A Dangerous Age by Ellen Gilchrist Page A

was in the same town as you, so I came out looking for you.”
    “How’s Arletta, or whatever her name is?”
    “Arlen. She’s okay. She’s been sick.”
    “How’s your golf game?”
    “It’s been better. Look here, Olivia, how about going out to eat breakfast with me? I’m starving to death.”
    “There’s a hotel in the next block that’s open now—the café, I mean. All right, let’s go.” I got up from my desk and put on my old tweed jacket, pushed my hair back from my face, took off my reading glasses, and came around the desk, and he put his body around me and held me as though I were a bird in a golden retriever’s mouth, and I let him hold me because why not, for God’s sake—I love the man.
    A ROUND NOON WE got out of bed and he called the Republican headquarters and I called the newspaper and we got dressed and went our separate ways, to pretend to work, and then we came back to the hotel and got sad as hell the way we always do. Here’s how we worked the sadness.
    “I can’t leave her because she’s sick.”
    “You can’t leave her because her father is part of the southern Mafia and he’d have you killed.”
    “That’s also true.”
    “So the Mafia is backing President Bush?”
    “I don’t know who they’re backing. I’m backing him because I believe in what he’s doing. I’m not arguing with you, Olivia. I have a lot of friends who don’t agree with me, but I can’t help believing what I believe, any more than you can help believing what you believe.” He hung his head again. It always got to me when he dropped that amazing chin down from that amazing neck. He’s so still and he just keeps on being there, six feet three inches of a man who was Rookie of the Year with the Chicago Bears and would have been the greatest running back they ever had if he hadn’t lost his right knee to gravity and a right guard from Champaign, Illinois, who afterward became his best friend and used to caddy for him while he was learning to play golf so that he’d have a reason to live. He won the Oklahoma state championship one year after he bought his first set of clubs.
    “I’m glad you hurt your knee and had to quit playing football,” I said. “They might have torn up your whole body if you’d kept on playing.”
    “They’d have had to catch me first.” He didn’t take his eyes from mine. His eyes were the darkest brown I’ve ever seen, except for an old chief I knew in Tahlequah who also had the strange, pure power this man I’ll never stop loving has or contains.
Contains
is the better word. It’s this reservoir he never taps in front of me. “What have you been doing, Olivia?” he asks. “I tried to call you at least twenty times last month, but no one would put me through.”
    “I’m going out with a newspaperman from Fayetteville. He used to work for the
New York Times
. I’ve been fucking him just to spite you.”
    “I don’t fuck her.”
    “Yes, you do. You liar. You fuck Arlette and half the women in Oklahoma and maybe Mississippi and Tennessee and Alabama. No, I’m sorry; I know that isn’t true. Jesus Christ, Kane. It’s a couple of days until the biggest election of the last twenty years, and you have to show up and do this to me. Make me jealous of shadows. Make me sick with dreading when you leave two days or two hours from now and then I’m back to taw without a paddle and no one to eat dinner with.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “William Finney. It’s nothing. He plays golf, but he’s not any good.”
    “Do you still have my putter?”
    “Yes, it’s at my house. You want to go over to my house and get it? Come on, let’s go. The main thing wrong with all of this is the rented hotel rooms. That always makes me so sad, but then everything about this is sad. In real life, nothing makes me sad. How dare you make me sad.”
    “I don’t know, baby. I don’t mean to. I know I don’t.”
    So we went to my house and I got his goddamn putter outof my