Buster Forgets His Anniversary

The man at the patio bar, still in his golf shoes, was not having a good afternoon. He was staring at his phone having just received a text message informing him that he had forgotten his wedding anniversary, and was now attempting to determine whether jewelry, a trip to Maui, or a complete personality transplant offered the best chance of survival.

“She reminded me a month ago,” he said, to no one and to everyone. “And a week ago. And apparently I said ‘got it’ both times. What kind of man says ‘got it’ and hasn’t got it?”

The Oldest Member, who had been watching this display from his customary chair with the quiet sympathy of a sage who has seen the abyss open beneath a fellow creature and knows there is nothing to be done about it, set down his gin and tonic.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “you have my sympathy. But I must tell you that your situation, while regrettable, is not without precedent, and compared to what befell Buster Cauldwell on the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, it is a matter of almost laughable insignificance.”

The man looked up from his phone with wary hope, suspecting that someone else’s hell might make his own feel smaller. He was right. It would. He pulled his chair closer.

“Let me tell you about Buster,” said The Oldest Member.

Norwood “Buster” Cauldwell III (said The Oldest Member) was a man of many qualities, not all of which were readily apparent. To the casual observer, Buster was a fit, sun-darkened, unapologetically unkempt rancher who drove an old truck, wore Lucchese boots that had seen better decades, and spoke with the easy confidence conceding that he could be wrong about many things but has not yet identified any of them. He had attended Dartmouth, where he had been an outstanding tennis player — first team All-American his junior year, on a team that included Bernie Sasso as a marginal varsity selection — before departing under circumstances that he described, when pressed, as “a difference of opinion between myself and the Disciplinary Council.” He had returned to California, taken over the family ranch, expanded the ranch to the back of the seventeenth green at The Valet Club, and settled into a life of ranching, golf, and matrimony, the last of which he practiced with a frequency and enthusiasm that implied he treated it less as a sacrament than as a seasonal activity.

His golf swing, I should note, was a thing of beauty — and this was because of the tennis. He had built his backhand at Dartmouth with a long, fluid, two-handed stroke, and when he took up golf in earnest he brought that same mechanics to the game: the smooth takeaway, the full shoulder turn, the unhurried acceleration through the ball. It had survived forty years of ranching and a lifestyle that would have destroyed a lesser athlete.

Buster had been married four times. He approached matrimony the way he approached the avocado business — with optimism, commitment, and a complete inability to read the weather. His first wife had been a former Miss Pasadena. He had met her during the summer term at Dartmouth when she was a visiting student from UC Berkeley, in their Law and Ethics elective, when the professor, charting the ambiguities of a case on the whiteboard, noted that “Miss Pasadena makes two very fine points,” at which Buster snickered. The snicker proved contagious. It traveled across the room at warp speed, cracking up the entire class and causing the professor an embarrassment from which, I am told, he never fully recovered. Miss Pasadena, charmed by the audacity if not the maturity of the man responsible, agreed to a date. They married a few years later. She is now married to a United States Senator and reportedly still flinches at the word “avocado.” His second wife lasted two months. He does not discuss her. His third had been a swimsuit model who had appeared prominently on the cover of Playboy, a detail that Buster counted as a point in her favor. And his fourth — his current wife, the one with whom this story is principally concerned — was Belmira.

Belmira was Brazilian. She was a former supermodel. She had previously been married to Rogério Cavalcante, the telenovela star, a man so devastatingly handsome that women in São Paulo were said to have fainted at bus stops when his billboards went up. She had left him for Buster, which tells you either something profound about the limitations of physical beauty or something alarming about the power of a California avocado ranch. Belmira was, by any objective measure, the most beautiful woman who had ever set foot in the La Cucaracha clubhouse, and she was also, by any objective measure, completely unstable and breathtakingly volatile.

It has been my observation that beauty and temperament are often found in inverse proportion, and Belmira occupied the extreme end of both scales. She was, above all, jealous — jealous with the white-hot, all-consuming, thermonuclear intensity of a woman who had once been married to the most handsome man in Brazil and who now found herself married to a man who wore the same pair of boots for ranch work as to dinner at the Biltmore. She loved the lifestyle — the ranch, the club, the mansion in Montecito — but she had spent the past five years in a dedicated and spectacularly unsuccessful campaign to upgrade Buster’s wardrobe, vehicle, and manners. She had failed on all fronts. Buster remained Buster. He could not be improved. Attempting to refine Buster was like installing imported Italian tile in a barn — the tile might be exquisite, but the barn remained a barn.

For two weeks before the morning in question, Belmira was in Brazil, visiting her family, sans Buster. She had invited him. He had declined, citing a need to be present for the avocado harvest, which was true, and a need to not be present in Rio de Janeiro, which was also true but which he did not say. The truth, which everyone at the club understood, was that Buster had no desire to spend two weeks being introduced to more of Belmira’s relatives, all of whom spoke only Portuguese and several of whom, he had been given to understand, had strong opinions about his boots.

Buster arrived at La Cucaracha that morning in his truck — and here I must say a word about the truck. It was a Ford F-250, originally white, now a color best described as “agricultural.” It had a dented driver-side door that Buster attributed to a tree that jumped out at him. It had a crack in the windshield that Buster attributed to the same tree, or possibly its accomplice. It smelled, permanently and irreversibly, of manure, diesel, and Butch, his big black Labrador, who accompanied him everywhere on the ranch and liked to roll in things smelling worse than manure. Belmira had bought him a Range Rover for his birthday. He had thanked her, driven it once to La Cucaracha where he was roundly congratulated, and never touched it again. The truck was his vehicle, and he parked it, as was his custom, directly in front of the main entrance to the clubhouse, in the spot traditionally used for the arriving and departing members of the Ladies Bridge Club.

The ladies of the bridge club eyed this truck, and in particular its positioning, with a hostility that had long since passed through irritation, through outrage, and into a determined, geological hatred. They had complained to the board. They had written letters. They had, on one occasion, placed a note under his windshield wiper that read, in elegant cursive, “This is not a barnyard.” Buster had kept the note. It offended him and delighted him in roughly equal measure. He did not understand, he told me, what right they had to criticize his favorite vehicle. He did not complain about their Teslas. You couldn’t hear the damn things. They crept up on you like politically correct¹ assassins.

Buster played that morning with Chet Spivey’s usual group — Hugh Cavanaugh, Chip Wetherbee, and The Admiral — Spivey himself being unavailable, as he was at that time confined to a detox center in Ojai owing to his excessive use of nicotine patches. I will not dwell on the round itself, except to note that Buster played well, as he usually did, for despite his many deficiencies of sophistication and personal grooming, the man could hit a golf ball. He shot a seventy-four that morning, collected his winnings from Cavanaugh, and repaired to the patio bar for a Corona.

At the patio bar he found Andy “Buddha” Budd playing gin rummy with Martin Hill and two other members. Hill was an insurance agent and a member of The Valet Club, a man of great good humor and extraordinary skill at gin rummy. He was a welcome guest at La Cucaracha because Buddha enjoyed his company and because half the members at La Cucaracha enjoyed the possibility, however remote, that a gin rummy game with Martin Hill might lead to an invitation to play The Valet Club. Hill insured Buddha. He also insured Buster. He did not yet know that more than one of his policies were about to be tested.

It was after Buster was finishing this beer and preparing to leave that the events that concern us began to unfold.

Buster climbed into a golf cart near the pro shop and was driving toward the parking lot — past the practice range — when he spotted one of the female assistant professionals walking toward the range for a golf lesson with Chip Wetherbee. Her name was Kelsey. She was young, blonde, a former college golfer, and beautiful in the untouched style of young women who spend their days outdoors in the California sun and who have not yet discovered that life contains disappointments. Buster, who was gallant if nothing else, pulled up alongside her.

“Hop in,” he said. “I’ll drive you over.”

Kelsey hesitated for perhaps half a second. One does not say no to a member. Kelsey got in the cart. Nobody had ever told her about Belmira. Had she known, she would not have.

They were halfway across the parking lot, Buster talking amiably about his avocado harvest and Kelsey nodding with the polite, fixed smile of a young woman who is performing a rapid calculation of how long this ride will last, when a white Range Rover turned into the parking lot at a speed that indicated its driver was not in a forgiving mood.

It was Belmira.

She had returned from Brazil that morning, as she had planned, for their fifth wedding anniversary. She had gone to both the mansion and the ranch house, but Buster was not to be found. She had driven to La Cucaracha to find him, because she expected him to remember, despite not having reminded him. To remind a man of his anniversary is to admit that he might forget it, and to admit that he might forget it is to admit that he does not value it, and to admit that he does not value it is to open a door that a woman like Belmira preferred to keep welded shut.

What she saw, upon entering the parking lot, was her husband — her fit, sunburned, boot-wearing husband — driving a golf cart with a beautiful young blonde woman seated beside him.

I have, in my years at this club, witnessed many alarming things. I have seen an orthopedic surgeon break his new putter over his knee on the practice putting green. I have seen an ophthalmologist throw his entire golf bag, then himself, into the lake after losing an Aloha press. But I have never, in all my days, seen anything quite like what happened next.

Belmira did not honk. Belmira did not brake. She accelerated, aiming the Range Rover at the golf cart with the purposeful trajectory of a heat-seeking missile that has locked on and has no thought of diplomacy. Buster, whose peripheral vision had been honed by decades of guarding his trees from marauding avocado thieves, saw the Range Rover coming with just enough time to wrench the cart’s steering wheel to the right and put a parked BMW M5 between himself and his wife. The Range Rover struck the BMW, pulverizing the vehicle’s left rear end and deploying an alarm of unnecessary volume and persistence, all in full view of the patio bar. The golf cart, shielded by the BMW, survived intact. Buster and Kelsey, though shaken, remained in their seats. Martin Hill set down his gin hand, closed his eyes, and began calculating. He did not yet realize that the BMW belonged to The Admiral, another of his insurance clients.

Belmira was out of the Range Rover before it had fully stopped. She was wearing white gauzy linen and Louboutin spike heels, which is not the traditional attire for an assault, but Belmira was not in a traditional mood. She did not make for Buster. She made for Kelsey. The distinction is important. In Belmira’s worldview, Buster was a fool and would always be a fool, but the blonde — the blonde was the enemy, and the blonde would be dealt with using the same approach that blondes who sat in proximity to other women’s husbands had been dealt with since Adam dumped Lilith for Eve.

What followed was brief, loud, and conducted entirely in Portuguese. Kelsey, who had been raised in Thousand Oaks and whose experience with confrontation was limited to a disputed free drop during the Southern California Amateur, found herself retreating at speed across the parking lot while Belmira advanced upon her with the murderous, high-heeled ferocity of a woman whose ancestors had, in all probability, conquered a significant portion of the Americas in the 16th century.

It was at this point that Rudy appeared.

Rudy was the club manager, a man of imperturbable calm who had, over two decades of service, handled member complaints about insufficient parking, landscaping choices, and the occasional fistfight in the men’s grill with the unflappable confidence of an ordnance disposal sergeant defusing a bomb. He heard the commotion from his office, assessed the situation through his window in less than three seconds, and emerged at a brisk walk, which for Rudy was the equivalent of a dead sprint.

He inserted himself between Belmira and Kelsey with the practiced ease of a bouncer who has separated combatants before, though never, I suspect, in quite this weight class of glamour. He spoke quietly, in the soothing, authoritative tones of a lion tamer who knows that the voice is the only thing between him and a mauling. Belmira, breathing hard and vibrating with a rage that seemed to distort the air around her like a heat shimmer, allowed herself to be redirected. Kelsey, pale and trembling, was escorted to the pro shop by the food and beverage manager, who had materialized from somewhere, as food and beverage managers do in moments of crisis.

Buster, who had been sitting in the golf cart throughout this entire episode with the blinking countenance of a man who has been present for every moment of a catastrophe and has somehow missed the entire point, climbed out and approached Belmira cautiously.

“Honey,” he said, with the careful, exploratory voice as if offering a treat to a rottweiler that has just bitten someone, “what in the hell was that about?”

“What is today?” said Belmira.

Buster considered this. “Wednesday,” he said.

“Is there anything important about today?”

Buster’s brow furrowed with the effort of a clerk attempting to access a filing system that was organized by a tornado. He thought. He thought some more. A light appeared in his eyes.

“World Pistachio Day?” he said.

It was, in fact, World Pistachio Day. It was, however, also their fifth wedding anniversary, and the storm clouds that crossed Belmira’s face at that moment were those that I hope never to see again on the face of any living creature. It was the face of a woman who has traveled twenty hours and six thousand miles from her family in Rio de Janeiro to be home for her wedding anniversary, driven to the club expecting flowers and champagne, found her husband in a golf cart with a blonde, rammed a BMW with her Range Rover, physically attacked the blonde, been restrained by the club manager, and has now been told that her fifth wedding anniversary is World Pistachio Day.

“Our ANNIVERSARY!” said Belmira, in a voice that hit every man on the patio bar somewhere between the gut and the conscience.

Buster stared. Comprehension filtered through. It filtered slowly, as through a long run of old, unshielded coaxial cable, and when it arrived, Buster did what Buster always did in moments of high stress, which was to open his mouth and make things worse.

“Now hold on,” he said, raising both hands in the universal gesture of the accused who knows he is sinking and believes that talking will somehow keep him afloat. “I have always been faithful to you. You know that. Ask anyone. And I have a photographic memory for dates. I remember our first date. I met you at the Biltmore. You were wearing that green dress — the one that made you look like a — well, anyway, I remember. I just — I’ve been waiting for the approval on the irrigation permits and —”

He trailed off. Belmira did not require comprehension. Belmira had known, from the moment she turned into the parking lot, exactly what she was looking at and exactly what she intended to do about it, with a certainty that owed nothing to evidence.

“You are” — she said, very quietly, looking at him with a coldness that was worse than the screaming — “the most oblivious man I have ever known. And I was married to Rogério.”

She pivoted and walked to what had, ten minutes earlier, been a new Range Rover, got in, and drove away. She did not spin the tires. She did not slam the door. She drove away with the calm finality of an executioner dropping the blade.

Buster watched her go. He looked at the BMW, which was still summoning the authorities with the tireless overkill of German engineering. He looked at the golf cart, which had survived without a scratch. He turned to Rudy.

“Rudy,” he said, “I think I may have forgotten my anniversary.”

“Yes, Mr. Cauldwell,” said Rudy. “I believe you may have.”

The divorce was swift, expensive, and conducted through attorneys who charged by the hour and billed with an enthusiasm that Buster later described as “criminal.” Belmira received the mansion in Montecito, the vacation house on Ipanema, a sum of money that caused Buster’s accountant to excuse himself from the room, and a new Range Rover, because Belmira had made Buster buy her one before the divorce on the reasonable grounds that it was his fault she had crashed the original. Buster kept the ranch, the avocados, the truck, Butch, and his Lucchese boots, which is to say he kept everything he had ever actually wanted.

I saw him at the patio bar some weeks later, drinking his beer with quiet contentment, having emerged from a natural disaster and found that his house, against all odds, was still standing.

“How are you, Buster?” I asked.

“Never better,” he said. “Ranch is good. Avocados are coming in. Shot a seventy-one yesterday.”

His gaze drifted toward the first tee, where Kelsey was teeing off for a playing lesson.

“That young lady,” he said, with the speculative air of an incurable romantic who has learned nothing whatsoever from the preceding events, “has a hell of a swing.”

I finished my gin and tonic and said nothing. There are moments, in the life of any man, when silence is not merely the best response but the only one that does not make you an accessory.

¹ The “barnyard” letter was delivered to Buster before Teslas became politically incorrect.