Miracle on the 17th Green (3 page)

The one and only reason Sarah and I went out for New Year’s was that it would have taken too much devious and painful explaining to the kids not to. Particularly to Elizabeth, who, sensing something was wrong, had insisted on baby-sitting Noah, and practically shooed us out the front door.

“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, La 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.

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.

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.