PROLOGUE [I]f you are bothered by the idea of this being real, you are invited to do what the author should have done, and what authors and readers have been doing since the beginning of time: PRETEND IT’S FICTION. —Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius If you choose books the way I do, you still have a chance to save yourself a few bucks. You are probably standing, feet comfortably spread, before the shelves of the Fiction section of your favorite bookstore. Having made a selection, you’ve settled onto your dominant side (for me, it is the left) to decide, based on the first page or two, whether or not this one is worth either the trouble or the cover price. You aren’t looking for anything in particular. Even a single word can win you. You once bought a book because the word macadam appeared on the first page. Maybe you picked this slim volume at random, even by mistake, Michael Benedict slipped inconspicuously between Saul Bellow and T.C. Boyle—two writers you already know to be worth your valuable time—and it was only after reading the summary text on the flaps that you realized you had just sat on the equivalent of a literary whoopee cushion. Very polite about it though, despite the momentary embarrassment, closing the book quietly, pulling the Boyle out first to make room for mine. Nice to have met you. Perhaps, God forbid, the cover (and not the spine) was facing out, and you just couldn’t help yourself—the bunny ears too illogical, to absurd to resist. I apologize for that. I tried to tell them that such a cover might serve to diminish the real crisis here: the crisis of a family that is, even more than most, on the verge of disintegration. One would think that an author would have at least a modicum of artistic input with regard to an issue as significant as jacket design. One would be wrong. Let me save you some time. This is not a book that is meant to be bought; it’s only a book that needed to be written. Although, to be fair, the fact that I am currently residing, at age forty-five, in my old bedroom at my parents’ house has nothing to do with my "need" to record the events of the past months and everything to do with the fact that my wife, Kelly, packed my bag for me and placed it on the front seat of my car with an attitude that said, quite clearly, "Go to your room." I suppose if you have made it this far you may well have crossed (despite my warnings) that critical divide between browser and buyer, and for that you are entitled to a little personal background. If you are a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal, you may have originally paused upon seeing this book because you thought you recognized my name, a fact that would make my father (whose name you really recognized) angry enough to loosen his tie, if only briefly. My father, at age seventy, is still the head money manager of one of the largest off-shore macro hedge funds in the world. If that means nothing to you, you are none the worse for it. For my purposes, you need only know he could make more money only by printing it himself, and even then the difference would be negligible. My recent decision to take up temporary residence in my old room, and my mother's decision to let me, coincided with my father beginning to introduce himself to others, quite pointedly, as "Michael Benedict, Senior." This new introduction was his way of distancing himself from the son whose life seemed to be in an accelerated meltdown at an age when he himself had been beginning to reinvent the ways in which money is multiplied by those who already have it. Or, at least, that’s my take. My wife and I disagree on the source of my father=s silence, his distance. I have always attributed it to disapproval. She insists otherwise. "Your father doesn’t even talk to your mother, Michael. He’s not a communicator. He’s just a smart, gentle man living life the only way he knows how—by working very hard." But I am stubborn where my father's disfavor is concerned, despite the lack of supporting evidence, and I wear it alongside my love for him, regularly weighing one against the other. To the unending astonishment of his Wall Street competitors and compatriots, my father has seldom left Pittsburgh since moving here to take his first job with Pittsburgh National Bank in 1957. My mother was a teller in the main downtown branch where the corporate offices were located, and when my father began cashing small checks at her window as if he were on a per diem, a great romance was born. He left PNB to open his own asset management firm in 1960, the year I was born, and my mother joined him as his office manager five years later. They still work together, and they still live in the same house that they bought in the tastefully upscale Borough of Fox Run at the absolute bottom (of course) of the real estate market in 1967. In short, I was born into a world in which the only opportunity I lacked was that of becoming a self-made man, and somehow I have still managed to fuck it up. Admittedly, being adrift is not a unique experience for me. In college, and even throughout law school, I wanted to be a writer. I spent those years stealing time to write eminently readable but thoroughly unpublishable short stories, several of which featured a troubled but ardent rich kid who was habitually trying to rescue beautiful young strippers and escorts from their sad lives of debauchery by inviting them out to a suburb strikingly similar to Fox Run for a home-cooked meal. Gradually, with the help of countless overly-critical, under-published professors, I convinced myself that writing required a kind of suffering from which my birthright would always protect me—a conclusion, thankfully, that has proved mostly true. "What is at stake here?" was my professors’ consistent refrain. "Strippers," apparently, was not an acceptable answer. The only other ambition I ever had was to become a professional golfer. I have been playing passionately since I was ten, and golf has always been the one area of my life where I possess at least a passing ability to live in the present tense. Any sports psychologist will tell you that there is no more important quality in an elite athlete than the ability to block out the past, especially the negative past, and focus solely on the shot, the pass, the pitch that is to be executed right now. The instinct to forget is one that I have had since the first time I felt that addicting click of the ball coming off the exact center of the clubface and rising, perfect white against perfect blue, into the evening sky. My father was there, having come home immediately after the four-thirty close of the market to begin teaching me the game he was just beginning to teach himself. I know he saw the look on my face because he told me about it years later. He said it was a look of sheer exhilaration that lasted precisely the amount of time it took my ball to travel a hundred yards or so down the fairway. Once it came to rest, he said the look disappeared completely, that I picked up my little junior bag (which still dragged along the grass when it was slung over my shoulder) and began marching purposefully forward, not even looking back at him for approval. It is an attribute that I inherited from him, the one that has made him rich, though he has never been able to move that ability to the golf course, and I have never been able to take it away from there. I taught Kelly to play when we were dating. She’s a more natural athlete than I am and developed a long, fluid swing that made her ponytail jump at impact in time with my own smitten heart. But the year our first daughter was born, she quit and has shown no interest in relearning. I had thought she loved it, that we’d play together forever. "I learned because it was the only way to spend more time with you," she said once. "What about now?" "Now I already spend too much time with you." "Ah." But she did learn enough about the game to know what a good score is—what separates the pros from the good amateurs—so she was not unprepared to do battle when I went to her with my dream for the Middle Ages. I had been working up to it for months but didn’t make my formal plea until immediately after an inspired, intimate celebration of my forty-fifth birthday in early March. I would begin (I proposed, in the irrational exuberance of post-coital flush) spending all of my free time working on my game with the goal of making the PGA Senior Tour when I turned fifty. We had accumulated a modest nest egg that would permit me (or so I argued) to scale back on my hours at the office and still spend plenty of time with our two girls, (Megan, fourteen and Hannah, eight). And besides, by the time I turned fifty, Megan would be in college and Hannah, like Megan now, wouldn’t want anything to do with either of us. "Just think," I told her, sounding like a recruiting commercial for the armed services, "you could see the world while I do something I really enjoy for a change." My wife is five years my junior and no less beautiful at forty than she was at twenty-five. She sat up on her elbow and regarded me with what appeared to be amusement, a reaction I hadn’t expected after my command birthday performance. "What’s your best score ever?" is what she said. What I said, reeling from the utter perfection of her question, was "Ever?" "Yeah. Ever. You know. Like from the beginning of time up until your forty-fifth birthday." She was sensing her advantage and let the sheet slide off her shoulder. She knows I can't concentrate when her clavicles are visible. "I don't see the relevance," I ventured. "You don't see the relevance of your best golf score to wanting to be a professional golfer." She said this in the monotone of a statement, rather than in the rising lilt of a question. "No I don’t." "And you’re sticking with that." Another statement. "Look. The best performance of a once- or twice-a-week player is irrelevant to what that same player might accomplish if he really devoted himself to the game." "Okay." She sat upright, making no effort to cover herself, moving in for the kill. "So what if a guy has been playing twice a week for twenty years and has never broken a hundred. Does he have the same chance as you of making the Senior Tour?" "No." "Why not?" "Because there’s a certain base level of aptitude for the game that he obviously . . ." "So then his best score is relevant." Jesus Christ. No wonder I hated being a lawyer. I couldn’t even win an argument with a naked Girl Scout Den Mother. "Okay. It's seventy. But I’ve done it five times." "At Fox Run?" "Yes. At Fox Run.@ "Never anywhere else?" "No." A White tees or back tees?" "Who are you?" "What? You think I haven't learned anything in the last fifteen years living with Kenny frigging Venturi? White or blue?" "White." "Pardon?" "White" Any thoughts of continuing the birthday celebration were withering quickly. "Okay. Now correct me if I’m wrong," (she always says this when she is certain that she isn’t wrong) "but don’t even the old guys shoot in the sixties most of the time?" "Only the winners. I don’t think Chi Chi’s broken seventy since the Reagan admin . . ." "You don't want to win?" "Of course I do. I’m just saying that . . ." But there was no longer any chance of recovery so I turned away, pile-driving my head into my pillow like a jilted teenager. "Just forget it." There was a rather long silence before she said, "You mean you're serious?" I knew enough not to overplay my sulk, so I turned to face her. "I think I am." She looked at me hard. Then she said, "Jesus." So we did what we always did—what any couple does who has come through seventeen years of marriage still surprised and thankful to see each other on the other side of the bed every morning. We negotiated a deal: I could play out my fantasy, but first I had to prove myself worthy. I had to shoot sixty-nine or better by the end of the season without giving up any part of my legal practice (the State Courts are closed most of the summer anyway, so I pretended to be giving in on that issue in exchange for other concessions on her part), and it had to be from the back tees. (Okay, so there were no other concessions on her part.) We consummated the deal with a second round of spirited birthday festivities, something I don't think we’d done since my fortieth. But that all seems like a very long time ago now. It’s mid-October and I have a two-thirty tee time today to play, by myself, one of the last few rounds of the season. I haven’t broken seventy yet, a fact rendered trivial by what I have done. You see, my current state of exile is well-deserved. I have not only failed to prove myself worthy of this outlet for my midlife crisis, but have managed to prove myself unworthy of the mostly perfect woman who offered it to me like the gift I thought it was. Kelly is seven months pregnant with what we hope—this time—will be our third child, a product of the passionate, if somewhat irresponsible continuation of my birthday celebration. My reaction to the news was not the proper one, though that represents only the beginning of why I am here, sitting in front of a laptop in my childhood bedroom, trying to make sense out of the undeclared disaster area that has become our life . . . I almost said "together," but that is as yet unclear. For several months now I have, almost nightly, haunted the sidewalk outside the home where my wife and daughters are living without me, trying to piece together windowed snippets of their lives into something I can take hold of for sustenance. But part of the punishment seems to be that the images I’m able to grasp are far more fleeting than the pain they produce. Worse still, when I come back here and try to get it all down, try to tell the truth about myself to myself, I can still hear the authoritative voices from my past asking the same question, a question to which I should by now have a ready answer: "What's at stake here?" they want to know. Honestly? I’m still working on that part. © 2006 Philip Beard all rights reserved use only by permission site by S324