Chapter 6 Levels of Outrage
Levels of Outrage
I never taped photos of Theo inside my high school locker.
I never taped any boys’ photos there. I had pictures from Sports Illustrated of great women golfers, LPGA champions such as the two Kathys—Ahern and Whitworth—and a young up-and-comer named Nancy Lopez.
I wondered sometimes if I was a joke in the eyes of my classmates who knew: the delusional Mira Winston who thinks someday she’s going to be a professional golfer.
After all, the Tallmadge high school football players didn’t have pictures from The Sporting News of great quarterbacks or linebackers in their lockers.
They had the pics of their girlfriends that would be used in the yearbook.
Meanwhile, the stoners had illicit cartoons of weed and blunts and bongs, and the cheerleaders had stickers of red megaphones and pink hearts—and their boyfriends.
Our school mascot was a bronco, as if we were in Colorado or Texas, not a suburb of New York City.
So, lots of lockers had horses, too, even though very few of the girls (and none of the boys) rode.
Kenny Foster had decorated his locker with album art, images he had cut from magazines of groups like Electric Light Orchestra, Foreigner, and—a reminder of his family’s exile in South Florida—KC and the Sunshine Band.
We all loved our lockers. To this day, I equate the metallic bang of a locker door slamming, a sound I hear now at the gym where I go for yoga and spin classes, with the crack of a driver on a golf ball.
That September, when I was still living at home in Tallmadge, my friends all off to their colleges and universities, I spent a weekend visiting my brother in Princeton.
By then I was known both for killing a classmate and breaking up a marriage.
My parents hoped my decision to get out of town for a few days was an indication that I was climbing from the deep sloughs of despair, or what they referred to, in denial, as my little funk.
Spencer had a friend who was a DJ at the university radio station, and his shift ran from two a.m. to six a.m. His listeners were sparse, and likely very stoned night owls.
But I wasn’t sleeping well, and so I was listening in a bed made from sleeping bags on my brother’s floor when the DJ played a set, dedicating it to a pal’s kid sister, that included these classic homages to older men and younger girls—older men and children:
“Go Away, Little Girl” by Donny Osmond
“Young Girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
“You’re Sixteen” by Ringo Starr
“Stray Cat Blues” by the Rolling Stones
“I Saw Her Standing There” by the Beatles
After the set, Spencer’s friend said on air that a caller wanted him to add Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” but he said no, the lovers were both seventeen in that ditty. Maybe, he told his listeners, if the boy was forty-seven and the girl was seventeen, he would have included it.
I considered waking up Spencer and screaming at him for having friends this despicable at college, but it wasn’t his fault. This sordid part of my high school experience was common knowledge in select circles, and (well) boys will be boys.
Instead, at seven thirty a.m., when his friend was back in his own bed in his own room, no doubt just falling asleep after having breakfast after his shift, I did something Spencer had shown me three years earlier, the first time I had visited him at Princeton.
The bedroom doors were fireproof, which made possible one of the most terrifying pranks imaginable.
You coated the outside of the door with rubbing alcohol.
Then you knocked. Just as the person inside opened it, you tossed a lit match at the door, igniting the alcohol in a brief but magnificent wall of flame.
It burned out in seconds, caused no damage, and scared the hell out of whoever opened the door.
I did that to the DJ, and I was thrilled when his voice, so perfectly chill on air, so album-rock cool, sounded like a little girl screaming for the first time on a roller coaster.
He was wearing red-white-and-blue boxer shorts and a Fleetwood Mac concert tee.
When he recognized me, he asked what the fuck I was doing.
I said I had some burning questions for him.
I didn’t. But it was an arson joke, and it was irresistible.
The revenge wasn’t as noteworthy as taking a nine iron to a car window, but I took a little pride in the idea that I hadn’t entirely lost my mojo.
Nick Foster had no bone to pick with Theo Catton, no reason to destroy him.
And while he had every reason to detest me, he didn’t: it wasn’t as if he wanted to wreck something that he believed mattered to young Mira Winston, to take Theo from me the way I had taken Kenny from him. No parent thinks like that, I know now.
He did what he did for the simple reason that he was, as Theo had said to me over our final lunch (our last meal!) together, a good man.
A good person. He was a grieving father married to a grieving mother, a parent who had two daughters of his own who soon would be old enough to be seduced by a grown man at fifteen and (choose your verb based on your level of outrage) fucked/raped/ruined.
Pardon me: strike the word ruined. Let’s delete that from the litany of the ways that Theo inserted his cock into me.
Fuck and rape are sufficient. The fact is, Theo did not ruin me.
He changed me. That’s clear. But you know me from twenty-five novels, the TV series and movies adapted from those novels, and three plays.
While some readers tell me that my books make them uncomfortable because some of the characters are so damaged or experience so much trauma, others have shared how much they like my women because they’re powerful—as, they suppose, am I.
Well, now you know more about me…
Nick Foster did not go to the police because he had no idea how long I had been with Theo and he did not know my age when our relationship had begun.
(All sustained interactions are relationships.
I am not suggesting a meaningful depth to our bond when I use that word.) He did not go to Theo because how could he trust a man like Theo to do the right thing?
He did not go to me because, clearly, I had zero judgment.
Eight days after his son’s death, four days after the boy’s funeral, Nick Foster went to see my parents.
My mother and father. He went there despite all that he and his family were shouldering: I was one more thing on his mind that horrific week.
He went to my house when I wasn’t home—though, I suppose, my presence wouldn’t have stopped him—arriving just after my father returned from work and my mother was preparing dinner.
I was at Grand Central, waiting for my own train to Tallmadge after my last (and I love this word because it sounds like assassination) assignation with Theo.
And so Nick sat in the living room with Peter and Alexis Winston, while the quiche my mother was going to serve for dinner baked in the oven, and the greens and vegetables for the salad sat on the cutting board on the kitchen island.
He told them the little he knew, but it was enough: he had seen their daughter draped on the arm of Theodore Catton, her body nestling into his, as he checked them into a hotel in midtown Manhattan.
There might be an explanation other than the obvious one, but he doubted it, and he was a parent of daughters himself and would want to know if one of them was, possibly, being taken advantage of by a married man. By a man old enough to know better.
When I got home that night a little past eight, when my parents sat me down on the couch and confronted me with what Mr. Foster had told them, they did not bring up Kenny Foster.
I asked them whether Mr. Foster had. They said yes, and that he didn’t blame me for the death of his son, not at all, and that he had come to the house, he explained, because he had lost a child and did not want to see the Winstons lose one, too.
My father added, after telling me this, “That’s good news. Or, at least, it might be good news.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It means there might not be a nuisance lawsuit in our future. I’d put out feelers to the club about whether there might be some sort of joint defense agreement between them and the netting company, and there isn’t.
There probably won’t be. It’s clear each entity is going to throw the other under the bus.
And whatever the Fosters do—whomever they sue—I don’t think it will include us.
Again, lawyers might change Nick’s mind.
We’ll see. But it was encouraging that he said he didn’t blame you.
” Then he leaned forward, clasping the fingers of his hands together as if he were praying, and demanded of me, “No more changing the subject. Tell us: How far has this thing with Theo Catton gone?”
My mother was sitting on the love seat, her legs tucked beneath her, her long hair down, a sleek waterfall cascading over her left shoulder and collarbone.
She looked at me, disappointment—not worry—evident in her eyes.
There was an Eve cigarette decorating her fingers like jewelry, the gray-blue smoke wafting into the air like a genie from a bottle.
What I couldn’t decide, not then or now, was whether she was upset by the idea that her daughter was having sex with an older man or with a married one.
I am sure she was worried about me…but did she also see herself and her own moral failings in her daughter?