So she hits me on the side of the jaw with a golf ball and my teeth shatter. I’m spitting out pieces for days. She is my soon-to-be ex-wife, and by this time all the teeth shattering, or gnawing or chafing or grinding, should have been long over. But this was an accident. Even so, I’m adding up the bills in my head. There are bits of tooth and bits of filling and red flowers, carnations that were scrunched up to provide stuffing; this was filling for the cavities, little red carnations.

I don’t know if she said she was sorry. I wasn’t sure I expected her to, beyond the usual "oops." And I’d had enough of that. Here’s what I figured happened: a golf ball came flying through the air, it’s source cosmic, golf having been the one game we know for certain has been played on a world other than our own. It could have been teed up on the Sea of Tranquility, or Mare Imbrium, for all we knew. It could have come from Mars, Olympus Mons. I can only tell you what I learned. I can only tell you what a few moments of thought gained me. If it’s worthless I cannot be the judge.

You do need teeth, though. And now I’m stuck, with a workable set on just one side, which is going to make for uncomfortable chewing, to say the least. It is quite possible, or even likely, that I will develop further associated complications. My heart will weaken, the blood vessels leading to it chalked with refuse that has traveled from my bleeding gums. My ex has slaughtered me, in other words. And I have nothing but the carnations, like bloody pieces of glass on the tiled floor, to remember the assault by. I’ve lined the pieces of tooth in rows on the glass table. This was my mouth. This was my life.

Since I am going to have to go without teeth for a while—I can’t afford to have them all replaced right away—there are going to have to be a few adjustments. Chewing is definitely at a minimum. The muscles at the sides of my jaw are already flaming with pain, so it’s going to mean giving them a rest. I’ll likely lose some weight, which is nothing to complain about as long as it doesn’t go too far.

I am, however, worried about my smile. I’ve noticed the involuntary effort to cover it up; even before I think about it I seem to be making efforts to hide my gruesomeness. What I worry about are the moments when I’ll be off guard and my smile will reveal this gaping disaster inside. I know this will happen at the worst moment, as when you meet somebody you’d like to impress, for example.

I’d like to strangle my ex-to-be, but I can’t blame her really. I have to believe it when she says it was an accident, otherwise notions of homicide will ensue. I’ve never contemplated killing anyone; the mere thought of it tends to make my stomach churn, but the pain in my face that’s come from this golf ball business could turn anyone into a murderer. I can see that.

So the medication, which makes me sick to my stomach, takes away this kind of murderous intent, at least until it’s replaced by exhaustion. My day is a repetitive cycle: pain, dope, sleep; pain, dope, sleep. You do not have to wonder why it’s easy not to smile.

There was about a week of this when I began to realize the pain was never going away and the smile would never heal.

When you take a tooth out of its natural habitat—your mouth—it begins to look not much like a tooth at all. All the porcelain whiteness and sheen becomes a thing of the past. Teeth become yellowish, and if there is a filling involved the dark burn of decay spreads, as if the surface of the tooth were sand. I have them lined up in rows—bicuspid, molar, and others I can’t name. The carnations are a different row. Who knew that inside we are flowers? Even inside our teeth? Not me, but you could say I am one who pays attention only when the matter is desperate.

So I decide to visit my ex to tell her she’s ruined my life.

"So, what are you going to do?" she asks. Even though it was an accident, it was an accident only in the way of understood intent. Or agreed-upon intent. I’d been doing a lot of thinking about this. If somebody hits you in the face with a golf ball, it means they threw it at you, or chip-shotted it at you, as was the case with my ex. Check. If they hit you, it means they’ve accomplished their intention. Check. If they hit you in the face and knock your teeth out, it has gone beyond the original intention and therefore is a mistake. Not so check. This is what I want to discuss with Selene.

Discussion is required for at least two reasons. A: because Selene managed to develop into a pretty good golfer. It was likely not entirely in error that the Titleist 2 she launched at my skull from the living room floor, my ex living room floor, found my skull. The carpet is relatively new, installed when yours truly was still on the scene, so this was not like chipping out of hard pan; she knew the kind of loft the carpet was willing to grant. This was no tough lie. B: because since I’ve had my teeth knocked out I haven’t got much else to do.

"What about your friend, Plankton?" She has taken a seat on the stone-white sofa she had slip-covered the day I moved out. His name, as she well knows, is Parton. This person, I realize, even while I’m admiring her legs, which shine like the linoleum floor, hates my guts. Hates me in a way only people who once said they loved you can hate you. Deep hatred takes intimacy. The more well-established the intimacy the more deep the hatred that can be achieved. Love does not make the world go ‘round. Unconscious anger does. And when you get to the point Selene has managed to reach it’s not even unconscious any longer; it’s no longer subdued, just-flat out anger. Flat-out anger cultivated over an extended period of time equals hatred in my book.

"He’s got tons of money. I’m sure when it’s a question of getting you a new face he’d be willing to chip in."

Talking hurts, but I managed to spit something out.

I don’t want to talk about what women think I may have done wrong. They are always taking each other’s sides anyway. There is, for example, this extremely suspect person Marty, which is short for Martina, in case you need clarification, who could shoulder a good share of the blame for what’s happened to my face. She’s one of these cold, calculating types, if you ask me. All bright smiles—toothy, comes to mind—and high-pitched, near-squeaky, delight at things not even remotely interesting (like, for example, a holed putt on the living room rug in the middle of a Bears game when there are plenty of more deserving occurrences going on to be all squeaky about). It’s Marty who got my wife to play golf at a level I couldn’t. And I mean that both ways. Had tutoring been left to me alone, Selene would never have reached the level of ability to chip into my teeth. I simply don’t work on the short game enough.

There’s this thing that women have. They don’t go all homo like men do, not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. If they’d just admit it, I mean. But they spend a lot of time admiring each other. They talk about each other’s hair all the time—how they wish they could get it to curl around the ears the way it does on another woman. "People pay a lot of money to get it to do that," Selene advised me once, while she was talking about guess who. They talk about how cute something is that they’re wearing. They watch each other when they’re not looking. This is how Selene got with Marty. It wasn’t just her swing she was admiring. Marty had this kind of cool look about her, her eyes pinched just slightly as if she was always aware of something nobody else noticed and she was concentrating heavily on it. Plus, she had an athletic body. She pretended to hate it. "Yeah, sure. It’s the body of a ten-year-old boy." But she wore stuff that clung to her body like cellophane, so you could tell she was proud of it. "Who wants big boobs anyway?" That was another one. "You know they’re just going to sag, eventually."

When I had a face it was not bad looking. And I try to keep relatively fit, which is not always the case among people who spend a lot of time watching the Bears, if you know what I mean. So I guess you could say I was a little miffed that it was Selene who was falling in love with Marty, and vice versa.

When I brought this up, Selene said I was a moron. We were on the 7^th green at Gleneagles on a day so clear it tasted like a glass of water. You only get a summer day like that once or twice a year, and I can’t help but get distracted by it sometimes. So I sent my approach shot, which I should have hit dead on, considering I was about 97 yards and was swinging the sand wedge full, which is good. It’s when I have to hold back that I get into trouble. I skulled it, and it shot into the evergreens to the left of the far left bunker. "I suck!" I yelled, in a voice you associate with people who have had too many beers. This was aggravated by the event of Selene having hit to within ten feet with a five iron from 140 yards out, the result of her tee shot having located her ball perfectly between two divots in the middle of the fairway. When you’re playing badly you get ill spirited about such luck, even, or especially, when the owner of the luck is your wife.

I don’t know what it is about women and other women, the way they admire one another to pieces. She said, at first, that it was no different than all your beer drinking buddies and the stupid way they yell at the television set. Except I don’t have any beer-drinking buddies, and I think as far as the television is concerned that’s where she’s seen them and not in my living room or our living room or her living room. She gets that pinched look in her eyes, just like Marty.

I can’t stand it when people take what they see on TV and consider it real, so the place I move to I make sure there’s none of that around. I don’t take much of anything, actually. This may sound as if I actually haven’t moved out, but I’ve moved out, okay. I just don’t want anything around reminding me of what happened. Parton says hey man you’re free, you can do anything you want now. By which he means all the golf and television you want. But I don’t want any of that any longer. I don’t want anything around reminding me how lousy I am. All I want to do is sit-ups. For some reason I want the smoothest, hardest torso on the planet.

"The killers are here," she said. I was trying to line up a 15-footer, having finally landed on the freaking green. She was seething. That was obvious, even though she was trying to hide it. Or perhaps she was trying to make it seem as though she was trying to contain it and really wanted to make me see what was obvious, which was that if I so much as breathed the wrong word I’d have a putter planted between the eyebrows.

There is no class you take that prepares you for such encounters with your spouse. It is not covered in the high school curricula, according to my experience, and as for college, if it was not listed as a subcategory of beer it was lost on me. The only opportunity, it seems to me, is witnessing the strife between your own parents, but this turns out to be totally unsuitable. Nothing is less interesting than listening to your own parents argue, especially once you’ve become convinced that any threat of violence is moot. I know that’s not the way in every household, but that was the way it was in mine, and when my folks started up with one another it was time to find the door. Now I recognize this was a missed opportunity.

As far as Selene was concerned, you had to admire the concentration. This was something even Marty could not have taught. You either have it or you don’t, as they say. My 15-footer came up about a third short, the result of a badly misread uphill lie and the fact that I can’t putt to save my life anyway, due to nerves that already tend to be in shreds by the time I reach any green, attenuated in this case by the pressure my wife’s excellent game was putting on my own.

"Alice." This was whispered through clenched teeth, and what I found remarkable was Selene’s inability to resist saying it. It was so automatic, and, I recognized, a result of my own training—a rather vindictive if not utterly misogynist way (from a female point of view, at least) of ridiculing a lack of vigor on the green.

In short, I deserved it. It was not the complete phrase: "Nice putt, Alice." But it was enough. My apprehension about her anger was being replaced by anger of my own. When you sense such rallies, it is impossible not to go with them.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me." She walked around my ball, a nice bit of etiquette, and it was beyond my ability to resist examining her legs. They were smooth and nice and I was inordinately proud of them, as if they were my own.

I put a nickel where my ball was and took a good hard look at the ball, rolling it around in my fingers, examining it for betraying flaws. There were none.

Selene was lining up her putt, with a genuine look of concentration. It occurred to me with that she had dismissed completely the exchange of seconds past, tossing it off as so much garbage, to clear her mind for the task at hand, which was to sink about a 10-footer for a birdie and polish off my humiliation. I could tell this meant a lot to her, so I decided to engineer a reverse attack by showing encouragement. "Steady hands," I said, repeating advice of practices past.

"Go fuck yourself."

She lined up the putt carefully, bending down to it all the way. If it hadn’t been for the pinched look in her eyes I would have found it incredibly attractive. Once you reach a certain point with your spouse, and five years is a long time, you start examining them all the more carefully because you recognize that you no longer see them. This is what had happened with Selene. I’d woken up with her, pretty much every day for a half decade—that’s 1,825 mornings. After a couple hundred, you stop looking at the person, the same way you stop noticing the arm chair where you toss your clothes.

The arm chair doesn’t get testy, but the spouse sure can. And when that happens it forces you to look at the person, is all I’m saying.

This had happened, intermittently, throughout the years we’d been married. Every once in a while you have to look at someone to figure out what it was you’d found so fascinating in the first place. You find things you hadn’t noticed before, like maybe a bit too much hair on the nape of the neck when she wears her hair up. It’s not like you’re Sherlock Holmes the days before you’re married, after all.

Then there’s the whole aspect of getting to live only once. The more time I spent with Selene, and the more I thought of the vow I’d made the spend my life with her, the more it bothered me. Does that mean, I thought, that this is the only person I ever get to sleep with? For the rest of my life? I’d never had a blonde, for example. Not that I’d ever had a list.

But that’s the point. When it comes to lists, all of a sudden I was making them. No blondes, no women over six feet tall, no people into bondage. I started dreaming up fetishes Selene had no chance of matching.

You can go very far with this. You do not have to go out and do anything. I hadn’t reached that point, anyway. If I was forced to guess, I would say I was still at least three years away from actually cheating on her. But the point is, "actual" didn’t make a difference. I’d been cheating on her in my mind, my dreams, my fantasies, since the day we were married.

Whether she had any clue about this is a good question. I’d been so obsessed by my own masturbatory impulses it didn’t occur to me—much—to check in on what was going on with her fantasy world. It seemed almost impossible to think that she could even have one.

Then Marty came onto the scene and proved that my wife not only had been occupied with other thoughts but that they’d been a lot more interesting, and concrete, than my own.

This was all fine. Annoying, but fine. But it still didn’t explain the vehemence. Selene had it in for me, with anger that was growing in precise counter ratio to my rediscovery of her attractiveness. I was now looking at my wife through Marty’s eyes, and it was incredibly stimulating.

I would have been utterly lost if it hadn’t been for the pinched eyes. I see now they were my invitation to rescue.

Because it’s the way people look at you that makes all the difference, ultimately. When you get right down to it, we can love nobody more than ourselves. Why delude yourself into thinking it can be any other way? Love, or at least what we’re led to believe is love, is like the ultimate bait-and-switch. It tells you that in order to lead a fulfilling life you have to give your heart to someone else, make them the most important thing. But this is nonsense. Nobody really does it. And if you’re one of these poor deluded saps that falls for it you end up with a lot of loose teeth.

Love yourself, is what I say. Screw everybody else. Including Marty, who now, thanks to Selene, I was developing an extremely powerful passion for. Nothing works like the inspiration that sneaks up on you, particularly when it involves the sex drive, and this thing for Marty had snuck up on me fast. My problem now was how to get to her, considering she very likely hated my guts. Thanks to my wife, this was going to be a giant hurdle. But I also had to admit that it was thanks to Selene that this thing for Marty had started at all.

So I was now turned on to both women—and it’s important to remember that at this point I still had teeth, which meant there was also a chance.

It was ridiculous to think so. How I didn’t recognize that I was the object of both women’s wrath is beyond me today. I suppose it should be humiliating that I happened to feel that I had a chance with both of them, at the same time, or menage a trois as they say in the movies, but it still doesn’t seem like such a crime. I’d read stories about how to spice up your marriage. I’m not sure any of them suggested getting it on with your spouse’s lesbian lover but the general idea was that experimentation was encouraged.

So I was taking a hard look at Selene’s legs as she bent down to line up her putt. I can’t say I had a fantasy about them right then and there, but the image of the legs got the fantasy rolling. I had never had a fantasy involving Selene before, which probably explains all you need to know about our marriage. And now that the marriage was about to crumble I was finally getting around to it. How was I to know it would take a stupid girlfriend to get it going?

Marty was by no means somebody who could get me excited on her own. I mean, if I saw her in a crowd it would be a forest for the trees kind of deal. But suddenly I had this vision of her and Selene on the seventh green, right where my wife was bending down. There was a considerable urge accompanying this vision.

When you’re in that state there is no way to have an intelligent look on your face. Selene looked up from her ball, which I can’t help but mention was a Titleist 1, and sneered, sort of.

"This one’s going in, buzzard."

The excitement that phrase engendered within me is difficult to describe. This is like the moment before you ejaculate, when nothing else in the world exists, when even the sky and its million stars are obliterated. This is the heighth of animal cruelty.

I was not on a golf course, nowhere near a green where my ex-wife (who at the moment was still not my ex-wife but my ex-wife-to-be) was about to humiliate me by going up five strokes in seven holes, leaving no chance of a tie before finishing the front nine—and we’d never managed to play beyond that. Not without getting drunk anyway (And by that I mean me. I had never seen her drunk, though she insists that it has happened, that I was always simply too blotto to notice. This would have to make me truly blotto indeed, because not to notice how drunk somebody else is requires a significant level of inebriation, and on a fairly regular basis, so I began to see, too late, as it turned out, what she was driving at.).

I was somewhere else because I was incredibly charged, having suddenly recognized, or rediscovered, Selene as an object of passion. It was like somebody had slipped me a drug, but no drug is as powerful as what I’m talking about. This is called discovering what you want the moment it’s taken away, namely, legs that were still smooth as a mirror, and I began to wonder how she could get through a day without being hit on. Then I began to wonder what might happen if I tried to hit on her. The idea of making a play for one’s wife, and of the result being very much in question, is the most powerful aphrodisiac I have discovered.

"What are you looking at, Howard?"

I felt my face flush, an unusual reaction to someone you’ve shared a bed with for five years, for the most part. In any case, recovery is everything. "I don’t want to question your green savvy, but I don’t think you’ve got that one lined up sharp, babe."

The "babe" bit was a mistake, which I knew the second it left my lips, but there’s no snatching some disasters back.

"Well, babe," she hissed, "see if you can savvy this."

She straightened up, addressed the ball, and let go with the smoothest stroke I’d seen in a long time, even on TV. This meant the toe remained an eighth of an inch above the grass for about two feet along the back stroke and, more impressively, ditto after contact. I was so amazed at this I forgot to watch the ball. By the time I caught up, the ball was inches from the lip and clearly on the perfect pace. A golf ball makes a very satisfying gurgle when it’s sent without doubt into the cup.

She matter-of-factly strode to the cup and fished her ball, bending down from the waist in a manner that highlighted how her legs lost none of their divine smoothness on the way up. I felt this very complicated urge. In short, I was turned on, but also sick to my stomach.

It was all working for her and if I’d had any brains I would have conceded defeat and fled the scene. Or made up some injury, which would have been cowardice but also would have saved me a lot of trouble later on. In short, I was trying to save face, and if you consider that to be a particularly bad joke all I have to do is remind anyone that the joke is, was, and has always been, on me.

"You’re up," said my wife, backing away with on hand on her hip and the other holding the putter directly toward me. She took about three backward paces this way then turned and walked off the green. I was being dismissed, and if I hadn’t been so turned on and sick to my stomach and outright disgusted with my own game I might have gotten upset. But at the same time it was fascinating to see what had come over Selene, how the influence of a single other person can be so dramatic. We think we’re in control of our lives, even when they’re completely a mess (actually, especially then) but the fact is it’s always somebody else jangling us around.

Now Selene was jangling me around. She stopped at the edge of the green and turned, making a big deal about waiting, as though whatever I was doing was of no importance and wouldn’t matter at all except for the manners her higher breeding required of her. I tried to think about the task at hand, to get some kind of read of the green and the line of my putt, but the truth is I’ve never been any good at this kind of thing. My putting’s best when I just try to put a good stroke on the ball and keep a straight line. Most of the time I employ a strategy of passive caring, which means I don’t lift my head to follow the ball until I hear the sound of its rattle in the cup. But at this particular moment I had nothing near the inner quiet required of such a method. In fact, what I had is what they call the yips. I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking or my fingers from twitching and for a moment it felt like the shaft had taken on a life of its own.

"We are all going to die," she said, from her perch on the fringe. "That’s a given, but some of us would like to get a few things accomplished before the bitter end."

I looked up at her, bewildered.

"Hit the goddamned ball, Howard."

Which I did. This was not anywhere close to a smooth stroke but more like a stab, as if I were trying to shoo away a chipmunk who’d wandered onto the green. For reasons equally mysterious, the ball initially seemed headed straight for the cup. I had that certainty that you get in golf, a kind of preordained notion of inevitability that visits rarely. Unfortunately, I had failed to notice a piece of errant fertilizer directly in my line and about three inches from the hole. The ball encountered it and was sent ever-so slightly off course. It rimmed around the cup and rested about a foot away directly on the line I had sent it.

This was extremely disheartening, more upsetting than if I’d missed by a mile, which is what I thought I was going to do in the first place. I didn’t see any reason for having been given hope, only to have it snatched away cruelly by some minuscule piece of toxic crap that I’d been too distracted to notice. My shoulders sank, a bit of body language I regretted the moment I recognized it, and I kind of waved the putter dismissively as I walked to the ball and tapped it in.

Selene had remained silent during this whole ordeal, and it wasn’t until I’d rescued the ball from the hole that I looked up at her and noticed that she was still paying attention. As soon as she saw me see her, though, she turned away and headed for the eighth tee. I will not deny that I had the urge to throw my ball at the back of her head.

On the way to the eighth tee Selene stopped and marked her scorecard. She looked at me. "Five," I said.

There was a frown, which in her case meant a slight downward curl at the edge of her lip. It was a gesture I’d learned to despise over five years and one I hadn’t noticed at all during the months we’d been dating.

"I think it was a six, Howard." She left no room for argument, putting the scorecard in her hip pocket and turning back toward the tee box. I recognized that she had entered a six for me regardless of what I had said. She may have even entered it before asking me. I felt the tip of my ears grow hot.

"You have to count kicking the ball out from behind the tree, right?"

"I didn’t kick it." Which was true. I’d used the heel of my seven iron. But she was right. I hadn’t counted that.

This was not an act of deliberate cheating. Sometimes strokes are so miserable the only recourse is to wipe them from your mind. Sometimes that means they remain wiped when it comes to score keeping purposes, that’s all.

"’Count every stroke, no matter how bad you’re playing—otherwise, how will you ever know the difference when you start playing well?’ That’s what you always tell me. Isn’t that right, Howard?"

This was precisely right. And I wanted to kill her.

This is not what I did, of course. We spent the last two holes playing silently. Selene birdied the par-3 8^th with a 130-yard 7-iron that spun past the flag three feet and then did a u-turn, a feat of topspin I’d never seen before in person. I had a five and a six. Selene made par on the ninth. Had we been playing 18, I probably would have murdered her.

As it was, those last two holes were spent with my mind preoccupied by examining this strange new urge. I recognized that I was trying to translate it into a desire to see myself amid the sheets with Selene and Marty. But what I was really trying to do was figure out if that was what I really wanted. We spend so much of our time brainwashed that it’s very difficult to notice a genuine thought when it arrives. I had at least accomplished that, but of course that was no great trick, since the thought was translating itself into my loins, as it were. I didn’t need television or other forms of advertising to suggest I needed a beer with that. What I needed was to figure out how I was going to get off in the best possible way.

What was challenging was the fact that the object of this desire was the one person in the world who most hated my guts. I vaguely understood that this situation was at the heart of my newfound desire.

"Howard. Your game is shit."

We were sitting in the clubhouse, waiting for a sandwich. A rim of sweat from my baseball cap had pressed my hair into a sopping crown, and I was trying to massage it back to some form of presentable fashion. Then I figured the hell with it and put the cap back on, but the dampness, chilled in the air-conditioning, made the cap too uncomfortable. I was stuck either looking or feeling ridiculous, or both. I went up to get us a couple of drafts and caught my image in the barroom mirror. I was encouraged to see my hair wasn’t quite as messed up as I’d assumed, but disconsolate to notice I was getting puffy around the cheeks. It didn’t matter how much I exercised; I had to stop eating so much.

When I got back to the table I put the stupid baseball cap back on, wanting to hide. Selene looked very comfortable, the way women do when they know they’re being watched.

"I think you ought to get some kind of help," she said.

I took a long drink from my mug and looked at the bubbles rising from within the glass. There seemed to be no source to them, and for a moment I wondered about carbonation.

She lit a cigarette, which was not allowed. I hadn’t seen her smoke in about three years. I watched a trail of smoke rise upward and sat back in my chair. I felt the strength leave my body. Nobody was going to tell her what to do.

"You lift your goddamned head before impact. Did you know that?"

I shook my head. I didn’t.

"And your hands have gone to hell." She blew a ring of smoke above my head. "I was watching. Every time you’ve got a different grip."

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to think of how to get my wife in bed. Not just that night, but right that moment, or as soon as I could. It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem possible that she was my wife. Not at that moment, or at any moment after.

"Right," she said. "If you don’t care, there’s not much point."

It was when we got home that she pulled out the nine iron. "Listen, Howard. I want to show you something."

I was drunk, sort of. I was hot and tired and the middle of my mind was like a soggy piece of dirt slowly turning to mud. When the ball smashed into my face Selene, despite the fact that she was about to divorce me, showed a glimpse of concern at first.

It was when I started spitting out the teeth that she recoiled for good. I don’t think she was fully aware of how ugly I was before she married me. Love, or whatever it is, has a way of casting its own priorities. I could tell, almost from the moment the ring slipped onto her finger, that the glow was lifting, like a veil from across her eyes. She told me later she’d gotten so caught up in the ceremony that it wasn’t like she recognized what she was doing. I tried to not hold any of this against her. And after I thought about it for a while it seemed remarkable that she could have lasted five days, much less five years. I couldn’t have done that.

Before she left she bent over and looked into my eyes one last time. The world was sort of spinning, if you know what I mean, and I wasn’t ready for questions I’d never be able to answer.

The teeth and their flowers were still inside me when I regarded a face that looked more beautiful than I’d have any right to remember.

Then she said, "Howard, are you all right?"