The Boston Tangler
Chapter Six: A good walk spoiled
By Roland Merullo
On Friday after work, prime Tangler suspect Louis Robinson met with his friend Max Twice, over milkshakes.
"You have the radost, the joy, in your face," Max told him. "Miss Unexpected Love, this is the reason?"
"Pinch me," Louis said. "Pinch me, I must be dreaming."
Max reached across the table and squeezed both Louis's shoulders in his strong hands. "This is the reward for my Louie," he said happily. "For everything what you are doing for the city, for us."
"Max, listen. I don't want to lie to you. I am not the Tangler. Some days I wish I was, but I'm not."
"Good, good. That's right, Louie. If they press on Max too hard, he can tell them: "Louie himself says me he's never not done any of this things."
The double negative - so important a part of Russian grammar - gave Louis no comfort in this case. He finished his snack and bid his pal good evening, in a less than optimistic mood.
That night, as they'd agreed, he called Luba at home, and the radost returned to his voice. They spoke for half an hour, Luba on her portable phone, Louis on his, a wireless opera of tender words arcing across the city night. Until that point, their relationship had consisted of a sort of quirky culinary tour of Boston: lovely summer evenings spent at a succession of atmospheric restaurants. Good food, a nice walk afterwards, some semi-public, middle-aged making out. But they were lovers now, though, no longer just dating. So this time, on the second Saturday of August, in the heart of summer's hottest, finest days, they decided to try something more in keeping with the new level of intimacy they'd attained. They decided to play golf.
Luba belonged to Bellevue, a private nine-hole club in Melrose, so they made a tee time there for Saturday at noon. Nine holes only: They didn't want to push things too far too fast. Louis offered to pick her up at her apartment (he thought it strange that he did not yet know her address, only that she lived "in the South End"), but Luba declined n a natural, pleasant way, telling him she had an errand to do on the North Shore that morning anyway, and it would be easier for them to meet at the club rather than make more complicated arrangements.
"Golf," she said, after giving him directions to the club. "Dinner. Then you can trick me into coming back to Allston for the night if you want."
He wanted.
Saturday broke humid and overcast, thunder crackling in the predawn skies. Not exactly perfect golf weather, but Louis signed out his regular cab, worked a few hours, came home, showered, loaded his clubs into the trunk, waved goodbye to Vizelot on the steps, and headed north in fairly good spirits.
Only fairly good, because, by now, the Tangler had pretty much taken over the daily news, and he could not keep himself from feeling that it, he, or she had also taken over part of his life.
You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing about the latest Tangle (the police spokesman insisted on referring to them as "crime events"). On Monday, all the theft-control devices in the stores along Boylston Street had broken down. All of them, all at once. Nothing, it turned out, had been stolen. On Tuesday, a three-minute clip of Charlie Chaplin was somehow inserted into the middle of the evening news on channel WSBT. No one, it turned out, called the station to complain. Most disturbing of all, at least as far as Louis was concerned, was the fact that, on Friday, the day after his encounter with Detective Hector and the Irwin Corey look-alike, something went awry with the frequency on which the dispatcher at All-Right Cab spoke to his drivers. The interference lasted for only 34 minutes, but no one could remember such a thing ever happening.
The Tangler story was attracting journalists from all over the world, giving Boston a notoriety it did not exactly want. Governor Cellucci was energetic, Mayor Menino apologetic, the police apoplectic, the citizenry, for the most part, amused.
Louis, though, could not help feeling extremely uncomfortable. First, there had been the trouble with the video screen at Fenway Park, then the ATM blackout, and now his own cab radio had been Tangled. Luba was clearly connected to all these events.
Add to that the odd professor, who just happened to be picked up near his apartment in Allston, then just happened to want to be dropped off near Luba's parents' house in Lynn, and then just happened to seem to know how Louis had behaved in the police precinct under interrogation, and who was obviously a friend of Luba's and following him everywhere; and it was pretty difficult to disentangle her from the Tangler.
He felt, at times, as if he were being forced to replay the difficulties of the only other serious love in his life, and he didn't want that. Luba was a wonderful woman, nothing like Alicia, really. He wanted a normal, wholesome relationship with her, untainted by any weirdness or police presence, any marijuana plants in the backyard, any tangling of any kind. As he left Route 1 and drove through Melrose's orderly streets, he told himself that for the first few blissful weeks, he'd been in a kind of denial and had let a lot of things go. It was time, now, to have a blunt talk.
But when he saw Luba near the first tee, in lilac shorts and a striped lilac shirt, taking practice swings with that wonderful grace of hers, most of his resolve slipped away. Love was a sort of hypnosis, he supposed, a sort of Impossible Dream.
Luba greeted him with a warm hug and a kiss. "You found it OK?"
"Finding my way around Greater Boston is my one talent."
She smirked, grinned. "Fishing for compliments again?"
"Nope," he said. "No brag, just fact."
He watched her face and thought he saw one line of trouble there, beneath the lovely smile. "We'll have to walk," she told him. "All the carts are on the blink today. It's never happened before. "
"Fine." Louis swallowed another little acid reflux of doubt and heard a distant grumble of thunder. "I'm in great shape; I'm up to it. No problem. Let's tee off."
Nonplayers often confuse the game of golf with cliches of wealth and ease, a gaggle of pampered white men whacking a hard little ball and taking puffs of cigars between crude jokes. In fact, golf is actually a type of prayer, the fairways and greens a firing range with the ego as target, a moral testing ground on which the soul is made to confront its limitations, in front of others, shot after shot, hole after hole, year after year.
Another interesting feature of the game is that, in this age of gender sensitivity, it has somehow managed to cling to its inherently sexist character. There are separate tees for men and women - in any other sport this would be a violation of law. The men's tees are marked by white or blue blocks, the women's (they are actually called "ladies"') are indicated by red. They might as well be pink. Somehow, this travesty has not yet been challenged in the Supreme Court, though the ACLU is said to have a suit pending.
The white tees are set farther from the hole, so Louis teed off first. He spent a long time getting into a comfortable stance, then reared back and took an enormous, macho swing. The ball flew off the tee, twisted in a slow, ominous arc, and ended up deep in the trees on the right-hand side of the fairway. Luba, teeing off from the reds, drove the ball 195 yards, but dead-straight center.
"Nice," he said, a little too enthusiastically. "Beautiful shot."
She glanced over just long enough for him to glimpse the vein of trouble again and said, politely, "It helps to know the course." There was not much intimacy in her tone, however, and Louis wondered if her ex-husband, Giorgio, in addition to being a J.C. Penney underwear model, had been a pro golfer.
When he reached his ball, Louis realized that his approach to the green was obstructed by trees. The safe thing would have been to chip out onto the fairway, but some inward voice labeled this strategy as unmanly, cowardly, the type of conservative play someone like Giorgio would never have allowed himself.
So he went for it. He opened the club face a bit to get more loft, opened his stance, squinted, waggled, lifted his chin, shook his rear end, adjusted his grip, straightened his left arm, checked the distance, waggled again, squatted down an inch, checked his feet, his grip, rehearsed his swing-thought, waggled a final time. And swung. The ball leapt off his club, headed straight for the flag, hit a tree limb with a resounding crack, and caromed back over his head and onto the driving range behind. From the edge of the driving range, with practice balls lying like bird's eggs in the grass around him and scratch golfers on the practice tee waiting, Louis tried going through the trees again, succeeded this time, but flew his Pinnacle over the green and into the rough behind. Luba played a conservative five-iron to the apron and two-putted for a par four. Louis chipped out of the rough, clumsily, and three-putted for a resoundingly masculine seven.
And, with a storm threatening, the rest of the round went pretty much the same way: Louis sending out powerful volleys that sliced and hooked and found every water hole and sand trap, every corner of rough on Bellevue's intricately laid out nine. Luba played an intelligent, reserved game and beat him by 11 strokes.
She did not rub it in. He did not take it too badly, not right away, in any case. On the way home, they stopped for roast beef sandwiches at Kelly's, and there, sitting at a table with a view of Route 1, the relationship unraveled. If asked, Louis would have insisted that this unraveling had nothing whatsoever to do with his being beaten by a woman. "So you always walk when you play, instead of riding a cart?" he said, in what he thought was a perfectly straightforward way.
Luba squinted, something he noticed she did whenever she disapproved of a question. On the first date, this little habit of hers had seemed sexy; now, suddenly, he found it irritating. "Always."
"What if the course is crowded, and you risk holding people up?"
"The people are there to relax. Golf courses were designed to be walked."
He nodded somberly, sipped his coffee, toyed with a French fry, gazed out at the traffic streaming south. When a suitable amount of time had passed, he said, "What do you think of all this Tangler stuff that's been going on? We've never talked about it."
She fixed her green eyes on him, steadily, seriously. The buds of trouble that had been playing along her lips and across her forehead all day seemed to blossom there as he watched. After a moment she said, "It's you, isn't it?"
"What? Who? Who's me?"
"You're that Tangler person."
A clap of thunder shook the windows. A minister at the next table glanced over at them. Louis lowered his voice. "Are you nuts? Of course I'm not the Tangler. What could make you say something like that?"
"Oh, only about eight different coincidences. You drop me at Fenway Park, and they have that thing happen there with the video screen. Then we go out to the North End, you say how much you hate ATMs, and the next day I hear that all the ATMs in the city have gone crazy. You tell me you don't like Muzak, and all the Muzak goes off in all the elevators. Next thing I know, the cab radios are all malfunctioning, just after you were saying you needed a vacation from driving. Don't lie to me, Louis, please. I had that in spades with Giorgio."
"You had it in spades with Giorgio! What do you think I had in spades with Alicia? She was growing marijuana for half the North Shore, it turns out, in our little back yard in Saugus, and I never knew the first thing! The State Police caught her with helicopter surveillance: They came to the house with shotguns, took her away like she was the next Son of Sam. To her dying day, she'll think it was me who turned her in. It wasn't. I had no idea what was going on. I'm the straightest arrow this side of Worcester. I won't even go to a chiropractor, for God's sake. You're the Tangler, is what I think! You were at Fenway that day, not me. You're the one who never lets me see her apartment."
"My apartment is a mess compared to yours, that's all. I'm embarrassed."
"You're the one who has the Professor Corey look-alike for a neighbor of your parents."
"Don't bring my family into it, please."
"You're the person who's half Costa Rican, half Uzbek, two of the most rabid eco-nuts - "
"I knew we'd get into the race thing, eventually. It always happens with white men ... "
"I'm not getting into the race thing. But this is making me crazy, Luba. All I want is a nice, normal relationship. No hocus-pocus, no hypnosis, no going up on mountaintops to gather in the cosmic energy, no going back into past lives. No acupuncture, no herbs, no channeling, no shark-cartilage therapy."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
Louis could not stop himself. "You're the computer programmer! All this stuff has to do with computers, doesn't it? I mean, how is a cabdriver supposed to wreck the anti-theft machines in the stores on Boylston Street?"
"You have some little magnetic device you carry around with you," she said. "How do I know? You told me you liked to stand your cab in front of the Lenox Hotel. The Lenox is on Boylston Street."
"That's just a coincidence, Luba. I'm the Tangler like ... like ... like I'm Mo Vaughn."
If asked, Louis would not have said he'd used a painful Red Sox reference just to wound her, but Luba looked wounded all the same. She sat staring out the windows until the minister had finished his meal and left.
"I would have bet everything I owned that you weren't another Giorgio," she said in a suddenly serious voice edged with a finality that terrified him. "I can't bear it, really I can't." At this, one round tear formed and swelled beneath each of Luba's eyes. Louis felt as though someone wearing platform shoes was kicking him in the heart.
"I swear on my soul that I've never lied to you in my life," he said. But this only made Luba begin to sob. Two weightlifters in line for roast beef turned to look at him in threatening fashion. A baby three tables away started to howl in its mother's arms. He saw a flash of lightning over the highway.
"Please," she said. "This was the most beautiful thing in my life; please don't make it any harder for me."
"Luba, I swear on my hackney license that I am not the Tangler."
Luba stood up and took her keys out of her purse, tears streaming down her face. Everyone in the restaurant was watching them. "Don't call me," she said. "I couldn't bear to have you call me. I should have known when I saw you wearing that Mets cap ..."
"The Mets cap! I cut up the Mets cap into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet, last night. For you. What? Where are you going?"
Luba was going out of the restaurant - anyone could see that. Louis followed her, trying to keep a mature, sensible expression on his face. When they reached the parking lot, she marched straight to her Volkswagen Beetle and fumbled to get the key into the lock. Louis took hold of her shoulder and turned her tear-stained face to him.
"Your friend told me everything," she said, through a fresh downpour of tears.
"What friend? Vizelot?"
"Max."
"How do you know Max?"
"You talk about him constantly. I've been having all these horrible suspicions, all this Tangler stuff on the radio, in the papers. I called the cab company this morning and asked the dispatcher to get Max Maximov to pick me up in front of my apartment, and once I was in the cab I introduced myself, and I told him how much I loved you and how worried I was that you were doing the same thing to me that was done in my marriage, living a double life. And he said all these wonderful things about you, all this, all this praise. What a nice man you are, how modest, how courageous, what a hero, and so on. And then, proud as a peacock, he says, yes, you are the Tangler, you told him so yourself."
Louis stood on the hot asphalt as if he had been slapped once on each cheek. Luba got the key to work, finally, opened the door, climbed in, started the engine. He raised one hand as she started away, tried to say something. But Luba Neazhidana drove out the exit and into traffic without so much as glancing back. And when she was gone, the skies opened, chasing Louis Robinson back to his cab.
Look for Chapter Seven of The Boston Tangler in next Sunday's Globe Magazine.
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