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that this was not a joke. His wave of anxiety had just become a tsunami. The setting was ripe for Goodwin to lose control. He knew the symptoms: muscles tensing, heart pounding, acid refluxing like a Mount Vesuvius eruption, and palms sweating. Like an epileptic sensing a seizure coming on he knew self control was leaving him and there was nothing he could do about it. Goodwin was entering the land of irrationality. In a voice loud enough to turn heads even at the most distant of tables he yelled, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    The somewhat public and loud use of this word by Goodwin underscored his level of distress. “Fuck” was rarely part of his lexicon and only used publicly when he lost control or when he intended to use it effectively to make a point. In this case, it was the former.
    Very upset at the premature exposure of news of which Goodwin was obviously unaware, Ricques said, “You mean you don’t know? That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
    Kass interjected, “We thought you knew and was just putting up a pretty brave front and didn’t want to talk about it.” Then, Ricques, Graves, and Kass, sounding like a Greek Chorus in Agamemnon wailed in unison, “You don’t know. Oh, God! Everyone knows. She’s leaving you for her secret lover, Sydney Maxine, your marriage counselor.”
    For an instant, Goodwin thought he had hallucinated because it seemed to him that everyone in the dining room, members, guests, waiters, and even the old codgers who were theretofore curled semi-comatose (except one who turned out to actually be comatose) into massive leather chairs while drooling in their sleep said, “Yes, it’s true. You’re a living failed marriage cliché, the last to know.”
    Goodwin, without thinking, responded by using the F word so rapidly and so many times in succession that he sounded like a cursing machine gun.
    Graves: “We just thought you knew. We’re really sorry, Philip.”
    Goodwin’s testosterone/macho-man/high school senior persona, which he was positive had been long exorcized by maturity, (though in men this persona is never eliminated, just dormant like herpes waiting to be summoned) surfaced and took hold. ‘Sydney Maxine,” he thought, “I am being ‘beaten out,’ (a typical expression conjured up from his high school memory bank) by a little faggot.” Many years later he confessed to a friend, “I don’t know where the hell ‘little faggot’ came from. I hadn’t used or even thought of that word in over 40 years.”
    Before Goodwin could vocalize his consternation, Kass, sensing his distress and in an effort to comfort him, said, “He’s just a little girlie man!” His friends who had also now slipped into their empathetic testosterone/macho-man/high school senior personas shook their heads in agreement and muttered “girlie man.”
    Ironically, Goodwin had always found the term “girlie man” to be offensive. The term went into slight disuse, but then resurfaced when a post-gubernatorial Arnold appeared in the final Terminator motion picture, Terminator IV, Rise of the Hermaphrodites, which took place solely within the confines of an assisted living facility and featured a new evil Hermaphrodite robot, who was virtually invincible because she self- propagated new robots (“Baby Terminators,” later a spin-off sit- com as well as a toy line from Mattel) whenever close to destruction, but who was ultimately destroyed through a large injection of estrogen and testosterone. And as she was melting, a la the Wicked Witch of The West in the Wizard of Oz, Arnold intoned, “You are such a girlie-man.” Caught up in the moment, Goodwin thought “Girlie Man” was an accurate way to describe Maxine.
    The term evoked a memory of the first session he and Sheila had with Maxine. Goodwin’s initial impression of Maxine was that he was effeminate, a conclusion that was confirmed when Maxine had proudly showed them his extensive collection of glass unicorns, a