Chapter 6 Levels of Outrage #2
Are you thinking it’s too much of a coincidence that it was the father of the boy I killed who saw me with Theo at the hotel?
It’s not. Coincidences are real. They happen.
How often do you run into people from one part of your life in another, momentarily not recognizing them?
There’s your dental hygienist at a Smithsonian gift shop buying astronaut ice cream.
There’s your accountant two tables over at an Italian restaurant in Chicago.
There’s that friend from college you haven’t seen in decades in the row ahead of you at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway.
And in 1978, it was not at all uncommon for the village of Tallmadge to overlap with midtown Manhattan. The worlds bled together, two populations that moved in tandem in traffic, on trains, on subways, in cabs.
It is far more surprising we were seen only that one time than it is that it was Nick Foster who spotted us.
“Yes, Mira,” said my mother, echoing the intensity in my father’s tone, “how far has this…this involvement with Theo Catton gone? You’re going to hotels together? Really?”
“And when did it start?” demanded my father. “How old were you?”
This was, of course, the question that mattered most. And so I lied.
I lied with my heart thrumming against my ribs.
I lied not only because I wanted to protect Theo, but because I wanted to avoid the chaos and drama of whatever occurred in a rape trial.
Or while being interviewed by more police detectives.
Or while being deposed by Theo’s defense lawyers or the district attorney.
Or as I was made privy to the negotiations in a rapist’s plea deal.
I lied to protect him, and I lied because I didn’t want to be known both for killing Kenny Foster and for having an affair with a married man while I was underage. I wasn’t sure I could bear that.
“That was the only time,” I said, trying to stabilize the obvious quaver in my voice. “And, obviously, I was eighteen.”
“Obviously?” pressed my father. “If we check the date—”
“You’ll see I’m telling the truth. The whole reason we were there is because I was eighteen.”
“So, you had intercourse?” my father continued, using the sort of stuffy word he might have used in a courtroom, if he ever had to speak to a witness in a trial—which he never did. “This was some sort of celebratory deflowering?”
I paused, momentarily nonplussed (and, yes, impressed) by the way with two words he had so perfectly channeled his inner Victorian prig. “Yes.”
“Sex?” my mother asked. “You had actual sex?”
I met her eyes. The truth was that when Nick Foster had spotted Theo and me at the hotel’s registration desk, it turned out to be a first, of sorts: it was the first time he had not had to use a condom because for the first time I was using a diaphragm.
When I had turned eighteen, among the first places I went was to Planned Parenthood to be fitted for one and taught how to insert it.
Theo liked the surprise. I did not share any of that with my parents, however; it was bad enough that I had to respond with the basics.
“God, we weren’t at the hotel because they had HBO!
” I answered. “Yes, we had actual sex. Intercourse.”
“With a married man?” pressed my father.
“Were you using protection?” asked my mother.
Their questions were spoken simultaneously, but I heard both.
The first was rhetorical and demanded no response.
So, I answered my mother’s, but without the specificity I just gave you.
“Of course we were using protection,” I replied.
Had I not killed Kenny Foster, I am confident I would have added, I’m not an idiot.
Clearly, driving a golf ball into a person’s temple is not a sign of idiocy; my point is that my guilt minimized my tendency that moment to lash out.
The HBO joke was about all I was capable of.
My mother looked at my father for a long moment, her eyes intense beneath her thick lashes. She was a smart woman, smarter than him, but he was the lawyer. “What do you propose?” she asked him. “What are you thinking we should do?”
He breathed in through his nose, the sound a coarse whistle. “If you were under oath,” he asked me, “could you swear you never had intercourse with this man before you were eighteen?”
“Yes, of course, I could.” Could. Past tense of can. Equally as often used to express possibility. I could do that. Certainly possible. It was an easy lie for me. Among the easiest.
“Peter,” my mother said, “are you suggesting we not go to the police?”
“I’m not sure there’s been a crime. If Mira really was eighteen, as she says, there’s only adultery on his part.”
My mother, an adulterer herself, flinched ever so slightly at this.
“He can argue it was consensual,” he added.
“It was consensual!” I insisted.
“But even if it’s not statutory rape, it cannot stand—Theo Catton’s behavior.” His face was flushed. “My God, don’t you play golf with him sometimes?” he said, the realization seeming to upset him as much as the idea that Theo and I were lovers. “Aren’t you part of his foursome sometimes?”
I nodded.
“Do the other men take advantage of you, too?”
This I hadn’t expected. Was he envisioning I was part of some sort of collegial gang bang, or that I randomly fucked lots of older men? (If it was the latter, I should give him props for prophecies.) “No. Of course not.”
“It’s just him?”
“Just him.”
“Even I’ve played golf with him,” he muttered, lowering his voice at his proximity to the man who had—to use his own Victorian vernacular—deflowered his daughter. I understood for the first time that among the riot of emotions swamping him like a flash flood was betrayal.
“He’s not evil,” I said, which seemed true enough at the time, though I’m less sure now.
“Of course he is! No, Mira, no: he’s done. He’s done with you, and he’s done in this town. He’s going to pay for this, I assure you.”
“You can’t go to the police,” I said, part plea and part debate-class argument. “You just said it wasn’t rape.”
“I said it wasn’t statutory rape.”
“It wasn’t any kind of rape!”
(This was, alas, obfuscation. Or confusion. Or mere panic.)
“But I can go to Catton,” he continued, ignoring me. “Your mother and I can. Or maybe we all go pay a little visit to Catton and his wife.”
“He has children,” I argued.
“And you’re a child!” said my father, raising his voice for the first time. “You’re a child, Mira, and what he did to you…well, it’s unspeakable. It’s goddamn unspeakable.”
“I’m fine,” I tried to reassure them, “and I’m not a child. And…”
“And what?” asked my mother.
“And, after Kenny, I just can’t bear this. I can’t bear more, I don’t know, shame.”
Did I expect them to say to me, as they’d been saying about my hitting the golf ball that killed Kenny Foster, that I’d done nothing wrong and, thus, had no reason to feel shame?
Perhaps. But I did feel ignominy and embarrassment and self-loathing, and this was all too much.
“Please, let this go. I promise, I’ll end it. I won’t see him anymore.”
“She is off to Yale in a few weeks,” my mother said, and even though I had no intention of going, I was not going to dispute this that moment if it kept Theo and me from the public shaming of the Tallmadge stocks.
“That would seem to end it, anyway, Peter. And hasn’t she gone through enough already? I’m not her and I’m exhausted.”
My father stood, and his shadow upon my mother’s skin was penumbral.
I do not believe he knew then of my mother’s affair with Sam Stetson or how that affair was affecting my mother’s reaction to her eighteen-year-old daughter’s involvement with another infidelious neighbor.
“I’m exhausted, too. But Theo Catton is a bastard, and he will not get away with this,” he said, and before my mother or I could change his mind—and I am unsure how seriously my mother wanted to—he was through the front door.
I ran after him, but he wouldn’t roll down the car window to talk to me, and he fishtailed his way in reverse as he left our driveway and started off to confront his daughter’s lover and break up a marriage.