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.’