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later attributed his skillful play to the fact that he was so deeply immersed in his sexual fantasy that he did not focus on his golf swing, a practice that inevitably improves one’s game. By the time he reached the 18 th hole, he and the woman were ahead by two strokes and his golf ball rested only two feet from the hole. As he and his partner walked onto the green, she suggested an actual affair. He was so rattled by the suggestion that he began to shake. “After all,” the man said, “I was a happily married man and was totally faithful to my wife.”
    “Except intellectually,” Goodwin thought at the time.
    The trembling of the man’s hands caused him to miss his putts, and lose the tournament. He declined the woman’s offer immediately and promptly ended her role as the star of his sexual fantasies, or so he thought. The problem was that every time he fantasized about a new woman his old fantasy flame, now described by him as a “fantasy crasher,” made an uninvited guest appearance and dispatched his new fantasy-woman with a Cuisinart whose blade was whirling. It was suburbia’s version of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
    When Goodwin sometimes replays the day that Sheila left him, he takes note of the fact that his sole emotion was anger, sometimes heightened to fury. He was angry because Sheila left him for someone he thought was inferior, angry because he would now become the object of pity as opposed to admiration, angry because the demise of his marriage would interfere with the country-club, couples only, structure of his life, and most of all, angry because she left him before heleft her. He was not sad, however. That absence of sadness, he would later say, spoke volumes about their relationship.
    Armed with rehearsed recriminations and ready to do battle, Goodwin entered their house, but Sheila was gone. He knew, as he walked from room to room and inspected Sheila’s empty closets, took a mental inventory of what was taken and what remained, that her departure was irrevocable. While many objects were taken, one was placed conspicuously on their kitchen table. It was a shoebox with the smithereens remains of his remote control, which Goodwin had fondly named, “Mr. Remotee.” Apparently, before Sheila left she had taken the remote control and committed a violent act of “technocide” by smashing Mr. Remotee into several hundred pieces. “His” remains were placed into a wood-grained shoebox (undoubtedly a symbolic coffin) to which she stapled an index card intended by her to function as a headstone. Mr. Remotee’s epitaph was simply: “RIP.” He realized that RIP was not meant as a joke. For quite some time, Goodwin assumed Sheila meant “Rest In Peace” or “Remote In Pieces.” Sheila later told one of her friends that neither interpretation was correct. It simply was a short instruction to tear up the card, RIP.
    There was a short message printed on small-personalized SG notepaper. In happier times, he had given Sheila the notepaper as a present and wrote on the gift card, “Use these to send me love notes.” Her final “love note” placed on top of the shoebox read: “I killed the remote control. This was not an act against you, but against it, since I felt you always liked it better than me.”
    Sheila’s observation of her relative standing with respect to Mr. Remotee was actually true. In the final years of their marriage, the remote control was certainly more responsive to Goodwin then Sheila. At least he knew how to push its buttons, not that he didn’t try to push Sheila’s buttons. It seemed, however, that every one of Sheila’s buttons appeared to be in the off mode. Sheila, if asked about his observation, would no doubt have agreed.
    At the bottom of the card there were two post-scripts. “PS. Since it’s over between us, you might as well know that it wasn’t because I couldn’t conceive that we didn’t have children. I just didn’t want any.”Goodwin was