Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

of rain. Mike had said that we’d take our chances. I liked his saying “we” and I liked riding beside him, in the wife’s seat. I felt a pleasure in the idea of us as a couple—a pleasure that I knew was lightheaded as an adolescent girl’s. The notion of being a wife beguiled me, just as if I had never been one. This had never happened with the man who was now my actual lover. Could I really have settled in, with a true love, and somehow just got rid of the parts of me that did not fit, and been happy?
    But now that we were alone, there was some constraint.
    “Isn’t the country here beautiful?” I said. And today I meant it. The hills looked softer, under this cloudy white sky, than they had looked yesterday in the brazen sunlight. The trees, at the end of summer, had a raggedy foliage, many of their leaves beginning to rust around the edges, and some had actually turned brown or red. I recognized different leaves now. I said, “Oak trees.”
    “This is sandy soil,” Mike said. “All through here—they call it Oak Ridges.”
    I said I supposed that Ireland was beautiful.
    “Parts of it are really bare. Bare rock.”
    “Did your wife grow up there? Does she have that lovely accent?”
    “You’d think she did, if you heard her. But when she goes back there, they tell her she’s lost it. They tell her she sounds just like an American. American’s what they always say—they don’t bother with Canadian.”
    “And your kids—I guess they don’t sound Irish at all?”
    “Nope.”
    “What are they anyway—boys or girls?”
    “Two boys and a girl.”
    I had an urge now to tell him about the contradictions, the griefs and necessities of my life. I said, “I miss my kids.”
    But he said nothing. No sympathetic word, no encouragement. It might be that he thought it unseemly to talk of our partners or our children, under the circumstances.
    Soon after that we pulled into the parking lot beside the clubhouse, and he said, rather boisterously, as if to make up for his stiffness, “Looks like the rain scare’s kept the Sunday golfers home.” There was only one car in the lot.
    He got out and went into the office to pay the visitor’s fee.
    I had never been on a golf course. I had seen the game being played on television, once or twice and never by choice, and I had an idea that some of the clubs were called irons, or some of the irons clubs, and that there was one of them called a niblick, and that the course itself was called the links. When I told him this Mike said, “Maybe you’re going to be awfully bored.”
    “If I am I’ll go for a walk.”
    That seemed to please him. He laid the weight of his warm hand on my shoulder and said, “You would, too.”
    My ignorance did not matter—of course I did not really have to caddy—and I was not bored. All there was for me to do was to follow him around, and watch him. I didn’t even have to watch him. I could have watched the trees at the edges of the course—they were tall trees with feathery tops and slender trunks, whose name I was not sure of—acacia?—and they were ruffled by occasional winds that we could not feel at all, here below. Also there were flocks of birds, blackbirds or starlings, flying about with a communal sense of urgency, but only from one treetop to another. I remembered now that birds did that; in August or even late July they began to have noisy mass meetings, preparing for the trip south.
    Mike talked now and then, but it was hardly to me. There was no need for me to reply, and in fact I couldn’t have done so. I thought he talked more, though, than a man would have done if he’d been playing here by himself. His disconnected words were reproaches or cautious congratulations or warnings to himself, or they were hardly words at all—just the kind of noises that are meant to convey meaning, and that do convey meaning, in the long intimacy of lives lived in willing proximity.
    This was what I was supposed to do, then—to give him an amplified, an extended notion of himself. A more comfortable notion, you might say, a reassuring sense of human padding around his solitude. He wouldn’t have expected this in quite the same way, or asked it quite so naturally and easily, if I had been another man. Or if I had been a woman with whom he did not feel some established connection.
    I didn’t think this out. It was all there in the pleasure I felt come over me as we made our way around the links. Lust that had given me