ACT II: Scene 9
The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain
[The Wind in San Nouveau Stays Mainly at the Golf Course]
SAN NOUVEAU ISLAND, CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS
Wherein our hero proves himself to be a formidable force, and our heroine starts finding her own ramparts less impervious to that force.
“I’ll load all your equipment into the golf cart and meet you at the clubhouse, Monique-Noelle.” I tried to keep my tone measured, but inside I was in full freak-out mode. If I found Henry and got him to the links fast enough, maybe we could at least have time to go over a few golfing pointers before Mo-No arrived.
I needed to buy us some time.
“So, I’m sure you’ll want to fix your hair and choose just the right thing to wear.”
At this, Mo-No turned to me in alarm, her eyes flashing open as if she might choose the wrong outfit and ruin everything.
Oh, brother.
“I’ll be getting ready. Do you think it’s too cold for a miniskirt? Probably, but I could buckle a cute trench over it that would highlight my waistline, and…”
I left her to her wardrobe selection and jammed my way out into the yard where I saw Henry relaxing on a roadside bench a few yards down the way.
“Now who’s a brilliant wool-puller?” He laced his hands behind his head and leaned back with a satisfied grin, tipping the hat over his eyes. The perfect white teeth shone forth and tripped me up, but I gathered wits quickly this time. Mostly.
I grabbed his hat off his head. “What on earth did you let her off the hook for? You could have been canoodling, or whatever, in her hot tub by now, sealing the deal.”
“But then what would that accomplish?” He took the hat back and planted it on his head. “She’ll want me more if I seem unattainable, at least at first.”
I saw. So he’d dangled the bait. I could see that. Good strategy—until I factored in the whole golf club-shaped monkey wrench he’d thrown into our plan.
“We have a problem, Houston.” I paced back and forth in front of the bench. “Monique-Noelle is heading to the imaginary charity golf game, and she’ll be there to see you play.”
Henry looked up with bright eyes. “All right! That’s just what I’d banked on. That’s beauty.”
I halted in my tracks.
“Beauty!” I may or may not have mocked his Australian pronunciation of the word beauty. “It’s a disaster. We have exactly one hour and thirty-eight minutes for me to teach you how to play golf well enough to hold your own in a game, plus well enough to pull the wool, as you say, over Mo-No’s eyes. A game which we still have to arrange, at a club I don’t belong to, no less.”
“I love that you call her Mo-No.” He snorted. “I’ve been to Tokyo a few times, and I picked up a little Japanese. You know the word mono in Japanese means thing. She’s The Thing, as far as you’re concerned.”
It fit, her being the equivalent of the namesake starring-role of a horror movie.
“We don’t really have time to be yukking it up here, my friend.” Yeah, my friend who claimed he’d traveled to Tokyo a few times. Right. Those trips probably occurred between his watching nonstop rerun episodes of Dingo Nights on TV to perfect his Australian accent, like Polly had theorized to his face and he hadn’t denied. Like every other red-blooded American male he’d developed a crush on Mindi Dresser, the star of the night-time soap opera, and caught the accent like most people caught the common cold.
“I can’t think of how we’re going to fix this.” I had started pacing again.
“Calm down.” He reached out and grabbed my hand to stop my relentless back and forth strides in front of the bench. It shot electric pulses up my arm, but I blinked them away. Sort of.
“What do you think I was doing all the time you were entertaining that dog this morning painting its toenails—again? Trust me, I wasn’t spending the whole block of time trying on cheeky grin after cheeky grin in the mirror to get the right one.”
He flashed me a practiced but still slaying smile. Its cheekiness only melted me a third of the way.
“Okay, then, what were you doing while I played doggie beauty shop?”
“Me, I moseyed over and hustled up a round of golf with a few guys who were already in the bar hiding from their wives. They were more than happy to let me make a friendly wager with them.”
“But you told Mo-No it was for charity.”
“It is. She’s the charity case.” He leaned up and punched me in the arm, as if this was a good idea and now I’d realized that fact.
I hadn’t. No way did this guy know how to golf. We were dead. Toasty dead. Ready to dry up and blow away in the next stiff breeze that hit San Nouveau dead.
And the penniless wonder had just made a wager he couldn’t win. Who was going to pony up the cash when he lost to the wealthiest men on the planet?
My throat dried out, and I thought I might faint.
However, at this point, we were in too deep to back out. The only way out was through.
“We’re wasting time. Come on. You have now,” I checked the clock on my phone, “an hour and thirty-one minutes to learn to golf.”
***
For all the windless calm of the morning’s weather, a fair breeze had picked up for the afternoon. Henry and I stood at the edge of the unique, one-of-a-kind golf course only a place like San Nouveau could create, my toes sinking into the spongy Bermuda grass on the fairway of the first hole.
“That is what they call the rough.” I pointed to the scraggly area of St. Augustine grass flanking the mild curve in the run about thirty yards yonder. “Do whatever you can to avoid it. This course, being on the bad spot of ground it is, has the worst rough of any eighteen holes in current use. They actually brag about it. It’s a draw for some people who think they can aim their shots so straight they won’t ever go into the rough.”
Henry licked his thumb and stuck it in the air.
“I’ll guess what they don’t bank on is the wind, though, right? The way it blows across a rocky island is going to be gusty and unpredictable.”
For a guy who was homeless yesterday and ranting about coyotes and rivers, he seemed to have good common sense on the links. For a brief moment, I scraped together a small pile of hope.
But then his first shot sent him straight into the rough, and so did the second. And the third. And so on. My small pile of hope got scattered like so many raked autumn leaves in a squall.
We were running out of golf balls.
“It’s almost as if the green doesn’t exist for you.”
“Maybe I need some hands-on training.” He flashed me those teeth. The come-on was a resurgence of the blatant flirting of last evening, when I was showing him how to work the shower at Pickering Place.
The flirting type of girl would have batted her eyelashes and told him, in a coquettish tone, that he was getting fresh. I batted away his come-on instead.
“Cool it, cowboy. We don’t even have time for me to tell you you’d better hit another five dozen shots until you get it right.” A glance at my phone’s clock told me there was no such luxury.
“I’d do better if I was coached, you know.” Again with the teeth, my kryptonite.
Much as I hated to agree, his flirtatious suggestion unfortunately looked like our only option, given the time constraints.
“Fine. Come here.” I grabbed our third-to-last practice ball from the tee. “We’ll practice without a ball for a few swings. This is what you do. Show me your grip.” I inspected the way his hands lined up with each other on the leather of the club’s shaft. “That’s not bad. How did you learn?”
“I saw it on that golf movie. You know, the one with Matt Damon.”
I knew the movie, but I didn’t remember any part of the show with a tutorial on grip. Whatever.
“Good. Now show me your swing.” I came and stood behind him to watch how his arms moved, how his torso twisted, how his back muscles rippled…
“That’s almost there.” I cleared my throat and pulled myself together.
Usually I didn’t get nearly this flustered by attraction to a man. It had to be pheromones, crazy bus station pheromones. Or maybe I’d been like a spigot rusted in the off-position all these years, and Henry came along with steel wool and loosened things up, because all of a sudden my hormones were like a tap that wouldn’t shut off.
“Uh,” I spluttered, “I think you lack straight follow-through. Let’s try it with a real ball. I’ll guide you as you make the motions.”
He gave a nod and set a ball back on the tee.
Stepping forward, I placed my chin on his shoulder, looking over him, my hands around his back and on the shaft of the club so that I could swing the one wood driver along with him. But his torso was a lot broader than I’d bargained on. As we pulled back to the right, my torso pressed against his back, he turned and whispered, “Believe me, I’m not lacking in follow-through.”
I choked. Our swing sent the ball veering at an angle twice as far into the rough as any Henry had projectile-launched on his own.
“See?” I said, stepping away and patting the hotspot on my neck with the back of my hand. “You’ve got it. Good tips. Let’s get you back to the clubhouse to make your tee time.”
My pulse was pounding and my face was ablaze, and I couldn’t do this anymore. Not with any dignity remaining. I made a quick dash for the golf cart loaded down with Mo-No’s clubs.
We arrived at the clubhouse and met up with Henry’s new golf buddies just as Mo-No came sashaying in.
“Oh, there you are.” She came up and draped herself across Henry’s shoulders, giving him one of those kiss-hellos that rich or foreign people always did. “Lovely to see you, Henry.” She turned to the others. “I’m Monique-Noelle. MacDowell Bainbridge is my husband. We live on San Dorado Street, next door to the Dancies. You know the Dancies—they’re in jet engines.”
The men gave a grunt or two of acknowledgment, mostly ignoring Mo-No and quickly refocusing on a conversation they’d been having before she interrupted, something about a stock market in Asia.
“Henry, dear. Have you hired anyone to help you cart your clubs around? Because I’ve just canceled my tee time. Instead, I’d love to watch your game, cheer for you with my darling and polite golf-clap.”
“That sounds great.” It sounded like grite. “And no, I haven’t hired anyone to help me. I figured I’d manage on my own.” His shoulders definitely had the strength for it.
Oh, shush up, traitorous thoughts.
“Well,” it was Mo-No’s well-practiced come-on voice. “If you let me tag along on your game, I’ll loan you my caddy. She’s a whiz with knowing which club to use. Then you’ll owe me a favor.”
I did not like to think about any of those implications.
Besides, now Monique was offering me as his caddy. It wasn’t as bad as loaning me out to be her friend’s nanny, but still. Come on.
I leveled a glare at her, and when no one else was looking, she gave me an imperious gaze. So this was my punishment for losing Chachi: humiliating me and treating me like yet a new kind of servant.
“You’re here without your dog. Where did you leave Chachi?” I whispered, perhaps as a hiss.
“With a responsible sitter.” Her eyes were slits, just wide enough to send out lasers of shame at me.
Henry reached out and shook my hand, my palm roughing up against his skin. Those calluses again. I loved and hated them so much.
“There’s nothing I’d love more in the world.” Henry slid his golf bag toward me and offered Mo-No his arm. “I think a good caddy, who can coach in detail on a swing’s follow-through, is worth his or her weight in gold.” He said this gold part with a gaze leveled right at me.
My temperature spiked. I had to turn away.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Mo-No sidled up to him, not having seen his glance in my direction.
“However,” Henry said, “I believe in this game, we’re acting as our own caddies. It’s more athletic that way.” He turned to the businessmen who were shouldering their own golf bags. “More sporting. And we’re here for the challenge.”
They grunted a yes and headed out onto the grounds. Mo-No’s lower lip went into full pout.
“But does that mean we can’t trail along?” She demonstrated her little golf clap, batting her eyelashes. “I mean, at least me?” She must have realized she’d inadvertently invited me too.
He asked the men, and they once again gave a communal grunt. If I hadn’t heard them talking markets, I’d wonder if they spoke English or Caveman.
Then one spoke.
“We love golf bunnies.” He chortled. “The more the better. But none ever trail after us. This’ll be new.”
We were in.
Annnnd, I braced myself for the humiliation.
***
By the seventh hole, however, the humiliation still hadn’t struck, much to my shock and awe. An hour and a half into it, and yeah, Henry didn’t have the lowest score in the group, but he was holding his own. None of them were heading to the Masters Tournament anytime soon, that was certain. But this course also didn’t grant any favors. The men weren’t here to compete against each other. At this course, with its rocky terrain and mean gusts, they were here playing against the earth itself, and Henry hadn’t let the course beat him down yet.
As we advanced to the eighth hole, I walked beside him, feeling a definite buzz coming off his skin. He was enjoying this. I was enjoying watching him do so.
“Nine over par? Not bad.” One fellow was at thirteen, and the other three were in the lower ranges.
“Beginner’s luck.”
Maybe the people from his past life, the ones who had made sure he enjoyed good orthodontia before they let him go wandering off to proclaim himself king of the bus station, had also given him a little time on the golf course and this was all muscle memory.
“You haven’t hit the backside, though. It’s where the wind carries all the balls into the rough.”
“I’ve spent some time in the rough, Elizer. I’ll keep my wits about me.” He walked on ahead, and I lagged back, watching him go using that cowboy stride, so long but lazy at the same time.
Mo-No bustled up next to me.
“Hands off. He’s not in your league.”
“I was just warning him about the back nine being rough.” She was the one who had recommended me as his caddy, after all.
“You’ll stop speaking to him, and moving in on him immediately, or I’ll show you what’s meant by rough. Hands off, I said.” She flounced ahead, but over her shoulder said, “Eyes, too.”
Guilty as charged. My eyes slid over to where he was lining up a tee-off. His biceps and triceps had this rippling interplay going that was impossible to ignore. I stifled a sigh.
Then on the tenth hole, it happened. Just as I predicted, he sliced—straight into the scrubby vegetation on the leeward side.
“You want to take a mulligan, man? That’s how we play this course. We’re here every Friday.”
“No mulligans for me.”
“Fine, but take a penalty and keep going forward. That ball is buried deep.”
“Remember we’re playing on a wager.” Henry hung back while the others teed off. “You don’t want to give me any kind of advantage.”
“Advantage!” The one with the visor reading Rivershire Electric hit his ball into the rough as well, but not nearly as far. “Fine. But I still take my own mulligan.”
“She’ll be all right,” Henry said, as if to mean, everything’ll be fine.
What was he doing? He was going to completely botch this, lose the game—which I’d predicted in the first place, but now that he was actually in the running, I hated to see him squander a fairly good run—and blow all his capital with Mo-No. I knew her. She’d never keep throwing herself at a guy who bragged and then lost bets.
“It’s risky, Henry.” I said it under my breath. I don’t know if he heard, but he met my eyes and blinked twice, as if to say, “Trust me.”
Trust him. Last time I trusted him, I ended up at strike two over Chachi.
The group of us moved our way down the course to where Henry’s ball languished. It took a minute to find it.
Please. There was no way he was chopping his way out of this one without adding a dozen to his score. His ball was deep in sand within the rough, which amounted to a trap within a trap.
He measured his shot, sizing it up with his eyes.
We should quit. We should quit while he was ahead. He could tell Mo-No he’d changed his mind about lunch and about the jacuzzi jets and she’d squeal and be elated and assume she’d won him over with her charming golf clap and—
Whoosh! In a single chip with the pitching wedge, his ball was back on the green and rolling toward the hole.
I completely forgot how to golf-clap. I was applauding and shouting like someone at a rock concert instead. All eyes turned to me in warning, and I quit right away, but the golfer who also had a ball in the rough said, “Not bad.”
Understatement—of the year.
Ultimately, Henry sank his shot one under par for the hole.
Mulligan Man ended up three over par—not even counting the penalty—for this hole, and he’d held the lead before now.
Suddenly, Henry was a serious contender.
At the eleventh hole, the wind kicked up. Sand peppered my arms and neck. Every single guy in the group sliced to the rough, thanks to the gusts of wind.
“You want to take a rain check on finishing this game?” One guy put away his shade umbrella so it wouldn’t haul him away like some kind of parasail. “It’s getting serious.”
“You’re just afraid this Aussie is going to whup up on you.”
“I’m not afraid.” The guy’s hackles shot up, and he squared his shoulders. “In fact, I’ll forfeit any mulligan for this shot and go hit it out of the rough. If Henry can do it, so can I. Gentlemen?” He lifted his chin to challenge them all.
They all accepted, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and started walking toward the rough.
“Did this game just get interesting?” A fellow in a golf cart up on the green stalled beside us. “Did I hear a no-mulligan, no-penalty game is going down?”
“It is.” Visor Guy nodded toward Henry. “The Aussie instigated it. You can tell management if you want.”
“Already alerted.”
What was going on? I looked over at Mo-No, who seemed a lot less mad at me—for the moment—enough so that she responded to clear up my unspoken confusion.
“Oh, MacDowell told me that so rarely does a real challenge game happen on this course that they have to tell the club management so other golfers can either play through or choose to watch.”
“Is that true? Some would watch? Rather than finish their own round?”
The guy on the golf cart shrugged. “It’s a tough course. Hardly anyone takes it on at its full power.” He buzzed off in his little electric vehicle, and next thing I knew he was back with a cartload of golfers. They’d dropped their bags near the tee. I guessed management would collect those, in the San Nouveau way of things.
“I’m up, then boys?” Henry wore a broad grin. While I adored the view of his teeth, I couldn’t figure out why he was so happy, considering that his ball perched on a pile of rocks surrounded by some sort of scrubby, stick-laden weeds that looked even worse than the surrounding chaparral. Never would he effect a second escape from a nasty trap as spectacular as his first—if he got out at all. That last shot out of the rough on the tenth hole hadn’t been beginner’s luck, it had been a divine intervention.
Assessing the other guys’ shots, all on less rocky ground, I was sick for Henry. Plus, now an audience was stacking up, men and women, young and old. They filtered up beside and behind me, golf-claps at the ready.
This was bound to be one horrendous choke.
Mo-No slid next to me and started bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, her hands clutched together at her heart. “Come on, come on…”
More people filtered in. Henry pulled out this club and then that club, and then he went back to the first one, settling on not the pitching wedge but a nine iron. That was more of an advanced choice, one a golf pro would make at a good course.
I almost couldn’t watch. After that lucky shot on the tenth hole, everyone from our original group expected nothing less than amazing skills from Henry Lyon. Didn’t he know you underplay things at first and then come on strong, not the opposite? Otherwise you’re bound to disappoint.
He lined up his shot. I almost couldn’t watch, but I definitely couldn’t breathe.
Pulling back, Henry’s swing cut with a whoosh through the air despite the wind. Whack! Up chipped the ball, onto the fairway, down the stretch, and directly onto the green.
No way.
Pah! My breath exploded out from my pursed lips, but in spite of extreme elation, I managed a sedate golf clap. The others gathered added theirs as well, and Mo-No swiveled around and hugged me.
“Isn’t he wonderful?”
He was. For once, I couldn’t disagree with something Mo-No asserted.
The rest of the round went like that. Teeing off, straight or not in the follow-through, and the wind catching each shot and hurling them into the pines or the cactus or the sand—if there was a trap, these golfers found it.
But only Henry Lyon escaped each snare with a single stroke and came back to sink putts under par.
Onlookers continued to amass, and with each of Henry’s successive victories against nature, they let their golf claps sound more and more like applause at a hockey match—until the elite of San Nouveau were all high-fiving each other and slapping each other’s backs. Bets on how he’d manage it, which club he’d use, were audibly being made all around me. The guys golfing with him didn’t even seem to mind how badly they were getting their clocks cleaned, the energy was that good.
At the completion of the eighteenth hole, Visor Guy patted the air to signal for everyone to quiet down. Then, in a voice of gravity, he announced the score, with Henry coming in at four under par for the course. The crowd erupted in clapping, and then there arose cries of “Speech! Speech!”
Oh, no. Hot lead fell in my stomach. What would he say? Had he ever been put on the spot like this? Please don’t let him say anything about his geneticist or the tour bus driver that gave him the dehydrated stroganoff.
“I wanna thank the guys here today,” he indicated the other golfers, “for letting me jump into their game.”
A woman near me gasped.
“He’s Australian. I’m so hot for Australian accents.”
I glanced over and she was fanning herself with her scorecard, despite the December wind. Good gracious. Her friend was biting her lower lip and giving Henry a lascivious stare.
“I call dibs.”
Oh, brother. Just look at that. Women were powerless against the magnetic pull of the Aussie-speak.
Fortunately, Henry either ignored the women or didn’t hear their blatant flirtations, because he went on with his speech.
“I played for charity, and I’m pretty sure that’s why the gods of golf were working all in my favor. Thanks to you all for coming along for the ride. This is a ripper of a golf course you’ve got yourselves here.”
There was more clapping at his flattery, but someone called out to him, as if this were a post-Pebble Beach press conference.
“But why could you do that well on your first time out here? We’re all aware this course is a beast.”
Henry looked down a second, going all aw shucks on us, and making my heart get those annoying palpitations again.
“Where I grew up, all we had was the rough. My brother and I took bets on who could chip it over the horse stables. I’m nothing by comparison to Frank. You should see his chip. He won every time.”
The crowd clapped, and the two women wolf-whistled, so classy, and then started elbowing their way to the front of the throng.
They would have needed to be shot from a compound bow to beat Monique, though. The second he took a bow, she’d super-glued herself to his side, long before the other two could spell trollop.
“Henry, hon. Now should we grab that lunch? Actually, it’s getting late. Shall we make it dinner?”
“Henry. Henry Lyon?” The disappointed girl next to me spluttered. “Is he the same Henry Lyon I read about this morning? ‘Aussie takes Frogs in the Sand Premiere by Storm.’ See? I thought he looked familiar.” She had her phone out and was flashing it at her also-ran friend. “Right here on GossipMongers.com.”
Wait. He’d made the tabloids when he went to the movie premiere last night? I had to see that for myself. This could be great—or absolutely terrible.
When I opened my phone, I saw a pile-up of texts from Polly. One of them, truncated, started with GossipMong…—so I knew she’d seen it, and that the rumor mill was grinding its grain today, with Henry caught under the millstone.
As I was about to start digging out of the Polly Text Blizzard, I heard Henry say something over the other voices.
“I don’t know, Ms. Monique-Noelle. I’ll have to check my schedule since I’m only here a few days looking at property. If you’ve got a horse to lend, though, I’d love to join you next week on your fox hunt.”
Fox hunt!