Chapter 2 Postcoital Epiphanies
Postcoital Epiphanies
In the high school cafeteria, in the free periods mid-morning when the only things you could buy were soggy muffins, milk, and bad coffee, the seniors controlled the vinyl, and we all played a lot of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I mention this because of their song “Lucky Man.”
There had been a morning seven weeks before I killed Kenny Foster, early June, when I was sitting on one cafeteria table with two of my female friends—yes, on the table, my feet on the bench—and Kenny was with two of his male friends at another.
They, too, were sitting on the table with their legs over the sides.
We never sat that way at the tables during lunch.
So, I would liken the way we all used to relax on the tables during our free period to the way teens of a later generation would wear ball caps with the bills backward so the sun visors shielded the backs of their necks rather than their faces: an innocuous and wholly nonsensical act of rebellion.
(Even today, a part of the dress code at the country club where I learned to play golf is this: “Caps are to be worn with the bill facing forward.”)
In any case, the vinyl spun, and the needle reached “Lucky Man,” a tale of a fellow who has everything…until a single bullet takes him down. I overheard one of Kenny’s friends teasing him by crooning, “Ooh, what a lucky man he was,” the chorus from the song. I had no idea what the joke was.
Once upon a time, bullets were round balls, like golf balls, not conoidal the way they are now.
I recalled that morning in the school cafeteria when I was falling asleep the night of Kenny Foster’s death, and wondered if his friends would, too.
All too often, death—like pretentious organ rock—has a slavish adherence to irony.
I awoke a little more than twelve hours after I killed Kenny, got my bearings in my bed, and then climbed from beneath the sheet, sat up, and listened to an owl through my open window.
Harvey slept beside me and, like most dogs, was a very good sleeper.
A champion. He was still mostly under the sheet, but I buried my head in his fur for a long moment, his breathing deep, his exhalations sonorous and calming.
Then I got dressed and went for a walk around the neighborhood.
At one thirty, I knew that I’d see no one on the streets, the houses uniformly quiet and dark.
There had been a summer kegger that night at Carolyn Eastburn’s, and because it was a Thursday in August, I supposed there had even been a boozy dinner party or two for some of our parents.
But they were likely over and done by then.
If there were lights on at my friend Marie Morris’s house or music wafting from the living room stereo, I told myself I might edge closer to see if any of my stoner pals were sitting toasted in beanbag chairs around the bong, but not because I wanted to see people: I wanted to get stoned and had no weed of my own.
And given how baked they would be if they were still there at one thirty in the morning, I doubted there would have been much discussion of Kenny Foster.
But it wasn’t an issue because the Morrises’ house was as dark as every other house on the block.
And so I walked alone through somnolent suburban streets as safe in the middle of the night as they were in the middle of the day.
I was astonished at how much quieter they were now than they would have been a mere two hours earlier, when they would have been alive with activity since so many of us teens had summer curfews at eleven p.m. or midnight, and parents always wanted to bring their babysitters home at a decent hour.
Even the house where Kenny Foster had lived was dark.
Even the house where Theo Catton, my forty-seven-year-old lover, lived was dark.
I stared outside both their houses until, in each case, my eyes were welling up once more and I had to shake off the tears as if I were a wet dog. Then I moved on.
No patrol cars passed me, no delivery trucks, no one was out with an old dog that could no longer sleep through the night without having to pee.
Sometimes there would be a ringing in my ears that would lead me to pause where I was, either on the street or the sidewalk or the edge of an invariably manicured lawn, the electric thrum as calming as it was perplexing to me.
I pondered what would happen if I walked to the train station across from the village movie theater and waited for the first train into the city.
Would it arrive at five a.m.? Five thirty?
I had no idea. I imagined myself on the train before my parents awoke and in Grand Central by five thirty or six in the morning, and disappearing forever into the city.
But I hadn’t brought my wallet, so I lacked even the money to purchase a ticket from a conductor or breakfast when I arrived. And after breakfast, what then?
For the first time (but not the last) melodramatic ideas of suicide crossed my mind, too.
Pull an Anna Karenina and dive in front of that five a.m. or five-thirty train.
Or, perhaps, walk home, draw a bath, and slice my wrists.
After all, the guilt ran through me like blood.
Why not drain it and purge myself of self-hatred?
Onus was oxygen. I wanted to wear my penance like a hair shirt.
But, of course, I was wearing a Lilly Pulitzer blouse.
And so I walked home, though the idea of self-destruction would grow more compelling over the coming years, a sort of death spiral from which I saw no possibility of escaping.
Harvey was still sound asleep when I returned to my bedroom.
Hadn’t moved in the slightest that I could see.
My parents were in bed, too. Hadn’t known I had come and gone.
I took off my clothes and got back into the gym shorts and T-shirt in which I was sleeping that hot and humid August night, and wrapped myself around my dog like I was five and he was a teddy bear, and waited for whatever would happen next.
In 1978, golf great Arnold Palmer was about to embark on his last professional act, playing with the PGA Seniors.
He was almost fifty that year, his last regular PGA victory long in the rearview mirror.
But I had grown up at the country club with grown men who spoke fawningly of Palmer, some claiming to have been a part of Arnie’s Army for a day or two, walking among the hordes who would follow Palmer around the course at Augusta, Pinehurst, or Pebble Beach when he was at the top of his game and no one was better.
I had my own version of Arnie’s Army: Mira’s Moppets.
My summer job was to give the young children of country club members a two-week-long golf day camp.
It was really just babysitting and mini-golf courses I’d create around the club.
But we’d putt and chip, and the club pro would join us at the practice net once in a while and offer tips.
The girls fell under my spell the summer between my sophomore and junior years, a dozen of them in elementary and middle school, and they’d follow me around the holes nearest the club’s main building.
Each summer, until Kenny died, they continued to trail me sometimes when I played, and the gallery grew when the girls brought some of their friends.
One Saturday in July that year, during the ladies’ championship the week after my summer camp was finished, I was facing a tough lie in the thick rough on eighteen.
I took my five iron and risked a shot through a slim gap in a copse of evergreens.
It was stupid, and I was showing off. But I nailed it.
The ball sailed between two trees as if they were field-goal posts, plopped onto the green, and rolled to a stop no more than ten feet from the cup.
I was a goddess in the eyes of those kids.
The phone rang a lot the next morning, beginning around seven a.m., and my mother was the gatekeeper.
My father went to work as if nothing untoward had occurred the day before.
The calls, from what I could overhear after I opened my bedroom door, were from friends of hers and then from friends of mine.
None, as far as I could tell, were from the police. But I could suss out no specifics.
I finally went downstairs around eight. My mom was taking one long, last draw on her cigarette and then snuffing it out in a crystal ashtray. She said she was about to take Harvey for a walk.
“Why don’t you come with us?” she suggested, and so I did. I was afraid to be alone with the phone, which was ringing again as the two of us and Harvey stepped outside.
Tallmadge was—is—a village of one and a half square miles, the population then (and now) not quite seven thousand people.
The public school is a brick monolith, and the village kids go there for thirteen years, from kindergarten until they leave the town for college.
It was designed by the same architect a century ago who was also the mind behind the village’s public library and the Episcopal church, which anchor two of the three corners around the school. It’s a lot of brick.
That morning, Harvey led my mother and me up Lakeland Road, once upon a time a cow path and still a very slender street even for a residential neighborhood, the scent of bunnies that had survived this far into summer and the mostly unkillable squirrels leading him on.
It was a shortcut to the more trafficked street and the way I usually walked to and from school.
My mother asked how I was doing, and I told her I was terrible.
“I’d expect that,” she said. “But—”
“I know,” I said, cutting her off. “It was just…dumb luck. Dumb bad luck.”
“Precisely. You did nothing wrong, Mira. Please stop blaming yourself. Please.”