Charles Myloft Martin the Third arrives at the shadow golf pro-am with a plan. But her plan quickly forces her into a hazard. First, the club refuses to let her play because of her gender. Then, she finds help in the unlikeliest place. And that help comes with a handicap—one she failed to realize she had. One that will make her question her own place in the “real world.”
“Playing with Reality” by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers.
Playing with Reality
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
It took me forty-five minutes to get to the first tee. Not because I was slow, not because I dawdled on the practice green, but because the dumbass in the clubhouse wouldn’t let me onto the course.
Never mind that I paid more money than some people earn in their lifetimes to be part of this pro-am. Never mind that I was a legitimate member of this golf course.
What seemed to matter to the Small Minds in charge was that although my name is Charles Myloft Martin the Third and I have had a membership here since I took my first breath, I am a female Charles who theoretically had the bad manners to fail to show her face here for the first thirty-five years of her life.
Never mind that I have shown my face here. Until last year, apparently, the Small Minds in charge always thought that I had come as a guest of my father (Charles Myloft Martin the Second), and not as a member in her own right.
Ever since I showed at 6 am, just like the materials sent out with my ticket to the pro-am told me to, I had been subjected to a one-sided discussion of rules and honor and tradition.
The men surrounding me, listening to the discussion but not participating in it, were all captains of industry, heads of government, and, in fact, partners at major worldwide law firms. Like me, they had paid hundreds of thousands for their membership over the years, and unlike me, apparently, they were entitled to walk on the course and play the ticket they’d paid for.
As I scanned the crowd—by then it was 7:30, and the first groups were going to start at 8—I had my realization, mostly because of that thought about the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I didn’t stamp my cleated golf shoe nor did I lose my temper, although I truly wanted to.
Instead, I used the wiles of my gender—the expected wiles of my gender, I should say—smiled sweetly, and said in dulcet tones, “Well, then. If I’m not entitled to all of the perks of membership, I must ask for the return of my membership fees, plus interest, right now. And since my membership dates back to the date of my birth, I must ask for the fees for all thirty-five years at once.”
The Small Mind behind the polished mahogany desk flushed dark red. I knew he wasn’t in charge of memberships, just the rules. He was an employee, hired for his tremendous season on the tour fifteen years back and the charm he exuded to those captains of industry.
“Ma’am,” he said, “Um, I mean, miss. I mean—well, I’m not authorized—we have to talk with the club president and the board—”
“Either I’m entitled to walk onto the course as a member or I am not,” I said. “If I am not, I demand my membership fees at once, or I shall go to the press and let them know that your club has bilked hundreds of thousands from my family over the past three and a half decades. Since my father was beloved, this will not go over well.”
“Ma’am,” said one of those captains of industry. At least that was what I thought he was until he introduced himself as the name partner of the most famous law firm in Georgia. “If your father bought the membership, then he’s entitled to the refund. I’m sure that this can be settled later—”
“And I’m sure, sir,” I said, “that the refund would come to me since I am the sole heir and manager of his estate.”
He shut up, of course, but did shift from foot to foot, as many of these captains of industry were also doing. This pro-am was important to them all, and there was a Schedule To Maintain.
I was preventing all of them from getting to the course, which meant that I was preventing them from their annual four-hour schmooze with some celebrity they wanted to co-opt for business reasons, whether that reason was a stunning photograph or a mutually satisfactory contract that would pay them both handsome dividends over the next few years. There were, from what I had heard, other factors as well.
Those other factors were the reason I was here.
“Let her play,” a captain of industry said under his breath.
“Yeah,” another captain of industry said, just a bit louder. “I mean, what’s different? She’s apparently been playing for years.”
“What’s different,” the poor club professional said, “is that the media will be here for shots of the final tee, and we’re known for not having women members. Someone in the press will jump on us and…”
His voice trailed off, but we all knew where he was going. He would be blamed for my presence and he would lose the sorry little job that he got after his fifteen minutes of fame had ended.
“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” said a third captain of industry. The industry he captained was a multinational media company. If anyone could guarantee this poor club pro’s job, it would be that captain.
Unfortunately, we all knew that this particular captain’s word was as good as a mulligan on the last day of the Masters.
So we all ignored that particular captain. Including the club pro.
“Ma’am, um, miss, um, Charles, um….” The club pro sighed, clearly unable to think clearly just because of my unusual name. “Unfortunately, if you don’t cooperate, I’ll have to contact security. None of us want that and—”
“The press is here, you said.” I smiled sweetly. “Surely you don’t want to give me a fast-track to them.”
“We’ve kicked malcontents with more media contacts off the course without a media disaster,” said one of the famous lawyer/partners with the sneer he was famous for. “I’m sure we could figure out a way to handle one tiny woman with an ego problem.”
“No need,” said a voice in the back. Deep, rich, the edge of an upper-crust British accent. Not enough to be snooty; just enough to be sexy. “I will sponsor her. You can then hammer out the membership issues when the pro-am is done.”
We all turned toward the voice. It belonged to a big man with broad shoulders and a rangy build. He was too tall for the average golfer, but his skin had the bronzing that only time in the sun could bring. And not a summer’s worth of sunlight, but a lifetime’s worth.
He had black hair and stunning gray eyes, and he looked familiar in a movie-star sort of way. But he wasn’t a movie star, at least not in the conventional sense, although he had been the subject of more movies than everyone in the clubhouse combined.
Those gray eyes twinkled as he looked at me. He made his way through the captains of industry to stand beside me. His golf shirt and pants were perfectly pressed, but his hands were both scarred and calloused. Usually when you stuffed men like that into clothes, they looked like a cartoon giant in ill-fitting human clothing instead of the model for whom the clothes were made.
This was no cartoon giant. This was, quite simply, the most handsome man I had ever seen.
“Thank you, milord,” the club pro said with, of all things, a half bow, as if he were uncertain how to address this particular Important Person. “I’m afraid, however, that your suggestion doesn’t solve our problem. This is a men’s pro-am. The lady’s tournament was yesterday. I cannot, according to the rules, allow her onto the course.”
Several of the heads of those world-famous law firms nodded. I tried not to glare at them. At the moment, apparently, they loved rules, as if they hadn’t spent their entire careers trying to find loopholes so that their clients (many of the other men in the room) could casually violate those rules.
The lord sauntered over to me, and the captains of industry parted for him. My heart beat a little harder, and I tried to tell myself it was because he was so very tall. I’m not a short woman, and it’s unusual for someone to tower over me.
But tower he did. He had to bend down just to ask me one question. As he did, I caught a faint whiff of his cologne—a signature brand, clearly, just like so many of these men had. Only this signature had something a bit wild to it, a bit of the jungle maybe, a hint of the sea, a touch of his scandalous and intriguing beginnings.
“Is it truly important for you to play?” he asked so softly that only the three men around us could hear.
“Twenty-four hours ago, it wasn’t as important as you’d think,” I said, “but after this little wrangle, yes, it is.”
I had thought—oh, silly me—that my father had gotten me into this course as one of the first female members. When those protestors stood outside, with their pink signs and their Unfair To Women! messages, I figured they simply didn’t know the intricacies of the club.
I had played on this course with world leaders, made deals with some of the captains of industry, and actually hired one of the law firms whose head now refused to defend me at this ridiculous pro-am. The argument that women couldn’t participate fully, that they had no access to power-brokers on the golf course, had seemed like untrue sour grapes to me.
It turned out that I was the one who hadn’t known the intricacies of the club, I was the one being naïve, and now I was the one who tasted the bitterness of those sour grapes.
The lord gave me a smile that made my heart lift. (Sadly. I hated these clichéd girlish reactions.) He took one more step forward. He had excessively long legs, so his steps were excessively large. He passed two more captains of industry in a single bound (to paraphrase the publicity line designed for yet another member, who kindly did not participate in tournaments for obvious reasons).
The lord blocked half the room’s view of the counter, but I could see him. He beckoned me with his large hand, and I joined him. I hadn’t gotten this close before because I wanted everyone to hear the argument. But they were focused on us now, and they weren’t going to miss a word.
“So,” the lord said to the hapless golf pro, “this woman’s name is Charles, is it not?”
I started to answer, but he put that large hand on my arm, not holding too tightly, but clearly not wanting me to speak either.
“Yeah, um, obviously, I mean, I believe so, milord, yes, she says so, yes.” The club pro’s face had flushed dark red, which made him look a bit like a bruised tomato, given the level of permanent sunburn he always had.
“Well, then,” the lord said, “is there anything in the rules that states you must list her gender on the entry forms?”
The club pro looked at all of the captains of industry, then at the lord. The club pro purposely did not look at me.
“Um, it’s assumed, um, that anyone who signs up for the men’s pro-am is, um, a man,” the club pro said.
“But do the rules require you to inspect to determine if the gender is correct?” the lord asked.
I bristled until I realized that the club pro had turned an even darker shade of red than I thought possible. He was quite flustered.
“Um, normally, um, we just look at the membership status and the name,” the club pro said.
The lord nodded, then he smiled. It wasn’t one of those pleased smiles or even a polite smile or a satisfied smile. It was a feral smile, one of those smiles that was more of a challenge than part of a friendly interaction. A baring of the teeth, rather like (dare I say it?) large apes do as a warning to a challenger.
“Well,” the lord said, sounding not feral at all. “I’ve been playing golf for most of my very long life, primarily because it’s expected of someone of my station. I have learned that the game has a strict adherence to the rules, of course, but the rules as tradition defines them. Someone in the past allowed this woman to become a member of the club. She has signed up for the pro-am. Her name led you to believe she was a man.”
The club pro bit his lips nervously. He looked like someone about to play Tiger Woods in an all-or-nothing putting competition. The old pre-scandal Tiger Woods. The phenom, the one so many in the media compared to some of the secret and special celebrity players who showed up for this tournament.
“Yeah, all of that is true, sir. Milord. Sir. Your highness,” the club pro said.
“He’s a member of the British aristocracy, not the royal family,” one of the captains said with an eye roll. “How do we address you, anyway? There’s always been a bit of a controversy about that?”
The lord wouldn’t be distracted. He shrugged, and didn’t even turn around. “John will do,” he said, “for some of you.”
And his tone implied that if the captain didn’t already have permission to call this particular lord by his first name, then the captain wasn’t going to get that permission any time soon.
“So,” the lord said to the club pro, “if we have Charles on your membership list, and Charles is playing as part of a foursome as planned before Charles inconveniently showed up dressed like a woman, then perhaps, if we kindly ask Charles to change into some more masculine clothing, put that lovely hair under a hat, and not speak to members of the press, perhaps no one will care that she’s on the course.”
“I’d know, sir, milord, your—I mean, I’d know,” the club pro said, clearly not comfortable calling the lord by his first name. The club pro wasn’t supposed to call any member of the club by his first name. (Or her first name, in the case of me.)
The lord looked at me, as if my reaction were more important. Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn’t have cared how I was dressed at the pro am. At that moment, however, I was trying to decide if I should stand up for all of womankind or if I should wear a disguise, however miniscule.
“It sounds like a solution to me,” said one of the name partners of a very big law firm. “If someone challenges it, then the fight would go to whomever it was that let this little lady in as a member, not to you, Derrick.”
The members could, of course, call the poor club pro by his first name, and did so with that condescension that only the very wealthy could sustain.
“You should let Charles play,” said another of the name partners of a different law firm, careful not to use any pronoun that might give my gender away.
“If,” said a third name partner of the biggest law firm associated with the club, “she agrees to sign a document not to speak to the press.”
“We all signed that as members,” said the captain of the media company with a bit of disgust. “It’s why we have to get permission before we do interviews and why the members of the media are only allowed on the last green. It’s also why we—I mean, they—the media, that is—must vet its footage with the club before airing anything.”
I didn’t even know about that rule, but it made sense, particularly given the sensitive nature of this ninety-year-old pro-am.
“I’m not talking to the press,” I said. “That’s not why I came. I came here to play golf, just like the rest of you. I paid a great deal of money to do so, and I’m a bit offended that you’ve taken this long to—”
The lord’s hand tightened on my arm. This time, the pressure was just a tad painful. He wanted me to shut up.
I rarely shut up for anyone, and I debated doing it for him.
Then he gave me a sideways look, and I swear he winked.
“You do realize,” he said to the hapless club pro (and it seemed to me that his accent had suddenly become quite posh), “that one of the conditions of your employment is to keep the members happy at all times.”
The club pro got even redder. I thought maybe the top of his head might blow off and release the pressure that seemed to be building in his veins. I almost felt sorry for him.
“Right now,” the lord said gently, but it was that kind of gentle that a father uses on a very badly misbehaving child, “you are angering almost every member who has shown up for the pro-am, not to mention Charles Myloft Martin the Third here, whose family has a long history of membership and is, from what I hear, quite prominent.”
The from what I hear wasn’t even snobby. It was the least snobby of all of the phrases that the lord had uttered in the last five minutes. I had no idea how he managed that. It should have been the snobbiest phrase.
I was impressed, in spite of myself.
“I realize,” the lord said to the club pro, “that you are in an uncomfortable position, but the best way to satisfy honor and follow the rules and get the pro-am under way is to let our friend on the course. I’m sure there will be no trouble from that moment on.”
I wasn’t sure of it, but then, I wasn’t the one vouching for me. And, honestly, I was less likely to cause trouble now that the lord had spoken up. I did feel an obligation, a need to uphold my own personal honor, whatever that meant.
The club pro looked at all of the members most of whom were shifting impatiently. They didn’t look like villagers with pitchforks—that would be too blatant for this crowd—but they didn’t look happy either. They looked like they were ready to take prisoners. Politely, of course. They wanted on their golf course now.
“Do you have clothes?” the club pro asked me, a bit desperately.
I ignored the stupidity of the question—Of course I have clothes. I’m wearing clothes for God’s sake— and answered it as intended, not as posed.
“Yes, I have something else I can wear,” I said.
“And do you promise not to talk—?”
“Enough,” the lord said. “She’ll be with my group. We’re leaving in the second hour. Is that all right with you?”
He turned to me for that last question, with just a bit of a bow. I should have been a bit miffed at the way he took control of not just my argument, but my pairing.
I wasn’t miffed. I was charmed. I felt like a simpering female, and tried very hard not to show it.
“Charlie,” I said. “Please call me Charlie.”
“John,” he said, and inclined his head.
“And yes, that’s just fine with me.” I had used the conversational gambit to think about it all. “Thank you.”
“No thanks needed,” he said. “We both know how among certain crowds, it is clothes that make the man.”
Then he grinned and walked away. I finished signing up and headed for the clubhouse where I would find clothes that were less fashionable and more suited toward the man I wasn’t quite pretending to be.
***
Golf is a game played over four to five hours. Except in real tournaments, with rankings and endorsements and extreme dollars at stake, much of what happens on the course matters only to the players. And, in fact, it matters only to the players in the foursome, or to a single player.
In golf, you play yourself more than you play anyone else. Eventually, you run out of time and course, and wherever you stand in relation to the others is where you’ll be in the annals of that tournament for all of history.
But you can win a tournament and still lose the competition with yourself. If everyone else plays poorly, and you end up on top of the leader board, it’s just a matter of luck, particularly if your play is worse than usual.
I love that about golf. I love it about life, in fact, and always strive to improve. I believe if a problem gets revealed, it should be solved, or at least worked on, and that, above all things, disturbed me the most about the morning’s interactions.
There was a problem with memberships at the club that I really hadn’t known about, and someone should solve it. That someone, unfortunately, was going to have to be me.
The biggest problem I had after I changed clothes in the clubhouse was my mental attitude. Golf, like chess, is a mental game, and I wasn’t thinking about golf at all. I was thinking about the fight with the club pro, which would become an issue Real Soon Now (as soon as I could study the rules and meet with the board). I knew that I would have to be diplomatic—strident women never got the attention of Old Boys’ Club—and I would have to make points they had trouble arguing with.
I had my work cut out for me.
I also had to play well in this pro-am or they would think me ill-suited to be the champion of all women who wanted to belong to this institution. I am a good golfer, but I am not one of the best. I wasn’t sure I could corral my brain to play my best round.
I had two other problems. The first was one I had faced only a few times before: the fight in the clubhouse took most of my warm-up time. I usually spent an hour or two hitting range balls and making sure my back and shoulders were limber. I also concentrated on putting, since the game could be won or lost in six-inch increments on a course that extended over miles. The best way to spoil a good walk? End up with a terrible score at the end of it.
My second problem had more or less commanded me to be part of his foursome. I couldn’t really say no. He had gotten me into the game, after all. I appreciated that. I also appreciated how gorgeous he was, and the fact that he made my rather guarded heart go pitter-pat.
The fact that he was married bothered me; I had some internal rule—which I had never had to activate before—that I should never allow myself to be attracted to a married man, let alone get involved with one. Not that this man would want me, not by any stretch. His wife, an American, caught the world’s attention as a damsel in distress, but if you really look at how she lives her life, she’s quite an amazing and adventurous woman.
Who, after all, would be attracted to a man that, upon first meeting, seemed little more than an inarticulate and uncivilized savage? But she saw beneath all of the trappings to the real man beneath.
And I knew that the man I had met that morning was no more the real man than the one in the jungle who didn’t wear tailored clothing or speak with such a cultured accent.
Of course, a few hours before, I would have argued that using the words “real” and “man” in conjunction with the lord would have been incorrect.
Like so many players in this pro-am, he wasn’t a “real” person at all, but a fictional construct, made real—the theory goes—because so many of us believe in him.
Strange, but he seemed real to me.
I made my way from the practice tees to the spot not too far off the main course where the foursomes met. I felt vaguely ridiculous. I wore baggy tan knickers, golf socks that covered my calves, and a loose shirt with the club’s logo on it. I also wore a cap that was more baseball than golf. My hair didn’t entirely fit under the golf hats provided at the clubhouse. I had to stuff strands underneath the cap and then pin everything in place.
And, unlike the man I was (sort-of) pretending to be, I had to be girly enough to bring both a comb and a mirror, in case that hair escaped during the hours of play.
I scrubbed off my make-up, and knew at that moment that I looked more like one of those fresh-faced boys from the golf illustrations of a century ago than I did any kind of man.
At least, though, the press wouldn’t pay attention to me if I even got near them. The club protected the fictional characters, so anyone who went out with them had to sign yet another waiver, one guaranteeing that we would not discuss who we played golf with, except in vague terms. I could call the lord “John” and say that I played with a British aristocrat. I couldn’t discuss his dramatic history, the death of his parents at a young age, or the now-disputed (and perhaps mythical) ape-like creatures that had raised him. Nor could I discuss his incredibly long life. He’d been breathing—if that was the correct term—for a century now, and it didn’t look like he had aged at all.
In fact, he had gotten a bit—um—more glossy as time went on.
I hadn’t expected to play with a fictional character. I had planned to do a bit of observation. I had a business idea, one that would cause my poor father to spin in his unbelievably expensive coffin, and I wanted to watch the shadow tournament to see if the idea was even viable.
Now, apparently, I would be playing in the shadow tournament with one of the more famous characters, one, in fact, who predated the word “superhero” and therefore never had that word attached to his name. Even though, by my lights, he deserved it as much as, say, the billionaire from a shadow city who was somehow dubbed a knight, even though he’s American, and wears a rather silly black winged costume when he went out at night on his so-called anti-crime crusades.
Neither man had super powers, like some of the others who were eligible to play here (and generally refused, believing their powers gave them an advantage—although I don’t believe so. Let’s see someone with superhuman strength attempt an 18-inch putt for birdie. Such putts require finesse which I believe most superheroes lack).
I hadn’t planned to spend time with John. I had been considering discussions with less popular fictional characters, those who had suffered grievous losses to their names or whose names had become much less currency than they did, say, in the postwar era. That would be the post-World War II era, when fiction became the stuff of children, and the “real world” was where we had to concentrate all of our efforts.
My poor father, raised in that real world, had disliked the shadow tournament from the moment he heard of it. I had always been intrigued, but I had been raised in a more permissive society, one in which everyone had a favorite book, movie, game, comic book, song, one in which fiction bled across real world lines.
It all began with Kris Kringle, who was here, by the way, in his Bermuda shorts. He looked tanned and rested and just a bit thinner than I expected. Only the ho-ho-ho built into his laugh identified him. It echoed across the putting green where the shadow tournament’s players stood with their foursomes.
I had planned to talk with Kringle; to see how he had gone from a myth to a jolly man in a beloved poem to an advertisement for Coca-Cola—which, by the way, hadn’t hurt him at all. I wanted to find out how he felt about hawking brands, which he was doing these days, with everything from M&Ms to Macy’s.
No one paid attention to him at the end of March; either the captains of industry were doing their best to play with all the Big Name Golfers who had arrived for the Major or they were hanging out with the superheroes whose powers didn’t give them super strength. I figured I’d have a shot.
I never expected to jump over the conceptualizing stage to the actual talking-to-the-talent stage with a swing of a single metaphorical vine.
Not that the fictional characters were the talent per se. They were potential clients.
I resisted the urge to check my hair pins as I walked out of the clubhouse. Almost no golf carts remained in cart parking—apparently captains of industry preferred good rides to good walks. My mouth was a little dry.
I didn’t even have a pitch. I didn’t know how to approach any of this, not that I was really the pitch person in my industry.
Not that I even had an industry.
What I had was a conglomerate that my father left me. He had built it out of the corporations that my grandfathers had owned, separately. To say that I came from money wasn’t even putting it delicately. It was lying.
I came from real money, extreme money, secret-superhero-with-a-cave-in-his-basement money. I had people who managed all of the corporations, and people who handled the conglomerate. I did what I could, but those businesses were stable, and more than that, they were staid.
I, as you can probably tell, am not staid.
I wanted to start my own business. Or, rather, revive one of our flagging businesses. I wanted to merge our intellectual properties division with our management division. I wanted to discuss trademarks. I wanted to expand our thinking when it came to managing our PR corporation, and begin handling the fictional characters themselves.
Of course, the staff at our corporation would assume what I meant when I said “handle the characters” was that we would handle those who held the trademarks—and sure, yeah, I meant that. But I also meant we would handle the characters themselves.
After all, they were in the unenviable position of having no control over their own image. Their lack of control did give them certain freedoms—like entire days to play a shadow golf tournament—but that had to grow tiresome, right?
I joined the rest of my foursome. In addition to John, I would be playing golf with a dot-com billionaire. Everyone knew his history—hell, they’d made a movie about him—the way he’d dropped out of the Ivy League after potentially stealing his Grand Idea, the money he’s making from it, and the innovations he’s attempting.
We’d met at half a dozen functions, the kind that the super-elite got invited to, and he’d never struck me as a golf kinda guy. He was, apparently, a fictional-character kinda guy, and I had to stop for just a moment to figure out if Dot-Com Boy was a fictional character himself (courtesy of the movie) or if he was real.
Then I looked around the gathered shadow tournament pairings and realized that all of the fictional characters were hugely famous, long-time famous. The only newcomers were a boy wizard and his pals, and only then because their author had let them grow up at the end of the last book.
“Think they’re gonna cheat?” Dot-Com Boy asked me under his breath. He was watching the wizardly group who looked like out-of-place twenty-somethings at the golf outing organized for their high school reunion.
“They had to sign a waiver,” I said, not bothering to disguise my voice.
“Charlie?” Dot-Com Boy peered under my hat. “I thought no girls—”
“Oh, god, kid,” I said, even though I wasn’t much older. “‘Girls’ is so 1980s.”
“Charlie’s playing with us,” John said, and whisked me away to the fourth member of our group.
He was a short little man wearing, of all things, a three-piece suit made of tweed. He swept the cap off his balding head and bowed toward me.
“Pleasure’s mine, little lady,” he said in a booming voice, and instantly John shushed him.
“We are not advertising her gender,” he said.
“Hard to miss it, kid,” the man said. “You got eyes. You should look.”
“He has eyes for no one but Jane,” said another man. Him, I recognized, partly because of the cheesy Disney movie of a few years back. He bore a startling resemblance to Hugh Jackman, who probably should have played him in that flop of a film instead of Taylor Kitsch. “So, miss, if this is a ploy to get his attention, then I would suggest—”
“Don’t suggest,” John said. I was glad he didn’t call his—what, fictional brother in arms? Progeny of the same writer? I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how much their creator loved the name “John.”
John turned his back on the Jackman clone (whom I should have found attractive, but did not), and smiled at me. Good heavens, the wattage of that nearly knocked me backwards.
I turned my attention away from him. “I’m sorry,” I said to the short little man, “we didn’t get to exchange names. I’m Charlie.”
The little man grinned up at John. “She doesn’t recognize me,” he said. “I’m Oscar.”
Oscar—as in Oscar and Felix? I didn’t think so. I thought I had seen that odd couple near the head of the groupings. That Oscar probably had connections, being a sportswriter and all.
“Oscar and I have played this tournament for about eighty years,” John said. “In fact, Oscar’s the one who helped me through those years. He was not yet at the height of his fame, and I was known for wearing a loincloth.”
That image rose in my mind: John, rising out of a pool of water in the jungle, water dripping off his—
I forced that image away by imagining the 1920s Olympic swimmer who had actually played John on the big screen. John was much better looking than anyone who had ever portrayed him in film.
“I didn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Oscar was saying, eyes twinkling. “I was just a character in a children’s book.”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” John said, then turned to me. “He was quite famous, even then. You probably mentioned him in conversation yourself within the last month.”
“I have?” I asked. I couldn’t remember calling anyone Oscar in years for any reason whatsoever.
“Around here, we just call him Great And Powerful,” said a slender blond man who looked startlingly like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“You’re great and powerful, Jay,” Oscar said, without looking around.
“Only if you believe the hype that Carraway kid was pushing,” said a tall thin man with the largest Adam’s apple I had ever seen. His clothes, which looked like they dated from the Revolutionary War, should have told me who he was, but really, it was the fact that he looked like Tom Mison’s older, uglier, and somewhat miscast cousin. However, this guy was much more plausible as a schoolteacher who might or might not have had a horseman’s head thrown in his face on a Tarrytown bridge.
Great and powerful. I frowned at Oscar and then realized that he resembled the green head which rises up out of its own flames in the 1939 movie that had become an American classic.
“Really?” I asked Oscar. “You’re—”
“Really,” he said with a grin and a wink. And that’s when I believed he could have charmed all of the denizens of that magical land—or any land, for that matter—into thinking he was a wizard.
“He is a lot of fun,” John said, “really.”
I didn’t need the endorsement. I finally understood that this game of golf I was about to play would be the strangest in my entire life.
***
I’m a scratch golfer. That’s what happens when you combine athletic ability with a driven father who puts a golf club in your hand at the tender age of three. I wasn’t as driven as Dear Old Dad, however, or maybe I just didn’t want to impress him as much as, say, Eldrick Tont Woods wanted to impress his father back in the day. Maybe if I had been that needy, I would have ended up on the women’s tour or something.
Or maybe I never thought the women’s tour was an option. I hated the way that sports segregated everything, even then.
The shadow tournament wasn’t played on the same championship course as the Major. It was played at the same golf club, however, on a course not even all the members knew about.
It wasn’t played the same week as the Major, of course, but the week after, when the crowds had gone home. The shadow tournament was called a pro-am by tradition mostly, since a lot of the big players moved onto the next PGA-sponsored event. But a few pros stayed each year, along with some members of the Senior Tour.
Things happened at this shadow tournament, things I had only heard vague things about.
I figured I’d have trouble on the course, which was similar to the championship course. Okay, it was the same as the championship course. Maybe it existed in a parallel universe. Maybe that was why all the fictional characters could play. Or maybe it was a true shadow course, something created magically.
I had no idea, and no one told me, at least on that day. Later, I learned there were some theories that no one had ever proven or disproven. Most people were as distracted as I was by the fictional characters.
I mean, how often do you see King Lear walking side-by-side with Huck Finn, deep in conversation? Or Ebenezer Scrooge helping Long John Silver keep his balance as he hit one off the tee?
The actors didn’t hurt either. Downey was in the first foursome, talking the ear off two men—one an early 20th century British icon whose lineage went back as far as John’s and the other yet another billionaire (the course was full of them!) who made his money as an engineer and industrialist. Cumberbatch had joined them, probably for the Brit, while his co-star on British television found himself one group back, playing golf with a rather pudgy doctor.
Television actors, movie stars, enough eye candy to hurt—I could have watched all day. But I wasn’t here to gawk. I was here to play and schmooze.
And I was doing more looking than playing or schmoozing, which wasn’t good.
Or it wouldn’t have been good to my scratch golfer ego (although, truth be told, the championship course here always chewed me up, even on the one time I gave up and played from the Lady’s Tees) if it weren’t for one thing: the fictional characters (and most of the actors) couldn’t play golf.
When I finally started paying attention to the game, I realized that we should have been playing a scramble—you know, where everyone on the team played the team ball in the best position.
Because John could hit off the tee like a wild man. Seriously, if fictional characters could play on the PGA Tour, John would have given Rory McIlroy a run for his money.
Our dot-com billionaire had a nice little swing that could get him up and down the course beautifully. I was the only one of us who could putt. And Great and Terrible, I mean, Great and Powerful, I mean, Oscar…he seemed to find every single hazard known to golf. Water hazard, sand traps, that man could hit them better than any other player I’d ever seen.
Then he’d grin and say, “I meant to do that.”
There was something to be said for bravado, and by the sixth hole Par 3, I needed to find some. The course was only going to get rougher, and the stakes got just a bit higher.
My little group didn’t have much to say to each other—we were playing in earnest, unlike some of the others around here—and none of us was performing well enough to justify such seriousness.
So, as John and I watched Oscar swing and miss (I kept hearing baseball announcer Harry Carey in my head—Swing! Anna Miss!), covering himself over and over again with fine white sand, I said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
John smiled, a wide toothy grin that accented his tan skin. “I doubt there’s a personal question you Americans have not asked me,” he said. “So, by all means. Ask.”
“Does it bother you to have someone else control your image?” I asked.
He let out a “heh,” and it made me wonder if I had asked a question no one else had asked before.
“Technically,” he said after a moment, “my image, as you call it, was controlled from the start. I am a fictional construct, or so they tell me. I have even met the man who created me.”
“But he’s gone now,” I said, “and his estate controls you.”
“I suppose.” John did not look at me. He kept his gaze on the Great and Powerful digging himself deeper into the sand trap. “Although I like to think that I have transcended mere ownership.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “I have a life, you know. Wealth beyond compare, lands in England, lands in Africa, and more friends than I want to think about.”
He glanced at me sideways and gave me a small smile, one that seemed much more real than that toothy grin he had used a few minutes ago.
“Which is, I think, better than the circumstances of my friend here, who flits between being a circus magician, a hot air balloonist, and the greatest fraud of his mythical country. This tournament is one way that he escapes the traps his image have placed him in.”
I frowned at Oscar, who had finally managed to roll the ball out of the trap (“Jeez,” Dot-Com Boy said as he walked to the putting green, “How did you manage a 12 on a par 3?”).
“And,” John said, raising a hand, “don’t say he seems to have an affinity for traps.”
I wouldn’t have said it, even if I had thought it. I was beyond punning. I was thinking about my pitch. I was going to try it.
After all, what could it hurt?
“What if you could control your own destiny?” I asked.
“In which world?” John asked. “In my world—rather, my creator’s world—I do control my destiny. I am quite an important man, who does amazing things.”
He peered at me. I peered back. He was right; he was an amazing character, whose fictional adventures made him attractive more than a century after he burst on the scene.
We walked toward the green.
“In these shadow areas,” John said. “I do fine as well. I’m respected for who I am, and I do learn. Modern concepts find their way into my life, and I grow. I am not as busy as some—right now my detective friends are busier than I’ve ever seen them—but I was once. Back then, Oscar had to make certain we had privacy on the course. Until, you know, he didn’t, and I had to help him.”
I hadn’t realized it until now. John saw the actors as some kind of creepy paparazzi.
His ball had landed only a yard from the pin. I lifted the flag out of the hole and stepped aside. The one time I hadn’t stepped aside, I’d been hit with the ball in the ankle, and I knew I’d have a bruise for weeks because of it.
He said, “It is only in your world—that ‘real world,’ as you so rudely call it—that I seem to have difficulties.”
And on the putting green. He tapped the ball as gently as he could, but it still had enough speed and spin to fly over the hole and into some deep grass on the edge.
I took that moment to tap my ball into the cup for par. Then I leaned on my bag and waited.
He slung his bag over his shoulder, just like I did. We walked along the path to the tee box at the Par 4 seventh. I found myself scanning for hazards, probably because I didn’t want to wait for Oscar yet again. My little course map showed sand traps in front of the green, again, so I figured we’d have another fifteen-minute wait while Oscar tried to hit the green.
We let Oscar and his billionaire friend go first.
After they’d hit—Oscar into the trees lining the fairway, and Dot-Com Boy straight down the center—I said, as if I hadn’t planned it, “I’m talking about controlling your fate in my world, what you’re calling the ‘real world,’ although I would contend that it and what you call ‘the shadow world’ have been merging more and more in the last seventy years.”
“Traveling between them has been easier,” he said. “But I’m not sure what I would gain controlling my destiny in the so-called ‘real world.’”
“Financial compensation whenever someone steals your yell,” I said.
“I never yelled in the first place—not that yodel-y thing, anyway. I merely imitated the sound of the creatures that raised me, creatures which do not exist in your world, by the way.”
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t researched a talk with an English lord who had been raised by wild animals. I’d planned to have a conversation with a jolly old elf. Totally different kinds of prep needed. “You could model clothing or recommend investments—”
“So middle class,” he said, and then grinned. “Do I sound like someone from my proper station?”
“If you don’t want a movie made of your life story,” I said, “you could quash it.”
“As if there’s a great interest,” he said.
“You saw what Disney did to your friend from Mars,” I said.
“Technically, they didn’t do anything to my friend from Mars,” he said. “He’s probably on the green right now, wondering why his contemporary is holding up play.”
I got the hint. I pulled my driver from my golf bag, and hit the ball as hard as I could.
It flew with a perfect arc down the center of the fairway.
“Well done,” John said. He held his driver and slammed the ball so hard, I thought we’d never see it again. From what I could tell, the ball landed at the far edge of the green.
We walked together, heading toward my ball. Dot-Com Boy slapped his ball forward a hundred yards. Oscar was still fighting with the trees off to the right.
“What I’m trying to say, John, is that in my world, you’re a second-class citizen. You have no real rights. You can be manipulated for someone else’s profit, and you might not even know. I would like to resolve that for you. I have an innovative idea that combines trademark law with character protection and management—”
“Stop,” he said, hand out, blocking me.
For a moment, I thought he was stopping me so that I wouldn’t get hit by Oscar’s ball, which had bounced off the bark of a scraggly pine, hit a branch, and somehow zoomed backwards toward the fairway.
Maybe John had been trying to save me from the errant ball, but his expression told me that he was also stopping my pitch.
“I am no second-class citizen,” he said softly. “I cross freely between three different worlds. I exist in all of them. Yes, I have varying degrees of power in each, but if I cared only for power, I would probably remain in the world in which I was created. I have chosen not to.”
I opened my mouth to apologize, yes, but also to continue the discussion. But apparently he was not done.
“You, my dear,” he said with all the condescension of his station, “do not exist in my world at all. You barely exist in this one. In fact, you would not be in this world without me.”
“I know,” I said, “and I am grateful—”
“I am not telling you this to receive your gratitude,” he said. “I am telling you this because I don’t believe I’m a second-class citizen at all. You, on the other hand, will have a great deal of difficulty tomorrow morning. My dear Charles Myloft Martin the Third, you are facing a difficult few days at best, a lawsuit at worst.”
“Yes, but—”
This time, he didn’t interrupt me. Oscar did. He sidled past us, a golf-ball sized bruise swelling on his right cheek.
“’Scuze me, sorry, I’ll be done in a minute,” he said, and he hurried past, to wherever his ball had ended up.
“Charlie,” John said, “My understanding of your world, after having participated in parts of it for more than a century, indeed, after listening to interminable conversations with ambitious men like our young billionaire companion, tells me that unless you participate in games like this one regularly, you miss out on ever so much deal-making and profits-taking, just by virtue of your gender. You may run a company—indeed, you may have inherited something grand—but you won’t exist for these so-called ‘real’ men on this course until you can join a foursome without someone like me vouching for you.”
His argument, cogent, intelligent, and—dammit—spot on, irritated me. “I’m not talking about this course,” I said. “It harks back to old traditions—”
“And yet those old traditions are alive in your world, are they not? Not just in country clubs and political establishments, but in assumptions and behaviors throughout your so-called enlightened country. And let’s not even discuss the parts of the world where I was raised. In many places there, I doubt you could even spend time with men not your husband, am I correct?”
He flashed that fake smile at me, and headed down the path to the green, where his ball waited.
I stood for a moment, catching my breath.
Damn him. I should have spoken to Kringle first.
I stared at the course for a moment, and realized that he couldn’t be a true jolly old elf. There were no elves on the course, nor anything else that wasn’t quite human. And John himself was the closest person I saw to a person of color. Even the lone western superhero precursor was here without his sidekick. I suppose had the sidekick been non-native like Johnny Depp (no matter how much greasepaint he wore) he would have been allowed on the course.
I growled slightly. I hated it when someone had a good point.
***
I stomped through the next four holes which, of course, affected my play. No more perfect shots down the middle, no more lovely little putts into the hole. Instead, I joined Oscar in the hazards, and he told me, as politely as he could, that it was not necessary to keep him company.
By the time we reached a facsimile of the Par 4 eleventh at Augusta where the most famous corner in golf begins, I had a plan. The club would acknowledge that it had a female member.
Or, by God, it wouldn’t know what hit it.
Second-class citizen my ass.
Just because they made the wrong assumption, based on my name.
“You look determined,” John said as we stopped near the tee box.
“Well,” I said, “sometimes it takes someone else to open your eyes to reality.”
“I do so hate that word, ‘reality,’” he said with just a hint of a smile. “It truly is something that we can bend to our own needs.”
I frowned at him, not entirely understanding.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why some so-called creations live so much longer than their so-called creators?” He nodded toward the parade of characters heading along the greens, watching from the sidelines, taking obeisance from very famous actors whom some had compared to American gods.
I hadn’t really wondered at all, but I was starting to now.
I didn’t admit that to him, however.
“Which life has more reality, Charlie?” John asked. “There are men on this course who have played this game since it was invented. We all have constraints. Some of us just know how to break through them.”
Then he grabbed that driver and headed alone to the tee box.
And I breathed ever so softly, “Amen.”
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November, 2014
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Solarseven/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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