Chapter 8 “Your Life Sounds Like a Novel.”
“Your Life Sounds Like a Novel.”
I expected to run into Theo and often rehearsed in my mind the things I might say and fantasized about what he would say in response.
In those fancies, sometimes we’d go to that hotel and sometimes we wouldn’t.
Sometimes he would apologize to me or I to him.
We would be epically forlorn lovers, separated by a culture that didn’t understand what we meant to each other.
Arguably, I should have built my writing career on romance and fantasy, rather than on bicyclists who are raped and flight attendants who are drunks.
And by the beginning of Thanksgiving weekend, I had a new Theo in my sights: a writing professor at NYU who’d published a couple of books to nice reviews, but hadn’t yet enjoyed the sort of sales that would allow him the freedom to steer clear of classrooms and aspiring novelists.
In hindsight, Dennis Kerrington didn’t want that freedom.
He liked the attention of young women, as you know now from his own memoir, and had the libido to keep two or three of us in his life at any one time well into his sixties.
He was forty-five when we met at a bar on Second Avenue.
I was a new kid living in the city for the first time, entertaining a friend from high school, and he was there with his brother.
Dennis wasn’t on the hunt; Dennis was never on the hunt.
Usually, the prey came to him every September and January of their own volition, the start of each semester, walking unaware into the leghold trap that was his classroom.
I was at the bar with Marie Morris, who was home from Vassar for Thanksgiving and had come into the city the Wednesday night before the holiday to see me.
The plan was that I would return to Tallmadge Thanksgiving morning with my aunt and uncle to celebrate the holiday at my home.
“Where is Theo living now?” Marie asked me that night in the bar.
(Yes, in 1978, eighteen-year-olds could drink legally in bars. And we did.)
“I don’t know. We don’t talk anymore,” I said.
I was drinking a scotch and soda because I wasn’t in college and drank like my parents and their friends.
Because Marie was in college, she drank like an eighteen-year-old, and thus was sipping an orangish concoction called—I kid you not—“Daddy, I Don’t Wanna Drink This.
” It had a lot of booze and a lot of sweeteners.
For all I know, among its ingredients were Whip’n Chill and Tang.
“But I think he’s still in Westchester. When he moved out, my parents said he wanted to be near his kids. ”
“He’s a good dad,” she said, and I was unsure if she was being sarcastic. “God, I can’t believe you haven’t seen him.”
“Everyone agrees that would be a bad idea—for everyone.”
“Do you miss him?” Marie and I were the same age, but she seemed younger to me now.
I suppose it was because she was in school and I was working with people older than me at a tony travel magazine.
Even the editorial assistants were in their early and mid-twenties.
Her drink seemed like a kid’s drink, not the alcohol an adult would order.
Moreover, in addition to scotch, weed, and cocaine, thanks to one of those assistants—a cute guy who was twenty-two, which meant he was too young for my tastes—I was now adding quaaludes to my recreational potpourri.
The fellow called himself Commander Quaalude and his pills “disco biscuits.” He wondered how I could resist his charms, and so, finally, I told him to check in with me when he turned forty-five.
“Do I miss him?” I asked, repeating her question and thinking about it. “I miss feeling like a grown-up,” I answered finally. “I had two things that made me feel like I was different from everyone else. Theo and golf. And now they’re both gone.”
“Golf doesn’t have to be gone.”
“Oh, it does. I hate it now.”
“Mira—”
“Even the word, golf, makes me sick. And it makes me sad, because it reminds me of Kenny Foster and how much his family hates me.”
“I don’t think they hate you. I mean, the whole reason Mr. Foster went to your parents was because he was worried about you.”
“I get it. It’s just…it’s just too much, some days.”
“And why do you want to be different from everyone else?” She rested her elbow on the bar, her chin in her hand, and added, “I mean, I don’t think you’re conceited. But why do you think you deserve to be different?”
It was a fair question. But golf had always set me apart from my peers.
Plenty of us were good at school and likely to spend four years at places like Princeton and Yale.
I was not unique in that regard—Tallmadge gave us all a leg up.
But in junior high I was playing golf with grown men, and by senior high I was destroying most of them.
I had fallen hard for the delusion that I was special, and among the perks of being singular, that rare seashell on a beach awash in calcium carbonate, was that I could sleep with a man and not boys, and our bed wasn’t the back seat of a Chevy Caprice.
“I don’t,” I said. “I know that now.”
She slurped the last of her drink through her straw. She’d made her point. “How often do you think about him?”
Him. Kenny Foster. I could hear the tremors of death and loss in the way she had lowered her voice.
“All the time.”
“So, it’s not just golf.”
“No.”
“I mean, is it, like, daily?” Again, there was that youth, the inability to fathom how one’s own mind could be so relentlessly cruel to oneself.
“Maybe hourly. I don’t know. But I can be doing anything—xeroxing, finding someone a new typewriter ribbon in the supply closet, getting someone else their coffee—and I’ll see his body fall over and the book he was reading hit the ground.
I’ll see the golf ball sitting on the green grass like a white egg.
It was weirdly neon. The ball. So white.
At least in my memory, it is. Range balls usually aren’t that white. They’re scuffed and grass-stained.”
“What about Theo? Do you think about him that often?”
“No. It’s less often. Mostly just walking to and from work, because I’m within blocks of our hotel. When you kill a kid, breaking up a marriage is a pretty forgettable misdemeanor.”
“You didn’t kill—”
“I did, Marie. I did.”
Remember, in the magical thinking world in which I was living, Mira Land, the two were inextricably connected. The punishment for sleeping with a married man was Kenny Foster’s blood on my hands.
Dennis Kerrington was not married. I would not have slept with him if he were.
At least that’s what I like to believe.
He was standing at the bar beside us when Marie and I were discussing my crimes, getting another round for his brother and him. He told me later he had known that very second that he had to get to know me.
“Your life sounds like a novel,” he said while the bartender was making the drinks.
Marie and I exchanged a glance, unsure how much this older man had heard, but aware that he was interested in us.
In me. She’d had boyfriends in Tallmadge but was single now at Vassar.
(Back then, girls dramatically outnumbered boys at the newly coeducational college, and Marie had not yet even hooked up with another student.
Now she was witnessing another man more than double my age see whether I was game.)
“I’m not sure her parents would agree,” Marie told him, answering this interloper while I appraised him.
“Do you two go to NYU?” he asked.
“She goes to Vassar,” I answered. “I go to a travel magazine on Forty-Seventh Street.”
“Where did you go to college?” he pressed, and I liked the idea he had assumed I was old enough to have finished school.
“I didn’t. I don’t know how much you heard.”
“I’m Dennis Kerrington,” he said, and he waited a beat, hoping one of us would recognize the name.
When neither of us did, he continued, humbled not in the slightest by the idea that his name hadn’t caused our eyes to grow wide, “I teach at NYU. I’m a novelist. I heard just enough to know that your lives are interesting. ”
He was being polite when he said both our lives were interesting. I knew it, Marie knew it. Not that Marie’s life was any duller than most people’s, but we weren’t discussing her when Dennis had sidled up to the bar.
Also? She hadn’t killed a kid with a golf ball.
“I’m Mira,” I said.
“I’m Marie.”
And then Dennis said—and he said it to me, not Marie—“I’m not trying to pick you up, I promise.
But I’m going to give you my card because it sounds like you’ve been through a lot.
I teach writing, and writing can be cathartic.
Helpful. It won’t heal you, but it may help you figure some things out.
And that, in turn, may make you feel better.
Call me, please, if you ever want to”—and he said the next two words with the erotic thrum that was his dog whistle—“explore that.”
Dennis was never going to be as obvious as Theo.
They may have been contemporaries when it came to age, but Dennis spent lots of time with college students, and that kept him more (as we would say today) politically astute.
Theo would make male golfer jokes about washing his balls—or having me wash his balls—that would never have crossed Dennis’s mind, and not because Dennis played tennis and squash, rather than golf, but because he understood that a young woman wouldn’t find them funny.