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When I combed my hair with them it stayed in place and smelled like limes.
    We were on the course at dawn. At the first fairway the other men dug in their spikes, shifted their weight from leg to leg, dummy-swung at an empty tee while my father lit a cigarette and looked out over the hole. “The big gun,” he said to me, or, if it was a par three, “The lady.” He stepped on his cigarette. I wiped the head with the club sock before I handed it to him. When he took the club, he felt its balance point, rested it on one finger, and then, in slow motion, he gripped the shaft. Left hand first, then right, the fingers wrapping pinkie to index. Then he leaned down over the ball. On a perfect drive the tee flew straight up in the air and landed in front of his feet.
     
    Over the weekend his heart lost its rhythm for a few seconds. It happened Saturday night, when Anne and I were at the house in Sausalito, and we didn’t hear about it until Sunday. “Ventricular fibrillation,” the intern said. “Circus movements.” The condition was always a danger after a heart attack. He had been given a shock and his heartbeat had returned to normal.
    “But I’ll be honest with you,” the intern said. We were in the hall. He looked down, touched his stethoscope. “It isn’t a good sign.”
    The heart gets bigger as it dies, he told me. Soon it spreads across the x-ray. He brought me with him to a room and showed me strips of paper with the electric tracings: certain formations. The muscle was dying in patches, he said. He said things might get better, they might not.
    My mother called that afternoon. “Should I come up?”
    “He was a bastard to you,” I said.
    When Lorraine and Anne were eating dinner, I found the intern again. “I want to know,” I said. “Tell me the truth.” The intern was tall and thin, sick-looking himself. So were the other doctors I had seen around the place. Everything in that hospital was pale—the walls, the coats, the skin.
    He said, “What truth?”
    I told him that I’d been reading about heart disease. I’d read about EKGs, knew about the medicines—lidocaine, propranolol. I knew that the lungs filled up with water, that heart failure was death by drowning. I said, “The truth about my father.”
     
    The afternoon I had hidden in the trunk, we came home while my mother was cooking dinner. I walked up the path from the garage behind my father, watching the pearls of sweat on his neck. He was whistling a tune. At the door he kissed my mothers cheek. He touched the small of her back. She was cooking vegetables, and the steam had fogged up the kitchen windows and dampened her hair. My father sat down in the chair by the window and opened the newspaper. I thought of the way the trunk rear had shifted when he and the woman had moved into the back of the Lincoln. My mother was smiling.
    “Well?” she said.
    “What’s for dinner?” I asked.
    “Well?” she said again.
    “It’s chicken,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
    “Max, aren’t you going to tell me if anything unusual happened today?”
    My father didn’t look up from the newspaper. “Did anything unusual happen today?” he said. He turned the page, folded it back smartly. “Why don’t you ask Lenny?”
    She smiled at me.
    “I surprised him,” I said. Then I turned and looked out the window.
     
    “I have something to tell you,” Anne said to me one Sunday morning in the fifth year of our marriage. We were lying in bed. I knew what was coming.
    “I already know,” I said.
    “What do you already know?”
    “I know about your lover.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “It’s all right,” I said.
    It was winter. The sky was gray, and although the sun had risen only a few hours earlier, it seemed like late afternoon. I waited for Anne to say something more. We were silent for several minutes. Then she said, “I wanted to hurt you.” She got out of bed and began straightening out the bureau. She pulled my sweaters from the