Good Trouble

by Joseph O'Neill

  The men dump their bags in their rooms and head straight out to the golf club affiliated with the hotel, which has a course designed by Robert Trent Jones. There is a squabble about golfing handicaps in which Aaron shamelessly pleads for shots. The dominating conversational genre of the weekend is already fixed: amiable bickering with episodes of somewhat willed sunniness.

  It is raining softly as they arrive at the first hole. This gives them all the more reason to cut themselves a break and play off the forward tees. Aaron tosses a long white tee in the air to determine the honor. When it lands, it points at Tom. He pulls out the huge driver his wife bought him for Christmas and, after a couple of practice swings, he hits. The ball slices beyond a small hill to the right of the fairway and disappears. Mick says, “I’m not sure Robert Trent Jones is going to reward that.”

  After nine holes, they stop at the clubhouse to buy lunch. Mick takes the opportunity to tally their strokes out loud, chortling as the totals spurt forward in horrible leaps of six and seven. Nobody has played well. Aaron, who is especially disconsolate about his performance, buys a packet of cigarettes and offers his friends a smoke. “Jesus, why not, it’s my fucking fortieth birthday,” Tom says. Mick also takes one, although like Tom he is officially, and certainly for all matrimonial purposes, a nonsmoker. The cigarette makes Tom, who during his twenties smoked heavily, unpleasantly woozy, and he resolves not to have any more, a resolution he will break after a triple bogey at the eleventh. They play on, in rain. On the fifteenth green, as he approaches the shadowy hole with three grubby moons clustered around it, Tom allows himself the thought that this uneventful golf course is, at green fees of sixty-nine dollars, insufficiently superior to the New York public courses they play at thirty-five dollars a pop. Still, it was an enjoyable round, the players eagerly agree in the locker room afterward.

  At the pro shop, Aaron asks the two clean-cut young men behind the counter, “What is there to do around here at night?”

  “Drink heavily,” one of them says.

  Aaron says, “I mean, is there anywhere in Clearwater that’s kind of interesting? A bar, or someplace to eat?”

  The two young guys look at each other with strange animation, and one says to the other, “What do you think?” and the other one, reading his mind, says to the visitors, “Ybor City. It’s about an hour from here, back toward the airport. There’s a lot of good places round there.”

  Somebody told Tom, after he’d opted for Tampa on the advice of a golfing friend, that he’d picked the strip club capital of America for his weekend break. There has been no sign of any strip joints on the roads they’ve taken, and Tom is fairly sure, from the significant tone used by the pro-shop guys, that Ybor City must be where these famous establishments are located. This knowledge fills him with both dread and anticipation: anticipation because, after all, there is the prospect of women removing their clothing; dread, because he really does not want to find himself, turning forty, watching strippers. Just shoot me and bury me now, he thinks.

  “An hour away?” Mick says, looking at Tom.

  Tom hears himself say, “That’s too far.”

  “Way too far,” Aaron says.

  The three friends, who have all been thinking the same thing, decide with relief to eat out where they are, in innocent Clearwater.

  They return to the hotel. Tom is rooming with Aaron, and Mick is paired with David, whose flight arrives later in the evening. They make arrangements for a car to pick up David at the airport. This is done with the help of the concierge. When they ask her to suggest somewhere to eat, she declares, “Frenchy’s, on the beach. You guys will love it.” She gets out a photocopied sketch plan of Clearwater and highlights the route to Frenchy’s. She says it’s a Friday night, and it’ll be busy and—this is nice of her to say, because she’s no more than thirty—full of “people our age.” Tom takes the plan and inspects the bright-yellow trail they must carefully follow, as if to treasure.

  * * *

  —

  Before they go to Frenchy’s, however, they relax for an hour. Aaron wants to go to the Jacuzzi—this is a spa, after all—and he asks Tom to join him. Tom, who has neglected to bring swimwear, is unsure; but in the end he follows Aaron down, wearing two pairs of undershorts. They find a spot in a corner of the hot tub where they can stretch out and talk.

  Tom says, “You know, Suzanne’s grandmother”—Suzanne is Tom’s wife—“once worked for Mr. Jacuzzi.”

  “She knew Jacuzzi? Wow.”

  “She was his secretary,” Tom says. “In California. Or maybe Minnesota. California or Minnesota.”

  Aaron says, “And how is Suzanne?”

  Tom says, “Great, just great.” He shifts to let the current massage his upper back. He is glad he has made the effort to come to Florida. “How’s it going with you and, ah, Consuela?” Tom is not yet accustomed to uttering this astounding name.

  “Oh, fine,” Aaron says.

  Tom is tempted to put a more penetrating inquiry to Aaron about the latter’s new situation—and about marriage and womankind in general. Tom feels his own unhappiness pressing at him, and he judges Aaron to be a man of the world, with a superior sense of its realities, a man who might be able to clue him in on something. For Tom believes that there must be some common knowledge that has been withheld from him, some widely yet selectively disseminated confidence, some trick of living that he, in his slowness and unsophistication, has not yet grasped. Tom thinks that he has already identified one such trick: ambition. It has only recently dawned on him, as the uncertainly merited and somewhat preposterous successes of various acquaintances come to his notice—Tom is an advertising manager at a magazine aimed at the legal services industry—that those who achieve powerful positions are those who have the imagination to desire them. Why wasn’t this fact brought to his attention years ago? Why has he been forced to make this discovery on his own? Bothered, he slides forward and lowers his head into the hot water. He stays underwater for a long time, holding his breath. In the aftermath of the immersion—funny how a dip can make you feel better—his need to talk to Aaron has abated. It would be a delicate conversation, anyway, since Aaron’s breakup with Annette is less than a year old. Talk about clichés: one evening, Annette returns from a high school reunion in Wisconsin, declares herself to be a new woman and young again, and demands that Aaron leave the house that very night; which, partly out of sheer amazement, he does.

  Tom says to his friend, “You know what, I think I’m done here.”

  “Me too,” Aaron says.

  They go up to their room. “You got to shower,” Aaron says firmly, as if the matter were in issue. “You don’t know what’s in that Jacuzzi water.” As he waits for Aaron to finish up in the bathroom, Tom turns on the TV and channel hops. On the CNN ticker, he catches sight of the fleeing words “…Billy Joel, 55 years old.”

  Tom thinks, Billy Joel, dead? Only a month or so before, he’d seen photographs of Billy—a white blubbery fellow with a graying goatee—in the Post. Billy was on some Caribbean island with his new girlfriend, and she was rubbing sun cream onto his back. Where was it, Tobago? Tom can no longer recall. But he is not surprised by the news, because the singer evidently had drinking problems. He recalls some fiasco of a concert with Elton John, where Billy was too drunk to perform.

  When Aaron comes out of the shower, Tom says to him, “Billy Joel died.”

  “No way,” Aaron says, rubbing a towel against his head.

  “I just saw it on the ticker. Aged fifty-five.”

  “Jesus,” Aaron says mildly. “Billy Joel. We were just listening to him in the car. The Piano Man.”

  In the shower, Tom takes an interest in his feelings about the dead Joel. He notes, first, that there’s something triumphant about the business of lathering shampoo into his scalp: he is here, applying the anti-flake lotion and submitting to a hot adjusta
ble waterfall, and Billy is not. Second, he detects relief, the relief you feel when you reach the end of a roll of toilet tissue, or—he is unwrapping a square of complimentary soap—when you finally throw out a withered nugget of soap. Yes, Billy was like a shrunken old bar of soap. Now that he’s gone, the world seems minutely renewed. By the time he steps out of the shower cubicle, Tom is actually whistling.

  It’s raining more heavily than ever when they drive off in search of Frenchy’s. Clearwater, supposedly a civilized place, looms as an aggregate of malls. Aaron and Tom agree with the proposition, muttered by Mick, that there’s nothing to do here but shop in the same stores as everyone else and look like everyone else and behave like everybody else. Meanwhile, in spite of their map, they are having trouble finding Frenchy’s, and they stop off at a Starbucks to consider their options. Mick and Tom have espressos; Aaron orders a “Venti®”—i.e., gargantuan—decaf soy latte. Tom says, “Venti. They’ve registered it as a trademark, or whatever.”

  Aaron says, “Whatever else you do, don’t use ‘Venti’ to describe anything.”

  “Yeah,” Mick says. “Don’t use it unless you’re looking for Venti trouble.”

  At last, venturing down an alley that leads to a parking lot, they find Frenchy’s. It’s a brightly lit place with televisions showing high-school basketball, and loud green plants, and pastels randomly smeared on tabletops and walls and light fixtures. Old people and young patrons mix happily. The men are fat or red-faced or both, the New Yorkers decide to notice, and the single women tend to dress in a style that Mick calls amateur hooker. There are no black people. Aside from one guy with a terrible duck hook on the driving range at the golf club, they haven’t seen a black person since they arrived in Florida, not one. A waitress hands them laminated menus. They order beer, calamari, steak, and salad. While the food is being prepared, they step out with their drinks to the porch. The porch overlooks a soundless black void that they must take to be the sea, or the gulf, or the bay. Mick tosses a glittering butt into the darkness. “Venti fucking night,” he says.

  A little farther down the porch, a kid and his girlfriend are kissing. The girl seems to Tom wasted on this boy, with his little fuzzy mustache. Tom is embarrassed. Of late, this has been his invariable reaction to the sight of a pretty young woman with a boyfriend: that she’s wasted on him. As if she would not be wasted on Tom; as if being with Tom would be so terrific. He wonders, not for the first time, how Suzanne puts up with him. Her responsibilities, even more mechanical and overwhelming than his, cause her anxiety and tiredness but not, as far as he can tell, crashing, numbing doubt. Perhaps it is different for women, Tom thinks. Perhaps they are programmed to function more efficiently, more resolutely. But then how to explain Annette and Aaron? Infuriated by the banality and uselessness of this line of thought, Tom goes back inside.

  They finish their meal quickly. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Aaron says.

  At the hotel, they thank the concierge for putting them on to Frenchy’s, and go to the bar. They review their golf scores and contentedly wade around in the small financial morass into which their various activities have placed them: they set off the cab fare to LaGuardia against the hotel costs against the airfares against the valet money against the cost of dinner against the golf bets.

  A member of the hotel staff approaches. “Mr. Rourke? Telephone message.”

  The message is from David. David has been caught up in Chicago and will have to skip the weekend. He sends his apologies.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Aaron says.

  “The fewer the merrier,” Mick says.

  They go to their rooms. Aaron and Tom undress into T-shirts and boxer shorts and get into bed. Then the hotel phone rings. Aaron picks up. “It’s Suzanne,” he says. He raises his eyebrows and whispers, “Booty call.”

  Tom takes the phone. “Hey, darling.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Great. Just great. Although it hasn’t stopped raining.”

  “Good, good. Listen, did you mail that Verizon check yet?”

  “Which one? The one for the phone line or the Internet?”

  “I don’t know. The phone line, I guess.”

  “I don’t think so. Though I certainly put a stamp on it. Why?”

  “I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”

  “It was on the desk, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what I thought. But I don’t see it anymore.”

  Tom glances at Aaron, who is leafing through a magazine. Tom says, “Well, I don’t know what to say, honey.”

  “I just don’t want to be late with it, that’s all.”

  Tom takes a breath. Then he says, “OK, sweetie, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’ll turn up. And if doesn’t, big deal, right? What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll pay it next month.”

  Suzanne, anxious, is silent. Tom says, “Listen, just assume I mislaid it, OK? You’re in the clear, and I’ve mislaid it, OK? How are the kids?”

  “Asleep,” Suzanne says. Then she says, “I think I’ll call it a day, too.”

  “Good idea,” Tom says. “Call it a day, darling.”

  He hangs up with a sigh. Aaron says politely, “Lights out?”

  The two men lie in their beds in the dark. Then Aaron’s voice sounds in the room. “You know, Tom, about this thing with Consuela.”

  Tom is listening.

  “It may seem great, and it is great, of course it is,” Aaron says. “But there’s no escape, is there? You know what I’m talking about? Whether, I don’t know, you’re on a beach in Thailand with a bunch of underage hookers or whether you’re watching The Battle of Algiers with a hot little law professor. Either way it’s one damn thing after another. You know what I mean?”

  Tom senses that Aaron is warning him about something—putting him on notice of something important. This could be it: one of those inklings he needs. Tom says cautiously, “I guess so.”

  The two men lie there. “Well, I’m bushed,” Aaron says. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” Tom says.

  The next morning they drive off to another golf course with the intention of playing thirty-six holes, although Mick is nervous about whether he will have the stamina to do it. At the first tee, the course starter has a New York accent. He tells them that he worked for many years in Manhattan as a homicide detective. The ex-cop says that he’d thought about retiring to the east coast of Florida but preferred it here on the Gulf on account of there being much less “bustle.”

  “You know what he means by ‘bustle,’ ” Aaron says, once they are safely out on the first fairway.

  Mick says, “Nothing worse than coming all the way down to Florida to find yourself surrounded by more bustle. Not after twenty years of busting uppity bustle.”

  Only now does Tom figure out that “bustle” is being taken to mean “African-Americans.”

  They complete thirty-six holes, finishing just as the gray sky empties of light and putts are impossible to read and straying balls, which in daylight stand out in the woods, can no longer be found. They drive back to Clearwater. Every few minutes, it seems, they hit a toll, and there is a pleasant squabble over toll money and who has or has not contributed his share. During the hour-long journey, they listen once again to seventies music; and once again, Billy Joel sings for them. “Hey,” Tom is pleased to announce to Mick, “he died yesterday.” Billy is singing, “(This Is) My Life,” and Mick immediately says, “This was my life,” and Tom tries to think of something waggish to say about uptown girls and downtown boys, but can’t. When the Bee Gees come on, Mick asks, “What’s the name of the dead Bee Gee?” and by a process of elimination, and discounting the death of the youngest Gibb brother, who wasn’t a Bee Gee, they come up with the name Maurice. “I knew a guy called Maurice Morris,” Aaron says, and Tom, eagerly leaning forward from the
back seat, tells the story of his childhood friend John Elder, who along with his father was an elder in the church, with the result that the father was known as Elder Elder the elder. “If they moved to Mexico,” Mick says, “he’d be El elder Elder Elder.” Now they’re listening to “Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney and Wings. When Tom tries to make a joke about the Piano Man getting it on with Linda McCartney in heaven, Aaron doesn’t like it. “Come on, she was a nice woman,” he says seriously. The travelers fall quiet. Tom thinks back to 1980, when he was sixteen, and two girls he knew went to see Billy Joel in concert. Afterward they met him backstage. The girls said that Billy Joel—Jesus, he must have been about thirty-two at the time, though he seemed so ancient—had been very kind and very respectful. Tom thinks about mentioning this incident, about saying something good about Billy Joel.

  They take dinner at the hotel. There’s no talk of Frenchy’s or Ybor City.

  The next morning, Sunday, they play one last round on the hotel course, this time off the back tees, and afterward go directly to Tampa Airport. There, Tom is again confronted by the irksome unworldliness that for some reason seems to be overtaking him. He is at the curbside check-in counter when Aaron says to him, “Don’t check in here, it costs extra.”

  “It does?” Tom was not aware of this. The check-in man—a black face, at last—already has his luggage labeled, and silently stands by. When Aaron goes off to join the long line inside, the man says, in a booming theatrical voice, “Sir, just so you know, there is no charge for this service. If you wish to pay a gratuity, that is up to you. But there is no charge.”

  “I’m not going to worry about it,” Tom says with a smile. “Let’s do this.”

  “I just want to be clear on that,” the attendant continues. “You don’t owe me a dime. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”