A Theory of Relativity

  Was that it? The general what-the-fuckness of Gordon, the aphrodisiac quality that he would be totally happy whether anyone else was there or not? The offhand way Gordo stayed right in the moment, while Tim was already worrying, as he got dressed for the first date, how it was going to affect his job next week or next month when he realized that the woman didn’t like him as much as he liked her? Tim didn’t ordinarily mind. Gordon was the readiest friend he ever had. He had the best ideas. Gordo figured out how to mount a camcorder in the vent above the girls’ shower and record a solid four hours of great nudity, and when Tim suggested maybe they were perverts, Gordo told him, “Church, this isn’t voyeurism, it’s pornography. Voyeurism is a mental illness, but pornography is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

  Calling Gordo was like checking in with some force of nature. There was always something absurd to do, like the six weeks shearing Christmas trees down in Wautoma, hot as hell and caked with sticky sap, playing softball with the migrant kids who worked on the potato farms and all the other kids who came by bus from miles around to shear trees—a keg at second, which meant you had to chug whenever you rounded the bases, and after that they’d go back to work, with goddamn machetes no less! Streaking with Jessica and Libby Dickensen in the woods behind Fidelis Hill—Gordon had the gift for clothing removal with women—and the Colorado camping trip when they’d jumped eighty feet into the river like Sundance and the Kid, the spring-break nights in Florida, blasted on ganj like no other dope he’d ever had, bumping down the beach in Jurgen’s umpty-million-dollar convertible, he wouldn’t have traded his adventures with Gordo. He loved the McKennas. It was a goddamned wickedness, what had happened to Georgia, the sister that Tim, afflicted with four brothers, had never had. She was as good as any guy to talk to.

  If only he didn’t have it so bad for Lindsay. Worse since Gordo had come home and gotten back together with her and Tim had to spend time with the new Lin, this sharp-dressed, peaceful, curvy woman that Tim could no longer even pretend was the skinny-legged girl who’d grown up practically in his backyard, so shy she’d always worn a big T-shirt over her bathing suit.

  Sweet Christ, Tim prayed, let me stop feeling like I want to burst my pants around Lindsay Snow. Let me be a good friend to my buddy when he needs me.

  * * *

  In the few moments that remained before he would need to raise himself from this pew and speak, Ray Nye, Sr., was attempting to compose himself. A pulse in his neck was pounding as if it would tear through the cloth of his shirt. He was thinking of his child’s hands, those magnificent hands, he now imagined, closed softly over Raymond, Jr., huge chest beneath that shiny lid. He was thinking of Raymond at seven, so brawny he’d outgrown the cut-down set of clubs his father had given him at kindergarten graduation. Even at seven, the Vaden grip, which took most youngsters years to master, was as natural to him as breathing.

  He had not been in favor of the marriage. He would admit it. They were too young, and Raymond’s game too fragile. When they had come to him, he’d tried to suggest they get established first, even offered to stake Georgia in that business idea she’d had, a service that would redecorate people’s houses with the furnishings they already had. He’d reminded them that life wasn’t a big race. But he remembered also that he and Diane, the two of them all of nineteen years old, wouldn’t be talked out of it either. And though there had been a moment, long ago, when that had seemed a mistake, he could not imagine life without his Diane sparkling at his side.

  Just before the two of them moved, Big Ray had come upon Georgia sitting on a hill behind the house at Sandpiper, watching Raymond hit two-irons, then five-irons. He hadn’t been surprised five hours later, coming home from the office to grab a bite, to see Raymond still at it: His son’s zone had been astonishing. Even as a baby, when they’d laid him down to sleep, he’d fallen asleep in less than a minute, and slept twelve hours. He’d come down late to the Christmas tree once, because he’d wanted to finish his Hardy Boys book.

  What was astonishing, that day at Sandpiper, was that Georgia was still there, too, and when Big Ray had come closer, he’d seen she was crying. It was on his lips to ask, What’s wrong, honey? Is the baby all right? But then Georgia had whispered to him, she was not sad, she was just moved. By Raymond’s hands. That he had the hands of a Michelangelo.

  And Big Ray had known then that the girl understood. That she was the best wife his son could have found, and that he was a fool to doubt his son’s judgment, which had never been anything but on the nose.

  Stiffly, the blood roaring in his ears, Raymond Nye, Sr., lifted his feet and made himself walk to the lectern. He touched Gordon lightly on the shoulder and took Gordon’s place at the lectern.

  “I’m not much at Bible quoting, not since Sunday school. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t quite get it all right. But this,” said Ray, opening his big hand as if to sprinkle something soft over the domed sheen of the coffin, “is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”

  He rattled a sheaf of papers and held up a copy of Life magazine, with Katie Couric on the cover. “Perhaps some of you read, just a few months ago, about Ray in this publication. I don’t have it here because I’m full of myself, but because I’m full of pride for my son, who brought us much joy in his short life.

  “My son played golf. Oh, he did a lot of other things, too. He majored in mathematics. He could figure out and make sense of things I couldn’t even read without getting a headache. He had a ton of friends, some of them, like Carl Jurgen right here and Gordie, they were like sons to us, too. Our house was always full of boys and cleats and golf clubs; they ate like condemned men . . .” Big Ray paused, and swallowed. “But in golf, my son was among the top young players of his generation. Now, you can say that Ray Nye, Junior, was not Davis Love, the third. He was not Phil Mickelson. And I would say to you, yes, he was not those men, who are prodigies. But if you can imagine several hundred men who, out of all the men who love the game in America, have the hands and the heart to become touring pros, then our son was among that tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent . . .” Ray sighed and scraped his hair. “And he was coming on. Last year, and this year, he was this close in winnings to that six days of torture at Doral, the qualifying school, to earn one of those slots on the biggest, richest golf tour in the world. He was coming on, but slowly. You see, our son did everything very slowly. You would hear about it in the stories written about it. ‘Slow but Sure, but Nye Will Not Be Denied,’ they would say. His backswing was so slow you would think he’d forgotten in the middle what he was doing. But he never forgot.

  “Now, I don’t know how much you Northerners”—there was a soft burble of laughter—“really know about golf. But there is no such thing as a perfect game. Arnold Palmer played a perfect game once, he says, but then he woke up.” Laughter stopped him again. “Only three times in the history of the PGA has a player broken sixty. David Duval did it. Al Geiberger did it. But you just can’t be perfect. There’s going to be a mistake. You’re not going to have five pars and thirteen birdies. It’s not human.

  “Nonetheless, all players are striving for that perfect game. And I believe that my son did achieve a perfect game. It was during the event recounted in this publication, in Life magazine, under the headline ‘Georgia on His Mind.’ At the end of the day last April, my son, Ray, was tied for the lead at six under in the . . . well, in the most important event of his career, when he learned from the McKennas here that his wife, who was terribly ill, had had a seizure. And Ray knew what that meant. It meant that if he waited, even another day, his wife might not be, she might not be . . . conscious to see him again.

  “And so he left Coachman’s Hill in Charlotte, North Carolina, my friends. He laid down his club and went to the airport, and he told the reporters that there would be many rounds of golf to play, but only once could he play the most important role in his life, as a husband in need and as a father . . . it says it all here in this
magazine. But it doesn’t really express what it meant for a young man who played golf to give up that moment, which was the biggest moment in his professional life. He didn’t even think about it. That was Ray.

  “Georgia got better. But not very much better. It turned out that Ray didn’t really need to make that sacrifice, giving up what would have been a tremendous amount of money he could have used to care for his baby, giving up the certainty of making that next step. But I stand here today to tell you that I am glad he did it. Even though it meant . . . it meant this . . . it finally meant that he would not have those other days to reach for medal play. Even though coming back here, and of course his mother and his sisters and I are brokenhearted that Ray lies here today, instead of sitting beside us, beside the little girl it was his right and his joy to raise . . .”

  Lorraine had to look away. Big Ray was chewing on his sorrow, trying hard to swallow. She looked down at sleeping Keefer, her four limbs confidently sprawled, and observed how little time she had really spent watching her granddaughter sleep. Asleep, her blue eyes hidden, she looked exactly like Georgia.

  As Big Ray cleared his throat once, then again, Lorraine heard Mark wince. “So,” Ray finally went on, “no matter what has happened, I am glad Raymond, Junior, did this, because he achieved in life what no player of golf can ever achieve on the course. He achieved a perfect game. And I am proud of him. And I thank you for being proud of him, too.” Diane cried out and stretched out her hands.

  They all bent their heads and tried to be still and tried to ignore the tumult of suppressed coughs and cries that rose on the left, on the right, from the rear of the church, as if instruments in an orchestra were being hastily tuned. Those who were Catholic placed a finger to their foreheads, wings, and hearts; those who were not gathered their sport coats and purses and the printed programs they did not want to keep but could not bear to leave behind, programs that would end up on kitchen counters and telephone stands throughout the town and throughout the state for weeks, finally scribbled on with times for baseball registrations, dates of dental appointments, and baby-sitters’ telephone numbers. They turned in hundreds as one body.

  Then, the thin, tenor throat of the organ surprised them and they looked up, expecting to see Mrs. Wilton at the keyboard. But instead, there sat Carl Jurgen, blue-white in his linen slacks and shirt, bathed in a funnel of sunlight, playing that old jazz, “Georgia.”

  CHAPTER six

  “Did you notice Carl Jurgen didn’t have a suitcase,” Tim was saying. “He’s like a spy in a movie or something.”

  Gordon didn’t reply. He had to tug himself from a trance state even to understand what Upchurch had said. They were sitting in Church’s Maxima on one of the embryonic roads in Wood Violet Hollow, the new subdivision that was Tim’s pride and obsession—he being, as he would often offer, apropos of nothing, the second-youngest public works director in the nation. After dropping Jurgen off at the airport, Tim had stopped for a couple of double cheeseburgers with everything. The smell of the burgers and the sound of Tim’s energetic munching made Gordon’s stomach quake.

  “I don’t know how that works,” Gordon admitted. “I know he changed his clothes two or three times. He was wearing linen pants at the funeral.”

  “Linen pants. Right. They’d have been up around my knees after the first hour. Where’d he iron them?”

  “I have no idea,” Gordon said. “I don’t even own an iron. Could you open a window while you eat that, Church? Or better yet, eat it in . . . Canada or someplace? I’m going to hurl, here.”

  Church bit into his burger unperturbed. A spurt of mayonnaise coated his lower lip. “Maybe the clothes thing is from being born rich,” he went on. “Maybe they have shrunken clothes like those capsules little kids have. You just put them in water and they grow up into dinosaurs. Only these would grow up and be sport coats. The rich are different from us, Gordo.”

  They sank into a silence that must have seemed companionable to Tim, but was excruciating for Gordon. It wasn’t that he minded the quiet. He’d heard enough voices in the past two days to last him the rest of his life. But a welter of competing thoughts and narratives were slugging it out in the back of his mind, nagging him to get home, not to his own place, but to Cleveland Avenue.

  Church was chattering on about the latest installment in the environmentally challenged history of the subdivision, which owed its name to a tiny circle of land, a bowl of tender blue flowers that legend described as an ancient buffalo wallow. Then the members of the Red Stick tribe had turned up, anxious, to the point of litigation, to halt the whole project until it could be determined if a strangely table-shaped rise was a Woodland Peoples’ burial cairn. The desperate developer then offered to name the subdivision “Indian Burial Mound Place.” One of Gordon’s only honest laughs of the past year had been Tim’s account of his diplomatic reaction, when he’d gently asked the developer, How long has it been since you’ve seen any . . . horror movies?

  “I think I’d better get home soon,” Gordon suggested softly. “My folks probably need me. We were gone all night. I just feel like I was in a play . . . a production of some kind and now it’s over. Like it was a show we put on for other people.”

  Gordon thought briefly of the news report they’d watched yesterday, as if TV coverage were a staple of everyone’s family tragedy. Jane Hampton of WINN-TV in Madison intoned sadly, “We first met little Keefer Nye last year when we covered a touching event. The forces of big-time athletics and small town love joined in a huge benefit to raise funds to fight cancer, which was claiming the life of Keefer’s twenty-six-year-old mother, Georgia McKenna Nye, whose husband, Ray, was an up-and-coming pro golfer on the Knockout Tour. Today, there is news almost too sad to imagine. Keefer Nye has lost both her mother and her father.” The sports guy, Mike Albert, weighed in, almost joshing, “Keefer is lucky in that she has two sets of loving grandparents still living, and maybe she’ll grow up to play on the LPGA . . .”

  * * *

  “Got any aspirin, Church?”

  Tim shook his head, chewing. Gordon was fairly certain he was well into stage one of a bastard hangover. This sitting around was aimless, but it seemed somehow necessary, an obligatory pause before everyone turned away and plunged into the flume of everyday life. There were two conversations that stood out in his mind from the night before. He cudgeled them in his mind, and they only deepened his impatience.

  The first was something Delia Cady, Ray’s cousin, had said at an impromptu dinner with the younger people.

  Gordon had, by then, sunk into a stupor he’d hoped would be taken as the effects of shock, and so at first, he hadn’t realized that Delia’s comments about Ray’s absolute faith in eternal life were directed at him.

  “And I know Georgia felt the same way,” Delia had said, brushing back the skillful rigid structure of dark ringlets that framed her large, pale face. “That’s right, isn’t it, Gordon?”

  “I don’t know,” Gordon had said, itching with discomfort as the rest fell silent. “I mean, I don’t know whether she believed in that.”

  “She was your sister,” Delia chided. “We discussed it many times. She felt certain that God was directing her course.”

  “God was her copilot,” Tim put in, his attempt at lightness landing with a leaden plop in the hush.

  “We just never discussed religion,” Gordon had explained. “I know she was more religious than I am . . .”

  “I wonder if she’ll be raised . . . Catholic,” Delia said.

  “Do you mean Keefer?”

  She’d nodded. “You know, the Nyes aren’t.”

  “My folks are, though,” Gordon said. “Socially, at least.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than smells and bells and holidays,” Delia went on. “It’s a big responsibility, one of the most important things about raising a child.”

  “I think . . . well, we haven’t got that far yet, Delia,” Gordon had said wearily, and he remembered wonder
ing as he spoke, were the McKennas somehow behind the game?

  He’d assumed, of course, especially after learning of the annulled will, that there would have to be some sort of conference about Keefer. But the McKennas were her designated guardians. Everyone knew that. He hadn’t discussed the lawyer’s message with his parents, hesitating out of deference to their grief. He’d been angry, in fact, that his attention to his own grief had been diverted by ridiculous speculation. But as he listened to Delia, he’d been forced into more speculating: Had his parents been holding back also, out of respect for him? Did all three of them know things they weren’t telling one another?

  The second conversation had happened that morning, with Carl Jurgen, during the dizzy dawn of a long night. A drinking conclave had followed the dinner. It started with at least two of the Upchurch brothers (Gordon’s memory blurred), Pat Chaptman, Kip Sweeney, Lindsay, and Stephanie Larsen and her boyfriend, along with great quantities of cranberry juice and vodka and Triple Sec that dwindled to vodka alone. By the wee hours, the crowd also had dwindled, leaving only Gordon, Tim, Jurgen, and Kip.