Chapter 9 Why Might an Older Man Recommend Lolita to His Much Younger Lover? #3
“I will carry your bag. And smile.” He hadn’t even asked for a counteroffer, a proposal of what I would do if I failed.
I nodded, addressed the ball, and took a deep breath to center myself.
And then I swung with all my might. It was a drive so god-awful that it did not merely fall well short of the green.
I sliced it so badly that it landed in the grass near the parking lot and bounced onto the asphalt, where it gained speed and rolled under easily three or four cars before coming to a stop against a curb.
For a long second, neither of us said a word. Then he observed, “We have men’s tees and ladies’ tees. Maybe we need tees for the teens. And for the beginners.”
I was furious with myself, but I was angrier with him.
“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.
“On my swing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No.”
“Okay.” He started to walk away, and I started toward the parking lot to retrieve the ball. But then he stopped. “I really think you need to practice your tee shots with that coach of yours, Mira,” he said. “You could have hurt someone.”
Animal House, though long gone from theaters by the winter, continued to haunt me, even though I hadn’t seen it.
One night when I was with Dennis in his loft, he climbed out of bed and instead of retrieving his cigarettes, as I expected, returned with his weed.
He had a little pipe, the stem wood, and he sat beside me while I lolled naked in the pillows and sheets, and packed the bowl.
He offered me the first hit, holding the lighter near the flakes, and then he took a deep inhalation himself.
“I seem to excel at a certain kind of trope,” he said. “Think Donald Sutherland in Animal House.”
I told him that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
And so he told me about the English professor, played by Sutherland, and the college kids and the weed and how the English professor sleeps with Boon’s girlfriend, played by Karen Allen.
Then he said, “I cannot believe you’ve never seen the movie. ”
After I explained why—the golf ball, the horse, the guy who gets conked in the head—he said, “I think you’re reading too much into some slapstick comedy. I don’t see a parallel between what you witnessed and what happens in the movie.”
“I didn’t witness it,” I reminded him. “I did it.”
Sometimes, as I’ve done occasionally in this story, I conflate Theo and Dennis. That’s not fair to Dennis. Yes, he was older than me, but I should have been in college that winter, and college girls sleep with their professors all the time.
Also, with Dennis I was eighteen, and then I turned nineteen. I was fifteen the first time Theo took me to bed. I was a sophomore in high school.
The difference between fifteen and nineteen might not be the Grand Canyon, but it is a chasm of some magnitude.
Let’s not forget: Dennis picked me up in a bar where I was drinking legally.
Theo hit on me at the country club when I was not even old enough to be taking AP history courses in high school.
Working at the travel magazine did not give me wanderlust. But the presence of all those editors and writers did inspire me.
(Yes, I was drinking too much, snorting coke, and smoking weed, but not twenty-four seven—just enough to keep me a step removed some hours from the recollection of Kenny Foster’s dead, blank face in the moments before the EMTs arrived.) Also, the fact I was but a gopher gave me time to write—and I was surrounded by words and the passion that these people brought to something as prosaic as, well, a sentence.
Sure, Time Traveler wasn’t The New Yorker, but these people took a paragraph very, very seriously.
They couldn’t help but motivate me. And so, on a Monday in March, I sat in my little cubicle over lunch with a bagel and the IBM Selectric typewriter that came with the desk, and began to write.
I couldn’t bear to write about Kenny, and so instead I wrote about Theo and me.
I renamed my older lover, now separated from his wife and children, Bradley.
I wasn’t sure how much I could reveal legally, and I wondered what my parents would think—what my friends would think.
They knew by then, but it was another thing to know the gritty details, even if shrouded with a fictional caul.
I decided that if whatever I wrote was ever published, I’d use a pseudonym.
Perhaps, just like the closest thing to porn that had ever appeared in our house (hidden barely at all in my mother’s nightstand), The Sensuous Man by M and The Sensuous Woman by J, my book’s byline would be but a letter.
I had read Lolita by then, Dennis suggesting the novel because—remember—he had thought I “might get a kick out of it.” Did the recommendation reveal great self-awareness because he hoped it would break me of an unhealthy addiction to older men?
Or did he propose it with an irony so unfettered it bordered on cruelty?
Writing now as a longtime novelist dabbling for the first time in memoir, I’m going to bet on the latter.