Chapter 3 “You Took Advantage of My Disadvantage.”
“You Took Advantage of My Disadvantage.”
I slept with a forty-nine-year-old bartender two times when I was nineteen, another in my litany of older men.
Just before we hooked up, I’d had tattooed on the inside of my left forearm in small, beautiful cursive, “You took advantage of my disadvantage.” You know the quote.
Nabokov. Lolita. The bartender did not know it, but that didn’t matter to me, because I was never going to judge a guy whose specialty was concocting flavored martinis and funky Negronis in an East Village bar for not knowing the canon of novels about predators.
Perhaps I should have given him brownie points for not knowing.
Nor was the tattoo a badge of honor that I had come out on the other side and now was doing just fine, thank you very much.
Because I wasn’t fine at nineteen when I got it.
Far from it. The tattoo was, in hindsight, a code for anyone who cared to decipher it that I was still more damaged than I understood.
At fifteen, I couldn’t outdrive the very best men’s players at the club, but I still beat all of them most of the time.
My short game was as precise as a drone strike, and I was excellent on the greens.
I rarely dropped a ball into a bunker or hooked one into the rough.
By the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I was often invited to join the better men, my reputation, as we like to say, preceding me.
And I wanted to play with them, especially with the club pro, Harry Fallows, who understood my potential but was never going to allow me to be in a foursome with him by the time I was fifteen, because of the possibility my game would humiliate him.
But I was drawn to those men because the high school didn’t have a golf team and the very few girls my age who played at the club took the game far less seriously than everything else in their lives.
And the boys? They were absolute duffers and steered clear of me on the course.
The lone exception was Frank Pendleton, who was also a nitwit with a club in his hands, but until I bashed in his car window would still try to play with me.
Others (again, including Frank) would want to talk golf at the keggers or occasionally even in the school lunchroom, some more deft at flirting than others, but there was no way they were ever going to suggest a round with me.
Golf, of course, was where and why and how I met Theo Catton, he who loved to caress my feet.
(I rather liked that, too.) He who was married.
He who had a daughter two years behind me in school and a son even younger than that.
He who, for a time, had played golf periodically with my own father.
He who, in all fairness, was the first man to go down on me, and—because he really knew what he was doing—would leave me spoiled.
The first time we played together was a bit of what I supposed in the moment was good luck, a chance to play with some of the club’s most talented golfers.
(Clearly, I know nothing of good luck. One can begin with Kenny Foster to see that, though his luck that summer afternoon as he waited for a second loop was far worse than mine.) A member of Theo’s foursome that Saturday morning had canceled, and he was looking for a replacement.
I was at the practice green, planning to tee off alone after all the adult men who’d scheduled tee times that day were on their way.
He strolled over and saw my bag on the grass, my clubs encased in head covers that looked like springer spaniels, and watched me sink three putts in a row from eight, six, and four feet.
“So, Mira,” he said, his arms folded across his baby-blue golf shirt. “Feel like playing with some old farts? Would you be willing to show us any mercy?”
I saw him around the club often, and, as I would remind him a few weeks later, he’d teased me in the dining room a few years earlier when his family had been beside mine in a buffet line at some country club soiree.
He pointed now at two men talking to the caddy master.
“We’ve lost our fourth, and we all know you’re pretty damn good. Want to join us?”
“You don’t mind?” I asked.
He shook his head ever so slightly, smiling. His grin was boyish and good-natured. His face was square, and his eyes, the color of my father’s ever-shined leather wing tips, were playful. He was tanned—weren’t we all in those days?—and the hair on his dark arms was blond from the sun.
And so I said sure, and he lifted my bag from the grass, slung it over his shoulder, and took my putter from my hands. He slid it into the bag and noticed my head covers.
“Your dog, right?” he asked.
I nodded. “His name is Harvey.”
“We have two Labs,” he said. “Dumber than toast, and I love them madly. I always like people with dogs. Don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Life lesson: if you have a choice of playing golf with someone who has a dog and someone who doesn’t, always pick the dog owner. They’re nicer, easier to deal with, and they don’t cheat.”
He brought my bag to one of the two caddies they were retaining, both of the men among the club’s old, wizened pros.
When I played alone, I usually carried my own bag because I was still, in the eyes of club management, a kid.
The only times I rode in a cart were the rare afternoons when I would play with my mother and one or two of her friends, and so I was pleased these men hadn’t rented carts.
(The days when my father would deign to play with me mostly had ended when I was thirteen.
That year, an eighth grader, I shot an eighty-three, and he was still hitting—on his very best days—in the low nineties.
Once it was clear that I was always going to beat him, he was done with me when it came to golf.
He gave me a very wide berth at the club and, especially, at the course.)
I was thrilled to join the group. Golf is supposed to be a social game, and yet for me it had become an often solitary, lonely pursuit.
Not necessarily joyless, but certainly an intense, mechanical pursuit of perfection.
And while playing a round of golf with three middle-aged men is not every fifteen-year-old girl’s idea of a rager, those parts of me that were a competitor and a performer were excited.
I was, I knew, a minor phenom—that sizable koi in an all-too-small pond.
And I liked the idea of playing with men who were pretty good and would likely force me to up my own game.
Theo sure did. The course is sixty-four hundred yards and a par seventy-one.
That day Theo shot an eighty-five. I played off the ladies’ tees and shot a very respectable seventy-six.
It had been more than a companionable couple of hours: I’d had a good time.
Theo looked directly into my eyes whenever I said anything, as if my fairway small talk was deep, my insights revelatory and new.
As we were walking from the eighteenth green to the clubhouse at the end of the round, Theo and I were probably a dozen yards behind his friends and the caddies, and he asked—his tone as smooth and confident as a leopard on a branch above its prey—“Would you take a look at my scorecard? I’m missing a number.
” I must have appeared confused, because he handed me the small piece of cardboard with its columns and the little pencil, and said, smiling rakishly and again meeting my eyes, “See? I’m missing your phone number. Would you write it down?”
The first time Theo and I had sex, afterward, the two of us still in the sheets of the bed that Theo shared with his wife, he said, “I knew when you reached the green in two on fourteen that this was going to happen.”
He was referring to the first time I had joined his foursome at the club.
Even from the ladies’ tee, few women ever made the green on fourteen in two.
And though one day I’d hit a golf ball hard enough to kill a boy, it wasn’t the length or the power of my drives that made me good: it was my short game, my putting, and the fact I rarely made mistakes.
But that first round I played with Theo?
I hit a few drives for the record book—my record book, anyway.
“And you knew that how?” I asked.
“I knew what I wanted.”
When you’re fifteen and a man tells you he wants you after he’s just had you, the world grows fuzzy and warm, and you manage to forget where you are and what you’re doing.
Remember what I told you about the way the frontal lobe develops? Judgment will never be an adolescent’s strength.
And you who read that passage just now want to reassure me, No, Mira, no. It was his fault. It was all his fault. You did nothing wrong. When you’re fifteen, there’s no such thing as consent.
It was 1975. I did what I did, and I did it for years.
I did it again.
And again.
And again.
Saturday afternoon, I went back to the Fosters’, as I had in the small, dark hours Friday morning, but this time it was daylight and I knocked on the front door.
Kenny’s mother answered. She stood before me, dark circles under her red eyes, the bags so puffy they might have been bruises.
At my age then, she was not Sharon. She was Mrs. Foster.
The only adults I called by their first name back then were the man who would fuck me and—forgive me—the help, including club pro Harry Fallows.
A moment later, another woman appeared, her sister, I’d learn soon enough, who had flown in the night before, dropping everything to support the family and help care for her nieces while their mother and father…
Their mother and father what? Recovered? Got back on their feet? Arranged a funeral for their son?
And what of those girls? They, too, had been scraped empty, their souls confused and tattered in ways I imagined it would take them years to parse.