Satisfaction Without Sweat

Reginald (Jake) Jacobson bent low and stabbed a tee through the perfect green turf. He frowned. It didn’t snap through that thin root film of resistance. He straightened easily–too easily. He raised a hand to his forehead reflexively, as he’d done so many times before, to guard his eyes as he scanned the fairway. Long fronds drooped beneath the giant royal palm above him, rustling gently against the cigar-shaped trunk indicating to him a five to six mile-per-hour easterly wind. 

Gentle. Consistent. Insignificant. 

He held out his hand and felt the club slap into his palm. It was the right driver. He nodded and his young caddy removed himself from Jake’s awareness. 

Jake planted his feet near the tee, rocked his weight back and forth from one leg to another. The grass was too spongy–too different–too much better than his old course. He held the club out in front of him, interlocked his fingers, found his grip. His brown cabretta leather gloves hugged his hands flawlessly, the seams were all but imperceptible. They breathed, they didn’t bunch between his fingers, they didn’t interfere with his interlocking grip in the least. His hands were gloves, the gloves were the leather wrapped ends of the shaft. 

But he sucked air through his teeth, adjusted, bit his lip. Then he yanked off the gloves. The crowd murmured softly behind him, he looked back and they stiffened. 

Respect, he thought, if there is one thing I have here it is that.

One of the onlookers stood out from the rest of the crowd, a blonde. Her eyes were on him–unlike everyone else. The crowd, they all watched his body, his movements, his decisions, his self-hypnotic routine–the woman though, she watched him. A straight unobstructed line connected her blue eyes to his. He resisted the pale curves teasing him in the periphery, and the red sundress from which those curves peeked. The hem fluttered in the five-to-six mile wind in a pattern that was unmistakably cousin to the crystalline glimmer of her eyes. 

Not insignificant.    

He tossed the woman his gloves. The crowd parted and she caught them with a single hand. She smiled flirtatiously, fluttering her long curled lashes and waved the gloves back at him daintily, as if to say, “When you win this hole, come find me and I just might give them back.”

He grinned, shining his perfect teeth in that irresistible charm women were suddenly so attracted to. Then, gracefully, she turned away, slow enough for Jake to yield his eyes to the allure of her frame and the outline of her perfect cleavage–not a ‘V’, but a lower-case ‘m’ patterned like the sprawling palm fronds that overshadowed them, or the waterway fountain arcing up, and out, and down; exciting and attractive. Slack-jawed, he surveyed curves as steep as the slopes and grades of this very fairway. 

The crowd laughed, admiring the less-than-subtle expressions between them, and Jake shook his head. 

And then there was the ball in his pocket. And then there it was on the tee as he straightened again. And the club, and his now-naked grip on the shaft. And there was nothing else. No hole at the far side of the rolling hills, no tool in his hand, not even that woman in his head–just purpose and intuition. Instinct and the end of himself, pulling back, knees bending, waist twisting, chest rotating, and connection–the ping, the tactile retaliation of dimpled sphere, aluminum wand whistling down, then up, then behind. 

Then would be his reflexive salute, palm barricading eyes against beams of light–

And the hunt for white. That race of the eyes, and awareness, and instantaneous unconscious calculation. Trajectory found against blue, lost against cottony white, found again against canopy green. The slow bounce. The long aw of the crowd as tension climaxes, as fist is raised, as ball crawls to find rest. And then the satisfaction. The cathartic flood of supreme contentedness, boosted exponentially by pumping fist–

But he wasn’t pumping his fist, didn’t feel any flood of…anything. Even as that tiny white dot disappeared into the hole and the crowd exploded in applause and in astounded, congratulatory praise, he felt nothing, not the faintest flicker of satisfaction. Neither pride, nor peace. And as he peered across the distant slopes beneath the brim of his bare hand, he knew that neither would he find pleasure, even if he retrieved his lost gloves. 

He let his arm fall by his side, and the beams of harmless sun pierce his perfect eyes. He strolled leisurely toward the water hazard watching the cascading fountain streams ripple into the pool of crystal clear water. Light sparkled in the turbulence beautifully, flickering and fluttering, but Jake saw a dance, a mesmerizing cadence of carefully arranged movement, sequence, not storm.

He wiped his brow.

How could there be satisfaction without sweat?

He crossed his hands over his chest as he was instructed, recalled the words, spoke them.

***

“Aw, Dad,” His son said. It was a complaint. 

“Don’t,” Jake said.

“I thought that was going to be a perfect fit. You can’t keep rejecting these.”

“I can, and I will.” Jake sat up, “I’m done, this isn’t what I want.”

“But it’s all you can afford.” 

“I can afford to die.”

His son looked away, “Don’t say that.” 

“I appreciate what you're doing here, but I don’t need this. I don’t want this. It’s not real.”

A woman in scrubs quietly removed the electrodes from Jake’s temple.

“What’s the alternative, Dad?”

“It’s the end of the road, Son. Hospice.”

“Stop. That’s not needed any more, there is only one hospice even left on the east coast. They have these retirement servers for a reason, Dad. At this place your road doesn't have to have an end. Why are you so eager to say goodbye to us? You’re giving up.” His son sighed and Jake heard defeat in his voice. “Besides,” he said quietly, “even if your stubborn ass refused this place, there’s no way in hell I’d let your last weeks be in a hospice. You’d come home with Jenny and me, and the kids.” 

Jake snatched his son’s hand so suddenly, and with a grip so tight, it surprised them both. “Nothing I could see in these damn computers could be more satisfying to me than spending my last days glorying in my greatest accomplishment.” Jake locked a gaze into his son’s eyes and watched the artificial retirement center fluorescents spasm in his son’s tears, and nothing Jake had ever seen in his life was more real than that.