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tunnel myself—frustration, anger, the desire to rush or to do it over, to sink into strings of mulligans—but my friends always pulled me out with a word or two. They knew how lucky we were playing on such a beautiful course, high on the island with views of the sea, and never crowded. (It was this extraordinary natural beauty, no doubt, that led to the recent construction of an eighteen-hole course just a half mile away. An exclusive club whose memberships go at three hundred thousand dollars a pop. I kid you not.) I became familiar with an inherent tension in the game that first season—contemplation of the calm beauty of nature, the immutable physical reality of the course itself, the fairways, the greens, even the slowly changing colors of the rough, in other words the
outside,
against the need to maintain an emotional calmness on the
inside,
to maintain a sense of balance between yourself and the world as you walked through the game and its tests.
    So we took golf fairly seriously those first couple of years—nothing obsessive, but we treated the experience with respect. We went out to the other end of the island and tried the links at Miacomet, which was in those days a mildly funky workingman’s course, with beer, hot dogs, and potato chips. We were not snobs, but when a couple of guys from the lumber yard teed off in front of us with some special gizmo that allowed them to hit the ball at waist level with a baseball bat, we went back to the simplicity at Skinner’s. We got ourselves invited to the old Sankaty Head Golf Club and played what must be one of the most gorgeous eighteen-hole courses in the Northeast. It seemed odd to ride the golf carts, however, as if a certain purity was lost.
    It may be that if you learn the game late in life, the particular course you learn on has a kind of lock on you you’ll never escape. For me, the only course that counts is Skinner’s. Only on those nine holes can I measure my progress (if indeed there is any) or feel any real sense of accomplishment. Maybe I got too serious, but for one reason or another by the third year the element of laughter—which had always been there to some extent—began to blossom in our threesome. Phil was a brilliant mimic, with dozens of accents and characters in his repertoire, and was capable of switching personae during the course of the game. I believe that was how it started. Not jokes, but entirely free improvisation, spontaneous role-playing, and other nonsense in a sort of Marx Brothers–Monty Python hybrid. We got really silly, in a way that would probably not have been possible in any other setting. In terms of my golf scores, I had more or less reached my individual plateau, going up or down only a few points from one game to the next. And so, with a kind of mild and delicious hysteria, we began to deconstruct the game of golf, or rather to deconstruct our behavior while playing it.
    Oh, there’s really no way to adequately describe it, or to directly describe it, but the fact is I would sometimes simply fall to the grass helpless with laughter at some riff of Phil’s as a Pakistani intellectual, or at our collective serial description of a Stalinist golf course, or some other foolishness. I remember once as Tom and I sat on the bench at the seventh—a “smoking hole” by tradition, Phil with his Old Golds, Tom with Marlboros, and myself with Merits (we have all since stopped)—while Phil teed up, bent over to pluck an offending blade of grass, and fiddled around as usual. Finally, he was ready. Tom and I maintained the silence and stillness appropriate to this charged moment. Phil took his backswing as usual, but then instead of keeping his head down he raised it and looked directly into my eyes. He twisted his face into a mask, into some demented gargoyle, and never broke eye contact with me as he swung, catching the ball perfectly for a 150-yard drive. Then, he