaking with hilarity on a summer's night. Hollis wouldn't conceive of that inevitable frost, that swirling snowfall, winter; he wouldn't yet feel the cold devouring the heat, that swelter which had nourished his garden while he vacationed inside or near his hut. Nor would he be prepared for the laughter to stop, to trickle into an uneasy silence—a hush made more formidable by the nighttime and Lon's then motionless form.
