Miracle on the 17th Green Read online

  “I feel like we just got fixed up,” I said as we were backing out of the driveway. I was trying to keep things light.

  “By our children instead of our parents,” said Sarah. She was trying to keep things light, too.

  Winnetka has a surprisingly good French restaurant, Provence, in an elegant room at the top of the town’s tallest office building, and that’s where Sarah and I, teetering into our fourth decade together, went to ring in the New Year. That evening they were featuring a young retro singer from New Orleans, backed by a sextet, and dancing. The night was so cold and clear that from our corner table you could see the lights on the Canadian side of Lake Michigan.

  I had planned to use our time together to tell Sarah about Q-School and my hopes of playing the Senior Tour. Instead, I found myself struggling to fill the awkward silences. And although I certainly had terribly important things to tell her, seeing her across from me so lovely and yet so distant made the other discussion seem almost irrelevant.

  As I describe my problems with Sarah, I’m afraid you might get the impression that it was something I was able to harden myself against, or get used to, but that’s not the way it felt. It was more like getting my heart broken, in a slightly different way, every day for two years. Maybe even longer than that.

  Part of the problem, though I hate to admit it, is that I’ve come to feel like “Dr. McKinley’s husband.” I have been proud of Sarah and her ferocious competence since the day I met her. I really have. And it’s not as if she thought she was marrying a future captain of industry. But the fact is, our careers have been going in opposite directions for quite a while now, and although I tell her it doesn’t bother me, it does. The feeling of inequality has even found its way into our bedroom, if you know what I mean, where it hangs over our bed like one of those distorting funhouse mirrors.

  Anyway, I want to fix it, not moan and groan about it. I just don’t know how. Once one person starts feeling a little sorry for themselves in relationship to the other, it’s tough. Because how can you talk about it with that person without feeling even more pathetic and insecure? This is excruciating. Can I stop now?

  “Why are you staring at me?” Sarah eventually asked.

  “Because you’re beautiful,” I said. Sarah, who wore a dark green velvet dress and gold earrings, did in fact look exquisite—but what I had really been doing was searching for some inkling of affection in her eyes. I needed to talk to her. I had some important things to say—to Sarah, and nobody else. But I didn’t want to tell them to someone who would gaze at me like a stranger.

  For so many years, I had been sure of her love. Sometimes it had been about the only thing I was certain of. Well, if all else fails, Sarah will still love me. Now that was as uncertain as everything else.

  Nevertheless, as we ate and drank, we both relaxed. And almost in spite of ourselves, we began to enjoy each other’s company.

  It reminded me how much I missed just talking to Sarah, how much I used to enjoy getting her phone calls during the day. Since men never grow up, at least with each other, Sarah was in many ways my only adult relationship, and I missed it badly.

  After dinner the band started cranking out some of the great Cole Porter tunes, and as hard as the young would-be Sinatra tried to massacre them, the songs were just too good.

  “We might as well dance,” Sarah said. Maybe she didn’t mean it to be cutting, but it was.

  “And it’s a slow dance,” I said with a mock salaciousness that wasn’t nearly as sarcastic as it pretended to be.

  The band played “I Love Paris” and I held Sarah close for what seemed like the first time in months—because it was—and although she didn’t exactly feel like she was mine, she felt really good.

  I looked down at her hand, and I thought of the very first day of our honeymoon in California—when the surf had twisted her engagement ring off her finger. The ring had been lost, but Sarah had insisted that she didn’t want to replace it. “Any other ring would make me feel like we’re starting over,” she said, “and we’re not.” It was exactly the kind of eccentric willfulness that I loved and admired Sarah for, but maybe it was also an omen.

  And so perhaps was the fact that in the middle of our second dance Sarah’s beeper went off. One of her patients had just gone into labor. She had to meet the young couple at the hospital in twenty-five minutes.

  “Isn’t someone covering for you tonight?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound too desperate. I hadn’t told her about Q-School yet. I had to tell her. If anybody could understand, it would be Sarah. I mean, didn’t we get together in the first place because we felt we could share our dreams?

  “No, it’s my turn,” said Sarah, who had obviously volunteered for holiday duty. That was it. The party was over.

  “Well, you’ve never looked prettier,” I said with my bravest, dumbest half-smile. “Some little ginker is going to have a charmed life.”

  Sarah dropped me off at home on the way to the hospital.

  “Happy New Year, Travis. Sorry,” she managed.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “Happy New Year. Give my best to the new kid on the block.”

  I got out a bottle of Wild Turkey, and listened to Sinatra sing the damn songs right.

  Then, I fell asleep on the couch, dreaming of a woman in a dark green dress with gold earrings, whom I missed talking to more than words can say.

  Eight

  AS THE GLEAMING, chrome-plated elevator surged upward toward the twenty-eighth floor of the Chicago advertising monolith Leo Burnett and Company, I can’t deny that I had a pleasant first-day-of-school feeling about being back.

  There were no miracles to be had on the twenty-eighth floor, but who was I kidding anyway. I was way past the miracle stage in my career.

  I suppose Burnett deserves some credit for trying so hard to seem like a friendly, homey place. There’s the basket of shiny red apples in all the reception areas. The gift book at Christmas on a subject you might even be vaguely interested in. The signed card from the chairman on your birthday. But to be honest, the whole “just think of us as family” culture has always given me the willies, in the same way that a good hair weave is somehow even creepier than a bad rug.

  For all the amenities, advertising for me has never been more than a job. Or a terrible mistake. A mistake I had never found a way to undo.

  The insidious thing about advertising is that it requires so little productivity it can ruin you for any other kind of work. Have one pretty good idea a year, and you’re a valuable cog in the wheel. Have one a month, and you walk on water. Except for politics, and maybe writing screenplays, in what other job can you go to work every day for five years, have literally nothing to show for it, and still get paid? Of course that’s the trap. Because when your time is up, even the superstars of advertising have about four minutes to hold up in their defense. It’s called a “reel,” and mine is dated, dusty, maybe even moldy.

  Still, I can’t deny I’ve made a few good friends, and my best is the first guy I greet upon my return, Richard Bellistrano, who for the past ten years has been rattling the bars in the cage next to mine.

  In addition to being the funniest person I’ve ever met, Richard has always extended like a generous Welcome mat the hospitable guarantee that no matter how bad I felt, he felt exponentially worse. Then again, misery and self-conscious torment are Richard’s oxygen, his best and longest-running gag. Imagining Richard happy is like imagining a world where justice and merit prevailed. It’s unthinkable. And although he has talked fervently about quitting every day since I’ve met him, I don’t think he has seriously considered it for a nanosecond. Where else but in these unsacred halls could he be guaranteed to feel this stymied and fucked over?

  “Good morning, Richard.”

  “Don’t start with me,” replied Richard, “I’m in a fetid humor.”

  “How were your holidays?” I ask.

  “Have you seen Nightmare on Elm Street Part Four?”

  I spent the morning working on a print ad for yet another new, tasty but healthy Kellogg’s cereal—“Milk it for all it’s worth” was probably my best effort—then I stepped out for lunch.

  When I returned, Mike Kidd, the company’s ponytailed wonderboy creative director, was sitting on my couch. This was not good. Had my visitor been the Grim Reaper himself it would have hardly been any worse. The chicken pot pie from lunch rose a few inches in my stomach.

  Kidd’s tiny Gucci-shod feet tapped involuntarily on my rug, although it was hard to tell if he was nervous or just excited. In any case, he got right to the point. That’s Kidd’s style, his strength, as it were.

  “Travis, we’re going to let you go,” he said.

  Like any other catastrophe, natural or otherwise, getting fired has a weird dreamlike quality to it. The suddenness. The devastating consequences. The finality.

  Even though it was happening to me—To Me!—I was no more than a startled spectator, since all I could do was watch and listen, and wait for it to end.

  I wish I could tell you that I was happy about it. After all, hating my job was one of the true passions of my life. I wish I was even a little grateful to have been given a much-needed push. But in fact I was scared shitless.

  Suddenly all the fears that had kept me there so long were let loose inside my brain. Even with two incomes, we weren’t saving enough. What would we do now? By the time Noah was ready for college, tuition would probably be $100,000 a year. I barely took in a word as Kidd mumbled about my generous severance package, and the lovely service now available to me called “outplacement.”

  What made me bristle was that this sawed-off little bastard so clearly enjoyed what he was doing. Kidd obviously relished his exercise of power. Maybe it made him feel a little
smarter. More attractive. A couple of inches taller.

  I hadn’t said a word for so long, even Kidd was starting to look uncomfortable on my couch. Maybe he’d noticed something in my expression. Not that I was going to pop him or anything. Even I had to admit this was not Mike Kidd’s doing.

  “So how long have you worked here?” he finally asked.

  “Twenty-three years,” I said. Unbelievable to hear those words come out of my mouth.

  “Wow. I would have thought you’d be chairman by now. I just meant…”

  “It’s okay. It’s fine, Mike.”

  “You must have started young. You can’t be more than forty-two, forty-three.”

  “Actually, I’m fifty.”

  He got up from my couch. “Human Resources will have all the information you need, Travis.” He shook my hand and left.

  I was out of advertising.

  I was free. I could do anything I wanted to.

  Without saying a word to anyone or stopping at Personnel, I grabbed my coat and headed outside. I barely had time to turn the corner before I doubled over and hurled my chicken pot pie against one of the shiny black stones at the base of the Leo Burnett and Company sign.

  Ah, the sweet taste of freedom.

  Nine

  WHAT’S THAT SAYING—be careful what you want, you just might get it?

  Without thinking where I was going, I headed north on Clark, and without knowing why, except that throwing up almost always makes you feel better, my sense of doom started to lift.

  I had a plan. Didn’t I have a plan? I certainly needed a plan.

  I was reminded how much I like this big wide-open city in the middle of America. There’s nothing hip about it, nothing pretentious. It’s a place with long hard winters and big beautiful summers, where people try their ass off, and as I humped past no-nonsense taverns, pizza parlors, coffee shops, and bookstores, a couple of weeks past fifty, somewhere in the middle of my life, I knew I still had a lot of try left in me.

  Mike Kidd thought I looked forty-two. Hell, I could barely believe I was fifty myself. I felt more like thirty-seven, or twenty-eight, or fourteen.

  But no matter how I looked or felt, there was no denying that time was getting precious. The meter was running. And if I was going to do anything of consequence in this final third or whatever of my life, I had to get on with it.

  As in now.

  Without further deliberation, I went to an ATM. I transferred three thousand dollars from my savings account to my checking account.

  I bought some envelopes, stamps, and sent my three-thousand-dollar Senior Q-School entry fee to the PGA office in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you get fired, isn’t it? Spend three thousand dollars in the first hour just to get the blood flowing.

  Then I went to a Greek coffee shop, where I wrote a long, emotional letter to Elizabeth. She had already headed back to New Haven. In the letter, I described the day I was having so far, my plans for the future, but mostly I told Elizabeth how much I loved her. I must have got choked up, because when I finally stood to pay, the waitresses were all looking at me funny.

  Even after taking care of all this business, it was still only midafternoon. I caught an early train back to Winnetka. I picked up Noah at nursery school and the two of us went grocery shopping.

  By the time Simon and Sarah got home I was ready for them with linguini and clam sauce, garlic bread, and a huge salad with three different kinds of lettuce, which happens to be one of Sarah’s favorites.

  I kept thinking: I have to talk to Sarah. I need to talk to her. And the fact that I still hadn’t gave the meal a surreal, Last Supper quality.

  “Isn’t anyone wondering,” I asked, as soon as they had a chance to take a couple of bites, “how on the first workday of the new year, I was able to get home so early that Noah and I had time to prepare this incredibly garlicky and delectable repast?”

  “Dad did most of it,” Noah piped in, “but I gave him something he called ‘moral support.’ ”

  “Okay, Travis,” Sarah bit, “how is it that you got home so early?”

  “Because I got fired, dear,” I said, my voice cracking a little bit. “Would you like some more wine?”

  “That would be lovely, Travis, but I didn’t realize getting fired was a cause for celebration.”

  I took a deep breath. “You’re right. Getting fired was just a prelude. This modest celebration is for what I have decided to do next.”

  “Which is what?” asked Simon.

  I let out the breath I’d sucked in. “I’m going to Qualifying School. I’m going to try to make the Senior Tour. I think I have a real good shot.”

  “I thought you were done with school,” said Noah.

  “It’s a school for grown-ups,” I patiently explained.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Sarah.

  I glanced at Sarah, and she gave me a look so piercing it might have been fatal if it weren’t for the slightest hint of a smile.

  I had wanted to tell her about Q-School on New Year’s, but the fact that I hadn’t called her this afternoon was undeniable evidence of how bad things had got between us.

  “Travis, I have just one question,” she said. “When, as you say, you get through this so-called Qualifying School, where do you want your mail forwarded to?”

  Noah spoke up again. “Is that what they said at work, Dad, ‘You’re fired!’ like in the cartoons?”

  “Actually, the exact words were ‘Travis, we’re going to let you go.’… Sarah, I tried to tell you,” I said to her.

  “Were you asking them if you could go somewhere?” asked Noah.

  “No, that’s just the way they put it. It’s called a euphemism.”

  “A upamism,” tried Noah.

  Sarah got up from the dinner table and left the room, while I continued to talk things over with the boys, answering their questions as best I could.

  I explained, mainly to Noah since Simon was already pretty familiar with the concept, that Q-School was the name of this huge annual tournament in which the top eight finishers get to play for one year on the Senior Tour, a series of pro tournaments held all over the country almost every week for players fifty years and older. Most of the spots in this tour, I said, automatically go to players like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer and Lee Trevino, guys who were stars on the regular tour, but that every year there are these eight spots up for grabs—that theoretically, at least—anyone can win. Both of them lit up at the thought of their dad playing with the pros, particularly Simon. It was as if the two of us were crawling out of our malaise together.

  But Sarah and I apparently had nothing more to discuss, and that seemed to say it all.

  Sad. It’s going around these days, isn’t it?

  Ten

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, my ninety-two-year-old grandfather, Edwin Joseph McKinley, stood in the middle of the 12th fairway of the Creekview Country Club.

  He dropped three Titleists onto the cold sod.

  In deference to the 35-degree chill, he wore a red flannel shirt buttoned all the way up against the loose folds of his neck, a heavy cardigan and corduroys, a wool cap, boots, and a tan workcoat, like the kind he wore when he and a friend built my parents’ house, the house I was born in, fifty-one years before.

  About forty yards away, directly between us and the small green, was a large leafless oak.

  “All right,” said Pop with a gravelly voice worn thin but still full of purpose, “you got two eighteen to the front edge. On the first one, I want you to slice the ball around the tree.”

  I pulled out a 2-iron, took a deep breath and a brisk waggle, and hit a hard low cut that caught the right edge of the green.

  “That’ll play,” said Pop. “Now, a hook.”

  With the same club and same basic swing, I drew the ball around the tree. Since my grandfather first introduced me to the game forty-two years ago, he has been my only teacher. He gave me my swing and my game and a great many other things at least as valuable. “There’s no such thing as a straight ball” was one of his basic tenets. “If you’re not shaping the shot, you’re not playing golf.”