Merrion recognized what he felt as envy, another reason for resenting Julian. In a few years, when the women in their early forties had finished with Julian, they'd be about the right age for him. But by then he'd have become a little too old to interest them in the tinkling drinks, light conversations and ninety-minute dinners understood by both participants as preliminary to vigorous and protracted sexual intercourse. But then again, perhaps, on a cold winter's night, wind blowing past the window… JFK? Sure, I knew him a little. One night down in West Virginia, back in Sixty, driving poor Humphrey nuts and..:
"Sklaffed too many off the tees in sudden-death," Julian said in the bar now, in the evenings to the visitors buying drinks, explaining his withdrawal from the tour. The kid was good in the clinches, no matter how he'd been out on the courses. And he looked as though he'd found a way to make up nicely for that deficit; for a player unsuccessfully seeking small jackpots the best player late on a mini-tour late Sunday afternoon during Julian's years had usually pocketed about twenty thousand dollars.
But he had an impressive collection of multi-dialed watches, and heavy gold chains for all occasions.
"Birthday presents, he tells me," Heck Sanderson said over beers one hot still late afternoon in the dark green shade. Merrion found that unconvincing but kept quiet, seeing Heck, though disapproving, believed it. "Lots of people like him, I guess. Women-type people. Like to give him things. Don't like to live with him long, though, seem interested in having babies with him." Julian was an only child. Heck had gone beyond the age at which his contemporaries had reported births of grandchildren.
Julian had been married and divorced once during the transition from his twenties to his thirties, but while he had had two or three steady ladies since then, the last had left him before George Bush lost in '92. Now he lived alone in a two-bedroom condo Heck had bought for him in a spartan half-shingled half-timbered white stucco housing complex on Route 2 west of Amherst. Most of the other tenants were young faculty from UMass. and Amherst College. Returning late at night in his monster-tired 4X4 Ford Bronco, he often had to clear his parking space of neon-pink and green plastic Big Wheels and small bicycles with training wheels. When cold weather closed the Grey Hills course for the winter, he commuted north six afternoons a week in the overcast darkness to tend bar at the Molly Stark Tavern, a rich skiers' hangout in southern Vermont. The previous May when he returned to Grey Hills to resume his summer career, he seemed to have what Merrion thought was a great deal of money for a barkeep, even a good one, generously tipped, but at least the job got him off Heck's list of dependents;
Merrion kept his mouth shut.
Julian had played well enough and worked hard enough in the PGA Apprentice Program during the mid-through-late-Seventies to earn the card that qualified him to enter pro tournaments for the coming year, when he was twenty-four. He was coming off a record of having finished among the top ten in nineteen New England and Canadian pro-ams.
According to Heck, Julian partially financed his first year on the road with $6,000 won from men whose professional success had made them overconfident. Mistakenly believing they'd become good golfers, too, they thought because Julian was a transient and they were scratch players on familiar home turf, they were each fifty or a hundred bucks a round better than he was. Because Julian was careful not to beat them too badly, many tried several times to disprove what was plainly so. Heck cheerfully provided the other $19,000.
From the outset Heck had agreed to provide $15,000. The additional $4,000 or so had gone to cover unexpected expenses: among them four new tires for Julian's Bronco, several disappointing pot-limit poker hands he'd drawn sitting in on a game down in Augusta, Georgia, the week before the Masters, and a flirtation with cocaine that for a few years scared the hell out of him -explaining his need for more money to Heck, he camouflaged it as a costly lesson learned in a high-stakes eight-ball showdown he'd lost in a billiard room in Baton Rouge. Heck guilelessly repeated that story to his friends.
Merrion had seen Julian playing poker and bridge at Grey Hills with some of the better-off but denser members. He had no trouble believing Julian had gotten hoovered in Augusta. Never having known Julian to wear out the felt practicing combinations in the hush of the mahogany billiard room at Grey Hills, Merrion disbelieved Heck's second-hand story of the embarrassment in Louisiana, but he didn't scoff.
